Reading mode

I've seen some pretty ridiculous commentary on the new Marvel trailer.

Mostly I've seen complaints that if you're going to do a film about how [issue] divides the eternal friendship of Captain America and Iron Man then it helps if you have, first, shown that they're friends.

That's kind of fair, it only gets ridiculous when people are turning it into deep psychological readings of Tony Stark that somehow leave out one of his most loyal friends and then say he's the one that doesn't know what friendship is.

Thing is, it's also reading in the wrong mode. It's reading the films with a TV hat on.

And yeah, okay, we've been watching these since 2008, we've got a bunch of 'episodes' here, we've got a feeling like we're on the 7th season of something epic.

But they are not television.

On television, if you want to break up an epic friendship, you devote a bunch of episodes to that friendship.

In a movie, you have one scene at a party (show they have fun together), one scene of working together (in our genres, show they save each other's lives), and one guy say 'we're friends'.

That's how they set up Rhodey. I mean, in Iron Man, he hung out with Tony getting drunk, then he turned up to save him in the desert, and then we know that when they have a falling out, that's serious, that's one of Tony's best friends having a falling out right there.

So when the movie says Cap and Iron Man are friends? Just look at how Age of Ultron set that up. They had a save each other's lives day at the office. They had a party, social together. Then when Cap makes sad frown faces at Tony, it's because they're friends, and Tony did a thing that was against that.

So when the next movie has them have a falling out? They're probably going to start with scenes of them working together, maybe have a social bit, and then boom, big argue.

And because that's a movie, we're supposed to extrapolate from those two scenes.

Because a TV series will show you a hundred days in the life, but a movie will show you the most important day in their lives, and whatever came before that, we have to fill in quickly in the establishing bit at the start of the movie.



The thing with comic book movies is we're so used to having decades of canon to draw on we bring the wrong toolkit and then complain the movie didn't do the thing. The movie did the thing, in movie language.

I'll grant it didn't make them close unto slashiness like it did Tony/Rhodey or Cap/Falcon, but, it did make them friends.

Achievement

I went and picked up my reserved book from the library.
I also got moneys for my phone and foods for me.

I went to the game place and found a game machine I could buy for £45 and play a swords game on the wii. I didn't get it today because the rule is to see if I want it later. Also because I don't know what kind of plugs it uses or if there's room in the back of the TV, which could be a thing.

I went to the TV shop and asked about a new TV, but only cheap old TVs have the kind of plug my PC uses. So I said I'd go ask the computer shop if they can change the plugs it uses. That would mean changing the graphics card. But then it would continue to work with the new and improved TV. Awkwardly though it would cease to work with this monitor, so I'd no longer have options. Maybe I could just get a new computer entirely and keep this one for reasons. That's probably not the best version of the plan though.

Things are complicated and trying to do one thing requires learning a bunch of things.

But okay, round one of Asking People In Shops How To Do The Thing has been achieved.


... now I feel like cry, because blergh, do not want outside, do not want talk words, not fun.

... but I have a book and a food and a moneys on my phone, which is all of the good.