beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

The more I think about it the more I think the 2016 the Legends crew arrived back in was not the same one as they'd left, ( Read more... )

It's frustrating with Dvds only having a couple of weeks to discover and chew over existing canon before new stuff Josses everything.

No point writing fic exploring clever theories of seasons past.

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.