MCU Television and Animation Series on Disney + - WandaVision, FATWS, Loki, etc

The Valeyard said:
Inverse published this article defending The Last Jedi because Wandavision also subverted expectations when fan theories didn’t come to pass in the finale.

IN THE END, WANDAVISION WAS THE LAST JEDI OF THE MCU​

As if knowing exactly what its audience wanted, WandaVision flipped the channel to give them what they needed.

EVERYONE LOVES STAR WARS, EVEN ELIZABETH OLSEN. IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, THE ACTRESS REVEALED IT WAS THAT FAR, FAR AWAY GALAXY THAT INSPIRED HER TO TAKE ON BIG POPCORN MOVIES AS AN ACTRESS, WHICH LED TO HER AUDITION FOR WANDA IN THE MARVEL MOVIE FRANCHISE.

"I was obsessed with Star Wars," Olsen told Collider. "You couldn’t peel me away from Star Wars as a child. And so I was trying to figure out, how do I start putting that out there because I feel like all I’m getting are these really disturbed women in independent films."

It's funny how Olsen's childhood obsession connects with her present role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — because one movie in the Star Wars pantheon shares eerie similarities to her buzzy work on WandaVision.

For all the uproar the 2017 movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi still stirs for certain fans, one thing it isn't is dishonest. The movie laid bare at several points its thematic thesis: YOUR EXPECTATIONS ARE NOT CANON. This was made clear when Luke Skywalker, played by a grayed-out Mark Hamill, threw his lightsaber away like a crumpled gum wrapper. The way Luke later screams "The sacred texts!" with panic is not unlike how fans felt when he tossed a revered relic with a shrug.

With The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson did one thing: He questioned everything. WandaVision is doing the same thing for our expectations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It's hard to imagine the state of the fandom four years ago, but in the months leading up to The Last Jedi, there were recurring talking points: a desire for Luke Skywalker to crush the First Order, theories about Snoke as the supreme mastermind (and maybe even a Moff Tarkin clone), hopes for Rey to descend from Obi-Wan Kenobi's line.

The Last Jedi all but takes a lightsaber to those questions. It challenged fans' self-assigned expectations of what a Star Wars movie ought to be, and instead asked viewers to consider a curious, not vicious question: "Why do you want this?" The film ruminates not just on Star Wars, but fandom at large, and the well-meaning but often unrealistic expectations that come with the territory.

In its own way, WandaVision was a rumination on fandoms too. In its final episode, the Matt Shakman-directed series absorbed the many expectations fans have for the MCU AND FLIPPED THE CHANNEL. A Patrick Stewart cameo? Didn't happen. Was Doctor Strange involved? He wasn't. Mephisto ... who?

Shot like a movie (the early presence of a live studio audience aside), WandaVision aired on a strict schedule with no delays. This eliminated room for the audience and WandaVision's writers to develop an organic relationship, a well-known phenomenon of TV before seasons got dumped on streamers. And yet, WandaVision knew. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer and her team knew we would theorize the Hex out of WandaVision. For weeks, speculation ran the gamut of Doctor Strange to Mephisto to the X-Men. The finale did not deliver on any of those fronts.

And WandaVision never promised that it would.

EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY​

It's premature to know the general consensus on WandaVision. Right now, writing these words, it's 1:05 p.m. on the Friday of the finale's release. By Monday, fans may crown WandaVision the zenith of the MCU, or curse it as a waste of nine weeks. A glance on Twitter reveals a lot of favorable feelings towards the finale, but there are still those bitter who didn't get the fan theories they dreamed up come true.

But WandaVision never promised "surprises." Bettany's trolling aside, what WandaVisionpromoted since the beginning was an exploration of nostalgia as a coping mechanism for pain, grief, and loss. It was not a teaser for a new X-Men movie (even if it was designed to set up Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness).

It's even in the trailer, in the form of The Platters' 1958 cover of Les Brown's "Twilight Time." The lyrics tell of an eerie yearning for an absent spouse. The potent power of nostalgia and the promise of an impossible, pleasant dream — one that can't happen in reality, at least for now — is the same electricity that sparks WandaVision:



Did Marvel court the theories? Sure. Look no further than the way the studio announced WandaVision at Comic-Con in 2019 in the same breath as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with Olsen and Benedict Cumberbatch together on stage. It's an extravagant reveal designed to generate excitement.

But that's the frosting. WandaVision lived and died by the cake.

For nine episodes, it told the exact story it wanted to tell. A love letter to bygone television made elegiac by its central character's sorrow, WandaVision used its grieving protagonist to give us, the audience, seven words that sound like oxygen. Spoken by Vision, "What is grief if not love persevering?" is our collective pain given meaning as we keep surviving a pandemic.

The perseverance of love — that was the throughline. And to that end, WandaVisionthreaded the eye of the needle, if not the Eye of Agamotto. The show ended with the lesson that we can, surely, engulf ourselves in misery, we can hide away in artificial comfort. But when we accept reality and learn to move forward, that's when we persevere. That's the meat and potatoes of WandaVision. Whatever happens now, with Wanda as the "Scarlet Witch" and how it sets up Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, is only frosting.

Back to the galaxy far, far away. I think about how The Last Jedi told its story, whole and complete from beginning to end while still being conscious of the next storyteller in line — then Colin Trevorrow, later J.J. Abrams. The Last Jedi did not give its audience the bowl of frosting they thought they wanted. It did something that WandaVision went on to emulate years later. It gave us something we didn't know we needed, something we still need, something we will always need: A story about hope against overwhelming odds.

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Most people liked Wandavision from beginning to end, unlike TLJ. This article is horseshit.
 
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Stab You in the Back said:
Falcon is literally the worst Avenger. He's a dude who stole a flight suit whose only notable achievement was getting humiliated by Ant-Man on Ant-Man's first day as a superhero. He should literally blow his brains out his very existence is a drain on the MCU.
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As bad as Falcon is, Rhodey is worse. His biggest accomplishment was stealing the War Machine suit from a drunk Tony Stark, and his second biggest 'accomplishment' is falling to what probably should have been his death in Civil War. Did he ever do anything of note after that? I don't remember it. He isn't even getting his own "black lives matter" show like falcon is. Although... I bet Don Cheadle being a hell of a lot more expensive than Anthony Mackie has something to do with that...
 
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Rhodey will probably also show up in Ironheart, another Disney+ MCU show about a black girl who is of course much smarter than Tony Stark and who gets mad when people aren't oppressing her. Riri completely failed to catch on in the comics (as have most of the sassy teenage female characters they've tried filling the comics with in recent years), so I'm kinda curious as to how they'll adapt her for the MCU. I doubt they're going to make her into a flawed, interesting character who sometimes fails.
 
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The Valeyard said:
Inverse published this article defending The Last Jedi because Wandavision also subverted expectations when fan theories didn’t come to pass in the finale.

IN THE END, WANDAVISION WAS THE LAST JEDI OF THE MCU​

As if knowing exactly what its audience wanted, WandaVision flipped the channel to give them what they needed.

EVERYONE LOVES STAR WARS, EVEN ELIZABETH OLSEN. IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, THE ACTRESS REVEALED IT WAS THAT FAR, FAR AWAY GALAXY THAT INSPIRED HER TO TAKE ON BIG POPCORN MOVIES AS AN ACTRESS, WHICH LED TO HER AUDITION FOR WANDA IN THE MARVEL MOVIE FRANCHISE.

"I was obsessed with Star Wars," Olsen told Collider. "You couldn’t peel me away from Star Wars as a child. And so I was trying to figure out, how do I start putting that out there because I feel like all I’m getting are these really disturbed women in independent films."

It's funny how Olsen's childhood obsession connects with her present role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — because one movie in the Star Wars pantheon shares eerie similarities to her buzzy work on WandaVision.

For all the uproar the 2017 movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi still stirs for certain fans, one thing it isn't is dishonest. The movie laid bare at several points its thematic thesis: YOUR EXPECTATIONS ARE NOT CANON. This was made clear when Luke Skywalker, played by a grayed-out Mark Hamill, threw his lightsaber away like a crumpled gum wrapper. The way Luke later screams "The sacred texts!" with panic is not unlike how fans felt when he tossed a revered relic with a shrug.

With The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson did one thing: He questioned everything. WandaVision is doing the same thing for our expectations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It's hard to imagine the state of the fandom four years ago, but in the months leading up to The Last Jedi, there were recurring talking points: a desire for Luke Skywalker to crush the First Order, theories about Snoke as the supreme mastermind (and maybe even a Moff Tarkin clone), hopes for Rey to descend from Obi-Wan Kenobi's line.

The Last Jedi all but takes a lightsaber to those questions. It challenged fans' self-assigned expectations of what a Star Wars movie ought to be, and instead asked viewers to consider a curious, not vicious question: "Why do you want this?" The film ruminates not just on Star Wars, but fandom at large, and the well-meaning but often unrealistic expectations that come with the territory.

In its own way, WandaVision was a rumination on fandoms too. In its final episode, the Matt Shakman-directed series absorbed the many expectations fans have for the MCU AND FLIPPED THE CHANNEL. A Patrick Stewart cameo? Didn't happen. Was Doctor Strange involved? He wasn't. Mephisto ... who?

Shot like a movie (the early presence of a live studio audience aside), WandaVision aired on a strict schedule with no delays. This eliminated room for the audience and WandaVision's writers to develop an organic relationship, a well-known phenomenon of TV before seasons got dumped on streamers. And yet, WandaVision knew. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer and her team knew we would theorize the Hex out of WandaVision. For weeks, speculation ran the gamut of Doctor Strange to Mephisto to the X-Men. The finale did not deliver on any of those fronts.

And WandaVision never promised that it would.

EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY​

It's premature to know the general consensus on WandaVision. Right now, writing these words, it's 1:05 p.m. on the Friday of the finale's release. By Monday, fans may crown WandaVision the zenith of the MCU, or curse it as a waste of nine weeks. A glance on Twitter reveals a lot of favorable feelings towards the finale, but there are still those bitter who didn't get the fan theories they dreamed up come true.

But WandaVision never promised "surprises." Bettany's trolling aside, what WandaVisionpromoted since the beginning was an exploration of nostalgia as a coping mechanism for pain, grief, and loss. It was not a teaser for a new X-Men movie (even if it was designed to set up Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness).

It's even in the trailer, in the form of The Platters' 1958 cover of Les Brown's "Twilight Time." The lyrics tell of an eerie yearning for an absent spouse. The potent power of nostalgia and the promise of an impossible, pleasant dream — one that can't happen in reality, at least for now — is the same electricity that sparks WandaVision:



Did Marvel court the theories? Sure. Look no further than the way the studio announced WandaVision at Comic-Con in 2019 in the same breath as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with Olsen and Benedict Cumberbatch together on stage. It's an extravagant reveal designed to generate excitement.

But that's the frosting. WandaVision lived and died by the cake.

For nine episodes, it told the exact story it wanted to tell. A love letter to bygone television made elegiac by its central character's sorrow, WandaVision used its grieving protagonist to give us, the audience, seven words that sound like oxygen. Spoken by Vision, "What is grief if not love persevering?" is our collective pain given meaning as we keep surviving a pandemic.

The perseverance of love — that was the throughline. And to that end, WandaVisionthreaded the eye of the needle, if not the Eye of Agamotto. The show ended with the lesson that we can, surely, engulf ourselves in misery, we can hide away in artificial comfort. But when we accept reality and learn to move forward, that's when we persevere. That's the meat and potatoes of WandaVision. Whatever happens now, with Wanda as the "Scarlet Witch" and how it sets up Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, is only frosting.

Back to the galaxy far, far away. I think about how The Last Jedi told its story, whole and complete from beginning to end while still being conscious of the next storyteller in line — then Colin Trevorrow, later J.J. Abrams. The Last Jedi did not give its audience the bowl of frosting they thought they wanted. It did something that WandaVision went on to emulate years later. It gave us something we didn't know we needed, something we still need, something we will always need: A story about hope against overwhelming odds.

(Archive)
Click to expand...
Bullshit. I actually like WandaVision. So this article is full of shit
 
I've got my issues with WandaVision, but it at least wasn't made with complete* contempt for its audience and source material.

*I think relegating bright comic accurate outfits to Halloween costumes suggests a lack of trust, possibly contempt for the source material, especially with the "lol you'll never wear the bathing suit don't worry" commentary from filmmakers
 
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SamTheEagle said:
*I think relegating bright comic accurate outfits to Halloween costumes suggests a lack of trust, possibly contempt for the source material, especially with the "lol you'll never wear the bathing suit don't worry" commentary from filmmakers
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The MCU costumes at least represent a more ”grounded” take on the comic book costumes, rather than putting them in the generic black leather costumes seen in the early X-Men films.
 
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The Valeyard said:
The MCU costumes at least represent a more ”grounded” take on the comic book costumes, rather than putting them in the generic black leather costumes seen in the early X-Men films.
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I agree. I like Wanda's outfit at the end of the series as it looks like the one she wears in the comics but more grounded
 
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WandaVision wasn't woke, for what I remember. I mean, if we ignore the Strong Female Cast™ they had, and that's something that most normies would consider normal because shows have been having female leads since ever despite what these assholes claim.

So, I doubt F/WS will have wokeness, specially because it's more male and action oriented. At most, they¡ll keep it at minimal and tbf, all shows ever were always preachy.
 
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Tasty Tatty said:
WandaVision wasn't woke, for what I remember. I mean, if we ignore the Strong Female Cast™ they had, and that's something that most normies would consider normal because shows have been having female leads since ever despite what these assholes claim.

So, I doubt F/WS will have wokeness, specially because it's more male and action oriented. At most, they¡ll keep it at minimal and tbf, all shows ever were always preachy.
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Why did you call them assholes lol?

The characters kinda sucked, I even liked Monica initially before she became a boring Mary Sue who had really weird motivations for the plot.
 
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InsolentGaylord said:
Why did you call them assholes lol?

The characters kinda sucked, I even liked Monica initially before she became a boring Mary Sue who had really weird motivations for the plot.
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Monica is amazing and lol calling her a Mary Sue when Brie Cheese Fem Carol Danvers is right there.

I do not hate War Machine because I can't hate Don Cheadle lol.
 
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The Valeyard said:
Inverse published this article defending The Last Jedi because Wandavision also subverted expectations when fan theories didn’t come to pass in the finale.

IN THE END, WANDAVISION WAS THE LAST JEDI OF THE MCU​

As if knowing exactly what its audience wanted, WandaVision flipped the channel to give them what they needed.

EVERYONE LOVES STAR WARS, EVEN ELIZABETH OLSEN. IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, THE ACTRESS REVEALED IT WAS THAT FAR, FAR AWAY GALAXY THAT INSPIRED HER TO TAKE ON BIG POPCORN MOVIES AS AN ACTRESS, WHICH LED TO HER AUDITION FOR WANDA IN THE MARVEL MOVIE FRANCHISE.

"I was obsessed with Star Wars," Olsen told Collider. "You couldn’t peel me away from Star Wars as a child. And so I was trying to figure out, how do I start putting that out there because I feel like all I’m getting are these really disturbed women in independent films."

It's funny how Olsen's childhood obsession connects with her present role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — because one movie in the Star Wars pantheon shares eerie similarities to her buzzy work on WandaVision.

For all the uproar the 2017 movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi still stirs for certain fans, one thing it isn't is dishonest. The movie laid bare at several points its thematic thesis: YOUR EXPECTATIONS ARE NOT CANON. This was made clear when Luke Skywalker, played by a grayed-out Mark Hamill, threw his lightsaber away like a crumpled gum wrapper. The way Luke later screams "The sacred texts!" with panic is not unlike how fans felt when he tossed a revered relic with a shrug.

With The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson did one thing: He questioned everything. WandaVision is doing the same thing for our expectations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It's hard to imagine the state of the fandom four years ago, but in the months leading up to The Last Jedi, there were recurring talking points: a desire for Luke Skywalker to crush the First Order, theories about Snoke as the supreme mastermind (and maybe even a Moff Tarkin clone), hopes for Rey to descend from Obi-Wan Kenobi's line.

The Last Jedi all but takes a lightsaber to those questions. It challenged fans' self-assigned expectations of what a Star Wars movie ought to be, and instead asked viewers to consider a curious, not vicious question: "Why do you want this?" The film ruminates not just on Star Wars, but fandom at large, and the well-meaning but often unrealistic expectations that come with the territory.

In its own way, WandaVision was a rumination on fandoms too. In its final episode, the Matt Shakman-directed series absorbed the many expectations fans have for the MCU AND FLIPPED THE CHANNEL. A Patrick Stewart cameo? Didn't happen. Was Doctor Strange involved? He wasn't. Mephisto ... who?

Shot like a movie (the early presence of a live studio audience aside), WandaVision aired on a strict schedule with no delays. This eliminated room for the audience and WandaVision's writers to develop an organic relationship, a well-known phenomenon of TV before seasons got dumped on streamers. And yet, WandaVision knew. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer and her team knew we would theorize the Hex out of WandaVision. For weeks, speculation ran the gamut of Doctor Strange to Mephisto to the X-Men. The finale did not deliver on any of those fronts.

And WandaVision never promised that it would.

EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY​

It's premature to know the general consensus on WandaVision. Right now, writing these words, it's 1:05 p.m. on the Friday of the finale's release. By Monday, fans may crown WandaVision the zenith of the MCU, or curse it as a waste of nine weeks. A glance on Twitter reveals a lot of favorable feelings towards the finale, but there are still those bitter who didn't get the fan theories they dreamed up come true.

But WandaVision never promised "surprises." Bettany's trolling aside, what WandaVisionpromoted since the beginning was an exploration of nostalgia as a coping mechanism for pain, grief, and loss. It was not a teaser for a new X-Men movie (even if it was designed to set up Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness).

It's even in the trailer, in the form of The Platters' 1958 cover of Les Brown's "Twilight Time." The lyrics tell of an eerie yearning for an absent spouse. The potent power of nostalgia and the promise of an impossible, pleasant dream — one that can't happen in reality, at least for now — is the same electricity that sparks WandaVision:



Did Marvel court the theories? Sure. Look no further than the way the studio announced WandaVision at Comic-Con in 2019 in the same breath as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, with Olsen and Benedict Cumberbatch together on stage. It's an extravagant reveal designed to generate excitement.

But that's the frosting. WandaVision lived and died by the cake.

For nine episodes, it told the exact story it wanted to tell. A love letter to bygone television made elegiac by its central character's sorrow, WandaVision used its grieving protagonist to give us, the audience, seven words that sound like oxygen. Spoken by Vision, "What is grief if not love persevering?" is our collective pain given meaning as we keep surviving a pandemic.

The perseverance of love — that was the throughline. And to that end, WandaVisionthreaded the eye of the needle, if not the Eye of Agamotto. The show ended with the lesson that we can, surely, engulf ourselves in misery, we can hide away in artificial comfort. But when we accept reality and learn to move forward, that's when we persevere. That's the meat and potatoes of WandaVision. Whatever happens now, with Wanda as the "Scarlet Witch" and how it sets up Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, is only frosting.

Back to the galaxy far, far away. I think about how The Last Jedi told its story, whole and complete from beginning to end while still being conscious of the next storyteller in line — then Colin Trevorrow, later J.J. Abrams. The Last Jedi did not give its audience the bowl of frosting they thought they wanted. It did something that WandaVision went on to emulate years later. It gave us something we didn't know we needed, something we still need, something we will always need: A story about hope against overwhelming odds.

(Archive)
Click to expand...
+1 for this being a shit take, Last Jedi just did random nonsense for the sake of nonsense. Anyone who thought WV was a letdown thought so because they assumed it was going to have some LE EPIC! reward at the end

cactus said:
I think we an all agree Cheese Lady Larson is shit and so is her character and we all want Rogue to come and do what Rogue does best to Captain Marvel.
Click to expand...

Brie can go either way, since the Carol/Fury shit in CM, where she acts like a normal person instead of a retarded Terminator, was really solid. It depends on what they write, because she's a competent enough actor to deliver a good performance with something good, but not good enough to make anything out of mediocrity. Brie can play off of other actors quite well so if they have any sense, they go that route.
 
KillThemCrackasBabies said:
+1 for this being a shit take, Last Jedi just did random nonsense for the sake of nonsense. Anyone who thought WV was a letdown thought so because they assumed it was going to have some LE EPIC! reward at the end



Brie can go either way, since the Carol/Fury shit in CM, where she acts like a normal person instead of a retarded Terminator, was really solid. It depends on what they write, because she's a competent enough actor to deliver a good performance with something good, but not good enough to make anything out of mediocrity. Brie can play off of other actors quite well so if they have any sense, they go that route.
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If I'm perfectly honest, it was mostly just Brie's press junket shit that turned me off of her. I still haven't seen Cap. Marvel yet.
 
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starborn427614 said:
If I'm perfectly honest, it was mostly just Brie's press junket shit that turned me off of her. I still haven't seen Cap. Marvel yet.
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It'd be a solid enough Phase 1 or 2 movie, at this point don't bother. Compared to anything after 2015 or so it's quite weak, particularly since they seem to be heavily inspired by a pre-MeToo'd Joss Whedon. Her "inability to act" is overblown, however. She was written to be "emotionless" and delivers what she's asked, it was just a retarded creative decision. I expect her to be significantly better going forward.

In the movies, anyway. She seems to be tripling down on the activism shit.
 
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KillThemCrackasBabies said:
It'd be a solid enough Phase 1 or 2 movie, at this point don't bother. Compared to anything after 2015 or so it's quite weak, particularly since they seem to be heavily inspired by a pre-MeToo'd Joss Whedon. Her "inability to act" is overblown, however. She was written to be "emotionless" and delivers what she's asked, it was just a retarded creative decision. I expect her to be significantly better going forward.

In the movies, anyway. She seems to be tripling down on the activism shit.
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Eh if I'm bored I'll throw it on. I heard good thing about Monica and her mum in the flick, plus Talos.
 
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