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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  2yr ago (text post)   2573 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I hope this is more Fun than Culture War, but She Hulk spoilers below:

Most of the show was very episodic. There were several episodes where I remarked to my husband that there were no outstanding plot threads that I could see and if the show ended there I wouldn't care. There were also many episodes where the highlight of the show was anyone but the main character. Wong, Matt, Abomination, everyone else at the law firm.

The finale went for a big merging of a bunch of disparate elements into one tropey climatic fight. And then they did the biggest lampshade hanging I've seen outside of crappy fanfiction. Basically the writers admitted that the story they wrote sucked, that Marvel Studios cannot make anything original or interesting, and that the direction of the MCU is literally written by an algorithm to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But they seemed to think that pointing this out somehow absolves them and made She Hulk good.

Did anyone else watch the show? Did I miss something? Did the lampshade hanging work for anyone?

I refuse to consume any franchise-milking media. People shat on Scorsese, but he was basically right: there's already too much content in the world, and we shouldn't busy ourselves with something explicitly designed to be sold from the ground up.

Why do you have to refuse ?

Most of it is either intensely boring or offensively stupid. Somehow our NAS ended up having some Avengers films and we watched one and I think I fell asleep doing so. Somehow, none of it seems interesting. All so contrived.

Principles are there to lighten cognitive load. I don't have to worry about whether to watch something or not. MCU? Pass. Disney Star Wars? Pass. Expanded universe anything? Pass.

I guess we basically agree; it'd never occur to me to watch these because I found it a snoozefest , and you refuse to watch it because it's proven to be commercialised crap made with little care to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Of the recent Marvel Shows, the one I liked the most was Hawkeye. I enjoyed Agents of Shield, but wouldn't claim it was worth anyone else's time.

I thought Daredevil season 1 was great though so we probably have very different tastes.

I did not watch the show, but one of my buddies raved about the breaking of the 4th wall and how awesome it was. Sort of intriguing but not nearly enough for me to slog through a season of anything.

Breaking the fourth wall was done in an amusing manner and was entertaining at least. It was just empty. It's like eating cotton candy on an empty stomach. It was amusing at the time but a bad choice overall.

Most positive thing I will say about the finale:

They tried something different and a lot of people will never do that.

I do not mind She-Hulk talking to the audience. She was doing that before Deadpool. But robbing the audience of a pay-off as a joke is, well, quite unsatisfying.

They said that they were dealing with Jennifer Walter's problems in her life, but then all the problems magically went away. I was going to be happy that they were not solved in a big cinematic CGI fight, but there was nothing. There was not even an explanation for her getting her job back, how she changed into She-Hulk at the end, why Titania showed up, or why Titania is now at least on her side.

On Titania, I expected her to be on Jen's side at the end, all the way from episode 1, since no woman is ever really a bad guy in a chick flick, but the explanation is "lol so zany if this happened".

There's a difference between breaking the fourth wall, which I appreciate, and lampshade hanging, which I find amusing in small quantities. It's just irritating when 'bad writing' is the thing they are explicitly hanging a lampshade over.

The "no resolution" thing bothers me. We didn't need a massive fight, we didn't need to see Jen argue with K.E.V.I.N. We needed to see Jen work through her self esteem issues relating to her job and social life and that was never addressed in a satisfactory way. Her getting together with Matt felt rushed.

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