- Joined
- May 19, 2018
Yeah, pretty much. Deadpool and Wolverine has come and gone, so what's next on thr slate? A bunch of TV miniseries nobody gives a fuck about? A Thunderbolts movie with only one actual Thunderbolt?
Marvel Cinematic Universe
- Thread starter jacobsonic
- Start date
-
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
Create account
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2023
We're going to have to wait until February, when Nigger America 4 comes out, for us to have anything to talk about.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
The story doesn't have nearly enough in it because the conspiracy isn't really the main focus of the narrative. It leaves most elements of it vague to let you fill in the blanks as nessesary. Its a noir murder mystery not a sci fi epic, and veldt isn't the protagonist, he's rich, he's powerful, he's clever, he's extremely well connected and he has a lot of time on his hands, that's really all he needs to be reasonably plausible with some level of suspenion of disbelief.
There's a reason the story goes out of its way to give him so many consessions as ot why he's capable of doing what he's doing. Just because its not something that could 100% be replicated in real life doesn't mean its suddently the same thing as wolverine regenerating from a drop of blood. Elon musk irl is already doing better than nasa when it comes to aerospace, Veldt is just super elon musk with a bit of a fantastical element.
I don't think comics are bad because they have fantastic elements or because they are god forbid unrealistic, I think they're bad because they're don't put any care into handling those fantastical elements with any ammount of grace. The writers who made wolverine, the main character, regenerate from a drop of blood or from having his head blown off, never gave it any though beyond DBZ level powerscaling where more strong = character development, but even DBZ at least tries to remember that goku or whatever shouldn't be beaten by a street thug next issue.
Meanwhile, contrast wolverine's (the main character) full frontal headshot regeneration with the watchmen discussion 7 layers deep about the plausible realism of the implication of CIA having a secret psion program alongside the manhattan project based on a random throwaway line.
If THAT was the level of issues most comics had I wouldn't call them shit to begin with.
I think its vague. Manhattan was already clouded by baryons or tachyons or whatever the fuck and I've seen people interpret his move as an extremely fucked up form of mercy because Rors didn't want to doom the world but couldn't live with a lie, because if saving the world was his goal, he'd also have taken care of the notebook which he should be aware of.
Either way I think its suitably open for interpretation in a way that doesn't negate the whole narrative.
The one staring captain israel called "new world order"?
Its gonna be really funny when that comes out and the ultra normies who don't watch the TV shows are like "wheres captain america all I see is some black guy".
- Joined
- May 19, 2018
Sorry, I don't buy that. Veidt is puppet-mastering a conspiracy that can apparently just black bag all the best minds at MIT and DARPA while the government stands around with its thumb up its ass, despite being in possession of an asset that van find these people in nanoseconds. He develops whole new fields of technology, in perfect secrecy, so far out that he can successfully imitate a full-fledged alien life form. The Manhattan Project, for reference, took years to pull off even with all the best minds, all the money, and all the foundations firmly established from the science of the day, and even that had leaks.
Maybe its just me; ive worked with and for engineers my entire adult life and can tell you from experience that being smart is not the I Win button that people like Steven Moffat and Alan Moore think it is, not when youre up against both human fallibility and the laws of physics. Or maybe it's Moore, wanting to justify the fantastical elements he intended to deploy but not realizing just how much he'd bitten off and in the process creating something at once underwhelming and ludicrous: a Theranos-tier corporate conspiracy weilding the power of the Illuminati, headed by a man who's such a good gymnast he can catch bullets. The setup does not justify the payoff, it's like putting an airsoft gun on the mantelpiece in Act 1 and using it to take down a kodiak in Act 3.
Theres a saying that people will entertain the impossible before the improbable, and tbats where I am: I'm more willing to entertain the possibility that a man can fly than that a man can develop a technique for flipping dimes that makes them consistently balance on their edge.
That's an issue with any long runner with multiple authors (or even the same author, if he's not paying attention.) You're always going to wind up with weird one-offs like the Star Wars Holiday Special or Archie Meets the Punisher. Different authors will have different interpretations of characters and their capabilities, and are almost always more consistent with their own previous work than they are with every portrayal of the character that's ever been done. That's why most fans of a particular entry will recommend particular runs (John Bryne She-Hulk, Kurt Busiek Thunderbolts, Chris Claremont X-Men, whatever.)
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2022
Let me know when you guys come to a consensus.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
I reached a consensus two pages back. The other two just don't agree with me.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
At this point you aren't even arguing against watchmen, you're arguing against any fictional story that involves any sort of international conspiracy.
You accuse me of hating comics for not being 100% realistic when that was never even my issue, but you're doing the same thing to watchmen. You're nitpicking a fictional conspiracy, not even for being self contradictory, just for being too improbable, whch is literally the whole point of any conspiracy to begin with.
I don't disagree with you, I disagree with krokodil.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
I was affecting humour. And conveying that I've said my peace and wont be spilling any more epic quantities of text on this topic. But if you care, I mostly agree with your counter arguments against Krokodil but disagree with you about how intrinsic the Superhero genre is to Watchmen being Watchmen and laid out my thesis a while back. I think it's a vital part of the themes and story.
As to @Krokodil Overdose 's argument. I feel he is taking an arguable point and building an edifice on it that it can't support. Something can be true but not important. I also feel he his building arguments that are true in abstract, but disregard numerous small things that call into question whether they apply in this case. Adrian is even sponsoring an "interdimensional research institute" in New York laying the groundwork for the idea of the squid. I actually think the framing of Dr. Manhattan that the movie goes with is far better thought out than the squid. I'd agree with small points of Krokodil's view, but the groundwork to make the squid work in the story is there and objections that 'super-genius jars with the realism the setting strives for and therefore shouldn't be used to create this profound unprecedented thing by one 6,000IQ person' don't hold water. Because Adrian doesn't do that. He IS a genius, maybe IS the world's smartest man. But he doesn't come up with all this himself or overnight. He has numerous leading experts in their own fields and lays the ground work with public efforts such as the Institute for Dimensional Research. The arrival of Dr. Manahattan has made many things possible that might not be before. We see Owlman's ship can levitate. It's not doing that by hot hair balloons, it's not a blimp nor behaves like one. And this is tech that maybe John helped provide Owlman with (we don't know) but it's a good parallel to counter the psionics argument. Anything one argues to say "if this were a thing then we MUST see widespread or advanced use of it elsewhere" would apply even more so to the antigravity of Owlman's ship.
William Gibson once said: "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed". I think that's a pretty good statement. The atom was proposed by Rutherford in the 1910s. The electron in 1897. It took half a century for these things to really take root in the public consciousness. From understanding of cathode rays to Flash Gordon rayguns, decades pass. And in reality, the transition from something being possible to it being economically viable and mass produced is often a long path. For what has been done to what we see often has a large gap in years. How much larger that gap might grow if you have Dr. Manhattan as your lab partner able to see atoms and manipulate sub-atomic events to let you test or try something out on a personal scale without having the barest inkling how to do it in a way that can be manufactured.
Some arguments are wrong not in logic but in degree. I feel @Krokodil Overdose is making mountains out of molehills.
Now look at me, you sly dog - you got me monologuing. I'm going to have a second attempt at withdrawing from all this.
- Joined
- May 19, 2018
Classic X-Files is one of my favorite shows. The conspiracy there is vast and powerful, featuring all kinds of crazy shit like memory erasure, cloning, shape-shifting assassins, and the whole thing is organized by an alien FTL civilization. And it still leaks more than Veidt's does.
Of course part of this is because the X-Files is basically a nonsense setting where every urban legend and conspiracy theory is straight up true. But it never tries to sell itself as anything else, so you can't fault the consistency. So no, I'm not ragging on conspiracies as such, I'm ragging on Enron times 10,000 except super-stable and competent because... uh... smart?
Im just taking you at your word, my guy. My thesis is that Watchmen is very similar to the genre exercises you affect to hate, given thay you're the one who went so far afield to draw a distinction between it and the rest of its parent genre.
Its a problem of degree, not kind. What Moore is trying to sell the audience on is "a strong man can bench press a V8 block, so this character, as the world's strongest man, can bench press a locomotive." Just like with the psionics thing, this breaks out one of two ways:
1. Veidt pulls out of his ass entire fields of science so advanced that it can fool the collective capacity of the rest of world, or;
2. Veidt flawlessly puppet-masters an Illuminati-esque conspiracy that includes black-bagging half of MIT and DARPA that, over the course of a decade, advances multiple fields of science to a degree that can fool the collective capacity of the rest of the world and successfully disappears all of the evidence and participants.
Both of these are, in a word, fucking impossible. The intelligence required to get within a country mile of either would make Doctor Doom look like Forrest Gump, especially from a notional non-super. While I wouldn't mind this normally, a book that affects being "realistic" and "grounded" can't invoke such genre conventions, especially as it conspicuously removes them from other facets of the story. It's as @wtfNeedSignUp said, a mirage of realism that appears and disappears at the author's convenience.
The potential synthesis, I suppose, is that Veidt isn't particularly smart but everyone else in the Watchmen universe is pants-on-head retarded. Lex Luthor even mentions this in Doomsday Clock- "if you're the smartest man in your universe, I'd hate to see the dumbest." Game of Thrones has this problem too, where the "dark" tone and the author's need to constantly showcase man's inhumanity to man has the cumulative effect of making the world operate by sociopathic retard logic.
If I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, its because the mole in question is the size of a skyscraper.
No one's said this except you. What I said, repeatedly, is that even a decent working theory about psionics (which are a real, quantifiable, observable thing) would be enough to demystify the squid and dispel the illusion Veidt is attempting to create. You don't need to know how to build an implosion lens to understand what it is.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2022
tbh I completely forgot that epsers were a thing in the comic of Watchmen
but yeah iirc there was a VERY loud silence in the field of atomic research and a sudden growth in demand for uranium over the 30s
normal people didn't notice but the people paid to notice things did
yeah I do agree with the idea that if we give that epsers are an existing thing (however insignificant for day-to-day life) then lots of them go missing does seem like it would be a thing at least somebdoy would notice
but yeah iirc there was a VERY loud silence in the field of atomic research and a sudden growth in demand for uranium over the 30s
normal people didn't notice but the people paid to notice things did
yeah I do agree with the idea that if we give that epsers are an existing thing (however insignificant for day-to-day life) then lots of them go missing does seem like it would be a thing at least somebdoy would notice
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
Do you mean Espers?
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2022
if you want to be a pedant than ESPer would be more appropriate
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
X Files is a procedual with little to no care for canon or conspistency. Its twilight zone except with an excuse to use the same characters everytime, which is fine, because the conspiracy isn't the main point, the individual episodes are.
You're saying watchmen is like the rest of the comics because a throwaway line that could be removed by a misprint and nobody would notice implies that psionics that humans are incapable of using exist and veldt using his enormous fortune and the help of thousand of top world scientists was the first to develop them around the cold war which the story takes place in.
I'm saying supehero comics are baby garbage because wolverine can get his head blown off on the reg and then regenerate it.
Except he didn't pull them out of his ass, he has been hiring experts from all over the world and running multiple institutes over several years.
And again, we don't know the aftermath of the squid. We don't know if the conspiracy was blown or not. That's why the book
ends like it does.
This is what I mean when I say you blow shit unreasonably out of proportion. You're claiming throaway lines that have no bearing on the plot are plotholes the size of skyscrapers.
Doomsday clock is the same kind of baby garbage I hate, I've never read it, I never will, and I don't think it has much of a bearing on the original watchmen.
Why would knowing what psionics are demystify the squid? Its just an alien squid that uses psionics. I don't think humans in xcom being able to use psionics somehow proves all the aliens are fake there either.
newuser131
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2023
unpopular opinion. zack snyder's ending to watchmen was better than alan moore's ending.
in the zack snyder movie, veidt used dr manattan's teleporting powers are the bases for the attach on not just nyc but all over the world. alan moore just a fake alien, created by artist and scientist and teleported it into midtown nyc and the psychic blast from the fake alien is what killed all those people in nyc.
the moore ending never made sense to me. the way veidt used the fake alien seamed too far fetched and did not really have any connection to the story. plus it only happened in nyc. why would that unite the rest of the world? for all the ussr knows, this could be a false flag by the usa. but the snyder ending, tied dr manhattan to the attacks and it was all over the world. thus uniting the world agains dr manhattan. it made more since because it had a narrative connection to the characters and the story.
the moore ending never made sense to me. the way veidt used the fake alien seamed too far fetched and did not really have any connection to the story. plus it only happened in nyc. why would that unite the rest of the world? for all the ussr knows, this could be a false flag by the usa. but the snyder ending, tied dr manhattan to the attacks and it was all over the world. thus uniting the world agains dr manhattan. it made more since because it had a narrative connection to the characters and the story.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
"Psychic" is the usual term. I wasn't being pedantic over a spelling mistake, you spelled it that way multiple times and I've rarely heard the term Esper. I think I recall it only from in-universe dialogue in some old Sci-Fi novels, so I was checking what you meant.
That's fine if it's internally consistent and you can find other meaningful ways for him to have risk or loss. In Doctor Who, before it all went to total shit, you had Jack Harness who had that level of immortality. Not because of some mutation but because an idiot with temporary godlike powers decided he should live and didn't set an expiry date on that. So he is alive in the same way that gravity is a thing and magnetism works. You can literally incinerate him and he just comes back. It's not very well-thought out, but it's in-universe not very well thought out in that the being who did it didn't think it through what she was doing. So he is still, very slowly, aging and at one point the government simply tips him into a large container and fills it with concrete. Think encased and immovable, he probably wished for death!
I'm listing this out as a comparison to one-drop Wolverine because they're similar in levels of invulnerability but they certainly manage to introduce risk and emotional stakes to Jack Harkness. It's pretty sad when you realise the woman he visits isn't his lover, but his daughter, and she's older than him. Comics aren't garbage if you have Wolverine able to regenerate from one drop, it's about how you handle it and how consistent it is with everything else.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2022
Last couple of years nerd buddies and me went through OG Files, the stuff before the revivals, and the conspiracy episodes were usually the biggest fucking drags of the series.
Ones where they were investigating spoopy and then _a_ conspiracy was there was one thing, but the ayyy/black goop/CSM Gang centered episodes usually ended up everybody mumbling at each other and wandering around for an hour.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
As I've said earlier, you can do everything well and you can do everything badly, you can have good vs evil done well or badly, you can have nihilism done well or badly and you can also have overpowered vs mortal done well or badly.
One punch man is a good example of this, the main character is invincible, indestructible and unstoppable, he can knock out gods by blinking and everyone who knows the truth about him instantly bends the knee to him and becomes a loyal follower, but the story still finds a way to weave a narrative that's intresting by actually building a plot around those elements, and focusing more on both the cast surrounding him and the depressive ennui of what such power would actual entail for an ordinary human.
One punch man is literally the first instance of "I wish I didn't have this much power" I've ever seen and didn't think it was complete bullshit/forced.
Mob psycho also does the same thing while also focusing on the main character and it also works for similar reasons, because most of the conflict is social/emotional.
I know saitama is never gonna die and I know that if push comes to shove he's just gonna instantly curbstomp any dragon/god disaster levels, but it doesn't matter, because that isn't what the story is about. The story is watching him find some other meaning in his life. He doesn't have a nemesis because he doesn't really need one, and neither does mob which is why he doesn't have one either.
Superhero comics tend fuck this up because the characters are martial gods and most of the conflicts they face are also martial in nature, with emotional/social conflicts often being tacked on and getting in the way of the main conflict instead of working in tandem with it.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
Then you're basically agreeing with me a comic is not "baby garbage" (your words) because of the powers the characters have, but because it's not done well. Watchmen is an excellent example of superheroes that is done well, imo.
- Joined
- May 19, 2018
Precisely, it doesn't write checks it can't cash. Unlike Watchmen.
They can use them, it's how Veidt finds his victims. Again, you're discussing the better version of the story that doesn't exist.
Thousands of top scientists that he sunsequently silences/dissappears on top of the tens of thosands of artists/engineers/etc etc etc with nobody noticing. In the Cold War, when the super powers were hyper-vigilant about that sort of thing and constantly researching unorthodox weapons.
So #2: Illuminati puppet master who can make tens of thousands of high profile people and their work disappear in a puff of fairy dust.
In real conspiracies, secrecy is a double-edged sword; Theranos ran into this exact problem trying to build something much, much, much, much less outlandish, because the compulsive security meant that all the field leaders they employed couldn't work together effectively. Holmes et all weren't idiots, quite the contrary, but as the conspiracy expands, the number of angles necessary to cover rapidly outscales the ability of a human- ANY human- to manage. The realistic version of Veidt's conspiracy is a dysfunctional, useless clusterfuck until it falls apart, which it will do very rapidly. The alternative is that Veidt can keep a Savoy Hotel's worth of plates spinning by himself because smart.
Doomsday clock is a story where Veidt's plan is retarded and didn't work, Dr. Manhattan is a psychopath, and murdering good people in cold blood for the sake of the Big Lie is Bad, Ackshully. It even has the nerve to say that hope and ideals are good and important. I don't like that baby garbage, I'm a big kid now!
Because the squid is made out of human parts which can only be obscured to the degree that it doesn't impede functionality. Unless we're back to Veidt inventing a field of science again. The X-Com aliens are trivially demonstrable as aliens independent of their psychic abilities.
Last edited:
Hey, Agatha all along is absolutely what someone who grew up reading Avengers and Spider-man comics wants to see.
Besides it's not like they have at of IP's they could adapt or things they could do and fail.
@Overly Serious I was with you till you used Watchman as an example...