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We have a badass panels thread, and we have a funny panels thread, we even have an edit based ruin the moment thread. But what about if the writer has managed to mangle a beloved character before Goons can even get their hands on them. An author handling your favourite character here in a way that drives you mad? Maybe you never liked the character at all? Post about it here. The nature of this thread means there will be some moaning, and debate over what is the true core of a character. Try to not froth at the mouth too much, and prepare to have your dislikes challenged. I'm going to start off with Captain America. I'm six months behind due to only reading via Unlimited, but he's been a petty, grade one rear end in a top hat for most of the past few years. Source: Avengers #44     So Tony Stark has just saved the entire planet pretty much single handedly through building not one, but two different doomsday weapons. Admittedly he did just kill an entire Armada of aliens, some of whom the Avengers know personally, but Steve Rogers doesn't care about that as he's a ginormous speciest. He just cares about his own mind having been wiped, and that the Illuminati were willing to kill 7 billion people to save untold trillions. His hate has blinded him to the following: 1) Maybe the supposed world's greatest tactical and strategic genius should be able to tell that having one of the world's greatest inventors on the lifeboat for humanity would be a good idea 2) If there's only a few hours left till the world ends, spending it beating the crap out of one of your oldest friends 3) Oh and then insulting him about not being up to your standards, whilst wearing the armour he designed and has been his life's work. Classy He's turned into post-Identity Crisis Batman. Guy turns into authoritarian rear end in a top hat after finding out his mind has been wiped has been done before. He's transgressed sovereign nations' borders. He's held people without access to lawyers, let his subordinates assault people under questioning, and all the while he's proclaiming himself to be whiter than white, and that all life is sacrosanct (whilst putting in place a plan to kill lots of aliens). The worst thing is that none of the comics seem to be really calling him on his poo poo. There's maybe a little bit of it, but it's usually in the same comics that a panel later "A bloo bloo bloo Illuminati bad also, let's sit on our hands and do nothing or just let the Cabal do our dirty work whilst wringing our hands". Well that was cathartic.
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Nov 10, 2015 00:23
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So you're telling me that Captain America became America.
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Nov 10, 2015 15:32
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Can I take a quick sidebar second to point out the art in that second page, where they put Steve in the stereotypical movie-style "face looking at readouts inside the Iron Man helmet" shot, when the panels literally above and below it on the same page show that half his face should be exposed, ie not at all how that shot is possible?
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Nov 10, 2015 16:31
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Yeah he is a little pissed as his best friend mind wiped him and then thought that he and he alone knew how to stop the incursions. He would not be so single-minded if Tony and other close friends mind wiped him and did not keep it a secret.
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Nov 10, 2015 18:00
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He is of course wrong and couldn't do poo poo either.
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Nov 10, 2015 18:13
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Basically everything that happened to the the Avengers Academy cast after that series ended. First arena, then Undercover. And now they've been used as punchlines in Secret Wars (I know a version of Striker got killed off in the first issues of Marvel Zombies for one thing). Arguably worst of all, however was Arcade. I mean, the whole point of the exercise (other than trying to cash in on those sweet, sweet Hunger Games/Battle Royale dollars) was apparently to make Arcade a 'credible' villain. Which they did by literally giving him arbitrary powerups from an original character (rather than him using his own apparent inventive abilities) and quite literally plagiarising the Hunger Games books in universe (not named, but he states he got the idea from a 'series of children's books'). Needless to say, racking up a bodycount (and you know, ripping off the idea for his new deathtrap from fiction) kind of goes against his character. For that matter, his motivation for all that - that people weren't taking him 'seriously' had already been done, and far better, in Avengers Academy (where he was doing far more in-character, and entertaining, death traps). Plus, killing people was never really what he was about - it was about the game to him. Chris Sims really explains why Arcade was so great: Chris Sims posted:Just the fact that Arcade is a guy who doesn’t hate his enemies, and isn’t grimly determined to carry out the contract for murder, but that he’s mostly just doing it because it’s fun. Which it is. I'll probably do an effort post later on X-23, who's probably the second worst off. Yes, maybe worse off than Mettle (who died) and everyone else in Undercover. Because she got...Bendissed.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:10
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Yvonmukluk posted:I'll probably do an effort post later on X-23, who's probably the second worst off. Yes, maybe worse off than Mettle (who died) and everyone else in Undercover. Because she got...Bendissed. I haven't really read every book Laura has appeared in, but I think her meta-level character arc has been kind of fascinating. She started out as a generic angsty teenager when she debuted on X-Men Evo (to fit in with the rest of the cast I guess) then she got introduced into 616 as a weird goth masochist hooker, then she got her full origin story which was like a weird cross between Weapon X and a sad anime about big eyed little girls, then she was Cassandra Cain 2.0 (taciturn killing machine with a heart of gold), and now she seems to be acting like a generic tough girl. That's a lot of iteration in ten years.
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Nov 11, 2015 21:53
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Yvonmukluk posted:Needless to say, racking up a bodycount (and you know, ripping off the idea for his new deathtrap from fiction) kind of goes against his character. For that matter, his motivation for all that - that people weren't taking him 'seriously' had already been done, and far better, in Avengers Academy (where he was doing far more in-character, and entertaining, death traps). Plus, killing people was never really what he was about - it was about the game to him. I can't believe that people got murdered in Murderworld!
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Nov 11, 2015 22:36
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Archyduke posted:I can't believe that people got murdered in Murderworld! I'm afraid you've missed the point. It was never just about killing people to Arcade, it was about the game. He wasn't a 'successful' villain because he wracked up a bodycount, he was entertaining because the ways he tried to kill the protagonists were always interesting, like when he brainwashed Colossus into thinking he was a deep-cover Soviet superagent and then laughed his rear end off watching him fight the other X-Men, or having one guy in a game of giant whack-a-mole. As opposed to Arena, where he just shoves a bunch of teenagers into a holodeck island and lets them go all hunger games. Hell in the first issue he kills a guy by just blasting a whole in him with his godmode powers. Where's the pizzazz? Where's the sense of fun? Where's the elaborate deathtraps? The most sophisicated he does is a land mine filled with trigger scent. That could be any supervillain's murder lair, but it's sure as heck not Murderworld.
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Nov 11, 2015 23:52
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I think my favorite Arcade moment is when he shows up in Alan Moore's run of Captain Britain. He's like a cypher for the exact moment where Moore stopped giving a poo poo about working within the system rules. Like, at the beginning of the run, it just starts out like a decently written standard superhero story, with him fighting some baddies and stuff. There's a lead-in at the end of one story that the next big villain's gonna be Arcade...and then Moore immediately changes his mind and starts taking the book into gonzo territory with dimension hopping, aliens with time travel based super powers, villains with literal omnipotence, etc etc and Arcade is all but forgotten about. He certainly doesn't actually encounter Britain at all.
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Nov 12, 2015 01:22
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I am the only person in the sweep of human history to either notice or care that Claremont gave Faith telepathic powers, apparently pulled out of his own authorial rear end, but god drat do I care. She had telekinesis because Faith can move mountains, you over-dialoguing baby fetishist, not because she's Jean Grey in purple Mahnke squiggles!  fake edit: ffs her other demonstrated powers are Faith healing and Faith as a source of comfort, are you somehow incapable of basic reading comprehension? double fake edit:   
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Nov 16, 2015 07:13
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I don't get Rogers end game. Wahhh, I'd rather everyone be dead?
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Nov 17, 2015 22:21
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TLG James posted:I don't get Rogers end game. Wahhh, I'd rather everyone be dead? Everyone was going to die no matter what as they were screwed, so Rogers just wanted to punch Tony a bit.
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Nov 17, 2015 22:23
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He wanted to wait until a perfect solution to present itself. Which is usual how things go so I can't blame em.
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Nov 18, 2015 20:09
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bobkatt013 posted:Everyone was going to die no matter what as they were screwed, so Rogers just wanted to punch Tony a bit. To be fair, punching 616 Tony Stark in the face for being a dick is probably how I'd want to go out.
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Nov 19, 2015 18:11
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CharlestheHammer posted:He wanted to wait until a perfect solution to present itself. Which is usual how things go so I can't blame em. That was so frustrating, and his idiotic "we'll come up with something, we always do!" didn't make any sense when he was standing in front of all the people who usually come up with something, and they're all shaking their head. And then he spends the rest of existence harassing the Illuminati and trying to stop them from trying to save the world, even after the ominous premonition that he would be on the wrong side and preventing them from finding a solution. I mean, you KNOW the entire universe is ending--is it that important, in your last months on earth, for you to waste all your time hunting your old friends who might actually be able to stop it?
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Dec 1, 2015 13:42
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.i was on his side for that kill them all really.
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Dec 1, 2015 20:01
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The illuminati are a bunch of stupid assholes and are both morally bankrupt and impractical in everything they attempt. The multiverse ending is a fair price to pay for not being in their camp.
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Dec 1, 2015 23:37
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yeah they should have gone with the guy who said "don't worry it'll work out."
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Dec 2, 2015 00:15
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Yes, but Tony Stark is a piece of poo poo. Monaghan posted:yeah they should have gone with the guy who said "don't worry it'll work out." It did, didn't it?
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Dec 2, 2015 03:22
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Boogaleeboo posted:It did, didn't it? It always does. It's kinda disingenuous to think Cap should act like he's not in a comic book universe. There's always a threat to the nation/world/galaxy/universe/timeline/all conceivable potential reality that could ever exist, and something always comes up. Rogers accepting that is perfectly logical, and the writers trying to skew it so he was wrong were about as believable as the crap Millar wrote to try to make Tony seem like he wasn't being an uncharacteristic rear end in a top hat in Civil War. Also the Illuminati have never been the "something that comes" up to fix things. For a group that supposedly existed behind the scenes to make everything better they basically have a track record of zilch. They're a fine plot device for "those assholes that think they're so smart hosed up again" but they don't fit in the role of "guys we actually trust to fix things".
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Dec 2, 2015 09:52
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I think the best approach to the wole Illuminati thing was when Blue Marvel basically told them off for deciding that they alone should make decisions for the entire planet.
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Dec 2, 2015 10:05
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Pieces of Peace posted:It always does. It's kinda disingenuous to think Cap should act like he's not in a comic book universe. There's always a threat to the nation/world/galaxy/universe/timeline/all conceivable potential reality that could ever exist, and something always comes up. Rogers accepting that is perfectly logical, and the writers trying to skew it so he was wrong were about as believable as the crap Millar wrote to try to make Tony seem like he wasn't being an uncharacteristic rear end in a top hat in Civil War. Maybe I'm the guy it was aimed at, because I hadn't read anything Marvel in a decade until Hickman Avengers, and I was on Team Illuminati hardcore. And no, "the Illuminati" aren't the something that comes up to fix things, but it's definitely Iron Man or Dr. Strange or Reed Richards a lot of the time. If all of the smartest intellects on the planet and the Sorceror Supreme are saying they have no idea how to fix things and they might need to blow up some planets to buy time, what is the "something else" that's gonna happen? Especially because nothing ever DID show up -- Cap had to know there had been multiple incursions the whole time he was figuring things out and then hunting them down, and so he was defeating the purpose of blowing up the planets in the first place, because Reed Richards and T'Challa and Tony Stark didn't get to sit and obsess over it in a fully-equipped lab all day. It's not even like he got all the nations of the world working on the solution, he just kinda ignored it to get in a pissing match with Tony. I dunno, it seemed like a really forced personality -- maybe he'd be angry, but not sheer world-endingly illogical about it. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 03:37
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Phenotype posted:Maybe I'm the guy it was aimed at, because I hadn't read anything Marvel in a decade until Hickman Avengers, and I was on Team Illuminati hardcore. And no, "the Illuminati" aren't the something that comes up to fix things, but it's definitely Iron Man or Dr. Strange or Reed Richards a lot of the time. If all of the smartest intellects on the planet and the Sorceror Supreme are saying they have no idea how to fix things and they might need to blow up some planets to buy time, what is the "something else" that's gonna happen? Especially because nothing ever DID show up -- Cap had to know there had been multiple incursions the whole time he was figuring things out and then hunting them down, and so he was defeating the purpose of blowing up the planets in the first place, because Reed Richards and T'Challa and Tony Stark didn't get to sit and obsess over it in a fully-equipped lab all day. It's not even like he got all the nations of the world working on the solution, he just kinda ignored it to get in a pissing match with Tony. The entire moral choice came across as contrived due to the history of the medium, though. It wasn't out of character for Tony or Reed or Namor or any of the other assholes to think there was no choice but the Grim Real Decision, but it was out of character for the Marvel universe (or 616 if you want to get picky) to convey any agreement with them. There are fifty years of comics in this setting where Earths did not have to be blown up in order to solve the crisis. I guess I'm stretching this thread's purpose, but Incursion really felt like a mischaracterization of the world - it felt like an Ultimate Universe (or, I dunno, Exiles) story forced into 616 for the sake of reboot. Which is a drat pity, because I loved Hickman's Fantastic Four/FF run, which had similar stakes and moral debates, and there were a lot of fun elements of Incursion, but the entire event doesn't fit with its surroundings - the curse of continuity, like most of the runs brought up here. (Oh hey, there's a big mischaracterization - the Hickman Fantastic Four Reed Richards has a humanity and hard-earned empathy that was completely lacking in his Incursion appearance. The guy who gives up a multiverse-fixing project to stay connected to his family is going to turn against his wife for the sake of a multiverse-not-even-fixing project like, six months later?)
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Dec 3, 2015 03:59
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Pieces of Peace posted:The entire moral choice came across as contrived due to the history of the medium, though. It wasn't out of character for Tony or Reed or Namor or any of the other assholes to think there was no choice but the Grim Real Decision, but it was out of character for the Marvel universe (or 616 if you want to get picky) to convey any agreement with them. There are fifty years of comics in this setting where Earths did not have to be blown up in order to solve the crisis. Again, I haven't read hardly any Marvel since I was in high school, and it seems kinda shallow to base your arguments on "the world's been ending every other day for the last fifty years, get over it." Especially since it WOULD have ended, several times over, and the only solution was for the Illuminati to blow up planets and work as hard as they could to come to an answer. Like, what else did Cap expect to happen? "We've got the world's greatest minds working on a solution, and we still haven't found one, and now there's a world-ending event that we only have one answer for, and we need more time. Oh, and it's already happened twice before you even got here. Do you have any magic friends that you can call that we haven't heard of?" Even if they never figured out how to stop the incursions, I still wonder what would have happened if they'd stopped fighting eachother and blew the poo poo out of the Ultimates Earth so there'd be nothing left to collide with. And as long as you're bringing up the Hickman Fantastic Four, I thought that seemed more out of place and unbelievable as a solution than Grim Decisions for the Avengers. Oh, hey, we just needed to get Franklin to solve it. Franklin can solve anything! Phenotype fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 04:11
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Phenotype posted:Maybe I'm the guy it was aimed at, because I hadn't read anything Marvel in a decade until Hickman Avengers, and I was on Team Illuminati hardcore. And no, "the Illuminati" aren't the something that comes up to fix things, but it's definitely Iron Man or Dr. Strange or Reed Richards a lot of the time. If all of the smartest intellects on the planet and the Sorceror Supreme are saying they have no idea how to fix things and they might need to blow up some planets to buy time, what is the "something else" that's gonna happen? Especially because nothing ever DID show up -- Cap had to know there had been multiple incursions the whole time he was figuring things out and then hunting them down, and so he was defeating the purpose of blowing up the planets in the first place, because Reed Richards and T'Challa and Tony Stark didn't get to sit and obsess over it in a fully-equipped lab all day. It's not even like he got all the nations of the world working on the solution, he just kinda ignored it to get in a pissing match with Tony. Breaking it down, your argument is that Captain America should be condoning the willful murder of TRILLIONS of people, and him NOT doing so is the mischaracterisation?
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Dec 3, 2015 04:14
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That's silly. They would save the lives of everyone in their universe by killing trillions, and they only do it a couple minutes before those trillions (and more!) would have died anyway. That's the entire point -- it's a grim and difficult decision, and Cap's response was ridiculously one-dimensional. "I can't have a part in this" would have made more sense than "I will stop you from trying to find a solution".
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Dec 3, 2015 04:50
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To be fair Avengers has a weirdly negative message and is probably the most grimdark you can get without massive violence. What I saying is it is basically a 90's comic. Maybe late 80s.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:17
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Even Watchmen was never as defeatist as "The entire universe is dying and there's nothing we can do about it except genocide on a planetary scale."
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Dec 3, 2015 05:19
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The incursions are trolley problems writ cosmically large. It's just that the heroes argued about which of the standard trolley problem solutions to apply, while Doom (in whom all hope lies) gave the only correct response: find out what rear end in a top hat keeps sending all these trolleys, and make them stop.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:55
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It's true, for all the poo poo Cap gets for not finding a solution, the illuminati weren't trying that hard either. Doom seemed to be the only character actually trying to accomplish anything.
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Dec 3, 2015 06:11
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Didn't Doom eventually need Molecule Man to outright tell him what to do?
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Dec 3, 2015 06:14
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Phenotype posted:And no, "the Illuminati" aren't the something that comes up to fix things, but it's definitely Iron Man or Dr. Strange or Reed Richards a lot of the time. That is more traditional than recent, as most of the current Illuminati has been in involved in colossal gently caress ups. Iron Man has like 4 of them in the past decade alone. They aren't the guys that solve problems anymore, they are the guys that probably caused them in the first place. They are poo poo people and they don't have the moral authority to order around a toddler. I mean it's a tossup if Beast or Tony are the biggest assholes in the current Illuminati, and that's loving impressive on a team that has Namor and Reed Richards on it. The fact of the matter is the world would be an objectively better place if they all just died. That's how terrible their recent track record is. And in light of that it's insane for them to start mind wiping folks and saying they are the ones that would find the answer. If anything you could say that entire event was a mix of poo poo characterizations being born and poo poo characterizations coming home to roost. e: Really if someone says "We should remake the Illuminati!" someone should immediately put a bullet in their head and save the heartache. Mulva fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 07:29
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Hell this isn't even the first time the illuminati as a group has hosed up. Even if Hickman wants to pretend that didn't happen.
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Dec 3, 2015 07:33
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Boogaleeboo posted:That is more traditional than recent, as most of the current Illuminati has been in involved in colossal gently caress ups. Iron Man has like 4 of them in the past decade alone. They aren't the guys that solve problems anymore, they are the guys that probably caused them in the first place. They are poo poo people and they don't have the moral authority to order around a toddler. I mean it's a tossup if Beast or Tony are the biggest assholes in the current Illuminati, and that's loving impressive on a team that has Namor and Reed Richards on it. The fact of the matter is the world would be an objectively better place if they all just died. That's how terrible their recent track record is. And in light of that it's insane for them to start mind wiping folks and saying they are the ones that would find the answer. If anything you could say that entire even was a mix of poo poo characterizations being born and poo poo characterizations coming home to roost. When you say the world would be better off if they died, do you mean now that the incursions or over, or at the time, when they were the only thing that stopped their entire universe from dying? Because I think their world would have been much worse off if they died while incursions were happening.
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Dec 3, 2015 08:20
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AzraelNewtype posted:When you say the world would be better off if they died, do you mean now that the incursions or over, or at the time, when they were the only thing that stopped their entire universe from dying? Because I think their world would have been much worse off if they died while incursions were happening. They didn't stop poo poo, their entire universe died. Then it got remade again a bit different down the road. Due to the vagaries of time fuckery, Doom was always the cause of their involvement and the solution to the problem. They didn't do anything that mattered. Doom was also the cause of Doom's involvement of things too, so they don't even get credit for that. They can all just eat a bullet at any point now, and maybe a time out in the dead room will start to rehabilitate their characters some.
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Dec 3, 2015 08:30
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CharlestheHammer posted:Hell this isn't even the first time the illuminati as a group has hosed up. Even if Hickman wants to pretend that didn't happen. Bendis pretty much created them as a group that does NOTHING BUT gently caress up. Unless you want to count them visiting Noh-Varr and being pompous assholes to him as something positive.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:26
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I find it suprising that everyone's calling the illuminati murders, when when push came to shove, only namor actually blew up a planet. The whole point was that most of the group couldn't bring themselves to do it. I guess you could say they made the bombs that allowed namor to blow up that one planet, but after that it was the cabal through and through.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:41
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Boogaleeboo posted:That is more traditional than recent, as most of the current Illuminati has been in involved in colossal gently caress ups. Iron Man has like 4 of them in the past decade alone. They aren't the guys that solve problems anymore, they are the guys that probably caused them in the first place. They are poo poo people and they don't have the moral authority to order around a toddler. I mean it's a tossup if Beast or Tony are the biggest assholes in the current Illuminati, and that's loving impressive on a team that has Namor and Reed Richards on it. The fact of the matter is the world would be an objectively better place if they all just died. You're gonna have to help me here, because again, I've barely read anything Marvel in the last ten years -- what have Reed, Tony, and Strange hosed up recently? I know Tony is an rear end in a top hat, but what else has he done besides build Ultron? Also, lol at Beast on that list of biggest assholes -- what on earth has he been up to in the last few years? My head canon Beast is still the one from the 90s cartoon, the furry scientist who talks like Fraser Crane.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:22
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Phenotype posted:You're gonna have to help me here, because again, I've barely read anything Marvel in the last ten years -- what have Reed, Tony, and Strange hosed up recently? I know Tony is an rear end in a top hat, but what else has he done besides build Ultron? Iron Man did Civil War wind he is to blame for secret Invasion partly. Beast grnocided a whole universe once. He is also a bit of a prick.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:40
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