With my nuanced take on why capes bad, I rise above both sides :grill:
I don’t like it because it’s drivel aimed at infantalising an entire generation so they buy expensive swag that is made through slave labor and just ends up in a landfill.
After Endgame, it’s like a switch was flipped and I just couldn’t be arsed anymore. I got the payoff from Nick Fury’s first cameo in Iron Man, although the payoff wasn’t worth it with all the missteps Endgame (and the MCU as a whole) took along the way. It still fucks with me how Marvel was bankrupt in the 2000s and threw the ultimate hail mary with a goddamn Iron Man movie starring Robert Downy Jr. No one saw it coming and now it’s dominated the film industry for a decade. Absolutely bonkers.
The MCU is a great timeline of anti-imperialist sentiment getting recuperated and redirected to benefit imperialism. Early stuff like Iron Man 1 and early Captain America was skeptical of US hegemony because we were coming off of Bush’s presidency but now you have the white CIA agent in Africa being the hero
The first Iron Man movie had no real criticism of US hegemony. One day I’ll do an effort post on this, but in the first Iron Man they never ever ever criticize the U.S. military’s goals or motivations. The U.S. military is in the right when they bomb countries, Iron Man just thinks he can do it better. When he weeps to the press he doesn’t mention the collateral damage of local victims to US hegemony, he literally is just sad that Stark weapons got used on US troops and himself. Iron Man (the film and the character’s) only criticism of the US military is that it’s not neoliberal enough.
Honestly I never started disliking it, I just got bored with it. If I see a trailer for something that seems like a fresh take on the genre I might get interested for it, but until then I’ll stick to watching classics that came out before I was born the same TV shows from my teenage/young adult years over and over again.
