Weekly Thoughts 2/25/23

Another week, another post. I’m really excited for the upcoming Pokemon Direct on Monday. Cannot wait to see what the news is. Easy money is on ScarVio DLC announcements, pretty decent hope is for an older Gen game to be available on Switch Online. Would stretch to hope for some kind of clue about the next Legends game. Wouldn’t the Sevii Islands be awesome? Although I am more tied to getting another shot at Unova, hands-down the best region in the series.

But that’s not what I’m going to be talking about this week, as I’m not much for prognostication. What I do want to talk about is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Mainly, I want to talk about my biggest issue with the movie. For my money, it was, overall, fine. It was entertaining, there were a lot of cool things floating around the Quantum Realm, Johnathan Majors is amazing, and the narrative was cohesive enough. My issue is that it could have been so many better things besides what we got. For me, the icon for all this is MODOK.

For what they wanted MODOK to be, they did a good job. He was a funny, silly-looking villain sidekick. Of course, that’s the exact problem. For as silly as MODOK is when you describe him, he’s also a major Marvel villain who can, and has, taken on the entire Avengers. While “giant head with arms and legs sticking out in a cyborg chair” sounds like a joke, that’s also what a real life horror movie would look like, right? If MODOK were real, he would be utterly terrifying to behold. Add onto that his vast intellect, leadership skills, unending determination, and the power he reserves for his own offense, and he’s every bit a lead villain worthy of a full team response. He’s not some one-off goon for the junior, untrained hero to beat by running around for a while and occasionally landing a punch. By all rights, he should have been the main villain of this movie, and it would have made a lot more sense. Kang could have been waiting in the background. Since we mostly just heard about him being a badass, the movie wouldn’t have been that different if we never saw him in action until the Kang Dynasty.

So why was MODOK made this way? Part of it is probably vibing off of the recent Patton Oswalt show, which is explicitly a comedy, unlike this dramatic movie continuing a serious narrative. Part of it is that MODOK hasn’t been a major player in the comics for a while, and when he’s come up, it’s been to make fun of him. That second bit really gets to the main issue, which is how MODOK is emblematic of professional fanfiction writing. What I mean is when writers and artists who grew up reading comics work on a book and write them from the perspective of a fan, usually only partially. This comes up with how characters are framed differently over time and the sort of humor you get. For instance, it’s very common for people to write jokes about how superheroes are immune to thinking things are weird. Why? They’ve only experienced a small selection of things in life, even with their larger than life adventures, and nothing says they ever have to get used to it. It’s an annoying bit of, “Well, we all know how this goes, right?” that is removed from the narrative. Leave the meta stuff to fans, or to fourth wall characters like Deadpool, and write the book seriously. Or how comic book superheroes have to address the damage they cause, when in the comics, it’s almost entirely the villains doing it, and they’re just responding to internet criticism of the movies. I get that in the movies, they have a bad habit of making the heroes really destructive as a show of their power, but even there, it’s still mostly the bad guys causing destruction. It’s just blaming the superheroes for being the last ones standing, and treating their battles as removed, self-contained conflicts that wouldn’t happen if they didn’t exist. And while yes, that speaks to a larger issue in the narratives no longer tying into real world issues and everything being personal, it’s still misguided.

MODOK is a great example of this, because it’s easy for fans to joke about how silly he is, and then when one of those fans starts writing MODOK for Marvel, they write him as the joke they assume we all think he is. I want him to be what he is, rather than what fans think he is, you know? Because that’s the great thing about fiction: It can be anything you can imagine. It’s often satisfying and illuminating to see very real situations played out in a fictional setting, to meditate on the issues, relationships, emotions, and philosophies of it all. It’s also really satisfying to imagine things that simply could not exist in real life and treat them like they are real, to think about how something would actually work and what you would actually do in this unrealistic situation. To put it simply, I’d rather deal with a ridiculous and absurd situation seriously in a story than laugh about it and move on, if the story is meant to be serious and dramatic. Obviously, a comedy is a different can of worms, a can that superhero comics generally aren’t. If you’re going to introduce someone with a ridiculous power or appearance as a world-conquering super threat who’s killed hundreds of people, don’t cop out by making fun of how silly they look. These are real issues the heroes are really facing.

It’s all pretty frustrating to me. It’s about immersion, you know? I’m never going to be a DnD player who talks in a make-believe accent as a figurine on a dining room table goes on adventures; I get my fix by reading stories where ridiculous things can happen, and I can put myself in that world and be a part of that larger than life action. It really helps when those stories take themselves baseline seriously and maintain a minimum level of consistency to stated physics and the dramatic stakes. That’s the basic underpinning to the only truly important sense of realism I need: Realistic characters.