zslane

I honestly don't remember the comics establishing clear rules for Cap's shield in the first place. As far as I can tell, it was just a shield made out of a nearly indestructible metal alloy and nothing more. If later writers added new properties to it then they are responsible for opening the door to internal inconsistencies; those inconsistencies weren't part of the character from the start. In any event, such internal inconsistencies are symptoms of poor writing no matter the medium. Just because the comics suffered from lazy writing is no excuse for lazy writing in movie screenplays.

For me, the Rule of Cool needs to be tempered with internal consistency at the very least. Realistic physics aren't necessarily to be expected in a superhero movie in any case, but if they establish rules for how things work, they should stick to them. Otherwise they fail to earn the drama they're trying to generate in their action scenes. This principle is just basic Writing/World-building 101, something any screenwriter worth their salt should know and practice in all their writing.

The succession of Mechanon write-ups from one edition of the game to the next feels to me like Second System Syndrome over and over again, as if each version after the first was a new "even better version" that learned all the wrong lessons from the limitations of the version preceding it.

If true, then that explains the dissonance succinctly. You can't take a tragic Norse figure and transform him into a tragic Greek figure without (negative) consequences.

What I mean is that the only way that comic served as an inspiration is the visuals of Thor turning soft, fat, and drunk. Feige dispensed with the cause of Thor's behavior in that comic, which was critical to making sense of it, IMO. You could argue that Thor lost his place in Asgardian society in both cases, but in my view the details matter tremendously here. What happened to MCU Thor was so different from what happened to comic book Thor (in the case you describe) that the response should also have been very different (again, IMO).

I will quote a very old post from the Red October BBS: Silly wabbit, points are for players! Nobody is going to care if you "pay" for that villain lair with a Villain Bonus representing villain XP or if you don't even bother with that unnecessary formality.

I don't see any threads of similarity between what led to Lebowski Thor in the MCU and the comic book storyline you refer to. Any such "inspiration" is solely in the mind of the writers/producers, as none of it appears on screen.

Mechanon is a good example in that he went from consuming 3/4 of a page in 1st and 2nd edition to several pages in 6th edition. He was always intended to be an Ultron clone, even in 1st edition, but in my experience it was never remotely necessary to define and describe him with the degree of bloat found in 6e.

This can't be laid at Hemsworth's feet. He was doing what was written for him and acting as the director(s) asked him to. As for Ultimates Thor, he was more of an eco-hippie, not an Asgardian imitation of Jeffrey Lebowski. Moreover, Ultimates Thor was not out of shape. I really don't see much of a similarity.

My favorite example of character write-up bloat is Mechanon. None of the GMs I played with back in the day ('80s and '90s) ever had a problem running villains as written up in editions 1-4 of the game. Perhaps this perceived need to spell out every little possible detail is an indicator of how the player base has changed since guys like Steve Peterson and Rob Bell left custodianship of the game in the hands of others.

To a degree, yes, but that scales differently depending on which character you're talking about. Asgardian "gods" should not be expected to be as relatable as your average human. As LL points out, that's why Thor was given an alter-ego in the comics. To give readers a human character to relate to. But I maintain that Donald Blake was never what readers were interested in. They wanted Thor to be All Ass-Kicking All the Time. There's room in any universe as large as the 616 or MCU for a couple characters like that. Thor is certainly one of them. Marvel had plenty of other non-human characters wrought with angsty melodrama (e.g., Silver Surfer) that they didn't need to put those chains on every character they introduced. To not let Thor "work through" his emotional turmoil in Endgame in a more dignified manner only showed the commercial mandate driving the character's development (i.e., "make him a lovable goofball now"); it was not some laudable creative achievement.

Yeah, my apologies for confusing the conversation. My comments really belong in an entirely different thread.

After defeating Ronan, reclaiming the Power stone, and then defeating Ego and literally saving the galaxy (universe?), they had every right to think of themselves as actual guardians of the galaxy. The only reason you and I as audience members are led to doubt that is because they weren't written in a way that allowed them to own the heroic stature they had earned. In a sense, this agrees with your thesis that the writers (and/or Feige) are inconsistent with their depiction of heroism in the MCU. Starlord seems to know what to do to save the universe when the script calls for it, but then suddenly doesn't when, again, the script calls for it.

By the time of the events of Infinity War, Starlord had been through the dramatic arcs of two GoG movies, more than sufficient to evolve as a character. I'd argue that he should have learned how to be a hero by then, at least by comic book standards, even if his methods were often somewhat juvenile. But he didn't display the kind of heroism the leader of a group that thinks of themselves as guardians of the entire galaxy should have, and the way I see it that's the fault of the writers, not my expectations.

Agreed. But we live in an era in which (super)heroes are often the subject of irony and scorn and "deconstruction". Where they are spared that indignity--such as in the MCU--they are still "grounded in reality", at least to the point of making these heroes more human and relatable. To my mind that's just code for "more like the average person", which is not what superheroes are supposed to be AFAIC. This was never more apparent than when Starlord's "losing it" on Thanos at arguably the most critical moment in the modern history of the universe was justified on the grounds that "he's only human", which again is just code for "he's just like us ordinary folk", which I axiomatically disagree with even if you take away his Celestial powers.

Indeed. However, I think that it was a (creative) mistake to mash the two together into a single character during Endgame just to make the thunder god more "relatable". My memory of comic-book Thor back in the day (the 70s and 80s) was that readers didn't really care much about Donald Blake and preferred to exclusively see/read about Thor. It made complete sense to me for the MCU to just give us the Asgardian god and not bifurcate him with the human alter ego. As such, I never saw a need to do what they did to the character in Endgame. But, of course, I am reacting as a fan of the old comics and not as a mainstream movie-goer with no past relationship with the comics.

I would argue that Asgard was not very developed in the comics when Thor first appeared in them either. It took a long time to develop Asgard and the rest of that pantheon of super-beings in the comics. Readers simply accepted Thor as he was without question for many hundreds of issues. But mainstream movie audiences don't have the same mindset that comic readers do, and so they demand something quite different from these characters. The need for (MCU) Thor to remain a viable solo "franchise" character put great pressure on Feige to pivot and make him funny and relatable so as to appeal to the masses, a problem Stan Lee never really faced with comic-book Thor.

In order to appeal to mainstream audiences, Feige has had to capitulate to the need to make the MCU characters "relatable" to the masses. Mopey Fat Thor is ostensibly much more relatable to Americans than Shakespearean Thor. This was not especially the case when Thor was introduced to Silver Age comic book readers in the 1960s. But times they have a'changed, n'est-ce pas?

By history I refer to the years and years this subject has arisen while nothing substantive has been done to move the needle and make meaningful progress. The fact is that it is haaaaarrrd, and no amount of wishful thinking and aspirational platitudes is going the change that. All that has ever been done is talking about it. And that's because talking about it is all that anyone is prepared and capable of doing about it. What is required is beyond the means of this community, as has been demonstrated by years and years of zero progress.

The early episodes are deliberately misleading in that they slowly establish Wanda's tenuous state of mind in the form of classic sitcoms before it all begins to unravel and the real drama ensues.

It will take the coordinated time, resources, and talent of a whole bunch of committed, invested, and qualified individuals to make any meaningful changes. History shows that such a collective does not exist.

Thor could have spent his days building an Asgardian-style "fortress of solitude" for himself somewhere in Scandanavia. I would have preferred a Thor single-mindedly obsessed with building some giant structure in homage to his lost people and lost realm than a Thor wallowing in pity and serving as the focal point for farce.

LL, I know you have a highly functioning imagination and a prodigious intellect to go with it, which is why I am surprised you gave up so easily there. Farcical behavior is but one reaction to profound loss, and I'd argue it is the least dramatically compelling--in the context of cinema--because it undercuts the tragedy/suffering with persistent bathos.

I agree 100% with archer here. You don't have to make a mockery of the Thor character in order to put him through another redemption arc. I know that the lighter, more humorous tone of Thor: Ragnorak was well-received, but if "Fat Thor would be great!" was what Feige took away from that, then I think it's one of those rare cases where he simply got it wrong. Listening to your audience is a good thing; pandering to the Big Lebowski fans among them is...IMO...not.

He doesn't appear to carry a narcissistic pathology anymore. Since the third act of his debut movie, his first concern has been for safety of Earth and the multiverse, not himself.