The Marvels

Okay, I'm about to get really really harsh. And, before that I do that, I wanna say something that literally everybody I have read or watched that has criticized this movie has said, and this includes those supposedly racist conservatives:

Iman Vellani is a pure joy to watch. I have never seen someone enjoy being a superhero so much as her. I wish her all the luck with her career in the world.

This movie is pure shit. My God, it hurt to watch this one. It's not as bad as Thor: Love and Thunder, which I couldn't even get through. But it's shit. The script is dumb, a good villain is wasted, the action is boring as hell, Brie Larson needs to get out of the MCU, and obvious fanbait to keep me watching has become actively resented, and just... Marvel can you please just stop?

So, the script is dumb. Captain Marvel, who murdered billions of people, hasn't been locked up for war crimes, nor does she turn herself in for having committed one of the greatest acts of manslaughter ever recorded... like you lost me right there. Right there I'm done. Why does the rest of the universe trust her? Why the hell does she have a singing husband on a silly planet of singing people? Why is the elephant in the room not acknowledged by anyone but the villain???

Oh, Captain Marvel feels bad about it? Her poor feelings are hurt??

Tough.

People have been imprisoned for life for a lot less.

And that's not where the script keeps being stupid. Why is our villainess, Dar-Benn, a villain??? There's this completely unnecessary mustache-twirling element added to a character who frankly didn't need it. Her planet, her people, are dying. There is absolutely no reason for her to go evil to be the antagonist. Quite the opposite! She's the only one with a sane complaint in the cast! Her going "I'll steal a sun and doom another planet and put someone else through what my people have been" makes no sense at all. If she cares about her people then, on some level, Dar-Benn cares. It would have been far more interesting to see her trying to take out Captain Marvel (RIGHTFULLY), only to relent when she realized that the destroyer of her planet could restore it. A lot could have been done with Dar-Benn to make her a more potent and interesting antagonist and just the sheer lack of imagination hurts.

The action is boring. No, it's not fun. Or even moderately interesting. This movie was clearly designed for a phone-addicted audience. And that's the most effort the action is getting from me, coz clearly it doesn't deserve more.

Brie Larson can be a fantastic actress. I've seen her try. I've seen her care about projects. When Brie Larson gets going in a role she can really dial in and turn her energy way up. And that is nowhere near this role. I can't even call it a character. Modern Captain Marvel is boring as hell, and required the Iron Man level of rehabilitation that the MCU originally gave him. And she didn't get it. She's just comic book Captain Marvel, which is... um.

Okay, quiet part out loud, most of the earlier MCU projects were improvements over what's honestly crap source material. Age of Ultron as a comic book event is awful. Just awful. Civil War is when the comics made character assassination cool. Secret Invasion is just shit.

NOTICE HOW MOST OF THIS IS TIED TO BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS????

Point is.

A lot of the MCU works coz they took good basic ideas from half-wit writers (don't balk, I'm complimenting Bendis's recent stuff by calling him a half-wit) and applied actual effort to them. Are these revolutionary or even vaguely high art ideas? Absolutely not, but they were fun, and popcorn cinema is a legit way to go. But in order to do popcorn cinema right you have to get good actors who care about the source material to play the hell out of the roles, stupidly competent writers who have to scrub the shit stains off diamond-quality ideas, and directors who love the source material enough to be critical of it and know they can do better.

And Brie Larson ain't got it.

The only soul in this production who does is Iman Vellani, and God she deserves so much better than this nonsense.

Also, I'm done with these post-credit scenes. Vellani's was fun coz it's two people who clearly like the source material just riffing off each other, but the alternate universe stuff... it's not working. It's just not. This is exactly where Marvel falls flat on its face, Exiles excepted, and Marvel needs to cut it out. 

Please hire good writers and directors who truly love the source material and give Iman a story worth being so damned adorable over. Junk this phase crap, and just let us see Ms. Marvel scout out talent, have fun doing it, and go back to our fun popcorn flicks.

I know they're not going to do it.

But in my last screams of protest over a franchise that has clearly lost its soul I will not go out quietly.

Oh, there's one bright spot to this. Just one. I can see who the shills are now. Coz anyone who claims to like this trash is most definitely a shill. More and more the conservative right's critiques are looking downright prescient: the supposedly compassionate left reveals their true colors of pro-corporatist and totalitarian zombies, with the most they're able to summon being "this was fun!"...

Seriously? That's the best you can do? "It was fun" is the best you can do???

Dude, Iron Man was a lot more than fun. I'm not claiming it was the best movie ever, but it had heart. It had soul. Tony was driven to do what he thought was right, and to hell with everyone else. Everyone knew they had watched something special. The deniers were met with just raw joy. So they had to shut up. I've learned, slowly but surely, but that such joy is the key to defending controversial things. I used to argue with a lot of people about the merits of The Last Jedi. It doesn't go anywhere, coz people can find any reason to dislike something. So I just tell them that I found the movie so beautiful that it stunned me to silence. I tell them about my friend who called me in tears, because she found the whole movie deeply cathartic. That the movie had communicated something transcendent to the both of us, and it was that simple. The same with The Rise of Skywalker. I got a lot out of the movie, and part of the trick is to meet the angry with the very simple statement: "But it changed me. I'm sorry it didn't you" and to drop it from there. It's not something I'm terribly good at doing, but it is what needs to happen.

There's no joy in the defense of The Marvels. It's just an annoyed "shut up racists", said with no oomph. Coz... well... there's nothing in this movie that's actually fun! Or cathartic! Nothing! It's just hollow nonsense. Defending this movie doesn't make you a good person, or anti-racist, or anything. It just betrays a lack of depth, on your part. I mean, c'mon folks, The Marvels could have been one of those fake movies in The Boys... well that's not quite true, is it? It would have to not have poor Iman in it. 

I hope they do right by her. She should be the new face of the MCU, backed by competent writers and directors, allowed to do what Doudney Jr. did. If there was any justice here that's what would happen. But that would be way too optimistic. 

And "optimism is cowardice", as Spengler so correctly points out.

Eternals

What the heck, folks? Just, what the heck?

I ignored this when it first came out. The reviews looked mixed, at best. I hate the less grounded Marvel comics, early Fantastic Four excepted for reasons that don't really matter here. Point is most cosmic Marvel stuff is boring. It removes half the formula that makes Marvel comics actually good (epic powers with grounded and relatable stakes) and chucks it out the window... thus making it DC-Lite. There is nothing wrong with DC. But it is not Marvel, it is something different, and Marvel's constant attempts to do something bigger usually falls flat. Marvel doing cosmic stuff means the stakes have to be really grounded in human emotion, really based in something that's easy to figure out and understand. Guardians of the Galaxy works because the emotions are big, easy to read, and sympathetic. Going big epic mythic heroes doesn't work for Marvel normally.

Had they cut the first forty-five minutes off of Eternals they would have proven me wrong.

After the first forty-five or so minutes this movie is awesome. Yeah, sure, there's a lot of standing around and talking but I like movies like that. Sorry, but I do. I like that most of this movie is just fancy suits and people sitting around and talking about how to handle a problem so freaking that large that nobody can adequately address it. I like that. I like that the issue is a truly no-win. It's about time for Marvel to actually do one of these. I love the ending conflict and its complexity. I love that it's not really a fight, not really. It's family trying to figure things out. For the first time in a Marvel movie since Civil War I actually really like the third act of the movie! I actually felt like it built well! 

Okay, maybe Infinity War, but you get my point. It's been awhile.

But you know what wasn't necessary? About 90% of the flashbacks. Kit Harrington is totally wasted. The very worst of the MCU's tendencies in not making self-sufficient stories are indulged here. The bad habit of putting the actual ending of the movie post-credits continues. It frankly ruins the very end of the movie. I was actually happy with everything up until those last ten minutes. 

I just...

Look. 

Can we finally just agree that what we want is a collective mythology? A real, actual, collective mythology? A summation of collective experiences, organically grown and checked against each other? Can we finally admit that these corporations are trying to control a very real collective need, and that they can't fulfill this need? Can we please, please, please admit that pluralism just doesn't really work? People have never been able to find meaning without others, and that "finding your own truth" is only possible with base assumptions that are given to you. It' a need that Disney has tried to control, over and over again.  I think this gaping hole of a need and Disney's attempts to control it is far more cringe than this movie.

And the first forty-five minutes is almost unbearable.

Marvel Dice Throne

So this happened on Christmas.

Like I've said before, Dice Throne is what I call a treadmill game: the goal of the designers is to get you to keep buying more stuff from them to keep kitting out your modular experience. If it’s done poorly you got something like Marvel Champions: just ooooone mooore expansion and then the game will be more than acceptable! And given how much money that means, it’s never acceptable!!! EVER. From my Season One review you’ll know I already found that set much more than acceptable: I used it almost every day for a year before wanting another box. I wanted to get Season Two, but I got outvoted for the Marvel box by certain smaller compatriots.

Last note: I am a weary Marvel fan. I began as a precocious child who called Marvel editors to chat (see here for more on that) to a jaded post-One More Day bitter man. I do not like most of Marvel’s modern comics, buy Rippaverse and Alterna, and at this point I await the day Marvel’s stupid decisions catch up with them and they decide they want to compete with manga, which is currently stomping the shit out of them, and good riddance. 

Really the last note: I know Marvel is a jerk to work with. They have a rep in the TTRPG community as divas. So the Dice Throne people, should they read this, need to understand who the vitriol is really aimed at. The Dice Throne folks, in my opinion, aren’t trying to get us to buy again so much as let the incredibly stuck up and arrogant pricks at Marvel know they’ll play ball. Some will rankle hard at me saying it, but Marvel’s arrogance in licensing is a poorly kept secret.

So we’re going to get the man-bitching out of the way: the character selection is… unfortunate. No Peter Parker, Steve Rogers, or Tony Stark is a “we don’t want to make money!” move, flat. With the glaring exception of Captain Marvel I do not mind the rest of the choices. But Captain Marvel being in the box hurts my already jaded soul. Obviously the gambit paid off, coz these incredibly talented people got to make the X-Men box! But man the gambit, while necessary, is painful.

The graphic design feels weird to me this time around. There is so much freaking purple everywhere, which for whatever reason bothers me. The design of the symbols can also be really busy, particularly on Scarlet Witch and Loki. Mileage (and taste) may vary, of course, but this is my blog, so the graphic design isn’t as much to my taste as the cleaner, less purple, Season One box. 

All that’s (not) well and probably a bit grating to read. What do I think of the one thing anyone who reads this blog knows I actually care about: the design? Is this treadmill treating me well? Will I buy more? Yes, yes, and definitely yes! Allow me to elucidate, oh you who put up with my bitching. 

I love the character designs for this box, for two reasons. As a singular box these characters are really fun to play, especially Captain Marvel! Anyone picking up this box is going to get a truly varied set of characters. From “punch me, I dare you” Black Panther, to Loki, who made my brother CACKLE in glee as he played him, there isn’t a dud in the box. It’s not there. If anything I am clicking with these characters faster than Season One! Now, granted, this ain’t my first rodeo with the game, but several characters (I’m looking at you, Moon Elf and Treant) from Season One I totally bounced off for the first six months. That simply didn’t happen here. Make of that what you will. I will write more the characters in follow up posts, but for now I happily can say I love all of them.

As a TTRPG designer who has made a whole ten bucks (literally), I found myself a better designer after playing this box. I didn’t comment all that much on the particular characters in Season One coz I honestly didn’t have much to say, beyond the characters worked extremely well! Playing this box, however, I found myself in an entirely different world. I actually felt disoriented after the first game, coz the style was so different. CP ramping was almost non-existent, defensive abilities weren’t as powerful, and base damage was a lot higher. The games were faster, much faster than I was used to. After a few games I found myself leaning into the new style, learning to appreciate that I couldn't lean on my defense and making the most of the main roll phase. There's an urgency, a demand to focus on the right now, that isn't in the season one box. What you prefer does actually come down to taste, not an objective standard: I've played with people who hate the Marvel box for the very reasons that make it good, and who would love Season One for the same reasons they hate the Marvel box.

That.

Is.

A. Fantatstic.

Success!!!!

I've had more conversations with people about their tastes between these two boxes than you'd expect. What's more it's not even "Oh such and such box is better, I prefer the design style of such and such box." Good game design drives you straight into the subjective, far far away from whether or not the game itself has any merit. You talk with your friends coz the objective reality has been handled for you.

As far as balance between the season one and Marvel box I got, on a casual level they hold up really well. Ninja's two outings against Thor was so inhumanly painful for him I was shooting Blake inappropriate jokes for awhile, laughing about how Ninja clearly wanted a... piece... of  Thor. Yeah, a piece. We'll just say that. It was hilariously awful for Thor. But at the same time Scarlet Witch can tear into everyone, and there's no general feeling that anyone is actually outmatched here. Are there characters who are objectively better than others? Sure. Can I leverage a viable strategy to get around it? Definitely. That's not a small thing to achieve.

So, let's sum this up. Not only did the Dice Throne folks manage to make a product with Marvel (who not only don't actually care about their characters but also are notoriously picky and unrealistic in their goals), not only did they make a fantastic box that I find to be a triumph of design, not only is it balanced with the box I already had, but they get to do it again with the upcoming X-Men box. I hope the designers patted themselves on the back, coz man they deserved it.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

 

I pretty much swore off the MCU after Far From Home. That movie was the right cross in the 1-2 combo that broke my love of the overly bloated juggernaut franchise. I just… the corporate checklist became too much. I’ve dealt with it too much. I’m done with it. 

But Raimi, doing a sequel to my second favorite Phase 3 movie?

Civil War beat Dr. Strange.

Yes, it is my second favorite of Phase 3, although Ragnorak is its own good time.

I mean, I couldn’t say no.

I should have. God if only. But I didn’t.

Let’s get the stuff I liked done. Because it is here. I just… what could have been!

I adore the central message of the movie: happiness is fleeting, relationships win no matter what. I really like how they kept asking how relevant happiness is to a good life, if life can be worth it given that you’re not getting what you want. That’s a message I’m surprised got through a corporate machine designed to make you buy toys. Anytime anyone makes that point in a corporate commercial I’m gonna point it out.

I liked most of Wanda’s arc. I adored WandaVision, and  while I was surprised that corporate allowed Wanda to be the antagonist I really appreciated it. Wanda being shown as a grief-stricken addict to power was incredibly well-done… until the end. We’ll get there, but I really want to show I approached this movie on its own terms as I could. And man Elizabeth Olson really really sold it, to a degree I should have come to expect from her, but I always kick myself when I don’t. Elizabeth Olson is a woman of craft. I’m glad she’s getting work and this movie was the one to sell me on being an actual fan of Elizabeth Olson.

Yes, even over WandaVision. 

So.

Cumberbatch really does a great job with what he’s given. He’s given a bit of screen time playing multiple versions of Strange and does a good job in making them similar, but different in ways that feel organic. There’s a lot of untold stories behind those eyes, sometimes in the same scene. Cumberbatch’s talent for camp is called upon and he did a good job with material that sometimes gets genuinely terrible. But more on that later. Suffice to say that Strange’s arc of grieving the loss of Christine was poignant and I liked how they ended the arc of the movie by showing the acceptance of the protagonist of his entire life situation, pleasant and unpleasant.

What, you thought his third eye opening after truly accepting his fate was an accident?

C’mon folks.

And the cinematography? God, it’s gorgeous! There was some really imaginative stuff here, particularly the music fight, which was one of the most creative sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie, nevermind a summer blockbuster. I’d not recommend seeing it in the context of the movie itself, just watch if on YouTube… here. Just watch. You deserve to see something this cool.

This movie also stands out as being the goriest and creepiest Marvel movie. Raimi got to play, straight up, and it was great to someone actually masterful with a camera directing a Marvel movie. There’s some seriously creative camera and editing work here. I mean it!

So the stuff I like? I love. 

Unfortunately corporate got involved: garbage world building, dialogue, and selling false promises. The stuff that’s bad in this movie? Holy crap. I mean Feige, I get you have your agenda but damn.

I hate the “not technology” magic. The magical not-artillery, the not-Star Wars energy shields, the incredible not-gadgets… this is the sorta magical shit I hate in my inmost depths. I hated it in Thor: The Dark World and I hate it more here. So many creative things going on in this movie… and they resort to canons and shield generators??? I’m sorry, I know  it sounds petty… but I don’t care. I hate it. 

Wanda’s turn around at the end was pure, nonsensical bullshit. The entire movie she’s clearly addicted to power and she sees reason at any point? That’s outright stupid. I don’t see Raimi in that, although I could be wrong. Humans don’t change on a dime, not like that. Gollum trips, he doesn’t change his mind and throw the Ring in!

Yes, I really do think she’d not make it because of the anguish of the children.

I know, people suck. I’ve watched mothers do worse. Get over it folks.

Speaking of people sucking… the Illuminati was clearly meant to be fan service. It was awful. Reed Richards was dumber than a bag of rocks and got everyone killed. I’ve never disliked a group of Marvel heroes so fast in my life and I read Civil War when it came out. This wasn’t storytelling, it was grade-A Marvel schlock, the type of nonsense I’d expect from the summer crossover comics… not a big budget movie that could actually afford to pay good writers.

Y’know, NOT modern Marvel writers???

Speaking of which, what on God’s green earth was up with the dialogue? I know one writer is credited, but that is a damned lie. There’s some dialogue in here so out of place, so cringe, so stupid that it could not have been the writer. I refuse to believe it. Even the sentence structure changes, and so drastically that the one writer credit really needed to be two, with the second being: “The idiots who thought “We have her back” was a good scene.” It’s truly an embarrassment, coming at points in time where the emotional weight of the movie was genuinely being sold… until the stupid joke interrupted like a turd being passed off as a meatball in gourmet spaghetti. What a waste.

Multiverse had real potential. There’s aspects of the film that are so good, so genuine, so artful, that it makes the Marvel corporate bullshit become a genuine offense to movies. Marvel had a virtuoso on their hands and just couldn’t trust the audience enough.

I’m shocked at how bad a product it made this movie. 

What a shame!!!

John Walker

I was asked to share my thoughts on John Walker, aka Falcon/Soldier’s Captain America. I’m about halfway through episode four, but I’ve gotten a pretty good read on Walker’s character. Overall I don’t think he’s a good representation of what an Army Ranger would look like if he volunteered for Captain America’s shield. So to do that we’re going to break down what an Army soldier is normally taught to handle, what an Army Captain is actually like and the duties they have on them, how Army infantrymen are different from the rest of the Army, and what experience I had with Army Rangers.

I preface this whole post with the warning: this is an opinion. It may be a somewhat reasonably informed opinion, given that I am an Army vet, but it is only an opinion. Wyatt Russel is a great actor and I've been enjoying Falcon and The Winter Soldier quite a bit, so far. I'm finding the discussion of power from Zemo quite enjoyable, as well as seeing The Falcon show why Steve picked him to be the next Cap.

Y’know what the first thing that was done to me at boot camp? I was forced to stay up for 48 hours, straight. During that time the other unfortunates and I were forced to stand in long lines, for hours, without falling asleep, a task I somehow managed to complete, although I’ll be damned if I know how. We were all asked to take in enormous amounts of information while sleep-deprived. And then we were given four hours of sleep. It was disorienting. Confusing. We just sorta bumbled from one station to the next, trying to absorb as much as we could.

The way we were greeted at Basic itself is what’s known as a shark attack. The drill sergeants get on the bus and scream at you at the top of their lungs, forcing you off the bus, picking at every last thing you did wrong, forcing you along into a path. People are routinely dropped into pushups or whatever else the drill sergeants felt like making us do. It was an entire day of being yelled at over the slightest thing, with you being punished for what others did; if one person screwed up EVERYONE was forced to do as many push-ups as the drill sergeants liked. And they liked seeing a lot of push-ups. You’d go to bed with the drill sergeants yelling at you over the PA system, listening to others around you crying themselves to sleep.

The next day was no better. Nor was the day after that. And the one after that. A seemingly endless number of days followed of being punished for things you did not do but were your fault, because you did not stop your neighbor from doing them. Image became everything. Individual disagreements took a back seat: band together or be worked into a state of complete and utter despair. You learned to pick your battles with those around you, to smile and laugh with those you desperately wanted to injure and maim for being pieces of shit, because you all suffered together. Folks you hated became brothers and stayed brothers, even if you still hated them.

During this point in time you’re taught cadences, marching songs. These songs center around a few themes: nobody is loyal to you (particularly your significant other), the only things that matter are how well you kill people, and living happily ever after is a lie. And, despite how awful Army life is, how spiritually destructive it is, you will probably renew your contract and stay in. And these ideas are ground into you, day after day after day. And you know the really awful thing?

By and large they’re right.

No one is actually loyal to you. Marital infidelity is astonishingly high in the military, as is spousal abuse. Supposed friends stab you in the back to get their promotion. You can claim to have whatever gifts and skills you’d like, but nothing really matters if you can’t live through the next task, whatever it may be. And accomplishing your goal normally doesn’t really feel all that good. One mountain down, infinity to go! The amount of things that can go wrong in a military day is close to 100% of the whole day, all day, every week, for years.

Soldiers are never off the clock. Never. Each and every action done can be brought up in a court marshal and in disciplinary action; there is no private life, not if someone with enough power pushes. You don’t decide when to go home, your command team lets you know when to go home. I’ve pulled 16 hours days unexpectedly, simply because some idiot lost a piece of equipment and no one was going home until it was found, by Captain’s orders! You could be awoken in the middle of the night and yanked out of your house to go see to an emergency of some sort, from something breaking down at command to watching your buddy who got into a drunken fight with the cops.

And you know what? I don’t know a single soldier who doesn’t laugh about every second of it. Actual, genuine, hysterical laughter. No irony, it’s genuinely funny to us! The constant wearing down and facing of utter bleakness produces a dark sense of humor that very few civilians can imagine. Jokes are routinely cracked about suicide, adultery, dying violently, running way, and roasting in the fires of Hell as a way of coping with the fact that we have no actual control over our lives. And we laugh to the point of tears about it all. I was more than halfway there with this sense of humor before the military. Now? I look at things that others would see with horror and chuckle darkly. It can always get so much worse. And it probably will. And since I can’t control it, I maintain the one true control anyone actually has in this world: the right to look oncoming doom in the face and laugh at it, to belittle the certain doom. To refuse to crack.

No, I’m not even halfway done. We haven’t talked about infantrymen yet.

Every single infantryman I’ve ever met has been extremely principled, honorable, and uncannily intelligent. There’s a self-possession in them that’s hard to describe, because every last thing I just described is far worse for an infantryman. And at the end of such an ordeal you possess yourself, because literally everything else has been taken from you. Pride, dignity, the illusion of control that civilians entertain themselves with, all of it gone. What you get is a sense of honor and control that one would not think possible to have.  Every single infantry leader I’ve met has a level of focus that should not be possible. Relentlessly goal-oriented, beyond ruthless, they know how to push you beyond what you would have considered in getting stuff done.

But that has a cost. One day I was talking with one of my sergeants, who was former infantry. Some of my compatriots asked him for some stories from “the front”.  Our sergeant proceeded to tell a story about shooting off an enemy’s nose and laughing hysterically with his battle buddies about the way the fallen enemy’s blood squirted out of the hole: an arc like a drinking fountain. Even years removed he had the look of look of nostalgia, over shooting someone’s nose off.  I’ve heard stories of infantrymen being forced to run over Middle Eastern children with tanks because terrorists frequently attach bombs to children, and so to stop was possible death… so you didn’t stop. And laughed. As they ran over children.  Infantrymen talk about these things with a casual, yet steely, acceptance. There is little regret left in them; they could not afford to question what they did then, as it would have killed them, and that would have been one more body bag, one more team of condolence whisperers sent to a grieving family. No thank you, they’re going to live, and sleep at night. And if you have issue with that that’s just too bad.

Being an officer in the military is both better and worse than being an enlisted. On the one hand you’ve not had your individuality ground out of you in the same way as enlisted.  But on the other hand you are taught to dehumanize those under you, while being threatened with jail should they get killed. An officer generally doesn’t have an issue with grinding enlisted into the dirt, depriving them of sleep and sanity, because they’re not people to the officer, but immediately flip the script if the officer’s actions lead to the enlisted’s harm, self-inflicted or otherwise. The enlisted become a means to an end, with the officer being forced to look the other way at all but the most egregious of harm.

Now it’s time to talk about the Rangers. Ranger school is one of the most grueling things one can ever go through: days without sleep, land navigational courses that would make others starve to death, and de-programming training. Most Army soldiers are taught to act as a cohesive whole by giving up their individual judgements. Don’t question, move on, the group needs you to. Rangers have that impulse to blind group think removed, the way a surgeon would take out a cancerous tumor. Formations, uniforms, and other means of enforcing blind group-think are destroyed, because if you can make it this far and become a ranger then you are truly trustworthy. At the same time the image of the Rangers becomes an unconscious reality. You have to look good, because you are no longer you. You are an Army Ranger and must present your group at its best.

You know the things that get trained out of you the most, with all that? Doubt. If you think something you have to own it. People can die if you’re unsure. You also develop a disturbing sense of the blackest humor, learning to lean into the sickest parts of your brain, because every part of that buffalo has been shown to be useful to you. And you will be found out if you’re not in 100%. No one is that good of a liar. No one.  So you have to become the real deal. If you’re not you’ll be drummed out.

People who doubt get other people killed.

People who aren’t willing to be okay with killing other people will get their friends killed.

People who have not learned to accept their darker impulses will crack under them at the first sign of stress.

My issue with John Walker is that he’s not sure enough. The man thinks his time in Afghanistan is awful and wants to cry over it? Boo hoo, you signed up for Ranger school, nobody drafted you! At no point in John Walker’s process would he have been actually forced into something. He signed up. He did it to himself. Entering the Rangers is completely and utterly voluntary. And there’s this curious entitled sense to the John Walker we see on screen. He thinks he’s entitled to doubt.

Doubt is a luxury, a sickly sweet poison that kills all souls that it comes in contact with if there’s too much of it. And for a soldier? A Ranger? Almost any instinctual doubt is too much.

And I find it more than a little odd that John Walker, a man who has had absolutely no room for doubt anywhere in his life for a long time, has any of it left. Put on your uniform, smile, kiss babies, and then go kill people. The Army puts you in whatever job they can safely put you, at any point in time. I promise you that in the real world John would not have been forced into Captain America’s role. He would have had to audition, to compete with others, and any personality flaws he had would have been spotted miles away. Miles.

Because doubt is a stench that would have been scrubbed off of him a very long time ago. And if it hadn’t John wouldn’t have gotten up there in the first place.

I never thought I’d miss the John Walker of the comics. Brutal and awful as he is, US Agent from the comics at least doesn’t doubt. And that is something, regardless of what he does with it.

So no, halfway through episode four I’m not buying it. This John Walker would have died a long time ago, nevermind gotten three Medals of Honor. And his friend would have died long before this point.

Marvel Champions: Review

So, it's been a while since I've played any card games. Pokemon had been my jam as a kid. While I had gotten into Magic later on, I've found the game to not be something I could really get into. While it was fun, it didn't have the dynamics that I enjoyed so much in Pokemon and, given time away from my friends who were playing it, I stopped playing. I've played about a dozen games of Marvel Champions, lost most of them (horribly) and had a blast doing it!

The core of the game is pretty simple. On your turn you play as many cards and do as much as you can until your options run out. All cards have a number in the top left and a series of icons on the bottom left, called resources, usually one a card. The top number tells you how many resources it takes to play that card. So, in order to play cards, you have to discard cards from you hand. It's fantastic. It's nail-biting. And it creates a game where what some of what you want is almost always available, but not necessarily everything.

And sometimes you really need everything in your hand to get played!

The thing is that you're playing against a villain, who you beat one way: knock him out by removing all his health. The villain can win one of two ways: either by knocking out all the players or by increasing the threat on their scheme, which escalates every turn. You need to, have to, keep that down. But the prevalent way to knock threat down makes you vulnerable to the villain, allowing him to attack you. And defending against attacks can make it harder for you to do things next turn. And it's possible to get one-shotted by the villain, so you have to be careful. What's more, additional villains, called minions, can be summoned, and that makes the threat and damage go up, exponentially at times. And so you have to manage the cards in your hand to utter perfection. So unforgiving!

One of the problems that I kept running into with games like Magic and Pokemon was trying to get people not as technically inclined. They didn't want to build a deck, but playing with them was fun and they were extremely good players! My sister Anna, who was a cunning Pokemon player (she destroyed my Charizards with a Weedle, with a sadistic giggle), wanted nothing to do with deck creation. At all. Every single deck she ever played, I built, and she beat me with them, and handily! With a sadistic giggle. But no deck creation. Nothing. She found that couldn't get into deckbuilding. Genius player! Wanted to nothing to do with deck creation.

I'm pretty sure I could get her to make a deck for this particular game.

It's pretty simple: grab your hero cards (which you have to have in the deck), decide what Aspect you want to play with (Leadership, Protection,  Justice, or Aggression, which is pretty much a thing of taste), and a few neutral cards, which would be pretty easy to have someone else pick for you, and then slam it together into a 40 card deck. There will be more options as time goes on, but I'm still finding some things to fine-tune, even with just the core set.

I'm really happy with this game so far. It's a tense affair, filled with unexpected spikes and valleys, complete with a deck building system that I think I could get anyone to do themselves. It's a really awesome set of mechanics, grafted on top of a great theme that most people know. If you want to do a Living Card Game (which is not made of random packs!) I'd say it's a good jumping on point. I say that as someone who is jumping in myself.

But for criminy's sake, threat is so mean!