Marvels Phase 4 Flaw: the multiverse MUST be comedic or contained

[Stalker0]

All the other's gave us character building, a full story and a great ending.

Also important, they were legitimately FUNNY. The jokes in AM3 were bland or cringy. Modok especially just fell completely into cringe territory.

 

[ART!]

Also important, they were legitimately FUNNY. The jokes in AM3 were bland or cringy. Modok especially just fell completely into cringe territory.

Agreed. A lot of the dialogue in Quantumania - especially the jokes - felt like rote "this is the line this kind of character says at this point in this kind of scene in every movie" stuff any handful of vaguely amusing people could come up with in an afternoon. You'd get similar results from and AI.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

See here's the problem.

A middle way absolutely could work. James Gunn has proven this time after time after time. He's nailed in different settings with different characters. He's had his cake and eaten it. Which is why he's now King of the DCEU. But the main thing is, he proves your blanket assertion wrong. It is technically possible to go a middle way and win.

The trouble: nobody else is James Gunn.

(I mean, probably someone else is. Jessica Gao might be - not yet but she's on the way imo. But certainly 95% of Marvel writers aren't.)

And the secret to the middle way is simple - make the audience care about the characters and what they want, not bollocks like "SAVE EARTH!". But that's relatively hard for most writers to do. They like to write plot-heavy drivel full of kiss-off lines, rather than really building up characters you actually have feelings (positive or negative) about.

And yeah, expecting us to care about the destruction of Fictionalia just doesn't work unless we care about the characters, and they care.

Or the location itself becomes a character, by going deep into it as "real" place, like Bajor and Cardassia in DS9.

 

[Kaodi]

At some point they are going to have to explain how there is actually still a "Sacred Timeline" beyond the scope of Kang and everything we have seen so far. Kang is from, what, over a thousand years in the future? For the Sacred Timeline, which leads to Kang Who Waits future, to be broken up and yet hundreds of Kangs spring up afterwards then Kang must be inevitable, no matter what else happens. But that is simply physically impossible unless an even higher power is manipulating the fabric of reality to make sure a Kang always comes into existence.