the first time I went in there I pointed at one of those extra-skinny baguettes and said “a flute, please” feeling pretty sure of myself, and the baker said “… that’s a ficelle” (you idiot) (was implied) “a flute is twice as large as a baguette.”

That’s insane, first of all, a flute is a skinny instrument. Call your fat baguette a bassoon, lady—I made some timid remark about how it would make more sense for a flute to be a skinny bread and the baker said, “In Paris it is. I thought you were from the South?”

oh, that hurt

I guess I’m from the part of the South that’s so close to Italy the bread’s waist size matters less than whether it’s got olives in it, but I left the bakery having an existential crisis over whether living in Paris had made me forget my roots

the Least Intimidating Bakery just had normal baguettes vs. seedy baguettes vs. horny baguettes (easy mode, some have seeds, some have horns), while the new bakery has breads that are only different on a molecular level—there’s a good old loaf and then another, identical loaf called a bastard? google told me a bastard is “halfway between a baguette and a bread” but denouncing them like “those are not regulation-sized bastards” would get me banned from the bakery for life

on my 2nd visit (while I stood in line discreetly googling baguette terminology) there was an English tourist who asked for a baguette while pointing at what was either a rustique or a sesame and I felt a bit worried for them, but the baker just clarified “this one?” to waive any responsibility if they found out later it wasn’t a classic baguette, then handed them the bread without educating them in a judgmental tone and I felt envious

I know it’s because she thinks the English are beyond saving but still it made me want to come back with a fake moustache and an English accent so I wouldn’t be expected to play bakery on expert mode just because I’m French. I asked for a pastry this time and the baker asked “no bread with that?” which felt cruel, like she wanted me to sprinkle myself with ashes and admit out loud that my level of bread proficiency isn’t as advanced as I once believed it was

The third time I went, I had lost all self-confidence and I hesitantly pointed at a bread and said “I’d like this, uh—what is it called?” and the baker looked at me in disbelief and said “That’s a baguette.”

God.

for the record, if that stupid bread had been flanked by a skinny bread (ficelle) and a fat one (flute) then yeah of course I would have known to call it a baguette, but in the absence of reference points I now felt lost and scared of being called a Parisian again

like, this is most obvious in Homecoming, where Peter wants to upgrade from the baby heroing of stopping street level crime to fighting space gods, and the progression of his arc is him gaining the experience to get that “promotion”. The implication is kinda that stopping a bus from crashing is kinda lame, cuz you only save like, what, twenty people?? And if you fight a space god, you save millions of people. There’s no point in helping someone carry their groceries or saving people in a burning building, because the numbers are too small to mean anything. What’s the point of saving anyone if you can’t save everyone? If you’re not incredibly powerful, you can’t make a real difference.

And I think this is the MCU’s disconnect from the superhero genre. We’re not watching people who have a passion for helping others and using their abilities to alleviate suffering—we’re watching people win glory in their personal epics. The soap opera of gods and giants. That’s not a bad type of story, but it lacks one of the core emotions of superhero stories—the fantasy of being able to make a tangible difference. This extends into the MCU’s unwillingness to disrupt the status quo, as described in this excellent video by PopCultureDetective. (One example of his that really stood out to me is how in Age of Ultron, Stark and Banner’s attempt to use their superhuman genius to create something that will benefit all humanity is framed as foolish, dangerous hubris.)

This incongruence is most obvious when comparing Spiderman movies, because the core of Spider-Man’s character is “great power, great responsibility”. The thing that makes Peter Parker stand out is how no matter how broke, lonely, or even powerless he is, he still tries to use what he has to help the people he can.

I think it’s also noticeable how the MCU superheroes don’t really have Helping People as their Job. Like, whatever they’re doing in between movies, when we’re not watching, when there isn’t a massive problem to solve, they don’t have Rescue as their day to day Job the same way most superheroes do. Plenty of them have Beating Up Bad Guys as their Job, but that makes them more……soldier than superhero. More military than first responder.

And its not something that like, breaks the movie in the moment- it just sits in the back of your mind, kinda itchy feeling. And then you hear Tony Stark say "isn't that the point? that we get to go home?" And you're like, why would a superhero say that the point of heroing is to stop heroing?

There's always gonna be people in a burning building that need someone who can walk through fire.

I didn't elaborate earlier because the humidity and other arbitrary stuff are making me super depressed and I did not have the energy, but this is exactly it.

There was some of this in the first Avengers movie, but you're right, MCU really dropped the ball on superheroes saving people.

Like, I remember, a few years back some rando on tumblr said something about super heroes being a fascist genre because their purpose is to collaborate with and enforce the power of the State, and this argument makes sense to make about the MCU.

But it's not what superheroes are about.

There's a lot of things superheroes could be, but one of the most important things is a vision of "What if there was a person with power to help people and that person was GOOD?"

And "using powers to help people" doesn't mean "collaborating with the government" or "fighting crime in collaboration with the cops" or even "vigilante justice" even though all of those things have come up a lot in superhero stories to the point that people can have a hard time thinking of alternatives

But there are plenty of alternatives. Saving people from natural disasters/accidents? Taking care of and protecting people the system doesn't help? Protecting civilians in a warzone? Shielding people at protests? Oops, now your superhero is considered a " terrorist... "

That's the thing, a superhero advancing the cause of good would have a hard time not getting into conflict with the government. A superpowered individual that collaborates extensively with the State might not even be a superhero. There's another archetype we could look at, that of the supersoldier. A superpowered person who is either created by a government's military or appropriated by it to advance the goals of the State.

Supersoldiers and superheroes are pretty different, and in some ways, non-overlapping things, and MCU ended up conflating the two.

I feel like any kind of satisfying arc for Captain America would have had him STOP being a supersoldier and start being a superhero, and of course MCU shat the bed on that one.

the albatross