Diddgery's Burrow

I assume this is in reference to some posts I made on Bluesky about overused critical buzzwords and/or the post where I said the new Rayman Legends remake adds "MCU dialogue." The phrase has absolutely been overused to the point that it's often thrown around where it doesn't apply—people will use it to complain about anything they don't like that has jokes in the script—but I do think it's at least sometimes a useful point of critical reference. It's referring to an identifiable style of writing used in a massively popular and influential franchise that spans dozens of movies, after all.

One of the defining traits of "MCU dialogue" or "Whedonesque dialogue" is having lots of quippy banter and one-liners. And this can of course be done well, but it's often done very poorly. I think to me bad "MCU dialogue" is quippy and gives off the air of comedy without actually having actual jokes. (Again, it is crucially important to me that there is a difference between this stuff and the concept of comic relief as a whole.) At its worst you get the stock "he's right behind me isn't he?" "sooooo that just happened" "they fly now? they fly now" type dialogue that gives off a slightly flippant, sarcastic, joke-adjacent tone without actually being funny. You see this a lot in genre fiction that's afraid it'll lose the lowest common denominator audience if it takes itself too seriously, so it undercuts itself with a vague air of humor. The MCU did not invent this style of dialogue, and there are definitely some MCU movies that pull off comic relief better than their imitators, but given they've been so dominant in pop culture for almost 20 years they're just an easy face to attach to a style people are getting tired of in genre fiction.

The Rayman Legends Retold trailer gives us a good example of this with the bit where Rayman's like "It's four against one! You don't stand a chance!" and then it cuts to a roaring monster and then he's like "Maybe he stands a LITTLE bit of a chance." This is just total screenwriting 101 filler joke stuff, just having the characters say a cliche for the sake of saying something even though it's not actually funny. The scene gains nothing compared to if it was a completely silent exchange—which it WAS in the original version of the game! But the data says quips make a story go down easier, so now there's a quip.