Unbetitelt

Following the reaction to our (sorta) first look at the MCU version of Wiccan in the Agatha trailer there may have been a few posts by worried fans about the character may not be getting portrayed in a way that is pleasing to his existing fanbase.

Now as somebody not shy about calling out bad portrayals of characters in very clear and harsh words I could not possibly complain about that, but sadly the I'm sure officially appointed arbiters of minority cultures had to demosntrate so thoroughly that our community here which we love to pretend is inclusive and tolerant holds for exactly as long as you can agree on an outgroup whose fault your common erasure and discrimination is.

If a jewish, romani or gay person wants to give their insights in what ways they feel personally offended, sorry, their group was wronged by the portrayal we're (likely) going to get, be my guest. That's not meant to be snark or irony. I'm serious it is very important to put these things out somwhere and if it is just a social media post where people can read it eventually. However, as much as I symphatize with people having strong oppinions on a topic and being ready to defend that oppinion, you should A) be aware that you are just one voice in a conversation and not the voice of god deciding the issue even if you blacklist everyone disagreeing with you and and find a few other users perfectly in agreement with you and B) should probably not show quite as much arrogance and selfrighteousness as you declare that other peoples similiar complains for their culture, race, sexuality are invalid or unimportant.

From petty calls that Billy should not be gay if he is not jewish, because why do you get some character to represent you if I don't I hate you now, buhu, to snide arguments of how Billy being jewish never mattered in the comics you certainly could find people of every background be massive self-important pricks about it, whose idea of tolerance and acceptance and progress go exactly as far as they feel it serves them and not an inch further.

So acting out of character and trying not to be (entirely) destructive in my criticism for once. Let me explain why you don't necessarily getting the significance of a characters background does not necessitate it not being important and a character of your background being vastly different from you yourself does not neccessitate them being somehow written wrong.

In short, if you have not the greatest grasp of the experiences of a jewish person or queer person or Upper West Side New York resident. Maybe you don't see all the reasons why this character represents them and you don't have to, but that doesn't mean other people that do know can't see it in their portrayal. If a good writer wrote these characters and specifically mentioned that aspect there is a good chance it played into their characterization, maybe even before they mentioned it openly. Second just because a character has one background does not mean other experiences were not more important in shaping their character.

What better example to demonstrate this with than the massively character important aspect of Wiccan's character that the comicbooks erased and you never bothered to complain about since it happened. Him being an older brother.

Lastly. None of it fucking matters on the basis that the current MCU is the farthest thing away from good character writing and only exists to create content for Disney+ and characters to throw at the screen in the next big crossover to make an even bigger line-up than in Endgame. If this character was queer and jewish it would only mean that the catty gay besty who exists to suck up to his female bestie would complain about his food not being kosher once or randomly having a Menora on his living room table we see one time.

Now why does Wiccan being an older brother matter or maybe more accurately should matter - it really only does in a well written story and with strong character writing I admit - when it is mentioned roughly once early on and his siblings never appear?

Why does a gay characters sexuality matter as long as the character is single? Or a jewish identity matter when they are neither religious nor them celebrating holidays is important to a story and they don't talk jiddish once in a while? Why does it matter that they are from New York when they've moved since?

Now this may shock you but our behaviors are a result of our experiences and our experiences are influenced by our identities, our surroundings and how our surroundings react to these identities.

Billy being from the Upper West Side in Manhattan with a supportive family structure means he grew up in a secure surrounding. This in turn means he could develop as a person without feeling anything wrong about him. So even though he faces bullying over his identity he does not feel self-loathing but absolute certainty that his aggressors are in the complete wrong, which on the flipside does hinder him once a conflict is not enitrely black and white and leads to his positions being uncompromising.

On the other hand his boyfirend/husband Hulkling grew up as an illegal alien and while unaware of the extraterrestrial background must logically have been told to keep aspects of himself secret all his life. As a result Hulkling is much more conformative to his surroundings and growing up that way in the very diverse surroundings of the lower east side and sneaking himself and his friend into all kinds of events by assuming other identities made him both a social chameleon and a very empathic person, but also much less certain of himself and who he is than Wiccan.

(Yes, Teddy is from the Lower East Side, there was a map in issue three of the original series. Proving again a characters background matters even if it is never mentioned if you do good character writing.)

(Eli: Bronx; Billy: Upper West Side; Ergo: Teddy: Lower East Side.)

Now what makes the character writing brilliant is that over ten years later the characters creator wrote their wdding vows and the positive and negative aspects I just spoke about in a way that shows that their relationships stems from their positive aspects and helps them work on the negative.

Teddy loves Billy becasue he has all the certainty about himself and any given situation that Teddy tries to have, while Billy loves him for the comfort and understanding he gives him and understands more about the different responsibilities and needs of others compared to himself as a result. So in a single page we gain more of a coherent characterization and logical character developments dating all the way back to their creation than we have in entire series in between.

But let's get back to the big brother aspect I promised. As you can see in the beginning of the vows Billy promises to protect Teddy now this goes back to Billy having a desire to protect other people that is stronger than protecting himself. He is both not as confident fighting for himself as he is about protecting others and quite reckless about his own well being when he does fight for others as very clearly demonstrated in his backstory in the Young Avengers special issue.

Storywise this is later on mostly demonstrated with Teddy and Wanda. Now consider this. Him being able to stand up for others more easily than himself could actually be related to him having two younger siblings. Shocker I know.

I mean like maybe right. As a younger sibling myself though I'm of the opinion big brothers just storm out of a room when they are pissed about something you said and don't even try to reason with you then mope and are unresponsive to any attempts to talk about it afterwards. Or snipe passive aggressive comments at you when they don't get to argue.

And there we have it.

Even though Billy's siblings never appear as an older sibling Billy has a way off dealing with conflict that relates to this aspect. His conduct in conflict is defined by the fact that he was arguing with unreasonable young children who could never be swayed and being forced put up with not getting to say his mind directly to them. Even though fighting is not in his character he still will do so to protect others because as a big brother he would do anything for his little brothers. The sort of selfish behavior I mentioned earlier is a result of him having to fight with his siblings for attention as he grew up with likely his younger siblings being often regarded as more in need of help and support than he was.

Teddy on the other hand is an only child with a single parent. He has no weaker smaller people to watch and protect initially, but a much different relationship where he had his own guardian to worry about. He had to mature much faster than other children because he had to take care of himself more than them and wanted to unburden his mother who had to take care of him and the job that supported them simultaneously as much as he could.

As a result Teddy is very mature, very empathetic and very much ready to put his own needs last, both because he watched it with his mother and because it is what he did to make it as easy as possible for her.

Children particualarly boys also tend to view their parents being sad or mad immediately as their own fault so this too contributes to him feeling the need to hide aspects of himself he was never as free to be who he is as others were.

As a result his dealing of conflict is much different from Billy's on one hand as an only child he is not used to conflict that needs to be fought like Billy is with his siblings on the other hand the only person he ever could argue with was an adult that wanted the best for him not unreasonable younger children or violent bullies. So while he is much more diplomatic and mature than Billy he also at times does not understand when a conflict can not be resolved by talking immediately.

Their contrasting dealings with conflicts are probably best demonstrated towards the end of the original series: On one hand you have Hulkling flying into the middle of a firefight trying to have chat with the people in the middle of trying to off each other, who have right now absolutely no interest to talk anything out.

And on the other hand you have Billy trying to stop him from getting killed and protect him to the point he does not give a rats ass about the entirety of the agressors species.

The intelligent point being made here is that Billy is 100% wrong on the substance. Teddy is literally both kree and skrull and if they are not the same as people neither is he and he proves before and after this scene he is capable of reaching an understanding even with the killer of his own mother, but as far as immediate actions or the strategy are considered Billy is completely right in criticizing Teddy as even when Teddy gets him to come along and get closer to talk to them he can't get them to settle down until the Avengers arrive and represent such a significant amount of firepower that neither kree nor skrull can ignore them.

This goes back to the fact that Teddy, and this is often ignored, WAS literally a criminal when misled by a person he thought his friend and was in love with, they were ultimately victimless crimes and he did stop the moment it interfered with his greater sense of morality, when his friend tried to steal from the destroyed avengers mansion, but his circumstances still led to him breaking multiple laws. So he does understand that people do bad things without necessarily being fundamentally bad people. But this often leads to him ending up in significant danger when he tries to have a conversation or reach out to people with deadly weapons and intentions.

Billy on the other hand was the victim of bullying from a guy that just beat people up for kicks without him having done anything to deserve this. So his initial concept of being superhero follows a very clear good guy bad guy mentality. Like with Teddy this is limited as we see that his black and white view does not fully mean he thinks any act towards "a bad guy" is justified after he nearly kills his bully. Still it continues and when the Avenger's don't live up to being the good guy he needs to view them as the bad guy and he calls himself the bad guy when his black and white view collapses in on itself at the end of childrens crusade.

In that these characters also represent to two ideas behind superheroes The Man of Steel that stands as a shield between criminals and the innocent and the Man of Tommorrow that builds a more ideal future in which he is not neccessary. The first responder and the activist to put it more plainly. Those that safe lives and those that change them.

But enough of that sidenote. I wrote this for two reasons: 1) were the two things this little snippet from the vows issue reminded me off:

That the oldest most significant lesson I learned back in the day from queer stories was that it was alright for me to be just me not that it was okay to be gay or bi or trans or non-binary, but the acknowledgement that you should be and are allowed to be yourself whichever classification if any you belong to, that your value and who you truly are does not depend on such a classification.

And second that superhero comics are not at their core supposed to be powerfantasies about being able to fly or throw cars, but about the very simple aspiration to think about other people and do what you can do help them and not just yourself.

Today all I ever seem to hear is about the importance of picking your identity and then conform to that. That you being different from what someone else decided that identity meant means you're a traitor of some sort or not as far evolved as someone believing something else.

It's very important now if you say you're gay or queer. Because the term gay is queerphobic now. And the term queer is homophobic of course and one got to be better than the other

And of course we reject the idea that different queer communities could see things different. No they can only be behind on ours. Because they are dumb hicks form the country side or foreigners who are simply primitive and less evolved.

We're all for everyone being represented as long as that means our own identity is the most important. We're almost openly saying to screw other peoples representation when they dare complain about their lack as we celebrate ourselves getting some and even demand others to be less represented as long as we don't get more ourselves.

We are supposed to completely ignore how shitty the characters representing us usually are in favor of an outrageous number game in which it is somehow more important that enough characters with a specific lable are present compared to any of them even qualifying as characters with their shitty writing.

It's not allowed to tell a universal story with a gay character or a black character, because it should have been an exclusive story for their group instead and as a writer you are supposed to be exclusionary if you are a minority.

And of course we feel the need to explain everything about an existing character by picking our shared label and basing it off that by which we mean basing it off ourselves. And if the character that shares one label with us is different in anyway with what we decided that label means its a bad character, and badly written and insulting or offensive simply because they don't follow our desire for instant gratification and indulgence.

Hence, here is me writing down a whole bunch of reasons not related to the typical identity categories we decided are more important than any experience we've had in our lives to prove why these characters were amazingly written and that those contribute to their idenitties just as much if not more so.

Because if you try to understand Billy solely from the persepctive of being jewish or solely from the perspective of being gay or solely from the perspective of him being a New Yorker or solely from the perspective of him being a big brother, you are not actually understanding the character in the slightest much less the truly amazing character work put into his creation. If you want the character to be changed to in your opinion fit one of those categories better and then feel morally superior for it, because the character supposedly solely exists for your identity/group and exclude everyone else, you suck.

A good character. Any good character is based on a multitude of influences and experiences as we all are influenced in our personalities, good writing is too show the growth and change of a character without losing that core and is believable in context of their experiences.

Stubborn

Reckless

Disagreeable

Enduring

Resentful

Wisecracking

Geeky

Brave

Proactive

Hotheaded

Snarky

How much do you want to bet that Agatha's version of Billy will have none of Billy's actual personality traits, but instead be whiny and "sassy" as she bosses him around cause that's what stock gay characters acting as handmaidens to female protagonists are like?

Assault on Eden had a plot that would make for a nice enough annual issue if Hulkling and Wiccan had on ongoing. The execution is messy and Carols inclusion honestly makes it weaker. So if this was to celebrate her it was not a great premise.

So the premise is that Carol attends a celebration of the one year adversary of the Kree and Skrull uniting.

During this the Supreme Intelligence attacks kidnaps all the hybrids to reedcuate and roll back the clock to its old empire.

And then it's just blown up by Carol while saying it will come back anyways. The end.

Now as I said fundamentally the idea of setting a story around the annual unification and the symbolism of the date being chosen for action by those that opposed it is not bad.

But just about everything in the execution is bad. Starting with Art that really gives no sense of scale or distance whatsoever, but primarily outsider Carol Danvers essentially singlehandedly solving the issue by telling the leaders of the Alliance what to do while its population does nothing and simply being super powerful weakens it unbelievably.

What was that supposed to do? Downplay everyone from marvels most famous empires to an iconic couple just to play up Carol Danvers?

The flaws go beyond that of course. The premise relies on the fact that Hala is now just this perfect place without conflict. Dumbing down everything unifications of different nations or even different groups living together in a country. It is Eden, paradise, Utopia, which just makes me think the writer doesn't know about the utopian kree where Noh-Varr and his Plex-Intelligence brainwashed everyone into feeling happy and the alliance are different things.

The point is bring different people together in this case brutal totalitarian empires by decree of the most brutal one of them as part of a military action and there are issues that don't dissappear. Multiculturialism does not mean everyone just decides tp come together and sing.

I personally live in the aftermath of a unification decades later and the issues are immeasurable due to abuse, economical differences and politicians using resentments it created for their benefits. But if you don't let's just look at muslim and lgbtq communities. Both face discrimination and does that stop the fact that many queers have islamophobic views or many muslims have transphobic or homophobic views? That's complicated enough before considering these groups have overlap with trans and queer muslims, which commonly bear the brunt of both forms of discrimination.

The point is this alliance exist, because a skrull royal who dressed up as a kree leader decreed it. The purpose was to beat back the native population the kree had commited genocide against in the past and resulted in them graciously placing them back in reservation and Teddy declaring that they beared no responsibility for the actions of their predecessor empires that murdered unimaginable billions.

Now look at it like this. The kree were represented by a skrull for this unification. Both sides are worshipping militarism. Now the grandson of that skrull leads them and says no more conquering. Additinally to those groups clearly pissed off by that we have a religious sect of the kree that worships said natives as gods. Skrull religious groups whose holy war their new ruler openly opposed. The fact that skrulls are super liberal regarding gender identity and sex while Kree view romantic and sexual desires as atavisms of their primitive ancestors and procreate essentially exclusively in the lab, also they operatively remove their females abikity to feel pleasure during sex. The amount of legitimate and illegitimate grievances with a united empire is unlimited. And that is before newborn hybrids are a thing and what they would undergo.

Now if this book had all these different groups come together when faced with the choice of returning to what came before or moving onward with the alliance , because their common ground was the potential and believe that what they built was still better than what came before. That would be powerful. Regardless of whether this was their rulers galvanizing them into such action or if they did it now even in their absence.

And when the inhumans ruled the kree the opposition to their and the tension within the populace was addressed so it's not like this was not done properly if characters a writer cared about were involved.

Ideally this would be the annual to a book in which Bily and Teddy had constantly been trying to bridge these differences with characters representing them appearing, but would absolutely be possible if the introduction was used effectively.

Instead they are now all peaceful friendly and completely asimiliated all because their ruler is nice and they think he is right about everything regardless of the fact that he kinda doesn't ever accomplish anything himself. And that's just infantile. The whole premise is reduced to being nice is good. People good now. There bad people. Blow up bad people.

What message do we have left? If anything that foreign military interventions rule and the US is awesome. The great american soldiers bravely defending the freedom of the weak incompetent nations wanting to live peacefully overseas from those seeking to oppress them. I don't mind the acknowledgment of soldiers sacrifices and what noble convictions they may indeed have signed up for, but those are always used for misreprenting the actual geopolitical interests in which interest they are getting deployed as some sort of heroic action.

No, 99% percent economical interests, 1% US security, 0% for the sake of helping anyone overseas, may occur as a side effect sometimes, though.

Carol comes in tells the people living there how this is going to work and then mostly just does it herself, while praising what a soldier she is in a place that we are supposed to celebrate for being less militristic. Imagine this happening with Black Panther and Wakanda. Just some US soldier with a loose connection to the nation solves their issue, while telling T'Challa whose actions go not beyond being a cool dude to hang out with how to run the show in emergency and celebrating the Wakandans themselves no longer fighting.

No, clue if this is intentional though. Writers are not necessarily that political. But what else is left than a story that can intentionally or accidentally be read that way.

I for example don't know if Empyre wanted to be anti-indigenous by placing an indigenous messiah and villifying him opposite of a blonde one and suggesting that one fullfills his destiny and the other is just a religoous fanatic. I know that in a book that was written during the time pre-covid when the news were dominated by fridays for future and Greta Thurnberg including the claim she was being used by her parents and that her followers were religious zealots. They(Slott, Ewing) knew what they were doing with Quoi in the last issue screeching about clean oceans and that they knew what they were doing when they said Bily and Teddy were a great examplemof the next generation for not sharing his believe.

Moving on.

The villain was poorly chosen. The supreme intelligence, which Carol never comments on not being vox supreme how it last appeared, is shown here obsessed with purity, but the intelligence is obsessed with evolution. It encouraged crossbreeding. It's what led to the creation of the pink kree to begin with.

The kree were an evolutionary dead end and the evolution of the intelligence depends on their evolution so it took brutal and calculated actions to kickstart it. The negabomb that gets mentioned in the book was meant to kill everyone but those with the greatest potential for evolutiin and irradiate them in hopes of mutating them. It sets up Ricks and Mar-Vells connection so it can absorb a human mind. It would be thrilled to expand its ability to assimilate to skrulls and humans due to hybrids.

A much better choice would be characters like Ronan or Sarek and the lunatic legion, or house fiero who were blue kree supremacists who overthrew the intelligence for the sake of their racist idelogy in the past.

Not digging the intelligence offering Carol rule of the kree and her rejecting it, considering every time Hulkling and her are in a book he immediately just does what she says. And her talking about how awesome Billy putting neonazis in a coma is just hypocritical in universe when she wanted to lock him up and maybe have to kill him in the story that happened.

Honestly I got to stop reading comics because Wiccan and Hulkling are in them. I actually try, but part of me just thinks I'm kinda in the right wanting my faves to be written well rather than stop reasing them because they are just used to boost sales. It's so obvious that neither Ewing nor Oliveira have any interest in it.

Ewing is all over the place with not giving a shit with how he changed his depiction of Teddys personality 100%, but when Oliveira is writing it's always the same thing.

Teddy is completely useless but gets to cry about his mom who Oliveira builds up more as a character than him and who somehow is behind everything good he could ever do. At the same time we get this time this nonsense of her being a warrior. No, she was a nurse. If she was a warrior she would have been involved with all the skrulls genocides and loyal to the man who condemend Teddy to death. She was a regular civilian who gave up everything to save him and raised far away from the skrulls militarism to be a decent person. But lets undermine it because she needs spiky armor on a shiny statue.

Billy on the other hand has no character development or struggle and is just the solution to everything almost instantly and just way better. Better half does sum it up. And that only gets worse when on one hand Teddy not taking action due to kindness is bad and him prevneting Billy from doing anything is a mistake, but Carol telling Billy to be a good soldier and not do something its great. It's a mockery of kindness being capable of archiving anything.

When Oliveira writes them we get to hear that Teddy is kind and see him in underwear and Billy solve an issue that's it. Does kindness ever make anything better in those books? No. Power does. Does Teddys kindness have to make Billys immediate actions more measured? No, Teddy can't fill that role, but Carol immediately tells him not to do so ething and is right, while Teddy doing the same would be foolish and naive and make things worse.

They are good kids, alright. So look at the shiny statue we bought you for the anniversary that you two as leader should have been organizing, you know, while the adult handles the job.

Me: "And her real superpowers were being a privileged white woman."

She-Hulk: "I'm not priveleged my life is incredibly hard and getting harder due to me being a Hulk."

Me: "How?"

She-Hulk: "I lost a case and my job."

Me: "And then?"

She-Hulk: "I got a job for having them."

Me: "And?"

She-Hulk: "Demanded my best friend would be hired too so we could have a fun time together."

Me: "And?"

She-Hulk: "And won a prize for being a super important female lawyer despite never winning a case in this show for having them."

Me: "And who did not get those things?"

She-Hulk: "Huh?"

Mallory Book: "The woman of color the show admits is more competent than you and was definetly slated to run the superpowered division at the company and now has to work beneath you, while the show never realizes and thinks of my race change as anything else than an inclusive action aka getting a token black character on screen. Not that they had that consideration when they made Thunderball white..."

She-Hulk: "You can break the 4th wall, too?"

Deadpool: "Can you break the 4th wall, Jennifer, because every time you do it you look directly at the camera and just expect everyone to pee their pants laughing because you talk to them. You know you still need to construct a joke around it."

She-Hulk: "The writing isn't that solid we were over that."

Deadpool: "What are we going to do about it. I think we go over ther and fucking mur-"

She-Hulk: "Demand to speak to the manager and have him rewrite our lifes to be easy, hot boyfriends inclu- Oh my god! I'm literally a Karen!"

Me: "That complains about her pay, while being able to afford an apartment in L.A."

She-Hulk: "Do you like kicking people on the ground?"

Me: "Occasionally."

She-Hulk: "When did this start?"

Deadpool: "First episode."

Me: "Why are you still here?"

Deadpool: "I'm still waiting for her to speak to the manager and get me a hot boyfriend."

She-Hulk: "It can't have been in the first episode! Complaining about the specific struggles of being a woman like men explaining my area of expertise to me or calling me hysteric and wanting to murder me alone does not make me a Karen."

Mallory Book: "I agree, but don't you think doing so while dismissing the advise on being a Hulk from 'the Hulk', a man who did once almost get murdered by three thugs trying to stop them from harrassing a woman and has a history of losing loved ones getting hunted by his own government and continuously having been denied control over his own body including for multiple years during which he was forced to reproduce against his will without a choice of his own is maybe not a good choice to get the point across."

She-Hulk: "Wait... how did we create a scenario in which a guy works as a metaphor for female reproductive rights by accident."

Me: "You know... comic books... mixing metaphors... not so good implications of science fiction scenarios... the Avengers #200 debacle was an accident, too."

She-Hulk: "Okay, anything else?"

Mallory Book: "Well, there is the Daredevil situation..."

She-Hulk: "Oh, I tried to explain being a superhero to him, too, despite me hating men doing that to me, didn't I?"

Mallory Book: "I was talking about his smug ass attitude and how you just let him."

She-Hulk: "Okay, maybe interpreting it here like it's just banter, while normally considering it inacceptable is a little hypocritical but in my defense... He is really hot."

Mallory Book: "The message of your feminist show can't be hot guys get to mistreat you, if you want to sleep with them."

Me: "The show really only screams 'Girlpower' and never 'Feminism' per se though."

Mallory Book: "... are you trying to say that the show is using the idea of 'strong women' to avoid having to commit to the idea of feminism while still trying to earn points for supposedly calling out social problems."

Me: "Sure, why not."

Mallory Book: "That would explain why I get to shame Jennifer for wearing a suit that is not up to my standards and the sollution is her getting a designer outfit, despite the real cause of the issue being not her She-Hulk power but the fact that our male boss dictates her to take that form aka how she has to dress in his employment despite this not being necessary for the job itself."

Me: "Sure, though her getting pushed around by woman without ever standing up for herself does not exactly scream strong woman either."

She-Hulk: "I stood up to Titania!"

Mallory Book: "The bitchy mean girl wearing too much make up we define as bad for her interest in fame, money and looks in this show that pretends to be empowering to woman. Considering this amount of subtlety one almost expects a frigid manhating woman as a second antagonist."

Me: "Well, they tried to be subtle about the not actually feminist thing."

Deadpool: "Man. I just love that I at no point try to be a role model of any kind in my movies and just straight up avoid ninety percent of this shit. I mean we get to show naked boobies for no reason except it being hot and can fridge my girlfriend and we still come of better simply by not pretending."

Me: "Fridging? Please? You call that fridging?"

Deadpool: "Huh?"

She-Hulk: "She appears throughout the movie whenever you die and comes back to life at the film so her dying tragically doesn't reduce her presence or role at all and is only temporary therefore barely if not at all or in short you didn't have the balls to go through with it, tough guy."

Deadpool: "A) Me seeing her when I die but being unable to stay with her is a reference to my romance with Lady Death from the comics which automatically invalidates any criticism about execution, because... comicbooks. Do you even read them, bro."

Me: "That makes zero sense."

Deadpool: "And B)... uh... uhm... you stole the rewriting your ending thing from me."

She-Hulk: "... Fuck, he's right. That wasn't even original."

Me: "It was not."

She-Hulk: "But... a CGI brawl really isn't necessary if the writing is good."

Me: "Yeah, the enemy really was bad writing you just never beat it."

Mallory Book: "But what if it wasn't? What if the real villain was a lawyer that was jealous about being passed over and hired a group of people to steal your blood."

She-Hulk: "To become a Hulk herself? Really?"

Mallory Book: "To frame you."

She-Hulk: "What?"

Mallory Book: "Yes, this lawyer..."

Me: "It's you... it's obviously you."

Mallory Book: "Set Todd her client up to try and get a date with you knowing that you would obviously reject and unreasonably piss him off. And being aware of his Intellegencia business, because she is his lawyer, would know he would try to harm you using it. Then just wait for you to lose control in response to his actions and get you released from prison afterwards, while having Todd beat to death by a different super strong woman, Titania, whose hits could be mistaken for yours, and has her place your stolen blood placed on his vibranium spear, which could cut your skin."

She-Hulk: "Which would lead to me being on trial and having to defend myself, when I realize, because the reformed Wrecker guy tells me about trying to steal my blood at the last moment that my own lawyer is the one behind it... YOU!"

Mallory Book: "Oh, so you figured out my secret."

Me: "We all knew it was you... but it is impressive how somehow everything that is necessary to make this plot believable was set up in the show already yet all the actual writers came up with after announcing good writing beats fight scenes, the only thing the show actually consistently produced at a decent level, was that Jen just gets everything her way. Hell, if I know why you were no longer required to wear the inhibitor you wanted and Banner could not built you in the first episode anymore, Blonsky went back to jail for the same violation.

She-Hulk: "You know for a guy who did not hate Thor Love and Thunder and actually liked Multiverse of Madness you are way to nitpicky, right?"

Me: "At least no character in either of those movies bragged about the writing quality while obviously being completely lazy about it."

Deadpool: "So I take it I'm not getting that hot boyfriend?"

Me: "Only if you and Wolverine get together in the next Deadpool movie."

Mallory Book: "Ridiculous, the franchise has clearly been setting him up with Collossus up until now."

She-Hulk: "Eh, guys, are you forgetting the 'you remind me of my wife' line from cable. Pretty clear where that's heading."

Deadpool: "Nope, I end up dating Ryan Reynolds who comes back to life wearing burn victim make-up as a zombie after I shot him in the last movie."

She-Hulk: "But you are already... I should have had a case involving my own actress."