#angrish

“Welcome to Trivia Murder Party! You’re free spa weekend was a lie-” 

*phone buzzes*

“-Aw crap, that’s my boss. I gotta take this, dumplings, stay put or I’ll murder you on the spot.” 

*beep* 

“Look, is it about that fake blood prank? Can we talk about this later? I’m kinda busy right now.” (pause) “Wait, I have to clean it up?!? It was Felicia’s idea!” (pause) “Alright, alright, fine. I just gotta tell my trivia gremlins what’s up. See you soon, Cookie.” *beep*

Some anon asked me what I thought of The Life of Captain Marvel, and jokes on you, I was already deep into writing this.

What the fuck was this bullshit?! And here I was sorta of optimistic reading the preview.  I guess I was hypnotized by Marguerite Sauvage’s heartbreakingly beautiful artwork, about the only saving grace of this melodramatic fuckfest of an issue.

THE PLOT

It’s father’s day, and while dealing with a weirdly matched band of supervillains, Carol has Vietnam-tier flashbacks of a family vacation that sends her into a frenzy. She decides to visit her old family summer home to try and deal with this baggage. Really badly written tragedy strikes, and she decides to linger, making some weird discoveries along the way.

THE BULLSHIT

Ok, this issue was mostly bland and trite, but what was really bad, what really made me angry, was the whole heap of bullshit and retcons surrounding Carol’s family. Ever since she got promoted to Captain Marvel, writer after writer tried their hardest to give her a supporting cast, all seemingly oblivious to the fact that she had a mother and a brother just hanging in limbo that could easily be the source of any number of stories. I’ve been waiting since 2008, ten fucking years, to see Carol reunite with her family, and now I got monkey pawned I guess.

Let’s start with her dad. Let me tell you something about Joseph Danvers: he was an ASSHOLE, a dick, a stubborn fool, but you know, he was also a brave man. When Claremont’s introduces him the first time, we see him risk his own life to save the one of another man, and he stands up to crooked criminals that want to run him out of business. He was pigheaded, yes, but he was also a good person deep down, a hardworker who simply didn’t know how to deal with his daughter, and part of the charm was seeing Carol both grow out of her animosity with him and simultaneously realize she got a lot of her temper from him, all in the span of a couple of issues, because Claremont is what we call in these circles “a good writer”, and made a character that had a little bit of texture to him.

Then Brian Reed’s came along and made him an alcoholic. Ms. Marvel v2 #31. I cut Reed’s a lot of slack, but that was frankly unnecessary. Still, ok, it tied to Carol’s harder, and he’s portrayed as a self-destructing kind of alcoholic rather than actively malicious with everybody, and it was after his beloved eldest’s death, so you could understand he was completely broken...

But here comes Margaret Stohl people, and according to her, Joseph Danvers was always an unabashed abuser who screwed up his children’s childhood, and Carol can’t even bring herself to THINK about him without going in a berserker rage and suffer a cardiac arrest! Why do this? What’s the point? Not only it is clichéd as hell, overused to the point of meaninglessness, it adds nothing to Carol’s character, except more empty soap opera angst. She already has countless other sources of drama and pain in her past, is an abusive dad really necessary? And God, what the fuck is up with Marvel and dads?! They pulled the same shit with Joseph Rogers (how many joseph are there?) turning a problem with the bottle mentioned in passing into a full blown stereotypical irish knuckle fest. Can’t wait for the day Uncle Ben gets it, that’ll be fun.

I feel bad, like it’s my fault, because months ago, I complained about Stohl writing of Joe Danvers in Mighty Captain Marvel #0. There, she had significantly mellowed out the scene where he tells her she wasn’t going to college and just needed to find a husband. I said he didn’t look like the stubborn dick I remembered, but a dopey, oblivious dude... It’s like, Stohl saw my post, decided I was making a good point, and went all the way into the other direction...  This alone should tell us how much care and attention goes into forging these stories these day, how clear and laid out the direction for each character is! Last year Joseph Danvers was just a moron with a pot belly, now he’s the King of Punchville, population: my kids. Maybe he’s not actually Joseph Danvers, but some skrull impostor, it would explain the absence of his awesome stache.

 Then there’s Joe Jr... I didn’t believe it was possible to fuck up a character that, before this issue, had TWO balloons of spoken dialogue across six decades of history, but somehow they did. First of all: HE’S YOUNGER THAN CAROL NOT OLDER. How do you fuck that up?! He’s the third child, she’s the second! Yet Carol calls him big brother, and he’s portrayed as bigger and taller than her in flashbacks. Look, I know Ike Perlmutter pays editors in stale bread and wedgies, but come on, it took me five minutes to double check it!

Besides that: Joe Jr was a complete blank slate, you could’ve done literally ANYTHING with him, and what happens? He gets fucking FRIDGED. Slams his car and becomes a vegetable so Carol has an excuse to linger in her family home... it feels like his head trauma is just there to have a time-skip, so that Carol’s hair grows to resemble Brie Larson’s length, just in time for the fucking movie! Like, are you kidding me? How wasteful is that? I mean, with how this issue ended, it’s entirely possible they’re going to have magic alien tech or some shit to fix him up, but still, I’m not holding my breath.

Finally, there’s Marie, Carol’s mom. Yup, there she is. She’s just there. She’s always been just there. Nobody seems to know what to do with her. She was always the quiet, sweet housewife that wasn’t quite sure how to handle her husband histrionics except be patient and supporting. That character trait still lingers, but now that Joseph graduated in open abusiveness, her patient looks criminal. At least, when they made Steve’s dad abusive, it was to showcase Sarah Rogers’ strength of character, how she boldly and proudly stood up to her husband’s abuse... here, Marie Danvers just tells her daughter to pipe it down while her husband wails on her children. She’s a goddamn enabler. One change, two characters ruined.

The fact that Carol has been brain wiped not once but twice, is completely disregarded, which is absurd, because it’s the biggest and most profound source of emotional turmoil she has! When Brian Reed wrote the story revolving around it, it was heartbreaking! Carol’s loss of memory, having her show up at her family house, realizing she doesn’t know these people, that she should feel anger, and love, and rage, and sadness, but nothing comes up, because she has nothing left.

In TLofCM, this feeling of alienation is never brought up, it’s only ever barely hinted at. Her mindwipe isn’t mentioned, just tangentially referred to, and it’s treated like the reason Carol never shows up to her old home is that the memories of her dad are too painful. Great job guys, you took Carol’s very specific and interesting source of pain and replaced it with daddy’s issues. Plus, as I mentioned, IRL it’s been ten years since Carol met her family. In canon at least a couple must’ve passed, yet this separation is barely mentioned. Her mother welcomes her to their summer home with the warmth you’d expect if they met like once a week or once a month, where she should’ve gone “Where the fuck have you been?!”. Joe Jr is the only one that brings it up, and it still feels way too casual.

Now, let’s finally speak about Carol. I really hope I won’t sound like an arrogant prick, but reading earlier issues of Margaret Stohl’s run, I once tweeted “this is something I would write if I lacked any self-awareness”. Nothing is more true than in this issue, where Carol acts like a unhinged psychopath in the most worrying of ways. We see her snap and downright punch her FATHER’S  TOMBSTONE into pieces. I mean, I was shocked! What the fuck?! Who does this? How is she going to explain this to her mother?! To her brother?! How much of a mental trainwreck do you have to be to go this far? Hating your dad is one thing, desecrating a cemetery is another one entirely! And at the beginning of the issue she brutalizes Moonstone, with the Avengers just idly standing by the side quipping about it... GUYS THIS IS NO LAUGHING MATTER, Carol is suffering another breakdown. Also no laughing matter is what happened to Carol’s brother, but the tone this book has is way too carefree and light to properly deal with it. Every single dialogue Carol has is coated with some matter of snappy comeback, or clever line. It creates an ironic distance that doesn’t allow the drama to unfold.

Look, ok, this is just the very first issue, and the ending seems to imply there was something more going on with Carol’s dad, but that just fills me with even more dread, suddenly we’re bringing in more spaceshit! We’ve been seeing Carol deal with trite spaceshit for years now, this could’ve been a down to earth, emotional, quiet miniseries focusing entirely on Carol’s family life and childhood, but no, there’s still conspiracies and mysterious glowing gadgets and space foetuses, and god knows what matter of absurdist retcon awaiting us.

I don’t want to hijack that post further, so I’m putting my response here -

My biggest problem with Ferus Olin is that I find him incredibly ham-fisted and utterly useless as a character.  He’s supposed to be “the most promising of his generation” (but Jedi aren’t supposed to make distinctions like that, and frankly, to be confirmed as Jedi talent is clearly immense accomplishment either way given how few there are) and then he’s supposed to be Anakin’s rival, which is like...lol what.  The whole point of Anakin is that he doesn’t have peers!  He’s an anomaly!  That’s why the masters were (rightfully so, unfortunately) so afraid of him given his instability!  So why the hell would you introduce a character who induces jealousy in Anakin with his remarkable competency?  It should be the other way around, if anything!

Also: WHAT THE HELL IS EVEN TRU VELD’S CHARACTER.  How is somebody that incompetent even allowed onto battlefields?  These people are so exacting and dogmatic they won’t even take Anakin Skywalker, nine year old slave with nowhere to go and nobody to take care of him, into training because he’s “too old,” but they’ll let a Padawan who can’t even construct a proper lightsaber out and about on missions??  It’s amazing it took THAT long for something like that to happen.