I know the guys who made the Defenders are responsible for the abysmal Daredevil Season 2 and some of the less great parts of the latter half of Season 1, but.... They aren’t doing a bad job right now.
Like, Defenders is pretty good and the characters are served pretty well.
Like, Luke, Jessica, and Matt are written pretty much at their best in their own shows and consistently so. I have only watched the first two episodes of Iron FIst, I’ll get to the rest later today after my Defenders rewatch, but if the first two eps indicate anything they wrote him as the same idiotic self-righteous man-child as his show has so they got that right too.
And I like Matt more here than I did in DD season 2. A friend was able to articulate that without anyone to preach to, the character became substantially less intolerable.
As my friends and I were chatting, one of them had sort of come to a realization of why Defenders went over so well and why the characters didn’t deteriorate. It seems that it might actually have to do with having decent precedent to work from. Actually it’s probably better for me to just copypaste that bit of convo than explain it. And removed some irrelevant bits. Also kept an amusing bit.
May as well see if the explanation makes sense to anyone else.
Convo credits go to mah bois @wackd with his insight, @thebibliomancer with his amusing asides, @zarekthelordofthefries for asking all the right questions, and @maxwellelvis for knowing too much.
Bocaj: I'm so jealous of Iron Fist. He has all the money and he got to hug a dragon. Life ain't fair, I tellyawhat
Bocaj: Out of spite I tried to brainstorm a setting where people get different powers by hugging different dragons but then I remembered that sans hugging, thats what Drakengard was.
Wack’d: But yeah what I was gonna say the smart thing the show does is, like
Bocaj: It sure could have used some hugging
Wack’d: Jessica and Luke both get really standard storylines that could easily be season arcs in their own shows
Except it turns out the Hand is behind them, which brings them into Matt and Danny's nonsense
Zarek: So the way it resolves the different styles is basically making the mundane stuff caused by the magic stuff?
Wack’d: Yeah
In this one specific instance, at least--there's no, like, "Kilgrave was secretly part of the Hand this whole time!" or whatever
Bocaj: phew
Wack’d: But yeah I think, like
Maybe the Daredevil showrunners are just shit because the show they were given to run was Daredevil?
They are pretty good at crafting good stuff out of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage material
Zarek: In the sense that Daredevil inherently doesn't work, or it just doesn't work with their style as creators?
Like, "did the best with what they could" or "just aren't good with this playset"
Wack’d: If I had to hazard a guess--Marco Ramirez and Doug Petrie are in the same position with the other three characters that they were when they came on board with Daredevil in season 2
Maxwellelvis: I'm going to say it's probably partially because the specific Daredevil stuff they chose to focus on for a lot of this, namely Stick, and Elektra, and the Hand, no longer work because it's no longer 1983, ninjas are old hat now and this story isn't innovative or groundbreaking anymore.
Wack’d: "Figure out what made this character tick last time and hew as close to that as possible"
The problem is Daredevil season 1 didn't have much of an identity? In the first half we get a kind of dark drama under Drew Goddard's pen, and then it slowly switches to melodrama and camp when Steven S. DeKnight shows up
Wack’d: So Ramirez and Petrie have to synthesize those two approaches while also introducing a ton of new characters and ALSO setting up another series two years from now
Zarek: Steven S. DeKnight is a hell of a superhero name
Wack’d: Which is, like--I don't think I recognized what a tall fucking order that is
Bocaj: Was Daredevil 2 the Iron Man 2 of Netflix too?
Wack’d: Kinda, yeah!
Zarek: Oh shit is Iron Man 2 still on Netflix i still havent seen it
Bocaj: This has been a victory for sentences that i said mostly because I liked the way they sounded
Wack’d: I mean I think, like--the reason I didn't recognize it because I didn't expect it to do as much heavy lifting as it ended up having to
Maxwellelvis: Is the Punisher the Black Widow of Netflix Marvel?
Bocaj: They did have a teamup movie
Wack’d: But yeah in hindsight this makes a lot of sense
Maxwellelvis: They team up a lot, Bocaj.
Bocaj: Avengers Confidential: Punisher & Black Widow:: The Other Avengers Are In It For Five Seconds
Maxwellelvis: I'd assume it's because Nat is like the only other superhero who is perfectly A-ok with murder.
Bocaj: Wolverine and Hawkeye are under Bendis
BENDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS
Wack’d: And so this time Ramirez and Petrie have it easy--they know what a good Jessica Jones story looks like, they know what a good Luke Cage story looks like, they had an entire season to figure out what they had to do with Daredevil
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@Wackd Mousa hit the big points, but to elaborate: RvB is old, and the reason it still exists now is because after the 5th season the writers looked over what they had and decided to use it to tell an honest story. Still funny, but with consequences and consistency and shit. It's by far one of the best examples of back writing I've ever seen. Test to see if i's worth it, do you have more than one fav, and did you laugh at the jokes? If not, have a nice day. If so, keep going.
Wait, you sent this to me and not directly to wackd? Why am I the intermediary here, I was trying to get you two to have a conversation if, for no other reason, you’re both good friends of mine, why am I playing messenger?
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Nick doesn't actually have any time powers. He's a noble from a country called Time. He's Nick, of Time. People ask him what his superpower is and he's like "I have hydrokenesis" and they're like "that's dumb. You're dumb."
Hilarious... I also don’t have any characters on the Heroes UNTED roster with elemental powers (Because in the same universe The League of Heroes have multiple). This might work. I’ll put a pin on it, It’s a good idea that I won’t dismiss. I want to explore the other options just to see what we get.
