The Inchoate Rage of All the Fandoms

The other day a friend of mine showed me the newest South Park special, Joining the Panderverse, which takes on the internet trolls who complain about diverse casting and the studios that are accused of pandering with their diverse casting (specifically Disney for this special). I didn't watch the full special, because we went to see a movie (the Zone of Interest, which is... quite a watch), but I've had it percolating in my mind since then.

I went looking for some reviews and recaps, and the best one I found was this one from Den of Geek. Unlike the subreddit that was my first stop, the Den of Geek piece nailed that the special's primary target is not the diverse casting but the people who are butthurt by it. It also suggests that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's natural posture of "both sides suck" is a little too pat.

The fact is, there's not that much recasting of roles for "diversity". Certainly nobody's recast Tony Stark or Steve Rogers as a "diverse woman", and the cases where you have a non-white version of a character are still taken from the comics. One is Miles Morales as Spider Man, which the South Park special calls out as being a cool concept, and the other is Sam Wilson as Captain America. Of course, a lot of supposed fans got mad about those characters in the comics too.

It's fair to say that these people get mad about all of this stuff, even when it's legit to the comics or whatever source material. Brie Larsen is a particular target of alt right fans, despite the Carol Danvers version of Captain Marvel/Ms Marvel having been a character in Marvel comics for about 40 years (and the Monica Rambeau version has been around almost as long). So when you dare to recast Ariel from the Little Mermaid as a black woman, look out.

Are there points where the diverse casting goes far? I suppose it depends on how granular you want to get. There are moments in some shows and movies that feel like box-ticking rather than legitimate explorations of story: Halo coming out as non-binary in season 4 of Young Justice could have been an interesting story, but it's used just as a way to show everyone being okay with it. 

And they should be okay with it! But I feel like the idea of a dead girl's body being reanimated by a genderless alien and the resulting entity trying to make their way in the world deserves more exploration than just, "Great! You're learning who you are! Next."

Similarly, the reveal of Enfys Nest at the end of Solo: A Star Wars Story lands with a bit of a clunk (to me, at least). It's not so much that she's revealed to be a young woman of color, but rather that it comes out of nowhere - we haven't seen Erin Kellyman in the film up to this point, so I was left with the sense of confusion at the reveal. The intent was to show that the future of the Rebellion would be led by people other than white guys, which is fair enough, apart from the fact that the main heroes of the original movies are, of course, white guys. But it might have been more powerful if we'd seen her without the mask earlier in the movie, before identifying her as the dread pirate Enfys Nest.

But I've now had to unfollow so many Twitter accounts for harping on "girl power = bad" in the context of Marvel and Star Wars. It's lame - the characters are being played by the same types of people who have always played them, and the fact that some of the latest movies are dumb is just because of poor scripting and the hubris that overtakes all successful studios. I dislike The Last Jedi, not because it's too "woke", but because the story makes little sense, since they decided to have different directors work on each movie of the sequel trilogy, meaning Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams then spent each subsequent film canceling out what the other had done. That's not a diversity problem, that's stupidity problem.

That said, I also appreciate that Johnson was trying to do something different with Star Wars, even if I think that factors beyond his control made the movie not live up to expectations.

Anyway, I'd love to see this freakout about diverse casting die a death, but that's a long way off: the latest controversy riling nerds is that an announcement of Anya Taylor-Joy being cast as a herald of Galactus is being taken as proof that they're going to cast her as a female Silver Surfer. Never mind that the actual announcement doesn't say who - there will always be people sowing this kind of mischief, either because they're legitimately dumb or because they're actively looking to stir shit up.

Maybe that South Park special should have focused more on people stirring up assholes like Cartman, rather than jokes about the Panderstone? Whatever - I despair either way, but if Taylor-Joy does play Norrin Radd, I'll probably still be there at the theater to see her do it.

Super Bowl 2024: No Joy in Mudville. Also Deadpool!

Quite apart from my own thoughts on the Super Bowl and the NFL in particular, I've managed to string together over a decade of watching the damn thing. I was about to say I've also strung together a decade of writing about it here, but it turns out that's not true: the last time I blogged about the Super Bowl was 2021, when I considered the year of pandemic awfulness that had just transpired, and 2017, when emotions still ran high over the election of Donald Trump and the fact that Tom Brady is buddies with him.

This is a relief, because unlike the Champions League final, I don't have much to say on stats. Although that said, it was interesting to see not only that last night's game was a repeat of 2020, with pretty much the same end result (the 49ers losing), but that Kansas City got to the 2021 edition as well, so my limited NFL statto-ness is twitching at the idea that Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs are probably the best QB and team of the last few years, since they always seem to get to the Super Bowl. And indeed, a quick check on Wikipedia turns up that 2022 was the only year since 2020 in which the Chiefs didn't feature in the Super Bowl.

So, good for them, I suppose.

Less good for the 49ers, whom I still have yet to see win the Super Bowl, at least since 1988 when they beat the Bengals. They haven't won since 1995, but I'd stopped paying attention by then, and wouldn't start watching the Super Bowl again until 2005, when I was at journalism school and doing a sports journalism course.

It was a little disappointing to see this streak of not winning the Super Bowl continue last night, especially when considering that the 49ers were in the lead for most of the game. But c'est la vie, I guess.

The other big point of interest for me last night was the debut of the Deadpool 3 trailer, but that was also a bit of a disappointment: they just directed us back to the internet to watch the full trailer there. The full trailer had its moments, but I was hoping for a bit more info on what the movie's going to be like - though the references to the Time Variance Authority were interesting.

I'm getting a little leery of that sort of thing, because I've noticed Marvel relying on it a bit too much: specifically, using characters and settings and plot elements from the Disney Plus TV shows to inform the plots of MCU movies. It was one of the problems with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and I think it didn't help the Marvels much either, which is particularly disappointing when you consider that the Disney Plus shows those movies referenced were really good.

Loki was also quite good, so that should bode well for Deadpool and Wolverine, but as I say, I'd have liked to see more about what the movie was going to feel like. Thinking back to 2017, trailers for both Thor: Ragnarok and Logan made good use of music (Immigrant Song and Hurt, respectively) set against key footage from the movies to give us enough broad strokes of the story to get excited.

On the other hand, Deadpool movies have always done a nice job of mining X-Men lore, which I'm particularly susceptible to at the moment, so that should be promising. I'm also hoping to see more of Wolverine's part in the movie in any subsequent trailers, since it marks the (hopefully) triumphant return of Hugh Jackman to the role.

Anyway, let's close by paying tribute to the fact that I closed off a blog ostensibly about the Super Bowl with a discussion of comic book movies. It's not often that I get to marry my sports nerdiness with my comics and movies nerdiness, so I feel like this deserves some kind of trophy of its own.

Whatever. I'll report back on Deadpool and Wolverine in July, when it comes out, and I may or may not write about the 2025 Super Bowl, if there are good superhero movie trailers then too.

Thoughts on the 2024 Primaries So Far

Just a quick one this week, because we're still early in the primary cycle, but I've had some thoughts on what some of the results mean, and what they might yet portend. It seems odd to have anything to say about a primary cycle that features one incumbent president and one competitor who seems destined for a procession to the nomination, but there are things to say about both the Democrats and the Republicans.

With regard to Trump, my thoughts are that he shouldn't even be on the ballot. Colorado tossed him off the primary ballot, invoking the 14th Amendment, and Maine did the same thing. There are arguments, advanced by people who really ought to know better (e.g. moderate Democrats, among others), that we don't know if the relevant clauses apply to the president, or that it should be up to voters, or even that he needs to be convicted of insurrection.

Bullshit, all of it. Read this piece at Vox, because I don't need to go into it all. The piece has some things I disagree with, but it's all pretty well-argued. The only point where I agree that it might be good for Trump to get to the general election and lose is, it would then show him up as a two-time loser and probably finish his quest to regain the White House.

Only problem with that is that if he loses, his supporters riot and he tries to steal the election again. My argument is that they'll riot and try to steal the election whatever happens, so we might as well get it all out of our system now.

What I think will happen is, the Supreme Court rules narrowly that Colorado, and only Colorado, is justified in barring Trump from the ballot, so that he only wins 49 primaries, and in the general, doesn't appear on a ballot that he wouldn't win anyway.

As for Biden, he's also won two primaries, New Hampshire (which was unofficial) and South Carolina. New Hampshire took place first, and Biden wasn't even on the ballot because the Granite State is annoyed that he moved South Carolina to the front of the schedule, but he won as a write-in candidate with more than half of the votes. This is a bit heartening.

He also won South Carolina pretty handily, and in an officially recognized primary. However, my cause for concern here (and in New Hampshire) is that turnout was much lower than four years ago. Not only did Biden win with around 100,000 fewer votes this year than in 2020, but back then Bernie Sanders and other Democratic hopefuls picked up loads of votes too, whereas this time Biden's challengers picked up less than 4% of the total votes, which means that fewer voters turned up overall.

The reason I'm concerned is that 2016 was another year marked by voter apathy in the primaries. Comparing them to 2008, the previous time a Democratic incumbent president hadn't been on the ballot, 2016's turnout was super low, showing a lack of enthusiasm for the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton (and, it must be said, for Sanders, who may have galvanized the left wing of the Democratic Party but not enough of them). This year is different from 2016 because there is a Democratic incumbent, and the low turnout may reflect the fact that people just figure Biden will win the nomination at a canter. But I'm still concerned.

As far as the arguments about Biden's age, I do think it would be nice to have a younger nominee (or two, rather - one for each party), but I just can't see who could run in his place, and who could run with a chance of beating Trump. Sanders could conceivably beat Trump, though I'm unconvinced by arguments that he'd win over loads of people who'd otherwise support Trump - I think that a larger than usual subsection of moderates and swing voters would vote Republican if Sanders won the nomination.

Now, Sanders has ruled himself out, so the question remains of who on the Democratic side has the national profile to challenge Trump. None of the Dem hopefuls from 2020 has had much impact in the last four years, or in the case of Pete Buttigieg, hasn't exactly endeared himself to the base. Or to put it another way, nobody voted for any of those candidates in 2020, so what's changed in the last four years to make Democratic primary voters want to vote for them now?

Part of the issue is also that many Democratic voters aren't comfortable with the Biden Administration's seemingly unquestioning support of Israel at the moment. This is reflective of how different age groups view Israel (rightly or wrongly), and it doesn't seem to be doing Biden any favors right now. It probably won't do him any favors in November, either.

Whatever, this is all speculative for the time being. Each side has held only two primaries, and while the winners of the nominations seem pretty clear, all kinds of interesting things can happen between now and November. I'm just worried some of them (Trump's court cases) won't be resolved before then.

Given that Trump has talked about suspending the Constitution and about pardoning himself, this is an election with extremely high stakes. I'll be interested to see how everything shakes out before the two parties' conventions.