Television We've got a trailer for Ms Marvel...

[Kal-El814]

This show remains really really good. The pacing is great, the acting is great, and it's just lovely to look at. Absolutely no notes so far.

 

Also I think it's great that such a mainstream show has spent a non-trivial amount of time showcasing Muslim culture generally and Muslim joy specifically. As a lapsed Catholic, atheist white guy I'm not in a position to say how real or authentic it is, but it feels earnest and I think it would have been able to make it window dressing. It feels like an integral part of the show.

[TheLeon]

Yeah, it’s really good. Which makes it a shame (but ultimately not surprising) that it apparently has like half the viewers of the other Marvel D+ shows. 

[EternallDarkness]

3 hours ago, TheLeon said:

Yeah, it’s really good. Which makes it a shame (but ultimately not surprising) that it apparently has like half the viewers of the other Marvel D+ shows. 

 

 

I'm enjoying it quite bit and hope it'll find a bigger audience. Has Disney given this much of a push. I'll be honest say I can't recall seeing much advertising about other than a few things on twitter. I do have to wonder if the small audience is due to it seemingly targeted toward a younger generation. The cast is great and I actually loved the style of the first episode (very comicbooky?!?! is that a thing?  )  but I'm not sure if that appeals to the average MCU fan. Does that make sense? 

[Jason]

she really is adorable tho

[johnny]

glad we are getting positive things about muslim culture. in america allahu akbar is like exclusively seen as a bad thing. 

[Greatoneshere]

13 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

This show remains really really good. The pacing is great, the acting is great, and it's just lovely to look at. Absolutely no notes so far.

 

Also I think it's great that such a mainstream show has spent a non-trivial amount of time showcasing Muslim culture generally and Muslim joy specifically. As a lapsed Catholic, atheist white guy I'm not in a position to say how real or authentic it is, but it feels earnest and I think it would have been able to make it window dressing. It feels like an integral part of the show.

 

As a first generation American Pakistani who grew up in and around Philadelphia and South Jersey (though I was 16 in 2002 as opposed to 2022 like Kamala in the show), I can saw that everything is pretty spot on, except Disney-fied because that goes without saying. It's all made a bit in your face and obvious to someone like me, but for uninitiated viewers I imagine that's necessary.

 

The show is good, but me and my wife find the show to be a bit of a teenage high school drama trope-y cliche show at times. It's fun and made well. I guess the problem is when real life is full of tropes and cliches (because immigrant Pakistani families do still mostly behave this way in a Disney version of this idea) then the show will also have tropes and cliches. But the depictions are all accurate. 

 

Also, my apologies @Brick, Aisha wasn't Sana's older sister but her mother, so not Kamala's great aunt but rather her great-grandmother. But yes, Kamran is Najma's son, but Najma is not related to Kamala. The flashback in this episode showed us that Aisha is someone else (alongside Najma and her Clandestines, or Djinn, cohorts). Hope that clears it up more.  

[Brick]

Well yeah now I know that as they explained it more clearly this episode lol 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

On 6/22/2022 at 1:27 PM, TheLeon said:

Yeah, it’s really good. Which makes it a shame (but ultimately not surprising) that it apparently has like half the viewers of the other Marvel D+ shows. 

for the uninitiated MCU follower, she’s a pretty unknown character. I only know about her for two reasons. She was the main focal character of the Avengers game, and my comic nerd friend bitches about her and other “woke” characters by Marvel. 
 

so with so many summer streaming shows popping up, many people may have just taken a “wait and see” approach, or the “I’ll bing it when all the episodes are out”. 
 

I doubt it’s anything so sinister as the “anti-woke” crowd taking issue with the shows existence, as it doesn’t appear to be getting review bombed online. 

[Greatoneshere]

2 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I doubt it’s anything so sinister as the “anti-woke” crowd taking issue with the shows existence, as it doesn’t appear to be getting review bombed online. 

 

It unfortunately is getting review bombed online. It has great critics and audience scores on RottenTomatoes (96% and 83% respectively), but while the critics score is pretty solid on Metacritic (78/100 after 23 reviews), the user score on Metacritic for the show is super low (4.0/10 after 139 votes), same with the user score on IMDb (6.1/10 after 40,000 votes). Why audiences would rate it highly on RottenTomatoes but review bomb it on Metacritic and IMDb I'm not sure but that does happen somewhat frequently (why not review bomb it across all three platforms?). Either way, I was surprised to see how review bombed it did get, it's unfortunate, and it's for all the reasons you can assume. I don't know how someone even fairly rates an entire season of television before, ya know, watching the whole season, but I guess you can start rating a show after one episode (you can already rate individual episodes separately on IMDb, so no need for this), which isn't really giving any show a fair shake. At least don't rate it until whatever constitutes the show's "season" has finished. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

23 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

It unfortunately is getting review bombed online. It has great critics and audience scores on RottenTomatoes (96% and 83% respectively), but while the critics score is pretty solid on Metacritic (78/100 after 23 reviews), the user score on Metacritic for the show is super low (4.0/10 after 139 votes), same with the user score on IMDb (6.1/10 after 40,000 votes). Why audiences would rate it highly on RottenTomatoes but review bomb it on Metacritic and IMDb I'm not sure but that does happen somewhat frequently. Either way, I was surprised to see how review bombed it did get, it's unfortunate, and it's for all the reasons you can assume. I don't know how someone even fairly rates an entire season of television before, ya know, watching the whole season, but I guess you can start rating a show after one episode (you can already rate individual episodes separately on IMDb, so no need for this), which isn't really giving any show a fair shake. At least don't rate it until whatever constitutes the show's "season" has finished. 

they’re not logical, and they’re filled with hate. They’re some of the same people that claimed Disney was retconning the fate of the Grand Inquisitor in episode 2 of Kenobi when there were still 4 episodes to go. And “oh look”, there was no retcon. 
 

they take offense to Marvel and Disney’s attempt to appeal to or represent any other group but the hard core, obsessed, who want the same static characters being 100% faithful to their favorite 30-60 year old stories. 
 

And everyone is a “Mary Sue”, unless it’s a white guy. 

[Greatoneshere]

8 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

they’re not logical, and they’re filled with hate. They’re some of the same people that claimed Disney was retconning the fate of the Grand Inquisitor in episode 2 of Kenobi when there were still 4 episodes to go. And “oh look”, there was no retcon. 
 

they take offense to Marvel and Disney’s attempt to appeal to or represent any other group but the hard core, obsessed, who want the same static characters being 100% faithful to their favorite 30-60 year old stories. 
 

And everyone is a “Mary Sue”, unless it’s a white guy. 

 

Indeed, same tune, different day. It's getting sad at this point, it's been years now of this.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

7 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

Indeed, same tune, different day. It's getting sad at this point, it's been years now of this.

What is funny is some of the younger ones doing this for like new Star Wars doesn’t understand the hate and reputation they discovered the Prequels had. Yet they don’t see their doing the same thing. The cycle of hate continues, and begins anew with each generation of “fans”. 
 

whether it’s comics, Star Wars, Star Trek, and too many more. 

[Fizzzzle]

Stories about empowerment can only ever be about white males. This is the way.

 

If it's not about a white male, it's pandering to the woke agenda. Unless the main character, who is either a woman or a POC or both, never once mentions how like maaaaaybe being those things affect their life. Because in real life those things don't affect your life at all, it's just whining. We don't like our characters to whine unless it's about dead relatives. This is EMPOWERMENT, goddammit, not therapy hour. Therapy is for pussies.

 

Do I think the show leans into it a little too hard? Yeah. But I also like that Disney is basically saying "hey, you bearded white cucks, it turns out bearded white men are an insignificant portion of the world audience, so we don't really care what you think."

[Fizzzzle]

I've been watching a YouTube channel called Cinema Therapy for a couple years now, and they kind of hit on this idea that movies and TV allow you to process emotions in a way that can cut through the shield that you put up around yourself. Because the story isn't about *you,* it's not an attack on you. You don't get defensive. There's a degree of separation that allows you to feel things that you brain would normally shut out.

 

There aren't that many popular stories about introverted Muslim girls in America, and what they go through every day.

 

Just having that one outlet where people who see themselves in this story can go "OMG YES!!!" is such a powerful thing. And I have yet to discover an argument of how expanding the role of super heroes to a more diverse group of people is bad that isn't simply closeted racism.

 

"It's cool that she's a brown girl, but I wish she would just shut up about it and get on with the show." I'm fucking sick of that attitude. The action genre in film has been 99% the property of white male power fantasies for... well, basically forever. Expanding that to include others is in no way a bad thing.

 

It's why I don't begrudge Jordan Peele, when asked if he said he'd ever make a movie with a white protagonist, he basically said "no, that story has been told a million times, I have no interest in it."

 

I love that you don't see color, tell that to people of color. They have to.

[Greatoneshere]

Pretty good episode today! The depiction of Pakistan, and more specifically Pakistan's coastal city of Karachi, was super well done down to little details like the types of curtains on the windows and bedding on the beds and the craziness of airports and traffic on roads (having been to Pakistan and specifically Karachi numerous times, I can confirm). Like Moon Knight in Egypt, an authentic change in setting helps bolster the reality of the mythology and background. I'm a little confused on Djinn still, with the implication that Djinn is some catchall term for anything "alien" that shows up on Earth in South Asia or the Middle East. but otherwise this was a fun excursion.

[jinx8402]

Not sure if I need to spoiler tag this, but will anyways

Spoiler

I'm guessing the origins of the bands are going to be related to the ten rings in Shang Chi. We're starting to see the different realms and their items showing up on earth. This explains the stinger at the end of Shang Chi with Captain Marvel and them saying it was acting as a beacon once it was used. The clan destines knew the band was used by Kamala in a similar way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jason]

BTW these D+ shows really are insane on recap/opening credits/closing credits. 48 minutes listed runtime easily turned into like 38 minutes of content on this one.

[Fizzzzle]

6 minutes ago, Jason said:

BTW these D+ shows really are insane on recap/opening credits/closing credits. 48 minutes listed runtime easily turned into like 38 minutes of content on this one.

Yeah I think most of the shows end up with something like 7 minutes of closing credits alone. You're probably not far off.

 

WandaVision was even worse, I think some of those episodes were like 18 minutes of actual runtime.

[Jason]

1 minute ago, Fizzzzle said:

Yeah I think most of the shows end up with something like 7 minutes of closing credits alone. You're probably not far off.

 

WandaVision was even worse, I think some of those episodes were like 18 minutes of actual runtime.

 

For WandaVision weren't the super-short ones at least limited to the three that they dropped at once to debut the show?

[Fizzzzle]

1 minute ago, Jason said:

 

For WandaVision weren't the super-short ones at least limited to the three that they dropped at once to debut the show?

Not sure, I didn't watch the show until after it was all out.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

I started Wednesday with my sister and we’re both really enjoying it. Watched episodes 1-3. I like how much of the show is focusing around her family and relationships. I love her father. lol I also really like how much of the show is clearly from Kamala’s perspective and not just about Kamala. 
 

we both wish that Bruno wasn’t the “friend zoned guy the female main character is friends with.” trope. Why can’t he just be her friend. It’s like the only times writes let a guy just be friends with a female lead character is if the guy is gay. 

[EternallDarkness]

13 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I started Wednesday with my sister and we’re both really enjoying it. Watched episodes 1-3. I like how much of the show is focusing around her family and relationships. I love her father. lol I also really like how much of the show is clearly from Kamala’s perspective and not just about Kamala. 
 

we both wish that Bruno wasn’t the “friend zoned guy the female main character is friends with.” trope. Why can’t he just be her friend. It’s like the only times writes let a guy just be friends with a female lead character is if the guy is gay. 

 

Hey When Harry Met Sally showed us that men and woman can't just be friends!  

[Greatoneshere]

I mean, when you're an introverted guy who is super into science and stuff and you're a teenager with only one friend and it's a girl - you may be cool with being friends, but you'll always accept the door to more if they open that door for you. It's less a trope and more simple biology, teenage boys want to hook up with girls their age first if they're attracted to them and be friends second, almost in every scenario. They'll accept the second option, and wait and see if the first option ever presents itself. I call it bench theory. Everyone's got a couple people on their bench, whether they be single, dating, or married, whether the person is being honest with themselves about it or not. I've had a lot of female friends, particularly, not like discussing bench theory since it realigns their perspective of their friendships with the men in their life, but it's the truth so I'd say accept it than stay ignorant.  

 

I've dated enough girls myself now and when I was with those girls I explained bench theory to each of them and when my relationship was working out, their guy friends sort of "disappeared", but when me and the girl broke up, lo and behold, suddenly the guy friends re-emerged and were more social with the girl again. Happened with my now wife as well, who did not believe me that it would happen once we got married. Hmmmmm.  

[TheLeon]

I see more of myself in Bruno than I care to admit. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

If the most unrealistic thing in the show turned out to be a teenage boy not trying to hook up with his cute, long time friend, I’d be ok with that. 

[silentbob]

1 hour ago, TheLeon said:

I see more of myself in Bruno than I care to admit. 

 

 

HEY. . . . 

 

 

 

 

In all honesty I really am enjoying the show. Like the family dynamic, she’s perfect as our hero. Again I  gotta mention my love of the Edgar Wright Baby Driver like flourishes happening in the background 

[Greatoneshere]

3 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

If the most unrealistic thing in the show turned out to be a teenage boy not trying to hook up with his cute, long time friend, I’d be ok with that. 

 

For sure, I'm just explaining why it's normally the case - and I don't think Bruno is trying all that hard to hook up, his indications that he likes her are primarily subtle for someone like Kamala to notice, so he's not like being overbearing or anything about liking her. 

[Fizzzzle]

I fucking love this show so far. Not sure if I like it more than Hawkeye (that show was pretty much peak Marvel imo), but I love how grounded and wholesome this story feels. It's a story about being yourself, but also about acceptance, which means don't be an unapologetic asshole . There is no "if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" happening here.

 

Every character in the story (minus the villain, I forget her name, she's just a plot device so far) is constantly compromising, but in a healthy way. They are compromising in a way that makes the people they love feel... well, loved.

 

And yet there IS conflict. It IS interesting. It just goes to show that you don't necessarily need toxicity to make human relationships interesting.

[TheLeon]

Wild that the most kid-focused series so far is the one that spends half an episode being a domestic drama set in 1940’s India with none of the series regulars. This show gets all my respect. 

[Kal-El814]

This show commits the same crime as a lot of the MCU movies and almost all the MCU shows, which is that the villains are underdeveloped. I hope we find out why these clowns didn’t just… work with Kamala to find a way home that didn’t involve wiping out a whole dimension? You’ve been here for almost 100 years and your son has the hots for her, maybe work with Kamala for an afternoon? 
 

But this episode introduced me to Mehwish Hayat so quite frankly all past and future sins are forgiven. 

[Fizzzzle]

Of all the episodes I've seen, that was certainly one of them.

 

Still love the show, but this week's episode definitely felt like it could have been squeezed into 4 minutes if they wanted to.

[Brick]

That episode was way too short. It ended and all I thought was, "that's it?!". 

[silentbob]

54 minutes ago, Brick said:

That episode was way too short. It ended and all I thought was, "that's it?!". 

 

When the credits started to roll I had to check the time and it was only like 31-32mins. I was like ”WTH” that was short and only one more to go!?! I just hope they land the ending because this has been a delight of a show to watch

[Greatoneshere]

I really liked the show had the balls to take a genuine amount of time illustrating Partition in a fairly realistic way for a D+ show, it helps with atmosphere and tone. I liked a lot of the episode, except the Najma stuff at the end. Her 180 degree heel turn and sudden death (sort of?) was completely unbelievable and as others have said, Ms. Marvel's biggest issue has been its villains - I think that's in part because as a show primarily aimed more at tweens and teens than other D+ shows so far (except maybe Hawkeye) and between Kate Bishop as the new Hawkeye and now Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel perhaps Marvel's is creating a Young Avengers (that could be led by Tom Holland's Spider-Man maybe?). The fact the tone of those two shows is significantly lighter than the other D+ shows means the villains are going to be hokier, less villainous/bad, etc. But yeah, the show has a villain problem. Liked the episode otherwise though.

[Kal-El814]

Thought this was a fun finale for a really fun season. 
 

Wouldn’t have guessed that they’d use Kamala as the first real tease of main MCU reality mutants, but hey here we are.