I continue to be cynical about crossover shit but it’s clear that the people making the comic are having a lot of fun while mashing together their different dolls. Like, yes, this is largely an excuse to sell really awful looking toys where Sonic wears the Flash’s costume, but also Lex Luthor sleeps with Rouge the Bat and that’s really funny.
The show continues to wear its anime inspirations on its sleeve with The Death of Superman by way of the Cell Saga. It’s a fun and pretty enough blend, though the characters continue to be fairly one-note.
It is a nostalgia bait show but I am not immune to nostalgia. I have enjoyed it but the pacing is a bit much. I understand that they want to adapt and move through different eras of comics but with only eight episodes and this many shifts in the status quo it feels like half the episodes are entire story arcs compressed down into too short a time and most episodes also revolve around the Apocalypse plotline when Apocalypse is a really boring villain.
The Boys remains fun until the end but it was very apparent that ever since the third series the show has no idea for what to do other than have Homelander put everyone around him under more and more strain while the boys chase after a series of plot devices in the hopes of killing him until here, in the last two episodes, one of them finally works. Everything just kept lurching on in much the same way despite how increasingly little sense that made. The promise of massive escalation at the end of the fourth series was immediately rolled back but the boys are able to operate in pretty much the same way, going alone with Butcher every time despite everyone increasingly saying how fucked up and wrong he is, whether or not they are broke and slumming it up in one of Frenchie’s mob-connected safehouses, part of the CIA, or the most wanted fugitives in an increasingly fascist police state.
There are some changes! Kimiko is American now! And she talks in fluent English with an American accent. I do understand why getting her voice back would be a big thing and why they wouldn’t want the actress to put on a Japanese accent with broken English but it’s incredibly jarring, especially in Though the Heavens Fall where she gushes to an Asian-American woman about inspiration it was to see someone like her on TV when growing up despite the fact that Kimiko grew up in fucking Japan. She has only been in America for a few years. It’s not like the writers forgot that she’s not American; she says a few lines later that the show is how she first learned English. Did the writers think that Japan doesn’t have it’s own TV shows?
Kimiko also now speaks like a 2010s Redditor who has watched nothing but Kevin Smith movies trying to write Joss Whedon quips. It’s painful to watch and Karen Fukuhara gives a much less expressive performance now compared to when she was playing without her voice (though I can’t imagine it’s easy to give a strong performance while reading those lines). Everyone else’s dialogue is almost as dire now too. The show has been Flanderised into puerile vulgarity and clichéd inspirational speeches, completing its transformation from comic book satire into Marvel with knobs. We even get a slow motion sequence for A-Train that is pulled straight out of Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men films except that it looks like shit.
The satire, of course, has entirely shifted to political, but is all very surface level. It makes little jokes about and references to Trump’s regime and its media arms, and some of them did make me laugh, but it has very little to say outside of orange flag man bad. The series also fails to give much of a sense of what Homelander’s regime is like for people day to day outside of those at the top. People getting rounded up and arrested is mentioned a lot in passing and we see the camps but we get nothing like the subplot of seeing M.M.’s ex-wife’s boyfriend getting radicalised. There’s no place for that in the series any more when everyone has fully become comic book characters and are completely disconnected from normal life. Firecracker’s plot in One-Shots is the one part of the series that delivers something a bit better.
When the series finally, reluctantly, puts Hughie and Butcher in a moral conflict that was promised for so long it really doesn’t seem like it has anything to say. Butcher, after Homelander is dead and everything is over, threatening to still release the supervirus, says that he wants to kill the very idea of superheroes. I was expecting, in line other big speeches in the final few episodes, some refutation of the importance of superheroes and of stories. Some point being made about comics and superheroes in general, but the show doesn’t really have anything to say about that. Hughie is just forced to kill Butcher to stop him from committing mass murder and there isn’t really anything deeper. It’s fine. Don’t worry that none of the underlying structural problems with Vought and the superhero industry have been fixed at all.
Sage also ends up being an incredible waste. After so much contrivance being justified as part of her master plan her big plan is just… cause mass chaos so she can be Henry Bemis from Time Enough at Last in a bunker. Wow! A seventy year-old episode of the Twilight Zone! How original. But… why couldn’t she just do this anyway? She basically was already doing that before Homelander showed up. What, she can manipulate everyone in convoluted ways but couldn’t figure out a way to just get away from Homelander? To get rich on the stock market and build her bunker anyway? And then in the same episode where Kimiko forgets that she grew up in Japan, Sage is blindsided about Soldier Boy siding with Homelander despite the fact that back-Ashley told her in the same fucking episode that Soldier Boy was sympathetic to Homelander. Why are you surprised?
It’s not all bad. I still enjoy The Deep becoming ever-more pathetic and I quite enjoyed Ashley’s suffering in proportion to her increasingly higher rank as she fails upwards, having long gone past the point here she should have stepped away and saved herself. Her short redemption arc, undercut by her literally declaring in a press conference “I did nothing wrong,” only to be immediately impeached was a great ending for her and the show is still, for the most part, quite fun.
They probably should have stopped after they ran out of ideas, though.
They really had no plan for how they were going to do with that cliffhanger did they? Just forget it and quickly return them to the school. The show is of such inconsistent quality and it gets markedly worse whenever it get hijacked by the plot of The Boys. It fails to build any kind of real tension and just have characters repeatedly tell each other how dangerous and important everything is while everyone just wanders from scene to scene with no sense of urgency and we can explain any tiresome, extraneous back and forth with it just all being part of Sage’s big, grand, vague plan. Also explicit ranked power levels exist in this now too. Sure. Whatever.
On the political side this series has generally been fast and lose with allegories and I don’t expect the logic of supe supremacist to be particularly sound, but pulling in eugenicist ideas of culling the herd to select for better superpowers when superpowers are explicitly nonheritable (unless you’re Andre) really annoyed me. What was he actually trying to achieve with that?
I should probably just stop watching this I have mostly lost interest. The episodes don’t really need to be an hour long. Sometimes it feels justified but other times it feels like they have to either stretch things out or else add too many things into one to keep them going. There are also just too many characters and too many plot threads that keep getting dangled in a way I find annoying. Previously it was Allen and Nolan in space doing almost nothing but now that that finally becomes the main plot we still have Angstrom and whatever aliens were sponsoring him not going anywhere and one check-in with Titan that felt completely pointless. The Hell episode felt like one of the more cohesive ones this series but that’s just another dangling plot thread.
The other problem with jumping between these is they feel so utterly out of scale with each other. I am not asking for the series to devolve into asinine power scaling metrics but on a basic level the viltrumite war plotline doesn’t make any sense if anything on Earth can give Mark this much trouble and trying to jump back and forth between the ethics of if and under what circumstances superheroes should kill people and a war where everyone is happily and indiscriminately killing hordes of enslaved soldiers is similarly incoherent.
If there was a sense of escalation from one of these ideas to the other it might work but the show just wants to keep every plot thread and concept in play so Mark can deal with every moral dilemma in near-isolation and forget about whatever the last one was.
I can understand why the writers would feel that dropping and and all subtlety, particularly in the political satire, is warranted right now, but the show has started to feel like a parody of itself as a result. I also think that if the show is going to make watching the spinoff crucial to following the plot (which I am told is even more true for the second series of Gen V) then it making fun of Marvel movie phases and crossovers starts to lose any and all bite. I did enjoy some of the sillier parts, such as the gang unloading into V’d-up chickens that are no-selling the entire thing, and there is still plenty else that I like, but I think that it is time for this show to wrap up. Hopefully the fifth series sticks the landing.
Starts of fairly insufferable with the attempts at social media satire, finds its feet after a while, and then suddenly just swerves in the last few episodes to being much more of a direct extension of The Boys and throws out a lot of characterisation in favour of feeding into the political division plot of its parent show.
Speaking of The Boys, Edgar’s comments on Vought being a pharmaceutical company, not a superhero company was a good moment but becomes increasingly nonsensical as the show goes on and Vought starts seeming like it makes up half of the American economy. They own the television ecosystem, they own the news, they own their own university and it’s all centred on superheroes. Several supes also having children with the same powers as them also seems weird in light of how big of a deal Ryan was made out to be.
The colour palette didn’t feel as overly washed out as in the first series (or maybe I am just getting used to it?). It does get a bit much with the nihilistic violence and misery but manages to pick up before the end. Stormfront was a good villain though in the end felt like a bit of an extended aside before focusing back Homelander again. I do enjoy the little asides back to The Deep every once in a while to see just how badly things are going for him today.
Superheroes are inherently fascist 🫡
This gives an amazing glimpse into a world where this show looked good but the writing was not improved at all. Also Kagami gets less autistic?
Everyone who gets access to time travel becomes immediately completely incompetent which is maybe a sign of why you generally shouldn’t introduce time travel powers into a setting. It is far too much of a escalation in terms of power creep.
The actual fifth series finale might have resonated emotionally a bit more if they had had these scenes with Nathalie in them after Monarch was defeated instead of a random press conference with the mayor but also they really did not need to recap the series finale at the start when they were literally going to show it again via time travel in the middle of this.
The fifth series was off to such a good start. Monarch, high on his victory in the previous finale, immediately returns to sucking shit and gets his ass kicked and loses the most powerful miraculous. And for a world-famous fashion designer who is this camp he is costuming is so, so bad. I love him. Other highlights this season were the episode that retcons that he was using the other time manipulation miraculous the entire time in previous episodes but is so bad at being a supervillain that all he manages to do is trap himself in a hyperbolic home for infinite losers and rapidly progress the crumbling of his body and the fact that his biggest, most evil villain speech in the show has nothing to do with being Monarch but gleefully spelling out the ills of the fashion industry to crush a girl’s dream of being a fashion designer.
But then the show does so much wheelspinning while teasing at an overarching plot that barely progresses before a very disappointing finale that feels like it is making everything up on the spot. Lila being this parallel mastermind (with a completely Flanderised Chloé being nothing but her patsy) which leads to her doing basically nothing but walking at the last minute, taking the butterfly miraculous and then seemingly getting it taken off her again in the stinger. Félix is a sentimonster I think? Or Adrien is? It is kind of an interesting idea but the exposition dump was so tedious to sit through that I zoned out a bit through it. And it has little consequence to the actual finale because Adrien gets completely sidelined and Félix just leaves of his own accord.
Adrien’s increasing willingness to try to kill people seems like it might have been going somewhere, especially with their powers getting unlocked towards the end, but it also doesn’t pay off and nothing is made of Marinette herself trying to cataclysm Gabriel as well. I did enjoy how the lucky charm immediately also becomes more violent and drops a piano on him and gives Marinette other weapons to hit him with. But then after all that, with the protagonist fully just trying to kill this guy now, we suddenly get the obligatory Gabriel redemption where he… wishes himself and his wife into heaven I guess? It’s dull. And then a press conference about making Paris solarpunk? So strange.
And then not only do they stills somehow not figure out each other’s secret identities but Marinette doesn’t even tell Adrien the truth about his dad at all so we can keep wheelspinning on this even longer.
I will keep watching but it definitely won’t be the same without failgirl in chief as the main villain any more.
Even putting aside my dislike for the naming scheme that simply labels it as a cross promotion and nothing else—art is ever more stripped to branding exercises not even trying to promise substance—I find it so strange that the title uses the brand name DC itself and not the Justice League. Is the name of the company really more of a draw or recognisable than the actual Justice League themselves? Do people get excited just hearing “DC”?
Still, this is about as good as it could have been. It’s very pretty (other than the superhero costumes the Sonic characters end up in which look atrocious on them), it has a snappy pace with each issue establishing a new set of ideas to play with before quickly moving on to set up the next one, and it has a few good gags and some charm to it. I especially like the bit in the first issue of the Justice League asking how the hedgehogs got their powers only for Sonic and Silver to say that they’re just normal men.
They looked a lot better when they were evil.
It is kind of fascinating to take the premise of an existing show and make a Disney movie version of it. The plot beats, the pacing, the songs; it all feels so much like an imitation of Disney. They even have the standard issue green fire and fog for the villain song. Even visually it’s taking the basic designs from the show but animating them like Pixar. I can’t say I love the result—I like the show for how messy it is—but it was interesting to watch and especially to hear the same voice cast doing different takes on the same characters. Chloe especially feels very different at first to the point where I thought it might have been a different actor, sounding much more like a normal person up until she gets angry and then starts sounding like her television self.
This show has really wormed its way into me to the point where I’m second guessing whether I should have rated the previous series higher and I was too embarrassed to. But also it has vastly improved over time. It has gotten more complex since the purely monster of the week structure of the first series as well as funnier, more self-aware and much more queer, though the queerness remains strictly subtextual.
I love Gabriel Agreste and Chloe Bourgeois, they are such messy bitches. Chloe has ridiculous (utterly ridiculous) shōnen anime protagonist levels of willpower to break through any barrier and uses it only for drama. She was the first person to shrug off akumatisation and now that she has relapsed into a brat she openly invites Shadow Moth to give her superpowers when she wants them and then just breaks her own akumatised totem when she feels like it. It honestly reminded me of Vegeta and Babidi of all things. She is the one using Shadow Moth now.
The shows disposition to tease shipping and forward plot progress and and then undermine itself is still annoying, though. The forth series wastes no time in immediately breaking up the protagonists from Kagami and Luka and we get another episode dedicated to showing an alternative timeline to Marinette and Adrien learning their secret identities which immediately results in him getting evilised and the world ending.
Any rules or limits on how powers work seem to be completely thrown out the window at this point, too. The transformation time limits stopped mattering to the plot a long time ago but now we just have, playground-like, Ladybug making up the power to make anti-evil shields and Shadow Moth saying that well I can make super-hyper-mega butterflies that can break shields and also that multiple people can be akumatised at once and people don’t actually have to be near the thing that gets akumatised at all (one wonders why he ever does it objects people are carrying at all), and, with the power of the peacock miraculous, he can just make up a guy to get mad at something so he can evilise them! But he is also so, so endearingly bad at being a villain that his most successful plan does not exploit any of this but just relies trying his luck and hoping Ladybug makes a really bad mistake, which she dutifully does. Good for him. He needed a win.
Also Simpleman was so fucking funny.
Why is the dean from Community one of the superheroes?
The show actually having a plot in the second series was a novelty but it quickly settles into a frustrating rhythm of teasing some actual forward development and then pulling immediately back. No one is ever allowed to really learn any new information as the overlapping secret identities is too much part of the central premise. If they ever do it will literally cause the apocalypse. Mostly all we ever really get is the occasional new toy1 as distraction.
Still, it’s fun. I really enjoy how much of an absolute freak Gabriel Agreste is and I don’t think a rich, famous fashion designer intentionally engineering situations to piss off a bunch of teenagers and their parents so he can evilise them will ever stop being funny to me. Also Kagami autistic as hell.
superhero transformation ↩
Actually pretty fun! Venom and Eddie Brock’s relationship and banter is surprisingly a highlight of the movie.
Fei has a red streak in her hair which basically makes her Shadow the Hedghog.
It’s so strange to come into the second series and immediately there is actually a plot! Characters learn new information! It is still mostly monsters of the week and it repeatedly pulls back when it looks like the story might advance in more significant ways, but it is less of a show for babies. I am getting into it the more I watch it. Partially is just layering more injokes with my partner as we watch it. Every time there’s a new hero transformation we shout “new toy!” at the television, we fistbump whenever the characters do. I also laugh every time at the face Hawk Moth makes during the transformation sequence he occasionally gets now.
Much is said about the choice of elaborate, comic book-inspired transitions but what made me scream at my television was the soundtrack blaring Middle Eastern-themed music every single time we get a shot of the Utah desert.
The first series of this show felt so deliberately constructed, with a specific tension hanging over the whole thing with occasional bursts of extreme violence with specific purpose. It no longer seems like it knows what its doing, throwing Mark between suddenly contrived moral choices while casually painting everything red with guts at every turn. It seemed like it has some point to say about superhero stories before and now it is just throwing in random teasing of future threats and multiverse doppleganger shite that feels just like Marvel movies with more gore where everything ends up coming down to who can punch biggest or do a fancy laser blast. It’s very glaring with Eve, whose abilities are almost limitless in what she can do but all the show can conceive of her doing is being Green Lantern but pink and making big hammers out of… light? What material is she even making this stuff out of? Her power is meant to be rearranging matter. Why is everything she does just energy blasts or force fields? Light it not made of atoms.
Sometimes you commit to a bit too much and you end up watching two dozen episodes of a show for babies with your partner. It has mostly been enjoyable and I am told that this does get more complex and actually has plot development as it goes on, and there was a whiff of that towards the end of the first series, but out of twenty-six episodes only maybe five of them had anything going on more than the basic villain-of-the-week plot.
