Saturday, August 17, 2019

Disney and Spin-Offs

I’m still furious about the Ragnarok question at Trivia on Thursday night, not the least because the text of the question was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article. So I had an idea for a Note about God of War and its take on Norse mythology, but I think right now I should stay away from Norse mythology if I want to keep anything like a semblance of calm and rationality.

I had an idea for a full essay about Camp Jupiter/New Rome from Heroes of Olympus being absolutely insane, but that might make it to ImpishIdea first.

At least I saved a hummingbird yesterday? That was cool.

---

Disney’s Doing Too Many Spin-Offs

Loki gets a series! Vision and Wanda get a series! Ghost Rider gets a series! Obi-Wan might get a series! And so on and so forth. People are already speculating how these movies are going to tie into the future films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the upcoming Star Wars films, and guys, I’m just tired of this.

I already wrote an essay about how I’m tired of several franchises, particularly those owned by Disney, are deciding that instead of stopping and explaining what the eff’s going on instead relegate it to a spin-off series or comic. For instance, Lucasfilm recently released the trailer for the second (and final) season of their animated series Star Wars: Resistance, and how it chronicles in-detail about how the First Order managed to take over the galaxy despite, you know, them being a fringe movement and their home base being destroyed and there being no rational reason that they’re as powerful as the movies keeping insisting they are.

And they shouldn’t have to do this! I shouldn’t have to watch a television series aimed at children in order to feel as if I have a grasp of how things work! I shouldn’t be questioning where the bad guys get their manpower and resources from and have to do homework to figure it out. The Original Trilogy had the advantage of making the bad guys the government, so it makes sense that they’ve got deep pockets; but by making the First Order explicitly remnants of a government that no one likes and keeps employing evil backstabbing bastards, one has to wonder how it stays afloat at all, much less keeps recruiting soldiers and building top-of-the-line technology.

But moving past my Star Wars issues, with Disney releasing its upcoming streaming service, they’ve decided they’re going to do more of this, meaning that they’ve decided that they’d import one of the worst parts of comic books into screen mediums. People are speculating how Loki will tie into the next Thor movie, and I just! Don’t! Care! Can you imagine watching a Thor movie, and then Loki pops up out of nowhere, and whenever you ask about it, all the fanboys are just like, “Oh no it makes perfect sense, you just have to watch his series on Disney+!” No! Bump that! 

Continuity is fine, and I love serialized stories. Boy do I. I’m reading like fifty different series right now. But this has to stop. If I see a movie, or watch a series, I shouldn’t have to do homework for it! I shouldn’t have to watch ten more hours of a series I have to pay monthly to legally view in order to make sense of the fact that a formerly dead character is now faffing about in the movie I’m watching.

This is one of the most frustrating things about comics and their crossover events. Not just the decades of continuity that keep springing up to become relevant and kicking you in the face with how much you don’t know, but how with every major crossover, of which there are now multiple times a year, the events leak over into several different other comic stories, and those comic stories sort of converge, so in order to understand the conclusion you need to have read all of those as well. Which is on purpose, in an attempt to boost sales for a bunch of other comic titles, but it’s really really annoying. 

It’s an obvious ploy to make even more money, and for whatever reason we’re all just fawning over it instead of being annoyed that our enjoyment of comic book movies is being held hostage behind paywalls. Because it’s baffling now but there are people who only watch Disney movies for entertainment. I’ve seen people brag about how they only go to the theaters for Marvel films now, as if it’s something to be proud of, owing brand loyalty to an entertainment franchise.

Disney, please stop. Everyone else stop too. Just make entertainment that stands on its own again, I’m begging you.

---

No comments:

Post a Comment