Ms.Marvel D+

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

So, as you may have heard from the howls of blood-curdling outrage from Certain Corners Of The Internet Where They Have Opinions At You, the Ms.Marvel trailer dropped today. And here it is...

 

 

Stuff to note:

• The powers have changed a little bit to energy projection, coupled to what looks like a rather elegant quantum device of some kind. I suspect this is either going to tie up with Shang-Chi's rings, Photon and Cap M's energy powers, or both. I like. Easier/cheaper to film convincingly than stretching skin, certainly, and gives her a wider toolkit of powers.
• Iman herself looks pleasingly normal and more than slightly adorkable. (Teamup with Turning Red's Mei would be hella fun, as they're both Disney properties...)
• As you're aware if you've read my other threads, I'm a Level 47 Social Justice/Righteous Rage Armour Scrapper with a fully slotted Epic Wokeness set. Buuuttt... the trailer is ever so slightly too worthy even for my tastes. Was expecting more Parker-level wisecracking.
• Also feels a lot like a high-budget version of Disney or Nick's endless superhero/wizard-based teen comedies*. Half expecting a Mitchell Musso guest shot somewhere. (Would be quite fun if he turned up as a villain, mind.)
• Speaking of which, not clear who the antagonists are or why we should care about them.
• All that said, it seems there's a lot of love for the original books here - particularly that last shot of her on the lamppost.

 

Packing everything about why you should be excited for a flick or series into 90 seconds is not easy. I'm not sure they've made the best choices they could here, but willing to give it a shot.

 

_{*...though not the one where someone keeps three teen superheroes locked in their basement and feeds them limited info about the outside world, which is in no way a supervillain/Weinstein-level supercreep move and would not cause me to telephone la police/SHIELD if I found out about it.}

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by ThaOGDreamWeaver
Let the wild speculation begin! (But keep it sane/polite, everybody.)

[DougGraves]

The general assumption is that Mr. Fantastic will be in the MCU soon and they didn't want two characters with the same stretching powers.

 

And the inhumans and terrigen mist is not a thing in the MCU.  Just in AoS.  So tying her to Captain Marvel with Kree technology probably fits better in the MCU.

 

The whole thing made me think off Never Have I Ever, a funny Netflix show about an Indian girl in high school in the U.S. (I know Kamala is from Pakistan).  In NHIE she has a cousin named Kamala.

 

My daughter loves Kamala so she will probably love the show.  It looks entertaining enough.

 

Clearly Marvel is pushing for young female superheroes as hard in the MCU as they have been in the comics.  That may help expand their market.  They don't need to be bigger, but its Disney so they can always get bigger.

[Cancrusher]

Trailer didn't wow me, but I'll give it a shot before I make up my mind.  Honestly, I'm not at all familiar with this character, so it's all new to me.

[Chrono-Bot]

I'm looking forward to it! I really liked the original comics run and it'll be neat to see Kamala in live action. I think the power change makes sense in a visual appeal sort of way, although I do fondly recall the times in the comics people were like 'your powers are gross and weird' because there needs to be more of that in powers.

[DougGraves]

New Rockstars goes over MCU stuff frame by frame.  Their take is that it looks like she does stretch, she just also glows.  So it may be stretching with extra sparkle.

 

 

[UltraAlt]

On 3/15/2022 at 4:41 PM, ThaOGDreamWeaver said:

The powers have changed a little bit to energy projection, coupled to what looks like a rather elegant quantum device of some kind. I suspect this is either going to tie up with Shang-Chi's rings, Photon and Cap M's energy powers, or both. I like. Easier/cheaper to film convincingly than stretching skin, certainly, and gives her a wider toolkit of powers.

 

Nega bands?

 

[DougGraves]

In the trailer she does something and flips upside down through the floor and is in a different place.  I could see that being using the nega bands to travel to the negative zone.

[DoctorDitko]

Oh, I hope it's Nega-Bands!

 

I understand Quantum Bands are also an option, but to me as a kid in the '70s, clashing wristbands together is second only to smashing your cane on the ground as a transformation emote.

 

"Revengers Resemble!" Or something like that.

 

[Frostbiter]

I've dropped my subscription to Disney+ and will not be picking it back up again.

[Frostbiter]

I didn't drop my subscription to Disney for the shows they make. This show was not made with me in mind as an audience and that's ok with me. I don't need everything to be made with me in mind, I'm not a child. I dropped my subscription because I am not required to pay for any service I don't want and I am not obligated to offer any reasons why, even though if I cared enough I could give more than a few legitimate ones. I don't see this as a place for such discussions, beyond offering my legitimate but limited feedback about something.

[DougGraves]

We are keeping our Disney+ for now, although really we should cancel and then just watch every 6 months when they have 2 shows out to watch.

 

We are canceling Netflix and going to subscribe to Apple TV.  

 

We need to start rotating our subscriptions to see just the stuff we really want instead of watching shows we half want to see because we already have the subscription.

 

Hulu would be next to subscribe to.

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

Kept D+ - not just because I'm liking the content, but all the other quite odd bits that are turning up in there. I don't know who their movie curator is, but they've got my tastes well served.

 

Dropped Netflix, and nothing they've announced lately is likely to tempt me back.

 

Kept Amazon because it comes with free parcel delivery (and decent old shows - caught myself binging The Blacklist, which still makes me hopeful for either a Kingpin or Thunderbolts bad guy-oriented D+ series or movie. Bad guys and rogues are fun to write for and even more to play. 

 

And while I've got a whole other thread from a while back about the ludicrous range of streaming platforms, the only one I felt has truly done fans dirty is Paramount+. It's expensive, the non-Trek content is pretty limited, and in the UK it's only available through one of the Evil Empire's most expensive packages.

[FrauleinMental]

I seem to be a half-step behind in the branding for Disney+.  When I saw the D+, I thought it was a grade... 🙂

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

Side note... fandoms gonna fandom 😛

[starro]

I was initially opposed to subscription services, but after cutting the cable -- I love it, especially the savings.   No more paying $60 a month for 100 channels I don't want to watch

 

Great content and I jump between different subscriptions and only pay $6-$15 month.

[Haijinx]

It will be interesting if this chracter actually has some connection to Capt Marvel lore.  As it may be based on some of this stuff.

 

In the comic there is no connection beyond her being a CM fan.

[Techwright]

18 hours ago, Haijinx said:

It will be interesting if this chracter actually has some connection to Capt Marvel lore.  As it may be based on some of this stuff.

 

In the comic there is no connection beyond her being a CM fan.

It is my understanding that she will join Capt. Marvel in the upcoming movie.  As will Photon.

 

 

I've never read the comics with Ms Marvel in them.  My only knowledge of the character comes from her several animated appearances, including in the Avengers video game.  Within that limitation, I've never been a fan of the character.  She falls within what I term the "Yakky Duck character".  That is, a character deliberately added by the creators to run their mouth incessantly, usually with unnecessary dialog, to the point of being obnoxious.  ("Yakky Duck" being a reference to "Yakky Doodle" the Hanna-Barbera poster-child example of the character type.)  To be fair, a bit of this got ironed out in the Avengers video game, where I found it a tad more palatable.  Still not a fan.

 

That said, I watched the trailer and was confused out by the addition of a mcguffin of power and a radically different power sent.  It came across like they don't trust their character as it stood to be interesting and had to dump a lot of bling in to fancy her up.  If, however, as the story advance, the mcguffin of power proves to be something in a broader storyline sense, like the Tesseract proving to be actually a Power Stone, something that Kamala will eventually set aside or lose, and focus on her own ability, then I'd just label the trailer as confusing, and not degrading to the character.

 

As to her similarity to Mr. Fantastic, I've always felt how she was presented had a fundamental difference.  Ms Marvel's "embiggen" power not only stretches, there's a mass alteration.  So she's just not reaching out to punch a villain, she's stretching out with a fist like a wrecking ball to smash him.  Last I knew, and its been years since I read Fantastic Four comics, Reed Richards could stretch, and apparently had some off-the-scale tensile strength, but not a mass shifting nature.  If the MCU can support several super soldiers, similar-but-slightly-different Ant-Man and Wasp, and two Hawkeyes, I see no reason to change Ms Marvel just because Reed Richards is similar.

 

 

 

[Haijinx]

The comic, at least the early run, was not really anything other than a coming of age tale for a pakistani-american muslim teenage girl who finds out she has super powers.

 

As such you got a peek into a diferent ethnic sub-culture and how its different than the now comic book standard that started with Spider Man.

 

23 pages a month keeps everything basically superficial.  Sure there are a lot of monologs and thought bubbles, but thats every solo comic book character really.

 

[starro]

There have been many Ms Marvels and Captain Marvels over the years....

[High_Beam]

I tried.  I wanted to like the show because I liked some of the stories I perused in the comics and in the ways she sort of fourth wall broke without actually fourth wall breaking (ala Deadpool).  Her fandom was our fandom yet wasn't winking to us directly.  The show, tried to put that in but just got overwhelmed by trying to cram so much other stuff in.  That stuff, ranging from the aspect of her heritage to how she dealt with her powers, while necessary, needed to be shepherded better like the way Wandavision slow-burned in Episodes 1 and 2 until the deep crazy set in.  The stories were clunky and the characters often plagued by tropes and it just fell flat.

 

This is the real problem with a lot of the Marvel TV shows.  Agents of Shield was all over the some good and some bad and most of it because they needed mutants without calling them mutants because Disney hadn't bought Fox media yet.  Peggy Carter couldn't sustain itself outside of the static warp bubble of the period piece.  Don't even start with the Inhumans.  Hawkeye was just a long-winded vehicle to introduce a new character that nobody will likely care about considering nobody really cares about Hawkeye.  Wandavision was good because it was quirky, not preachy and teased something more.  Same goes for Loki though the acting of Hiddleston really strengthened the soft plot points.

 

Then you have the Netflix shows, Luke Cage, Daredevil and Punisher were all solid A+ shows, while Jones was a B+ and Iron Fist was a D+ (Bad story and lame character, I honestly don't care about the other complaints).  The Defenders was okay (C) and had to happen because the others built to it.  But they all worked because they were all in a niche zone that not many fill; the gritty street hero (I use the term somewhat loosely with Frank Castle).  Cage was glorious, a damn shame it didn't get another season (fingers crossed).  Daredevil honestly ran its course, the well is relatively shallow with regards to Murdock, same for Jones.  And honestly, nobody gives 1 nor less two craps about Iron Fist.  And the Punisher, well he's the Punisher and he is the same problematic issue that Disney has to deal with like they do Deadpool, fans want them, a lot of money paying fans want them but they want them like they got them and Disney, well Disney is wholesome family entertainment (cough, cough).

 

Here's hoping She-Hulk will be better.