And that's why it works for him, his enemies aren't all the same sort of sarcastic and funny, many of them are deadpan, serious and egomaniacal, so this little spandex twerp being flippant with them drives them up the wall where he beats them with experience. XD
[This](https://old.reddit.com/r/Spiderman/comments/16qzcxg/for_normal_nonpowered_criminals_who_do_you_think/k2179i2/) comment has the images and the replies has the issue number
Some of the dialogue is cut off in the image, but that part basically says "I'm done, I swear I'll go straight"
Similar thing happened in Spider-man ps4 (the dlc iirc). Spidey just stare down on some webbed up thug and he just spilled it out of fear.
[The video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQprCQ6rsw8)
The first time peter fights goblin after getting his body back from ock cracks me up every time. He makes a joke and the zoom on osborne’s eyes when he’s like “you’re back, you little shit” just kills me
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/a8qxvh/superior_spiderman_31_i_love_how_the_green_goblin/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
...or when he meets up with the other heroes, and apologizes for being late because he got his body back but he was naked and tried to web up some shorts but Octavius changed the formula and he couldn't get it to come off...
...and everyone else immediately accepts that only the real Peter Parker would web his ...self and then immediately awkwardly tell the entire Avengers about it.
edit: I realized after the fact that this story has nothing to do with Parker's quipping and how he's scarier without it, but it's funny and I'm leaving it up with apologies.
The actual line is so much funnier and hits harder to me.
The pause, the processing look on Norman's face, and then the seething *hatred* as you can practically hear him growl, "It's *you*." Familiarity, and boundless contempt oozing from two simple words. All because Spider-Man cracked a joke about Gobby's purse, something Otto would never do.
It's why in Spectacular Spider-Man, the scene of Black Suit Spidey taking on the entire sinister six...completely silent...is so haunting, making the reveal that Peter himself was asleep the entire time, and it was the SYMBIOTE doing that all the more terrifying.
When Spidey isn't wisecracking, something is TERRIBLY wrong.
It's also part of why Miguel makes such a good antagonist in Across the Spider-verse. Dude is pretty straight edged the entire time, only occasionally making some passive agressive jabs at people, which makes him stand out that much more against all of the other, more generally jovial and quippy spider-heroes. Peter even calls him out as the "not-funny one" too.
That's why I personally loved the part at/near the end of superior spider-man (I haven't read it, just watched videos on it).
For those who don't know, >!Doc Ock switches bodies with Spider-man. Green Goblin figures it out, and during the final battles he's monolguing about how Otto will have nothing left, when Spider-Man replies "except the dignity of knowing I never carried a man purse" and Goblin knows immediately that it's Peter again.!<
Yeah. >!From what I remember, Otto falls in love with a girl. She ends up getting kidnapped. While rescuing her, he has a moment of hesitation when Peter (who's in the body but is just thoughts) yells at him to just act. After, Otto realizes that Spider-man is a lot more then he thought, and switches back with Peter. He just wants Peter to save his love!<
Also why Spectacular Spider-man is, in my opinion, the greatest depiction of Spider-Man. Whenever I read the "im shocked" line anywhere, I think of that show.
Sorry, just like gushing about the show.
Tbh i personally think the one from 1994's Animated Spider-Man is the best. i'm prolly a bit biased since that's the one i grew up with, but I think he had the best balance between sincere and quippy. It's just criminal how it got cancelled tbh, I feel like it could've become one of the best spiderman series if it continued. The stuff with Madame Web was never actually completed and it still fucks with me today. I wonder if there's any comics that'll satiate that question of "what does madame web want with peter?" lol; probably.
I do like Spectacular a lot tho. I'm a bit partial still to Ultimate tho. It probably goes 1994, Ultimate, Spectacular, and then 2099. I did not like Unlimited.
I actually thought the Marvel movies did a decent job of depicting Peter's banter. I only read the Amazing Spider-Man, and only like the first 40 or so issues tho
The D&D movie was a great example of this. It had a lot of jokes and punch line lines, but they were in the voice of the characters.
And it knew when to be serious or charming instead of just silly. There’s a scene where a character goes to a loved one, hoping for reconciliation, but gets rejected and hurt. Another character starts singing a silly song to them. I thought the joke was going to be “lol he’s so dumb he doesn’t even know when it’s a good idea to sing a silly song and when to not” but it wasn’t played for a joke at all. They were dear friends, maybe the song was an old inside joke, and it cheered up the sad character rather than being a moment to make the audience laugh at how stupid he was.
That scene was the tipping point for me, I went from liking the movie to loving it. I 100% expected her to reach out and crush his instrument or push him off his horse or something so the fact that we got this really sweet moment of him kinda cheering her up and them just moving along really surprised me in the best way. And it makes sense, they'd been friends for like a decade and it was way more important that the movie drive that point home than go for the cheap joke, but a lot of writers still would've gone for the cheap joke...
And even on the side of things where the quips are purely for laughs, they're often in the character's voice. The best example is Hulga, the min-max Barbarian who took few points in wisdom, very confidently saying "then she'll know we abandoned her for the RIGHT reasons" after the bard explains his motivations for getting back to his daughter. It gives this sense of her listening to it, and feeling like she understands it and that THIS is the right thing to say- and no other character lacks that awareness, so no other character would say it.
It kills me every damn time.
Spot on, if _any_ other character had said this, it would've sounded sarcastic as hell and it'd have killed the tone of the scene. But with Holga, it's very clear that she's just not that bright when it comes to interpersonal issues (she's great at choreographing fights though, which is very much a sign of intelligence) and for her this was the right thing to say.
Man, I love the movie.
I adore this movie for so many reasons but Holga and Edgin's friendship is one of the main ones. I was loving them as friends and was dreading the inevitable "he gets over his wife and they get together" that any other movie would have done, but in the end she was still the most important woman in their lives without any romance whatsoever. It was so refreshing and I love that Holga was able to be both a nurturing mother figure and a fucking badass who's bad at talking about feelings.
TL;DR Holga is the best
>even on the side of things where the quips are purely for laughs, they're often in the character's voice.
Simon's got an interesting line in this, because he's smartmouthed and cynical but underneath a bunch of his jokes or funny moments are hints that he's scared of magic, or of his inability to actually control it. He's insecure and quippin to cover up that a lot of the stuff he's being asked to do is stuff he's afraid to try.
Yes, I *love* that Xenk is played straight and didn’t end his scenes with the a wink to the camera and a sarcastic line as if to say “see I was just like you the whole time I was only pretending it’s okay you don’t have to be uncomfortable”.
He literally walks out of the movie in a straight line. And that’s *funny*. He doesn’t have to have a sarcasm-off with Simon or Ed because the humor comes from *their* sarcasm hitting him like a brick wall and falling to the ground with a thud.
I heard that that part of the scene was actually improvised, and that the directors let the camera roll longer than it was originally supposed to because they wanted to see how the actor would react to it.
God I wish people talked about this movie more. My nerdy dnd brain loved it, and the characters were great. It genuinely did everything correctly and I love it so much.
It's fitting that it got brought up in a thread that talks about The Princess Bride, because I think it's going to *be* this generation's Princess Bride. Kids watching the D&D movie on the weekends or after class are gonna be quoting it to eachother two decades from now. I'm actually really glad John Francis Daley doesn't intend to make a sequel, because I think it would dilute what they did.
That scene with the trapped bridge felt EXACTLY like a DM setting up an elaborate set piece, only for it to come crashing down due to the dumb decision of a SINGLE player.
And then the scrambling of the DM of “how am I going to get them across? I know this random knickknack they have been carrying for no reason is actually just the magic item they need!”
I don’t play dnd and I loved it - I feel like I have enough of an awareness of dnd to catch the top layer of the game mechanics humour, but honestly it was just a great movie even being a non-player.
> but it wasn’t played for a joke at all
honestly I was entirely expecting her (a barbarian character, for those who haven't seen it) to grab his lute, and smash it over his head, looney-tunes style. She was totally capable of that, both physically and it would be in-character to do something like that.
Instead, she gets an embarrassed little smile, kind of has the air of giving him a little appreciative punch on the shoulder, and they ride off singing the song.
Instead of just reiterating "here's a blustery violent character that solves things by hitting them!" they instead say "hey you know what? *she really gives a shit about him and is totally capable of recognizing when he's doing something good for her."
Ah yes, bathos my beloved. Fated to end the same as the horror jumpscare - abused until it stops working and becomes annoying. Man, I remember how Jacob's Ladder used 2 or 3 jumpscares in the entire movie and all of them land perfectly... Mediocrity is really the cinematography's original sin.
Bathos works when it’s used to *emphasize* the weirdness, not belittle it. Typical example would be in a Steven King novel where the protagonist is recalling pop culture while something terrible is happening—that relatable banality helps to emphasize the horror rather than give the audience a break from it.
‘Hurray!’ cried Pippin, springing up. ‘Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, Lord of the Ring!’
‘Hush!’ said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. ‘Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching over the world! We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark.’
‘Gandalf has been saying many cheerful things like that,’ said Pippin.
I think this example also segues to illustrate the point about character’s voices. That is absolutely the kind of thing that Gandalf would say in all seriousness, and the quip lands perfectly because it’s exactly how Pippin would react. They are different characters from different backgrounds with different views that play off each other which also enhances the humour.
The original Ant-Man nailed this in the final battle. The quick cuts from the fight scene at small-scale to the normal-scale of the room were brilliant. Thomas the Tank Engine bearing down menacingly on Yellowjacket only to cut away at the moment of impact to show the toy train casually derailing.
It highlighted the absurdity of what was happening without undermining the drama of Scott fighting to save his daughter. Unfortunately it feels like all they took away from that was "people like when silly things are happening!"
Oh, absolutely, and jumpscares are supposed to help release the mounting tension but instead of being a useful tool to elevate a scene it became a goal all by itself. Both are good tools used in horrible ways.
There are only two big jumpscares in *The Haunting of Hill House*. One of them is in the first episode and it's a complete flop.
The other is about ten episodes later and is the most perfectly executed jumpscare I've ever witnessed. It makes perfect sense in-story and it scared the bejesus out of me.
I dont even remember the first jumpscare. I do remember thinking after a few episodes how well the horror was done without using jumpscares at all. And then they hit me with the second one and it has been seared into my brain ever since.
It's barely a jumpscare. Basically it cuts really suddenly to Hugh getting into bed and the sound is weirdly boosted. It made me jump because it's sudden and loud, and I've noticed a few other people online who also jumped when it happened.
The second jumpscare made my spinal cord try to climb out of my body.
I think I saw Mike Flanagan say he doesn’t like jump scares so much. I don’t remember the first one but the second one was amazing.
He did do a send up of the overuse of jump scares in The Midnight Club - a teenage character trying to tell a scary story and so there’s jump scares over and over and it’s just deliberately ridiculous.
Worst thing is, bathos was termed by Alexander Pope to criticise the same thing happening in then current literature due to bad writers abusing tropes, so this has been happening for over three centuries!
If the joke you write can fit as a response in any other genre or situation, then you need to write a different joke.
Broke: "Let's get drunk after being deserted on this island." "Well, that's awkward. I kinda sorta already lit it on fire." "You're kidding." *Shrug.*
Woke: ""Why is the rum gone?" "One: because it is a vile drink that turns even the most respectable men into complete scoundrels. Two: that signal is over a thousand feet high. The entire royal navy is out looking for me, do you think there is even the slightest chance they wont see it?" "But why is the rum gone?"
This also shows that how closer you cater the joke to the characters involved, the better it lands.
Jack is an alcoholic. Elizabeth was raised in high society. You can infer this (not their names, but these characteristics) from the dialogue without knowing much else about them just from the way they speak.
I wasn't aware of OSP when I got my nickname, which was actually inspired by old Norse naming convention, and given to me by a friend. It simply refers to me having red hair.
[Comicaurora](https://comicaurora.tumblr.com/?source=share) is the tumblr page for Red's absolutely fantastic fantasy webcomic, [Aurora](https://comicaurora.com/)
It's fun, and doubly so when you get this on Tumblr itself, following her blog. Always love when she brings some random bit of intrigue or discussion to my dash.
I remember people saying this about the new Top Gun: “There’s no quips!” Babe that movie is nothing *but* corny one-liners, just not Whedon-esque ones.
...Wat...
Like, I dislike the movies for being propaganda, even though I can admit the quality is pretty decent but...
Wat?
Maverick a quippy little shit head. He always has been. We just get to see genuine sincerity from him struggling to connect with a subordinate because he has very personal ties to said subordinate that complicate his professional ones, and it fucking hurts him. But he's still a little shithead. He gets a medal and is forced into retirement before he actually kills his own superiors through stress alone.
People claim that the death of modern marvel films was quips, meanwhile the Guardians Films are full of them and even 3 is considered to be an amazing film, and again it all comes down to sincerity like OP says. James Gunn actually understands that characters can both be funny and have sincere emotions.
The idea that quips themselves make a movie bad is why I think that the D&D movie didn't do as well as it should have (that and Hasbro/Wizards pulling some bullshit around the same time). People were comparing it to "just another Marvel film" when it felt more like a Princess Bride style film instead.
People have just enough media literacy to recognize tropes and ideas, but not enough to realize that just "having tropes" isn't automatically a bad thing, and the quality of a film/story is HOW it uses them.
I was looking for an acknowledgement that not all Marvels are created equal, there's enough of them that they're practically a genre of their own, and several (including Guardians) are quite good. Age of Ultron is my least favorite. I've never been so aware of the fact that I was watching a movie the whole time. Just 141 minutes of actors hitting their marks and saying their lines.
Honestly there’s no better proof of this than the Thor solos. Thor was great, Dark World was trash, Ragnarok was fucking fantastic, Love and Thunder was Taika Waititi huffing his own farts. Thor is one of my favorite MCU characters but his movies are some of the most inconsistent in terms of quality in the entire series.
Thor himself suffers so horribly for this it's unreal. His first movie established him as a bit up his own ass, but an otherwise well intentioned and noble dude while in his element, and a curious goofball when out of it. Then Avengers 1 almost entirely ignored any real characterization in lieu of him just kinda... being there because Loki was? Like I can't think of a single memorable moment with him from that movie. Same for Age of Ultron. Dark World had him more back in his element but that meant that we lost the silly goofy side and they tried to keep him super serious for it, and then Ragnarok went full in on leaving him totally out of it and it was the best of the bunch for it. He's suffering from the same issue comics so with the constantly rotating writers in that, they all have different ideas of what he should be like.
Yeah, I’ve never understood how people can lump together every mcu film like they don’t have a host of different writers and directors who follow different styles and tropes
With so many movies obviously some are going to be shit, but come on there’s plenty of good stuff there
People talk about "Marvel movies" as if it were a genre, and that mentality is how we ended up with movies like Morbius, Love and Thunder, and Madame Web.
CA: TWS is a brilliant film. I mean if you think about it it’s a superhero film where the ultimate enemy is the government.
Sure there’s an antagonist with superpowers also running around, and it was specifically secret Nazis working inside the government to do the bad plan, but there were plenty of non-Nazis around them in the government actively participating in the bad plan for world domination, and the fact they didn’t know all of the info of the plan doesn’t really excuse that they enabled many aspects of it.
There’s quips in the film but there’s also sincerity - Steve Rogers trying awkwardly to connect with people in his personal life in the modern era, but being a fish out of water any time he’s not in a fight.
The “quips” of GotG have so much more character to them compared to The Avengers. Personally I haven’t seen 3 yet, but knowing those characters and what makes them unique, I feel like you could give me a comedic out of context line from it and I could at the very least confidently figure out who said it
For me it's that the "hero" makes a dumb quip when 10,000 innocent people just got obliterated in the exact same way regardless of who it is lol
If it's supposed to be light and goofy, don't have people get slaughtered and quip about it, or somber them up in that moment so you don't seem utterly devoid of caring about people. We wouldn't have so many "hero but actually evil" homelander stuff if the good ones had any sense of the cost of human life in their own genre imo hah
Wait, 3 is amazing? I was going to watch it, but I saw people saying it sucked and ruined the trilogy so I decided not to watch it, so as to not ruin the first two movies for myself. So is it actually good, or is it bad?
It’s strange reading this as a Buffy fan.
I’ve only seen a few marvel movies and decided they really weren’t for me. But I love Buffy/Angel/Firefly (though have mixed feelings about joss personally)
Did he get worse as a writer? Because the criticism here does not remind me of Buffy at all. The genius of the show is Buffy’s humor being built on equal parts trauma and Barbie, Giles world-weary British version of “I’m too old for this shit” peppered with nerdy enthusiasm, Willow’s awkward naive run-on sentences, and Xanders insecure, defensive sense of his own masculinity.
Their quips always felt very tied to their characters and not interchange in the slightest
I think part of the problem is by the time he wrote Avengers Whedon fell into two problems. He bought his own hype, and was too big for people to tell him no. He both believed he could do whatever he wanted and it would still be good cause he wrote Buffy and Firefly and such, and no one would say “no that’s not a good line” to the guy who wrote Buffy and Firefly.
A lot of people give Wedon-esque writting shit, but that's only because it's been over used these days. Buffy was so popular because of its writting that bucked the over serious, grimdark, and personalityless writting that was popular then. I'm watching Buffy for the first time and it still holds up
Just shows that if a counter culture is good enough, it becomes the culture to be countered
Overused is only part of it—Whedon himself has not grown as a writer. The bathos point really demonstrates that. Joss Whedon's older works had more distinct voice. Anya quips are different than Willow quips and that's why they work.
Cut to the 2010s and he literally recycled the same quips from Avengers: Age of Ultron in his rewrite of Justice League — *particularly* for Wonder Woman, who quips exactly like Black Widow (insert long-suffering sigh about *boys*) and is used in jokes the exact same way (awkward man landing face first in boobs).
Whedon may have popularized the culture of bathos done well but, somewhere along the way, he became extremely mediocre at it.
Yeah one of the best parts of that show was how everyone speaks in the voice of their characters. None of the little jokes would work at all if someone else said them.
you're in for a great time once you get to angel, it just gets better and better
the ending was kind of perfect but if you want more, there's comics that continue it, too
Holy frick this literally blew my mind. I always knew there was something I loved about the humor in The Princess Bride but I never had it put into words before this
I think the post about sincerity is right. You can be funny and in a ridiculous situation, but sincerity is what makes it feel like something worth paying attention to. Sincerity is hard to do, though, and a good movie will weave it in with the lighthearted stuff.
I recently watched *Yakuza Apocalypse* and I think it handles this really well. The protagonist is played completely straight, there's no eye rolling or smirking or 'well *that* just happened'. He says everything like he means it even when it's something ridiculous and you believe it because the dialogue sounds like it comes from him, from his experiences and point of view. You're laughing at his silly reaction to an extent but you like him anyway because you understand what kind of person he is through his honest reaction to the events around him.
A lot of fantasy and paranormal type media features this sort of 'deadpan snarker' (ew hate that phrase) dialogue and it always feels kind of tired and self conscious. A protagonist who just dives in is more likeable to me than someone who has to make a 'i'm too cool for this' comment before doing anything.
It's like when you have that one friend who always has to be sarcastic and snitty about everything, and it's cool for a while but eventually it just starts to get annoying, because they never let you enjoy anything for what it is. You realise that they're not really enjoying anything for the sake of it, they're not letting themselves be involved in anything because they always have to act like they're above it. Being sincere is fun, it's freeing.
I had the same thought. He wrote or co-wrote two of the 30ish movies in the MCU, and those were both pretty good from what I remember. It is not his fault if other people copy him and do it poorly.
The guy is a tool, but he did not single-handedly ruin movies.
I don't think the intention is to blame Whedon, just to have a reference point for the style. Promise I fully intend to blame Steven Moffat when referencing it in relation to Doctor Who, and RTD does the same thing, it's just better because he cares about characterisation.
do people not know joss whedon was working before the avengers or something? he's always been a hack. he just used to be a hack on TV when popular TV was dogshit, and then he moved over make dogshit movies.
Dude, I all but have a degree in Buffy studies. I know the man’s oeuvre. If you don’t like Buffy/Angel/Firefly/etc that’s fine, people have their own taste and all that, but I’m not going to agree that they’re “dogshit.”
I was responding to the specific argument that he’s the reason all movie characters sound the same. First, I don’t think they do across the board. Second, when they do it’s in movies he had literally nothing to do with.
>I all but have a degree in Buffy studies. I know the man’s oeuvre. If you don’t like Buffy/Angel/Firefly/etc that’s fine, people have their own taste and all that, but I’m not going to agree that they’re “dogshit.”
What I'll say for Joss Whedon is that I found some of his lines in the Avengers films a little out of character for the people saying them. '"At long last” is lasting a little long, boys.' is not a Black Widow-esque line and I'll stand by that, that's a Firefly line.
However outside of that he's pretty good at having characters sound different and even shows sound different to each other, Topher and DeWitt in Dollhouse sound completely different to the Scooby gang for instance because they're both older and much smarter and better educated plus have a compeltely different kind of career. Hell even Giles, Angel and Spike sound different to the Scoobies for similar reasons.
EDIT: Where I tend to think Whedon suffers is with his film hat on, and especially his script doctor hat. When he builds something from the ground up it seems to work well even if I don't rate the show but he seems to go beep boop insert pun sometimes when he's working someone else's film.
Right, I don't *really* get why Whedon is getting the blame for the fall of the MCU into quippy dreck with all the sincerity of a serial cheater with a bunch of flowers. Like, he's not a god among film writers or anything, but he's really not as bad as people like to paint him, and looking at his other work, you can't say he shies away from sincerity.
Because one of the things about Buffy, maybe not all the time but most of the time, is that everyone had their own very distinct voice. Like, yeah, it was super quippy but it was also *achingly* sincere. The same with Firefly tbh, its funny and quirky but at no point is it afraid to just, roll around in emotions and get the audience to genuinely feel things.
I can't speak to Angel because I haven't rewatched it since it aired on television, didn't even watch all of it then, and have conceived a blazing hatred for the character of Angel now that I'm no longer a naive teenager.
I would say that the problems are part of the first Avengers film. But then again, I haven't watched that film in a very long time.
Edit: Obviously I agree the guy isn't responsible for every film with bad quips, but I do agree with others that he's a great example/symbol of the problem.
The other fun thing here is that if the Princess Bride were to come out today, everyone here would be sneering at it for being too ‘Marvel-like’ just for having bathos at all. Like, I love that movie dearly, but I also know how fickle and shallow most online media criticism ultimately is.
The whole anti-quip argument is transparently just starting from criticizing Marvel’s oversaturation and working backwards to justify it.
why do you think people are mentioning joss whedon and not thinking of the lame ass, corny ass TV he wrote, too?
like, this as a fan of 90s TV culture, it was all bad and he was one of the worst offenders.
He didn’t even popularize it on TV! Quippy snarky nonsense has been the standard for light adventure/action entertainment for most of the last century- on television, in film, pulps, comic books, and the like. Hence why I think blaming Whedon *on any level* is at best selective ignorance and at worst deliberate bad-faith designed to farm clout.
Idk about all of the 6 original Avengers communicating exactly the same. So many quips by Tony towards especially Steve and Thor are missed by those two, though that changes slightly as the movie goes on and they finish bashing heads. Banner is actively uncomfortable by Tony's quips about the Hulk. Natasha presumably is familiar with Tony as a result of IM2 and that she has studied him beforehand. Barton and Steve get some on a military level I think. Because everyone present (once they are on the carrier) is aware that Natasha is a spy, there is no need for her to lean too hard into it (besides the manipulating she does for plot reasons). There is plenty to be said about it, but there is a limit to the bashing.
In the classic "Anybody want a peanut?" scene of Princess Bride, the quips serve to show off the uniqueness of each character.
Inigo leads Fezzik into a rhyming game, not outright attacking Vizzini, but with calculated banter. He maliciously creates a scenario he knows Vizzini will hate.
Vizzini responds like Vizzini, telling them to cut it out, "now I mean it!" insisting that he is in charge and leveling threats, even though he's tied up. Just like the iocane powder scene too, Vizzini can't stop talking, which means he can't stop giving Fezzik material to rhyme off of.
Once Fezzik catches on, he's all in. There's no malice like there is with Inigo, just pure enjoyment. The stupid rejoinders like "anybody want a peanut?" infuriate Vizzini, showcasing Fezzik's strength; namely, dumb brute force. Fezzik's stupid rhymes are stronger than Vizzini's incredible mind.
What a film.
Why are people talking about "the death of movies" anyway, that's not a thing. Good movies aren't any rarer
It's not even true of all Marvel movies. The Avengers movies got stuck with Whedon disease even after he left but the Guardians of the Galaxy movies didn't. The characters in that do all have different ways of talking. Only a couple of them regularly make quips and for the rest the jokes come from their actual personalities.
It's true. It's the same with music. If you actually look at old music charts there's plenty of crap on there. But most of it is forgotten and doesn't get played anymore.
Princess Bride is a masterpiece in literally everything.
Like all the actors were sweet and the filming is beautiful and of course the end product is incredible.
Comparing it's dialog, inspired by the incredibly ridiculous and lovable book, to the formulaic Disney owned corporate Marvel dialog (with the exception of maybe the first iron man, but it was the first one so like it gets a pass) is something I got lost writing this and forgot the word, its like specific so I can't just use another word.
yeagh anyway I love the Princess Bride; good post
I’m just sick of every line having to be a joke that’s well set up by the previous ones. Nobody responds to an applause line with a normal sentence because everyone has to think up a better one of their own.
I think part of the problem is once an author/writer starts writing quips for more than one character, and people notice that multiple or all of the characters are "quiping" the same way. Like in Whedon's Avengers, Ironman, Thor, Black Widow, Capt. America, Hulk, Hawkeye should all have their own sense of humor, which should vary and produce different types of quips. Instead, all of them have Whedon's sense of humor. And therein lies the struggle for the writer. How do you give a character a realistic sense of humor that the writer does *not* share? Its harder than it sounds, and if you can pull it off then kudos to you.
I wouldn't say that the Avengers all banter in the exact same way all the time. There's a few scenes where the background difference between scrappy Steve Rogers and smug Tony Stark drives the dialogue perfectly. they just couldn't keep it up for the whole franchise.
I rewatched Batman Begins the other day, and I couldn't help but notice the usage of quips throughout the film. They're funnier, I realized, in the first half of the film, and that makes sense. They help disperse the rising tension a bit, so the tension can continue to rise throughout the runtime without becoming a slog, but once the movie passes the midpoint (when Bruce first goes out in his Bruce Wayne mask and shows up in a supercar with a pair of supermodels) the jokes aren't as funny, and this allows the dramatic tension to ramp up to higher levels; you still get the quips along the way to prevent slog, but because they aren't as funny you don't lose as much of the tension.
Really well put together film.
I think that’s the problem with marvel recently, all the characters speak with the same voice and they kind of start to blend together
for characters like iron man and spiderman it makes sense for them to be coming up with funny one liners in the middle of battle, captain america is for the most part a shown to be serious guy, and having him deliver the same lines makes absolutely no sense, same with hawkeye or doctor strange
not every character needs to be making jokes, there’s enough characters who that makes sense for, leave it to them
It's been a while since I've watched any marvel movie, but from what I remember a lot of the quips were distinct from each character. Tony was sarcastic, Spiderman was more lighthearted and "geniune", Captain america was out of touched and cheesy.
Even Rocket who also had sarcastic quips was distinctly more pessimistic than Tony.
And I can't really imagine Tony delivering Spidermans "You have a metal arm? That's so cool!" line
I think you touched on an important factor on that last bit. Because I *can* see Tony saying that...but he wouldn't say it in nearly the same way! The words would be the same, but instead of Peter's genuine wonder and excitement, Tony would say it dismissively. A "You have a metal arm? That's cool....I have a whole suit" kinda thing even if he doesn't actually *say* that last bit.
Yeah, I feel like these characters aren't the ones that really had this problem, at least not all the time. If anything, I think it's Taika Waititi who is the worst offender with this kind of writing. Thor talks *completely* differently when he's being written by Waititi.
Personally, I think this is why Guardians of the Galaxy is consistently funnier than most of the rest of the MCU. Peter is similar to the rest of the MCU, but Rocket is deeply sarcastic and cynical, Drax is oblivious and unintentionally funny, gamora is serious and exasperated, Groot provides a lot of opportunity for jokes from the audience only being able to infer what he's saying and Mantis is an optimistic counterpart to Drax.
I found Stilgar more of a sad character than a funny one. He's being manipulated by religious beliefs implanted in his culture centuries ago for the selfish benefit of the Bene Gesserit.
That's pretty much as intended - Paul is not a hero because heroes are a lie and prophecy is a trap. Stilgar is brave, intelligent and actually pretty funny when he open up, but he ends up a fanatic ready to die
I think Paul straight up says as much in Dune Messiah. He thinks how sad it is that Stilgar is reduced to another fanatic blindly following along with no real independence. Tbh I feel wicked bad for the fremen overall, they just get manipulated, used and then tossed aside like dolls when the big players are done with them.
One of my favorite parts of Dune is that very few characters actually act different from the first to the second halves of their journey. Paul is the only one with an appreciable transformation: Stilgar is still funny and fatherly, Jessica is still scheming and looking out for her son, Gurney is still a loyal loving servant of House Atreides, even Paul himself continues to score heroic victories and make protagonist-y decisions. But the tone changes, and suddenly these actions we might’ve celebrated earlier become incredibly sinister because we know what they’re leading to.
Point is, Stilgar remains funny from the beginning of Dune Part Two to the end. That one bit at the end where he shouts out after the knife fight is funny, but because we know all of this context, the emotion is much more complex. It’s funny, but his reduction from a noble Fremen elder to Paul’s comic relief sycophant is an incredible tragedy.
Eh. This kinda is and isn't it.
A movie doesn't have to be sincere to be good.
But I think a movie does have to not be afraid of being disliked to be good.
This is where the bathos is a problem, it's not some specific artistic desire they're going for, but rather they're trying to maximise appeal.
Some viewers don't want to watch emotional sincerity and depth. So they add a joke.
Some people don't wanna watch a comedy, so they keep the joke to a short quip.
Some people don't wanna watch an out and out action movie without being invested in characters, so they add emotional sincerity and the cycle repeats.
Media doesn't have to be divisive to be good, but it has to commit to its thing. It had to value its own messaging and style and internal consistency. The big avengers films don't have a thing they value outside of money. They're cynical. There are marvel films that absolutely do commit to their thing, and more power to then for that.
But post avengers 1, they don't even commit to making movies focused on a single character because they're so keen on the widest possible appeal. Every marvel film now has a female empowerment scene and key character, a nerd empowerment scene and character, a black empowerment scene and character etc. these are all fine things to have in a film because these are good themes and topics to explore, but they're not in the films for that reason, they're in the films to maximise money.
Of course, they also don't properly explore those ideas because that too would turn people off seeing it and that wouldn't be maximising money.
Disliking all time greats of media is normal and good. It means you are engaging with things and seeing what you like. No one should subjectively enjoy everything.
I objectively recognise the quality in elden ring, I do not like from soft at all... They commit to doing a thing that I don't find fun.
And that's good! Because it means other people do, and I'm just not fromsofts target audience.
Inma just drop here that Marvel's Midnight Suns has much, much better character development and distinct quipping than all Avengers movies combined.
Which is so bloody weird.
Even the Milquetoast by designa POV character has more heart than anything Whedon has written.
I don't think that it's totally fair to blame Joss Whedon for this.
Buffy and firefly were quippy, but also character focused and good. The problem is the budgets and the committees.
One thing that I notice is the difference between characters making the quips to each other compared to making quips to the audience. Spider-Man is either quipping at his enemies or for his own sake. Despite being a Whedon movie, Age of Ultron’s running gag with Steve cursing works because its characters believably needling each other. In contrast, you have a lot of the “get lost Squidward” Tony Stark stuff later that is just there for the audience to have a quick laugh but makes no sense otherwise
Quips aren't the problem.
Quippy Dialogue, as a pattern, as a style, is. Once every character becomes a one-liner dispenser, it stops being a part of individual characterization, it stops being a chance to show a character as witty or humorous, and it just becomes, as the post says, a way of avoiding sincerity in dialogue.
I agree with the overall point about sincerity but disagree with the Marvel bashing.
1. Bathos is one of my favorite literary devices. Maybe that's just my neurodivergent ass enjoying everyone else failing as hard at social rules as I normally do, but there's not much funnier than someone delivering a genuinely heartfelt moment then turning around and falling face-first into the trash can. It doesn't "undercut" the drama; it increases the contrast making the emotions and the laughs hit harder. It absolutely can be over used or done poorly, as can every device, but done well it's my favorite.
2. There is a big difference between writing characters for a book or for a movie. PB is a fairly direct adaptation of the book. The Marvel movies are not. In a book you need hype-distinctive voices to tell the characters apart, but in a movie we can see who is talking so many directors prioritize a consistent style over distinctive voices. Watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (by the same writer as PB) and you'll see him doing the same thing.
3. The Avengers do have distinct voices. They have the same comedic style but unique personalities. That's why each character has memorable lines that are distinctly theirs.
Anyway. This turned into a rant. Thanks for reading!
Meh, I like the quips in Marvel movies.
At times I suspect that half of everyone just gets off on being too high-minded for designated pieces of popular media that they liked a decade ago.
Whether that's true, or whether a bunch of folks just truly detest Marvel and Joss Whedon, I still like the quips in Marvel movies. They're funny, and generally seem in-character to me.
This. Too many times going “i just watched a whole movie about why this character cares deeply about (thing or person). Why do they suddenly not give a shit?” It just got frustrating and boring.
On the topic of the Avengers specifically, I think part of the reason it's frustrating that they're like that in more recent Marvel movies is because they weren't always. Looking back at like, first and second-wave stuff (like the original movies, Age of Ultron, etc.), they *do* banter in their own voices, and it's what makes them work as characters. And yet now, those same characters exist solely to make a funny one-liner that Joss Whedon came up with in the shower and make 1 morbillion dollars.
I dont think Steve was disabled. He was just small and skinny. He managed to function just fine outside of being 5' 2" and 100 pounds. While it's never specifically articulated, I've always assumed it's the result of Depression Era malnutrition.
why do you think that people can't be disabled as a result of malnutrition, exactly? besides being frail as fuck, he was myopic, colorblind, partially deaf, had scoliosis, had some sort of unspecified soft tissue disorder, and had untreated asthma.
i think he was plenty disabled, even if he was able to walk without a wheelchair or whatever metric you think qualifies as 'true disability'
I have asthma that's bad enough that I would have needed a waiver to join. I do not consider it at all a disability. I haven't used a rescue inhaler in probably 20 years.
Soldiers got disqualified for all sorts of things that would not be considered a day to day disability. Flat feet were a disqualifying condition because they were believed to be more prone to stress fractures. Eugene Sledge, whose WW2 memoir is considered basically holy canon to the USMC, was initially turned down because of a heart murmur with no other symptoms.
Fair but you also have to remember far more work was manual labor in the 1930s and generally for unfriendly to people with asthma. idk I think asthma is one of those things that can mostly thank modern technology and medicine for being as non-serious as it is and would probably be a far more difficult condition 100 years ago.
Disclaimer that I haven’t slept in 28 hours (not hyperbole) so I’m probably pissing on the poor with my reading skills, or lack thereof, but:
It’s not *that* abnormal for a group of coworkers or close-knit humans to have similar conversation styles. I’ve read texts— or maybe it was a study, memory failing me for obvious reasons— about how a writers’ writing will change and improve on the job as they adapt to corporate culture. You adopt the mannerisms of those around you, and it bleeds into the way you speak, act, and write. You wouldn’t speak the same way in a warehouse that you would in an office— it’s a fundamental principle of adaptability. Hell, even between departments you may change the way you speak. I’m pretty sure code-switching is a racialized term, but it’s a term that captures something similar that people are more familiar with. You (often) don’t talk to your friends the way you talk to your coworkers, etc.
Yes characters would sound like what they would sound like and not have words shoved into their mouth— but also people of different backgrounds speaking similarly is not evidence of the latter.
Now that that’s done, send help. Preferably in the form of a cartoon character with a large hammer to knock me out & get me some rest. Bonk.
it's like how rightoids will rant about THE WOKE AGENDA when in reality there are plenty of things they like that have the same "agenda," the difference is that this one just sucks
I’m sorry but that person’s description of character is fucking wack, like they’re obsessed with choosing words that sound good as descriptors rather than words that are accurate in describing the person they’re talking about.
This is all fine and well, but every bit of media has a creative or intellectual budget.
Superhero movies were never meant to be literary masterpieces. They were meant to be entertaining action films. Energy and time was not spent on writing masterful dialogue. It was spent elsewhere. And until recently that was a fantastic choice. The issue with these films has nothing to do with a failure of writing. That was never the expectation or the selling point. The issue is that people got tired of the same shit over and over again.
Going into *Captain America: Civil War* after watching *Avengers: Age of Ultron* was like a breath of fresh air. Nobody in *Age of Ultron* felt like a person 😭 But in *Civil War*, even when they were being funny, it was sincere and actually worked with the characters. They have good banter in that! So what the fuck was Joss Whedon doing?! 😭😭😭😭
90% of original spider-man was he being a quiplord to get in his foes' heads.
And that's why it works for him, his enemies aren't all the same sort of sarcastic and funny, many of them are deadpan, serious and egomaniacal, so this little spandex twerp being flippant with them drives them up the wall where he beats them with experience. XD
And when he's not quipping, he's terrifying.
Remember the comic where he had Laryngitis, and the fact he wasn't talking cause a room full of villains to surrender?
No, but pls if you have the issue number, I would love to see it
[This](https://old.reddit.com/r/Spiderman/comments/16qzcxg/for_normal_nonpowered_criminals_who_do_you_think/k2179i2/) comment has the images and the replies has the issue number Some of the dialogue is cut off in the image, but that part basically says "I'm done, I swear I'll go straight"
Same. Please.
[read it here](https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Amazing-Spider-Man-2014/Annual-1?id=98669&s=&readType=1), assuming you're a CRIMINAL like me
Hell yeah, brother.
Similar thing happened in Spider-man ps4 (the dlc iirc). Spidey just stare down on some webbed up thug and he just spilled it out of fear. [The video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQprCQ6rsw8)
This is the first scene I thought of when commenting! ♥
The first time peter fights goblin after getting his body back from ock cracks me up every time. He makes a joke and the zoom on osborne’s eyes when he’s like “you’re back, you little shit” just kills me https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/a8qxvh/superior_spiderman_31_i_love_how_the_green_goblin/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
...or when he meets up with the other heroes, and apologizes for being late because he got his body back but he was naked and tried to web up some shorts but Octavius changed the formula and he couldn't get it to come off... ...and everyone else immediately accepts that only the real Peter Parker would web his ...self and then immediately awkwardly tell the entire Avengers about it. edit: I realized after the fact that this story has nothing to do with Parker's quipping and how he's scarier without it, but it's funny and I'm leaving it up with apologies.
Relatable
That silent image/pause is what got me though. That instant of 'Waitaminute...' then realisation. It's hilarious.
“…It’s *you*.”
With the extreme zoom on his eye and the tiny little speech bubble, you can almost hear him *hissing* it.
The actual line is so much funnier and hits harder to me. The pause, the processing look on Norman's face, and then the seething *hatred* as you can practically hear him growl, "It's *you*." Familiarity, and boundless contempt oozing from two simple words. All because Spider-Man cracked a joke about Gobby's purse, something Otto would never do.
god Superior Spider-Man is so good
Yeah there’s that whole thing where this little teenage kid that has a non stop motormouth can also pulverize their bones with a single punch
It's why in Spectacular Spider-Man, the scene of Black Suit Spidey taking on the entire sinister six...completely silent...is so haunting, making the reveal that Peter himself was asleep the entire time, and it was the SYMBIOTE doing that all the more terrifying. When Spidey isn't wisecracking, something is TERRIBLY wrong.
It's also part of why Miguel makes such a good antagonist in Across the Spider-verse. Dude is pretty straight edged the entire time, only occasionally making some passive agressive jabs at people, which makes him stand out that much more against all of the other, more generally jovial and quippy spider-heroes. Peter even calls him out as the "not-funny one" too.
It's why it worked in batman beyond too because he was kind of based too much on Spiderman, but the joker hated that he quiped.
"Wait. I like to talk too."
"Who do you think you're talking to?" "Not a comedian, that's for sure." "...*what*." "I mean come on. Squirting flowers? Where's your 'A' material?"
Peter and Terry together would give the Joker complete conniptions
“You’re not the REAL Batman!”
Drives them up the wall to where he is lol
A little worried that your last line is being lost and/or missed by a lot of people: and I want you to know I saw it, and I appreciate it.
That's why I personally loved the part at/near the end of superior spider-man (I haven't read it, just watched videos on it). For those who don't know, >!Doc Ock switches bodies with Spider-man. Green Goblin figures it out, and during the final battles he's monolguing about how Otto will have nothing left, when Spider-Man replies "except the dignity of knowing I never carried a man purse" and Goblin knows immediately that it's Peter again.!<
Knows immediately, and *immediately* is shaken and loses all his bluster.
He knows he can beat Otto. His record against Parker, though...not so hot.
wait i've never read superior spider man... they switch back?
Yeah. >!From what I remember, Otto falls in love with a girl. She ends up getting kidnapped. While rescuing her, he has a moment of hesitation when Peter (who's in the body but is just thoughts) yells at him to just act. After, Otto realizes that Spider-man is a lot more then he thought, and switches back with Peter. He just wants Peter to save his love!<
Also why Spectacular Spider-man is, in my opinion, the greatest depiction of Spider-Man. Whenever I read the "im shocked" line anywhere, I think of that show. Sorry, just like gushing about the show.
Tbh i personally think the one from 1994's Animated Spider-Man is the best. i'm prolly a bit biased since that's the one i grew up with, but I think he had the best balance between sincere and quippy. It's just criminal how it got cancelled tbh, I feel like it could've become one of the best spiderman series if it continued. The stuff with Madame Web was never actually completed and it still fucks with me today. I wonder if there's any comics that'll satiate that question of "what does madame web want with peter?" lol; probably. I do like Spectacular a lot tho. I'm a bit partial still to Ultimate tho. It probably goes 1994, Ultimate, Spectacular, and then 2099. I did not like Unlimited.
I actually thought the Marvel movies did a decent job of depicting Peter's banter. I only read the Amazing Spider-Man, and only like the first 40 or so issues tho
The D&D movie was a great example of this. It had a lot of jokes and punch line lines, but they were in the voice of the characters. And it knew when to be serious or charming instead of just silly. There’s a scene where a character goes to a loved one, hoping for reconciliation, but gets rejected and hurt. Another character starts singing a silly song to them. I thought the joke was going to be “lol he’s so dumb he doesn’t even know when it’s a good idea to sing a silly song and when to not” but it wasn’t played for a joke at all. They were dear friends, maybe the song was an old inside joke, and it cheered up the sad character rather than being a moment to make the audience laugh at how stupid he was.
That scene was the tipping point for me, I went from liking the movie to loving it. I 100% expected her to reach out and crush his instrument or push him off his horse or something so the fact that we got this really sweet moment of him kinda cheering her up and them just moving along really surprised me in the best way. And it makes sense, they'd been friends for like a decade and it was way more important that the movie drive that point home than go for the cheap joke, but a lot of writers still would've gone for the cheap joke...
And even on the side of things where the quips are purely for laughs, they're often in the character's voice. The best example is Hulga, the min-max Barbarian who took few points in wisdom, very confidently saying "then she'll know we abandoned her for the RIGHT reasons" after the bard explains his motivations for getting back to his daughter. It gives this sense of her listening to it, and feeling like she understands it and that THIS is the right thing to say- and no other character lacks that awareness, so no other character would say it. It kills me every damn time.
Spot on, if _any_ other character had said this, it would've sounded sarcastic as hell and it'd have killed the tone of the scene. But with Holga, it's very clear that she's just not that bright when it comes to interpersonal issues (she's great at choreographing fights though, which is very much a sign of intelligence) and for her this was the right thing to say. Man, I love the movie.
I adore this movie for so many reasons but Holga and Edgin's friendship is one of the main ones. I was loving them as friends and was dreading the inevitable "he gets over his wife and they get together" that any other movie would have done, but in the end she was still the most important woman in their lives without any romance whatsoever. It was so refreshing and I love that Holga was able to be both a nurturing mother figure and a fucking badass who's bad at talking about feelings. TL;DR Holga is the best
>even on the side of things where the quips are purely for laughs, they're often in the character's voice. Simon's got an interesting line in this, because he's smartmouthed and cynical but underneath a bunch of his jokes or funny moments are hints that he's scared of magic, or of his inability to actually control it. He's insecure and quippin to cover up that a lot of the stuff he's being asked to do is stuff he's afraid to try.
That scene is a lovely one. I too was surprised at the sincerity of it.
The scene where Edgin explains that he can't afford to stop trying no matter how many times he fucks up hit me harder than I expected it to.
Yes, I *love* that Xenk is played straight and didn’t end his scenes with the a wink to the camera and a sarcastic line as if to say “see I was just like you the whole time I was only pretending it’s okay you don’t have to be uncomfortable”. He literally walks out of the movie in a straight line. And that’s *funny*. He doesn’t have to have a sarcasm-off with Simon or Ed because the humor comes from *their* sarcasm hitting him like a brick wall and falling to the ground with a thud.
The way he just walks away is still just the funniest thing to me, straight over the rock
I heard that that part of the scene was actually improvised, and that the directors let the camera roll longer than it was originally supposed to because they wanted to see how the actor would react to it.
God I wish people talked about this movie more. My nerdy dnd brain loved it, and the characters were great. It genuinely did everything correctly and I love it so much.
It's fitting that it got brought up in a thread that talks about The Princess Bride, because I think it's going to *be* this generation's Princess Bride. Kids watching the D&D movie on the weekends or after class are gonna be quoting it to eachother two decades from now. I'm actually really glad John Francis Daley doesn't intend to make a sequel, because I think it would dilute what they did.
That scene with the trapped bridge felt EXACTLY like a DM setting up an elaborate set piece, only for it to come crashing down due to the dumb decision of a SINGLE player.
And then the scrambling of the DM of “how am I going to get them across? I know this random knickknack they have been carrying for no reason is actually just the magic item they need!”
I don’t play dnd and I loved it - I feel like I have enough of an awareness of dnd to catch the top layer of the game mechanics humour, but honestly it was just a great movie even being a non-player.
> but it wasn’t played for a joke at all honestly I was entirely expecting her (a barbarian character, for those who haven't seen it) to grab his lute, and smash it over his head, looney-tunes style. She was totally capable of that, both physically and it would be in-character to do something like that. Instead, she gets an embarrassed little smile, kind of has the air of giving him a little appreciative punch on the shoulder, and they ride off singing the song. Instead of just reiterating "here's a blustery violent character that solves things by hitting them!" they instead say "hey you know what? *she really gives a shit about him and is totally capable of recognizing when he's doing something good for her."
Ah yes, bathos my beloved. Fated to end the same as the horror jumpscare - abused until it stops working and becomes annoying. Man, I remember how Jacob's Ladder used 2 or 3 jumpscares in the entire movie and all of them land perfectly... Mediocrity is really the cinematography's original sin.
Bathos works when it’s used to *emphasize* the weirdness, not belittle it. Typical example would be in a Steven King novel where the protagonist is recalling pop culture while something terrible is happening—that relatable banality helps to emphasize the horror rather than give the audience a break from it.
‘Hurray!’ cried Pippin, springing up. ‘Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, Lord of the Ring!’ ‘Hush!’ said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. ‘Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching over the world! We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark.’ ‘Gandalf has been saying many cheerful things like that,’ said Pippin.
I think this example also segues to illustrate the point about character’s voices. That is absolutely the kind of thing that Gandalf would say in all seriousness, and the quip lands perfectly because it’s exactly how Pippin would react. They are different characters from different backgrounds with different views that play off each other which also enhances the humour.
The original Ant-Man nailed this in the final battle. The quick cuts from the fight scene at small-scale to the normal-scale of the room were brilliant. Thomas the Tank Engine bearing down menacingly on Yellowjacket only to cut away at the moment of impact to show the toy train casually derailing. It highlighted the absurdity of what was happening without undermining the drama of Scott fighting to save his daughter. Unfortunately it feels like all they took away from that was "people like when silly things are happening!"
That fucking "Hey Ho, let's go" in *Pet Sematary* has lurked in the darkest corner of my brain for fifteen years now.
Exactly what I was thinking of!
Oh, absolutely, and jumpscares are supposed to help release the mounting tension but instead of being a useful tool to elevate a scene it became a goal all by itself. Both are good tools used in horrible ways.
There are only two big jumpscares in *The Haunting of Hill House*. One of them is in the first episode and it's a complete flop. The other is about ten episodes later and is the most perfectly executed jumpscare I've ever witnessed. It makes perfect sense in-story and it scared the bejesus out of me.
Tbh I'm half convinced that the lackluster jumpscare was a way of lulling us into complacency to make the second more effective lol
I'm certain you're right.
I dont even remember the first jumpscare. I do remember thinking after a few episodes how well the horror was done without using jumpscares at all. And then they hit me with the second one and it has been seared into my brain ever since.
It's barely a jumpscare. Basically it cuts really suddenly to Hugh getting into bed and the sound is weirdly boosted. It made me jump because it's sudden and loud, and I've noticed a few other people online who also jumped when it happened. The second jumpscare made my spinal cord try to climb out of my body.
I think I saw Mike Flanagan say he doesn’t like jump scares so much. I don’t remember the first one but the second one was amazing. He did do a send up of the overuse of jump scares in The Midnight Club - a teenage character trying to tell a scary story and so there’s jump scares over and over and it’s just deliberately ridiculous.
I know the story you mean! By the time >!the guy slipped over and landed on the zombie demon girl!< I was in fucking stitches laughing.
Saw Jacob’s Ladder for the first time last October. Brilliant movie
Worst thing is, bathos was termed by Alexander Pope to criticise the same thing happening in then current literature due to bad writers abusing tropes, so this has been happening for over three centuries!
If the joke you write can fit as a response in any other genre or situation, then you need to write a different joke. Broke: "Let's get drunk after being deserted on this island." "Well, that's awkward. I kinda sorta already lit it on fire." "You're kidding." *Shrug.* Woke: ""Why is the rum gone?" "One: because it is a vile drink that turns even the most respectable men into complete scoundrels. Two: that signal is over a thousand feet high. The entire royal navy is out looking for me, do you think there is even the slightest chance they wont see it?" "But why is the rum gone?"
"It's Elizabeth, hide the rum!" Is also an excellent call-back.
And Gibbs complies without question because rum is no joking matter.
More importantly, he trusts Jack.
This also shows that how closer you cater the joke to the characters involved, the better it lands. Jack is an alcoholic. Elizabeth was raised in high society. You can infer this (not their names, but these characteristics) from the dialogue without knowing much else about them just from the way they speak.
I don’t even know the reference and I immediately got a feel for the characters just from those three lines of dialogue
It’s from the first Pirates movie. I guess they referenced it because the post also does at one point.
Watching the "Where's the Rum" scene . .. ... .... ..... ...... ....... Finding out Keira Knightley was only 17 when she played Elizabeth.
Ooooh, don't like that.
Just wait til you find out how old she was in Love Actually…
Man i love Stilgar, i wish Javier Bardem was real.
He's based off of people from a real country though. You can go there and there are even people called Javier
You will see the signs of His coming
# CUMING?!😱
What's the most you've lost on a coin toss?
Every time I see her I just go “oh it’s red from OSP!” Like she cameos in
which ones red?
Comicaurora. It’s named after the webcomic she has, which is called Aurora, you should read that if you haven’t by the way it’s very good.
Comicaurora, the name of her web comic—Aurora. (My name unrelated)
*Suuurrrrre* it isn't
I wasn't aware of OSP when I got my nickname, which was actually inspired by old Norse naming convention, and given to me by a friend. It simply refers to me having red hair.
[Comicaurora](https://comicaurora.tumblr.com/?source=share) is the tumblr page for Red's absolutely fantastic fantasy webcomic, [Aurora](https://comicaurora.com/)
I remember seeing this post a bit before the Bathos Trope Talk was released and I guessed that whatever she was working on was starting to escape XD.
Ahaha I was wondering about the timeline on that xd
A cameo? Marvel ass writing smh...
Oh no, I didn't realise! Now I have to go back and read it again in her voice (oh well, worse things have happened)
You just made me go back and read that part in her voice
It's fun, and doubly so when you get this on Tumblr itself, following her blog. Always love when she brings some random bit of intrigue or discussion to my dash.
I remember people saying this about the new Top Gun: “There’s no quips!” Babe that movie is nothing *but* corny one-liners, just not Whedon-esque ones.
...Wat... Like, I dislike the movies for being propaganda, even though I can admit the quality is pretty decent but... Wat? Maverick a quippy little shit head. He always has been. We just get to see genuine sincerity from him struggling to connect with a subordinate because he has very personal ties to said subordinate that complicate his professional ones, and it fucking hurts him. But he's still a little shithead. He gets a medal and is forced into retirement before he actually kills his own superiors through stress alone.
People claim that the death of modern marvel films was quips, meanwhile the Guardians Films are full of them and even 3 is considered to be an amazing film, and again it all comes down to sincerity like OP says. James Gunn actually understands that characters can both be funny and have sincere emotions. The idea that quips themselves make a movie bad is why I think that the D&D movie didn't do as well as it should have (that and Hasbro/Wizards pulling some bullshit around the same time). People were comparing it to "just another Marvel film" when it felt more like a Princess Bride style film instead. People have just enough media literacy to recognize tropes and ideas, but not enough to realize that just "having tropes" isn't automatically a bad thing, and the quality of a film/story is HOW it uses them.
I was looking for an acknowledgement that not all Marvels are created equal, there's enough of them that they're practically a genre of their own, and several (including Guardians) are quite good. Age of Ultron is my least favorite. I've never been so aware of the fact that I was watching a movie the whole time. Just 141 minutes of actors hitting their marks and saying their lines.
Honestly there’s no better proof of this than the Thor solos. Thor was great, Dark World was trash, Ragnarok was fucking fantastic, Love and Thunder was Taika Waititi huffing his own farts. Thor is one of my favorite MCU characters but his movies are some of the most inconsistent in terms of quality in the entire series.
Thor himself suffers so horribly for this it's unreal. His first movie established him as a bit up his own ass, but an otherwise well intentioned and noble dude while in his element, and a curious goofball when out of it. Then Avengers 1 almost entirely ignored any real characterization in lieu of him just kinda... being there because Loki was? Like I can't think of a single memorable moment with him from that movie. Same for Age of Ultron. Dark World had him more back in his element but that meant that we lost the silly goofy side and they tried to keep him super serious for it, and then Ragnarok went full in on leaving him totally out of it and it was the best of the bunch for it. He's suffering from the same issue comics so with the constantly rotating writers in that, they all have different ideas of what he should be like.
Yeah, I’ve never understood how people can lump together every mcu film like they don’t have a host of different writers and directors who follow different styles and tropes With so many movies obviously some are going to be shit, but come on there’s plenty of good stuff there
People talk about "Marvel movies" as if it were a genre, and that mentality is how we ended up with movies like Morbius, Love and Thunder, and Madame Web.
CA: TWS is a brilliant film. I mean if you think about it it’s a superhero film where the ultimate enemy is the government. Sure there’s an antagonist with superpowers also running around, and it was specifically secret Nazis working inside the government to do the bad plan, but there were plenty of non-Nazis around them in the government actively participating in the bad plan for world domination, and the fact they didn’t know all of the info of the plan doesn’t really excuse that they enabled many aspects of it. There’s quips in the film but there’s also sincerity - Steve Rogers trying awkwardly to connect with people in his personal life in the modern era, but being a fish out of water any time he’s not in a fight.
The “quips” of GotG have so much more character to them compared to The Avengers. Personally I haven’t seen 3 yet, but knowing those characters and what makes them unique, I feel like you could give me a comedic out of context line from it and I could at the very least confidently figure out who said it
Here's a tough one for you: "I am Groot."
Classic Drax
For me it's that the "hero" makes a dumb quip when 10,000 innocent people just got obliterated in the exact same way regardless of who it is lol If it's supposed to be light and goofy, don't have people get slaughtered and quip about it, or somber them up in that moment so you don't seem utterly devoid of caring about people. We wouldn't have so many "hero but actually evil" homelander stuff if the good ones had any sense of the cost of human life in their own genre imo hah
And if it's supposed to be callous/fucked up, really dig into that rather than just...leave it sitting there.
Wait, 3 is amazing? I was going to watch it, but I saw people saying it sucked and ruined the trilogy so I decided not to watch it, so as to not ruin the first two movies for myself. So is it actually good, or is it bad?
It’s strange reading this as a Buffy fan. I’ve only seen a few marvel movies and decided they really weren’t for me. But I love Buffy/Angel/Firefly (though have mixed feelings about joss personally) Did he get worse as a writer? Because the criticism here does not remind me of Buffy at all. The genius of the show is Buffy’s humor being built on equal parts trauma and Barbie, Giles world-weary British version of “I’m too old for this shit” peppered with nerdy enthusiasm, Willow’s awkward naive run-on sentences, and Xanders insecure, defensive sense of his own masculinity. Their quips always felt very tied to their characters and not interchange in the slightest
I think part of the problem is by the time he wrote Avengers Whedon fell into two problems. He bought his own hype, and was too big for people to tell him no. He both believed he could do whatever he wanted and it would still be good cause he wrote Buffy and Firefly and such, and no one would say “no that’s not a good line” to the guy who wrote Buffy and Firefly.
Ah, the Star Wars Prequels dilemma
A lot of people give Wedon-esque writting shit, but that's only because it's been over used these days. Buffy was so popular because of its writting that bucked the over serious, grimdark, and personalityless writting that was popular then. I'm watching Buffy for the first time and it still holds up Just shows that if a counter culture is good enough, it becomes the culture to be countered
Overused is only part of it—Whedon himself has not grown as a writer. The bathos point really demonstrates that. Joss Whedon's older works had more distinct voice. Anya quips are different than Willow quips and that's why they work. Cut to the 2010s and he literally recycled the same quips from Avengers: Age of Ultron in his rewrite of Justice League — *particularly* for Wonder Woman, who quips exactly like Black Widow (insert long-suffering sigh about *boys*) and is used in jokes the exact same way (awkward man landing face first in boobs). Whedon may have popularized the culture of bathos done well but, somewhere along the way, he became extremely mediocre at it.
Firefly uses Bathos so well that it became a cult classic with what, 11 episodes?
Yeah one of the best parts of that show was how everyone speaks in the voice of their characters. None of the little jokes would work at all if someone else said them.
> I'm watching Buffy for the first time and it still holds up Then clearly it being overused isn't the issue.
you're in for a great time once you get to angel, it just gets better and better the ending was kind of perfect but if you want more, there's comics that continue it, too
Holy frick this literally blew my mind. I always knew there was something I loved about the humor in The Princess Bride but I never had it put into words before this
I think the post about sincerity is right. You can be funny and in a ridiculous situation, but sincerity is what makes it feel like something worth paying attention to. Sincerity is hard to do, though, and a good movie will weave it in with the lighthearted stuff. I recently watched *Yakuza Apocalypse* and I think it handles this really well. The protagonist is played completely straight, there's no eye rolling or smirking or 'well *that* just happened'. He says everything like he means it even when it's something ridiculous and you believe it because the dialogue sounds like it comes from him, from his experiences and point of view. You're laughing at his silly reaction to an extent but you like him anyway because you understand what kind of person he is through his honest reaction to the events around him. A lot of fantasy and paranormal type media features this sort of 'deadpan snarker' (ew hate that phrase) dialogue and it always feels kind of tired and self conscious. A protagonist who just dives in is more likeable to me than someone who has to make a 'i'm too cool for this' comment before doing anything. It's like when you have that one friend who always has to be sarcastic and snitty about everything, and it's cool for a while but eventually it just starts to get annoying, because they never let you enjoy anything for what it is. You realise that they're not really enjoying anything for the sake of it, they're not letting themselves be involved in anything because they always have to act like they're above it. Being sincere is fun, it's freeing.
Blaming Joss Whedon for this style of banter betrays a comical lack of film literacy. This kind of thing has been standard for decades.
It’s giving Whedon waaay too much credit, tbh.
I had the same thought. He wrote or co-wrote two of the 30ish movies in the MCU, and those were both pretty good from what I remember. It is not his fault if other people copy him and do it poorly. The guy is a tool, but he did not single-handedly ruin movies.
I don't think the intention is to blame Whedon, just to have a reference point for the style. Promise I fully intend to blame Steven Moffat when referencing it in relation to Doctor Who, and RTD does the same thing, it's just better because he cares about characterisation.
do people not know joss whedon was working before the avengers or something? he's always been a hack. he just used to be a hack on TV when popular TV was dogshit, and then he moved over make dogshit movies.
Dude, I all but have a degree in Buffy studies. I know the man’s oeuvre. If you don’t like Buffy/Angel/Firefly/etc that’s fine, people have their own taste and all that, but I’m not going to agree that they’re “dogshit.” I was responding to the specific argument that he’s the reason all movie characters sound the same. First, I don’t think they do across the board. Second, when they do it’s in movies he had literally nothing to do with.
>I all but have a degree in Buffy studies. I know the man’s oeuvre. If you don’t like Buffy/Angel/Firefly/etc that’s fine, people have their own taste and all that, but I’m not going to agree that they’re “dogshit.” What I'll say for Joss Whedon is that I found some of his lines in the Avengers films a little out of character for the people saying them. '"At long last” is lasting a little long, boys.' is not a Black Widow-esque line and I'll stand by that, that's a Firefly line. However outside of that he's pretty good at having characters sound different and even shows sound different to each other, Topher and DeWitt in Dollhouse sound completely different to the Scooby gang for instance because they're both older and much smarter and better educated plus have a compeltely different kind of career. Hell even Giles, Angel and Spike sound different to the Scoobies for similar reasons. EDIT: Where I tend to think Whedon suffers is with his film hat on, and especially his script doctor hat. When he builds something from the ground up it seems to work well even if I don't rate the show but he seems to go beep boop insert pun sometimes when he's working someone else's film.
Right, I don't *really* get why Whedon is getting the blame for the fall of the MCU into quippy dreck with all the sincerity of a serial cheater with a bunch of flowers. Like, he's not a god among film writers or anything, but he's really not as bad as people like to paint him, and looking at his other work, you can't say he shies away from sincerity. Because one of the things about Buffy, maybe not all the time but most of the time, is that everyone had their own very distinct voice. Like, yeah, it was super quippy but it was also *achingly* sincere. The same with Firefly tbh, its funny and quirky but at no point is it afraid to just, roll around in emotions and get the audience to genuinely feel things. I can't speak to Angel because I haven't rewatched it since it aired on television, didn't even watch all of it then, and have conceived a blazing hatred for the character of Angel now that I'm no longer a naive teenager.
I would say that the problems are part of the first Avengers film. But then again, I haven't watched that film in a very long time. Edit: Obviously I agree the guy isn't responsible for every film with bad quips, but I do agree with others that he's a great example/symbol of the problem.
The other fun thing here is that if the Princess Bride were to come out today, everyone here would be sneering at it for being too ‘Marvel-like’ just for having bathos at all. Like, I love that movie dearly, but I also know how fickle and shallow most online media criticism ultimately is. The whole anti-quip argument is transparently just starting from criticizing Marvel’s oversaturation and working backwards to justify it.
why do you think people are mentioning joss whedon and not thinking of the lame ass, corny ass TV he wrote, too? like, this as a fan of 90s TV culture, it was all bad and he was one of the worst offenders.
He didn’t even popularize it on TV! Quippy snarky nonsense has been the standard for light adventure/action entertainment for most of the last century- on television, in film, pulps, comic books, and the like. Hence why I think blaming Whedon *on any level* is at best selective ignorance and at worst deliberate bad-faith designed to farm clout.
my contention was mostly getting stuck on the 'decades' part and wanting to remind every millennial that the 90s were 30 years ago
"I thought it was because my last name is Quippenger..."
Idk about all of the 6 original Avengers communicating exactly the same. So many quips by Tony towards especially Steve and Thor are missed by those two, though that changes slightly as the movie goes on and they finish bashing heads. Banner is actively uncomfortable by Tony's quips about the Hulk. Natasha presumably is familiar with Tony as a result of IM2 and that she has studied him beforehand. Barton and Steve get some on a military level I think. Because everyone present (once they are on the carrier) is aware that Natasha is a spy, there is no need for her to lean too hard into it (besides the manipulating she does for plot reasons). There is plenty to be said about it, but there is a limit to the bashing.
In the classic "Anybody want a peanut?" scene of Princess Bride, the quips serve to show off the uniqueness of each character. Inigo leads Fezzik into a rhyming game, not outright attacking Vizzini, but with calculated banter. He maliciously creates a scenario he knows Vizzini will hate. Vizzini responds like Vizzini, telling them to cut it out, "now I mean it!" insisting that he is in charge and leveling threats, even though he's tied up. Just like the iocane powder scene too, Vizzini can't stop talking, which means he can't stop giving Fezzik material to rhyme off of. Once Fezzik catches on, he's all in. There's no malice like there is with Inigo, just pure enjoyment. The stupid rejoinders like "anybody want a peanut?" infuriate Vizzini, showcasing Fezzik's strength; namely, dumb brute force. Fezzik's stupid rhymes are stronger than Vizzini's incredible mind. What a film.
Why are people talking about "the death of movies" anyway, that's not a thing. Good movies aren't any rarer It's not even true of all Marvel movies. The Avengers movies got stuck with Whedon disease even after he left but the Guardians of the Galaxy movies didn't. The characters in that do all have different ways of talking. Only a couple of them regularly make quips and for the rest the jokes come from their actual personalities.
[удалено]
It's true. It's the same with music. If you actually look at old music charts there's plenty of crap on there. But most of it is forgotten and doesn't get played anymore.
Princess Bride is a masterpiece in literally everything. Like all the actors were sweet and the filming is beautiful and of course the end product is incredible. Comparing it's dialog, inspired by the incredibly ridiculous and lovable book, to the formulaic Disney owned corporate Marvel dialog (with the exception of maybe the first iron man, but it was the first one so like it gets a pass) is something I got lost writing this and forgot the word, its like specific so I can't just use another word. yeagh anyway I love the Princess Bride; good post
Have you read the book? It's really good. It's far more meta, and the frame narrative takes place when the character "William Goldman" is an adult.
The footnotes about all the parts of the "original" story that he removed for being too boring are hilarious!
Can confirm the point about the actors being sweet, I met Cary Elwes at a convention one time and he was nothing but kind.
I’m just sick of every line having to be a joke that’s well set up by the previous ones. Nobody responds to an applause line with a normal sentence because everyone has to think up a better one of their own.
I think part of the problem is once an author/writer starts writing quips for more than one character, and people notice that multiple or all of the characters are "quiping" the same way. Like in Whedon's Avengers, Ironman, Thor, Black Widow, Capt. America, Hulk, Hawkeye should all have their own sense of humor, which should vary and produce different types of quips. Instead, all of them have Whedon's sense of humor. And therein lies the struggle for the writer. How do you give a character a realistic sense of humor that the writer does *not* share? Its harder than it sounds, and if you can pull it off then kudos to you.
I wouldn't say that the Avengers all banter in the exact same way all the time. There's a few scenes where the background difference between scrappy Steve Rogers and smug Tony Stark drives the dialogue perfectly. they just couldn't keep it up for the whole franchise.
I’ve never had as strong an urge to find someone who hasn’t seen the princess bride Right Now and watch it with them
I rewatched Batman Begins the other day, and I couldn't help but notice the usage of quips throughout the film. They're funnier, I realized, in the first half of the film, and that makes sense. They help disperse the rising tension a bit, so the tension can continue to rise throughout the runtime without becoming a slog, but once the movie passes the midpoint (when Bruce first goes out in his Bruce Wayne mask and shows up in a supercar with a pair of supermodels) the jokes aren't as funny, and this allows the dramatic tension to ramp up to higher levels; you still get the quips along the way to prevent slog, but because they aren't as funny you don't lose as much of the tension. Really well put together film.
I think that’s the problem with marvel recently, all the characters speak with the same voice and they kind of start to blend together for characters like iron man and spiderman it makes sense for them to be coming up with funny one liners in the middle of battle, captain america is for the most part a shown to be serious guy, and having him deliver the same lines makes absolutely no sense, same with hawkeye or doctor strange not every character needs to be making jokes, there’s enough characters who that makes sense for, leave it to them
It's been a while since I've watched any marvel movie, but from what I remember a lot of the quips were distinct from each character. Tony was sarcastic, Spiderman was more lighthearted and "geniune", Captain america was out of touched and cheesy. Even Rocket who also had sarcastic quips was distinctly more pessimistic than Tony. And I can't really imagine Tony delivering Spidermans "You have a metal arm? That's so cool!" line
I think you touched on an important factor on that last bit. Because I *can* see Tony saying that...but he wouldn't say it in nearly the same way! The words would be the same, but instead of Peter's genuine wonder and excitement, Tony would say it dismissively. A "You have a metal arm? That's cool....I have a whole suit" kinda thing even if he doesn't actually *say* that last bit.
Yeah, I feel like these characters aren't the ones that really had this problem, at least not all the time. If anything, I think it's Taika Waititi who is the worst offender with this kind of writing. Thor talks *completely* differently when he's being written by Waititi.
Personally, I think this is why Guardians of the Galaxy is consistently funnier than most of the rest of the MCU. Peter is similar to the rest of the MCU, but Rocket is deeply sarcastic and cynical, Drax is oblivious and unintentionally funny, gamora is serious and exasperated, Groot provides a lot of opportunity for jokes from the audience only being able to infer what he's saying and Mantis is an optimistic counterpart to Drax.
I found Stilgar more of a sad character than a funny one. He's being manipulated by religious beliefs implanted in his culture centuries ago for the selfish benefit of the Bene Gesserit.
That's pretty much as intended - Paul is not a hero because heroes are a lie and prophecy is a trap. Stilgar is brave, intelligent and actually pretty funny when he open up, but he ends up a fanatic ready to die
I think Paul straight up says as much in Dune Messiah. He thinks how sad it is that Stilgar is reduced to another fanatic blindly following along with no real independence. Tbh I feel wicked bad for the fremen overall, they just get manipulated, used and then tossed aside like dolls when the big players are done with them.
One of my favorite parts of Dune is that very few characters actually act different from the first to the second halves of their journey. Paul is the only one with an appreciable transformation: Stilgar is still funny and fatherly, Jessica is still scheming and looking out for her son, Gurney is still a loyal loving servant of House Atreides, even Paul himself continues to score heroic victories and make protagonist-y decisions. But the tone changes, and suddenly these actions we might’ve celebrated earlier become incredibly sinister because we know what they’re leading to. Point is, Stilgar remains funny from the beginning of Dune Part Two to the end. That one bit at the end where he shouts out after the knife fight is funny, but because we know all of this context, the emotion is much more complex. It’s funny, but his reduction from a noble Fremen elder to Paul’s comic relief sycophant is an incredible tragedy.
I don't think comicaurora is correct here. Bathos is not "the term for the actual issue" any more than "quips" is.
Convinced this is partly a symptom of more general irony poisoning in our culture. Sincerity is amazing and we need more of it
Why do we expect sincerity from Hollywood when we consider all sincerity "cringe"?
Eh. This kinda is and isn't it. A movie doesn't have to be sincere to be good. But I think a movie does have to not be afraid of being disliked to be good. This is where the bathos is a problem, it's not some specific artistic desire they're going for, but rather they're trying to maximise appeal. Some viewers don't want to watch emotional sincerity and depth. So they add a joke. Some people don't wanna watch a comedy, so they keep the joke to a short quip. Some people don't wanna watch an out and out action movie without being invested in characters, so they add emotional sincerity and the cycle repeats. Media doesn't have to be divisive to be good, but it has to commit to its thing. It had to value its own messaging and style and internal consistency. The big avengers films don't have a thing they value outside of money. They're cynical. There are marvel films that absolutely do commit to their thing, and more power to then for that. But post avengers 1, they don't even commit to making movies focused on a single character because they're so keen on the widest possible appeal. Every marvel film now has a female empowerment scene and key character, a nerd empowerment scene and character, a black empowerment scene and character etc. these are all fine things to have in a film because these are good themes and topics to explore, but they're not in the films for that reason, they're in the films to maximise money. Of course, they also don't properly explore those ideas because that too would turn people off seeing it and that wouldn't be maximising money. Disliking all time greats of media is normal and good. It means you are engaging with things and seeing what you like. No one should subjectively enjoy everything. I objectively recognise the quality in elden ring, I do not like from soft at all... They commit to doing a thing that I don't find fun. And that's good! Because it means other people do, and I'm just not fromsofts target audience.
Quips? ZINGOOO
Inma just drop here that Marvel's Midnight Suns has much, much better character development and distinct quipping than all Avengers movies combined. Which is so bloody weird. Even the Milquetoast by designa POV character has more heart than anything Whedon has written.
lol, just started that the other day, it’s been great seeing everyone’s distinct personalities, even my self insert.
I am here for Stark and Spooky's love/hate quipping duels.
I don't think that it's totally fair to blame Joss Whedon for this. Buffy and firefly were quippy, but also character focused and good. The problem is the budgets and the committees.
One thing that I notice is the difference between characters making the quips to each other compared to making quips to the audience. Spider-Man is either quipping at his enemies or for his own sake. Despite being a Whedon movie, Age of Ultron’s running gag with Steve cursing works because its characters believably needling each other. In contrast, you have a lot of the “get lost Squidward” Tony Stark stuff later that is just there for the audience to have a quick laugh but makes no sense otherwise
Quips aren't the problem. Quippy Dialogue, as a pattern, as a style, is. Once every character becomes a one-liner dispenser, it stops being a part of individual characterization, it stops being a chance to show a character as witty or humorous, and it just becomes, as the post says, a way of avoiding sincerity in dialogue.
I love the bonus analysis of The Princess Bride we got throughout this post. More Princess Bride conversations please!
I agree with the overall point about sincerity but disagree with the Marvel bashing. 1. Bathos is one of my favorite literary devices. Maybe that's just my neurodivergent ass enjoying everyone else failing as hard at social rules as I normally do, but there's not much funnier than someone delivering a genuinely heartfelt moment then turning around and falling face-first into the trash can. It doesn't "undercut" the drama; it increases the contrast making the emotions and the laughs hit harder. It absolutely can be over used or done poorly, as can every device, but done well it's my favorite. 2. There is a big difference between writing characters for a book or for a movie. PB is a fairly direct adaptation of the book. The Marvel movies are not. In a book you need hype-distinctive voices to tell the characters apart, but in a movie we can see who is talking so many directors prioritize a consistent style over distinctive voices. Watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (by the same writer as PB) and you'll see him doing the same thing. 3. The Avengers do have distinct voices. They have the same comedic style but unique personalities. That's why each character has memorable lines that are distinctly theirs. Anyway. This turned into a rant. Thanks for reading!
Meh, I like the quips in Marvel movies. At times I suspect that half of everyone just gets off on being too high-minded for designated pieces of popular media that they liked a decade ago. Whether that's true, or whether a bunch of folks just truly detest Marvel and Joss Whedon, I still like the quips in Marvel movies. They're funny, and generally seem in-character to me.
They were generally in-character. Phase One was somehow cohesive character wise.
This. Too many times going “i just watched a whole movie about why this character cares deeply about (thing or person). Why do they suddenly not give a shit?” It just got frustrating and boring.
I want everyone who is pressed about the MCU to read Stan Lee's dialogue from the 60s so they can have a heart attack and die.
Hey look Red OSP
Glad to see Red popping in there talking about one of the trope talks she’s done lol.
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
Relevant [osp trope talk video](https://youtu.be/dOj2hVjwrUo?si=RnsEVyswo4GeFiGX)
I just get excited every time Bucky Barnes comes up. Although he was never in any of the MCU movies Joss Whedon wrote.
On the topic of the Avengers specifically, I think part of the reason it's frustrating that they're like that in more recent Marvel movies is because they weren't always. Looking back at like, first and second-wave stuff (like the original movies, Age of Ultron, etc.), they *do* banter in their own voices, and it's what makes them work as characters. And yet now, those same characters exist solely to make a funny one-liner that Joss Whedon came up with in the shower and make 1 morbillion dollars.
Utterly absurd to blame this on Whedon when he has a solid track record in shows like Buffy and firefly.
I dont think Steve was disabled. He was just small and skinny. He managed to function just fine outside of being 5' 2" and 100 pounds. While it's never specifically articulated, I've always assumed it's the result of Depression Era malnutrition.
why do you think that people can't be disabled as a result of malnutrition, exactly? besides being frail as fuck, he was myopic, colorblind, partially deaf, had scoliosis, had some sort of unspecified soft tissue disorder, and had untreated asthma. i think he was plenty disabled, even if he was able to walk without a wheelchair or whatever metric you think qualifies as 'true disability'
I'm pretty sure it's mentioned during his attempts to join the army that he has asthma. Recruiter says "You'd be disqualified for your asthma alone."
I have asthma that's bad enough that I would have needed a waiver to join. I do not consider it at all a disability. I haven't used a rescue inhaler in probably 20 years. Soldiers got disqualified for all sorts of things that would not be considered a day to day disability. Flat feet were a disqualifying condition because they were believed to be more prone to stress fractures. Eugene Sledge, whose WW2 memoir is considered basically holy canon to the USMC, was initially turned down because of a heart murmur with no other symptoms.
Fair but you also have to remember far more work was manual labor in the 1930s and generally for unfriendly to people with asthma. idk I think asthma is one of those things that can mostly thank modern technology and medicine for being as non-serious as it is and would probably be a far more difficult condition 100 years ago.
Disclaimer that I haven’t slept in 28 hours (not hyperbole) so I’m probably pissing on the poor with my reading skills, or lack thereof, but: It’s not *that* abnormal for a group of coworkers or close-knit humans to have similar conversation styles. I’ve read texts— or maybe it was a study, memory failing me for obvious reasons— about how a writers’ writing will change and improve on the job as they adapt to corporate culture. You adopt the mannerisms of those around you, and it bleeds into the way you speak, act, and write. You wouldn’t speak the same way in a warehouse that you would in an office— it’s a fundamental principle of adaptability. Hell, even between departments you may change the way you speak. I’m pretty sure code-switching is a racialized term, but it’s a term that captures something similar that people are more familiar with. You (often) don’t talk to your friends the way you talk to your coworkers, etc. Yes characters would sound like what they would sound like and not have words shoved into their mouth— but also people of different backgrounds speaking similarly is not evidence of the latter. Now that that’s done, send help. Preferably in the form of a cartoon character with a large hammer to knock me out & get me some rest. Bonk.
"Code switching" isn't supposed to be racialized. But maybe most people associate it with AAVE?
> bathos Thank you for giving the word for what I hate so much.
it's like how rightoids will rant about THE WOKE AGENDA when in reality there are plenty of things they like that have the same "agenda," the difference is that this one just sucks
I’m sorry but that person’s description of character is fucking wack, like they’re obsessed with choosing words that sound good as descriptors rather than words that are accurate in describing the person they’re talking about.
I’ve been saying this for years!!!
This is all fine and well, but every bit of media has a creative or intellectual budget. Superhero movies were never meant to be literary masterpieces. They were meant to be entertaining action films. Energy and time was not spent on writing masterful dialogue. It was spent elsewhere. And until recently that was a fantastic choice. The issue with these films has nothing to do with a failure of writing. That was never the expectation or the selling point. The issue is that people got tired of the same shit over and over again.
People uoset about quips in marvel movies never read comics. That's nust how cape comics are. That's half their humor.
Going into *Captain America: Civil War* after watching *Avengers: Age of Ultron* was like a breath of fresh air. Nobody in *Age of Ultron* felt like a person 😭 But in *Civil War*, even when they were being funny, it was sincere and actually worked with the characters. They have good banter in that! So what the fuck was Joss Whedon doing?! 😭😭😭😭