Avengers: Age of Ultron (spoiler thread!)

Null

Null

Zero Esc said:
There's a laundry list of what I'll call "Joss Whedon's sins" floating around Tumblr and most of it is exactly the stupid crap you'd expect Tumblr-tots to be complaining about, i.e. do not have stories where bad things can happen to female characters. I disagree with almost every criticism I've seen about the Black Widow sterilization seen, except that it did seem like it was brought up more as a support beam for Banner's backstory than to be about Black Widow, but that shit happens when you're making a movie with 20 characters who could each be the main character in their own superhero movie.

Likewise the thing with the twins, multiple contradiction issues there. Complaint 1: that they're no longer Jewish or Roma (funny; no one complained about this when Quicksilver was in X-Men). Complaint 2: they're Jewish and Roma characters associating with Nazis.

The problem is, Whedon is at the mercy of Marvel on how to handle casting, same as when they give him a checklist of plot points his movie has to hit in order to set up future films, even if it detracts from the current movie's story. Then, it's not Jewish/Roma characters helping Nazis, because the characters are no longer Jewish/Roma and the organization isn't Nazis. True to the comics? Not really, but that's how the MCU is doing it. Hydra, at least its modern incarnation post-WWII, is not a Nazi organization. They haven't shown a desire for race-based genocide, but political genocide as they desire control. Not all fascists are Nazis.
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Yeah, the MCU is inspired by the comics, but not beholden to them. They'll change what they want in order to tell the story they want. The important thing is that the *essence* of the characters comes through.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

@Li3n said:
If Wanda and Pietro are gypsies then the High Evolutionary must have been using bleach as part of whatever gave them powers...[DOUBLEPOST=1431444691,1431444626][/DOUBLEPOST]

Some are just italians...
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It's not like cultures or races ever intermingle. That's unheard of.
 
Frank

Frank

Well, Quicksilver's basically an albino.

And you can't blame comic artists for Scarlet Witch's schizophrenic appearance, they've been retconned more times than Bucky.
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

Bowielee said:
It's not like cultures or races ever intermingle.
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Yeah, mixing brown and pink does not make more pink... and now that both their parents are supposed to be gypsies... yeah, racist High Evolutionary making them whiter = headcanon.

Also, Pietro is an italian name...

While apparently Wanda is polish...

Well, getting one right is close enough i guess.[DOUBLEPOST=1431451468,1431451277][/DOUBLEPOST]
Covar said:
S
So twice?
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Actually, Bucky dying at the end of WW2 was a retcon in itself, so it's more like 3 times.

Which is actually true... Whizzer and Miss American as actual parents instead of Maximoffs, then retcon to Magneto, then retcon to whatever they are now.
 
Celt Z

Celt Z

I thought the movie just made them Sokovian orphans, thus some random pretend Eastern European origins. I mean, the MCU could definitely use some diversity (and it's getting better with War Machine and Falcon now being active Avengers), but if we're going to nitpick Wanda and Pietro, we should probably put the blame on their creators/early appearance. Comics don't have the best history of delicate with representation, some attempts being more ham-fisted than others. It was probably something along the lines of "Eh, they're from somewhere in Europe, so white. Whatever."
 
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Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

CynicismKills said:
Yeah I think they're pulling that more from the comics. I would assume the movie's just painting them as some kind of Slavic.
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In this one instance, Tumblr gives a shit about comics canon, while they continue to write thousand-page fanfics about which teammate Steve Rogers will fuck tonight while he cheats on Bucky. :rolleyes:
 
Null

Null

CynicismKills said:
Yeah I think they're pulling that more from the comics. I would assume the movie's just painting them as some kind of Slavic.
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Yeah, Sokovian. Their parents were killed during civil strife (much like the former Yugoslavia) by weapons made by Stark Industries, leading them to have a vendetta against Tony Stark, and leading them to volunteer for Baron Strucker and Dr Listz's experiments. Note the less than cordial welcome the Iron Legion receives from the Sokovian populace: many of them probably lost people to black-marketed Stark weapons.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Null said:
Yeah, Sokovian. Their parents were killed during civil strife (much like the former Yugoslavia) by weapons made by Stark Industries, leading them to have a vendetta against Tony Stark, and leading them to volunteer for Baron Strucker and Dr Listz's experiments. Note the less than cordial welcome the Iron Legion receives from the Sokovian populace: many of them probably lost people to black-marketed Stark weapons.
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Or just pre-Iron Man white market Stark weapons.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

I, ehh...I haven't seen the movie yet, but err, I don't know how much experience you all have with Roma ("gypsies" is considered a racist term, folks), but they're not all that dark. In fact, there's several "sub-divisions" of Roma (Gitanos, Sinti, Kale,...). While some groups are much more tanned, most Roma you'll meet in Northern and Eastern Europe aren't any darker than, say, Italians. There's exceptions (and in Spain or former Yugoslavia they tend to be comparatively darker, for example)...but saying you can tell whether or not someone's Roma based on skin color is plain out wrong. I've seen naturally (well, she claimed she was, anyway) blond, fair Roma. Like with, say, Semitic people, there tend to be somewhat more subtle tells about ethnic background, but those can all be present or not from individual to individual. I looked up stills - yes, they're too fair-skinned (and him haired) for stereotypical Roma, but they're absolutely not impossible or anything.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

Bubble181 said:
I, ehh...I haven't seen the movie yet, but err, I don't know how much experience you all have with Roma ("gypsies" is considered a racist term, folks), but they're not all that dark. In fact, there's several "sub-divisions" of Roma (Gitanos, Sinti, Kale,...). While some groups are much more tanned, most Roma you'll meet in Northern and Eastern Europe aren't any darker than, say, Italians. There's exceptions (and in Spain or former Yugoslavia they tend to be comparatively darker, for example)...but saying you can tell whether or not someone's Roma based on skin color is plain out wrong. I've seen naturally (well, she claimed she was, anyway) blond, fair Roma. Like with, say, Semitic people, there tend to be somewhat more subtle tells about ethnic background, but those can all be present or not from individual to individual. I looked up stills - yes, they're too fair-skinned (and him haired) for stereotypical Roma, but they're absolutely not impossible or anything.
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If you don't caricature an ethnicity/culture enough, you're accused of erasure and/or whitewashing. If you caricature it too much, you're accused of exploitation and/or appropriation. Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome... im Tumblr, au Tumblr, to Tumblr...

I definitely didn't know that Roma were as ethnically varied as they are before stepping out of Spain (a good half of my neighbourhood was/is gitanos), but Roma are far from homogeneous.
 
Null

Null

Bubble181 said:
I, ehh...I haven't seen the movie yet, but err, I don't know how much experience you all have with Roma ("gypsies" is considered a racist term, folks), but they're not all that dark. In fact, there's several "sub-divisions" of Roma (Gitanos, Sinti, Kale,...). While some groups are much more tanned, most Roma you'll meet in Northern and Eastern Europe aren't any darker than, say, Italians. There's exceptions (and in Spain or former Yugoslavia they tend to be comparatively darker, for example)...but saying you can tell whether or not someone's Roma based on skin color is plain out wrong. I've seen naturally (well, she claimed she was, anyway) blond, fair Roma. Like with, say, Semitic people, there tend to be somewhat more subtle tells about ethnic background, but those can all be present or not from individual to individual. I looked up stills - yes, they're too fair-skinned (and him haired) for stereotypical Roma, but they're absolutely not impossible or anything.
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Which is all moot because the characters in question are never referred to as being Roma in the movie that we're discussing.
 
ScytheRexx

ScytheRexx

Finally got to see it, was a fun ride. Not disappointed.

I think the only thing that weirded me out was..
How much Ultron seemed to "care" for Wanda. Even after abandoning him, joining his enemies, etc, she comes over to his broken body to get revenge, and the only thing he says in a concerned voice is that if she stayed, she would die, like that was a bad thing to him.
 
CynicismKills

CynicismKills

ScytheRexx said:
Finally got to see it, was a fun ride. Not disappointed.

I think the only thing that weirded me out was..
How much Ultron seemed to "care" for Wanda. Even after abandoning him, joining his enemies, etc, she comes over to his broken body to get revenge, and the only thing he says in a concerned voice is that if she stayed, she would die, like that was a bad thing to him.
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Well comic Ultron always had a weird fixation on The Wasp thanks to Pym's data in his head, so changing the focus of Ultron's affection isn't so strange since Pym isn't the creator this time.
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

Bubble181 said:
Roma you'll meet in Northern and Eastern Europe aren't any darker than, say, Italians.
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Heh, Mediterranean people being darker skinned... it's called a tan. (but of course a lot of greeks have turkish blood etc)

Also, i don't know about Northern Europe, but if you think Eastern Europe Roma are mostly light skinned i'm gonna have to laugh at you... sure, they're not as dark as Indians, but that's because it's unlikely any of them don't have european ancestry too.

If the twins do have gypsy ancestry, it's not recent.

Bubble181 said:
(and him haired)
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Quicksilver's hair gets a pass, it's always been considered altered by his mutation/whatever-got-him-powers-now.
 
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