You know... I really liked the comic.
No. I REALLY liked the comic.
I know changes have to happen. I know MCU constraints and demands constrain and demand. But I really liked that comic. I really liked the characters and their interpersonal relationships. Their interactions.
Like, I know that I shouldn't be precious about my fandomery. But for years I suppose I had to live with the idea that nobody gave a shit about the things I loved, and sacrificed them on an altar of fan service expediency.
And then, for a brief while, creators seemed to care about the source material and the story beats and the characters being true to themselves as I had learned to at film school. That characters wouldn't be simply pressed into service interchangeably - that their centres would remain their centres.
But then First Class became Dark Phoenix. And we are kind of back to film and TV mining source material as if its just a pile of shit that nobody cares about. Worthless nerd shit, repurposed for cool kids.
Like Chibnall era Dr Who.
How could you take THAT source material and write THIS? How could you take Y the Last Man and make THAT? How could you make Jupiter's Legacy? How could the same folks who made the Cowboy Bebop title sequence that gets it also make the actual episodes that... don't? It's a mystery to me.
Why adapt a thing at all if you don't care so passionately about it you want it's characters to step off the page so living and breathing that people believe fiction is real?
Maybe we all live in palimpsest world now. Our pop culture endlessly retraced by monks who have long since forgotten what the words they trace mean.
Sometimes the weight of all the expectations of film and TV exist to be a tram track. You start off free wheeling - like how in the comic, Kate Bishop is super cool and self assured and Clint is trying to get his life back together... but hey, lets have another middle aged guy training a young girl to be his successor, on the tram track to Capitol and Katniss Everdeen strasse.
Will Clint get home for Christmas? Oh no, dad - you promised. Like context means nothing to the dewy eyed ideal American family. Because Die Hard and Home Alone are both Christmas movies. And the ideaspace they inhabit has to become the ideaspace that everything inhabits.
Safe as houses.
The Disney Landsraad has met. All shall be exactly as you the audience desire. Dreams regurgitated in our vomitorium, repurposed, regendered. Nothing left to chance. No story beat unchecked. All your future entertainment the same as it ever was.
The people have spoken.