humanist + humorist

Just finished watching this season, and had a whole post’s worth of thoughts, because wow, an incredible mixed bag. Some of the biggest quality whiplash I’ve ever seen in a Marvel thing.

One of the strengths of “What Ifs” is the ability to throw together new groups of characters who didn’t get to interact in canon, right? To dig into whole new dynamics that wouldn’t have fit into the main storyline, to explore and have fun with them.

Well, some of those are amazing. Episode 2 features Agatha Harkness as a Golden Age of Hollywood actress, while Kingo was already a Bollywood star. They’re both sassy divas who love playing to a crowd, they egg each other on and fight via magical dance-off, every moment is gold. I laughed so hard.

On the other end of the spectrum, episode 6 features versions of Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop who were born into the 1872 Old West…and there’s just nothing to it?

If you like classic Westerns, it could work for you just based on the tropes, but for the characters…I don’t know why it’s these two and not anybody else. I don’t know why they’re buddies with each other. They don’t have interesting 1872 versions of their canon powers or specialties. (Why are you doing Old West Hawkeye if you’re not going to come up with Old West trick arrows??)

(Conspiracy theory: this was originally written to be about Shang-Chi and Katy Chen. Katy could’ve done generic archery when the plot called for it, and the dialogue could’ve gotten all kinds of material based the friendship dynamic. Then someone made the writers swap in Kate — maybe because she’s a more popular character? — even though nobody ever figured out “what fun dynamic they could have instead” or “why this other friendship would be compelling to watch”.)

The other great ones are episode 3 (the Red Guardian invites himself on a team-up accidental-friendship road trip with the Winter Soldier) and episode 4 (follow-up to the earlier Party Thor episode, Darcy and Howard the Duck are still married, and various Cosmic MCU characters are trying to kidnap their newborn egg).

Episode 1 is really half-and-half. The good part is a friendship between Bruce Banner and Sam Wilson, which actually has some thought put into it! Sam also leads a new Avengers team-up that’s almost completely “why are these people here, other than some executive wanted to put their names in the credits?” Moon Knight is in it, and I kinda wish they hadn’t bothered, that’s how bad it is!

Listen, the MCU characters who should have the most deeply-personal reaction to “Bruce desperately trying to avoid getting triggered into Hulking-out” are Marc Spector and Bucky Barnes. The writers put both of them in this episode. And then didn’t do anything with that. Why?

(I opened the episode to look for a screencap, saw Monica Rambeau, and realized I had 100% forgotten Monica was in this episode. That’s how much character-specific stuff she has to do.)

Episode 5 focuses on Riri Williams, so it might be better if Ironheart was released before this (as planned) and we all had more investment in Riri Williams? Then again, it might not. Episodes 7-8 involve a team-up of characters who mostly aren’t in the mainline MCU (one is Peggy Carter, but two are What If originals, and one’s from the X-Men). I feel like I don’t know enough about Storm to have strong feelings about whether she was wasted here or not. Any Storm fans want to weigh in?

…Basically, the only episodes I’d recommend watching are 2, 3, and 4. Maybe 1 if you especially like Sam and/or Bruce, maybe 7-8 if you like cross-universal team-ups and Watcher-related worldbuilding (or just want to see how Darcy and Howard's kid turned out).

(And, Marvel, if you’re giving Oscar Isaac a tiny role in the big Avengers team-up movies…please give him something better to do than this.)

My 1/6 scale Orthodox Moon Knight figure is finally joined by a 1/6 Reform Moon Knight!

There’s an officially-licensed Steven figure now…but this model is not that one. Based on how perfect the design is, and how on-brand the promo images are, I am guessing its history is “Marvel commissioned different companies to make prototype Mr. Knight figures, this one didn’t get approved, so instead of letting the molds and patterns go to waste, the company rolled out a batch of figures for sale in countries where the copyright laws will let them get away with it.”

I preordered it back when the official one wasn’t an option. And then it took a year to get here anyway.

But hey, he’s here <3

Other pitfalls of ordering knockoffs: since the Marc figure only came with a masked head, but Steven came with a masked one and an Oscar-Isaac-face one, I was hoping I’d have the option of popping the Oscar Isaac head on the Marc body. No such luck, the pieces aren’t interchangeable.

On the plus side, the face sculpt is also different from the official one…and the version I got has messier hair with more loose curls over his forehead. Which is a more appropriate look for Steven in the first place.

So now they get to hang out in my workspace together, and any time I feel like it I can look up from my laptop and see them holding hands. Good times.

(Deeply unfair that they’re not selling a matching Layla [yet]. It’s fine if they don’t produce a Jake, that would be a lot to ask from his whole 2 minutes of MCU screen time, but give us a Scarlet Scarab figure.)

fail_fandomanon

fail_fandomanon

"thoughts on the comics villians of Moon Knight?" (you can probably guess, based on this, which comment in the FFA thread was mine...)

"thoughts on Moon Knight 35? It's the X-men crossover where Steven (and the others but mostly Steven) deal with being wheelchair bound and the reason he is in episode 5: Asylum..."

"Have you ever considered a moon Knight rule 63! gender swap?...does Marcella (fem!Marc) still serve as a Marine? Does the Jake equivalent still wear a false mustache?"

"I think in aus where Marlene and  Layla and Diatrice exist, Layla should babysit Diatrice" (I'm into it)


Tumblr, MCU + multi-continuity questions:

"which Moon Knight comic Villians would you like to see in MCU (besides Rueben Davis)?"

"i was wondering if you’d seen either of the moon knight episodes of the animated spider-man shows [..] and if you have seen them i was just curious to know your thoughts?" (short answer: one of them makes a lot of sense as an AU Marc, the other I'm headcanoning as a lost Murderworld robot with dodgy programming.)

"I’ve recently been reading your Cover of Knight series [...] and am really curious on any (non-spoiler) thoughts you might have on if Khonshu knows about the Inner Child?" (Ended up being general thoughts, not just CoK-specific ones.)

"In the fics, Marc and Steven are primarily associated with the colors white and blue, respectively. This makes a lot of sense considering the clothes they wear in the duat. What made you choose the purple/pink situation for Jake?" (short answer: the MacKay run)

Finished off the Moon Knight rewatch!

With a detour in the middle to watch episodes 1-2 of Agatha All Along. I’ll put those at the end, for easier spoiler-cutting.

MK observations, episodes 4-6:

• Headcanon that Marc was trying really hard to front the whole time they were exploring the tomb, but his part of the brain kept going “nope, this is clearly a cave, we’re not coming out and being stuck in a cave.”
• Probably doesn’t help that Steven (after kissing Marc’s wife) goes “what are you going to do, drown me?” and Marc huffs “I should.” (Fascinating that he can be casually-grumpy about this, in light of the backstory we’re about to see. Although it’s clearly not a real threat — he’d have to be furious and/or manic to say that seriously.)
• There’s a recurring trope in the MCU, where some character/group will be conspicuously bad at their job, and I’ll think “Aha, this is setting up a reveal that they’re sabotaging the heroes on purpose! This is all part of a sinister plan!” …And then it turns out, no, they’re just kinda bad at their job. Bucky’s therapist at the start of FATWS is the first non-MK example that comes to mind.
• So, the five Egyptian gods who dismiss Khonshu’s accusations against Harrow are this. They’re being snowed by Harrow way too easily. Surely they’re conspiring because they want Ammit released, right? Episode 4 only added to the theory — it opens with this gorgeously-ominous shot of Osiris’ Avatar putting sealed-in-stone Khonshu in a little lit-up alcove…and then we zoom out, to reveal a whole wall of alcoves with other gods in ushabti jail. Clearly they’ve been consolidating their power over the centuries, sealing up dissenters one by one…
• …But no. Once Harrow has Ammit’s ushabti, he comes back and murders all the remaining Avatars. Those five gods were just that bad at running a functional god-society.
• The Doctor Harrow who manifests in the Duat…almost fits the trope? On first watch I thought he was produced by Ammit interfering with the Duat somehow, to convince Marc and Steven to give up. (In the comics run this is loosely based on, their “your Moon Knight experiences are a delusion, stop fighting it” therapist is Ammit.) Still think he’s deliberately bad at his job, but it doesn’t seem like there was any clever plan in mind, just “be the generic embodiment of all Marc’s psych-treatment insecurities.”
• Props to the crew for not even trying to make a cliffhanger out of “ooo, maybe the show so far was all Marc being delusional?” They know their target audience has already seen this Buffy episode. And this Doctor Who episode. And this Community episode. And this SGA episode. And this Hello From The Magic Tavern episode. And — you get the idea.
• Lukewarm about how they did try to make a cliffhanger out of “could Marc Spector be Dead For Real this time?” The comics tried to do the same cliffhanger at the end of the last run. As if Marc Spector is ever Dead For Real.
• Kinda disappointed real-Harrow didn’t get a cool magic outfit when he was declared Ammit’s Avatar. I know we’re stretching the CGI budget as it is, but come on, is a menacing croc-skin suit too much to ask?

I swear I’ve posted about this before, but a quick search of the blog didn’t find it, so let’s cover some Cool Duat Choices now. Still not over how, in the pre-cave flashbacks, little Marc is shown in a solid light-blue shirt…

…then in the scenes leading up to “the moment when Steven split” (I kinda figure their dissociation history is more complicated than that, but Marc thinks this is when they split, which is what matters to the narrative right now), the kid is in a checked white/dark-blue shirt…

…then when we see them in the Duat manifesting separately, they’re both in solid-color shirts. One white, one dark-blue.

Separately (didn’t spot this one on my own, but I’m not over it either): the afterlife/headspace sarcophagus Jake is definitely in:

Compared to their memories of their abuser:

Yyyyeah. Put this slide in my TED talk about how, between the headmates, Steven is most influenced by Elias — both in good attributes, like his compassion and preference for nonviolent solutions, and bad ones, like his (initial) denial of the abuse Marc went through — and Jake is most influenced by Wendy.

…uh, to be clear, this is not going in a “what if Jake is the ~*~eeevil~*~ alter” direction. Anyone who thinks that is working off of their own biases/preconceptions, not what’s actually on-screen. Canon never shows Jake doing a single thing to hurt Marc, or Steven, or Layla. (Marc and Steven are way meaner to each other than Jake ever is to them.)

It’s more like: maybe the original inspiration for Jake was their brain going “what if…a scary, angry person, who deals with their trauma by turning it outward, who doesn’t hesitate to hurt other people…was on our side?”

And, okay, this is more than enough MK thoughts for one post.

Except to say, hey, Disney, if you give us a season 2, I will immediately get the family re-subscribed, and never miss an episode.

Was reminded recently that I did this AO3 stats meme 12 months ago. Let’s run through it again and see what’s changed!

…spoiler alert, by now it’s a Cover of Knight sweep.

Most hits: Cover of Knight (125,454). First installment in the “what if the Moon Knights accidentally made friends with everyone?” AU, which has been occupying the biggest part of my brain for the past year. I’ve posted some kind of update for that series almost once a week this whole time.

Cover of Knight was the runner-up last year, and as predicted, it’s swapped places into the lead…though He Says He Is An Experimental Theologian (120,412) is still a closer second-place than I expected.

Most kudos: Cover of Knight (6,562). Same winner as last year, almost 2K more kudos. The runner-up is still Persephone’s Waltz (2,976), which last year was just 13 kudos ahead of the 3rd-place spot, but now has a 300+ lead over Experimental Theologian (2,649).

Persephone’s Waltz got a noticeable uptick of new kudos + comments this past April/May. I figure it must have gotten recced somewhere! No idea where.

Most comment threads: Cover of Knight (1,474). Last year’s winner is now the runner-up: A Blinking Light Up On The Clouded Mountain (1,315), the less-read but more-discussed sequel to Experimental Theologian (down at 981). Reveals by Knight, the less-read sequel to Cover of Knight, isn’t on track to overtake it any time soon…but since last year, it’s shot up to 4th place (960).

The 5th-place spot is Here’s What You Missed (513), another longfic in the Cover of Knight ‘verse, which didn’t exist this time last year. It’s nowhere near cracking the top ranks for hits or kudos, but it’s got the readers talking.

Most bookmarks: Cover of Knight (1,640). Same as last year. There’s a new runner-up, though: Persephone’s Waltz (1,147), bumping Experimental Theologian (1,129) down to a close third place.

Most words: Clouded Mountain (313,788). The longest new fic I’ve written since last year is Here’s What You Missed (60,761), and it’s only 8th place on the list. Heck, the whole Cover of Knight universe currently sits at 321,803 words, just barely over the wordcount of Clouded Mountain alone. (The whole Republic of Heaven Community Radio series comes to 568,074 words.)

Fewest words: Same four-way tie as last year.

Final observation: Moon Knight is now my second-most-written AO3 fandom, with 38 works! (The latest fic I posted edged it up over WTNV, still at 37.)

That means I posted exactly 10 new MK works since last year…which feels low, but it includes the 21-chapter longfic Here’s What You Missed, and most of the 36 chapters of the already-started Reveals. (Speaking of which: gonna go post the last of those now.)

I will do more Yuletide recs at some point, but for now, the gift I got (comicverse Steven/Jake having fluffy headspace sex with feelings, plus the House of Shadows being the best House) is lovely and you should all read it:

The Spaces That Hold Us (4468 words) by estelraca
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Moon Knight (Comics)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steven Grant/Jake Lockley, Steven Grant & Jake Lockley & Marc Spector
Characters: Steven Grant (Marvel), Jake Lockley, House of Shadows (Moon Knight)
Additional Tags: Oral Sex, Psychological Drama
Summary: Steven and Jake don’t know where they are, but it feels real enough to hold each other in, and that’s useful sometimes.

Also! At some point in the past I saved a list of several dozen links to art tutorials…and most of them have disappeared from the internet since. Here are the ones that remain. Grab ’em before they go too:

Using gesture in drawing

Using structure in drawing

Group of art/writing tutorials, with a focus on webcomics

How to draw beef…not actually about food, it’s an anatomy tutorial for big muscles

A whole ebook about constructive anatomy

Smashing’s roundup of Traditional Drawing tutorials is very old. Somebody else want to click through and see how many are still available?

Not a tutorial, but a resource: Medieval fantasy city-map generator.

A writeup of the Moon Knight comics for pluralstories! I’m posting a draft here first, so I can share it around with other fans and get feedback. Because with 40+ years of issues to go through, the odds that I’ve forgotten or misremembered something are…high.

Specific things to look for:

• Things to warn for? There’s no formal list of required warnings, and I’m assuming “canon-typical superhero violence” doesn’t rate. Just give a shout if you think I’ve skipped anything warn-worthy.
• Plural tags? This post explains some tags the comm uses, and this page has the full list. Spot-check whether you think I’m using them right on your favorite (or least-favorite!) run.
• Creators: Let me know if I’ve missed writers/artists who had a significant role during a given volume. Doesn’t have to be “wrote the whole thing”, but at least make it “did more than one issue.”
• Which runs to read: It’s not about quality, so please, no comments like “you should include run X, it’s so good!” or “don’t recommend run Y, it’s the worst!” This is specifically a list of “which MK comics to read for significant Headmate Content.” We have to include Bendis and Bemis. I’m sorry.

I’m also putting in some images, because this is long and I want to break it up a bit.

Tonight’s goal: write up short and concise reactions to stuff I’ve been meaning to talk about.

Moderate spoilers follow!

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

As a fantasy comedy adventure, this was…okay? It wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. The jokes from the trailers were snappy, but there were a lot of long stretches without enough jokes.

As a D&D movie, it was pretty unsatisfying. Which I kinda expected, but was still a bummer. It had the place names, the magic types, and the owlbears, but what I want from a D&D movie is the sense of “behind-the-scenes this story is getting built by a group of friends, sitting around a table having fun together,” and it didn’t deliver. (Example: a real-world campaign would not start with one guy narrating his character’s whole backstory, while the rest of the table sits and listens!)

Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

Full disclosure, I’m one of the basic gays who watched this because I heard it was “what if Gundam did Utena?” The plot had a bunch of interplanetary political dramas, and power struggles between corporate factions, as Gundam shows are wont to do…which I did not track very closely, and mostly didn’t try to. That’s not a criticism of the show at all, that’s me slacking as a viewer.

I had already seen a ton of screencaps, gifsets, and promo images featuring Suletta and Miorine, the main f/f couple, and liked what I saw! What I did not anticipate going in was that I had seen basically all the Suletta/Miorine content. Their dynamic is the center of the first few episodes, and they’re married in a flash-forward at the end…but they spend large chunks of the middle in separate places, pursuing different plot points, not keeping in touch or interacting at all.

That said, my circles were so focused on sharing and discussing the f/f, I managed not to get spoiled for a single hint of the more Evangelion-inspired parts of the plot. And I liked those too.

Moon Knight: City of the Dead

The 5-issue limited miniseries that just wrapped up. I wanted to like this so much more than I did! It had a promising setup and some cool ideas, but the worldbuilding potential kept getting wasted, and the characterization felt off in ways that weren’t satisfying.

It gets a lot of influence from the TV series — which, listen, obviously I love. But it makes major changes to the comics setup, and some of them did not get backported well.

For example: This is where 616 Layla gets her own path to becoming the Scarlet Scarab. And I’m into it! She looks great! But 616 Layla was a woman Marc dated for a short time, way back in his mercenary days, before he even met Khonshu. She wasn’t his adventuring partner for a good chunk of his adult life, let alone his wife. It doesn’t seem likely that she would’ve met Jake or Steven at all.

I can believe they loved each other, and that they clicked really well! I don’t buy that she was “the one great love of 616 Marc’s life” or “the person who understands him better than anyone else.” (…Also, I don’t buy that Marc would call her that. For one thing, 616 Marc’s brand of melodrama is “I am so broken and tormented that nobody can understand me.” For another, if he was in a mood to admit that there are people who have his number, he’s self-aware enough to know the list is topped by Dr. Sterman, Marlene, Duchamp — and possibly, by this point, Tigra.)

Credit where credit’s due, it did finally give Jake and Steven something to do toward the end. (And it gave us 616 canon “Jake calling Layla affectionate bug-related nicknames,” which, as someone who writes MCU Jake doing the same thing, I was very excited to see.)

The Marvels

This movie was so much fun. Just a delight from start to finish. Kamala in particular is a champion and a treasure.

Critics are picking on the plot, but I don’t think it was any more comic-book-silly than the average MCU movie. And frankly, I could’ve watched 90 minutes of this team doing random space nonsense and loved it, even with no plot at all. There are individual bits I could complain about, but overall? Possibly one of my favorite films in the whole Multiverse Saga.

Also! I have had a fic in progress for a year where one of the plot points is They Need Monica But Can’t Find Her, and my vague plan was always “whatever she does in The Marvels is keeping her too busy to reach.” Haven’t added to the fic for most of that year, because it got to a point where I couldn’t write more without knowing the specifics, but the general idea seemed safe to make plans around. And I was prepared to fudge the details if necessary.

Whoo boy, I will not have to fudge those details. Not only that — the specific movie reason for Why Monica Is Unavailable suggested a specific idea for How They Get Monica Back, which I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise, and which is perfect for the overall themes of the fic.

…and in the week since then, I’ve been marathon-writing almost 20,000 new words. (Stick around for 6-ish months more, and maybe I’ll finally be ready to start posting it.)

Got a Tumblr ask for my thoughts about Moon Knight vol 1 issue #35…and I ended up rereading the thing, and writing a whole mini-essay. Decided it was substantial enough to crosspost!

Original ask:

And the reread/more-or-less-liveblog…

In the comic the guys are using a chair because of a spinal injury (a Comics Injury which comes and goes as the plot demands), and the implication I got from the show was that the asylum put them on meds so strong they couldn’t walk. So I don’t think they’re that directly connected. But it’s nice to have the visual callback.

Marlene being so present and supportive during the hospitalization and physical therapy is extra-depressing compared to how Marc will treat her hospital-grade injury in later runs =(

I don’t think it’s actually Steven fronting for the first chunk. Marlene usually calls them Steven, but that’s just like how Frenchie always calls them Marc, and the diner crew always calls them Jake – even if someone with a different name is fronting, he almost never corrects them.

(More than that, Marc specifically encourages Marlene to call him Steven! Skipping to a later scene, this is one of the issues where he spells out how much he wants to be Steven for her.)