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scans_daily
So after the messy breakup Disney and Sony have patched things up and Spider-Man will be back in the MCU.
Per Variety:
The new deal was signed late on Thursday night. Negotiations involved top players from both studios, including Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman, Feige, and Walt Disney Studios head Alan Horn. In exchange for lending Feige’s producing prowess, Marvel and Disney will receive roughly 25% of the profits, according to insiders. Disney will retain its merchandising rights. As part of the arrangement, Spider-Man will also appear in one future Marvel Studios film.
Not too surprising but a relief nonetheless.
In related news Sony is making a Madame Web film. Yep.
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Date: 2019-09-27 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 03:44 pm (UTC)It is interesting that this is only for one Spider-man movie and one cameo though and it looks like that Spider-man movie comes out relatively soon - in 2021.
I am wondering if this is just a temporary truce. Sony may take Spider-man back after these movies are done. Surely Disney would like to have Spider-man for more than 2 movies.....
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Date: 2019-09-27 03:45 pm (UTC)But since Sony made me absolutely furious with their decisions about the Spiderverse, I'm going to root for Disney out of sheer spite.
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Date: 2019-09-27 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 04:27 pm (UTC)It certainly killed any enthusiasm I had for the sequels.
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Date: 2019-09-27 05:20 pm (UTC)The Spiderverse movie is perfection. I honestly don't have a single criticism of it. It has everything I love about SM and things I didn't even know I wanted. Five stars with chef's kiss.
Therefore I am absolutely livid that I will have to pass on its sequel and all-female spin-off, because Sony decided to hire two individuals who hurt me so badly, I'd rather eat nails than touch anything they make ever again.
You know the funny/sad part? I'm actually grateful for S8. It got people to stop telling me that I was crazy for being so upset for S6&7. The same people who yelled at me and my friends that we were ungrateful idiots for not seeing the brilliance of the EPs, are now still crying over the epilogue. Talk about turnabout.
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Date: 2019-09-27 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 06:05 pm (UTC)The short version is that the executive producers for the Voltron reboot, who made a lot of horrible decisions, have been hired to direct the upcoming Spiderverse sequel and the upcoming all-female Spiderverse spin-off series. The situation is muddled by the fact that, while fact-checking timelines and interviews shows very clearly that the EPs constantly lied to blame others for their terrible choices regarding racist, ableist, sexist and just plain cruel tropes, Voltron Fandom is incredibly abusive, and dishes out death threats like they are candies. So that it's extremely difficult to make any kind of criticism, because it gets co-opted by deranged people who go "that's right, what they did was super shitty! That's why we should break their hands at the convention!"
If you have been lucky enough to stay out of the loop so far, I highly recommend you remain there.
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Date: 2019-09-27 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 10:29 pm (UTC)Seasons 1 & 2 had five executive producers including at least one very experienced show runner. Dreamworks was also vetoing the worst of the final two ep's ideas.
Season 3 all but the final two left but Dreamworks was still watching so that's why the show seemed so unfocused they ep's wanted something very different and they admit they through out the bible that had been used for season's 1 & 2. They also have admitted they pulled an intentional bait and switch on many plot lines. (A pattern that continued until the end of the show with stuff implying one thing then it being abandoned and somethingelse random shove din place)
Then when Voltron wasn't the smash hit Dreamworks wanted (post Season 3 the viewership seemed to tank and the ep's blamed Keith not being in black instead of other things)
They were then given the go ahead for season 7 and 8 to be mostly how they wanted and fans were not happy so based on interviews it looks like they wanted to tank the show even further during the final few episodes because they were mad folks didn't like their vision for the series. As in their post series interviews they blame everyone but their own decisions for the reception. They seem especially bitter that one of if not the most popular character is the one they found boring and wanted to kill off.
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Date: 2019-09-28 12:04 am (UTC)Rather than the showrunners having an ending in mind all along and refusing to change it despite it no longer fitting the show they had created, there were too many visions collading and making a schizophrenic mess (is that right? schizophrenia?) and a change of course that was at odds with the original vision.
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Date: 2019-09-28 05:27 am (UTC)So it is almost like we get three different shows of 26 episodes each. The first two seasons are what Dreamworks, the initial writers and most of the EP's wanted. which is probably why despite not being perfect it holds together far better than any of the rest of the series.
Seasons 3 through 6 is the disjointed seasons because executives still want more of Seasons One and Two but now being the only executive producers LM & JDS start to try to sneak in as much of what they want as possible. Like they admit they intentionally misled Viewers with Lotor. that they intentionally wrote him as if he was going to be redeemed while all along knowing they weren't going to redeem him. Which on it's own is fine a character having the potential for redemption adn not being redeemed can be a good story. However, they didn't write that instead they wrote two waffling extremes that jumped back and fourth from Lotor is redeemable to Lotor is a just a monster and always was without explaining or justifying anything. The story line skips around with Lotor's goals changing by the season and none of his villianous actions actually being fully explained. Another example would be like the black paladins fight which is a blatant rip off of Winter Soldier but again doesn't really fit thematically and isn't followed up on cause JDS just thought it was a cool fight and wanted a version of it.
Seasons 7 & 8 are where they finally get their way and based on comments is when the show started being pulled apart and frankenstiend together to make their idea a reality. We know that from Season 3 on wards episodes were thrown out and reworked constantly as they fought to get their chosen line up and jumped from one idea they thought was cool to another without any consistency. For example we know that they wanted Shiro dead and gone by Season 7 (hell they wanted him dead after six episodes) and Executives initially wanted him back in Black (and at least some episodes from Season 7 at least had started production with him in that role before being recut and reanimated to not feature him in the role)
And one mystery that still bugs me is why the leaks of the ending had Roy Fokker in the place of the nameless back ground extra that married Shiro. Cause it makes no sense for them to ever exist at all. Unless someone was trying to intentionally set Dreamworks up for a law suit from the mess that is the Robotech/Macross rights mess.
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Date: 2019-09-27 10:36 pm (UTC)The the show runners are horrible and we need to physically attack them folks and the The show runners would have given us an awesome show its all dreamworks fault how dare you mention that they admitted dreamworks gave them permission to address fan complaints how they wanted and what we got is what they choose. (This is the same group that keeps insisting there is some secret cut of season 8 that is good.)
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Date: 2019-09-28 07:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 11:32 am (UTC)- The Alteans are genocide survivors. Out of ALL the Alteans, who are 99% white, ONLY the black Altean was used for a Reverse Racism story where she resents a teammate for belonging to the race that exterminated hers. The white Alteans are totally cool with him, and with his race in general, and only hate the bad people. But the black one had to be taught that hating people because of their race is wrong.
- Said black character is also the only version of that character who is black. In every other Voltron media (several different cartoons and comics), that character is blond with blue eyes. ALL the white versions of the character get a happy ending, while ONLY the black version ends up dying to save the world.
- While "hero sacrifices himself to save the world" is not a bad trope in and of itself, it becomes bad when it kills off one of the extremely few black female characters in leading roles. You kill off a white male hero, there are 463278462387 more. You kill off the black female hero, you are kinda screwed. Making it worse, this character had been portrayed as suffering from depression throughout the latest seasons, so that her death comes across less as heroic sacrifice and more as suicide.
- The brown Cuban kid who dreamed of being a pilot, and never once in 78 episodes ever expressed anything but sheer love for an exciting life, in the final two minutes of the final episode ends up realizing that the place for him is a farm.
- By the EPs' own admission, Lotor was meant to be a "bad example" of mixed-race person, to contrast him with Keith as "good example" of mixed race person. Forgive my French, but what the fuck.
- In every other Voltron media, Keith is an Asian guy. Here, he is very clearly whitewashed, but still they cowardly made it ambiguous enough that people could HC him as Asian without actually making him Asian in canon.
Seriously. They refused to give him a last name ("Kogane" is fanon, comes from a different version of the character), gave him a Texan father, and refused to confirm his nationality, even when EVERY OTHER character had a specific nationality. So it was like:
Interviewer: Keith is half alien, but about his human half, what is his ethnicity?
EPs: oh, we couldn't possibly say, because the story takes place in the future, and in the future, everybody is mixed up! So, Keith is HUMAN, we can't give him a specific race because there are no specific races in the future!
Interviewer: ok. And what are the races of the other characters?
EPs: Pidge is Italian, Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half-black half- Samoan, Shiro is Japanese.
Interviwer: but Keith...?
EPs: HUMAN! There is no such thing as race in the future!
Some people at least had hope that Keith's Texan father had Asian ancestry because he kinda looked like Shiro, who is Japanese. But the EPs confirmed that the resemblance was just a coincidence, they never meant for the dad to look Japanese.
- Keith is said to be the best leader of Voltron, better than his poc predecessor, because he has Galra blood. The Galra are basically Space Nazis. So, out of all the reasons they could have brought up to justify why Keith should be in charge instead of the poc guy (like, I dunno, his empathy or pilot skills or whatever), they go with "the half-white guy is also half space-nazi and that's why he should give the orders."
- Even BEFORE they became Space Nazis, back when they were still on the side of the angels, the Galra invaded and conquered planets. This is portrayed as totally cool when they happily name the prince after a "hero" who conquered a lot of worlds, and the peaceful Alteans think the guy is just as heroic as one of their greatest scientists.
- Hunk, the aforementioned half-black half-Samoan guy, was going to be killed and replaced as Paladin by a blue alien. The EPs were really pissed when DW forbade them to, and openly whined in the interview about it.
Sexism:
Every single woman who is ever put in charge ends up going insane, making terrible decisions that endanger her planet, or losing all of her authority.
Allura starts out as co-leader of Voltron and leader of the Coalition. Ends up as a foot soldier who takes orders from Keith and Lance, and is treated as a cadet by the Earth military.
Homophobia:
The EPs very, very, very heavily promoted S7 as GLBT-friendly. They gave whole interviews about the relationship between Shiro and new character Adam, and enthusiastically sent tweets like "you are going to see more of Adam in S7! :D" from their personal accounts after they showed the episode that introduced him.
In S7:
- Shiro's homosexuality is so ambiguous that even the Spanish voice actor didn't realize he was supposed to be gay. Just by watching the show, without knowing the World Of God, it's impossible to tell he and the other guy are engaged.
- Adam gets about 30 seconds of screentime after that one episode they had already shown. Then he dies screaming in pain and terror in a fire.
A lot of people claimed that it was okay to kill Adam because Shiro was supposed to be our rep, not Adam, who was a brand new character we knew little about. But 1)as mentioned before, Shiro is entirely closeted in S7, you need to read interviews to know he is gay, and 2)they very heavily marketed both Shiro and Adam as gay rep, and specifically talked at length about Adam in several interviews, and 3)Adam was also a man of colour.
- The moment Shiro is revealed to be gay in interviews, he is practically quarantined from the Team. Then he is married off to a nameless NPC in the epilogue.
- A female villain is revealed to be a lesbian. 30 seconds later she gleefully tortures a little girl. Then she, too, dies in a fire.
(Fan outrage about pulling two Bury Your Gays in the Season that had been very heavily promoted as GLBT-friendly caused DW to retcon her death and bring her back in S8, but she was definitely meant to die in the explosion)
Ableism:
- Shiro's PTSD magically disappears offscreen. When asked about it in interviews, the EPs claimed that he "got over it" between S6 and S7 because "he is a professional." Wow! Who knew being a professional magically cures mental illnesses!
- Shiro is an amputee. The EPs admitted in interviews that they never put any thought into his status as disabled rep, they just wanted a character with a cool-looking arm. It literally didn't occur to them that making him lose his arm (TWICE! First up to the biceps, then up to the shoulder) meant anything.
(Compare and contrast DuckTales: https://66.media.tumblr.com/4b0925aca92cb96cddd82d706816559f/tumblr_inline_po635jiUJc1r4pd3o_1280.jpg)
- Shiro is systematically robbed of his agency. He is the only Paladin who never gets to use his bayard (Paladin's special weapon), he is replaced as leader of the team for NO given canon reason (and the reason they give in interviews makes no sense, they basically say that transferring his soul out of the Black Lion makes her stop loving him), he loses the fight against his abuser Sendak, his new robot Atlas is bigger than Voltron but also much weaker and can only buy a few minutes for Voltron to come save the day, he follows Keith's orders in the final battle, every single enemy he ever defeated comes back to be finished off by somebody else (even the friggin' Gladiator from S1 comes back in S8 for God's sake!), and in the epilogue he retires in his twenties.
- Narti, the disabled General, is fridged shortly after her introduction. For a while at least it seemed like her death had affected the remaining three Generals, but then it turns out that the "For Narti" line was a trick and they never actually planned on avenging her.
Cruel tropes:
- They intentionally baited the fans by pushing the plot thread that Lotor would be redeemed. They named the episode where he defects "A New Defender," they kept saying in interviews that they come from Avatar and they are very familiar with Zuko *hint hint*, they showed his family as incredibly abusive and Lotor himself as desperate, they showed that Lotor was a victim of severe racism (he is mixed race, and as stated above, the Galra are Space Nazis and are pretty obsessed with blood purity).
Then, after revealing him to be a villain, they gave an interview where they practically dislocated their shoulders by patting themselves on the back as they gleefully bragged that "we made them think we would give them a Zuko, but we gave them an Azula!"
(Nevermind the fact that Azula herself was a 14-year-old child, not a monster, and that Aaron Ehasz himself confirmed that he always wanted her to be redeemed).
When a fan who was a survivor of child abuse told them that the bait-and-switch really hurt him, they laughed it off, and claimed that Lotor was just beyond redemption. Then they proceeded to redeem Lotor's abusive parents, who were objectively much worse.
- Shiro is replaced by a clone in S3-6. The real Shiro lost his body, and his soul was preserved in the Astral Plane. The clone has no idea he is a clone, he sincerely believes he is Shiro. He also sincerely loves the team, is kind, heroic, and always tries his best. He suffers tremendously in his short life, and works hard to keep the team save and save the universe.
After 4 seasons, this clone is mind-raped by the villain, and forcibly mind-controlled into betraying the team.
Literal seconds after he is confirmed to be a clone, the story immediately informs us that he is not a person, but rather a "thing." Keith, who had been desperate to save him when he believed him to be the real Shiro, switches to referring to this still living guy as just a body. Lance cries for the real Shiro, who tried to warn him about "the impostor" from the Astral Plane, but not for the clone, who reached out to him for help when he started to suspect that he was not himself.
The clone is injured, but explicitly stated to be still alive. The team takes him out of the healing pod. Just a couple of episodes before, Allura used her magic to heal a mortally wounded Lance. Here, instead of healing the clone, she forced Shiro's soul into his body. The team cheers happily when the guy who wakes up identifies himself as the real Shiro, they never ask what happened to the clone's soul.
In interviews, the EPs admitted that they created the clone's character solely because they wanted a version of Shiro who could make mistakes, because they felt that the real Shiro was dragging the team down by being too perfect. They happily explained how the clone would serve his ultimate purpose by becoming a "husk" to bring the real Shiro back, that the popolar "Monster & Mana" episode was meant to ridicule him for being boring, and they referred to him as an "it."
When the EPs realized that fans had grown attached to the clone after watching him suffer and try his best for four seasons, and were questioning the ethics of basically murdering a sentient being in his sleep to steal his body (especially right after the heroes fought Lotor over the crime of harvesting people like things), they started saying that Shiro and the clone merged together. Supposedly, the Shiro with white hair is an amalgamation of both the real Shiro and his clone, a fusion of both their consciousnesses.
Whether this merge was intentionally done to save both Shiro and the clone, or was just an unintended consequence of saving the real Shiro, is left vague. They also said nothing about consent.
But those points are moot anyway because S7 flat out confirms the WoG to be a lie when Shiro himself talks about "the dead body of an evil clone of myself." So, not only did they dehumanize him and let him die in incredibly questionable circumstances, but didn't even mourn him, because they victim-blame him for the evil things that he was forced to do while under mind-control.
Most of Fandom's take at this point is that the clone's soul is gone, but Shiro got his memories, just like when Shiro was dead and the clone had his memories. Not only does this take still beg the question "so why are they not mourning the guy they lived with for half a year, then?" But it's also never even hinted at in canon. At no point does Shiro in S7-8 ever shows that he remembers anything from S3-6.
- Shiro is revealed to have a disease that will destroy his muscles within a couple of years. We are told in interviews that he is cured now, but the show never bothers to take even ten seconds for a throwaway line to make that canon. As far as canon is concerned, Shiro retires in his twenties because he is still sick. They did think it was vitally important to take entire episodes to show us tertiary characters' hobbies!
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Date: 2019-09-27 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 06:46 pm (UTC)huh...
it's... odd that description could fit two different shows...
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Date: 2019-09-27 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 04:09 pm (UTC)That said, I genuinely disliked the MCU's take on Spider-Man for a lot of reasons so the promise of more of it doesn't exactly enthuse me. Also, I just like to see Disney lose, so I'd have loved to see them get that particular toy snatched away from them.
And now I'll never get to see Tom Hardy's marvelously manic Venom meet Tom Holland's military-industrial-complex-teen Spider-Man.
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Date: 2019-09-27 04:29 pm (UTC)Eventually, Sony will try to make another Spider-move and it'll bomb and they'll sell the rights back to Marvel. This just means they get money without the outlay of money to make a movie.
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Date: 2019-09-27 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 05:57 pm (UTC)(616 got around it by making Peter a huge, aggressive asshole every time another hero popped up in his book (or vice-versa), but eventually even that wore thin. Is there really any reason for him to keep crawling back to Jameson when everyone from Tony Stark to Luke Cage would probably be happy to take him as a part-timer?)
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Date: 2019-09-27 10:53 pm (UTC)A Iron man fan boy with Miles best friend under a different name instead of movie actually about Peter Parker in the MCU.
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Date: 2019-09-27 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 05:48 pm (UTC)And now I just defended one multi-million mega corp from another, so I need to take a shower now.
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Date: 2019-09-27 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 07:11 pm (UTC)Assuming Sony wants that (which I doubt due to a series of reasons) the would need to take it to trial and have someone decided wether animated movies count or not.
I am not a lawyer, but I imagine Sony would probably argue that making an animated movie COUNTS as making a spider-man movie 1) it was a full-feature film, 2) it premiered in theathers and 3) it's animation was necessary to capture the comics's unique visual style, ergo a PROPER spider-man movie has to be animated (basically, in case animated movies don't normally count, to argue that comic-book movies should be an exception because being animated is a necessity)
Disney, on the other hand, would probably argue either that the deal was intended for live-action movies or (if they believe there is not a strong enough case for that) that live-action and animation are different on a fundamental level, ergo they are entirely different rights and Sony is free to keep making animated spider-man movies, but the rights to the live-action version should be returned to them.
It should be noted that, in either case, what both studios are interested on are the live-action version of the character.
Again, I am not a lawyer, so do not take this as reality in any way.
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Date: 2019-09-27 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-29 01:18 am (UTC)I'm betting on at least one set of lawyers being idiots given the way Marvel used to handle rights sales.
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Date: 2019-09-27 10:02 pm (UTC)Oh well.
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Date: 2019-09-27 10:21 pm (UTC)Then I find this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6WEvHsvzOQ
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Date: 2019-09-28 12:10 am (UTC)Now we can get Spiderman: At Home, where Chameleon wants to kill Spider-Man because Tony Stark took his parking spot that one time.
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Date: 2019-09-28 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 08:07 am (UTC)What’s next, an Ezekiel Sims solo movie? A Crusher Hogan film? A Carlie Cooper rom-com? A TV show about the secret history of that one scientist who irradiated the spider?
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Date: 2019-09-28 06:34 pm (UTC)