Captain Marvel

[sophia_sol]

I saw Captain Marvel the other night! A fun movie. I really loved Carol, and her storyline of finding herself and freeing herself.

I also loved her interactions with Fury, their whole dynamic was AMAZINGGG, plus also her friendship with Maria was lovely and also Monica! And I want to know more about Mar-Vell, she seemed super cool too.

Also I think Carol is my not-having-to-smile-spiration. I really liked the things she did with her face. And something about this made me feel, like, weirdly comfortable in myself on my way home from the movie.

The plot with the skrulls on the other hand was..... Well, as Rose Lerner says, a story about a race of lizard people infiltrating the earth is really uncomfortable wrt antisemitic tropes even if their evilness is subverted in the second half. I'm sure the creators just weren't thinking about it rather than being actively malicious but it's still unfortunate.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Huh. The Skrulls thing hadn't pinged me at all that way, which is odd, usually I bang on and on about things like that. I think here my sense from many, many comics of the Skrulls vs. Kree as Cold War metaphor overrode the other potential coded meanings. Most of my complaining about the handling of the Skrulls in the movie was how their vision of the Skrulls didn't work within the Cold War metaphor, so I didn't get as far as thinking about what they'd replaced it with. But yes, not the best choice.

[sophia_sol]

I have no idea whether the skrull thing would have pinged me that way on my own, as I saw Rose Lerner's tweets about it days before going to the movie. But I don't have any of the background about skrulls from comics, as skrulls haven't appeared in any of the Marvel comics I've read so I wasn't aware of the usual burden of metaphor they're given to carry.

[seekingferret]

There's very much a The Skrulls Are Evil Soviet Infiltrators... THERE COULD BE A COMMUNIST RIGHT NEXT TO YOU AT WORK thing going on in many of the early Skrull stories in the Avengers comics. The best Skrull-Kree stories for me, therefore, are the ones where it emerges that the Kree, the noble warriors identified with the US, and the Skrulls, the sneaky sneaky communists, are both colonialist imperialist powers and therefore heroism for our superheroes involves rejecting both sides and trying to fight for the downtrodden being harmed by the war.

[sophia_sol]

Huh, yeah, that is pretty different from how this goes in the movie!