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What If...? |Spoiler OT| Groot Was One Of Us?
- Thread starter Deleted member 1248
- Start date
- Spoiler Entertainment OT
I'm not letting my title suggestion die in the previous page.
Yup Shuma is an easily pissed omnidimensional being. Definitely The endgame for what if and yeah likely in MOM too
"YO LOOK GALACTUS IS COMIN"
I like how we saw Watchers all the way back in GotG 2 but now we're getting into the meat
Finished the new logo for this episode.
Bwahahaa. This is fantastic.
It's very much a product of it's time, the anime adaptation is pretty good too.
I'm not the biggest anime fan, but Steins;Gate and and Noein are two stories I absolutely fawn over.
Also, I love how they seeded the Watcher watching by making him more visible to us as an audience. And the only reason he interacts with a reality is cuz Darkter Strange noticed he was there
I think I'll have to turn in my anime credentials, because I've never even heard of this series. Gonna add it to my list.
Doing some proper voice work usually takes (a few) hours, and a bunch of the characters feature in multiple episodes (so most of the scripts of the season should be near done before recording); so I can imagine some of the cast spending a few days in a voice booth. That said, it does make sense to do it when you already have a bunch of actors close, so near/during MCU-filming makes sense when possible. I do believe that Boseman recorded his lines +/- a year before the series aired, so that would indicate that that was after he filmed Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
I am just thinking if the Chrono Trigger Solution would work here
Ie: tricking the Stephen from the past into thinking that Christina is dead, then bringing her to the future, thus preserving the timeline and preventing the paradox
Proving that Steves > StephensSteve Rogers got to live a happy life with his dead girlfriend using time travel shenanigans yet Stephen "Sorcerer Supreme" Strange can't even do it
Was literally just saying to myself that Thanos resurrected Vision just to kill his ass again. And literally got his dream farm out of it.Steve Rogers got to live a happy life with his dead girlfriend using time travel shenanigans yet Stephen "Sorcerer Supreme" Strange can't even do it
Absolutely amazing episode.
Also Rachel McAdams had more to do in this that she did in the entire 1st movie 😅
Also Rachel McAdams had more to do in this that she did in the entire 1st movie 😅
Really fantastic episode. Very poignant.
My current episode ranking so far is 2, 4, 1, 3 ( I find Nick fury a great side character, but anything focusing on shield is a snore fest for me)
My current episode ranking so far is 2, 4, 1, 3 ( I find Nick fury a great side character, but anything focusing on shield is a snore fest for me)
Man some of the animation in this ep was WOO lawd tight shit. Probably wouldn't have been half as rad if it was movie-style CG.
Also fun to see Jeffrey Wright's face right there in the Watcher, kinda like Ruffalo Hulk. And the lighting was kinda weird but it looks like they made the Watcher black, to match? I appreciate that, wonder if they'll do that for the entire "race" of watchers, as it were, or if there will be variation between em. Or if it'll ever even be touched on. I know there were those watchers in GOTG but that was mostly just a gag.
Also fun to see Jeffrey Wright's face right there in the Watcher, kinda like Ruffalo Hulk. And the lighting was kinda weird but it looks like they made the Watcher black, to match? I appreciate that, wonder if they'll do that for the entire "race" of watchers, as it were, or if there will be variation between em. Or if it'll ever even be touched on. I know there were those watchers in GOTG but that was mostly just a gag.
Having the whole narrative spin around the death of a lady was pretty tropey, but once it got over that initial setup and into the meat of the episode - I thought it was quite good. I didn't expect Dr Strange to vore himself.
It was a good episode, but I personally hate the theme its theme of "this awful thing has to happen or else the world collapses". It's a recurring theme in time travel stories where the status quo of a universe has to remain unchanged, so the only way characters can justify not stopping shit like the holocaust is to say that "Oh, it's a fixed point, it just HAS to happen, or the universe implodes". In this 'what if' case, where status quo isn't a concern, it allows the character to take it to it's logical conclusion and actually have the universe implode for strange. But for me, the issue of the structure of these kinds of stories is the arbitrariness and unrealistic behavior needed to make it happen. Like, it got straight up comical how utterly random things kept happening so that Christine dies, including atleast one case where she is dancing and dies...seemingly for no reason? Like she was having a heart attack or something? At age 25 or however old she is lol? And then the love that Stephen has is treated solid fixture for the rest of his live, even centuries later, where he cannot get over this girl, where I think that's a very teenage understanding of love. Which I get is the target audience, so maybe I'm just being an old man, but being an old, elderly man at this point, I know that love is something that has to be maintained in order to work. Which, okay, maybe the series about the time wizard doesn't need to be realistic, but the problem with that is that, narratively, it doesn't give much characterization to Christine herself. Like, she's already a pretty flat character in the single movie she was in before this, but here's she's very stereotypically a damsel in distress, post-mortum edition, without much to her except that she likes Stephen, likes pizza, and really wants her goddamn creme brulee. Compare that to the first episode, with Steve and Peggy, where we were shown on a somewhat constant basis how and why Steve and Peggy were in love with each other and constantly strengthened their bond (I'm not saying the first episode was better overall, just that they had a better depiction of love).
The fact is, the only way the future works out is if this one woman dies to motivate this one dude to be a hero, and that's just....well, it's a shitty message, both because it's just not realistic human behavior and it's arbitrary (if he's this motivated by her death, you'd think telling him "Look fuckface, either you become sorcorer supreme on your own or Christine bites it to make you do so" would get him to play game), but also because it robs Christine of characterization or agency and simply makes her a plot mechanic that just HAS to be pushed in order for the story to happen. And I just think that's an old fashioned way of storytelling that I would prefer to leave behind. Not that that makes it inherently bad, I guess, like I said, this is a well produced and well told episode as a whole. It's just made of tropes I generally do not like.
The fact is, the only way the future works out is if this one woman dies to motivate this one dude to be a hero, and that's just....well, it's a shitty message, both because it's just not realistic human behavior and it's arbitrary (if he's this motivated by her death, you'd think telling him "Look fuckface, either you become sorcorer supreme on your own or Christine bites it to make you do so" would get him to play game), but also because it robs Christine of characterization or agency and simply makes her a plot mechanic that just HAS to be pushed in order for the story to happen. And I just think that's an old fashioned way of storytelling that I would prefer to leave behind. Not that that makes it inherently bad, I guess, like I said, this is a well produced and well told episode as a whole. It's just made of tropes I generally do not like.
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I think they're waiting for a Strange movie to do a full reveal and not just the tentacles.
Evil Strange was giving me both Mephisto and Belasco vibes throughout his descent into darkness, so I could see him being the MCU version of either of them.
Do it! I absolutely adore Noein and like I said I am not an anime head at alll.
Random aside, Benedict is a great VA cuz you can hear the difference in his Evil Strange vs the classic MCU Strange. I loved that nuance
Yeah, I agree with almost everything you say here. It would have been more interesting for Strange to "lose his heart" in a different way then just fridging a fairly undeveloped character. This was just an easy way to keep him "sympathetic" while having him do pretty horrible things to get what he wanted. The only point I disagree with you is that we are supposed to believe love is fueling his actions by the end. Dark Strange believes he is doing it out of love, but his other half calls it out as obsession and a belief that he can fix everything.
Dark Strange might not have been pure evil, but he was a narcissist who refused to believe there was anything he couldn't fix/control. Some people have said they think he will get a chance at redemption if the Watcher pulls him out later in the show, but this feels like a really fitting end for the character.
The love thing is more of a semantic difference. I don't disagree that it is an obsession, but that's not mutually exclusive from it being "love", and I think the main disagreement people have with that is that they see love as a pure good thing, whereas I think love can be harmful if done in certain contexts, such as strange obsessing over saving Christine at the cost of the entire universe. Like I said, the debate is largely semantic - we all see the same thing and agree it's bad. I just don't have a problem calling this bad thing strange does love, while others do, but we're talking about the same thing.
And I agree with you about it being a good end. The whole point of the series here is to unshackle themselves from the demands of canon and the status quo. Here, they can just have it end tragically, so let this Strange have to live in his destroyed universe.
That's a good point. Media generally takes a pretty simplistic view of love and romance. Maybe with more time the episode could have examined his relationship with Christine more and explored why that relationship was worth doing what he did. What we got was a lot of fun, but it had to rely on some tired tropes as a narrative shorthand to get the story to go where they wanted it. Still, after being a little lukewarm after the first episode, it has been fun seeing this series really embrace the freedom of not being the "cannon" timeline.
This is an actual scientific principle about why events can't be changed. The Novikov self-consistency principle. From wiki: "The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes."
So basically yes the universe will make sure whatever is supposed to happen will happen. If Christine is supposed to die, yes she will die no matter what happens. Probably borrowing from that principle for their "Absolute time points".
Though since this is a what if, we know it's that you can't change that specific event, but you could stop it if you went further back. It's not that there aren't other ways Strange becomes sourced supreme, there are just none where he gets Christine
I think that's a misapplication of the concept. That ought to apply to any change at all to the Christine event, but it obviously doesn't. Like, the paradox already happens the first time Strange time travels, because when he does, he signals in his car and drive safely like he did. That creates a lack of a causal connection between the other driver hitting him when they could see him. The car hitting him regardless is itself a paradox unless the idea is that that car was intentionally trying to kill them, which isn't what the episode suggests. In fact, in the timeline where they go dancing, she just falls over dead, without an apparent cause. That itself is a paradox as well.
And it's all nonsense, because according to the fiction, the only 'paradox' that christine's death is preventing is the idea that Strange not becoming Sorcerer Supreme, which is stupid because we know for a fact that he can become Sorcerer Supreme without her dying because he fucking does in the mainline MCU.
The narrative hinges on the idea that Christine has to die or else Strange just doesn't do his thing is dumb, because if he's that devoted to Christine, then all you really need to do time travel a little further back and convince him that if he doesn't become Sorcerer Supreme, Christine will die. Which shouldn't be that hard. Strange shows up to himself from the future, says "you need to do this or Christine is fucked, and not in the way you like" does magic to prove he's the real deal and Strange's gonna be heading towards Kathmandu on the next flight.
I took it as she created a Strange that was x amount of behind the other on the timeline
yeah she created another Strange, that's the main thing I was saying. using the term 'timeline' is no different than using 'universe' to me.
say nexus beings always have to come into being
and in this universe the only way he becomes SS is by her dying (just like the MCU one is probably he had to lose his hands). by the very fabric of this universe she is always going to die even to the extent he resurrects her because he can't change it and still be in that universe. He failed only because he did go one step further and leave his universe because he only thought of timelines unlike Kang does
level of cosmic awareness is?
Timeline (as seen in Kangs place)
Universe (as seen as the intros)
timeline/universe (as seen as the MCU)
You're not really refuting my complaint so much as describing it, but uncritically.
The narrative frames her death for Strange's ascension as Sorcerer Supreme as being vital and inevitable for arbitrary reasons, and I think that's bad. The answer to the question of why does Christine have to die, despite other ways of Strange becoming Sorcerer Supreme (itself being a mandatory event is arbitrary), is "because she just does" and saying "because it's a nexus event" is as meaningless and callous as saying "god willed it". And I don't like that for reasons I stated and because it both eliminates naturalistic storytelling for the idea that there is this mandatory order to the universe when that's obviously not realistic, and it carries the inherent implication of a cosmic justification to real world tragedies. Don't like it at all.
Lol, Uatu you're not supposed to do that shit. Of course he shows himself to be like "You dumbass. You fuckin moron." right before the end of a universe
I wonder if that's the point though. It's arbitrary that it's her specifically.
I think the question posed is what if Stephen lost his heart. What if no matter the circumstance he could never fill his heart?
Obeng tells Stephen "Love can break more than your heart, it can shatter your mind."
Unfortunately, the device they choose to explore the narrative is some basic a** fridging, but I don't believe her death specifically was the catalyst, but moreso what would happen if Stephen lost what he loves in an Absolute way. Would he get the Point or drive himself to a Madness.
I mean that's usually when he shows up, when something world/reality ending goes down, that's when he's allowed to show himself, even state his purpose but he can't directly influence events
