In the latest episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, we were introduced to the fictional island, Madripoor, where Sam and Bucky learned some interesting information that turned the series on its head. I, of course, went Googling to see what significance the fictional city had for the MCU and what I learned excited me big time.
Apparently, Madripoor is very popular with X-Men character, Wolverine. Yeah, you’re hearing correctly. I see what the MCU is cleverly doing. They’re slowly weaving in the areas that have something to do with these X-Men characters and that is truly an exhilarating thought!
I just wanted to share that tidbit with you and I thank you for reading and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Annlyel Online 
I’m… not unaware of what they’re going for here, but I’m not sure I’m that excited about it. One, I’m not sure I’m in a hurry to see the main characters of the X-Men recast even if Feige and company would probably do better with the actual stories than Fox did. Two… I’m having uncomfortable thoughts about whether a superhero concept that originated on a metaphorical take on the civil rights movement of the 60s, that nonetheless portrayed predominantly white mutants as victims of prejudice, has aged all that gracefully today. It’s an open question whether it could be updated to be more racially diverse without today’s audiences losing their minds at the sight of, say, a black Professor X. They got away with it with Nick Fury, though, so maybe they could pull it off. But… it’s a thing.
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The X-Men casting will surely raise some eyebrows in the future considering that the only X-Men of color that I’m familiar with is Storm…which means there will undoubtedly be people who will say to boycott it and blah blah blah.
It’s definitely going to be interesting seeing how Feige handles the X-Men in the MCU.
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Yeah. Basically there’s… Storm and Jubilee, and that’s about it. They did portray Magneto as Jewish and, at least in the films, a concentration camp survivor, but that’s just a conceit that lets them not actually need to ask people to sympathize with actual people of color in front of them, and it’s one that gets harder to work with as we get further in time away from World War II. And now that Black Panther has been successful, do we even need to use the metaphor to get away with a story about prejudice with (mostly) white mutants as the victims any more? Sadly, we just might.
But Falcon and the Winter Soldier might be a bit of a test to see if people react poorly to calling out the things that happen with race in this country. We know from seeing what happened to Finn and Rose in Star Wars that Disney is not terribly courageous about dealing with racist audience backlash. They might not have the stones to go there yet with Marvel, so this show might be a case of dipping their toes in the water.
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I think the show is doing very well with audiences considering the fearlessness of their material. The Marvel fandom is a lot more progressive than Star Wars which can be evidently seen on the Twitter feeds every single week. On Twitter, I haven’t seen anyone say anything about the show other than praise for all of its moments, including even its tensest racially. Meanwhile, as soon as Finn showed his face in the teaser for TFA there was a wave of outrage.
Black Panther, ultimately, was the test and it passed with flying colors. That gave Marvel the greenlight to be able to tell the stories they want to tell without repercussions. And honestly, the people complaining are always the minority. Kathleen Kennedy and everyone else working on the sequels just gave into their complaints because they were loud.
If you notice, the one SW movie that made the most money of every film in the saga was The Force Awakens, a movie with a female and a black lead. And it wasn’t just because people were excited about Star Wars’ return. It was actually really good and tbh, no one cared except for a minor few. Once LucasFilm decided to succumb to the noise the movies got worse and worse.
And guess what other SW movie did really well and is regarded as one of the best in the franchise? Rogue One, the most diverse movie in the franchise.
Marvel understands that if you provide great content people aren’t going to care about the themes within the story and honestly, a story about a man having to become a black Captain America isn’t realistic if it doesn’t touch on the racial implications.
Whoa, this was a long comment. Lol.
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Heh heh. You should get your own blog or something. 😜
More seriously, I agree with you for the most part. Marvel’s side of the Disney empire does seem like it’s more accepting of this stuff than Star Wars. Hopefully that continues to be the case. I don’t know if they’ll actually cast a person of color for a major character the way they did with the most recent Fantastic Four movie for Johnny and Alicia Storm. In fairness, that movie was terrible, completely independent of that decision. Some day I hope those rights will also come back to Marvel and they’ll get Doctor Doom right. The FF themselves, I could take or leave, but Doom is on the short list of the most important Marvel villains over time, ever, and it’s unfortunate that he got licensed out. It’s like Batman getting the Joker wrong and casting some dude to show off lots of tattoos and… oh. Never mind. 😓
Yeah, I also largely agree that Force Awakens and Rogue One were the two best movies of the lot. That said, they could’ve done better and still screwed it up by turning Ep9 into “somehow Palpatine returned” and a big cameo fest anyway. (Seriously, is there a better example of a self-ownage line in any movie, ever, for acknowledging how bad and poorly thought out your plot is… anywhere?)
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Oh my goodness, I know right! “Somehow Palpatine returned” is what kept me from finishing the film about a month and a half ago. I just couldn’t go any further.
In terms of Doctor Doom, I’m lucky because I don’t know anything about the character and considering how poorly he’s utilized in the movies I still barely know anything about the character. Is he like…Thanos-awesome because if so…oh snap!
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This is maybe my own opinion, but I think Doom is Marvel’s best all around villain ever. At minimum, he’s the best villain that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up with in the old school era, the quintessential “mad genius gadgeteer/powered armor” supervillain of Silver Age Marvel. He could work well off of any hero or hero group and had classic stories with many, many different characters. Iron Man, the Avengers, Captain America, Doctor Strange, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Thor, the Silver Surfer, the Beyonder/Secret Wars… _every_ major Earth-based hero had a good story somewhere with him as the heavy. And when DC wanted a good Marvel villain to work with Superman in one of the first couple of Marvel-DC crossovers? They called for Doctor Doom.
In a nutshell, his basic power level was probably around Iron Man level, but he was generally portrayed as one of the greatest minds on Earth, but his ego and his character flaws kept him from being an even greater genius than he was. IMO, the two no-arguments best Marvel graphics novels of the late 20th century were “Emperor Doom” and “Doctor Doom/Strange: Triumph and Torment”, where he achieved two of his life goals: (temporarily) coming to rule the world, and (less temporarily) rescuing his mother’s soul from Mephisto with Doctor Strange’s assistance. When done right, he’s the most noble and most dastardly of Marvel villains all at once.
In short… yeah. Doom is Thanos-awesome, at minimum. It’s really been quite a travesty of Marvel’s licensing scheme that he’s never gotten to shine the way he could.
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Wow, I can’t wait to see him in the MCU then. Let’s hope they do him justice.
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Spoiler alert, Madripoor is where Arcade, a villanous hacker lives. I’m an MCU fan, and I got to know this when I watched Ultimate Spider-Man, the animation series… so, I’m assuming that he will show up…
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