man. Remember the first time you watched Thor: Ragnarok (2017) Dir. Taika Waititi and hela asked thor ‘what were the god of again?’ and then it went to loki smirking and you KNEW something good was coming. And then immigrant song started to kick in and the LIGHTING started and you felt your SOUL leave your body and go to another plan of existance. Then Thor desending lighting and all onto that pile of aliens in slow motion looking goddamn RENAISSANCE painting? That moment changed me! the DRAMA! The rest of that scene? Valkyrie, Loki, and Hulk fighting together? Thor’s LIGHTING striking those aliens straight outta there like they were fucking ants? ICONIC! The iconic truly JUMPED out of that movie! Taika Waititi took my hand in that movie, told me it was all gonna be ok and then changed my life FOREVER! That was ART! Mr. Waititi thank you for my LIFE
the whole point of scifi is to be this bright, optimistic escapist fantasy of the future and all these “the future is Dark and Oppressive” narratives in current popular media are really killing that vibe
Deadpool really is iconic like “only best buddies execute pedophiles together” you are absolutely right mr pool that’s my favorite way to spend time with my loved ones
not to step on anyone’s toes but trying to make out that mairon and melkor could be good guys is…kinda problematic? like these guys literally kept people as slaves and tortured them (see: maedhros, beren and finrod and co., gwindor, hurin), attempted to kidnap and rape luthien, and generally fucked up the world with their inventions and poisonous plagues and natural disasters. like, i’m not saying you can’t like them as characters, i just don’t Get how you can argue that they were good guys from any angle.
this post has received at lot of backlash and i realise now that i could have been a lot more sensitive with my wording, so here’s an expansion on my original point:
i’m not saying that anyone is a bad person for liking these characters or relating to them. i’m not saying it’s bad to want to give them depth as characters and explore their personalities. i’m not even saying you can’t argue that SOME of their actions were good. but i have beef with saying “melkor and mairon were actually good people, from a certain point of view” because to me you just can’t argue that actions like mass slavery are good, or the people who engage in them are good people, no matter how you skew it. and that’s not a case of me “moralising”, i’m just tired of seeing people gloss over it like it means nothing when it’s actually a pretty serious topic, fictional or not.
I finally got my shit together and wrote out the meta about Shatterstar’s powers that’s been ruminating in my head for a long time.
It’s been well established that Shatterstar’s actual powers aren’t really particularly useful for him, the after-effects don’t really make them worth using other than, like, the teleportation, but even then he needs a 4 hour recharge period and an emotional anchor or he runs the risk of killing himself in the process.
Even though canon was fully committed to the ‘Shatterstar can’t feel emotions’ thing in the 90s, he really does read as someone who feels a lot and just doesn’t know how to process and externalize what he’s feeling because he’s not used to that being an option. (I’m sure some of that derives from writers just forgetting that, like, anger is an emotion but that’s beside the point.)
It’s easy to read him as someone who is numb and disconnected from himself and the fact that he’s used to seeing himself as Property, knowing full well that his body has been trademarked by Mojo can’t have helped with that at all.
That’s the context I need to get to the point I want to make, which is that the fact Shatterstar has to channel his powers through his swords and that they are such deficits to him says a lot about sense of self.
His powers aren’t remotely sword related and yet he still needs them to channel/focus his powers. Even with characters like Silver Samurai, he doesn’t physically need the swords to use his power, he just prefers to use it to make his sword cut really well.
Most mutants don’t have to channel their power and the ones that do have to focus their powers, like Nate Grey after his TK went all fucky in NM Vol 3, do it with a specific thought or something they do physically.
Star always channels his powers through his swords.
Could he give off shockwaves without the swords? Probably.
Could he teleport without the swords? Also probably.
But he doesn’t.
Personally, I think it’s because of two reasons:
Either he views the swords as an extension of himself, which is possible because they are hard to wield for anyone but himself.
Or, he thinks of his swords in the same way he thinks of his body. An object. One he uses to fight but still an object and that’s why it’s so hard for him to use his powers. It’s not natural to him because he doesn’t feel like his body belongs to him.
That an interpretation that’s in line with his canon. He was copyrighted. He was owned. As far as he knows for a majority of his time in canon, he was created in a lab. He likely had to come to terms with his own mortality at a very young age and there’s no way all of that combined wouldn’t great some kind of disconnect from the idea of inhabiting a physical body.
Here’s my premise: Shatterstar’s powers exhaust and/or actively harm him because they feel forced. It’s part of his natural skillset, like someone who’s really flexible or great at swimming, but he’s not used to being in touch with his body and actually inhabiting it in any meaningful way. So he doesn’t always know his own limits and it’s not easy to use them even though they’re an innate part of him.
He thinks about his powers in terms of trying to use a weapon instead of them being a part of himself, which is why they don’t work efficiently or safely and have so many side-effects.
(Plus there’s probably the problem of them likely not being his latent mutation and rather the byproduct of fucking with his genetics. 9 times out of 10, the kid’s powersets follow the parents so his latent mutation is probably something more in line with either Dazzler or Longshot’s powers.)
