I know we all have justified critiques of the MCU being a massive cultural juggernaut etc
And I'm not saying a version of #WandaVision that was a purely scrappy indie project couldn't do a lot of things they can't
But it really does gain a ton of power from being in the MCU
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We all know that millions of people saw his death happen on the big screen in one of the highest-grossing movies of all time It feels real, it has weight, simply because of that fact Because this is a "canon" MCU production we know that undoing it is also a Big Fucking Deal
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This is the borrowed power that mainstream comics with their burden of decades of continuity ran on It is not a power that, to say the least, they have generally used responsibly, but it is a lot of power To tell the kids "Superman is finally going to DIE in this issue"
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I mean it's like my favorite moment from the CWverse doing Crisis on Infinite Earths They did the original DC Comics Death of Barry Allen and they did it the only way they really could do it, that would actually have an echo of that same power
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They'd brought back John Wesley Shipp, from the 1980s Flash TV show -- which was unceremoniously canceled after two seasons and never got an ending And they said THIS was the ending
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They played a clip from that show -- the OG Flash meeting his version of Iris in '80s 4:3 standard definition -- as a final farewell, as the John Wesley Shipp Barry Allen destroys himself in the cosmic treadmill to save his Earth-1 counterpart
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It was EXTREMELY meta This Flash has already seen everyone he loved die, seen his entire universe brought to an end, and is this incongruous relic from a world that now never was But he makes the choice to end his existence as the hero he always was
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So that this other younger version of him can live, so that a different version of his world and his loved ones can continue I mean when you explain the meta it comes off as a very melodramatic take on the simple fact that they're referencing an old TV show that got canceled
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But it's the fact that THIS WAS A REAL SHOW, and that John Wesley Shipp is a real guy who really did take the cancellation of his show and the end of his superhero career pretty hard, and they really did call him and say "We really need you for this scene in the new Flash series"
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The fact that this all really happened in the real world, that it has a meaning beyond something they just made up for backstory It's like when they called Adam West to ask him to be the Gray Ghost in Batman the Animated Series It always gets me verklempt to think about
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It personally works slightly better if you vaguely remember it from seeing it a while back rather than just binged it all yesterday like you're doing homework. I find the fuzziness of memory makes the retcons more seamless.
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But like... in a way that feels borderline intentional. Like, it's playing on the impression of the film. The osmosed version of it. The afterimage of it. I feel less like its asking you to go and swot up on all the preceding lore and more just.... know it's vaguely there?
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