Frozen II is about to come out. If you ask me, I think the trailers are intriguing and I think there’s a chance it’ll be good.
To be honest: I am one of those people who is annoyed by just how POPULAR Frozen is and how every little girl (it seems) loves Elsa and “Let It Go”. Or is it that Frozen is marketed by Disney as the coolest thing (pun intended?) they ever came up with when it actually isn’t? Or it is Frozen Disney’s proposal for a Holiday cult for a secular society?
Yuck.
On reflection, I do remember that there were legitimate reasons I liked Frozen when it first came out and in the first phase of its popularity before the hype wore off. Now is a good time to review them.
Let It Go
I adore the songs written for this film, all of them have a special place in my heart.
I’m not gonna lie, “Let it Go” isn’t my favorite. It’s one of the things about Frozen that is so overrated. But it does deserve some of the love.
The thing about being obsessed with someone or something is that you can’t run out of things to say about the thing. Your mind is constantly turning the subject over and finding new angles. From time to time, this is actually beneficial.
I was going to write a longer post and go more in-depth about the upcoming DisneyPlus series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The thing was, the draft came to about thirteen typed pages. At least forty-five percent of it was me going off about Endgame and my fears for the upcoming series. This new version is eight pages, but I hope it’s more readable.
Bucky Barnes has already been featured in two blog posts of mine this year already. But, in honor of Sebastian Stan’s birthday (Aug. 13), and the upcoming series, I want to say a little bit more. To reiterate, I don’t even know if I will be able to subscribe to DisneyPlus to watch the series properly. I have a little over a year to figure that out.
For now, I do have thoughts about Bucky’s character and where he goes in the future. And instead of going off about every instance that Bucky has been shortchanged in the MCU to date, as well as little thing that could go wrong in Falcon & Winter Soldier, I want to tone down the angst and focus on my hopes. (I swear this will be my last Marvel post for the year—but I can’t promise this will be the last time I mention Bucky.)
Spider-man: Far From Home is due imminently, so if I am going to say something about Endgame I had better say something now. Just to be upfront, if you liked Endgame you may not want to read this post, because I didn’t and I am in no state of mind to argue.
Remember when I said I was going to write a review for Avengers: Endgame? Well, I wasn’t able to go see Endgame a second time during its initial run in theaters (so that I could have a “fair” opinion of it), and I don’t even know if the rerun with the “extra footage” is playing in my area. I might not get to watch it again until it comes out on digital/blu-ray…but even then I am not sure I want to even see it.
I was planning on a much bigger article about this year’s Spring FanX in Salt Lake. However, it turns out that I am struggling with my depression right now and I have other demands on my time, and I just don’t feel terribly inspired to write a blow-by-blow 3000 word essay.
I moved to Arizona last fall, but my mom was willing to drive me up to Utah for a weekend and also give me a lot of financial support for the con. Not to mention that she gave me a lot of help with my Captain Marvel costume a month earlier.
I will tell you about a few important things. The biggest one is that I got to meet Clark Gregg. Clark Gregg is the actor who plays Phil Coulson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Those of you who have been reading my blog posts might have an idea about what this character means to me.
I told you briefly last fall about my Jedi OC and her living in the Marvel Universe and being a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. What I didn’t tell you was that her partner and trainer is Phil Coulson. That was the story I came up with for Coulson when I quit watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.—at least the first part of his story in my fanfic arc.
If you’ve been able to see Avengers: Endgame, good on ya. There will be a review post coming soon, I hope. There has been a lot going on on my end. Keeping with the spirit of commemorating the last eleven or so years of Marvel films, here is a walk down memory lane that shows you the funnier side of this universe.
The early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were in the early days of the internet becoming a hub for social media and meme culture. Memes as a form of humor, to my recollection, exploded in 2012, around the time The Avengers came out. You could argue that Marvel fandom invented online fandom and memes. If not, you have to at least agree that this fandom and memes have more or less always gone hand in hand.
The MCU fandom has spawned billions of images with funny captions or screenshots of Twitter and Tumblr text posts. This saga, that many are now referring to as the Infinity Saga, is the story that the digital generation grew up with. They have celebrated it in countless ways: the examples below are just a few.
1. Iron Man Not Having a Superhero Identity Crisis
SparkNotes Version/Summary: My headcanon is that the end goal of Hela in Thor: Ragnarok was to turn the universe into a realm of the undead by enslaving the souls of the living in a trance-like state, similar to what Thor saw in his dream in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
I wanted to do more for Women’s History Month in March. With the time crunch to an upcoming convention and Avengers: Endgame, I had to make some sacrifices. However, I feel this theory of mine is important enough to merit a blog post, and since it’s Marvel-related I can move forward with it. (If this reads like an English paper, please know that it’s how I’ve been trained to present an argument.)
Remember that tangent I went on in my Captain Marvelreview about how Carol Danvers should consider the possibility of taking over the universe simply because she is that powerful and she can just blow up anyone who gets in her way?
It was while I was pursuing that line of thought that it occurred to me that the MCU has already featured an overpowered female character who wanted to do just that.
Since then, I’ve rewatched Thor: Ragnarok. The whole movie is great, but the best part for me is Cate Blanchett as Hela, the goddess of Death. Seriously, I can’t take my eyes off her. Especially when she’s got her hair down. She is just soooooo fabulous. And of course, I loved cosplaying her last fall at FanX.
Thor: Ragnarok has been criticized for being too much of a comedy, but then again what could be more dark and depressing than the scenes of Hela just killing…and killing…and killing? Maybe the critics took home their blu-ray copies and just skipped all of Hela’s scenes.
Hela’s story in the movie is that she wants to conquer the entire universe simply because SHE CAN. She argues that it is Asgard’s responsibility because they are worthy to do so as the most superior people in the universe (not stated but definitely implied). It’s also because her dad didn’t let her do that before, and now he’s not in the way.
“It’s come to my attention that you don’t know who I am.” (Jason Hsu)
After Ragnarok came out, there was something small about Hela that bothered me for a while. She is the goddess of Death, but how so? In the movie, she conjures weapons, slaughters the innocent, and raises an army of zombies so she can kill even more people. In the comics and in Norse mythology, however, Hel/Hela rules over an actual realm of the dead, which seems more like the trait of a goddess than just being an overpowered warrior and conqueror. What does Hela killing people with magic weapons have to do with her being a Death goddess, besides the obvious?
The Apprentice Chronicles 