Total Control Doesn't Equal Total Quality

 Last month there was another of those annoying clickbait articles on my Facebook feed proclaiming something like, "Army of the Dead and The Snyder Cut Prove Zack Snyder is Better Without Studio Interference!"  And in the comments there was some naive dork saying how it's always better when the creator has complete control.

Which is completely false.  We really have to look no further than Zack Snyder's own creative masterpiece Sucker Punch, which was basically a lot of misogynist action movie/video game cliches sewn together into an utterly incoherent movie.  It does have some cool visuals and plenty of sexy violence, but it was a critical and financial failure.

And then we have the Star Wars prequels, all written and directed by George Lucas.  They were financially successful but critical failures and roundly maligned by fans.  Episode VIII was written and directed by Rian Johnson and while it was a critical and financial success, it's divided fans.

Another high profile disasterpiece:  Gigli was written and directed by Martin Brest and was a huge critical and commercial failure.  But on the bright side it helped destroy "Bennifer" v1.0.

Fans of Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are familiar with some real turkeys that were written and directed by the same person.  Plan 9 From Outer Space is probably the best known and widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made.  But there are plenty of others in its weight class like Birdemic, Star Games, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Hobgoblins, Blood Theatre, The Dark Power, Alien Outlaw, Galaxy Invader, and a lot lot more!  There was even a joke in a Rifftrax:  "Written and directed by the same guy, that usually works out well for us, doesn't it?"

The point being that for every Citizen Kane, there are probably three movies written/directed by the same person that were completely awful.  It's really difficult for someone not only to come up with a brilliant idea but to be able to successfully mold it into something great all on their own.  Usually what you get is like those movies I mentioned above where it's either hacky garbage or self-indulgent crap.

It's pretty much the same way with books.  Pretty much every great book has had someone else edit it.  In the old days especially the relationship between a writer and editor was really important to make a great book.  

Really I think the books where I had help from other people like Where You Belong, A Hero's Journey, and Chance of a Lifetime were better than ones I did all on my own.  It'd be nice if I had the time and money to have someone edit the Eric Filler books.  So often it's good to have another pair of eyes connected to another brain with its own experiences to spot things that don't work and to provide an added perspective.  It really requires a lot of hubris to think you can do everything on your own as well as a group of talented people.

Especially with non-creatives, I think there's a tendency to think great movies or books or music or whatever springs fully formed like Athena from Zeus's forehead.  In reality it takes a lot of work to hone any creative endeavor into something great.  It's really hard to do all of that work alone.

But when it comes to movies, the opposite can also be true.  If you see in the credits a movie has like 7 different people listed as writers, then it's also probably a piece of shit.  Something with so many writers usually means it's been kicked around a lot and had a bunch of different treatments done.  Is there a perfect number of writers?  Not really.  It all depends on who's doing the writing.  Still, doing everything by yourself is more often than not a recipe for disaster.

Sequelitis Part 3: Scarlet Knights

I've toyed with the idea of a sequel to the Tales of the Scarlet Knight stories but this is a different tack--maybe.

If you followed this blog from the start, then you know Tales of the Scarlet Knight is an 8-book series (plus two prequels) following Dr. Emma Earl, a brilliant young scientist who finds a suit of magic armor and becomes the titular Scarlet Knight.  At the end of Book 8, Emma is reunited with her 2-year-old daughter Louise, who was stolen at birth, and her boyfriend Jim Rizzard, aka the Sewer Rat, is returned from the dead by Merlin the wizard.  Emma also takes in Joanna, an 8-year-old girl from a parallel universe who is essentially a genetic clone of her, except Joanna has this power where she can communicate with versions of herself all across the multiverse.

The basic premise for this sequel idea would sort of follow the short-lived Birds of Prey series on the WB back in 2002-2003 that I blogged about months ago.  It's about 15 years later and Rampart City is at peace and Emma has hung up her cape.  But then a powerful new bad guy shows up and when Emma gets back in the armor to fight it, she winds up crippled.  Her daughter Louise, now about 17, takes over as the new Scarlet Knight.  

Emma then becomes like Oracle (or Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond) in helping her daughter by providing intel and hacking computers and also being a mentor.  And Joanna gets involved too, using her power to bring back Renee Chiostro, an 18-year-old girl who was born on Emma's world but after being corrupted by Isis and using her powers for evil went to live on a different Earth.  When Renee comes back, her powers come back as well.  Her biggest power is sort of like Rogue in the X-Men where she can siphon magic from people and objects.  So the bad guy would probably have some kind of magic power or object for Renee to siphon.

Emma, Louise, and Renee have to learn to work together as a team and stop the bad guy.  They'd each have an issue to overcome.  For Emma it would be to not try to micromanage and trust her daughters and Renee.  For Louise it would be learning to rely on her mother, sister, and Renee instead of trying to do it all herself.  And for Renee since she comes back to a world she left when she was a baby, while a lot of things are the same, not everything is, like maybe on her world green lights mean stop or whatever.  After they start working together and beat the bad guy, they probably learn that bad guy was only the tip of the iceberg and so they need to keep their team together to find the Big Bad and stop him--or her.

Like the other ones there are a lot of blanks still to fill in here.  I'd have to define what happens to Jim Rizzard and some of the other players in the Scarlet Knight multiverse, though some of them might show up for other stories.  Joanna would probably go in and out of the lineup depending on what the story called for, leaving Emma, Louise, and Renee as the core.  There'd be romantic subplots and Louise and Renee dealing with regular life in high school or college or whatever.

I probably won't actually do any of these, but it's something to think about.

Sequelitis Part 2: Chance of a Lifetime...The Next Generation?!

 This was an idea that hit me a couple of weeks ago to do a sequel to the Chances Are books only focusing on a different character.  The idea is inspired by this weird Japanese manga I got free on Amazon called Futaba-Kun Change! where a boy hits puberty and whenever he gets excited, he changes into a girl.  His father then tells him everyone in his family is that way and that his "father" actually gave birth to him!  My idea would cut out some of the weirder and incesty parts.

If you don't know, the Chances Are books are Chance of a Lifetime, Second Chance, and Last Chance about a grizzled homicide detective named Steve Fischer who, while thwarting a robbery at a pharmaceutical company, is turned into an 18-year-old girl going by the name Stacey Chance.  In Chance of a Lifetime Stacey reconnects with Steve's daughter Madison and gets revenge on those who changed him.  In Second Chance, Stacey and Madison are kidnapped by a Chinese company trying to recreate the formula from the first book and end up becoming little girls--until the drug wears off and they grow up again.  And during the story Stacey and her therapist Robert fall in love--once she's grown up again.  In Last Chance, Stacey and Robert are getting married but she finds herself becoming a man again.  An old enemy of Steve's resurfaces and is able to escape authorities by using the drug that changed Steve.  Then the bad guy kidnaps Madison and Steve rescues her.  Steve is mortally wounded, but Madison gives him a shot of the formula that makes him Stacey again.  She and Robert get back together while Madison and her girlfriend Grace get married and everyone is pretty much happily ever after.

This sequel idea would be 12-13 years later, which would still be almost present day.  Stacey and Robert have a son named Max.  Max has been a fairly normal boy, but while his classmates are starting to go through puberty by getting body hair and their voices deepening and dicks growing and such, Max finds himself getting less hairy and his voice getting higher and his dick shrinking.  Then he starts developing breasts!

At some point then Stacey finally has to come clean and it's sort of like in Teen Wolf where Michael J Fox's dad tells him he's a werewolf.  Only in this case Stacey has to tell Max about how she was a man and all the stuff that happened.  And that "Aunt" Madison is really his half-sister!

Once Max is finally a complete girl, she has to go to a new school as Maxine and make new friends and probably do something akin to winning the big basketball game.  Maybe like her mom, Maxine discovers a talent for singing and saves the big dance or something.  And in the end she decides being a girl isn't so bad after all.

This would be more of a comedy than an action drama like the Chances Are books.

Sequelitis Part 1: Another Another Chance

 Back on May 28 I mentioned someone finally reviewed Another Chance on Amazon and they brought up an interesting idea about a sequel that would give Sherman, the villain of the book, some redemption.

It got me thinking of a different approach to a sequel than I had previously been thinking.  First, some background.  In Another Chance, conman Vince is changed into a young Indian woman named Vinaya and tasked by Sherman and his shadowy government agency known as CHANCE to steal a mechanical "gland" that produces nanobots allowing someone to change his/her appearance, gender, etc.  But instead of stealing it, Vinaya falls in love with its inventor and they wind up going on the run from CHANCE until ultimately Vinaya is able to stop them.  Sherman had framed Vinaya for a bank robbery and so when Sherman is captured, Vinaya gives him some of the drug he gave Vince.  Sherman also turns into a young Indian woman who looks enough like Vinaya that no one really notices the difference and so he (now she) takes the rap for Vinaya's crimes, allowing Vinaya to have a clean slate.

At the end, Vinaya is reunited with an old girlfriend who's the founder of CHANCE, who wants her help in cleaning up the organization and undoing the damage Sherman did.

So the basic idea for the sequel is that a particularly nasty former CHANCE agent has lately been causing trouble with bombings, assassinations, and whatnot.  Every time Vinaya and her compatriots get close, the agent escapes.  Finally Vinaya goes to the prison where Sherman resides and they make a deal:  in exchange for helping them nab the bad guy, Sherman gets a new face, and eventually gets to go free.  She reluctantly accepts the deal.

And then to escape Sherman is injected with some nanobots or whatever and becomes a different woman.  For a few years Sherman has been a woman, but she has never really been a normal woman as she's spent her entire female life in prison, so there are some adjustments she has to make.  And she tries to escape a couple of times, but in the end she and Vinaya catch the bad guy and maybe Sherman falls in love with someone and decides to turn over a new leaf and so on.

The Evolution of Covers

 When I first started to make covers for Eric Filler books, they were pretty primitive.  A lot of that is from September 2014-March 2015 I was living in various motels from here to Seattle to Arizona and back again, so I only had the PowerPoint on my laptop to work with.

As time has gone on, I've tried to get a little more sophisticated.  Like some graphic "artists" at publishers like Solstice Publishing, I've tried to do more layering images.  I might get a picture of a woman from a stock photo site and then eliminate the background (which can be tricky) and then put it over a background.  Something I found recently in PowerPoint is there's a "Smooth Edges" tool that can help to take some of the edges off one picture so when you paste it on a background it doesn't stick out so much.  But you have to be careful or else you can wipe out too much edge and have pictures that look unnatural or just have holes in them.

Having use of a desktop computer makes it easier to download fonts.  You can pay for fonts, but there are enough free ones that I can usually get by.  In the last few months I've tried to get a little more creative in placing the titles, like maybe off to one side instead of just centered.  One like this kind of uses all that stuff I just talked about:

On Facebook I talked about the cover for my latest release, Hitchswapper.  It's a story about a guy who picks up a hitchhiker who turns him into a woman and they go from Oklahoma to LA and fall in love and stuff.  It was a fun story in that I used a lot of my traveling experience in 2014, at least until it gets to the LA part.

So for this cover I first wanted a picture of a female hitchhiker.  I couldn't find a great one for free.  I finally settled on this one with a lady with her thumb up.  The sign she's holding was originally white but I recolored it a light brown to look more like cardboard.  And then I used a font to make it look sort of like the words were painted on.  I dug around for a background that would show a Route 66 sign because most of the story takes place on the old Route 66.  I found this one that has it painted on the road.

In the story the main character buys a 1958 Ford Thunderbird convertible for his road trip down Route 66 from Chicago to LA.  I looked around online to find a sort of classic car looking font to use on the title and author name.  The first one I found was too wide, so I went with this other one.  Since the title is only one word (not a real word) I just centered it across the cover.

This was my first draft then:

Looking at it, something really bugged me:  there was a lot of empty space on the right side.  Maybe other people wouldn't have paid much attention to it, but my eyes kept going right to it.  

So I looked around and found a picture of a 1958 T-Bird, cut out the background and it fit in really well on the pavement of the old gas station or whatever in the background.  It's probably not exactly to scale, but who really cares?  Then I moved the author name a little bit to the right and down a few lines.

Also, when I looked at the picture for this entry, I noticed that her thumb looked really skinny, like a finger.  I  had the Soft Edges thing turned up too high so it cut off a lot of her thumb.  So I turned the Soft Edges down a little and used a copy of her thumb from the original to make it look more normal size.

This is the final result:

Obviously it's not as good as if I could pay a model to go out to a Route 66 sign with a T-Bird, but considering I paid a grand total of $0 I think it's pretty good.

Here's an example of a bad cover from someone else's book:

Basically what this guy did was take the cover he'd made for the paperback and then for whatever reason use the Kindle template.  As you can see he's got the title and the author name on it twice!  It looks ridiculous.  When I pointed this out on whatever Facebook group, someone (I don't think the author) said, "It's his cover and he likes it!"  So he likes garbage?  It's no wonder he hasn't sold a copy; if he's that lazy about the cover, what about the book inside?  Hasn't he even seen a book cover before?  Also, no one puts "By" on the cover.  Yeesh.

The #FirstWorldProblems of MTV's Daria Make Me Yearn for the Good Ol Days

 Last year Pluto TV made me slightly happier when they introduced a new "Comedy Central Animation" channel that also featured a couple of old MTV series from the 90s:  Beavis and Butt-Head and its spin-off, Daria.  The former had been shown sometimes on the "Guy Code" channel but the latter had not been anywhere since Hulu stopped streaming it at some point.  I own the series on DVD but it was still nice to be able to watch random episodes.

The premise of the show is that highly intelligent cynic Daria Morgendorffer and her family move to the suburban town of Lawndale.  Daria's mother is a successful lawyer who struggles to balance work and parenting.  Daria's father is a high-strung marketing consultant who isn't extremely bright.  And Daria's younger sister Quinn is a self-absorbed freshman who's instantly popular with boys and joins a few other snooty, narcissistic girls in "The Fashion Club."

Watching the show again in 2020-2021, it became clear how pretty much all the "problems" are what we'd call #FirstWorldProblems.  A lot of the episodes revolve around Daria's not fitting in with other students and her strict moral code that causes her to butt heads with teachers, administrators, other adults, and her parents.  In the first couple of seasons there's also her crush on her friend's twentysomething loser musician brother Trent and in the last season or two she gets a boyfriend named Tom.

As a social outcast I always enjoyed the show, but when I watch it now it seems kind of quaint.  "Problems" like difficult school assignments or whether or not to get contact lenses or that old people at a nursing home don't like her voice when she reads to them or the struggle to get into the college of her choice seem pretty minor when you think of today with Covid, gun rampages, cyberbullying, and so on.  In the show the school's principal Ms. Lee is seen as paranoid for wanting metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs, but it turns out that she was just ahead of the curve.  If anything in today's world we'd probably think she's not safety-conscious enough.  Even the token black students, class president Jody and her jock boyfriend Mac, don't face open racism from other students, but there are a couple of times where Jody experiences more thinly-veiled racism from adults, like when for a class assignment she and Daria have to apply for a small business loan and she gets turned down until she mentions her wealthy father.

In that quaintness there is a nostalgia for when things were a lot simpler, when your "problems" weren't life-and-death like they are these days.  If they rebooted the show for today's audience, Daria would be crusading against the "fake news" being peddled on social media and lapped up by her dumber classmates.  Quinn and the Fashion Club would probably be trolling and fat-shaming girls online and telling girls like Daria to kill themselves.  Jody and Mac would probably get a lot more harassment from fellow students.  And Ms. Lee would have to be even more like a prison warden.  

It's kind of depressing to think about.  Anyway, that's not to say there weren't real problems for a lot of young people in the 90s, but it was easier to be a sheltered suburban or country kid than it is today.

Coming Next Week: Sequelitis!

Next week I'm doing a theme week that probably no one will care about.  And I'm announcing it on Memorial Day, when no one will probably read the blog anyway.

I came up with new sequel ideas for some of my old PT Dilloway series and so I'm going to share one on Monday, one on Wednesday, and one on Friday.

So stay tuned for that.  Or don't.

Rebuttals

 A long time ago writing sites might have a debate about whether you should respond to bad reviews on Amazon or not.  Not being a big time author I tended to think it didn't matter if I did.  But then a couple of months ago Amazon settled the issue forever by eliminating comments from reviews.

That doesn't mean people don't still say stupid things in reviews.  Though I doubt the people who wrote stupid things ever saw my comments, at least maybe someone would see them.  Now there's no chance at all to correct fake news reviews except on a blog.

This was a particularly stupid "review" of One Day As a Bimbo:

Besides the poor grammar, the really stupid thing is the book is FREE!  It's been perma-free for years.  So saying it was "to short for the money" is moronic because you spent no money.  I think a 25-page story for free isn't that bad of a deal.  Certainly not so bad that you should give it one-star.

This 3-star review is another of those John Daniels types who wants to act like some great expert and yet clearly is not.  Check out this review of Night at the Carnival 3:

The obvious glaring error is referring to ERIC Filler as "she" and "her."  How many girls named Eric are there?

This crap about my "struggle with endings" seems to fall into that old cliche bullshit about they don't all end Happily Ever After.  I'm not writing fucking fairy tales for kindergartners so they don't all have to end Happily Ever After.  As for not being a "complete" ending the main character escapes from the psycho ex-girlfriend who changed him into a girl.  He's still a girl but doesn't feel too bad about it.  Then in the end he gets a text from the psycho ex-girlfriend to imply she's still out there.  It's basically a horror movie ending.  So you're basically saying Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and so on weren't "complete" endings?

In a shorter "review" he basically said the same thing about Night at the Carnival 2:

In this case the idiot thought the book with the creepy clown on the cover was going to end Happily Ever After with "justice" for the main character.  As for "forced relations" I don't think that really is true.  The main character had a choice:  get turned into a girl and have sex with the creepy clown or get chopped up into hamburger.  Those aren't great options but it's not "forced relations" like the clown threw him down and raped him.

The thing about both "reviews" is neither one says "verified purchase" so he's paid a grand total of $0.  Probably rented them with Kindle Unlimited.  But he did like the first book of that series, so I guess that's something.  

And then after those ones he really liked Pool Hustle Swap:

Which is funny because the ending of that isn't entirely Happily Ever After.  I mean the main character falls in love and marries a guy and she gets knocked up, but the price for this is that she had to give up her pool talent to a demon.  So while she has a new husband and child on the way, she loses something precious to her.  I'm just saying.

"Amazonian God" disappeared for about a month and then liked Mulligan, a golf swap story. "This was a fun story, when you should check out if this is your preferred genre. Seriously, it’s in Kindle unlimited so you have nothing to lose."

Looking back, he's actually been reviewing some of my books for a while, usually not favorably.   In 2016 he whined that Transformed for Summer Too needed to "leave its politics at the gate" though I still have no idea what was political about it.  And in 2018 whined that the main character in Transformed for Christmas 4 was "too giggly."

Just because a review is 4 stars doesn't mean it can't be annoying.  Like these ones of Reunion:  Gender Swap Warriors:

I object to calling it "Voltron fanfiction."  Fanfiction would imply it's actually set in the world of Voltron.  Which it's not.  Besides the gender swapping, it's not purely drawn from Voltron.  The thing the dude bitches about the bad guys not matching the technology of the good guys refers to that the good guy ship crashed on Earth over a thousand years ago, where it was found by three college kids.  That was actually drawn from the 2017 Power Rangers movie, not Voltron.  And instead of lions or dinosaurs or whatever they use space fighters that form a giant robot, more like Transformers or Robotech.  So there.

As for lacking magic, there is an evil witch based on the witch in Voltron who does use magic to make one of the good guys a double agent.  So there--again.

Then there was this one:

The title says it's BOOK ONE, which implies there could be a series, so why would everything be tied up all nice and neat?  At the end of the first story our heroes form the giant robot and hand the bad guys a defeat and escape to continue the fight.  Saying it's not "a real end" is like saying A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back wasn't a real end because they didn't defeat the Empire right away.

It reminds me of Forever Young where some people complained that the mystery of Samantha's origin wasn't all wrapped up in the first book.  Do these people not understand how series work?

On Goodreads there was this 4-star review of Chance of a Lifetime last October:

I would say it was an enjoyable read, however, it wasn't perfect, the author is good but not Jim Butcher great, so 4 out of 5 feels right. However, since finding enjoyable reading as a Transgender person is limited to Cheap porn, preachy agenda fiction, or gender bender, when I find a gender bender which isn't someone's fetish fantasy I give it a read. This is a book worth a read because it's not a GB fetish book, but a Noir fiction with a GB twist. Since there are more books in this series I do plan on continuing it. As I said, it's hard to find fiction as a Trans woman and this book hits all the right checkboxes. 

p.s. I purposely compare all Noir fiction to Butcher, because he is still the best at modern fantasy noir, I think PT Dilloway could get close, although I'm not sure Stacy is the right protag for the job.

It's nice Jim Butcher is your favorite author, but I've only read one of his books and that was years after writing this book.  So obviously I wasn't trying to be like him.  Really leading up to this I had been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler and Lawrence Block, so if you mentioned one of those I might have agreed.  I  have another of Butcher's Dresden Files books on my Amazon Cloud but I haven't been in any hurry to read it.  I think I liked the first one but it didn't rock my world to the point I said I had to become like him.  But maybe I'll keep that in mind with the second one.

This last one wasn't a negative comment.  It's a positive one that I just find amusing:

That's pretty much the textbook definition of a backhanded compliment.  Here's the cover:

I thought it would be really easy to find a cover photo.  I mean how hard could it be to find a picture of a girl in underwear?  But it was kind of difficult to find one that had a good image of the panties and showing a face too.  The one I chose I liked because my eyes are always drawn right to the panties.  They aren't really the sexy kind of panties but still my eyes are always drawn straight to them.

I was glad when I finally got a review for Another Chance by PT Dilloway.  Since it came out in 2015 I had sold or given away hundreds of copies (and who knows how many were read in KU) but gotten no ratings or reviews on Amazon.

It's too bad this person didn't write this review in 2015 or so.  I don't think Sherman, the bad guy from the first book, really deserves redemption, but it gave me an idea.  Vinaya (the main character) could team up with Sherman in a Silence of the Lambs kind of thing.  It wasn't something I had thought of on my own.  But it's been 6 years so I'm not really that keen on doing a sequel right now.

WandaVision, Falcon & The Winter Soldier Fix Some of the MCU's Sloppy Storytelling

It took me a little while to get around to Disney+'s Marvel TV series WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  The latter I liked a lot more as it was really more my speed as a fairly straight-forward action thriller in the mold of Captain America: The Winter Soldier rather than featuring a bunch of magic and crap like that.  Still, what both really do is fix some of the MCU's sloppy storytelling over the past 13 years.

The thing is that both of these shows really put a spotlight on characters who hadn't seen tons of action in the MCU.  Wanda Maximoff was first shown in Age of Ultron with her brother Pietro; they were villains from Sokovia who later became heroes.  Pietro died saving some of the people of Sokovia while Wanda survived.  The Vision also had his origin in that movie as a body for Ultron that was inhabited by Tony Stark's Jarvis AI and brought to life with the Mind Stone, one of the Infinity Stones.  In Civil War the next year, Wanda and Vision fell in love though they were on different sides of the conflict.  In Infinity War they were on the run in Scotland until they went to Wakanda to have the Mind Stone removed from the Vision and destroyed until Thanos showed up and killed Vision and took the stone.  Then Wanda was snapped out of existence along with Falcon and Winter Soldier and all three only had minor roles at the end of Endgame.

Bucky Barnes first appeared in the first Captain America movie but he died and was brought back to life by HYDRA and the Soviets to be used as a brainwashed assassin.  Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, appeared in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a counselor for PTSD-ed soldiers who befriends Steve Rogers and becomes his partner in trying to stop the Winter Soldier, aka Bucky Barnes.  Sam had a minor part at the end of Age of Ultron as one of the new Avengers, a cameo in Ant-Man, and then in Civil War joined Steve in trying to help clear Bucky's name.  And like I said, then he was snapped out of existence in Infinity War.

The point of all that is none of these characters had tons of screen time and most of it was action scenes, not character building scenes.  So what these shows do is start to fill in some of the gaps, especially with Wanda and Sam Wilson.

The structure of WandaVision, while a big selling point in getting attention for the series, kind of hinders the character development.  It's not until Episode 8 that we really find out Wanda was fascinated with old sitcoms because her father used to smuggle DVDs in Sokovia and Wanda would watch the DVDs with Pietro and her parents until their house was blown up.  It wasn't really something established in the movies and like I said it's 8 of 9 episodes total before we get into that.  But still that episode especially helps to fill in the gaps that were left from the character's limited screen time in the MCU.

Falcon & The Winter Soldier fills in more gaps for Sam Wilson than Bucky Barnes.  Bucky was somewhat fleshed out in the first Captain America movie as Steve's friend who joined the military before him.  Most of his character work in the series focuses on him trying to atone for the things he did while brainwashed as the Winter Soldier.  

Early on Sam goes to Louisiana and we meet his sister and nephews and learn about the family shrimping operation.  None of which had really been mentioned before so it's like, Wait, whaaaaat?  It was nice to really get more of a backstory for him than just that he was formerly in the military and worked with soldiers.  The rest of Sam's character development is somewhat timely as he struggles with the idea of being a black man taking up the mantle of Captain America.  This is highlighted by the story of Isaiah Bradley, a black man who was given a shot of super soldier serum and then locked up in prison for 30 years to be a guinea pig for government scientists.  In the final episode Sam has a long speech to world leaders to reconcile the issue.

What both shows also do is help to align the movie characters of Wanda and Sam with their comic book counterparts.  For a period from about 2013-2017 Sam Wilson was Captain America, though Steve Rogers came back about a year or two into that and they had two different Captain Americas.  But with Chris Evans departing the MCU, they obviously needed a new Captain America and so this series allows Sam's Falcon to pivot to Captain America, complete with a comics-accurate costume courtesy of Wakanda.  

In the comics, the Scarlet Witch is one of the most powerful characters.  She famously changed the whole world in "House of M" so that her family ruled the world and ordinary humans were the underclass.  At the end of that she took powers from almost all mutants (except the most popular ones) just by saying, "No more mutants."  In the last couple episodes of WandaVision it's finally revealed that she's a witch not by birth or training but because of experiments by HYDRA that exposed her to the Mind Stone.  In the end she has Agnes Harkness's book on witchcraft and is studying it to learn to control her powers.  It's a little different from some of the comics I read before this where Wanda's mother was a Gypsy witch and Agnes was her mentor in witchcraft, but I suppose this was a way to reconcile the movies and comics.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier also makes a big change to the character of Sharon Carter.  In the comics she was frequently Steve Rogers's girlfriend, but in the MCU they never really set that up and when they got rid of SHIELD, she was pretty much abandoned.  In the series she's gone to Madripoor, which like in the comics is a hive of scum and villainy in the South Pacific.  There she's become "The Power Broker," who as you might guess is a crime lord.  The heel turn doesn't really seem in character for the niece of Peggy Carter, but I guess they didn't really have anything else to do with the character with Steve Rogers gone back in time to marry Sharon's aunt, so why not make her a bad guy?  Maybe they could have tried hooking her up with Bucky instead?  That would have helped build up both characters, but whatever.

Anyway, I went through WandaVision in about 3 hours by fast-forwarding all the fake sitcom crap I didn't care about.  I'm sure there were Easter eggs and whatever but I didn't care.  I just watched the real modern day stuff.  I'm sure they were hoping to do some clever, mind-tripping stuff like FX's Legion, but the solutions to what was going on and why ended up being pretty simplistic.  Really I think instead of a series it could have been cut down into a movie but they probably didn't think there was enough interest in a movie involving two relatively minor MCU characters.

I liked Falcon and the Winter Soldier a lot better.  Generally I think the TV series format works better for more grounded superhero shows like this, Arrow, Daredevil, and Luke Cage because most of the time you don't need a lot of showy special effects that just don't look good because the studios don't spend the same amount of money on them versus movies.  As I said at the beginning, the plot for this was pretty much a straight-ahead action thriller.  I was somewhat surprised it was only 6 episodes when WandaVision had 9 episodes, albeit the runtime on most of them were shorter.  It was pretty cool when in the last episode they changed the title card to Captain America and the Winter Soldier to reflect Sam finally becoming Captain America.  Something I noticed in the first couple of episodes was how the credits alternated whether Sebastian Stan or Anthony Mackie was listed first, which I guess made it fair to both actors so that neither was really featured above the other.

I guess the next Disney+ MCU show is the Loki one, which unlike these ones doesn't seem like it would really help fix the character's backstory since he already had plenty of development in the Thor and Avengers movies.  The Hawkeye one would probably be more along the lines of Falcon and the Winter Soldier and help to add some backstory to the character and introducing Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye in the comics.  I think I'd be more interested in that one.

The Ignorance of #RestoretheSnyderverse is Typical America in 2021

 It wasn't all that surprising that after HBO Max released Zack Snyder's Justice League, the same fans who spent three years begging and screaming for their precious "Snyder Cut" began bellowing on social media that WB/DC should continue the "Snyderverse" from Man of Steel, BvS, and Justice League.  

Not surprisingly, they've pretty well ignored the data that shows their precious "Snyder Cut" was not really a big hit.  In this CNBC article for instance if you read past the headline, it says that while the "Snyder Cut" brought in some subscribers, it wasn't as many as movies like WW84 and Godzilla vs Kong despite all the hype.

More damning was this article that describes how many people watching the "Snyder Cut" stopped watching it before the final battle with Steppenwolf, which was radically different from the original theatrical version.  So they missed a big chunk of Snyder's grand vision.  They also missed the 7 different ending cookie scenes including the precious "Knightmare" sequence featuring Jared Leto's Joker.

And that's on top of the simple practical reason WB/DC wouldn't make anymore "Snyderverse" movies:  letting Snyder reshoot and recut the movie cost about $40 million but much of the movie was already made.  To make new movies like Ben Affleck's Batman v Deathstroke movie would cost upwards of $400 million--for each one.  That's a huge investment whereas the "Snyder Cut" was about as much as a Super Bowl ad.

But as is typical of America in 2021, there are a lot of stupid people who ignore the truth or deny the truth.  On my Facebook feed I see articles from ScreenRant or ComicBook.com or other sites declaring "The Snyder Cut" a success and suggesting that WB/DC is trying to hide its success.  They point to things like the 4K DVD selling out in the UK, which is probably a drop in the bucket for what WB/DC needs to recoup its investment.  Or they point to the Rock Tweeting something positive about the "Snyderverse", which is fine but he's just an actor and his movie won't even come out for a year or so.  Unless it's a huge hit, he's not going to be able to dictate spending hundreds of millions on new movies.

In a country where a large portion of people still believe "The Big Lie" about voter fraud and refuse to get vaccinated against a deadly disease because of bogus "facts" and junk "science" it's not surprising that people still refuse to throw in the towel on "the Snyderverse."  And like how MAGA hatters, anti-vaxxers, and QAnoners (often the same people) are enabled by Republican politicians, social media, and Fox "News," Snyder fans are enabled by clickbait sites, social media, and WB/DC themselves when they decided to put out the "Snyder Cut" in the first place.

It's just another sign that we're rapidly spiraling into an Idiocracy situation--centuries before even Mike Judge thought it would happen.