Writing Update + Captain Marvel Impressions

So: as of my last article, I’ve published 27,279 words on Medium across 12 articles. That last article contributed 7,837 of those words on its own. That’s 29%!

After the Jade Empire review, I didn’t expect to write such a long, detailed article for a while. I wrote like the devil to get that one finished before my self-imposed deadline… though, if I’m being rigorous with myself, I actually uploaded it a few minutes after midnight, technically breaking my commitment to upload every Sunday.

As the evening sped on, I started doubting myself, questioning if my work even constituted “good writing”. Could it have been more concise? Because it was longer than anything I had written previously and covered so many topics, it was hard to tell in the final instance if it was structurally effective or if I was getting across any key message. On reflection, I think it’s a great article, but it was a beast, and I was quite happy to spend a few weeks working on something terser, tighter and to-the-point.

Then, only two weeks later, I found myself in almost exactly the same position with my piece on Hollow Knight vs Samus Returns. The main two differences from the Jade Empire situation being that a) I actually managed to upload a few minutes before midnight this time, even though b) the article itself was almost twice as long. It’s possible it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but it’s even harder for me to tell for sure.

It’s was nice to look back on each of my articles as I totted up the word count. I’m proud of almost all of them. The first four especially, which I wrote last year in a separate “stint” of writing and which all fell under the topic of comic-books or comic-book movies, surprise me. They were by no means my first attempts at critical writing, only my first on Medium, but I can see that I wasn’t half-halfheartedly dipping my toes in here. They show a level headed style, some creative thinking and a belief in what I was writing (even if all I was writing was opinions on comic book things).

Sometimes I go back to old pieces of writing and am deflated to see what a moron yester-me had been to have come up with them. That said, I can at least take that as evidence for myself that improvement is possible and is occurring. That isn’t always easy to convince yourself of.

By far my most popular article to date comes from that initial batch, and it’s the Captain Marvel article. At this point in time, only two of my articles have received more than 100 views. One is that Hollow Knight one, which has a few hundred, and the other is “Five Reasons Captain Marvel Fundamentally Sucks”, which currently has over 12 thousand views. It was popular when I wrote it, and for obvious reasons views have only continued to rocket upwards as we got closer to the release of the MCU movie. That movie came out yesterday, and the last two days have shown the highest activity for my Medium articles on record.

I set myself some goals when I started here. I wanted to see 10 people click on one of my articles. Then, when that happened, I wanted 10 people to finish reading one of my articles. Then I wanted 100 people to read one, and so on. The Captain Marvel article kind of threw any rational sense of progression I could have had out of the window. How can you go from having thousands of views on one article, then zero on the next? It was informative.

I was also waiting for my first “clap”, my first comment/response, my first email, my first follower etc. I didn’t realise how many reads it would take to get one clap. Even those who finished my longest articles seemed reluctant to give a clap at the end. But eventually they relented, and I received some responses as well. I’m particularly appreciative of the emails I’ve received. They have been longer than any of the responses, and they really make me feel like I’d reached somebody in a small way, if just for a few minutes of their day. That’s something no form of metrics can replicate.

Still, though… no followers as of yet.

The goal I set myself when I started here was to write 52 articles in a year. My desired outcome from this was an issue of personal development. Despite starting plenty of writing projects the number I have finished (not counting projects while I was in school or that I was paid for) could probably have been counted on one hand. I had big ambitions and did a lot of work towards them, but was chronically incapable of finishing anything. I felt strongly that I had a lot to say on a lot of subjects, a lot to give. Medium is my way of… well, not proving it to myself, but making good on my belief in myself.

The jump from writing notes on my phone to finishing multiple thousand-word essays proves to me that the distance to writing books or screenplays can also be bridged. This has been a very encouraging project so far. I have no intention of stopping. I don’t know if I’ll make it to 52-in-a-row. But knowing I will give a good chunk of my free time to writing if I’ve got an idea in my head has told me something meaningful about myself.

The only filler article I’ve had to upload (except for this one) is “Writing Is Medicine”. I didn’t feel proud of pulling out an old note and uploading it with a grainy picture just to say I’d published something that week… but I’m still glad it’s there as a reminder. The message is valid.

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What I wanted to upload today was a short history article relating to gaming, but after doing my research I realised it was a good enough story that I didn’t want to rush it. Deciding that I wasn’t going to finish it this weekend, I took a break from writing and went to see the Captain Marvel movie instead, which was convenient because it gave me something topical and relevant to pad this post with.

The first thing I noticed when this movie started was how good everything looks. The aesthetic is TV sci-fi, but the highest production version of that yet committed to the screen. This is Heston Blumenthal’s wine-gummies of the sci-fi genre.

The second thing I noticed is that Carol’s hair is constantly dangling in her face, and it was driving me nuts. I called out her comics counterpart for wearing a fashionable hair-cut to the battlefield, and it’s a similar issue in the movie. None of the other soldiers of Starforce have this problem, but then out comes out Carol, Instagram-ready, hair perfectly draped across one eye at all times. Unless she has a Dragon Ball Z scouter sellotaped under that bit of hair, I don’t see the tactical advantage to this. I’m a guy with long hair and I was getting sympathetically irritated for her.

Sometimes it’s little things like this that can ruin a good costume. A great design has to be attractive and fit the situation. Marvel continually makes little mistakes that show they don’t get it. Both Black Widow and Skye/Quake from Agents of SHIELD go and do spy things with their jumpsuits zipped halfway down their chest, and I’m intolerant to that too.

Onto more important matters. This is a good-looking, good-sounding movie throughout. The level of design work that goes into the environments and characters is exceptional, as it often is with Marvel… but it’s weirdly almost too good for the amount of meaning much of it has in the film. This mismatch bothers me. It feels like effort has been wasted. Take characters like Minn-Erva, who has an eye-catching design, is played by a talented actress, and probably deserves her own mini-series, who only exists to randomly die near the end. I’m reminded of J J Abrams saying that he writes with a MacBook so that he is inspired to write something worthy of the beautiful machine he is working with. This is more of a case where the writing is not worthy of the glossy shell. You could also call this the Captain Phasma-effect.

Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve made a better job of writing a story for Carol than I was expecting, particularly in regards to their re-interpretation of her origin story. What Carol has to give up to be a superwoman is her memory and her life on earth. It may be that her memory has fully returned before the movie is finished (it’s not entirely clear), and she does have to chance to stay on earth at the end, but for the length of this movie’s runtime she is far more sympathetic than in any typical comic book you can see her in today.

The movie’s two big missteps come one after another and they both relate to the part of a movie MCU films almost never get right: the climax, the third act, the point at which the hero is at their lowest and fight becomes the most vital, consequential and intense. I don’t love the third act of any Marvel movie except one (feel free to guess in the comments).

The pivotal moment is when Carol is bound by the psychic tendrils of the supreme intelligence, who I’ve developed a bad habit of thinking of as “Mother Brain” (I reckon Captain Marvel contains about half of the ingredients of a good Metroid movie). Almost everything about this scene is awesome. Carol burning through her bonds with righteous flame is awesome. Her “going binary” and blasting through the ship at light speed is awesome. But her argument with Mother Brain has no drama to it. She makes no meaningful decision in this moment other than to “stand up” and decide that her “NAME. IS. CAROL” [maximum cringe]. There is the fume of a theme here, that of her choosing to be human instead of kree, but the execution is vapid. She had already decided to fight the Kree. Mother Brain had the opportunity to convince her otherwise — that would have made for a dramatic moment. “We raised you, Carol. The Skrulls are still evil, our war is still just. You’ve erred, but we will forgive you as long as you reaffirm your loyalty. We will even spare your friends.”

Isn’t that what “communing with the supreme intelligence” was supposed to be? Re-education in response to emotional dissidence? We know that it appears in your mind as somebody you trust — all the better to sway you back to the cause. If Annette Bening had come out trying to show Carol the error of her ways, it would have been a good scene. Instead, she’s all like “Duh, I’m a villain now”, so we’re all like “Well, duh, Carol’s going to fight you now.” Lame.

Immediately afterwards, the movie makes another error. During what should have been an emotionally important fight against her former comrades of Starforce, the movies hits your ears with “Just a Girl” by No Doubt. Nothing more needs to be said.

This lack of a definitive climactic battle means that the gag pulled after the build-up to a fight with Yon-Rogg is not only obvious but also frustrating. It was the right thing for the character to do (as she rightly said, she had nothing to prove to Yon-Rogg), but Jude Law really sells the moment that he’s asking for a fight. The music swells. Then it doesn’t happen, and when all is taken into account it feels like something is missing.

The third act of Captain Marvel is by no means even a fraction as terrible as that of Wonder Woman (it’s actually less rubbish then a lot of other MCU movies, even). But then it doesn’t reach the heights of the first three-quarters of Wonder Woman either. This is indicative of the situation with Marvel movies, I think. They’ll never make anything as bad as Suicide Squad, but they’ll never make anything exceptional like Logan. Most of Wonder Woman was exceptional, and it’s the better movie overall.

Damn, I’m being harsh. I actually liked the movie quite a bit. It’s not one of the groundbreaking MCU films, just one of the ones that takes the formula and does most of it to a high degree of competency, like Spiderman: Homecoming. There were some decent gags, too. The quip-lash inflicted by MCU movies is well known, but I only felt one or two instances of it here. Compared to something like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, fewer of the jokes were truly lol-worthy, but fewer of them stood out abrasively or broke your immersion by being out of place. Talos and N. Fury served good dual roles as comic-relief and sidekick/villain.

Oh, and when Mar-Vell was revealed as a woman, I was nothing but stoked by the audacity of it. Fans will be furious, I knew, and that made me grin. What can I say, I’m an asshole. But I think having a female mentor for a female character is a more archetypically powerful than the alternative. On some instinctive level it makes sense to us for women to teach women and men to teach men, and crossing the streams only adds complications. This was a good choice for this story. There was also concern that if Mar-Vell appeared as he did in the comics, his story might overshadow Carol’s, but if he didn’t appear at all Carol’s story would feel like it was missing something. They could even have made him a symbol of patriarchy if they really wanted to disrespect him. The Mar-Vell issue was deftly navigated here.

One way to judge a new Marvel character is this: am I looking forward to seeing her in future Marvel movies? I like Brie Larson’s deadpan, nonchalant interpretation of Carol. It’s much better than the bossy, scowly character from the comics. I recognised in my article that Carol works best as a low-key ass-kicker, and in the ensemble of the Avengers she might well shine, if she’s given the right jobs to do.

Is she a Mary Sue now? I don’t think that’s a useful question. It’s fine to feature a goddess in your story as long as you’re not spending too much time looking closely at her. Pure porcelain is featureless. The question is what role she plays and whether it makes the story more or less interesting. Carol didn’t have to deal with that hurdle this time. Her real test will be her next solo movie.

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Thanks for reading this far. This piece was something a bit different for me. Not a meticulously planned and edited effort, like most of my articles have been, but more stream-of-consciousness and largely written in one sitting. It can’t be bad to practice different approaches, so I’m glad to add this to my catalogue. No doubt I will have other unplanned updates like this, but my mission is only to write ever more thoughtfully, creatively and usefully. Never pretentiously and never written for algorithms over people.

I intend my next article to be an interesting little tale from the early days of computer RPG development in Japan [published]. I also have a review of Far Cry 2 half written that will likely be uploaded in the next few weeks (it’s a super interesting game). I’ve got some unfinished business with a series of comic-book articles of which I’ve only uploaded part 1 so far. I would hate to be the sort of writer who leaves frustrating dangling threads, so I will be sure to return to that one soon also.

But other than these, who knows what the future will hold? You’ll only find out if you hit “Follow”!

Read Next: Writing Update 2