Thursday, January 16, 2020

Nothing To Marvel At

Cleaning out some old boxes and found a story/essay I'd written in elementary school. I was maybe nine years old at the time. The story's arc is pretty simple: space aliens are invading and only specific knowledge of American military hardware can be counted on to save the world (read: America) from whatever thing(s) the invading aliens did different.

The point of this horrific narrative was I thought it would impress my forebears, in this case not only my immediate father but his paternal power figure as well, aka my Grandfather.

So I did my best to imagine - at 7 to nine years of age - what story would appeal to both generations of parentage, the final desired outcome being the opening of the elder family's proverbial purse-strings and elevating me (and by proxy my family) from rural poverty to....well, whatever was better than that.

Which was pretty much everything.

But I digress. My larger point is this:

To me, this is what the Marvel franchise films feel like; someone tried to write a story that was meant to impress their elder family for whatever selfish reasons and what ended up on screen was a perfectly predictable outcome of that.

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