I still love Boku no Hero Academia and still utterly despise its worst character.
Well, that’s less preamble than usual. Let’s keep this brief. The sooner I lay out this article, the sooner I can stop thinking about sexual harassment.
Last year, I caught up on a beloved piece of modern pop culture I had been missing out on, and watched through the entire run of Young Justice. And it was… fine. A solid B Minus. Pairs well with chocolate.
There’s a few critiques I could point to; overall I found the tone too dour, and I didn’t really connect with any of the main characters. (It’s a bad sign my favourite member of the team is Wolf, who is a wolf. Not a wolf-man, or a talking wolf. Just a wolf. He’s a good boy, Brent.) But moreso than anything else – and this is tragic, coming from me – I could not stand the villains.
Here is a very basic sociology fact: as education increases, birthrates decrease. The more educated Jane Doe is, the less kids she’ll probably have. As a result, many countries such as Italy and Japan are in fact below the necessary 2.4 children per parental couple required to maintain a population, meaning their populations are now falling, not rising.
Did you get all that? Did you understand this basic phenomenon I learned off for my first year exams? Congratulations. You are officially more intelligent than the antagonist of Marvel Studios’ record-shattering blockbuster, Infinity War.
On April 21, director James Cameron made some controversial remarks about the Avengers franchise.
“I’m hoping we’ll start getting ‘Avenger’ fatigue here pretty soon. Not that I don’t love the movies. It’s just, come on guys, there are other stories to tell besides hyper-gonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process. It’s like, oy!”
At the time, there was a lot of backlash to this on social media. A lot of people pointed to a perceived hypocrisy; much of the fatigue around the Marvel Cinematic Universe comes down to the sense that they’re churning out sequels on a conveyor belt. Cameron can hardly take the high ground on that topic since he’s working on four (!) Avatar sequels even though much of the original response to Avatar was muted. It’s also unreasonable to say that families have nothing to do with Marvel movies like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 or any of the Thor films.
