Tonight’s goal: write up short and concise reactions to stuff I’ve been meaning to talk about.

Moderate spoilers follow!

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

As a fantasy comedy adventure, this was…okay? It wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. The jokes from the trailers were snappy, but there were a lot of long stretches without enough jokes.

As a D&D movie, it was pretty unsatisfying. Which I kinda expected, but was still a bummer. It had the place names, the magic types, and the owlbears, but what I want from a D&D movie is the sense of “behind-the-scenes this story is getting built by a group of friends, sitting around a table having fun together,” and it didn’t deliver. (Example: a real-world campaign would not start with one guy narrating his character’s whole backstory, while the rest of the table sits and listens!)

Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

Full disclosure, I’m one of the basic gays who watched this because I heard it was “what if Gundam did Utena?” The plot had a bunch of interplanetary political dramas, and power struggles between corporate factions, as Gundam shows are wont to do…which I did not track very closely, and mostly didn’t try to. That’s not a criticism of the show at all, that’s me slacking as a viewer.

I had already seen a ton of screencaps, gifsets, and promo images featuring Suletta and Miorine, the main f/f couple, and liked what I saw! What I did not anticipate going in was that I had seen basically all the Suletta/Miorine content. Their dynamic is the center of the first few episodes, and they’re married in a flash-forward at the end…but they spend large chunks of the middle in separate places, pursuing different plot points, not keeping in touch or interacting at all.

That said, my circles were so focused on sharing and discussing the f/f, I managed not to get spoiled for a single hint of the more Evangelion-inspired parts of the plot. And I liked those too.

Moon Knight: City of the Dead

The 5-issue limited miniseries that just wrapped up. I wanted to like this so much more than I did! It had a promising setup and some cool ideas, but the worldbuilding potential kept getting wasted, and the characterization felt off in ways that weren’t satisfying.

It gets a lot of influence from the TV series — which, listen, obviously I love. But it makes major changes to the comics setup, and some of them did not get backported well.

For example: This is where 616 Layla gets her own path to becoming the Scarlet Scarab. And I’m into it! She looks great! But 616 Layla was a woman Marc dated for a short time, way back in his mercenary days, before he even met Khonshu. She wasn’t his adventuring partner for a good chunk of his adult life, let alone his wife. It doesn’t seem likely that she would’ve met Jake or Steven at all.

I can believe they loved each other, and that they clicked really well! I don’t buy that she was “the one great love of 616 Marc’s life” or “the person who understands him better than anyone else.” (…Also, I don’t buy that Marc would call her that. For one thing, 616 Marc’s brand of melodrama is “I am so broken and tormented that nobody can understand me.” For another, if he was in a mood to admit that there are people who have his number, he’s self-aware enough to know the list is topped by Dr. Sterman, Marlene, Duchamp — and possibly, by this point, Tigra.)

Credit where credit’s due, it did finally give Jake and Steven something to do toward the end. (And it gave us 616 canon “Jake calling Layla affectionate bug-related nicknames,” which, as someone who writes MCU Jake doing the same thing, I was very excited to see.)

The Marvels

This movie was so much fun. Just a delight from start to finish. Kamala in particular is a champion and a treasure.

Critics are picking on the plot, but I don’t think it was any more comic-book-silly than the average MCU movie. And frankly, I could’ve watched 90 minutes of this team doing random space nonsense and loved it, even with no plot at all. There are individual bits I could complain about, but overall? Possibly one of my favorite films in the whole Multiverse Saga.

Also! I have had a fic in progress for a year where one of the plot points is They Need Monica But Can’t Find Her, and my vague plan was always “whatever she does in The Marvels is keeping her too busy to reach.” Haven’t added to the fic for most of that year, because it got to a point where I couldn’t write more without knowing the specifics, but the general idea seemed safe to make plans around. And I was prepared to fudge the details if necessary.

Whoo boy, I will not have to fudge those details. Not only that — the specific movie reason for Why Monica Is Unavailable suggested a specific idea for How They Get Monica Back, which I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise, and which is perfect for the overall themes of the fic.

…and in the week since then, I’ve been marathon-writing almost 20,000 new words. (Stick around for 6-ish months more, and maybe I’ll finally be ready to start posting it.)