*Takes out badge* Dragonman: Professional Nerd at your service! The "space whales" in the comics are called The Acanti; giant toothless red whale looking entities which are normally harmless. They are frequently lobotomized and used as spacecrafts by the parasitic Brood species. Life tends to suck for them, but I think with the Brood all but extinct, things might be getting better for the remaining Acanti.

Great points Derek, just saw it last night and the whole film was a 2 and a half hour nerdgasm for me and my friends.

Glad Diamanda, LC, and BB chick enjoyed the movie. Sorry The Omega didn't but given her reasons I can respect that point of view. Diamanda...please start your own movie studio and make those movies you mentioned, that'd be awesome!

Interesting that Omega says that, because to me it seemed that only one of the characters is as flawless as she thinks. The one character who is specifically being pushed as the character she is supposed (supposed as in mandated by the powers that be) to relate to. Black Widow. The chick.

- relatively ineffectual gripes -
The whole deal with token characters for the sake of relatability and equal representation is pretty wack. We'd better to relate to heroes for them being human, not for them being men or women. To not be satisfied with that is just nitpicking, and one can whine about equality with that argument all the way even past gender, age, lifestyle and such to to point where it's deemed derogatory to not have every single individual person from the audience making an actual, personal appearance in the film. And being every bit as effectual to the plot, while were at it. As I said: wack. In the end it'll just be a convoluted mess of which group has the biggest whining voice and adjusting their representation accordingly, smothering out those who are ACTUALLY in minority and powerless to change the current opinions about them.
- end gripes. the rest is more worth reading and comment-y -

Especially with Black Widow this is just a damn shame, because I felt that the character had real potential to really be a fully established, human character, and can't help thinking that her undiagnosed tokenchickitus somehow actually made her less of a character. Like, if only she wasn't a woman she could have joined the boyses during their scuffle around the magic wand, instead of totally owning Loki at that time. Can't show the only girl in the group showing baseless magic anger, that'd be sexist. People wouldn't understand that it's the staff, they'd just think it was HER pms rubbing off on everybody.

Wait. Now that I think about it, maybe there's a clever whedonian rock-paper-scissors game behind it: in this post feminism era where it's secist to even be feminist, Joss went ahead and established BW as non-normative being a chick, but then added another, NON-non-normative guy to be HER foil. Whom would be Hawkeye. I should look into this. (And by the way, I'm taking any girls favoring Hawkeye as evidence. I'll assume they like him for the same reasons men liked women in the 1950's. "Didn't speak enough to be annoying".)

Omega sums up how I feel about the Ultimate universe Nick Fury. I don't ever think I've seen the version that looks like Jackson ever actually looks like he cares about individual people.

Right after talking about how the movie is said to be the new Star Wars, Omega says Captain America is a cunt. She's right in both of her opinions.

But I just wanted to mention that, incidentally, Steve Rogers' inability to fit in made me really curious of the character, and the Captain America movie I haven't seen. Although, assuming that Captain America isn't a blast-from-the-past themed sitcom, I suppose the draw in my case would quickly end in disappointment.