So, incidentally, my experience with the movie Megamind is that I ended up watching it backwards in a hotel once when I was younger and nothing else was on. And by “backwards” I mean, the first day I only caught the latter half of it and then it was on again the day after and I saw the first half.
That said, that one dang scene, is kind of an immortal one in my mind, because it’s one that has a lot more depth than it seems to.
The part that people often miss is that right after that pithy one-liner of how the difference between a villain and a supervillain is presentation… that whole conversation gets context.
Because Titan makes an immediate lunge for Megamind.
And immediately gets crunched by the giant head, and stuck in that situation because Megamind just drops out of the bottom, to a waiting vehicle, and maneuvers around him to focus on the actual issue: rescuing the hostage while Titan’s occupied.
That whole setup isn’t just, “watch me out-drama you”, it’s showing off an actual tactical asset.
Because Megamind as a character is someone who was always, always motivated by getting attention. The reason why Roxanne is never afraid of being his hostage isn’t because of her unshakable faith in a rescuing hero as much as it is that she knows, ultimately, what Megamind is doing is overwhelmingly a show. His atrocities are symbolic in nature. When he actually needs to take somebody out he dehydrates them into a cube for a while. And it’s not just Roxanne that calls him on this, either- Metro Man’s entire retirement scheme hinged on the idea that Megamind really didn’t need someone keeping him at bay from innocent civilians, because, as we’ve seen, innocent civilians really don’t have much to fear from him. Ultimately he is still, actually, just a kind of needy person desperately looking for validation and approval, neither of which can be provided by dead people.
But that’s not to say he can’t actually fight. Like any actual proper magician, he knows how to hold attention and an element of danger is how that works. He’s actually brilliant, and plenty capable of raising genuine hell.
However- he’s been doing this stageshow thing for ages. He’s mastered this. Titan may have him outgunned practically in every respect- but the guy has no conceivable head for subtlety.
So the real kicker to that whole setup, is this isn’t just Megamind being Megamind for the sake of drama- this is Megamind knowing exactly how easy Titan is to bait, dangling the largest trap he could possibly conceive in front of the guy, and doing it in an unapologetically glorious manner as any true performer would.
“Presentation” is not a superpower to be overlooked.
Paranormal entities like demons aren’t native to our reality, so I love monster designs where they look human but something’s clearly wrong: Jerky movements, fast twitching, floating off the floor, etc.
Concept: Demons who look just like humans but are clearly not:
Visually distorted even when up close.
Even if your vision is poor you can still see the demon far away even if everything else is blurred.
Shadows from the wrong light source.
Mimics your breathing and blinking.
Voice can be heard clearly no matter where the demon is.
Mouth not in sync with words.
Somehow breathing while speaking, or not breathing at all.
Features change every time you look away from them or blink. For example, a mole on the nose has moved to the forehead, or they’re suddenly taller/shorter than you.
Subtle sounds like scratching an itch or cloth being rustled by movement is much louder than it should be, or makes no noise at all.
Reflection/shadows are not matching.
When asking other people what the demon doing right now, all accounts are different.
Because demons aren’t from this world, anything they interact with becomes “wrong”. For example, doors that usually open from the outside now open from within, and ceilings being lower or much higher than physically possible.
I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
I remember lots of my classmates mocking my math teacher because of her accent, when I was a freshman. She was from Syria, in a mexican school. Little pieces of shit were always imitating her accent and mocking her from getting certain words wrong.
I saw her about four years later and she looked so tired of everything, less cheerful and with a tougher attitude from the beginning. Fortunately she still talks to me calmly and smiling, but it’s awful to know she’s always anxious around thw kids she teaches.
In seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Burns. It was only her third year of teaching, and it was her first year of teaching middle school. And the class I had her for?
My fellow classmates were fucking awful to Ms. Burns. They talked over her when she was trying to teach, they made fun of her appearance (said she looked like man and called her a ‘tranny’, or “It Burns” instead of Ms. Burns), and when a few months into the school year, she broke down and screamed at the top of her lungs at the class before sitting down at her desk and crying, they considered it a triumph and laughed about it for weeks.
Being a kid doesn’t exempt you from being a piece of shit, and just because, on the whole, adults have more power than minors doesn’t mean that minors get a free pass on being purposefully cruel to adults. Some of you on this website really need to learn this.
Discipline your goddamn kids.
Seriously doubling down on the last part because this behavior doesn’t form in a fucking vacuum.
Back in secondary school, I had a fantastic science teacher and he happened to be gay. I admired him because he was actually out, at a time when it was super rare to see that sort of thing. He was a really sweet, bearish dude and helped me feel more comfortable in my own skin, being a young queer myself.
Well, one day some of the homophobic kids in our class decided to start rumours about him being a pedo (because, to them, all gays were pedophiles) and told their equally homophobic parents about it. There were calls from “concerned parents” about the teacher and his “inappropriate behaviour” and eventually, after over a year of daily complaints, he was asked to leave, not because he had actually done anything, but because the school didn’t want to “look bad”.
So yeah, a bunch of 14 year olds ran to their parents and got him fired for being gay. Over 15 years later and I am still pissed.
Some kids learn pretty quickly to weaponize their youth.
Fandom policing communities have turned this into an art form, shaping and rewarding [fellow] adolescents (and younger) who intentionally put themselves in online adult spaces and publicly implode: destroying the adult space, the adults in that space, and shredding the conscience & mental well-being of the minor that’s being encouraged to turn themselves into an emotional bomb.
I was thinking about Venom this morning before breakfast, like you do, and I keep coming back to how baffled I am that Venom, and apparently everyone else in Eddie’s life, thinks he’s a loser.
I sort of get why, in a Hollywood way, they might. He’s in a bad situation for most of the movie outside of the fact that he has an alien up his ass. But Eddie was a successful journalist with a significant viewership, engaged to a lawyer, an attractive man with a nice house; he’s clearly intelligent and well-educated. And yes, he does a stupid thing and betrays his fiancee’s trust and gets her fired, and she (quite rightly) dumps him. And he ends up living in a shitty apartment without career prospects because a rich guy fucked him over, eating crap food, trying to hustle work, and giving money he can’t afford to people who have an even shittier situation than him.
But the movie seems to equate poverty with loserdom, because Eddie is still the intelligent, educated, fundamentally decent person who believes in justice that he was before he fucked up. He’s just an intelligent, educated, fundamentally decent, justice-loving guy who fucked up once and now has no money.
yeah, that is definitely a thing we did. we were getting called losers for being poor, and slackers for being disenfranchised, and we embraced it. we were like, “yes, we are losers, because we LOST. the world is a competition, and it’s not fair, and the big guys cheat, and so we lost. so what? what are you gonna do about it?”
we embraced those words as an antidote to shame. because we were being shamed for being victims of an unfair system, and we chose to say, no, we’re victims because you victimized us. we’re poor because you robbed us. we’re disenfranchised because you shut us out.
so i can absolutely see gen-x writers calling eddie a loser, because yeah, he lost. somebody wiped the floor with him. seeing a loser come back and win – or even find a better game – is really uplifting, in my book.
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