It’s fascinating to observe how TV people – and remember, George RR Martin was a TV writer – simply don’t understand some of the technical basics of storytelling. The Dark Herald explains why Black Captain America was always doomed to failure from a technical perspective, even if the Disney degenerati were not actively attempting to subvert the characters and the storylines, at the Arkhaven substack.
Feige was determined to follow his plan of a Marvelverse that had one continuous storyline for both TV and movies. He clearly viewed himself as a grand master storyteller who could rival Tolkien. Except it was a truly terrible idea. First of all, he didn’t invent any of the characters so they are now nothing like they should be, consequently, the audience has wandered away. Second, if he had read the comic books then he would have known just how utterly hopeless a task a single grand storyline has always been. It’s been tried repeatedly, and it’s always failed because you can’t tell any kind of coherent story with one hundred POV characters. The closest thing to a success was DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths because most of the cast was dead by the end of it.
The attraction for executives like Fiege is that it feels like you are making people show up for everything you do because if they don’t, they will miss part of the story. This creates two major problems, one, there is no entry point for new viewers. They are expected to go all the way back to Iron Man (2008) and work their way through what is now about 100 hours of content and you have to include the TV shows because Kevin wanted it that way. Even if you are rigidly trying to keep the narrative cohesive you have the problem of people just not being interested in ALL of the characters. This confuses the hell out of casual viewers because a story like Captain America: Brave New World is built on major events they didn’t know about because they didn’t watch them.
Just for a baseline understanding of the setting you had to have watched the 2008 Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Captain America Civil War, Avengers Infinity War, Avengers Endgame, Falcon and the Winter Solider, and The Eternals.
It’s really not a very difficult concept. The average individual has trouble keeping more than three simultaneous thoughts in his mind. So, the optimal limit on perspective characters in any one creative work is nine, which works out to an average of three characters per act. One can certainly go below this, but one goes above it at one’s peril of cause the reader – or the viewer – to lose interest.