by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I didn't want to be the one to tell you this. It isn't fair that we live in such an inflexible world. But you did not produce Eternals.

You can enjoy Eternals and you can slot that enjoyment into your identity, but you did not produce Eternals.

Yesterday, my friend Gita Jackson posted a screengrab of a tweet she had found about adapting Eternals from its original comic source into a $200 million-plus blockbuster. The tweet was almost as condescending as the first paragraph of this article:

It's a troubling outlook shared by a surprisingly large chunk of the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom. You can find folks dunking on these perspectives, but search "Eternals" on Twitter and you'll find even more people trying to Pete Hammond their tweets into TV spots. Some of them succeeded. It's the kind of groveling before film studios Roger Ebert was worried about.

As Gita says, "Justice for Jack Kirby." The person who created so much of the Marvel world and, more importantly, the visual language of superhero comics (and romance comics, and war comics...) didn't make all of this work so it could be sandblasted into something that looks badass in a banner ad. It's also frustrating to see "diversity and representation," huge concepts that clearly matter and deserve more care in Marvel films, get used as a cudgel to beat back any general criticism. When it takes 13 years to get a (named and in any way significant) gay character into your massive ensemble casts, you don't get to act like an indifferent audience is a bigoted one.

The comments on comics' visual aesthetics and tiny scraps of diversity aren't really what bothered me about this comment. It's the use of one word that speaks uncomfortably to fans' relationship with franchise films. It's the "we" in "Look what we had to work with."

Because the person who wrote this tweet was, like you, not a producer on Eternals. I said this in a tweet response to Gita, but a decade-plus of pandering has led some people to think they had anything to do with the creation of these movies. We now have a million nerds standing up and shouting "I am Kevin Feige" to protect a fellow gladiator.

It's not that intense fan engagement is bad, it's that this specific type, coming from this direction, is going to poison somebody's brain. I don't interface with fanfiction culture at all, but I can respect that the people writing it are taking the stories they love and sketching out ideas for lost chapters and impossible sequels. Dedicated Harry Potter fans are trying to cut the series' deranged author out of their favorite books so that they can go back to enjoying the things they fell in love with, before the official canon got diluted to the point that wizards were shitting on floors and we knew the person insisting on that was the kind of abusive asshole who thought trans women were inherently dangerous.

Studios serve nobody when they cultivate fanbases convinced of their own material importance to the creation of these films. People dig their heels in and criticisms morph from "you're addressing a thing I like" to "you're addressing a thing I took part in." I thank my friend Josh for grabbing me one of these wild Snyder Cut Associate Producer t-shirts because they're a ridiculous piece of merch, but they're also the weird last little pat on the back to a group of people who couldn't figure out how to shut up. And if you think I'm overestimating the importance fans put on these knock-off Affliction shirts, I can point you to plenty of dudes who took it as seriously as a heart attack.

None of this is to diminish enthusiasm with boundaries. Marvel movies are pretty fun! My favorite is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which Marvel Studios didn't touch, but I'm still out here enjoying Black Widow and Endgame. Marvel's baseline film product is enjoyable at worst, thrilling at best. I didn't connect with Black Widow on an emotional level but I also didn't expect to and have access to enough other art in my life that I don't need to. The Twitter critique of Marvel's writing style–"So that just happened"-style reaction quips in the middle of big action scenes–is itself totally hack. People can't even make their own jokes when criticizing a franchise's lack of jokes. I couldn't care less for Joss Whedon (henceforth known as "Josh Whedon" because I think that would annoy him) but his tics aren't so ingrained in the Marvel formula that I hate the rest of the bombast.

But that's the problem right there: Josh Whedon made these Marvel movies. The Russo brothers and Jon Favreau made the Marvel movies. Taking on Josh Whedon's decisions as your own isn't an act of empathy, it's an act of delusion. He gets the rewards, he should get the critiques. You did not produce Eternals. Please don't act like there's a culture war going on and out here and the hoi polloi are mouthing off about something you poured your heart and soul into. If these people read about Jack Kirby for five minutes, they'd find out that closely aligning your sense of self with a corporation only leads to pain.