10 MCU Complaints That Make No Damn Sense

Stop getting Marvel so wrong.

Marvel Villains
Marvel Studios

It's easy to take shots at successful institutions. Just as fans and critics love to put creatively impressive people up on pedestals, they're invariably then overcome with the urge to tear them back down again. Some people no longer watch Pixar to see how good the next one is, but to see whether it manages to be better than the last one. That implicitly suggests a perverse attraction to the idea of it failing.

Such is the Internet and the fetishisation of complaint.

Marvel is in the same boat (Star Wars too): because the MCU has pulled in billions, wowed critics and made its fans positively drenched with perpetual excitement, the army of haters it has also amassed is embarrassingly big. Sometimes, their complaints are fine (yes, Thor: The Dark World is terrible), but what should never be accepted is the kind of scatter-gun whinging that relies on ammunition that is coated in bullsh*t.

And unfortunately for those card carrying Marvel anti-fans (and that's the best way to describe them, since they get as much pleasure of hating the MCU as some do in loving it), most of their key arguments fall flat on their face under even slight analysis.

Here are the 10 complaints Marvel haters should stop saying about the MCU...

10. They've Never Done A Good Villain (Bar Loki)

Marvel Villains
Marvel Comics

The Argument

Loki is the only villain Marvel have managed to get right, and it's mostly only because Tom Hiddleston is so excellent that he's elevated the material. Everyone else has been either horribly formulaic or just not up to the billing.

The Rebuttal

Even before Loki became great (in The Avengers, not Thor), he had competition. Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane was the perfect counter-point to Tony Stark (representing not only a titan on his own but also being the embodied shadow of Stark's own past coming back to haunt him).

Red Skull was also great (and arguably is still the best Cap trilogy villain), The Winter Soldier and Zemo were also very good and Ronan The Destroyer had his moments in Guardians Of The Galaxy. And while he was undoubtedly divisive, James Spader's Frankenstein's monster Ultron was endlessly entertaining.

Sure, there have been low points (Abomination was poorly handled; Yellow Jacket, Whiplash, and Malekith were bland; the Mandarin was a kick in the gut), but to say Loki is the only one is plainly ludicrous.

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Contributor

WhatCulture's former COO, veteran writer and editor.