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duhragonball · 4 years

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Potpourri

I’ve been thinking about various storytelling things, not really Dragon Ball related, but I figured I could write them all down here and make something out of it. Yeah, like an old school Livejournal post, except I can’t write a sassy message in the read-more cut.

Okay, first, I’ve been watching a lot of AEW Dark episodes on YouTube, because AEW puts out a new one every Tuesday and it’s easy to fall behind on them. So it’s like reliving wrestling angles that I watched on AEW Dynamite back in June and July. One of these angles was a world title match between champion Jon Moxley, and “The Machine” Brian Cage, who debuted by winning a ladder match in dramatic fashion, along with his new manager, Taz.

Taz does a lot of the color commentary for these episodes of Dark, and Cage debuted around the release of Episode 35, so after that, Taz started using his announcing job to promote the upcoming title match and gloat about how his guy Cage was going to destroy Jon Moxley and win the title. Taz’s main argument was that Cage is absolutely jacked, which made him a success before, but now he’s got Taz coaching him in all the cool stuff Taz used to do in ECW: suplexes, submission holds, etc. Taz sells you Brian Cage’s world title victory like a lawyer presenting a case to a jury. At the center of Taz’s argument was his claim that Cage was simply too big, too strong, and too prepared for Jon Moxley’s finishing move, the Paradigm Shift. Taz predicted that Mox wouldn’t be able to apply the Paradigm Shift properly, and even if he could hit it, it wouldn’t be enough to stop Cage.

The plot twist came from real life, when Moxley had to stay home because his wife contracted COVID-19. There was a lot of speculation that he might get sick, and even if he didn’t, that he wouldn’t be able to appear for the title match. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and the match was simply postponed an extra week. During that time, Taz accused Moxley of ducking Brian Cage, which I wasn’t crazy about, since I didn’t like coronavirus being used in a wrestling angle. On the other hand, it did give Taz a couple of weeks to run down the champion unopposed. At one point he reintroduced his old FTW title belt and gave it to Cage because the world title match had been postponed. Good stuff.

So finally, Moxley comes back, and he did one promo before the title match, and this was his chance to respond to all the shittalking Taz had been doing. It was brilliant, because for weeks, Taz had been declaring victory, and he shut it all down in one quick segment. He brought up Taz’s claim that the Paradigm Shift wouldn’t work on Cage, and Moxley just said “well maybe I won’t try to use my finisher on him. No, instead, I’m going to target his left bicep, which was surgically repaired last year, putting Cage out of action for several months.”

And just like that, the tone of the show changed, where suddenly it looked like Cage might be in trouble, because his camp only seemed to have a perfect game plan, and here was the champion announcing his own counter-strategy in advance. “You talked shit about my wife being sick, so I will reinjure your arm.”

And it was awesome. At one point Moxley went for a pin, and Cage kicked out, only for Moxley to reverse the pin into a submission move on the arm. There were points where it seemed like he couldn’t decide which arm to target, and eventually I realized he was going after both of them, switching from one to the other as needed. It’s smart, because if you go after the good arm, he’s gotta use the vulnerable one to fight you off, and by doing that Cage basically handed it to Mox for his next hold.

Finally, Moxley had Cage trapped in an arm hold, and the whole time he was looking Taz in the eye, basically waiting for a submission or a ref stoppage, and Taz had no choice but to throw in the towel to save Brian Cage’s career. It was a beautiful finish because it sewed up the whole story. Cage never tapped out, so he still looks like a relentless badass, but Taz had to let discretion be the better part of valor. He mocked Moxley for playing it safe when his wife got sick, so Moxley forced Taz to make the same choice. Great stuff.

Second. I’ve been reading Darth Vader comics since Marvel started publishing new Star Wars stuff again. Disney bought Marvel and Star Wars, so it was only a matter of time before the comics began to reflect this. The smart thing they did was to give Vader his own title, which I like because I’m not that into the adventures of Luke and Han.

The first Vader series was twenty-odd issues featuring his fall from grace after the Death Star’s destruction, and his rise to command of the Imperial Fleet. Basically it charts Vader’s career between Episodes IV and V, though there’s plenty of room for other side-stories.

The second series flashed back to the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith, and tracks Vader’s actions before A New Hope. It doesn’t cover the entire period, but it hits a lot of the important notes. How he got his red lightsaber, how he trained the Inquisitors and hunted down the surviving Jedi, and how he built the castle on Mustafar seen in Rogue One. So it handles everything important Vader was known to have done between Episodes III and IV.

The third series, currently ongoing, starts right after Vader’s final scene in Empire Strikes Back, and I would assume it’s going to lead him right up to his arrival at Death Star II in Return of the Jedi. I’m really into this, because I feel like this is an especially overlooked stage of Vader’s career. Starting out, it seems to be mostly about Vader investigating how his son survived Padme’s death, as he seeks revenge against anyone who hid the boy from him. Of course, nearly everyone involved in that cover-up is already dead, so I’m not sure where this is going to lead.

All three volumes of the Vader title focus on the utter futility of Vader’s quests for power and revenge. His hunts for Jedi survivors was just something for him to do in his spare time, since the Jedi were no longer a threat to him. His castle on Mustafar was designed to give him special knowledge of the Force, but it only revealed truths that he already knew, or had long since rejected. His plot to regain the Emperor’s favor after Yavin was very satisfying to watch, but also pointless: The Emperor needed him too badly to dispose of him, and Vader’s still a patsy whether he’s the #2 guy in the Empire or the #5 guy in the Empire. And now this new series sees him chasing ghosts, trying to make sense of Luke’s refusal to join him. He wants some sort of answer to his dilemma, but the only answer he’s ever going to find is the one in ROTJ, where he sacrifices himself to kill the Emperor, the one thing he cannot bring himself to contemplate until the time comes.

What saddens me, a little, is the realization that there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for Marvel to go with the guy. We’ve got an arc of Vader between Episodes III and IV, an arc between IV and V, and now V and VI, and that’s it. The only way to do another Darth Vader series after this would be to go back and cover one of those three periods of his career. And I’d be up for that, but the three series Marvel has done seem a little too decisive for this. Like they purposely planned these comics because they weren’t going to revisit the character again for a while. At least, not as the star of his own feature.

I guess I could deal with that. Maybe Marvel could finally get around to exploring the Sith career of Count Dooku between Episodes I and II, or work out some loose ends with the Emperor between Episodes VI and IX. The main thing that’s been on my mind about Vader, though, is this idea that the character could just be done, and laid aside.

This is something I’ve often observed about Cell and Frieza in DBZ. I still think it’s dumb how they brought back Frieza after Trunks killed him, because there really wasn’t anything left to do with the character after he got turned into a cyborg and instakilled. There’s nowhere to go after that. His character arc was to start as the Final Boss of the entire Universe and then to get reduced to a pathetic, minor threat. You can bring him back, but your only choice, dramatically speaking, is to reset the character, which means putting him back on the same track he’s already covered. There’s no way to bring back Frieza and not have it be a retread of stuff he’s already done once before.

Cell might have some interesting applications beyond his original story, but he’s too much of a slave to his purpose. His job was to carry on Dr. Gero’s revenge scheme, and that all ended when the saga ended, so he just seems out of place whenever he appears after that. This is why I’m glad Toei and Toriyama haven’t brought Cell back, although at this rate it feels like it’s only a matter of time. The thing is, if they brought him back, what else could they do with him?

With Darth Vader, all of his most important moments have already been covered in the movies, so all that’s left is to produce some side-story content. The old Expanded Universe tended to steer clear of Darth Vader, probably out of respect for George Lucas’ prequel plans. Later, the Clone Wars projects gave us more Anakin Skywalker than anyone knew what to do with, which is basically Darth Vader content, but not quite. That’s why I dig these Marvel books so much, because there’s never been such a sustained effort to tell a Darth Vader story like this. But once it’s run its course, the only way to keep using the character would basically be to start over. I have a hard time seeing Marvel do that. They’d have to get a new writer to retell those years like the first set of comics didn’t happen. That could be very entertaining, but it doesn’t sound likely to happen.

I’m not terribly worried about getting my Darth Vader fix in the future. They’ll keep making stories about him long after I’m dead. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about the limits of what you can do with one character. I’ve long thought that you can always find gaps in the narrative that can be filled in with new stories, but maybe that isn’t true. Maybe at some point, for some characters, there’s a finite amount of things to do with them. You look at all of the Anakin Skywalker Clone Wars stories, and I’m sure someone could write a few hundred more, but would it really accomplish anything that hasn’t already been covered? Is it possible to “use up” a character? I probably won’t know for sure anytime soon.

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