Lyri said:
He isn't awfully wrong though, everyone here is just incredibly knee jerky because "Omg he insulted my fandom".
He kind of insulted a lot of fandoms... and women as well. Typically, it's considered a bad idea to insult your core demographics.
Lyri said:
"He can't be fucking called the Martian Manhunter because that's goofy. He can be called Manhunter
It is a goofy name and when you look at what the character is and does, Manhunter makes no real sense.
Anymore than, I don't know, BATman? SUPERman? Also, he's a Martian... that hunts down killers. A Manhunter. Martian Manhunter. It 100% perfectly describes his origin AND his occupation in one fell swoop. Superman's title doesn't even do that.
Beyond that... if it's goofy... so what? Isn't that one MAJOR reason people started reading and loving comics? Why characters like Deadpool, Squirrel Girl, Ant-man, Plastic Man, and Wonder Woman have endured for decades? David Goyer seems almost ashamed of anything wacky or goofy in comics, despite the fact that's one of the main reasons Marvel is so successful right now. Being a tad "goofy" doesn't mean it can't be serious. Batman, conceptually, is goofy; a rich playboy dresses up as a flying mammal to drive around the city punching thugs with his sidekick Robin, whose costume is only slightly less distracting than a signal flare, all while his butler keeps his giant, enormous, impractical bat-cave a secret while cleaning all the computers of bat guano on a daily basis...
Lyri said:
... The whole deal with Martian Manhunter is he's an alien living amongst us... So he comes down to Earth and decides, unlike Superman who already exists in the world now, that he's just going to be a homicide detective... So instead of using super-powers and mind-reading and like, oh, I could figure out if the President's lying or whatever, he just decides to disguise himself as a human homicide detective. Dare to dream!"
He is right, again.
Martian works in the comic books and TV series because he can readily play a side part whilst they fill out his background over the series.
A 2 hour film isn't going to convey a strong enough story to put John into the foreground, it would be Green Lantern all over again. 2 hours of watching an alien live amongst us as a detective is great and all that but, it isn't much different from Superman - the alien who lived amongst us and became a news reporter and then our greatest hero.
what makes John more sellable to the people who aren't fans?
Because he's NOT the same as Superman. Superman is, as one comic writer described it, a 2nd generation immigrant. The only home he has ever known is Earth. He was raised by humans. He blends in with humans because he identifies as a "man" (it's the "man" part of "Superman"). Martian Manhunter is a 1st generation immigrant, one who still vividly recalls his former home and friends and family and life that was left behind. Earth, despite being his new home, does not feel like a place he has settled into. It doesn't feel like "home". And because he left everything behind, the only friends and "family" he now has is the Justice League. They are his new home, his new family, and there's a reason he's long been described as "the heart" of the Justice League by many creators.
It's the reason you can have multiple heroes with similar powers and origins, yet the execution of which can yield incredibly different results. What makes Iron Man different from Batman? They're both rich, billionare playboys with no real powers in expensive, high-tech suits of armor they use to fight crime with inventive toys and weapons, with support from their British butlers, finding redemption and purpose through a tragedy in their lives that forever altered their outlook on life. But the two are polar opposites in personalities and execution.
Lyri said:
Whilst we love him, Goyer has to sell him to people who wouldn't be interested in the comics but do like super hero movies, the first Spidey worked so well because it was fun - for everyone and not just fans of comics.
And that's a core reason why so many people didn't like Man of Steel. It wasn't very fun. It was dark, moody, gritty, morose, and super serious. So of course that same approach wouldn't work for Martian Manhunter... or 99.9% of DC comics heroes in general. It didn't even work for Superman. It only works in Batman's world and other truly "dark" heroes and villains.
Lyri said:
Martians powers are just so ridiculous that they would be hard to translate for a person in the spotlight to have - a man who can phase through danger, play with peoples minds and shapeshift is well, not very hard to imagine he would be in peril.
Supes has to learn which way his moral compass points and how to be a human despite not being one - which can be compelling.
John like Supes, loses his homeworld and now just wants to live amongst us until he is recruited into the JLA where he becomes a secretary.
He was never "a secretary". He was a detective (which means he didn't solve all his problems by punching them). X-men Days of Future Past is now in theaters showing everything from shape-shifters and psychics to phasing through walls, and it's somehow not struggled in any regard showing these powers off or translating them to the big screen. This isn't 1995 anymore. We can have a 10 foot green behemoth punching a skyscraper-sized flying alien snake beast in the middle of New York and a talking raccoon riding a sentient tree man into space battle... Martian Manhunter's powers are significantly easier to adapt than that.
And the big thing about John is that, no, he DOESN'T want to live among us. He wants his home back. He wants his family back. He wants a place to belong where he can be himself and not hide. He wants his status quo restored. He is stuck on earth because he has no other choice... and his character development has always been growing to accept an alien world with creatures that he does not resemble and finding a place among them, to find a new family, to rebuilt a new life, to give purpose and meaning to a life originally stripped bare of everything he knew and loved. How can that NOT be compelling to watch develop?
Lyri said:
"I would set it up like The Day After Tomorrow. We discover one of those Earth-like planets... So maybe like... we get the DNA code from that planet and then grow him in a petri dish here... He's like in Area 51 or something and we're just basically... doing biopsies on him."
Not to say that this idea is good either, if he had said Super boy was being grown in a dish I could have gotten behind it but not John.
Not unless he twists it that John is infact just shifted into the dish in order to survive the loss of his planet and loved ones and the humans carried him back to Earth.
This is the same guy that wrote a story of Superman renouncing his American citizenship because he felt standing for "the American way" was too outdated and cheesy... which was the same reasoning he gave for having Superman no longer abide by a "no kill code" because he felt superhero rules and morality are too simple and silly in this day and age.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is proof that, if anything, we need MORE heroes like the ones from our past. A noble, heroic, all-American symbol of truth and justice struggling to find his place in a morally ambiguous world with tough decisions without compromising his value or integrity... The Winter Soldier was a better Superman movie in that regard than Man of Steel was.
