That was a lovely way to reminisce on a very rainy afternoon.

Huh. A Chrome search suggests you are correct. Surprising casting.

You may be aware there is a current pop culture trope in which white guys are always supposed to say, on hearing the name of any black celebrity woman, “I find her very attractive”. Any black guys are supposed to groan at this stereotypical, right-on, Stuff White People Like middle class progressive reflex. Rihanna is the usual example.

I had not heard of this and so if ever asked the question would given an honest answer, even if it is “who?”

I could also name a few more attractive black women of my workplace acquaintance easily.

None of that cast holds a candle to Phylicia Rashad, circa 1985, anyway. Or the actresses who played her two elder daughters, for that matter. Or a young Lena Horne, though that would be well before my time.

Sure, age is a factor. But even when I was an 80s teen wishing for a decent Batman movie [which I finally got in my 30s], I wasn’t into comics the way convention-goers are.

I finally attended a few in the earlier part of this decade and realized I had drifted away from even the margins of this culture, and it had also moved away from me in new directions that perhaps were inevitable.

Call it a combination of my always being on the margins, ageing out even of that, and the subculture slipping its moorings and assuming an unjustifiably large cultural presence. It’s not the only such thing from the 70s and 80s, come to think.

I wouldn’t say they are a distillation of what it is to be human. I’d rather see even dumbed down historical dramas or mythology for that. But comics and comic movies definitely represent something of what their producers and consumers want to see and see happen in the world.

If I go to see these now [I've missed the last 57 movies in the enormous Marvel universe], it’s usually to hope against hope that the villains will win and the heroes and all their hopes will wind up dust. I gather that almost happened in the last Avengers movie. Maybe I’ll see it someday.

On a side note, I have noticed that comic book sensibility has affected historical and war movies pretty hard. Such movies always did reflect their times [WW2 movies of the 70s were Vietnam metaphors to some degree, sure]. Now their times are the age of comic superheroes, childish archetypes, and over the top snowflakery.

Yes, absolutely none of the women were hot. I work with hotter black girls everyday than they allowed in that movie, and that’s why a comic book movie got awards.

Yeah, maybe comic books are a tapline into the cultural zeitgeist, but I’ve never been able to take them seriously as “literature”. Most of the writers who’ve worked in that genre have been amazingly trite and about as deep as the water vapor beading up on your mirror after a shower. It ain’t the Analects you’re looking at, in the comic book stand, but the equivalent of the village storyteller writ somewhat large.

They’re literally comic books ferchrissakes… This ain’t Shakespear writing about the human condition; it’s barely grade-school level stuff, trite and empty of real depth or profundity.

I am not convinced by a conservative interpretation of the MCU, either as to creator intentions or public reception.