One of the early Facebook memes you’d see everywhere on the site was, “What if superheroes had social media?” The answer was, they’d be at each other’s throats. So, typical Facebook users then. The format typically had a post, group chat, or string of DMs, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Daredevil asking who wants to join the Defenders, followed by a bunch of comments from other superheroes who would either join in or tell him to bog off. There’s one where Luke Cage is persuaded to join because of a bulletproof hoodie, so he doesn’t have to keep buying new ones. It’s all a bit silly, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel’s Midnight Suns has captured that charming littl𒐪e internet nugget and made it a unique way of getting to know its heroes.
There’s a tab in the menu called Superlink where you can check DMs or posts, with bots that will share Daily Bugle and WHIH Global News stories. In execution, it’s more like Tony Stark’s private Discord server, but that just modernises the meme - the only people using Facebook these days are your racist extended family and angry gamers. Putting both of those in the rearview mirror, we get to spend time exclusively with superheroes privately added by Stark himself. One of my favourite threads on Superlink popped up a little 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:after Spider-Man joined. Robbie Reyes, AKA Ghost Rider, posted, “Hey Peter. I appreciate you, bro.” It was followed by Spider-Man saying, “I appreciate you too, man”, and Nico and Carol chiming in with, “Um, this is a public post… Yeah, do we all need to be here for this?&rdqu♒o;
Sometimes, you’ll get cryptic and awkward posts like Bruce Banner saying, “Never listen to what the others say”. Clearly, he’s 𒈔going through something rough, grabbing his phone, and tweeting. It’s an easy mistake, we’ve all been there. Like any social media, we get to form parasocial relationships that let us unpack these characters in further depth, complimenting the dates and hangouts we have in the real world. We barely meet Bruce Banner since he’s a comlink away in Avengers Tower, but through Superlink, we get to see conversations with him that are separate to the plot. It’s a welcome break going from all the fighting and world-ending doom to something so human and mundane.
Maybe the best example of superheroes being ordinary is Robbie asking if astronaut ice cream is actual ice cream, a completely innocuous post made interesting by the weirdness of the Marvel universe. The team has a back and forth leading to Captain Marvel explaining what it’s m𒐪ade of, “On earth? Usually milk, fat and sugar.” Everyone then, understandably, asks what it’s like on other planets since she clarified “On earth”. It turns out, somewhere in the outer reaches of the universe, there’s astronaut ice cream made of real astronauts. Yum.
Another has Spider-Man asking if anyone heard about Symkaria’s lake going “poof”, which everyone asks him how he knows about. Apparently, he has sources in Symkaria, so Blade snarkily responds, “Look at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mr. Connections over here.” Midnight Suns’ greatest strength is the banter between heroes when the༺y’re not fighting for their lives, something we rarely see outside of the comics, but one of the best ways we ever got to see heroes just being people was through those old internet memes. They were cringe, but charming, as we’d see these characters having monotonous chats about all sorts of topics, superhero or otherwise. And they were using the same day-in-and-day-out tech as we do, rather than the futuristic battle suits and intergalactic comms we normally see, and that was the whole appeal.
Years later, it’s an outdated and overdone meme that died off like everything else does on the internet, appearing like a lightnin💎g strike before we all moved onto the next storm. So colour me surprised that Midnight Suns dove deep into Marvel’s unofficial and obscure history to add even more depth to the way we get to know its cast - lightning struck twice. It’s one of the things I look forward to most when I get a new hero on the squad. I can’t wait to see what Wolverine thinks of Stark’s private Discord, and whether he’ll have any interesting comment♔s - I’m foreseeing a lot of bubs and, somehow, grunts.