(electronic crackling)
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- How are you doing, you wonderful nerds?
Let's talk about Guardians of the Galaxy for a second.
You have to admit, it's a pretty interesting Marvel film.
Not only was it set in a completely different setting,
but the characters were different.
And I don't mean a talking raccoon and a tree man.
I mean, every character is a jerk.
- Bunch of jackasses, standing in a circle.
- And with the second movie on its way,
they seem to be doubling down on the amount of a-holes
they want on the team.
They're adding Yondu, officially, to the team.
They're adding Nebula to the team.
All of these characters, not the best people.
Even Baby Groot, who in the first movie
was the only glimpse of decency we had among the team,
is described in the second movie, as, quote, a little jerk.
But hey, at least in this cast of unsympathetic characters,
we get Mantis, whose power is literally empathy.
You know, of course, then she gets hit in the face.
You might think, "That's nothing really new from Marvel.
"They've had Iron Man back in the beginning
"of their cinematic franchise, and he's a jerk."
But to explain how this is a little bit different,
I thought I would bring on a couple of a-holes that I know.
- Yes, Marvel has had other jerk characters.
We all know that.
But they always seem to evolve
into some sort of good person.
Or even a hero.
And the nature of jerk characters
means that they have a lot of room to grow and change
and become that hero that we want them to be.
And sometimes they actually do that.
For example, Iron Man.
Iron Man quickly becomes that generic hero
that we all wanted, but when we first saw him,
he was a warmonger, he was a womanizer,
he was a drinker, he was rude to everybody,
and he didn't even realize that the most important person
in his life was Pepper.
Or for example, Thor.
Thor was completely and utterly pompous.
He was egotistical.
He knew he was gonna be the king.
He knew that he was the best at everything he did.
But once his hammer was taken away,
he ended up realizing that he had to become something more,
so he finally becomes the hero.
There's even those moments in Iron Man and Thor
when we get those pinnacle moments when we realize
that they are now a hero.
The Guardians, on the other hand,
they don't actually go through that change.
Sure, they all banded together and ended up
saving the universe, but they still went back
to being the jerks and bad people that they were
when we first saw them.
This follows a rule that was adopted
by the TV show Seinfeld called, "No Hugging, No Learning."
Usually, when you have a sitcom,
you're having, at the end of the sitcom,
a situation where someone's hugging it out,
or a lesson is being learned.
For example, on Full House, you would have Danny Tanner
talking to Michelle with that annoying,
really quiet piano music playing in the background,
and then all is good.
Everything's solved in 30 minutes,
and you learned a very wonderful lesson.
This is the opposite of what Seinfeld did.
They're jerks.
And they continue to be jerks.
They never apologize for the horrible things that they do
to other people, and episode to episode,
they're the same jerks that they always were.
- Ah.
- Now there's a couple basic rules of being a jerk
or using a jerk character.
What you have to do is you have to have them fail
at every single thing you do so it becomes funny,
and you just realize that they're being a jerk.
You can kind of think
about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Yes, they're terrible people,
and they're trying to do these things,
but they never really succeed at them,
so we could just laugh at them,
and we don't need that redemption or them hugging
or any of the lessons to be learned,
'cause let's be honest, there is no lesson to be learned
on It's Always Sunny.
Or, another thing is you have
to make them sympathetic somehow.
You have to show how terrible they are, yes,
but you also have to show that you can care about them, too.
Perhaps there's something in their life
that caused them to be such a way.
All of this definitely ties into the Guardians of the Galaxy
because of the fact that they don't make that change
and they don't become heroes.
It's really apparent.
Even when they have their hero poses, the slow-motion walks,
or those moments when they're supposed
to be stoically standing like Captain America would
or Iron Man, you have Rocket adjusting his crotch.
You have someone picking their nose.
You have someone looking off in the distance
and not really caring about anything.
Their hero poses are basically,
"We're the same jerk people
"that we were in the first place."
And let's be honest, later on, we realize
that all they care about is doing something for money
and going back to thieving and killing
just like they were in the first place.
- What if someone does something irksome
and I decide to remove his spine?
- That's actually murder.
One of the worst crimes of all.
- And trust me.
I know jerks because I've lived with this guy
for a few years, and...
He's a jerk.
- Some really good points there, Teq.
Not so much, Cojac.
As you were saying, you can either have
an unsympathetic character fail at everything they do,
and that's really funny to us,
or you have to make them likable in some capacity.
And the best way to get audiences on board
with an unlikable character is by showing them
doing at least one act of kindness.
Even though every member of the Guardians backstory
is steeped in tragedy, right?
Peter Quill lost his mom.
Drax lost his family.
Rocket was experimented on.
Gamora was tortured.
You'd think that that would be enough
for audiences to get on board with them,
but really, at the end of the day,
they just keep showing us that they are jerks.
So, audiences might need something a little bit more
to go off of.
In the broad terms of storytelling,
there is a trope known as saving the cat
or petting the dog.
It doesn't have to be a literal translation there.
I know Rocket is kind of iffy around specific dogs.
It usually means that one character has to perform an action
that helps a weaker or more vulnerable character.
Like, consoling someone who is in mourning.
Or saving someone's wife and kid.
But it's a fine balance.
Even when Peter goes out of his way
to sacrifice himself and save Gamora,
he still immediately starts to feed his own ego.
All in all, Rhomann Dey summed it up pretty well
when he said...
- He's an a-hole,
but he's not 100% a dick.
- What do you guys think?
Are the Guardians of the Galaxy jerks with a heart of gold?
Or just jerks?
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.
Also, huge shout-out to the BossLevel8 guys
for helping out with this video.
We did another video on their channel
where we actually reviewed terrible reviews
of Guardians of the Galaxy.
It was a lot of fun.
It caught me off guard, and it was just a blast.
Definitely go check it out.
It'll be linked onscreen right now,
and in the description down below.
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make sure to hit that big sexy subscribe button
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I will see you guys tomorrow for another video.
In the meantime, my name is Scott,
reminding you to read between the panels
and grow smarter through comics.
See ya.