Brian, are you an Avenger?
I'm not an Avenger.
Nina?
Legally you're not allowed to ask me that.
Does Hawkeye suck? That's the question we've got on the docket today. I'm here with Tom and Nina.
They are going to argue their positions. I'm going to be the judge of whether or not Hawkeye in fact
sucks. On the pro Hawkeye sucks side we have Nina Starner. On the con Hawkeye does not suck side
we've got Tom Meisfjord. So we're going to do a little high school debate style thing that I
vaguely remember from when I was in high school, about 10,000 years ago. We're going to start with
opening statements from Nina and then Tom, and then each person is going to have the
opportunity to offer a rebuttal. And then I will weigh in and decide whether or not
Hawkeye sucks. Nina does Hawkeye suck?
Yeah. Extremely hard actually. There you go. That's my argument.
Good night. Yeah, that's it. That's all I've got. Hawkeye sucks. So here's why Hawkeye sucks.
Here's why I have never given a flying fart about Hawkeye. So he shows up in Avengers and
immediately gets possessed by the Tesseract. So you have no idea who he is for most of the movie.
You're just like, oh, so he's bad maybe because he's obviously fighting against the Avengers.
And then they unpossess him or whatever, and he's friends with Natasha ... And
for the remainder of the movies, he does exactly one interesting thing,
which is be married to Linda Cardellini. Congratulations to that man.
But other than that, he does absolutely nothing of value. He has easily the worst weapon and like
his connection to Black Widow is something that I'll keep touching on. But
I'm always annoyed that everyone has ... Thor has a hammer and Ironman has a suit
and Cap has a shield and they're just like give her a gun. In that famous Avengers shot
in the circle, she's just reloading a tiny shotgun. And I'm like that sucks. She should
have a better weapon than that. But his is just a bow and arrow. He should be-
Which is worse than a gun.
Which is worse than a gun because it's slower.
And arrows, I would imagine take a very long time to make, so where are you getting all
of these? And if you run out, it's not like you can be like, "Oh, I have another arrow
clip." I feel like you have a finite amount of arrows. It's fine for Katniss Everdeen,
but it's not fine for an Avenger. She lived in the woods, he's in New York city.
He continues to do absolutely nothing interesting for several films to the point where I literally
can't remember which movies he's even in until we get to Infinity War and End Game. And after
his family vanishes, the beginning of End Game, he gets the world's stupidest haircut and goes
on a vaguely problematic mission to hunt people in Asia, for reasons I don't fully understand.
And then when he goes-
For sport, Nina.
You wait your turn, Tom.
Anyway, yeah, I will wrap this up in one second. And the only reason that he gets to live instead
of a much more interesting character who I will probably argue again gets shafted by the entire
cinematic universe by getting killed off before her stand-alone movie even shows up. The only
reason that he lives and she doesn't is because he is worthy of being alive because he has a wife and
children and she doesn't have a family. So that sucks extremely hard. He should have been like,
"No, I'm going to kill myself. My kids will be fine." I mean no disrespect to his kids, but
him having a family does not make him more worthy of life. So Hawkeye sucks.
All right. Thank you, Nina.
You're welcome.
Very good, Tom. Your opening statement on whether or not Hawkeye sucks. Tom, does Hawkeye suck?
Brian consider Hawkeye for a moment. It's true. He has no powers. It's true. He has
a costume so dumb that even the MCU won't try to grunge it up. And yes, it's true that he's
probably the kind of guy who would give Cabela's gift cards at Christmas but ...
Oh my God, that's so good.
Does he suck? Let's consider his accomplishments. He is an expert marksman married to Linda
Cardellini as my associate brought up. He's an adoring father and with Quicksilver and Black
Widow under his belt, he's killed two times as many Avengers as the next leading super-villain.
These are not small things. Consider Nina's argument that he has a stupid haircut. I put
it to you that he has an awesome haircut in End Game. And he carries a sword with him to work and
he's in his forties. How does that not describe the coolest guy you've ever met in your life?
And I put it to you, Brian and Nina, that a man is more than just the sum of his parts. We have
to consider where this man came from, Hawkeye in the comics. Do you know where he comes from?
Ohio.
Brian?
Yeah. He comes from the circus.
Waverly, Iowa.
Well, I wasn't far off with Ohio.
The small town of Waverley,
Iowa. The Hawkeye State a little on the nose. Yes, I'll give you that. But Waverley, Iowa.
I hate that.
Town motto, "When you're here, you're 289.9 miles from Chicago." Waverley, Iowa,
the home of character actor, Michael Talbot from Miami vice. And that's it. Iowa the state, home
to captain Kirk, the itchiest Star Trek captain, Miss Piggy, and according to Wikipedia, others.
And what did he manage to do? He picked himself up by his bootstraps and he got out there.
He made something of himself. He became an Avenger. Brian, are you an Avenger?
I'm not an Avenger.
Nina?
Legally you're not allowed to ask me that.
That's the end of Tom's statement. Nina, a rebuttal?
Rebuttal. Yeah. If a guy I knew in his forties carried a sword to work, I'd call the cops.
Because I'd be like, he definitely has a manifesto somewhere on his computer
about people who have wronged him. And I don't feel good about the situation.
Yeah. Okay, yeah. He's killed two Avengers. I don't even know what to say. I genuinely don't
even know where to begin. Yeah. Knowing nothing about his comics origin, even if I knew what his
comics origin was, I would still be like, oh, like you could replace most of Jeremy Renner in these
movies with a cardboard cut out of Hawkeye giving a thumbs up and I would not notice honestly.
His first appearance, he was in a circus sideshow.
Oh boy. Doing what? He's a regular man. Did he just shoot things?
He's shooting arrows really good.
He's great at shooting arrows.
And then Iron Man shows up and he's like, "Oh shucks, everyone's really interested in that
Iron Man. I better dress up in purple and then commit crimes to show I'm better than Iron Man."
What is Iron Man doing at a circus in Iowa?
I don't think he was in Iowa. I think the circus-
He's - the magic of life's beautiful tapestry
I think the circus was in New York at the time. I'll
give Iron Man that. No, he wasn't at a circus in Iowa-
I was like that doesn't track at all for Tony Stark's whole deal. But if you're a more casual
Marvel fan, like I am without the lore of the comics behind you, you don't know any of that. You
just look at Jeremy Renner and you think about his album and his app. And you're just like ... no.
Are you saying that you would have been more on board if we included the circus situation in his
onscreen portrayal? Just 40 minutes blasting circus music.
Maybe that's what we'll see in the film.
Oh, no. I just thought of that too. I was like, what if that's in Hawkeye?
I will leave the earth. I will not continue. Yeah.
Okay. Is that the end of your rebuttal?
My rebuttal is just nothing you said convinced me. I still hate him. And I'm so mad that
Florence Pugh is going to be wasted on the Hawkeye series trying to kill him because also that fight
should not be a fight. She should immediately be able to murder a guy with a bow and arrow.
She is explosion proof.
That's right. We did find that out.
Yeah. And she killed a guy by putting him in a bear costume and setting him
on fire and a different movie. So she's capable of anything.
That's what happened to Ursa Major in the MCU.
That's right.
Told you.
Tom, rebuttal to Nina. I feel like you did that kind of in your opening statement where you
took her to task about the haircut.
It's still stupid.
No, I don't mind to talk some more. There's plenty of other stuff that we can talk about
with Hawkeye. He's a phenomenal character with plenty of depth and nigh on 60 years of backstory
to consider, Nina Starner. He's a remarkable guy who's been brought up in multiple different
iterations. We don't just have to talk about the MCU version of Hawkeye. We can talk about
the Ultimate Comics version of Hawkeye written by Mark Millar, the one with an Eminem haircut
and the sick hoop earrings and the gross story where he pulls out his own fingernails-
He shot his fingernails. And he throws them at people to kill them.
That's how cool he is.
We can talk about Lego Hawkeye. Who's-
I'm actually more, he has one hoop earring or two?
I'm way more stuck on the hoop earring than I am the fingernail thing.
Two hoop earrings and some wrap around sunglasses.
Oh boy.
And he kills everybody in his house with silverware from his
silverware drawer. He's a remarkable character. We could talk about the version from the Matt
Fraction comic that won multiple Eisner awards and told everybody that, wow, this guy actually
has something to do and introduced Lucky, the pizza dog. That's a heck of a guy too. But I
think that my favorite thing about Hawkeye and I had a lot of time to think about it is that
we were going to do this episode three weeks ago, and then we had to keep putting it off.
My favorite thing about Hawkeye is that if Hawkeye was ever like,
"Hey, do you guys want to talk about Hawkeye?" He wouldn't make somebody wait three weeks to do
it. And maybe give them the opportunity to put together an entire visual aid.
Has that been on your wall for a month?
That just sat.
Oh, no.
Like the eye of Sauron staring down a person's anxieties-
So wouldn't you say, Tom, that knowing more about Hawkeye has recently made your life worse?
Nina wins.
Yeah, I think we've determined.
Yeah.
Sorry, Jeremy. I tried.
Sorry, Jeremy. Knowing about Hawkeye made Tom's life worse. Hawkeye sucks.
Hawkeye sucks. I'm sorry.
Damn it.
It was close. I wasn't sure which way it was going to go.
Yeah.
Nina crushed it at the end. You got it. Hawkeye, you suck.
Hawkeye sucks. Yeah.
You earned it.
Thank you. You earned it.
Thanks for watching. Please hit like and subscribe.