Let's talk about this beautiful glorious batshit radnasty excuse for a musical. (I love it. I love it so much.)
Oh my god. This is GLORIOUS. I need to watch this when I'm working, right now I'm too distracted. Thank you!! I'm gonna share this with all my friends and spread the gospel.
The FUCK YOU song is my favourite and I have to watch it on repeat sometimes. I may or may not think it's totally hot (I ship Batman<3<Supes so very hard, whoops)
I must @(Not) Literally A Bird, whose 18th (I think? Or was it 19th?) birthday was themed after this musical. It is the best musical. I love everything about it.
...I want to talk about what I love about this musical. I love campy shit. I get so much more entertainment out of something which is terrible and ridiculous and utterly gleeful about it than I will out of something which is 100% grimdark grittiness no fun allowed. (I mean, I like grimdark grittiness a whole lot, but my heart and soul belong to the things which embrace their goofiness wholeheartedly.) This is what happens when you grow up with an appreciation for Power Rangers and TMNT, I guess. So I love the humour in HMB. It's not meanspirited at all, it totally loves what it's doing, and that's important. I don't want to watch something which constantly talks about how stupid it is, I want to watch something which says "yeah this is stupid and campy and over-the-top but that's why it's fun". Superhero stuff in particular! I really do not have any patience at all for the whole gritty realism thing. I mean I fucking love Watchmen but that's because Watchmen is a story, it's got once solid plot and well-defined ending and it spends a lot of time on backstory and character motivation, I would not love it even slightly if it were an ongoing series with no end in sight. But in general, superhero comics are about a bunch of dudes with magic powers dressing up in skintight costumes to go solve crime by punching it a lot. It's sort of inherently campy, and if you try to take it seriously I'm going to spend a lot of time being confused and frustrated that "punch criminals" is taken as a popular and legitimate crimesolving tactic. (I think preexisting investment in superheroes is a big part of why I like the musical so much. I didn't really care about AVPM because I don't really care about Harry Potter.) Related to that, I like that the musical pokes fun at all the things I hate about Batman. Batman's a static character, he can't ever grow or emotionally develop past his parents' death, and therefore he's fundamentally uninteresting to me because why the fuck should I waste time and effort getting invested in this guy who is just gonna Sulk Forever. And then the whole musical's about how someone said "yeah sitting in the dark sulking all the time kind of really totally sucks, Batman's more fun when he has friends instead of being a miserable sack of organs". Also the puns! The fucking puns. The music is great. Both versions of Rogues Are We are my favourites but I love all the songs. Do I bellow them out while I do housework? ...maybe. And Batman<3<Supes forever oh god. They even get a hate duet, you can't tell me that's not a canon blackship (and obviously everyone already ships Batman<>Robin).
Yeah okay the puns are pretty great. And terrible. They are a Great and Terrible Thing. Now I want to watch the whole thing again, oh no.
Great and Terrible probably counts as a redundancy when it comes to puns. Or possibly even... a repundancy.
I got "Girls on Film" (a Duran Duran song) stuck in my head after Rogues Are We. Also, Sweet Tooth for Best Non-Canon Batman Villain, and Sweet Tooth's actor for Best Performance, what the hell even was that voice/laugh it was marvelous. Should probably rewatch AVPM soon. What else has Starkids done?
Someone said Starkid and now I am here, and I am going to sperg about Starkid because holy shit I love them and I spent like 2+ years of my life obsessed with them and I still enjoy their shit even tho I'm not up to date. @pixels - assuming you've watched the whole AVPM trilogy, they've also done a show wherein people's genitals are characters of their own (Me and My Dick; has some decent songs but isn't my favourite of the bunch); a show with Alien Insect Puppets (Starship; I liked it so much I wrote an essay about it for my final year of high school, plus it has some really great music.); a show that is Wicked but with Aladdin instead of The Wizard of Oz (Twisted; okay I haven't actually watched this one b/c it came out when I was in the middle of assignmenting and I never got around to watching it, even though I backed it on Kickstarter), and an audience-participatory musical about Oregon Trail (The Trail to Oregon, which I've got scheduled to watch when I'm recovering from surgery later this week because it looks funny as fuck.) I think that's it? That's all I can think of rn. They've also done tours, and obvs. Darren is off being Darren.
