It was, but not for the reason you think.

FATWS suffered from heavy edits to remove a plot about vaccines and manufactured disease during covid. I understand why they did it, but it hurt the show and would have been better left in.

She-hulk and secret invasion are actually good shows that a bunch of vocal fan boys won’t stop crying about because marvel didn’t do it the way they would have.

She hulk is probably my favorite production of theirs, and ive literally seen all everything theyve done. I’m a big fan of bryne’s runs from the 80s and the show really nails the flavor of those comics. Shulkie’s fourth wall breaking isn’t just aimed at the viewer. She would frequently argue or call out writers, artists and editors from her panels. She would break them and dump them off the page. She would question why they drew her in a skimpy costume on the cover that she was never seen in throughout the issue. The show gets that and executes it well. When she goes back to the disney+ screen and crawls through the BTS doc to go find Kevin was perfection. It’s exactly what I would expect from the Jen Walter’s that I grew up reading. Marvel knew which parts of the fanbase would hate her and made them the villains, of course it pissed then off. It was supposed to. If you saw the forums plotting her demise and saw yourself posting there, you just outed yourself as part of the problem.

Secret invasion suffers from a different problem.

Think back to Age of Ultron. Was that a close adaptation of the titular comic event? No. What about civil war? Not really. Infinity war? No Adam warlock, no Death worshipping Thanos trying to impress his love, so no. They have a consistent habit of naming the movie for the most recognizable, or marketable, event and adapting the characters faithfully while rearranging the story to fit their needs. Which is a good way to do it. I don’t want to watch a direct adaptation of most comicbook storyline. I want to see a fresh take on it, I’ve already read those issues.

So everyone went into Secret Invasion expecting the comicbook storyline, which was stupid. It didn’t track with their naming convention or how that story would make sense in the current state of the MCU. Theres going to be spoilers ahead, but the last episode aired almost a week ago so I doubt anyone who cares will be surprised.

spoiler

I enjoyed the show very much, but I didn’t expect it to be just like the books. What we got was an adaption of the original Super Skrull story, from way back in the F4s early days. The skrulls couldn’t overpower the F4, so they figured out a way to replicate their abilities too. All of them. That was the goal of the original super skrull story, to pit them against one enemy that can do everything they can. We don’t have the F4 in the MCU though, we only have the avengers right now. Overall, I thought the show felt like a lot of lead up, there wasn’t a pay off because that’s coming next. It was left with Ritson as a devisive, offensive president, I believe he is a skrull. For all the complaining about “why did skrodey get to shoot his mouth off and ritson didn’t care?”, “why didn’t he listen to nick after he knew about the threat” starts to make sense if Ritson was the next phase of the plan.

Spoilers end her and we enter into my wild speculation.

We know that thunderbolt Ross will be the president, and we know who will be on his thunderbolts team. Who are they? Huh, mostly supersoldiers and spies, and a big change up from their comics lineup. I expect Ritson and the vp will leave seats vacated, through death or betrayal or some other means and Ross will assume command as next in line, however far down they have to go to leave it to him. He puts together that team to hunt down more skrulls.

In short, I think the payoff that everyone wanted will be in Thunderbolts and this was the prequel.