Review

When the first season of Invincible had come out, I had heard a number of good things about it. I decided to watch it myself, and indeed, I enjoyed it. With the notably long wait between season 1 and season 2, I fell off and only recently got back to watching season 2 and 3. And I have to say, my opinion has soured on the show, quite a lot.

I don't know if there was really a substantial change between the first season and the following two. Or if my own tastes have changed that drastically. Either is totally possible. One of the overwhelming takeaways I'm getting is "This feels like standard comics trash." Comics are not a medium I gravitate towards. It's not that I think it's impossible for good things to come from them. It's just that to me an average quality comic is well below an average quality show or book or whatever. I would say the same for manga. Firstly, I think the medium is this weird middle-ground between movie/tv and book. Where it sort of has the detriments of both and the strengths of neither. They've never drawn me in. But speaking in a 2025 world, I can also say that the light from descendants of comics (show adaptations, MCU shite) no longer reaches me. They're just boring. The superhero everything. It just feels like the story has been told and no one has anything interesting to say. I am sure there are comics of things that are not superhero. My immediate question though when presented with such an example would be "Can't you just make this into a book or a show?" With Invincible, when I think back on how I felt about the first season, one of my thoughts was something along the lines of "this feels different". That was a draw, even then, I felt like I was watching something that had diverged from the mean. I no longer feel that way at all.

Much of the second season runs together for me and one of my primary problems with it is that I feel it did almost nothing to advance the larger plot. What substantially had changed between the ending of season 1 and the ending of season 2? There is now a brother, I guess and also we have decided that we want to try humanizing and (jesus fucking christ) redeeming Omni-Man? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. He is a sociopath. What are we even talking about maybe he could be convinced to do better? Truly bewildering what we're even doing with him. The show genuinely seems to want me to befriend the Nazi and I don't understand. You don't greet a Nazi with an open hand to shake, but with an M1-Garand. But what if he's just the product of a bad society and he has good in him? He slaughtered a group of people that he pretended to care for for years. He is a sociopath. I can't comprehend what's going on in people's brains where they can't identify sociopathy. You see people do it with not just characters in media, but people in real life. Where they see direct evident with their eyes and hear it with their ears, but their brain seemingly throws it in the trash.

Something that greatly annoys me by the time we get to season 3 is I have this overwhelming sense of people doing things for no real reason, just because the plot demands. The biggest example by far is the rift between Mark and Cecil. There is quite literally, no reason for any of what happened between them to happen. Why does Cecil decide to tase Mark instead of speak to him? Why does he reveal his trump card over Mark? Why? What purpose does that serve at all? Why does he not just explain anything? Why does Mark get butthurt about the zombie robots? There's no real reason why he should find them to be unacceptable over anything else. It just feels like the plot is leading the characters along.