Originally Posted by
Albert1981
I definitely hope the new Zatanna movie will show her using her powers in really original and unique ways. The DCEU has been even MORE reluctant to incorporate magic in its movie universe than its Marvel counterpart. Part of me likes this because I want that cinematic universe to have CLEAR and DEFINITIVE magical "rules". I believe Zatanna's introduction into the DCEU will be just as important as Strange's into the MCU when it comes to magic.
MCU's rules overall are not really defined, and it extends beyond just the use of magic. There's no defined rules for many of the character's powers, how they can be used, how strong they are, WHAT they are, and often times battles get reduced to characters shooting multicolored energy blasts at each other, which is what happened in WandaVision. WandaVision was awesome at the start because it showed how Wanda's powers can be used more versatilely, but the show ended up devolving into Wanda and Agatha shooting different colored energy blasts at each other, which looks cool but is kinda lacking in creativity and boring. This happens a lot in the MCU, characters like Thor, Captain Marvel, and Wanda have these undefined energy attacks that aren't really used for anything besides shooting colorful blasts or lightning at others. I wanna see more interesting creative uses of these powers. I've heard that a good example of a strong power/magic system would be My Hero Academia's (I actually haven't read it myself) because every character's abilities have strictly defined rules, strengths, and limitations, which leads to much more creative uses of these abilities and more dynamic and interesting fight sequences. Certain characters are strong or weak against others due to the rules of their powers, but they can still persevere if they use them creatively. Dr. Strange was a great movie imo because of this. Strange was using his magic creatively, conjuring shields, sending people to different dimensions, using the time stone to trap people in buildings and such. In most of the MCU, it's more "whoever punches harder or lands an energy blast first wins", and even then it's really difficult to even define character's strengths compared to each other because they fluctuate all the time since they are not really defined at all. Like in Infinity War and Endgame, even though I loved the movies, there were a lot of instances of this. How did Thanos effortlessly defeat the Hulk, but Captain America still somehow put up a fight against him? Why was the power stone able to knock back Captain Marvel, who could take punches from Thanos without flinching and fly through giant spaceships like it was nothing, but the power stone seemed to do minimal damage to Iron Man's titanium armor, which Thanos could break apart with his hands? The more powerful characters and artifacts that are added to the MCU, the more the ill-defined powers and abilities are starting to become a liability. And the whole battles consisting of energy blasts and explosions and nothing else thing is starting to get boring.