Familiarity and Contempt

Three issues into Defenders, I've noticed that Dr. Strange's teammates seem to find him annoying. At least, the Silver Surfer and Harpy do. Be curious to see what Cloud thinks, assuming issue 4 focuses on their perspective. Maybe it's owing to Strange plucking them out of the aether and throwing them into this whole mess, or maybe it's just a Defenders thing. Long tradition of people on that team being irritated by each other.

But this seems like an attitude I've seen elsewhere. Characters just being a little tired of Strange and his whole deal. True for Tony Stark to an extent as well. Some of that is younger characters, teen heroes who are going to naturally not be impressed with the old guys. Especially old guys who strut around like they're hot shit all the time. Some of it is probably a general cultural pushback. Marvel's early days were steeped in "the intelligent white guy knows best" stuff. Richards, Stark, Xavier, to the point it was sort of baked into the universe. They're the leaders, they're the ones that form a secret cabal to guide everything. 

That kind of thing gets more critical examination now, so there's some backlash. Characters aren't just going to nod along docilely with whatever those guys say. Not all the time, anyway.

But it could also be a fun way to play with how long all these characters have been around. For a long time - couple decades, at least - interactions between Marvel characters were typified by the "misunderstanding battle." The Fantastic Four perceive Spider-Man trying to bust into their home as an attack. The X-Men try to keep the Avengers from walking into a trap, so the Avengers think they're working with the villain. Everyone keeps bothering the Hulk. Eventually things get hashed out, and the heroes manage to work together long enough to get the job done and go their separate ways.

After a certain number of team-ups it's not feasible. Spider-Man's going to stop assuming the worst about Daredevil, and vice versa. Start thinking, "Something's wrong here," not, "Ol' Hornhead's gone bad!" there are ways around that. Clones, faking your death and changing your costume. With teams, it's easy enough to shift up the roster. Add someone the other heroes aren't sure of, like when Magneto joined the X-Men in the late '80s. Suddenly the X-Men could be a little more suspect. But given Marvel's (and DC) tendency to reset to particular status quo, even that's only kicking the can down the road.

So it moves into another phase, which I think became more prevalent in the mid-2000s. Might be able to tie it to Bendis writing the Avengers. Now, the fact practically everyone knows each other is a feature. If his Avengers team stumbles across Wolverine in the Savage Land, there's no big fight. They immediately team up, and Stark offers Logan a spot on the team. Storm can join the Avengers, Daredevil and Squirrel Girl, too, when she's not looking after Luke and Jessica Jones' kid. Oh, and she and Wolverine apparently know each other, too, somehow! By Jonathan Hickman's run, basically every character in an Avenger. 

There's even an Avengers team (the Uncanny Avengers) designed to pull from all the different little realms. Avengers, X-Men, Inhumans, Fantastic Four, the solo acts like Spidey and Deadpool. There are no fiefdoms any longer. Everyone networks, so everyone can call on anyone whenever they need.

It's a fact of life there are going to be people you just can't get along with. Where something about them, whether something major or something minor, is going to rub you the wrong way. The more people you meet, the more likely that is to happen. Even with people you might be OK with initially, the more you hang around them, the more their idiosyncrasies will either endear or frustrate you.

Maybe that's where we're at. The heroes of the Marvel Universe know each other enough to know who's trustworthy and who's not, but also which of those they'd be glad never to see again. There are definitely heroes who find Spider-Man incredibly annoying, and others who want nothing to do with Emma Frost and her casual disregard for the sanctity of anyone's mind. The ones who find Steve Rogers tiresome for his old-fashioned views, or his idealism (or maybe because of how many people fawn over him), and the ones who don't want to deal with Logan's tendency to rack up a bodycount, or Hulk's unpredictability. In a crisis, they can still work with them, because they're heroes and you put that stuff aside to do the job, but it's like fingernails on a chalkboard.