Secret Invasion #8 (OF 8)

This may do nothing to change your opinion, but... the "He Loves You" thing was NEVER meant to be important. It's no different than, say, a Muslim terrorist shouting something about Allah. Or a Christian terrorist shouting something about God. We wouldn't ask for the subplot on this "God" fellow in those stories. It was never meant to be a big element of this story.

Except for the fact that they kept on saying it. 

Repetition generally denotes importance in most fiction.  I see the real world parallels, but expected something less on-the-nose.  Sure, it's the Skrulls' god...so what is their religion like?  If you're going that route, invoking the real world, then I would hope the story would reflect the complexity that comes with talking about our world's fundamentalist terrorists. 

Yea by virtue of the cryptic repetition, the "He love you" bit ought to have held some sort of significance to the larger work of the story. But then there was no larger work in Secret Invasion at all, was there? Just because Bendis, and others, and said in interviews and such that it was never supposed to be important doesn't excuse bad writing.

I thought they did mention who "he" is in the main Secret Invasion book. Wasn't it right before this big, end battle (like 2 issues ago?) they said that "he" was God? I remember it because it set up the line "Our god has a hammer."

Yeah, they did.  It's not that we don't know who "he" is, so much as a lot of people finding the explanation to be too simplistic and/or lame.

Well, its not even just that the explanation of who "he" is is lame, its also that it is indicative of the whole problem with the series in general. The whole series is a mish-mash of half-explored ideas that never reach anything more than a quasi-significance to the actually story.

1. He Loves You

2. Captain Marvel

3. Nick Fury's Team

4. The Ship full of Skrull Dopplegangers

5. Iron Man's Self Doubt

In fact, i take it back. None of it is really significant to the story story at all. It all just happened. Not really weaved together in any rhyme or reason. If we want to talk about just throwing ideas into a blender, this is it...

I honestly don't understand this concept that every idea has to be fully explored. Hell, Grant Morrison dashes off tons of ideas and doesn't explore them fully. That's part of the fun of comics.

That said, I seriously don't get that here: 

1. He Loves You was fully explained. People just expected something more. But it makes sense in and of itself.

2. Captain Marvel - also explained. What's to get here? He was a skrull, but he was actually affected by the DNA and have a crisis of conscience. I'll give you this - the fact that this may inspire Marvel Boy to be a hero was kinda weakly handleded.

3. Nick Fury's Team -- what more did you want? It was all explained, and actually got a lot of play in the Avengers series. He went underground and he gathered a team of people completely off the grid, in preparation for an invasion. That's all it was. It gets a whole series after this.

4. The Skrull Ship -- it was part of the invasion tactic. Another strategy to confuse the humans. I don't think we really need that fully explained. I thought it was pretty obvious. 

5. Iron Man -- that was a nice character moment. If you suddenly realized that sleeper agents were everywhere, if your whole life had recently changed, if you had been under control by others before, you might have a bit of self-doubt. He froze. It was a moment to show how the skrull's plan was fairly insidious. I don't get why that needs more explanation.

So -- you know, I think this all gets chalked up to expectations. I think people put such emphasis on what they WANTED this series to be, that it can never really live up to the hype. The He Loves You thing would never be noticed if it was on an episode of 24 and the terrorist revealed that "'He' is 'God'." All of the ideas are like this. They're definitely not thrown in a blender. Everything had a design to move characters into different places. Osborne, Fury, Iron Man, Marvel Boy, Hawkeye, Cage... all these ideas move various characters and situations into Dark Reign. Whether they were well executed can be debated. But there's a clear rhyme and reason here.