just-ur-friendly-neighbourhood-lesbian

like first of all: Katheryn Hahn. need I say more? but also, HOUSE of harkness? house of M???? also witches and backstory and maybe some sapphic content (a long shot but just imagine all those gay witches....) 

and I agree with her. vision should have been sacrificed and that way the stone would have been destroyed and the avengers, primarily wanda, could have focused their energy on actually killing thanos. plus, I think that was sort of the moral of infinity war? (among other things) but like, in infinity war they were unwilling to sacrifice and lost because of it. in endgame they learned the value of sacrifice and were able to win, thanks to that 

is it just cap’s fault? no, of course not. it’s understandable that he and the others didn’t want to kill vision but cap’s logic of ‘we don't trade lives’ really irks me because they’re unwilling to kill vision for that reason but are okay with sacrificing hundreds of wakandan soldiers? (not to mention the fact that vision had literally been the one to suggest it and was 100% okay with it) 

I’ve already made a post about Sharon recently but now my post is about women in phase 4. 

marvel has always had very questionable talent when it comes to writing good, complex, proper female characters. it’s gotten better, though that isn’t hard seeing as natasha in iron man two was basically a prop. with wandavision, black widow and now Shang-chi with the introduction of xialing, marvel has finally began to give it’s female characters depth. they’re well written but...

all of them are becoming evil. now, there should be female villains. 100%. but marvel is turning all its newer developed female characters into villains, from Yelena to xialing to wanda. am I overreacting to this a little? maybe. but what’s mostly annoying me are wanda and Yelena. xialing is seizing control after a life of having none. she’s building her own empire after escaping the bonds and restraints of her past and father. that’s great (still kinda want her to be ‘good’ but also she’s a great villain) 

now. wanda. I love wanda, following from wandavision. In the mcu movies, I always felt that she was underdeveloped and utilised. she was there but never invested in. we were just expected to like her, but in wandavision, they gave us a reason to. we got incredible writing and development but... it all fell into the horrible trope of ‘woman looses male lover and goes crazy/looses control’. wanda’s whole development stems from the sexist trope of women going crazy and being unable to control their powers without their male counterpart. essentially her whole villain arc is sort of based around that. and Yelena, who's whole life has been about being controlled and now she’s free to make a choice and she’s working for Val? I'm sort of okay with that (even though I feel like it contradicts where we left off that the end of black widow) but since she escaped the red room, she’s been searching for the control she never had but now she’s being manipulated and lied to by Val into choices she wouldn't otherwise make? forcing her to become a villain? 

idk I just don’t like it. again, I'd love to see more female villains, but why are all the well written female characters the ones being turned into them while the female protagonists’ stories still continue to centre around their male counterparts? (There are exceptions, of course. the women in black panther are a spectacular example of that and Katy in Shang-chi was pretty decent, even if she was mostly there for the more childish comedy) 

and not to mention the whole Christine dying over and over and having no other function than to motivate strange 

wow!! another amazing misogynistic incarnation of Sharon Carter in this what if episode!!!

honestly. at this point, I've given up on her character. like, when I first watched the mcu, I despised Sharon but as I got older and read more and watched more, I realised I didn’t hate Sharon, I hated the way she was portrayed and written. she was never given any real characterisation. she was always a plot device, always there to be useful but for no reason. she was pretty much useless, in the nicest way possible (she did good stuff, but we never got to learn anything about her character, which undermined all of her decisions) 

and then of course, they turned her into a love interest for her aunt’s ex a few days after she died. they didn’t show her grieving over the aunt she was supposedly close to at all. they barely showed her dealing with the repercussions of her aunt’s organisation, that she worked for, turning out to be hydra. they hyped her up for falcon and the winter soldier so much and she was in it for, like five minutes with very confusing plot twists that didn’t really make much sense (though I did like how she was bitter over the fact Steve left her to fend for herself, though it was mostly just a one-liner) 

and now in what if, she was there but she had little to no purpose other than to be there, look pretty and serve as a plot device. she did virtually nothing in the episode and once she was turned, she was pushed away like a rag doll. like, when everyone else was turned it was like oh no!! and they were legitimate threats but Sharon was just... floppy. bucky was just like meh and no one gave a shit 

Betty ross and... Natasha Romanoff as ex-girlfriends??

ik ik I should’ve learned from wandavision but WHAT IF GUYS

which of course, it isn’t. endgame was the culmination of 22 movies and an entire franchise. of course it was epic and on a whole different scale. now when marvel makes movies that centre around one specific character and don’t involve massive cameos and aren’t used as major world development projects, people say the stakes are “too low” when in reality, the stakes are high, just maybe not as high as in other marvel movies. for example, I saw a lot of people say black widow’s stakes were too low (which I disagree with, obviously. what was at stake was the freedom and lives of women all around the world but if that isn’t important enough for you...). however, if that movie was made outside of the mcu, the stakes definitely wouldn’t be seen as too low. 

things like wandavision, which focus around one character and are more about development of character and exploration of a theme are criticised when they’re perfectly good projects, just not on the scale of infinity war and endgame. people forget when it comes to marvel movies that the whole point of a movie/show/whatever is to enjoy yourself, which they often do, but then they spend weeks picking over the fact that there was no major avengers cameo in a project about one character 

(also, it’d like to add that this criticism has largely centred around female-lead projects. there are only three of them but they’re the ones who get this kind of hate the most)