#marvel negativity

The number of ‘John Walker’ versus posts or ‘Can John Walker/Bob/Sentry/the Void defeat (insert character)’.

Or the number of ‘Can Sentry defeat Scarlet Witch/Thor etc.,’

Also this fascination over John Walker when Yelena is Right there.

Like I have no beef with the characters themselves but boy is the fandom for Walker getting on my nerves. It’s like the fandom for Howard from Wandavision, except they’re vindicated.

Except canonically what Walker was, was is very much ‘not as terrible as you could have been’.

Admittedly, this irritation is powered my never ending bitterness that the director decided to kill off Antonia after everything Natasha did to save her. Thus cutting more of Ava’s storyline.

I could be totally off-base with this, but has anybody else noticed that here lately the mcu has had a slight pattern of making a few female characters ridiculously overpowered as well as turbo-hyped by the narrative and marketing…

This specifically includes Wanda, Carol Danvers, and Sylvie.

I’m in particular talking about how all 3 of them had far less time for character exploration and strength build-up than the majority of the other more powerful heroes, had fairly bland and uncreative personalities compared to the other more powerful heroes (Wanda was coddled by the narrative and not allowed to have any ownership in her wrongdoings which would’ve made her more complex, Carol was a victim of the “having the same arrogant attitude as the douchebro male characters is all it takes to make a Strong Female Character(TM)” writers’ mentality, and Sylvie with mary sue-ed to hell), and were generally made more about the cool powers and ‘oooh such a badass’ moments and the aesthetic than the actual depth.

My point is… they’re all so shallow and performative. It’s like the (mostly male) writers looked at the female character and scoffed and said “ok there’s no way this lady’s gonna become a fan fave on her own- we have to help her. We have to give her a boost. I have zero faith in women being able to gain popularity by their own merit (because who’d be interested in a woman, ammiright?), so we can’t just give her a compelling backstory and let that be it. We have to make sure she has the most tragic backstory of anyone on screen at any given time, and we have to make sure the audience knows it! We can’t just give her a specific set of powers and depict them in an interesting and unique way. We have to make her stronger than any other character she’s going to share screen time with and we have to have her flaunt her powers every ten minutes to remind the audience how strong she is! We can’t just make her intelligent in her own way and give her witty banter with the male characters. We have to make sure she makes them look like idiots and condescends them as frequently as possible so the audience knows it! We can’t just flesh out her morals and let her get things wrong sometimes. We have to make it so she’s always in the right and the audience should always be on her side! And even when she does something wrong, we have to make sure the audience knows that it wasn’t really her fault and she still has the moral high ground! That’s the only way we’ll ever get people to like her as much as the main male characters!!”

It’s just…. This is just rank with a lack of confidence in women. They approach the idea of having women front and center with equal parts skepticism and greed. They’re so out of touch with what women want in superhero films and just what women want in general. They fall into the trap of thinking feminists want everyone to know that girls are actually superior to guys, when in reality we just want to be treated with the respect and humanity and agency guys have always been treated with.

And by creating these female characters the way they do (making sure they’re not equal but decidedly better than the male ones, making sure they’re nearly infallible strength-wise, making sure they’re never allowed to be held accountable for mistakes) they literally defeat that whole point. They’re being extremely counterproductive to what feminists are actually trying to do, because they aren’t actually interested giving women genuinely good representation- they’re just interested in pandering to Twitter stans and casual female fans who form their opinions based on a first glance and girls who are so starved for rep that they’ll praise movie-makers for serving up rank crumbs.

me when taika first said that: oh he’s just being cheeky

Basically:

I hate how fandom treats Loki how he’s an irredeemable villain and throws out all the nuance he has in the world because he’s -checks notes- a “narcissist” “born evil” “is mean to Thor and Odin” and presumably responsible for every bad thing to happen in the MCU ever.

I support evil Loki because fandom is so blatantly stupid that it can’t see him for the sympathetic character he is. I want to watch Loki burn the world to the ground. I want to watch Loki burn your faves, yes because I just am that spiteful. Because the heroes suck suck suck!