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Originally Posted by The Batlord
I think that kind of reactionary opinion that women having a romance subplot are automatically THE love interest, as opposed to the man, who just HAS a love interest, shows a condescending mentality that treats women as victims first and people second.
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I mean I just think that in the movie she's treated as the love interest. It isn't always true but I think it is here.
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1.) It comes out of nowhere for the Hulk too. And saying that she is now defined by the guy is likewise condescending. She has her own character development and has much more time in action scenes than the Hulk. The Hulk is just kind of there for the most part. He really has only one scene that's about him (his fight with Iron Man), and that's not really followed up much as a character development until his last thirty seconds in the movie.
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All of her character development is "I'm sad because I can't have babies (and, to be fair, because I was raised in a way that traumatized me)" and "I wish I had a boyfriend". There's not much going on there. Which makes a lot of sense because there were so many damn characters and things going on that no writer could've possibly made the characters complex and multi-dimensional enough - but Black Widow matters especially because she's the only major female character.
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2.) There was one (now two with Scarlet Witch) female Avenger. It would be kind of difficult to fit in separate romance subplots for each of them into a single movie, but they all do have them in their own movies.
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Fair enough, I forgot about Scarlet Witch. I mean yeah, they all have romantic relationships too, but they have much more agency in them. Black Widow is largely defined by Hulk in Age of Ultron, in a way that, say, Tony Stark isn't defined by Gwyneth Paltrow.
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3.) She explicitly has a "just friends" relationship with Hawkeye. How often does a female character in a movie have an in-depth, non-romantic relationship with a male character?
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You're right that it's good that she has a relationship with a male character that is explicitly not about romance, but I don't know that it would cancel out the rest of what I'm saying.
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Incidental. The rest of the world does not define this particular male and this particular movie. I would also like to point at that this man has a track record of being particularly obsessed with strong female characters who are not merely defined by their male love interests. He's Joss ****ing Whedon. Were Buffy or River Tam defined by men? Show some respect for context.
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It's a little interesting that you've now come up with three powerful female Whedon characters who are basically programmed to be killing machines (obviously in kind of a less awful way in Buffy's case). Weird that he relies on that same basic setup so much. On Buffy, I don't think it's a coincidence that Faith, the female character with the greatest degree of sexual agency, is completely crazy. Whedon also punishes Buffy for having sex (when Angel loses his soul again), which is not exactly a feminist move.
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Not Joss Whedon's fault that so many people use lazy logic based on knee-jerk reactions.
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You're right, and also burn! but I do think he kind of should be more cognizant of how people might perceive the stuff he makes, if that makes sense?