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Old 05-24-2015, 10:39 PM   #50 (permalink)
The Batlord
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Originally Posted by Josef K View Post
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.

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.
The point of that whole thing was that she was dehumanized by being trained to be a pure killer. Removing her ability to have children was just another way that diminished her possible role in normal human society. If she was a man who'd been castrated, then I don't think it would have been a sexist subtext.

Rape is dehumanizing partly because the victim becomes defined entirely by their usefulness as a sexual object rather than as a person (I assume), and Black Widow's being sterilized would be dehumanizing because it illustrated that her worth was being entirely defined by her abilities as a killer.

Would a female writer have gone there? **** if I know, but I think it's presumptuous to think that it's automatically sexist for a man to do so.

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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.
Black Widow doesn't have her own movie to explore a romantic subplot, so of course it's going to dominate her screen time more than Iron Man or Thor. The other two characters who don't (Hulk and Hawkeye) also had subplots about there romantic lives, and yet it's only sexist for Black Widow?

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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.
It undercuts your point that she is defined by her romantic subplot.

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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.
Michael Bay has explosions, David Lynch has weirdness, and Joss Whedon has female protagonists. Is that wrong somehow?

You also neglect to remember Willow, Kaylee from Firefly, and he wrote a X-Men comic series that partly focused on Kitty Pryde, who is like, not a killing machine. Besides, he writes action series. So wouldn't it make sense that his female protagonists would be adept at kicking ass?

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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.
Joss Whedon just doesn't like keeping characters in stable relationships. None of their romances last much longer than a season or two. And I remember him explaining that that Angel thing was supposed to be sort of a metaphor for a guy sleeping with a girl and then turning into an *******.

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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?
I'd rather he wrote from his gut rather than worrying about the eyes of society looking over his shoulder.
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