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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Not Joss Whedon's fault that so many people use lazy logic based on knee-jerk reactions.

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Oriphiel

Wasn't She Hulk an Avenger for awhile? They should get her back in there! And if Joss tries to mess with her character, she can just reach through the screen and throttle him.

John Wilkes Booth

didn't read the thread beyond one of the articles in the opening post, so i don't know if what i'm gonna say is relevant to the current discussion or has been said/addressed/etc, but i'm just gonna throw it out there anyway cause i care just enough about this issue to **** my opinion out here but not enough to read 5 pages of everyone else's opinions since feminism and comic book characters are two of my avid non-interests.

basically yea it's sexist cause the movie is geared for men probably because men mostly watch this kind of movie. if it was some romantic comedy it would be more geared for women. so yea i'm sure it doesn't live up to the ultra liberal gender bending feminist ideology that is being pushed out these days by god knows who, probably some people with funny beards at universities across the world. like this dude.



but yea, the whole "lets have more female x" just cause.... people don't like uneven gender ratios for anything anymore... that **** is really kind of forced and i dunno... just, yea. if that truly concerns you then do your thing. imo reality is a bit sexist tbh.

like i'm really angry that there aren't more males doing ballet. let's stop oppressing these poor boys and let them prance around on their tippy toes like they must truly want to somewhere deep inside their thick patriarchy-washed neanderthal brains

YorkeDaddy

I used to be really huge into making video games, and a very respected member of one of the communities I was at wrote an article on how to make your games better and one of his points was "have equally as many or more female main characters than main characters"

And then I was like...if I'm actively doing this just to appease people that are looking to find artificial flaws in my game isn't THAT inherently sexist too????

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The Batlord

I'd love to see her in a movie. Want a strong female character with a strong personality who is in control of her sexuality? Bam!

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John Wilkes Booth

i just thought of something... it seems a bit immature but yea

i don't know much about the specifics of the history of the feminist movement, tbh. but at this very moment, my theory that i just made up is that in cases like this, 'feminism' is sort of a proxy for tomboys trying to gain acceptance by their male peers. like i dunno if **** is considered offensive? but i do notice lesbian couples usually have 1 girly chick and 1 ****. i learned this mostly at my cousin's lesbian wedding. other than that i haven't had much interaction with the lesbian community. but yea, basically the point i'm trying to make my way to here is that i think it would be more effective for ****s/tomboys to form some sort of boyish-chick movement that mostly advocates for males accepting boyish chicks in boyish activities, rather than 'feminism' where they just seem to try to blur the lines and pretend like categories don't exist, imo. i feel like i would see that as a more honest approach and really for the most part i think in many cases men (at least some of us) do treat boyish chicks like men, cause that's how they carry themselves.

but being a superhero is just an inherently manly activity, imo. i mean if you think about how we evolved, in hunter gatherer societies it would primarily be the men that handled more of the hunting and anything requiring violence like wars with other tribes etc. and that's basically all super heros do, is fight bad guys. so you can pretend like thats not a manly thing to do but i think it clearly is. not to say there's not exceptions. but i would bet in most cases the exceptions are a lot more tomboyish and a lot less feminine. so all of this is to say, having a sexy, feminine street fighting protagonist is representing a very small portion of the human population, most likely. so maybe it's not all that surprising why they don't always show up in pop culture and when they do, they get type-casted by their gender.

Josef K

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.
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.
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'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.
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?

The Batlord

I've always found that whole dynamic of "girly" lesbians pairing up with "butch" lesbians to be odd. If they don't find men attractive, why do they find women who basically look like men to be attractive? I mean, I don't find men to be attractive, which is probably why I don't find butch lesbians attractive in the least.

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John Wilkes Booth

yea... i brought the same basic question up here once but basically just got hissed at for being ignorant

but i'm not even knocking it.. i love my cousin, and her and her wife seem to have a good relationship. but yea i think iirc her wife used to date men. where as my cousin kinda sorta did but not really, and she was always clearly a tomboy. so i feel like she became butch enough to basically substitute for a man, and since its a close resemblance the girly chick is into it too. might not even necessarily not like men, just happened to find a butch chick she really liked? plus i can imagine there are some things a butch chick can bring to a relationship that a man can't and vice versa. so they could develop a preference for just butch chicks. but i feel like 9 times out of 10 in a lesbian relationship with that dynamic, if either of them was to go back to go back to screwing men, it would be the girly chick.

that reminds me of couples therapy s4 with ghostface. there was a lesbo couple on there and in one of the episodes they got in a fight cause the girly one was overtly flirting with ghost, who was the clear alpha male in the house.

The Batlord

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.

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?

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

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?

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 *******.

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

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