The Batlord

Really? I think she had much more of a part than Bruce Banner, making him more the love interest than her. When you think about it, it's actually kind of sexist to automatically view the female as the sex interest rather than the dude.

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Josef K

Weren't you just saying that you were against people caring about this specific instance of sexism? In the future, know that it helps to pick a position and stick with it instead of just disagreeing with everyone for the hell of it.

Anyway of course nothing you say is wrong, but it doesn't really apply and you're missing the point: that most of the sexism that I see in the movie would have been prevented if the movie had in general been made better. Like if it didn't have a billion characters, then maybe it would have had time to give Black Widow the depth she's had in previous movies. Maybe it wouldn't have focused so much on just the mother/love interest aspects, which it largely did because that's what's easy to do with a female character. Stuff like that.
Not seeing it for two reasons (in addition to "you're the real sexist!" being kind of a lazy argument). First, it really comes out of nowhere for Black Widow. It's kind of a letdown because she hasn't been very romance-focused in the series so far, and changing that leaves us with no female Avengers who aren't defined by a guy (it's also telling that her non-romantic role is largely reduced to "Hulk whisperer"). Second, this was a movie written by a man in a society in which women often are objectified and reduced to child-bearers and romantic interests. Based on that I think it's more likely that the intent was not to make Hulk more the love interest than her, and I also think that the people writing the movie should've recognized that, because we live in a society like I just described, the way I saw it was how it was going to look to a lot of people and they should've tried very hard to keep people from having that impression.

ETA: And GWG is gone again. Whatever.

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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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

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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Josef K

Dude I'm super tired. I don't disagree with a ton of what you wrote there, and I think the stuff that I do disagree on is stuff that we're never going to agree on. I might respond, but if I do it'll be, uh, later in the morning.

grtwhtgrvty

Nah. Learn to read.

Josef K

Welcome back bro