Reviews FanficRecs / Simply Indispensable

Painfully Obvious Wish Fulfillment

Since her introduction in 2011's Thor, Darcy has been used as fodder for countless wish fulfillment fanfictions. This story is no exception to the former. It's like when a kid is bullied on the playground and imagines his favorite superhero coming to give the bullies a taste of their own medicine; needless to say, that premise hardly makes for quality fic.

Wish fulfillment in itself is not bad, as it's the basis of all fiction. But for stories like this fanfic, where the author sacrifices characterization and believability in order to facilitate her own wishes, it can be uncomfortable to read due to author projecting her juvenile personal fantasies onto her favorite characters and her bullies.

And I say "her bullies" because the author has removed Darcy's character and replaced it with her own interpretation: a young woman, who, despite canonically tasering a stranger on impulse, cannot stand up to a group of laughably malicious peers. Darcy has been stripped of her canonical impetuousness and pluckiness that made her character enjoyable, though she has a few lines of witty dialogue hastily thrown in to attempt to convince readers otherwise.

Instead, she has been reduced to victim who needs to be rescued by the Avengers from blatantly unimaginative and unthreatening agitators. It's not difficult to conclude that the author has erased Darcy's characterization so she can vicariously live out her desires of the Avengers upbraiding her perceived tormentors. It's unfortunate that in the process, the author abolished the effectiveness of one the few capable civilian women in superhero movies.

Perhaps such implications were inevitable, as this fic was arbitrarily constructed to meet a kinkmeme prompt. However, I feel that if the author had bothered to individualize the bullies, writing them with unique traits instead leaving them as generic Rich Bitches, the story wouldn't be such transparent wish fulfillment.

The bullies were caricatures; the story could have been much improved had the author made an effort to write them as legitimate characters rather than human plot devices whose purpose was to set up a Hurt/Comfort fic. The bullies were painfully uncreative characters, who managed to be barefaced antagonists but at the same time, remarkably unmemorable, interchangeable, and frankly, dull.