Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

I don't think it would be to difficult to make an interesting gameplay out of her utilizing her guns, martial arts and stealth skills.

Black Widow’s leadership abilities get hurt by the fact that she’s not the leader, if she was in charge and giving orders she’d seem much more key, but that duty falls to Cap, who already has the boost of being superpowered.

The Black Widow fits as well as Hawkeye and is also a character who adds a darker edge the Wasp doesn't.

Hawkeye's an interesting and cool Badass Normal combatant though. He can do Rule of Cool stuff with his arrows and he's always been primarily a front-line fighter. I mean, there was a point where the entire Avengers team was him, Captain America, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

Widow could always hold her own in a fight, but she's a spy who barely gets to do spy stuff beyond tricking Loki in Avengers 1. She's always felt kinda out of place as a mainline Avenger to me, can't quite put my finger on it.

Hawkeye deserves his spot just as much as Cap IMO. Hell, I'm still annoyed they deleted his wisemouth persona for serious House of M Hawkeye...

Edited by GoldenKaos on Jun 17th 2019 at 9:28:53 AM

Black Widow wasn't particularly high profile as a superhero to begin with. I'm guessing Whedon chose her for a mix of Author Appeal reasons as well as the fact that the other possibilities were blacklisted due to the Fox ban and Edgar Wright's request to hold onto Wasp. Part of it suffers from the decision to go with Ultimate Hawkeye instead of 616 Hawkeye, who has a much more bombastic personality and stronger relationships with the other Avengers.

I think what makes Black Widow stand out to me relative to Hawkeye is that she picked up a more colorful backstory to draw upon in addition to the emphasis on her having various soft skills that Hawkeye didn't to expand her niche; besides his aiming skills it feels like the movies doubled down on Hawkeye's normalcy which makes it difficult for him to carve out a storytelling space that other characters couldn't do better.

Widow showed up in Iron Man 2 first so I doubt Whedon picked her.

I'm not really sure how people can say "imagine someone saying this about Batman" when Batman's general memetic status on the Internet hovers somewhere around the 'has a targeted Kryptonite-powered Kill Sat aimed at the biometric nanobot trackers he has inside Superman' level. I know (or at least assume) that that's not the tack the actual writers tend to take, but saying that Batman has no powers is a deliberately obtuse reading, I would say.

Agreed on Black Widow's spy stuff, too. It is a shame that the Avengers tended a lot more toward Giant CG Army Spectacle rather than anything that would let her actually use her skillset.

Edited by RedSavant on Jun 16th 2019 at 10:01:02 AM

Something I remember was a talk about how female heroines aren't allowed to fight in melee. That's IMO true.

Or if they do, they're pitted against female villains ala Designated Girl Fight.

And when they are pitted against male foes, there's usually a bit of Waif-Fu involved. Examples: Buffy, River, Black Widow, Echo...shit, damn near anything Whedon is involved with.

And that's got its own issues.

Edited by M84 on Jun 17th 2019 at 2:13:02 AM

Really? When has this ever been the case?

Because whenever they actually fight, it goes such ways, so they won't be actually hurt or punched or bruised. Like they either make female fighters too powerful, so she could just easily beat anyone (and avoid getting punched) or too weak, so that anyone can simply "grab" her and defeat her without actually punching her (or without bruising her in any way).

Umm, lots of times

Like, most of the The Chick members of superhero groups have powers that deliberately mean they never have to engage in fisticuffs, with Wonder Woman being the obvious aversion since she was always meant to challenge this image. But Jean Grey, Invisible Woman, Storm, The Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Polaris Marvel Comics... they all have powersets (or gadgets, with Wasp) that mean they can defeat enemies without having to physically touch them. Even Carol Danvers with her Flying Brick powerset tended to use energy blasts for a while (but her powers went through so many iterations it's a bit whacky...)

You don't get punch-girls (i.e female superheroes whose main powerset is all about introducing Miss Fist to Mr Teeth) showing up with semi-regularity until at least the 80s/90s (at least for Marvel, I'm not as familiar with DC), but I can't think of a mainline punch-girl outside of Wonder Woman, who is a notable deliberate aversion from The Golden Age of Comic Books.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Jun 17th 2019 at 2:07:28 PM

DC’s didn’t generally start showing up until around the 80s too. Vixen, Cassandra Cain, Spoiler, etc

Black Canary is a notable exception though. Even in the 40s, she was a martial arts character.

Yeah, she was in the back of my mind too, but I didn't know where she came into it. DC's whacko chronology doesn't help.

There's also Supergirl (1959) and Power Girl (1976). And remember, these two are physically on par with Superman.

Edit: And there's also Donna Troy (1965) who was physically the most powerful member of her team in their original incarnation.

Edited by windleopard on Jun 17th 2019 at 6:51:57 AM

And on the villain side, you have characters like Cheetah (40s), Lady Shiva (70s), and Giganta (40s).

Supergirl usually is below Clark, due to being younger and less experienced.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 17th 2019 at 9:14:56 AM

There was one incarnation where she was actually stronger due to absorbing more yellow sunlight during her journey to Earth while in cryosleep. Remember that it's not a matter of age per se but a matter of how much solar energy they have absorbed. She was still less experienced than Supes though.

Edited by M84 on Jun 17th 2019 at 10:17:28 PM

Supergirl, Batgirl, She-Hulk, the myriad female Spider-Persons, etc. There are a lot of female supers who get away with being punch-women because they're a Distaff Counterpart of a punch-man. "Like that dude, but less popular and probably not as powerful".

Captain Marvel herself is a particularly weird instance of this phenomenon, wherein she is technically a Distaff Counterpart to the original Mar-Vell, but her popularity and public presence has far outshone him to the point that nobody really cares about Mar-Vell anymore.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 17th 2019 at 8:22:07 AM

They later subverted that by saying that Superman just holds back a lot. Kara had become something of a Designated Hero at this point so a writer decided to knock her down a peg or two.

Edited by windleopard on Jun 17th 2019 at 7:21:59 AM

This, incidentally, is part of the reason for why X-Men is such a beloved franchise. There are a lot of cool female and minority characters in the X-franchise who didn't just take a popular existing white guy and reskin him.

Unfortunately, as noted at the beginning of this conversation, many of the more popular X-characters aren't punch-women. Rogue, at least, has a reputation for being a punch-woman, but that's just because people mostly remember her from the 90's cartoon where she had Captain Marvel's stolen powers.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 17th 2019 at 8:25:27 AM

Even then, X-Men does have characters like Marrow, Callisto, and Frenzy. All of whom deserve more love and pagetime, imo.

She-Hulk is 80s, granted. And all but the first Spider-Woman were 80s onwards.

Just read a part of the first issue of the 1978 Spider-woman run, she does punch-girl stuff, but the first scene has her NOT be able to beat up a non-powered person who, despite being hit and kicked by someone who can apparently lift 7 tons, is still able to tackle her and remove her mask. That comes worryingly close to Informed Attribute or Faux Action Girl to me. Hopefully it's just that scene.

Edit: I think X-men created a LOT of characters that deserve more love and airtime, in general.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Jun 17th 2019 at 4:40:10 PM

x3 That's what happens when you get a guy with a femdom fetish to write your comics.

Her too.

The lesson here is that more writers should be into femdom.

Edited by Rynnec on Jun 17th 2019 at 11:08:45 AM

That's Wonder Woman tho.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 17th 2019 at 11:06:58 AM