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

So, on a different topic, some conversations I had with friends about the most recent X-Men issue involves a very interesting reveal. Spoilers below for the series House of X...

It was implied that just about all of Charles Xavier’s plans and ideas in X-Men comics aren’t actually his own, but were given to him by Moira Mactaggert. In addition, the only characters with any sort of agency in this issue (which involves Moira navigating several different timelines) are both women. Only Moira and Destiny can actually impact the flow of time, while everyone else is merely reacting to their decisions.

It’s a really big change from how things were previously thought of, and how male centric these storylines usually are. Especially since the last X-Men arc was criticized for having tons of women die for Cyclops and Wolverine’s manpain.

Though I think people in general tend to get killed for Wolverine's pain.

Nope, it's mostly women.

Do you have a specific count because I didn't say it was an even amount just that being friends with Wolverine or related to him tends to be fatal no matter the gender of the person.

Your post was dismissing the trend of women who get close to Wolverine having a tendency to die for his pain. It doesn't happen nearly as often with the men in his life.

Where exactly did I dismiss anything? I simply stated people in general tend to get killed for his pain.

Saying people in general die for his pain — nevermind that this barely happens at all with male characters in his life — really comes across as dismissing the obvious sexist ramifications of damn near every woman in Wolverine's life being killed for the sake of his pain.

Edited by M84 on Aug 8th 2019 at 1:59:09 AM

Not sure how that comes of as anything other than what I said, but I don't think I would ever really get and and will just let the subject drop.

Edited by Darthwyn on Aug 7th 2019 at 2:26:44 PM

Male characters that Wolverine knows, such as Nightcrawler, sometimes die and since he's a popular character, we usually get to see him mourning or something.

This is not the same thing as female characters being murdered for the specific reason of making Wolverine sad. Wolverine's story has left a trail of female corpses in its wake. The fridging is so common it's an actual plot point. Sabertooth has an annual tradition of murdering Logan's girlfriend on his birthday. And that still only makes up a fraction of Wolverine-centric fridgings.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 7th 2019 at 12:34:55 PM

Wolverine Publicity never died

...Do superheroes ever get divorced?

Like, is it seriously just considered preferable to kill off love interests than dealing with divorce?

One more day literally happened because the author wanted to separate Peter's marriage but didn't want to make a divorce

Very rarely if ever. Superhero companies worry a lot about the optics surrounding a character's status.

When Spider-Man sold his marriage to the Devil, the rationale for this incredibly stupid concept came from fears that having Spidey divorce MJ would "age" him.

The person responsible for the decision, former EIC Joe Quesada, originally wanted to dissolve the Spider-Marriage because in his mind, Spider-Man was and should always be a young, swinging bachelor in his early 20's. Joey Q felt that Spidey being a responsible married man made him too old and ruined his appeal.

By the same logic, Spider-Man couldn't get divorced. If "responsible married man" made him too old, then "divorcee searching for his second marriage" only made him even older. Killing off his wife and making him a widower had the same problem. The marriage had to be erased from existence in a way that restored Spider-Man to an unmarried status while also restoring his Bachelor Purity.

Thus, Spider-Man sold his marriage to the Devil. Infernal timey-wimey shenanigans made it so he was never married in the first place, and everyone lived happily ever after. Except the entire Spider-Man fanbase, who was outraged and remain pissed off about it to this day.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 7th 2019 at 12:44:56 PM

^^Kinda bizarre that divorcee status is bad to PR, but being a widow isn't

^Ah, yeah, but I can't believe they thought having deal with the devil in highly christian country is preferable to both being widow and divorcee :P I mean, how the heck they didn't figure out better nonsensical comic book way of retconning it from existence?

Also, I'm reading older pages and catching up, but another thing I wanted to ask:

Aren't pretty much only people who can do teenager-adult romances without being seen as horrible criminal creeps the teenagers themselves?

Also, why the heck you never see older authors who want to do age difference romance do ones that are twenty something up, why the heck they always insist on teenagers?(18-19 still counts)

Like is it actually because of the whole "forbidden" thing or do older men just have fetish for "as young as possible while still legal"?

Are there even any younger authors who do age difference romances?

Edited by SpookyMask on Aug 7th 2019 at 9:52:29 PM

Also, of note, the story where Spider-Man sells his marriage to the Devil does some phenomenal acrobatics to pin the blame on women.

It all starts when a sniper shoots Aunt May. Everyone and their dog is like, "Wow, that sucks, but these things happen." At one point, the Christian God Almighty comes down from the Heavens to tell Peter that he needs to accept May's passing. But Peter's like, "No! Whatever it takes to save her!"

So Peter goes to Dr. Strange and has Strange do a magic spell. The spell allows Peter to be in a million places at once. This lets him go to each and every super-scientist, sorcerer, powered healer, deity, and other cosmic being in the universe at once. But the combined scientific, magical, and supernatural might of the entire Marvel Universe can't heal a gutshot, and he's left with no recourse but Satan.

Even then, the comic goes through some shenanigans to make it not Peter's fault. Mephisto comes to Peter and offers to save May at the cost of his marriage, which he wants for stupid reasons. Peter's initially going to decline the offer, but then it's MJ who steps up and convinces him that the best thing he can do is sell their marriage to the Devil to prevent the fridging of his nonagenarian aunt.

It's super weird and really f*cked up in a bunch of ways. And then, like. That's the last word. There's no follow-up story where Peter and MJ stick it to Mephisto. The Devil wins, he taunts them for a bit about their future daughter who will never exist (Fridged before even being born! That has to be a record!) and then he leaves with his infernal pact in hand. The end.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 7th 2019 at 12:55:36 PM

As much as I love Moira, the fact is that removes the accomplishments of a disabled hero for a abled one who is already a genius geneticist.

^^I repeat what I said, I can't believe an american company thought that Satan winning is the preferable option out of all possibilities

x4

I mean, pairing Junkrat and Roadhog up gets called pedophilia a lot of the time because of their age gap (~15-20 years IIRC) and the fact that it means Roadhog is technically old enough to be Junkrat's father even though Junkrat is in his mid-20s). And then there's the anti-Phamercy discourse over how that ship is pedophilic as well. So even the teens who do enjoy such things are no longer immune to this. Being an adult who enjoys romances between characters who don't have age differences but are below the age of minority is also considered pedophilic and creepy (so if you're an adult who actively ships Stevonnie, you really deserve to be in the slammer). Pairing Sans and Frisk (who is supposed to be some kind of child but is often aged up in these stories) gets you cookies laced with needles and people cheering the perpetrator on for their supposed act of vigilante justice.

Modern fandom^note this kind of behavior is actually highly specific to Americans, much less common among European fans, and almost totally absent from Asians (who have their own baggage and possibly the opposite problem), but most visible fandom in the West is dominated by Americans, so what they believe tends to hold the most sway in dictating the direction of discourse is very obsessed with the matter of pedophilia. But yes, a lot of teens will write teenage-adult stories out of a desire for wish fulfillment - often fantasizing about an attractive adult they crush on reciprocating their affection, or character standins, and people of all ages coming from troubled family situations and indulging in stories where a supportive adult with the right skills and life experiences will swoop in to save them and provide them every form of love they were denied. Real life doesn't work anything like this but I think a lot of them particularly the latter know this already and have admitted to doing so as a form of therapy. Hence the controversy over whether it's appropriate to make victims of abuse publicize their traumas in detail in order to get a pass on writing "problematic" fiction without harassment, and some more hardline fandom Moral Guardians saying that such themes are so toxic and harmful that having a traumatic past isn't a good enough justification, and harassing them for it anyway.

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 7th 2019 at 3:27:07 PM

Honestly, it's Mephisto's best moment in a lot of ways.

• He kills Spider-Girl retroactively
• He destroys Peter's marriage
• He destroys M.J.'s support for Peter
• He does it all out of an attempt to keep an old woman alive a little while longer.

Bravo, demon, this is your biggest win.

You're right. Definitely a window view for a reward territory.

Maybe I a mistaken but wasn't there supposed to be some convoluted reason that Spider-Girl doesn't get completely erased from the universe not was that retconed or never actually implemented?

She's from an alternate universe anyway. But Mary Jane was pregnant in a final knife twist from Quesada.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 7th 2019 at 1:22:37 AM

Spider-Girl not being completely erased is because she had nothing to do with that story in the first place. There was a bit of a fan outrage over "Marvel just ERASED SPIDER-GIRL from continuity!" alongside the more legitimate outrages. But it was dumb.

The hypothetical future child that Peter and MJ were going to have if they didn't sell their marriage to the Devil is not Spider-Girl. Spider-Girl is the literal actual child that Peter and MJ did, in fact, have during the Clone Saga in the 90's. She was abducted from the hospital right after being born, and then the plot thread was abandoned and never came up again.

An issue of Marvel's What If? series explored a scenario where the infant Mayday Parker was not abducted and then vanished into character limbo, and was instead raised by the happily wed Parker couple and grew into a powered teenager. That story was popular enough to spark its own AU series, Spider-Girl, which grew into the MC 2 continuity.

One More Day's red-headed hypothetical future-daughter who is a dead-ringer for MJ is not, and never was, Spider-Girl's Mayday Parker. In fact, the only thing stopping Mayday from returning to the 616 continuity right now, with or without spider-marriage, is the fact that writers just kinda don't want to deal with that plot point.

Who knows? Maybe ten years from now, someone will write a Spider-Man story about finding the lost Parker child. Or maybe she'll turn up as a supervillain or something. She's the perfect kind of limbo-character for some writer somewhere to go, "Hey, nobody's doing anything with this, so they won't care if I use her."

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 7th 2019 at 2:30:28 AM

Note: The kidnapped original baby wasn't actually kidnapped.

The original plot was that Norman Osbourne arranged for the child to be killed by a nurse. They also did a later scene showing the nurse didn't have Spider-Baby, just a dog she was calling sweetums.

Tom Defalco was the one who arranged for it to be ambiguous.

But it should be noted that Spider-Girl is STILL erased because Peter and MJ never got married or had their pregnancy.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 7th 2019 at 1:31:30 AM

I mean, I rarely feel that the Comicbook fandom are religious. Notice how the Islamophobia in nerd spaces if framed in "They don't belong to our society" rather than "Death to heathens"