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

They don't have to be overtly flashy to be something to really want having: a little battlefield divination akin to Spideysense combined with an insta-kill/ shiv of healing/ variant of either upon command and an extra boost to inherent illusion and time manipulation abilities would be devastating with the correct skills to use them to the max.

The insta-kill aspect would also point to, you know, Hela. It wouldn't just from Odin she got her connections to death. She's just not fussed about the life bit of Mama's skill set.

I'd also go the extra mile: these awesome daggers? To Hela, they're nice enough little back-up weapons to have, but not all that special beyond being, you know... Mum's. And, stopping Loki from getting 'em.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 11th 2019 at 12:54:59 PM

Well with Loki dead(?) Amora has one less son of Odin to worry about when it comes to that.

Some ideas I thought of:

1) Amora is a former friend of Sif and the two fell out because of differing paths. Sif wanted to become a warrior but Amora was a sorceress and wanted to elevate this role in Asgardian society.

2) Amora wants to return Asgard to it's former glory and revive the Asgardians that died. She even offers to bring back Odin and Frigga to Thor.

Yeah, I trust Loki's ever-so-permanent death about as much as any of the Master/ Missy's.

As I do Hela' s, for that matter. Woman has "Queen Loch of F-You" written all over her.

Isn’t Thor not even going to be in Thor 4? He’s in Guardians 3, and Jane will be the protagonist of Thor 4, right?

Chris Hemsworth is confirmed to be reprising the role, so he'll certainly be in it. Whether he's the main protagonist or not is another question.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Sep 11th 2019 at 3:26:03 PM

I'm just worried because I'm all psyched for Jane-Thor to show up in Jane-4, and I don't want this to turn out to be another Iron Man 3 situation. "Pepper finally suits up in an Iron Man suit! We got Rescue! ...for thirty seconds, involuntarily."

The title "Love and Thunder" is giving me an uncomfortable dread that the focus of the movie might just be on rekindling the terrible Jane/Thor romance, and we'll only get Jane-Thor for like two minutes 'cause Thor gives her some superpowers in one brief scene. Or something like that.

When it comes to representation, Marvel's burned me a lot. I want to be excited for Jane-4, but I still have old scars tempering my hype.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 8:42:32 AM

Agreed. The shitty “grrrl power!” scene in Endgame made me groan, and they haven’t done anything to show me I should trust them.

Part of me really cringed at that scene. Oh, all the women coincidentally grouped up at this one spot to look really cool did they?

That Endgame scene was transparent pandering, but any oasis in a desert is still something, at least. After all, pretty much the entire rest of the film is pandering to men.

It's worse than actually making an effort to be inclusive with female characters, but better than doing everything exactly the same but without that scene.

Good Representation > Tokenism > Marginalization > Erasure

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 9:12:11 AM

The scene just really hit me in a sore spot because the movie is just. Really sexist, actually? It didn’t deserve that scene.

So. In Age of Ultron, Black Widow is revealed to be infertile, she feels like a monster, all that terrible sexist jazz.

And then in Endgame, the reason she sacrifices herself instead of Hawkeye is because he has a family and she doesn’t.

So an infertile woman kills herself because she can’t have children, and because her friend can.

But grrrrl power, am I right?

Yes, Planet Manpain was a mistake. In both movies it appears in, the planet exists for the sole purpose of killing off some of Marvel's scarce few female superheroes, so that the men in their lives can feel bad about their deaths for five seconds and then advance the plot.

So far as female representation goes, Vormir is the worst thing ever to happen to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Honestly, Black Widow's mourning scene is kind of amazing because it really highlights the fact that she does not now, nor has she ever, had a personal relationship with a female character. Multiple people come together to be said about her passing and every single one of them is male. In ten years of appearances across multiple films, Black Widow has never once passed the Bechdel Test. It's actually kind of shocking in retrospect.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 11:38:22 AM

If a single man sacrificed himself for a family man, is that wrong? Yes, the context of the genders IS important (I'm not a moron). However, the idea of people actually valuing families as a moral part of their persona is not something I'm comfortable judging. Especially for someone who had a highly traumatic non-family upbringing.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 11th 2019 at 10:40:45 AM

It’s not that she doesn’t have a family. It’s the root of WHY she doesn’t have a family.

Black Widow killed herself because she was infertile. As a woman who is infertile, I find that incredibly offensive. Women do not need to have children (or be capable of having children) in order to matter.

I think that leaps from A to Z.

Black Widow killed herself because she:

1. Is self-sacrificing and both were willing to die for the other. 2. Believes that Hawkeye has someone to go home to.

In war movies, the family man not dying is not actually uncommon because the single or lone wolf characters give themselves up first. Wolverine has also done this like a dozen times for Scott and others.

Also Widow made it clear in the film that she does have a family, not a biological one, but one that is very real the same.

I actually like her sacrifice, because she earned the right to die the hero, not to be the secondary who mourns, but to be the big hero who makes the sacrifice play. The difference between her and Gamora is that Widow made a choice, a choice she fought hard to be allowed to make, she got to be up there with Tony as the one who made the ultimate sacrifice, nobody else. She got to save not just the universe but also her closest friend, she won.

And yes the women team up scheme was pandering, but I liked it, it was a sign that we’d made progress, not enough, far from enough, but the cast of female hero’s is growing and so is their prominence.

As for Love and Thunder, I believe the indication is that the Love part refers to Valkyrie looking for a wife to be her queen, not anything to do with Thor.

Remember, the shitbag behind the mess of female power that was Iron Man 3 has been removed from the process, that’s why we finally got Captain Marvel, Black Panther and the upcoming Black Widow film, Disney got sick of a sexist dirtbag stopping them making diverse films that make lots of money.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 11th 2019 at 6:36:09 PM

I've got it! Amora will be Valkyrie's queen!

Of the people you mention, Black Panther and Captain Marvel were both conspicuously marginalized in Endgame. T'Challa was killed off in Infinity War so that he could miss the boat, while Captain Marvel wasn't killed off on account of her movie not existing yet and was instead just sort of ignored.

After so much fuss was made of Carol being the most powerful Marvel character, she's given two jobs in Endgame: ferry Iron Man back to Earth so he can do important plot stuff, and then ferry the Infinity Gauntlet across a battlefield to not actually accomplish anything. And certainly, while you have it in hand, DO NOT put on the Infinity Gauntlet and end this whole goddamn thing right now; that's the boys' job. In this film, Carol literally exists solely to enable Iron Man to do important things.

Black Widow, meanwhile, did not miss the boat on the Time Heist because someone had to die on Planet Manpain. And they certainly weren't about to kill off a male character or write a Cutting the Knot Taking a Third Option solution into the problem. Much easier to just bring Black Widow along and chuck her off a cliff despite already having an upcoming film on the slate - literally ending her solo franchise right before it even has a chance to begin.

Fans have wanted Black Widow to get her own solo films for years. Marvel finally delivered on that promise, but turned around and went, "WHOOPS SHE'S DEAD" exactly one film before doing so. If that's not jerking the dog's chain, I don't know what is.

And that's not even getting into Replacement Gamora. Or the 100% totally unearned Rescue moment, where Pepper is just suddenly wearing an Iron Man suit despite her character arc to this point making pretty clear that she would never in a million years do that.

Just because Perlmutter isn't in charge of the films anymore, that doesn't mean representation is solved forever. Perlmutter had nothing to do with Doctor Strange, and that didn't stop that movie from having a major debacle with asian representation. Perlmutter was A problem, but he was far from being THE ONLY problem.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 1:29:11 PM

In fairness, there was a very good chance using the gauntlet could kill her and they obviously wanted Tony to be the one to sacrifice himself. Which I just now realized was Tony showing Steve that he can indeed sacrifice himself for the greater good as Steve accused him of being incapable of all the way back in Avengers.

She absorbs energy, is more powerful than both Thor and the Hulk, and is later shown draining energy from the Gauntlet to overpower Thanos.

Carol could have solved the plot right then and there and been just fine. The reason they didn't have her do so is because they wanted it to be Tony's big sacrifice moment instead. Which is a great scene for him, but contributes to Carol's marginalization in this film.

Carol's power also kinda undermines the "Girl Power" moment. Carol just split Thanos's entire warship in half. What the hell does Okoye think she's going to do to bodyguard her?

Endgame purposely excluded Carol from the part of the plot where finesse and cleverness is called for, and therefore Carol's immense strength isn't a plot-breaker. They only bring her in once the story's devolved into a slugfest she should demonstrably be able to solve easily for multiple reasons, and then go out of their way to keep her from doing so.

Scarlet Witch, incidentally, also gets hit with the "WHOOPS, TOO STRONK, better come up with a way to get her out of the fight!" stick too.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 2:06:12 AM

Correct, because Endgame was not a standalone film, it was the culmination of the MCU until this point, including all the sexist and racist crap that has been part of the MCU. It takes a long time to replace rotten foundations without knocking the whole thing over. Disney aren’t going to knock the whole thing over and start again, they’ll replace one rotten strut at a time, it’s slow progress but it is progress.

Yeah, welcome to a film built around Iron Man, Carol is far from the only character who plays second fiddle to Iron Man, until we get a female lead avenger that’s going to happen, we’ve now at least gotten women leading films (honestly Ant Man & The Wasp felt like a Wasp film that Ant Man was tagged into for marketing reasons) and an expanding portfolio of female Avengers, we won’t get a female lead avenger as soon as we deserve one (that would require time travel), but we’re on the right track.

Also I’d note that Captain Marvel and Scarlet Witch are the only ones to seriously challenge Thanos solo.

I suspect that there was talk about everything, but do you not at all see how a female character getting to be the hero, be the one who makes the sacrifice, can be empowering? When was the last time a female character sacrificed herself to save everyone, not to save a love interest, not to motivate a man to save the world, but to save the world explicitly? That’s rare, that’s new.

Do we know for certain that we’re only getting the one film? This is Disney, they don’t like to leave money on the table, if they’re okay making works about dead characters they may be happy to make more than one.

The Gamora thing is just bad, if they wanted a Finding Gamora plot so bad they could easily have done something very interesting by having two Gamoras, then you’d have the character arc of Gamora having to deal with who she used to be and who she’d have become if she hadn’t fallen in with the Guardians.

The Rescue moment, I think you’re going to deep into it, the film was a massive fanservice binge, they couldn’t undo the mess of Iron Man 3 and what it did to Pepper (though I’d say they managed a little of getting her towards Rescue), we either got a slightly ham fisted Rescue or we got no Rescue.

I’ll take representation without groundwork over no representation, in large part because media creators so often use the sexism of the past as an excuse for more sexism is the present, I want that excuse gone.

No, nor do I believe I have suggested that anywhere in my posts.

Endgame didn’t magically fix the sexism that’s been in the MCU from the start, nor did it lack its own sexism issues, but by god was it progress, we got a multitude of female hero’s, we got them being powerful and varied, we got womenpain with Wanda.

Endgame was betting on sexism that Avengers, it was better than Age of Ultron, it was better than Infinity War, no it wasn’t perfect, but it was progress and we should take the win.

Yep, and you don’t see that as progress? There are always characters that are to powerful and have to be magically sidelined/depowered, I’m pretty sure that up until now they’ve all been men.

That’s another role that Endgame added women into, the “shit they’re super powerful, we need an excuse to remove them so thing don’t end in five minutes” roll that was previously reserved for the likes of Thor.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 11th 2019 at 8:09:18 AM

I think that the issue is that people wanted more fight scenes with the female characters. Because damn if "The woman are too strong so we sideline them" becomes the new excuse

No, Action Girls dying so that men can solve the plot is actually pretty standard. Check out Michelle Rodriguez's entire filmography for reference.

"... people can call it typecasting, but I pigeonholed myself... Saying no to the girlfriend, saying no to the girl that gets captured, and eventually, I just got left with the strong chick who's always being killed." ~Michelle Rodriguez

You want "rare and new", have a man die so that a woman can solve the plot. That practically never happens in media.

Who knows? Maybe they'll make more prequels. Maybe they'll come up with a Replacement Goldfish. The only thing that's really certain is that Black Widow will never show up in the forward-moving narrative again, on account of being dead and all.

Getting this one movie out of Disney has been like pulling teeth over these last few years. And now that we've finally got it, and its main character is dead before the film even hits theaters. I'm not giving Marvel the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this is TOTALLY setting up a turnaround for her character and they're finally going to give her a bunch of movies that finally do her character justice after years and years of misuse.

She's dead, this movie only exists because fans wouldn't shut up about it, its existence wasn't enough to convince Marvel not to kill her off, and I have no doubt it's the last we'll ever hear of her barring a reboot or some other convenient prequel appearance. We've been hearing "Just wait; better representation is coming, just keep waiting, JUST KEEP WAITING," about Black Widow for years. I stopped buying it before they literally killed her off.

That is, indeed, a problem.

Incidentally, here's a Mary Sue article on the female representation in this film. And one specifically about the "WHOOPS TOO STRONK better keep her out of the film!" issue.

Infinity War/Endgame were all around a bad set of films for their female characters, despite the efforts other parts of the franchise have made in trying to improve female representation. I think Nebula might be the only Marvel Gal who comes out of the whole thing with an interesting and respectable depiction.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 2:22:55 AM

I’d argue that there’s a difference between the character who dies to prove the villain is a threat and things are serious, and a character sacrificing themselves to save everyone.

I’d say my defence of Widow jumping over Hawkeye is kinda summed up by a joke HISHE made in their Endgame video, they have Black Widow say to Hawkeye “I never get to do anything”, it’s true, Black Widow hasn’t gotten to play a huge pivotal role before, she’s been a solid team player, but she hasn’t been above and beyond the others before, getting to make that sacrifice gave her that, as the person who sacrificed herself she got to be more narratively important than many of the others.

I certainly hope her sacrifice isn’t forgotten, I won’t hold my breath because it is Disney, but I’m not instantly ruling it out.

I think the big divide here is that for you it’s key that Black Widow is treated fairly and like she deserves, anything less than that seems to make the film sexist trash. For me, I’m not hung up on Black Widow, I like her and everything, but her getting her 100% dues isn’t a must have for the film to be better than past films and thus progress and worthy of praise.

The MCU has a problem with sexism, it always has and sadly likely always will, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t praise it when it make progress and has less of a problem with sexism than past parts of it.

Yes I’m grading on a curve, I think that’s fair when we consider the rest of the class.

There's an unfortunate dichotomy there — Captain Marvel (and Scarlet Witch to a lesser extent) both have Story-Breaker Power in Endgame because they're already fueled by Infinity Stones so they might actually have a shot at taking on Thanos more or less solo. But the whole point of Thanos as an antagonist is that he's the final boss for the Avengers as a whole, too strong for any of them, so they need to gear up and beat him as a team. Having Captain Marvel come and and punch Thanos until the problem is solved is narratively unsatisfying (and indeed, that was my biggest problem with the Captain Marvel movie).

So you need to either power down the character somehow (making it so they can contribute without taking over the entire story), or else sideline them somehow (so they're still powerful, but just doing something else that's really super important, we promise). Both methods have obvious problems.

The real solution is simply to have more female characters. Part of what makes Black Widow's treatment so problematic is that she's the only OG Avenger who's a woman. Part of what makes Captain Marvel's treatment frustrating is that she's the only woman in the MCU to get solo billing in her own movie. It's not quite tokenism, but it's something similar — no character's treatment is perfect, but because there are so few prominent women in the MCU to begin with, the problems with their portrayal are magnified.

I don't think Silasw and Tobias actually have much disagreement on the issue here, the main difference is that Tobias is looking at it from a "it's bad and needs to get better" perspective and Silasw is looking at it from "it wasn't good but it's getting progressively less bad over time, which is progress" perspective.

These two things are not mutually exclusive, and honestly I agree with both positions.

Kinda off topic: But Americans really use the term "People of Color"?

It just feels...weird. Like, a barely altered form to say "Colored people"