You get what you ask for, and people deserve to get what they ask for good and hard. I think about this whether it’s New Yorkers getting assaulted by criminals, and then turning on the people who help them,1 or progressives complaining about the culture created by progressives. Here’s an example: Freddie deBoer’s recent post lamenting that “We’re Still Stuck with ‘Strong Female Characters’ Who Are Smug, Mean, & Reductive.”
“it’s not progressive to squeeze so many female characters into a tired set of tropes,” the subtitle goes, and he leads off his post with an image from the spectacularly unfunny Mindy Kaling’s spectacularly unfunny Velma from her spectacularly bad Scooby-Doo reboot/cultural desecration.2
Freddie, a self-professed man of the left, is mystified, baffled even, at why this continues to happen. However, even though I don’t watch Marvel movies, I know enough to know when a writer is lying to me, or at least didn’t bother to get his facts right, and Freddie hits us with a whopper here at the start while pondering the anemic performance of the MCU’s3 recent The Marvels:
There’s also the unfortunate history where, as has become an ugly pattern in franchise moviemaking, a small but loud group of angry fans attacked the original film for having a female lead character.
This is absolutely false. The original film was not “attacked . . . for having a female lead character.” It was attacked because lead actress Brie Larson is very unlikable and went out of her way to antagonize fans, and also the movie was poorly written and represented the exact tropes Freddie complains about in his piece. Also, find me a comic book fan who doesn’t like females or female characters. I read comic books as a kid and a teenager and was around other comic fans all the time. This myth of “toxic male fandom” is such a lie and I refuse to let the Gell-Mann amnesia effect make me forget that people who purvey this lie that I know is false are probably lying about other stuff. This goes for Freddie too.4
Freddie does admit he too didn’t like how Captain Marvel was portrayed in the 2019 Captain Marvel film, and how Hollywood is lately portraying women in general:
I find the way that they choose to characterize her really aggravating, and it’s not an isolated problem. tired, [sic] which is a parody of what feminine strength looks like[.] As Hollywood has made progress in representing women in genre films, the industry has also developed a grating tendency to write the same kind of female characters, a series of tired tropes that inevitably leave us with women who insult everyone, never betray the vulnerability that actual human beings possess, and drop tired joke after tired joke in lieu of real dialogue.
As a very important aside, this is the criticism that us men and women of the right have been levying against Hollywood’s depictions of women for twenty years. And we were called bigot/racist/sexist/homophobe for pointing out that bad writing sucks.
The rest of the piece is paywalled, but here’s another bit to ponder:
Women-led movies, women characters who are competent and self-assured, women characters who are funny, women characters who aren’t afraid to mix it up with the men, women characters who demonstrate excellence and pride - we need more of all of these things in Hollywood. What we don’t need is the cliché that Captain Marvel represents and which has become inescapable, the woman who speaks only in insults, who condescends to everyone around them, who’s perpetually unimpressed.
The kinds of female characters Freddie wants have existed in Hollywood movies going back to at least the 1930s. I don’t understand where this myth that (a) men never went to see movies with female leads and (b) all female leads, or female characters in general, were totally stupid and useless, mere sex objects, or both, in every single film. The Year Zero generation has to believe that history started with them. That there is no great chain of history linking present to the past. Because tradition is what old stale pale males forced on you because of their racisms, you have to reject it, which means willfully ignoring things that people alive today could tell you actually happened.
I don’t know if Freddie is willfully ignorant or just ignorant, but, at least from the preview portion of his piece—and if he gets into what I’m about to say later in it, please let me know so I can correct the record—he is not curious about who is writing such characters or why.
We’ve briefly touched upon Mindy Kaling. Let’s look at The Marvels, but first, a word from our culture:
“Freddie, baby, this is American culture speaking. Listen, Fred my boy, we won. Us, the left. We’re in control of everything. Big budget movies? Prestige TV shows? Publishing? That’s us, man. A book about mind-controlling hair cream that makes black women subservient to the evil white racists status quo and lambasts the publishing industry as racist white people doing racisms (FN Not parody!) is a critically acclaimed bestseller loved by white people. Listen, F-Man—it’s our culture now. We are living in the progressive utopia. Nice, right! It ain’t white male Christian conservatives creating your entertainment. So sing and rejoice! Our people are in charge. When you’re complaining, you’re looking in a mirror.”
Back to The Marvels. This movie is written by Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, and Elissa Karasik. Three women. Awesome! And Ms. DaCosta is a woman of color, which make her extra awesome. Those female character tropes you don’t like were written by females. Biological ones. So, I mean, maybe there is a market for these types of characters. And this is a step up from the first Captain Marvel movie which was written by two women (Anna Boden and Geneva Robertson-Dworet) and one man (Ryan Fleck). Maybe Mr. Fleck was solely responsible for the characterization you don’t like?
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was another lame comic book TV show5 nobody liked, featuring the same types of characters Freddie doesn’t like, and seven-out-of-nine episodes—77 percent of them—were written by women.
I’m not going to go through every single show with these types of non-feminine female characters my friend Daddy Warpig calls, though he’s not the only one, “Men with breasts,” but my point stands: these characters reflect the people who write them, and the people who write them are your people, Freddie. They share your politics and your view of the world. My people criticize them for being poorly written and not true to life and, yes, politically motivated. And politics is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. Because everything is political, now and always. Pop culture is mass culture, and mass culture is mass indoctrination. This is why it’s so disingenuous when defenders of pop culture brands say “Lol why are you so mad, it’s just fiction.” Listen, if it’s “just fiction,” or “just comics,” or “just video games” or “just TV” or “just cartoons” or “just movies” or “just TTRPGS,” then why do you fight tooth and nail to take over these things in the first place?
Look, Freddie, my point is this: you can have a wokeified, DEI-saturated, secular progressive utopia or you can have well-written female characters. Pick one. This isn’t entirely accurate, and I’m using hyperbole to make a point, because (a) there are tons of well-written female characters in modern fiction, and (b) chances are 99 percent of them are written by committed progressives. But these people are good writers who got to where they are on talent.
The best writers in all mediums let character and story come first, regardless of their politics. They’re probably pushing a message because all fiction is message fiction—this is why this stuff matters—but the message is secondary. First, they follow writing basics:
Likeable characters (this is something miserable SSRI-addled progressives with severe mental illness and empty souls cannot create, because all writers put at least a little bit of themselves into their characters)
A clear goal that is meaningful to said characters
Stakes that matter
A sense of urgency
Conflict and obstacles in the characters’ way
Not insulting their audience
After these fundamentals have been set up, the message can be woven in. Progressives used to be subtle, because they’d have good writers who knew their craft start with this foundation and the message came from the likable characters embodying the socio-political viewpoints they want to inculcate in the viewer. Conservatives used to do this too, back when they were allowed to (and weren’t trying to add in cringey ham-handed political points, but that’s a lament for another day). Anyway, good stories trust the audience enough to figure this stuff out without sledgehammer messaging and symbolism so basic it makes me want to nut-punch every hack who scoffs at the black hats the villains wore in cowboy movies. That’s hyper-delicate compared to how blatant the messaging is across all media.
Could it be the fault of a rapidly dwindling national IQ? Maybe. But is it the audiences who are getting stupider, or is it the writers? I don’t have an answer to that. Honestly, I think audiences have been wising up to this for a while.
This complaint underscores a common complaint of mine: if you don’t like what the mainstream is giving you, stop giving the mainstream your time and attention. There are scads, scads I say, of excellent independent writers, artists, and filmmakers giving you what you want. There’s a distinct lack of imagination in sticking with the mainstream to somehow fix itself, when we all know that’s not going to happen. Why? Because money isn’t the goal. Shaping culture is.
In any event, you get what you ask for. Freddie, this is the world you wanted, this is its culture. Now deal with the stories it gives you. If you don’t like it, maybe it’s time to change the culture. You’ll never agree with this, though. The problem is never you. The mirror always lies. Better to double down. So here’s my idea: shut up, pay your money to see these movies made by your people, and choke on the “smug, mean, & reductive” female characters you claim to dislike. Time to take your medicine.
- Alexander
Help fuel my writing habit by fueling my caffeine habit and buy me a coffee.
If you’re ever in New York for some reason and see a New Yorker in trouble, the only finger you should lift is to point and laugh.
Even if you aren’t a fan of the original Scooby-Doo, it’s a willful act of cultural desecration to take a kid’s show and turn it into a platform for gross sex jokes and anti-white racism. Also, Mindy Kaling just isn’t funny.
That’s Marvel Cinematic Universe for those of you who have touched a woman before.
This is similar to claims that the awful The Last Jedi was derailed by misogynist racists and, uh, Russians. No, seriously.
For all that is holy, noble, pure, and good, enough capeshit. American culture is such a joke.
My favorite is still when Jennifer Lawrence claimed with total and complete sincerity that there had never once been a female action hero before she starred in Hunger Games. These people are such deluded and self-aggrandizing lunatics.
I cannot disagree with anything you say here.
I liked everything Roger Stern did with Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau) in "The Avengers" in the 1980s. He, a white man, was attempting to boost Black female characters at a time when they were underrepresented in the genre. (It cannot be understated that comic books made vastly more money in the 1980s -- when they were present at every spinner rack in drugstores, grocery stores and cigar shops -- than they do today. Also, do cigar shops still exist?) Now the money is all in the IP.
I, an aging fanboy, should theoretically be the target audience for THE MARVELS. I do not want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. I wonder if Roger Stern is making a dime off of it; in a fair universe, he would.