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Posts tagged: female characters

KATE

mattfractionblog:

So I was driving home and something occurred to me that I want to write about real fast, because i am apparently incapable of experiencing moments of learning and NOT sharing it here. 

I have been, over time, fond of making jokes about Kieron Gillen killing off Kate Bishop. To me, it’s a joke about cavalierly spoiling another writer’s work and filling that writer’s inbox up with concerned emails and asks. I do this because I love Kieron. He’s one of my dearest friends in comics and out and I am on any given day at any given time in awe of something he’s said or written somewhere. And because Actually Feeling Stuff is hard this is how I show affection. Or at least it was. 
For whatever reason I was chewing it over in my head and I started to feel like Lucy with the football. I dunno about you or who you are or what you like but I don’t like feeling like Lucy with the football. 
It doesn’t matter what I thought the joke was, it occurs to me that because Kate is Kate and not, say, Karl, it occurs to me that there’s another angle from which to view that joke from that makes it seem… well, mean-spirited.  Because this is a thing that comics does to Kates.  Frequently.  
Which, uh, which is bullshit.  And I’m sorry for not sensing that sooner. 
So I’m not going to make that joke any more.  And I promise nobody’s gonna off Kate so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done
Not right now, I mean.  Not while she’s carrying that baby.
KIDDING! KIDDING!
Okay, that was the last joke like that. I promise.  

For those who don’t know, Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye (not to be confused with Clint Barton aka Hawkeye aka Hawkguy) has been featured pretty prominently in two popular marvel titles. One of them is Hawkeye which Matt Fraction (the OP) writes, which is about Kate and Clint being Hawkeye and what that title and role means (and also about pizza dogs and adorable things) and the other is Young Avengers, written by Kieron Gillen, which is about a group of young super heroes (and gay love).

What Mr. Fraction is saying here that is so awesome and so wonderfully insightful into the medium he is writing in, is that the jokes he makes about Kate being killed off in the other series she is in are far too reminiscent of a real problem in comics - the killing off of women for the pain and motivation of men - as he puts it, “so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.”

The next line is a lovely jab at both plot twists and conservative politics, because Mr. Fraction is a wonderful man.

Even if  death in Marvel comics doesn’t mean much, the idea that female characters, and the violence enacted on them are tools to further the plot of male characters is a problem, and it is one that Mr. Fraction clearly understands.

It just makes me really happy when people show awareness of the problematic tropes of their medium, and vow to work against them. Also of course that Kate will be around for a while longer.

snoozingcat:

sometime I just think about how easy it would be to market superheroes toward little girls and I am filled with rage

like do these people not realize how fucking easy this shit would be

there’s the dazzler she’s like a popstar and a superhero do you know how many 4-12 year old girls would dig that shit

there’s the wasp and her superpowers are seriously like zapping jerks, flying, and being cuter than everybody else. also she’s a famous fashion designer. and she’s better than you. (like she shrinks and stuff too but mainly her power is being better than you)

she-hulk is like this nerdy chick with the power to get bigger and greener and be spontaneously tougher than everybody in the vicinity like I don’t even know a little girl who wouldn’t slit someone’s throat for the ability to be stronger than all the boys when they pissed her off

little girl likes magic? scarlet witch

little girl likes science? invisible woman

little girl likes spies? black widow

little girl likes aliens? karolina dean

little girl likes bionic arms? misty knight

little girl likes flying horses? wow. guess who has one of those? valkyrie. valkyrie does.

My point is that’s it’s so fucking easy so chop-chop, Marvel, get on it. Seriously, I went ten years of my life thinking superheroes were boys. That’s ten years of you not profiting off of my inability to refrain from buying even the crappiest merchandise you offer if it has a character I love on it. Little girls are an enormous market; they will buy all your shit if you just suggest to them that maybe they’d like to.

or you could just keep on not profiting when you could be making money selling literally any object that has enough space to plaster a female superhero’s face on it. that’s cool too.

Heroine Addiction: Dissecting “Strong”, “Female”, and “Character”

resurrecttheliving:

image

This is something of a dead horse, but while we are posting our definitive opinion on things, we might as well have at it. This issue is not just important to me, it’s a necessary step towards creating good narrative, so it really must be covered. It would be an understatement to say I feel passionately about this. Women and storytelling is pretty much all I care about, because “female characters” and “characters” are one and the same thing.

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