I also understand why they made her figure out how to control her Hulk side so much quicker than Bruce: They didn’t really have time to spend a decade showing her figuring all of that out, let alone multiple movies to play around with her character. But that’s small potatoes in the bigger scheme of things. It was a little confusing and abrupt and frankly felt glossed over. It just comes atop a pile of unnecessary baggage the show would be better off without.įinally, I’m not thrilled with how She-Hulk gets her powers. That’s fine! They do a fine job joking around with it here. Yes, of course we were going to play off the absurdity of the name “She-Hulk” and how female superheroes are often strapped with a moniker that’s derivative of a male counterpart. In many ways, I find the whole exercise in crafting strong female characters these days unintentionally sexist in and of itself, or at least unimaginative and predictable. Strong male characters are written without this dichotomy in mind. I’m definitely interested in where it goes.īut I remain irritated that modern TV writers seem to think that creating a “strong female character” requires her to be constantly contrasted favorably against the men around her, instead of just existing as an interesting character in her own right. The CGI is fine and as the story progresses we get some interesting new conflicts and cameos. To truly weave this theme into the story in a way that makes viewers actually think or question things She-Hulk’s writers would require a softer, and more clever, touch.Īgain, I like Jen Walters as a character and I enjoy her fourth-wall-breaking. They feel as outlandish and unrealistic as the superheroes themselves. Instead of making us question inequality in the workplace or the dangers of misogyny, we’re given such outrageous examples that in the end we just feel detached from them. When all your chauvinistic men are so blatantly awful, the story abandons nuance. The problem with laying it on too thick is that it quickly loses its power. She may have put up with more annoying men but he’s a superhero almost definitionally angry all the time, whose rage is both his power and his curse. Jen lectures Bruce on ‘anger’ because of all the crappy men who catcall her and mansplain her and says she’s dealt with more anger than he ever has-but this is the friggin’ HULK we’re talking about. Matthews as Dennis Bukowski Chuck Zlotnick (L-R): Tatiana Maslany as She-Hulk/Jennifer "Jen" Walters, Ginger Gonzaga as Nikki Ramos, and Drew. But it’s like that woman in the park telling her toddler she doesn’t love him. My ex-girlfriend was once told “I hate to see you leave but I love to watch you go” by some middle-aged dude at a bar because some men really do believe that cheesy pickup lines actually work. I mean, don’t get me wrong here ladies, I know these men exist. Really, She-Hulk writers? Then there are the men who won’t leave Jen alone outside of a bar the trickle of terrible first-dates with self-centered losers the one good date that ends up being just as bad in the end the entitled prick trying to buy Jen and her paralegal drinks at the bar who describes them as “sitting alone” despite the fact that they’re together. “There’s a 10,” he says, referring to this woman on an attractiveness scale. A workplace colleague at one point notices an attractive woman. It’s a parade of slimy men, basically, who our protagonist must endure. But the way these moments are littered throughout the show becomes unbelievable and too on-the-nose. Some of the stuff that happens to the female characters in this show likely has happened to real women in the real world. It’s not that these things don’t exist or aren’t present in the real world. This is how I feel about the portrayal of chauvinism and misogyny in She-Hulk. It wasn’t earned, so to speak, in the narrative I had constructed, whether or not it was based on something that actually happened. People will read it and it will ring false. When I told him that it was a true story-at least that bit-he said it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. I incorporated this into a story I was working on and my creative writing instructor told me it was too unbelievable to work in the context of my story. When I was younger, we were at zoo and I overheard a frustrated mother say to her young, misbehaving child, “I don’t love you anymore!” It was shocking and terrible, though almost certainly just a reaction from an exhausted and frazzled parent who (one hopes) regretted ever saying it (even if she meant it in that moment). Long ago, I was in a creative writing class working on a story in which I incorporated a real-life event I had witnessed.
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