The Captain Marvel Kerfluffle · 10:52pm May 28th, 2019
Or, How Captain Marvel‘s Writing Team Showed They Really Don’t Know Their Craft.
There wasn’t supposed to be a post today. In fact, I am slamming this out in-between a work shift, a very important errand, work on book projects (my email box is FULL of comments, fixes, and changes from the awesome Alpha and Beta Readers I have), and then a big social event tonight. But this warranted a post.
Okay, backstory: This last weekend, with Marvel’s Captain Marvel about to come out on Blu-Ray, the marketing team released an extended version of a scene from the film.
Okay, fine, not worth commenting on so far, right? Well, this came with an additional caveat. It was marketed as “see a hero taking on toxic masculinity.”
Oh. Oh no.
As I pointed out in my thoughts on Captain Marvel, the largest weakness of the film by far was the writing. And … that’s come back to bite folks again. Badly.
As you can imagine, the internet exploded.
Hang on though. We’re still in backstory. The scene in question is an extended version of the scene in the film where—minor spoilers—Vers steals a guy’s bike and some clothes. In this new version, rather than her simply eyeing the bike and stealing it (which is justifiable in character at the moment), we instead get a scene where the biker hits on Vers in a pretty sleazy manner, only to get his conceptions crushed by Vers. She shakes his hand, then crushes it (you can hear bones crack and pop) and tells him to give her his bike and jacket or she’ll remove the hand.
Again … a bit more sinister, sure. Except … then the writers had to step in and explain that this was Captain Marvel being a hero and striking a blow against toxic masculinity. And … well, you can imagine how the internet has taken it. Both sides have, as you can predictably guessed, gone up in arms. Both make some good points, and both make some bad points.
However, the reason I chose to take some time out of my crunched day to post about this was because at its core, the argument Disney’s marketing team and the writers of Captain Marvel have claimed is … well, wrong.
Vers isn’t a hero in that scene. Not by any definition of the term. And to see people so aggressively defending Vers actions as “heroic,” even the writing team? Well … I think that’s in part why the Captain Marvel had the problems it had.
Ugg... I sigh nope stepping away now.
How anyone could assign being a bully to being a hero just...
Wow, somebody rattled your cage, I see. Not that I blame you.
But I don’t think this has anything to do with the definition of heroism. I think it’s just a bunch of over-politicized people trying to advance an agenda through the massive platform that they’ve been given, with zero care for what more sensible, less political people think. It may be worse than that: not that they don’t know their craft but just don’t care about the damage they do. I wouldn’t put it past these people to happily trample over something as valuable as the definition of a hero in the name of their cause. Just add it to the mountain.
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I ... really care for the sanctity of the term "hero." People need heroes. Heroes give them hope, drive, ambition, something to look up towards.
For someone to come out and try to paint anti-hero qualities and actions as heroism really does ruffle my feathers. Less so if it's ignorance, but despite my willingness to give the writers of Captain Marvel the shadow of a doubt, it really does feel a lot like someone stomping over ideals in pursuit of their own goals, like you said.
I can always trust you to point out when something outrageously dumb is going on.