Captain Marvel - Literally, from "her" to "hero"

[Anonymus Fluhre]

So Goose has become Star Wars The Last Jedi graphics for Captain Marvel. If you don't know what that means, it's going to be used by the Left as a point of how good the movie is while not having anything else to say about it.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

http://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/...p-culture-hate-is-starting-all-over-again.php

http://archive.li/sVhf5

Captain Marvel Versus Sexism: Why The Cycle of Forced Pop Culture Hate is Starting All Over Again
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | February 20, 2019 | 437 Comments





Brie Larson hates white men, according to a lot of white men. Her support of diversifying the journalistic pool sent to cover her latest movie, Captain Marvel, has been attacked by those who seem to believe the mere possibility of inclusivity is a personal attack on their lives. Smears like this against Larson, an Oscar winning actress who will become the first woman to headline a solo Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, are sadly nothing new. She’s been on the receiving end of this kind of hate since her casting was announced. The usual suspects went after her for her politics, her feminism, her support of #TimesUp, her shade towards Casey Affleck, and most recently, for showing off her strength by pushing a stationary car. It doesn’t take a genius to see why Larson is the one getting this level of hate and not, say, Chris Evans.

Captain Marvel is set to be a very big deal this year. How could it not be? It’s taken over a decade for Marvel, the now undisputed champions of blockbuster cinema, to give a female character her own film. Carol Danvers is a true icon of the comic book world, in large part thanks to her depiction in Kelly Sue DeConnick’s arcs. If Wonder Woman proved anything, it’s that an arse-kicking heroine is both a crowd-pleaser and a money printing machine. In that aspect, Marvel are just jumping on an already lucrative bandwagon. Really, it shouldn’t have taken them this long.

I don’t think we need to drag out the reasons why Larson and Captain Marvel are on the receiving end of so much hostility. It’s misogyny, pure and simple. For once, the centre of attention in this genre is a woman, one who isn’t a sidekick or love interest, and she’s being played by a strident feminist activist who is using her moment in the spotlight to shine attention on the lack of gender and racial representation in other fields. Bigots like to pretend they don’t have a problem with women in leading roles or stories where people other than straight white men are the heroes; they’re just sad at all the ‘forced in social justice politics’. They loved Lara Croft until she got smaller breasts, a pair of trousers and some character development. They probably had no problems with Carol Danvers’s original skimpy outfit and thought that outfitting a military woman in something more suitable was political correctness gone mad. They were perfectly reasonable, you see, until the women took it too far.


We’ve been through this spiel countless times before, especially over the past few years as pop culture and the wider ‘geek’ world has become a dishearteningly volatile battleground for a fruitless war. We still live in the shattered remnants of the mess GamerGate left behind and the mere mention of the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot on Twitter can guarantee a swath of smug fury in your mentions. And then, of course, there is Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It boggles the mind to this day that a critically adored film that made over $1 billion worldwide could ever be considered a failure. It wasn’t unexpected for a Star Wars film to inspire fan furor. Indeed, that seems to be the default mode for said fandom. However, what happened with this film and its aftermath felt different, darker, more poisonous. Star Kelly Marie Tran was harassed from social media by ‘fans’ who despised her character so much that they felt the need to destroy the actress in the process. Director Rian Johnson faced endless screeds of violence, hatred and accusatory smears, much of which can be found in his Twitter mentions to this day. Endless conspiracies have sprung up around this one film, and a lot of that has been fuelled by supposedly journalistic outlets willing to fan the flames under the guise of reporting.

We could be here all day talking about The Last Jedi and everything that created that anger, but one aspect worth focusing on is how hating it, and other pieces of pop culture that buck bigoted trends or feature diversity in any way, has become an entire industry. Once again, this is not new. Look at how many creeps made a mint from Patreon accounts and endless YouTube screeds against Anita Sarkeesian. Plenty of right-wing sites took up the mantle of being GamerGate’s biggest defenders when they realized there was big money to be made from mining angry clicks from people looking to validate their misogyny. It didn’t matter that said publications were seldom journalistically reliable (ironic for a movement that claimed it was about supporting the ethics of video game journalism): All that counted was that these people with the vaguest sheens of legitimacy were in their corner. We’re seeing it again with ComicsGate, and all the tactics are the same. You don’t have to look far on YouTube, unfortunately, to find hours’ worth of videos on The Last Jedi being everything wrong with SJWs or Brie Larson representing the ills of feminism, and as evidenced by those scarily high view numbers, there’s a zealous audience for this kind of opinion.

One of the more exhausting aspects of this kind of forced outrage in the name of perpetuating a right-wing agenda is that it leaves the rest of us wasting far too much time trying to refute a crooked argument. On top of positioning a multi-billion dollar media monopoly as some sort of beleaguered underdog in this race - believe me, Disney does not need that kind of narrative - it drags the rest of us down into the mud to fix a problem that isn’t broken. The people who have decided that Captain Marvel, The Last Jedi, Ghostbusters, and so on are their enemies have already declared victory in this ‘debate’. If Captain Marvel is anything less than the biggest film of 2019, then it will be decried as a flop and proof that the sexist backlash against it worked; if it’s a record breaking hit then that only happened because of the feminist agenda or Marvel shill critics making it happen. It’s been over a year since The Last Jedi became the highest grossing movie of 2017 and the 2nd biggest Star Warsfilm ever and we still have to put up with this obsessive campaign pretending it was a disaster for Disney, a narrative you never see for Solo, the Star Wars film that did flop on a major level. They keep you talking and yelling and running around in circles for their benefit because it gives them another gasp of relevance until people are eventually ready to move onto the next topic of the day. Hell, I’m keenly aware that by even writing this piece, I’m probably contributing to this problem on some level. It never ends.

This may depressingly be the new normal for pop culture criticism and consumption. We are now hyper-aware of how these narratives unfold and how the most basic elements of critique and industry analysis are hijacked, misused and weaponized. Pop culture is the perfect battleground for them: It’s still considered a frivolity by many so it doesn’t garner the same level of serious reporting by mainstream publications, and it’s assumed to be white male dominated in the first place, meaning any calls for inclusivity can easily be posited as ‘intrusion’ without a second thought. As we contend more with issues of problematic art and its creators and how we consume that in the modern age, that easily converges with bigoted paranoia about censorship and makes said conversations all the more fraught.

However, it’s important to remember that the times have indeed changed, and we have different standards now for pop culture, representation, and the stories told on a grand scale. That’s a good thing. We all benefit from that shift, even those who cry oppression at the very prospect of it. Our heroes look more like the rest of us, their struggles are different, and there’s a promise of a brighter future. Captain Marvel would approve, and so would Brie Larson.



Kayleigh is a features writer for Pajiba. You can follow her on Twitter.

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As a white man, is this supposed to make me want to go see Captain Marvel?

Edit: The comment section is breath-taking. So many posts about buying tickets to a movie as a political act, I only grabbed two screenshots but there's loads more. Plus "my cousin doesn't give shit about GamerGate or Intersectional Feminism or Skin Color," therefore he's a racist and a misogynist. Interesting logic. I'll bet these people think they're tolerant.

​

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

There was a time when people were good at segregating an actor's politics from the movie itself. I really don't give a shit what Larson has said or done on this dumbass tour of hers. She didn't write this movie. It's not her personal vanity project where she gets to beat up Donald Trump and his army of Angry White Men. It's just another studio superhero movie which she's attached to because her name's marketable. Yet this whole movie has this fakeass controversy around it. "It's time for Women to have their day!" "Is this the end of the MCU?" "Sexists and Trolls Can't Stand a Strong Female Hero!" "Is 'Captain Marvel' the Ruination of the Female Hero?" "FuckMenFuckMenFuckMen" "Murry Soo Murry Soo Murry Soo".

I guarantee you most of the people going into see this movie are only barely aware of this feminist tour or of the clickbait outrage videos on YT about said feminist tour. Even the Fucking White Males who this movie apparently isn't for. Whatever happened to just watching the film? Every movie nowadays has to be a battleground for this gay culture war shit and I'm fucking sick of it.

 

[GrungyLawnChlorinate]

http://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/...p-culture-hate-is-starting-all-over-again.php

http://archive.li/sVhf5




As a white man, is this supposed to make me want to go see Captain Marvel?

Edit: The comment section is breath-taking. So many posts about buying tickets to a movie as a political act, I only grabbed two screenshots but there's loads more. Plus "my cousin doesn't give shit about GamerGate or Intersectional Feminism or Skin Color," therefore he's a racist and a misogynist. Interesting logic. I'll bet these people think they're tolerant.

View attachment 672706 View attachment 672707 View attachment 672708​

She chose a journalist who is disabled to interview not because she respected the person's work, but because of the disability. That's not inclusive or diverse, that's patronizing and insulting.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

[...]

So tl;dr: people who don't like a film if shoves identity politics are "haters?"

I'm fucking sick of it.

I wonder when -- or if -- it will ever end.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

So tl;dr: people who don't like a film because it shoves identity politics are haters?


I wonder when -- or if -- it will ever end.

The film ain't even gonna shove identity politics. It'll just be another inoffensive popcorn flick. The only people who think it shoves identity politics are the ones who interpret any female hero as a feminist statement; for good or bad. It's a two way street. The YasKween blue check marks are bad but so are the faggots making thirty minute YouTube videos about how feminism finally killed Marvel.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

The film ain't even gonna shove identity politics.

Like you said, I also miss the days when people weren't trying to cram politics -- "red pill" or "blue pill" -- into everything, whether it's political or not.

 

[Jetpack Himmler]

The film ain't even gonna shove identity politics. It'll just be another inoffensive popcorn flick. The only people who think it shoves identity politics are the ones who interpret any female hero as a feminist statement; for good or bad. It's a two way street. The YasKween blue check marks are bad but so are the faggots making thirty minute YouTube videos about how feminism finally killed Marvel.

One thing I have to give Kevin Feige credit for is that he is much more canny operator than Kathleen Kennedy, whose tenure on the Star Wars franchise left it in a bad state.

On a personal level, all this bickering over capeshit has let me emotionally exhausted whether it is identity politics or the pettiness in the DC/Marvel rivalry online. I wasted hours of my time arguing with this one emotionally-stunted dipshit who couldn't let go of how bad BvS was and couldn't tone down his vitriol for the DCEU. He really seemed to have it in for Wonder Woman because it was only DCEU film to be a breakout success at that point and he couldn't stand for that. He had to attack Gal Gadot and accused the director/writers/producers of racism because the other characters called the native guy, "Chief" and deliberately ignored context. I am ashamed to admit that I lost my temper and unleashed all the vitriol I had back at him.

I began to ask myself this question, "Is this bringing any joy into my life?"

No. It wasn't. I learned that I have no stake in whether Captain Marvel succeeds or fails. I'm just tired of the bickering between the aforementioned Blue Checks and the YouTube fags. This film has become more of cause to these people than entertainment and I've avoided talking about the film on social media because I don't want to get sucked in again. My opinion on Captain Marvel at this exact moment is quite succinct: utter indifference. I don't see how it's absolutely necessary to see this film when Endgame is going to bring the Avengers saga to a close and all of the hype Marvel is giving it feels contrived.

Fuck. Marvel Studios is pretty much an assembly line at this point and it has a pavlovian hold on the audience. It would take The Last Jedi levels of cringe to break it.

 

[Secret Asshole]

The thing is people are tired of this woke bullshit from corporations who clearly don't give a fuck. Nobody wants to be lectured by some dumb cunt who makes 5 million about how women are underprivileged when she makes more than most men in their entire lives on the whole of Earth. Its getting fucking annoying. You aren't important. You play pretend on a screen for massive sums of money for corporations who don't give a fuck and will gladly use your vagina obsession to sell tickets to mongoloids to wring as much money as possible out of them.

The very SECOND this becomes unprofitable or too much trouble resulting in massive lost income, they will tell this dumb cunt to shut her fucking mouth. The only reason the woke shit works is because Twitter blue checkmarks still have some marginal influence.

I honestly wonder if folks in marketing have had traumatic brain injuries because they seem to want to continue to go to the Ghostbusters 2016 type of marketing where females don't want to see it because generally those movies don't appeal to them and males don't want to see it when you tell them they are assholes. Though I do notice that when a movie has to rely on what it represents from the get-go for its marketing, it does seem to suspect that they are covering up a turkey that is colder than a Deep-Frozen Butterball.

The thing about woke marketing is it only occurs when the product is fucking terrible. That's basically a huge red flag to anyone. They don't have traumatic brain injuries, they're like, 'Ok, we have this huge piece of shit. How do we sell this turd?' So they figure to guilt people into seeing it. You didn't see this with Wonder Woman or Black Panther. The problem is that this just exacerbates the problems with the film. I asked a couple of people if they were going to go see it and they made a cringe and went 'no'.

Ghostbusters 2016 isn't getting a sequel and is going to get memory holed because it lost Sony 500 million and nearly crashed their movie studio division. That's why Sony isn't going to come out and defend it and has remained silent while the blue-check-mark brigade screams and shouts from the rooftops that they aren't getting another woke sequel to a movie pretty much 90% of the public wants to forget.

Companies just don't learn that these people are such a small audience they really have no power when it comes to buying products. They're just the loudest and there's this illusion that because you see them tweet all the time, they're the majority of users on Twitter, while most people don't even bother posting their real opinion because they're afraid of getting banned.

The only way the companies will learn is to constantly lose money until they realize Twitter doesn't matter at all. For every 10 Blue checkmark that shouts YASS KWEEN, there's 1,000 normies who are disgusted and ignore it. Or who have been banned for wrongthink.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

As was said, all the flame wars over the Internet about identity politics -- especially with petty stuff like superhero movies -- help keep people distracted.

And of course, more divided and thus easier to manipulate or control.

 

[KingofNothing]

I don't expect this movie to bomb even though I want it to because the media keeps trying to shame me for not caring about it and Larson keeps going around saying "eww, privileged straight white men" in interviews(Fuck off Brie, you're getting paid 5 million for this shit, your ass is privileged). It should easily make its money back or close to it just from riding the goodwill the MCU has built up, but the fact that reviews I'm seeing are raving more about that damn cat then the fucking main character does not fill me with confidence about the movie's quality.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

I was thinking about this movie last night, and something struck me about the plot.
A human pilot with a special attribute gets drafted into a cadre of outer-space badasses, and must ultimately save the world from an insidious extraterrestrial threat.

Guys, this is the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie, just with a much less likable lead. Hell, her costume is even green (well, turquoise.)

 

[Godzilla@1989]

I was thinking about this movie last night, and something struck me about the plot.
A human pilot with a special attribute gets drafted into a cadre of outer-space badasses, and must ultimately save the world from an insidious extraterrestrial threat.

Guys, this is the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie, just with a much less likable lead. Hell, her costume is even green (well, turquoise.)

I for one think this movie won’t outright bomb. The Marvel brand hasn’t become box office poison yet. So I think this’ll do the same as Doctor Strange. It’ll definitely won’t be Black Panther successful.

That’s interesting you would call this a Green Lantern movie. The thing is that Green Lantern looked like shit the moment the trailer dropped and while Captain Marvel is more or less the same the MCU has been doing, it doesn’t help that a boring actress such as Brie Larson is in the lead. However, Annette Benning is in it so that’s a plus.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

I have no idea how new or old this is, but it came across my Twitter feeed today, so...

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

ComicBookGirl19 is not a fan. I'm surprised. I figured she'd bend the knee.

https://twitter.com/DanikaXIX/status/1099424591989006336

http://archive.is/0Hu3v

 

[Bread Fetishist]

I have no idea how new or old this is, but it came across my Twitter feeed today, so...
View attachment 674791 View attachment 674790

What a cunt.

 

[Mr. A. L. Mao]

Maybe the real victory here is having the first autistic superhero actress, cuz the idea that your average gym bro is actually impressed by your 2pl deadlift is hella

 

[Commander X]

I had skimmed that Hollywood Reporter article, even skimming it's a slog to get through.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/f...ave-womankind-but-shes-doing-her-best-1185915

In the summer of 2017, after she had been cast but before Marvel began shooting, Larson went to see another superhero movie, DC's Wonder Woman, in the theater and found herself sobbing. "As a kid, I wanted to be an adventurer," Larson says. "I wanted to be a smart-ass. I wanted to get my hands dirty. But it wasn't until being in the theater seeing Wonder Woman ... I was like, 'Why is this making me cry so much?' I realized 'cause I hadn't had that, and there was a kid in me that was like, 'Oh, my God. I can do that?' "

"I always wanted to be a tough woman-of-adventure as a girl, and I'm still so tough some pandering piece of average capeshit film that was at least somewhat better than being repeatedly poked in the eyes with a sharpened stick, made me weep uncontrollably in public".

 

[neverendingmidi]

I had skimmed that Hollywood Reporter article, even skimming it's a slog to get through.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/f...ave-womankind-but-shes-doing-her-best-1185915



"I always wanted to be a tough woman-of-adventure as a girl, and I'm still so tough some pandering piece of average capeshit film that was at least somewhat better than being repeatedly poked in the eyes with a sharpened stick, made me weep uncontrollably in public".

Jane Goodall didn’t inspire this idiot. Dian Fossey didn’t inspire this idiot. Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Gertrude Bell- nothing. Seeing a movie about fiction- “oh my god women can be strong!”

Brie Larson is pathetic.

 

[XYZpdq]

I had skimmed that Hollywood Reporter article, even skimming it's a slog to get through.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/f...ave-womankind-but-shes-doing-her-best-1185915



"I always wanted to be a tough woman-of-adventure as a girl, and I'm still so tough some pandering piece of average capeshit film that was at least somewhat better than being repeatedly poked in the eyes with a sharpened stick, made me weep uncontrollably in public".

Uhh... she knows that acting in movies isn't real, right?