Joss Whedon’s idea of writing about female characters
- Natasha ‘I am a monster because I cannot bear children‘ Romanoff
- Jane ‘I get a nobel prize but I am reduced to my boyfriend boosting about me’ Foster
- Pepper ‘I run Stark Industries but I am also reduced to my boyfriend using me like a joke line’ Potts
- Wanda ‘I get called weird and witch and even though I am technically more powerful than all of them I need Hawkeye to give me a pep talk’ Maximoff
Do not let Whedon touch female character 2kFOREVER
ouch
Wanda ‘I’m Romani and Jewish but Whedon made me white’ Maximoff
Wanda ‘I’m Romani and Jewish but Whedon made me white and a Nazi sympathizer’ Maximoff
I’m pretty sure Nat called herself a monster because she is haunted by what she did while working as an assassin, not because she can’t bear children, you guys will jump on literally fucking anything without giving it any thought. Also the lines about Pepper and Jane were because they couldn’t be in the movie. I agree about the bit about Wanda though, like that wasn’t cool at all. Like I get that the Twins couldn’t be mutants, but doing that to their characters was down right disrespectful. But calling her a witch was fine, because you know, she the mother fucking Scarlet Witch and how the hell is calling her powers weird offensive, and yes she’s powerful but this is her first real fight and being scared is totally okay and it’s actually fucking demonstrating depth. And Whedon can write really good women, like have any of you seen Buffy or Firefly or Atlantis: the Lost Empire?
^ pretty much agree with all of this. Joss is guilty of falling into certain tropes when writing female characters, but I didn’t see that happening in this film and I was actually quite impressed.
concerning the twins, I didn’t get the impression they were Nazi-sympathizers though? I know tumblr has been kind of relentlessly perpetuating this idea and granted, the association with Hydra/Nazism is in poor taste, whatever the circumstances are. but Wanda and Pietro were taken in by Hydra, experimented on (without their actual consent, I assume) and given powers.
then the first chance they get: they escape, track down Strucker and murder him. that doesn’t seem very sympathetic to me? what I gathered is that Hydra was a means to an end for them in their quest for justice and their vengeance on Tony Stark.
it would have been awesome to see her played by a WoC, but I’m still hopeful they’ll establish her as Romani and Jewish in future films (although perhaps I’m just being optimistic on that one, we’ll see)
I’m Jewish, and the majority of my family, who were from Poland, were slaughtered in the holocaust. My great uncle (still alive) was taken to Auschwitz when he was 10 years old. My grandmother was in different concentration camps for basically the entire war. She barely survived.
My great aunts were actually twins who actually had horrible experiments done on them by Nazis. (By Mengele, specifically.) One of them is still alive, and she is EXTREMELY fucked up. Like, you don’t even know.
So I’m gonna tap in here.
To show the The Twins as, basically, slaves forced into that camp, experimented on by Hydra, forced to work for Hydra, them ultimately breaking away and FUCKING UP THE SHIT of all the people who were metaphorical Nazis, everyone who was using and manipulating them (from Hydra to Ultron) was pretty great. I wasn’t offended at ALL and I actually quite liked it.
Like, my whole family has never been offended by the Hydra stuff. It feels cathartic, honestly, to see the likes of Cap and the Avengers kicking their asses. For me, it’s ESPECIALLY cathartic to see a female twin who was a victim of their horrifying bullshit use WHAT THEY DID TO HER and turn it around on them to free herself and to stop them from hurting anyone else.
My dad, who was raised by a holocaust survivor and a survivor of a Russian Prison Camp (my grandfather), and who has been a comic book nerd since the first issue of X-Men and Spiderman and basically the beginning of Marvel, eats that shit up with a spoon.
for this last comment ^^^^
(note i have not seen the film)