The Rise and Fall of Captain Marvel
The Ballad of the Space Karen
The 2010s was the heroine decade. I skipped Katniss Everdeen because I’m still not into teenagers (or even adults) killing each other in a contest, and the Starks and Daenerys because I like my medieval Europe to be historical.
Rey was my first heroine. The Mary Sue of Star Wars. The actually she’s the Jedi. The Englishwoman with a cute forehead. Especially when people anticipated her to be the daughter of Luke Skywalker. And in the same antediluvian year of 2015, Supergirl. Part office dramedy, part blonde millennial punching it out with murderous aliens.
And that’s the tragedy with the heroine. So much potential, so much anticipation, and so much disappointment. They were cool for just two years or less. Daisy Ridley didn’t really get that stardom. Ghostbusters, released with the belief that women of SNL could be as funny as their male predecessors, is still a tragedy for Sony, although it remains a cable and TV fixture. And America didn’t get its first female president.
Like many others, I blamed toxic masculinity coming from white men. Star Wars’s “The Resistance” became a real thing and Melissa Benoist, wearing a “Feminist” sweater, sported a sign written “Hey Donald, don’t try to grab my pussy – it’s made of steel” at the Women’s March. Even the tradwife Lois Flagston from Hi & Lois wore the pink pussy hat.
I got my market share by writing about heroines in the context of pop culture and feminism, praising new movies and series, and examining the classics while sneering at the losers who don’t like heroines.
The peak of this heroine age was the summer of 2017, the summer of Diana Yes, Wonder Woman. I got to know the ecstatic feeling of receiving the Holy Spirit. The tears of joy, the overwhelming emotion, the hand raising (not at all, I didn’t want to bother other viewers), and the afterglow. Both DC and Marvel happily sold their comics to more fans, from 1950s Supergirl to 2010s Mockingbird (wearing an “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda” shirt).
Heroine fandom was already well-established on Twitter, maintained by gay and lesbian-identifying Brazilians, French, and Americans who used the same profile pictures and similar usernames. In the same year, Taylor Swift embraced her dark side, embraced the “Darth Becky” epithet coming from black girls, knowing that her renaissance would come.
2018 was the year between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, and I got Supergirl in the meantime. The hate against Captain Marvel had begun as well, focusing on two things: Brie Larson wanting more diverse critics by saying that she didn’t want to hear what a white man had to say about A Wrinkle in Time and her stoic, resting bitch face throughout the trailers of Captain Marvel. She doesn’t smile and you may draw two conclusions: She cannot act, or this is what a feminist looks like.
Carol Danvers debuted in 1968 as a USAF officer, and during the Ms. Magazine decade of the 1970s, she became Ms. Marvel (note the superhero name) and had her moments as a minor superhero, before Marvel reinvented her as a human Millennium Falcon, Captain Marvel, in 2012.
The Captain Marvel fandom had overlapped with the Supergirl fandom by 2018 and there was no rivalry between these DC and Marvel followers. Both characters are also named similarly, Carol Danvers and Kara Danvers. Both are blonde, white women with alien heritage and spacefaring powers, and coincidentally played by French-American actresses. In fact, the Supergirl Twitter account still hailed Kara and Carol as “Blonde, beautiful, beaming women of action” as late as April 2020 (this tweet no longer exists).
March 2019 came, and I left the theatre somewhat disappointed. No ecstasy. Fun 1990s adventure in the style of Independence Day or Face/Off, but too lightweight. Fun Gen X music but Carol is abducted in 1989 and returns to Earth in 1995, so no way she’s aware of “Come as You Are” unless it’s also a hit in Hala. Even no way she had a memory of Street Fighter II (also a product of 1991) unless it was another false memory planted by the Kree.
But whatever. I got the fandom, I got the merchandise, I won the giveaway, Brie Larson loved Singapore, and Captain Marvel gonna be as famous. Then came the worldwide event of Avengers: Endgame. It opens with Carol, a goddess she is, lights up the dark space to save Tony Stark and flies from deep space to Earth in one night. She disappears for most of the movie to return in the final battle, flirting with Peter Parker, taking on Thanos and fails, and showing up for Tony’s funeral.
Well, she would return in more movies. The fandom would get bigger. She would lead the new Avengers like in the comics. She would appear in Disney+ shows.
No, no, no. By autumn 2019, the age of heroine was over.
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The age of white heroine, more accurately. Articles complaining that the heroines were too white, too straight, and too heteronormative had appeared years before. A Medium hoax, supposedly written by a Muslim Norwegian girl, accusing Gal Gadot of being an abusive senior model in the 2000s, appeared in November 2017.
The pandemic damaged many media plans, and the deluge came in the summer of 2020. The slur for THE white woman, ‘Becky’, has been replaced by ‘Karen’, referring to Becky’s mother. Corporates and celebrities did the damage control during the autumn. Brie Larson, who became a YouTuber, mentioned that she wanted to be a better antiracist, hinting that she’s read some books (DiAngelo and Kendi are the overused examples) and that she’s one of the good girls.
Disney+ came out, the vaccines came out, and yet the Captain Marvel moment never came. Marvel beautifully branded WW2 heroine Peggy Carter as Captain Carter – British, brunette, badarse, and banking, while Carol, not voiced by Larson, made sporadic appearances and then dies in What If?. She makes a cameo in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but the Master of Kung Fu himself was also quickly sidelined. Larson was safe while the two stars of Shang-Chi, Simu Liu and Awkwafina, were accused of “anti-blackness”.
In short, the blonde, beautiful, beaming women must give way to the 2020s, or at least padded by assorted black and other minority characters. WandaVision, the only Disney+ series I like, introduces Monica Rambeau as a heroine in the making, while Marvel Comics had set the new Ms. Marvel as a Pakistani Jersey girl for a decade.
Supergirl went for that painful final season run with more black characters and even a trans actor – but at least Kara’s first love Kenny Lin is resurrected and even played by the Indonesian American actor Peter Sudarso. The age of the low-budget, easy-sell Arrowverse, and even the CW as a teen Warner channel, concluded soon.
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Some 1000 words introduction to The Marvels there. I came to understand how the Women’s March, attended by both Brie Larson and Melissa Benoist, coming as both celebrities and superhero characters, had been poisoned from the start, thanks to white Hillary voters who believed they had to include some professional nutters in the name of diversity.
The COVID vaccines worked, we’re allowed to ignore the virus, and corporations and celebrities rode the war on whiteness well. The global superstar of pop is Taylor Swift, not Beyonce or Lizzo or any other black woman. Two Gen X icons, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, still rule Apple+, along with Brie Larson’s retro feminist series Lessons in Chemistry. Women’s professional sports could sell Black History Month and the Indigenous Round and vowing more black and indigenous players while being supported by white fans, white (she/her) journalists, and white superstars.
The Marvels is designed for this world. A black female director cannot be cancelled. A superheroine movie that doesn’t centre on whiteness and promises to share the stage with a black woman and a Muslim Asian woman.
And Marvel has prepared for failure, just like other post-pandemic, if not post-Endgame (or subjectively, post-Shang-Chi) superhero movies. Brie Larson even admitted she didn’t really enjoy the Carol Danvers role, and it’s understandable. Even if there had been not a pandemic, Carol would have remained sidelined.
Since 2019 I have waited for 2023, the setting year of Endgame. In November 2023 there were two films about blonde, beautiful, beaming women of action and I skipped them. Nobody wanted my presence in any Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour screening, not even my Aussie daughter in an alternate timeline.
When digital media critics praised The Marvels, I got worried. It’s that bad, is it? In the premiere weekend, two articles decided it all. Alex Abad-Santos praises it on Vox as an examination of the white girlboss (Carol), stanned by the Asian fangirl and side-eyed by the black protege who knew better.
Then The Straits Times reported that Korean viewers complained that Park Seo-joon’s screen time is “shorter than cooking a cup noodle”, less than 3 minutes. At least Nia DaCosta said she loves Korean drama and while the comics’ Prince Yan is an annoying character who Carol hates, here he’s a better character with a better relationship. I don’t know, seems this world still cannot accept an Asian man partnering with a European woman or something.
Or not. Kara Danvers remains single to the end of the series and dates two Asian men in the final season of Supergirl. Her stepfather, Elijah Danvers, is played by Dean Cain. And no matter how badly you want the marriage between Carol and Prince Yan to be fake, MCU’s Carol Danvers is legally married to an alien with an Asian name and look. Just my luck.
It’s simple to explain what’s happened with the rise and fall of the girlboss. White women wanted to topple white men, and instantly, black women wanted to topple white women. It happened in the 1970s and it has happened again in the last 10 years.
The bright side is still there for everyone. Larson cannot be blamed, and nor is DaCosta, the most successful black female director ever. The Marvels gained the top two spots in the worldwide box office before the Thanksgiving weekend, and interestingly it’s watched by more men than women – I’m really curious, I don’t think they are completionists or MCU hardliners. Maybe men above 25 do have a thing for Brie Larson. Eventually, I will watch it next year on Disney+.
Larson can move on, and the smart studio executives will eventually learn what the people want to see. I can stop worrying about Carol Danvers, cherishing her memory, and be happy with the fact that there are millions of Karen Danvers out there.