Do you see this lady right here? She’s M’gann M’orzz: budding superhero, secret nerd, and teenage girl. She’s perky, exciteable and personable, a little bit forgetful and sometimes distractable, but she’s also very, very intelligent, observant and quick-witted. She’s kind, she’s empathic, and she’ll go out of her way to soothe others, but she isn’t a pushover: she’ll fight if she needs to, and any setbacks she suffers, she overcomes.
UNSURPRISINGLY people are already ragging on her. Because she’s, what, feminine? Because she just might be crushing on Superboy? Because she isn’t the stereotypical “Badass” “Strong Woman”? (lolololol, it’s because she’s a ~girl,~ full up.) Ordinarily I would take the time to deconstruct in excruciating and boring detail why these are all ridiculous and terrible reasons to heap hatred upon a lady character, but right now I just do not have the energy to engage.
I love M’gann. I love that she forgets the cookies she’s baking until they’re burnt all the way through. I love that she’s trying her hardest to master her powers. I love that she’s clever and brave, that she’s kind and that she’s clearly a total fangirl. I love that she messes with the guys just ‘cause. I love that she ~likes~ Superboy (and fuck the haters: GET HIM, GIRL), and as a sidenote, what the fuck ever fandom, I friggin’ love dorky teen romances and I am hella excited for M’gann being like :> :> :> at him constantly and Superboy going, “What is this strange thing I am feeling.”
Whatever, fandom. I ain’t letting you harsh my buzz.
(.gif credit to @ayries!)
I’m not “hating on Miss Martian”. I’m upset that the creators of the show chose to showcase their first female character in an episode that was basically 20 minutes of the other characters constantly putting her down and treating her like garbage. I’m upset that they portrayed femininity as a bad a thing and proof that she wan’t good enough. I’m upset that her main focus and apparent the only reason she’s in this show is to get hit on and stare dreamily at Superboy while he shouts at her. I’m upset that someone told me her character arc in this episode was to “gain confidence in herself”. SHE WAS PERFECTLY CONFIDENT IN THE BEGINNING UNTIL THEY STARTED BELITTLING HER! That isn’t a character arc, that’s coming back from the damage that was done to her.
Except that when the entire point of them doing so was to show that when she defied what they tried to tell her to do, she saved the day, the show says that those characters were WRONG. I’m sorry, but portraying a female character being belittled is not the same, at all, as the show ITSELF belittling a female character. Presenting a female character with conflict and adversity to overcome is not ‘beating her down’, it’s showing her get shit done despite her hypocritical teammates. The episode wasn’t perfect, but it was far from uniformly terrible.
Feminism does not mean showing a perfect, sexism-free world where female characters never experience less than perfection, it means showing female characters competently overcome such things.
Also, to say she is just there to be gawked at is to ignore the presence she had in the fight scenes, the fact she created the plan to beat the villain, etc. and that’s just ridiculous.
ETA: In fact, know what, I thought up a good metaphor for this I think gets what I mean across better.
Say you have a gay character on your show. The gay character has a teammate who is insensitive about their orientation. The show has the gay character stand up to said homophobe, and in return, the show rewards the gay character; their teammates respect the way they stood up for themselves, and denied the homophobic character’s judgement.
The show depicted a homophobic character, so it must be homophobic, right? Uh, no. Because the one who came out best in that scenario is the person who turned the homophobe down. Which means that the viewpoint being treated with the most respect… is the one that denies the homophobia.
Same goes for sexism. Refusing to show sexism is in and of itself possibly sexist, because we don’t live in a nice fantasy world where it doesn’t exist, and to pretend we do lends credence to the claim that sexism doesn’t exist. Depicting sexism, and then having the character who defies it be rewarded, a) shows people it IS a problem and b) forces the audience to come away thinking, not ‘the boys were so right to tell her not to join in!’, but ‘she was so right to disagree with them, if she hadn’t they’d be screwed!’. Which forces the audience to come away disagreeing with the boys and feeling the way she was treated is wrong.