Girls Will Be Boys

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I used to be a big fan of the Marvel superhero movies. That fandom, an offshoot of my Spider-Man comic book reading and collecting, was a fun diversion from the routines of daily life. But, somewhere along the way, Marvel, or rather Disney, who owns Marvel, lost me.

It appears to have happened last summer, with the release of Ms Marvel and She-Hulk on the small screen. I watched the entirety of the latter, got about halfway through the former, and realized that what used to be fun had become tedious.

The tedium? A good part of it was relentless obsession with redefining what used to be called "gender roles." I was reminded of that obsession when YouTube offered me this amusing review of Peter Pan And Wendy by the always entertaining The Critical Drinker.

That review, in turn, reminded me of my ever-growing annoyance at one of Hollywood's favorite tropes of recent decades: the small and skinny girl who is trained into such an amazing fighter that she routinely beats down men twice her size. Excluding superheroes (when you have magical power, all bets are off), we've got Lucy, Hanna, Anna, Red Sparrow, the Atomic Blonde, Salt, Lara Croft, Ava, Lioness, Cataleya, Anna, Amber Midthunder, Anita, Kate, Natasha Romanoff, Alice, Jill Valentine, Lindy, and on and on. And, almost invariably, at some point they all employ the cliche "Power Thighs" trope to take down some bad guy.

Weight classes exist in many sports for a reason. A male bantamweight fighter (118 lbs or less) would be destroyed by a less skilled heavyweight (200lb+), and no one would be surprised in the slightest. Boxing, MMA, wrestling, and kickboxing sort athletes by weight, because reality. While it's fun to see choreographed fight scenes where a waif takes down a goon, the truth is that the waif would be tossed about like a rag doll in short order.

Still, as an occasional escapist fantasy, it can be fun.

But, when Every. Single. Iteration. of female action lead is based on the same fantastical cliche, the novelty becomes tedium.