…I was thinking about the fact that somebody said they weren’t behind lesbian Carol Danvers because they saw the relationship between her and Maria as queerplatonic.
Both are actually pretty well supported by the text, esp. if you bear in mind that the movie was set in the 1990s and they were both mil types, so…late 90s and 00s kids, you don’t understand how much tighter the closet door was back then. If they were a couple and it came out, Mar-Vell might not have been able to save them from a dishonorable discharge.
Then my thoughts went to a different relationship in the movie.
The relationship between Danvers and Fury.
This was the obvious place to put the Obligatory Heterosexual Romance, and they didn’t. A decision I honestly applaud. The last thing this movie needed was an Obligatory Heterosexual Romance.
Some of the criticisms of the movie are that it “emasculated” Fury. Mostly because he does the dishes.
But it got me thinking about the character of Nicholas J. Fury as presented in the MCU. (We’re ignoring the comics here).
Up until this movie, we’ve seen Fury mostly as the ruthless, competent spymaster. He treats everyone as assets. He values people by what they bring to the table. He doesn’t care who you are or what planet you are from as long as you can do your job.
This movie was Fury’s origin as well as Captain Marvel’s. They explicitly show Carol as why he feels that way.
Except that there’s no indication he actually felt differently. All he needed was to expand his horizons. Perhaps part of it was being a black man in intelligence.
But at no time in the history of the MCU have we seen Fury look at a woman in a sexual manner. The dish washing scene was the intimate moment where the kiss would have happened in the Obligatory Heterosexual Romance. Instead, it was rendered explicitly platonic.
It is absolutely supported by the text and never contradicted: Nicholas Joseph Fury is not attracted to women.
So I mentally ran another analysis based off of the hypothesis that Nicholas Joseph Fury is, thus, gay.
And that didn’t fit either. The MCU has never been afraid to queer code (and I suspect if it wasn’t for Chinese money and censors we’d see more overt queerness). Furthermore, I don’t see Samuel L. Jackson as being at all uncomfortable with a bit of homosexual tension.
Now, it makes a good amount of sense to set the “ruthless spymaster” archetype aside from romantic entanglements.
But combined with the fact that he doesn’t look at Carol’s breasts once, this has led the text to inadvertently support a different analysis:
Tl;dr: The MCU has had an aroace character from day one. It’s Nick Fury.
And you can pry this headcanon from my dying hands, as I’m pretty sure we are never going to see him romantically involved with anyone…
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