misogyny in green lantern 1990 post emerald twilight (the kyle rayner era). below the cut cause this is a lot of words. copy and pasted from discord ramblings once again, this is not the cleanest explanation but it’s something. okay?
the thing is that kyle’s comics, as much as i adore them, are misogynistic. it’s imperative to recognize this, and from multiple angles (is it on purpose? is it the writer? is it both? how do you go about recognizing and dealing with it?)
like. it is partially a writer issue partially a character issue. i think its important to understand the context and that a lot of it is at the fault of ron marz beinf a huge misogynist. HOWEVER this is not a “once or twice this hapoened” thing that can be wiped, it is an attitude that is consistent in his comics. additionally, though the narrative itself is misogynistic and expects the reader to more or less agree with kyle’s thought process on that, it still has other characters telling him he is in the wrong. to some degree, it is a written in the text character flaw, or at least written in the text for certain other characters to view it as a character flaw. and that is enough for me to believe it shouldnt be erased in entirely, though it should be acknowledged a lot of the reasoning behind it being “90s misogynistic writers”.
not to even MENTION the detriment it does to his canon dynamics and how it treats the women who are repeatedly at the brunt end of this misogyny as not mattering as much to the narrative as “keeping kyle’s slate clean” is. like you erase kyle’s misogyny entirely and it’s very clear that you don’t actually gaf about how that effects donna’s storyline and her direct qualms with him not giving her as much respect as he should. how it ties into them not being right for each other despite the importance of their relationship. how it ties into donna’s history of bad relationships and how despite kyle’s behavior he is still at least trying. it’s so hard to explain but like… tell me you don’t care about the women in his comics without telling me. they’re characters, sure, but they don’t need to just be props to be flattened bc you can’t handle your favorite male character having a flaw that, realistically, makes a TON of sense for his character. again, this isnt Weird Author Makes Character A Pedo For A Little Bit In A Sea Of Thousands Of Comics. this is CONSISTENT and called out ON PANEL in his entire initial run. like, on top of that, he’s also paired with people who don’t think that way! his various girlfriends dislike his attitude and behaviors, connor and john call him out on it, etc. it’s unreasonable to say it’s JUST because of the writing when other protagonists actively dislike his attitude towards women!
even though marz has the entite narrative be misogynistic it doesnt mean that is isnt a character issue in this case. and on top of that, even if it is fully a writer issue, it’s such a constant feature that i think erasing his misogyny nearly in entirety does more harm than good? i don’t like that he’s misogynistic, don’t get me wrong, but him being a misogynist informs the stories that happen in his comics. like i said above, what about the female character (especially donna) and their storylines that are effected by kyle’s misogyny and immaturity? what about how he slowly grows throughout the comic and these ideals are lessened to some degree? you have to take into consideration that a large chunk of his character was written by the guy who made fridging a thing, yes, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the character is also written to be misogynistic ontop of a misogynistic narrative.
ftr this is not me calling kyle a raging misogynist. i really don’t think that he needs to be portrayed as such, especially post gl1990. i do think he needs to be portrayed with acknowledgement towards his misogyny, and not just have it erased (or well. mostly erased bc comics are nearly always inherently misogynistic), i feel like having him actively unlearn it is a better solution but the comics didn’t do much of that, imo. he matured and that helped, and then it was just gone a little while later. whatever.
and i’ll reiterate. i don’t like that he’s a misogynist. i like the idea that he ends up growing out of a lot of those ideals, but like. it’s so sanitizing and flattening to ignore a huge ass character flaw that is baked into his narrative AND how he is written to be acting.