There’s a big issue with all the ‘fresh’ and ‘fun’ female hero books DC is putting out lately: Agency.
Every revamp or new title of a female hero has had a very crucial part stripped out of it lately: the main character’s deliberate, specific choice to actually be a hero. Batgirl, Starfire, Black Canary–for years, all of them have been active heroes and heavy-hitters in the superhero big leagues. They’re some of its most well-known heroines and biggest draws, particularly for girls. They also have something else in common now. In addition to being demoted back to the minor leagues, all of them are being or have been re-written into females who happen to have extraordinary things happen to or around them, but who take no initiative to seek such things out. Some of their titles (Black Canary, I’m looking at you) are in fact, actively pushing their heroes not to be seen as or act like heroes.
Starfire just wants to play tourist. Black Canary joins a band to pay the bills or something. Oracle became a generic college girl who sometimes plays superhero on the side.
None of them are conscientiously making the decision to be a hero or a vigilante or having that billed as the priority in their lives. Not in their marketing campaigns and not by the characters or stories themselves. Our female heroes are being altered from characters who made things happen and actively took their lives as heroes into their own hands into characters who things happen to. They aren’t directing what happens in their own stories anymore, they’re just reacting to it. Active heroines are reduced to passive/reactive characters.
Accidental or incidental heroism stories, which is what titles like Starfire or Black Canary are really trying to push, are okay. The problem isn’t the genre itself. Slice-of-life hero titles can be fascinating and wonderfully humanizing, as titles like Hawkeye and Ms Marvel have shown. The problem is that instead of creating new characters to fill the “Accidental Hero” and “Extraordinary Girl Who Also Wants To Be Normal” tropes that are marketed trends right now, DC is (literally) dumbing down some of its best-known females with long histories of agency and choice and forcing them into those molds.
It’s critically important for us as readers and consumers to see girls and women choosing lives of deliberate heroism and being proactive in their own lives, not just having events sporadically happen to or around them. DC’s new brand of superheroine titles are taking away many of their best-known examples that women can choose to be heroes. And that’s important.
I’m tired of seeing DC sacrifice intelligent, tough, deliberate heroines on the altar of ‘fun’ and ‘fresh’ marketing campaigns. Genius, degree-ladened, team-leader, mastermind Oracle into selfie-taking college Batgirl. Intelligent alien warrior Koriand’r into airhead, idiot tourist Starfire. JLA/JSA/BOP member, ‘Martial-artist-on-par-with-Batman’ Black Canary into angst-ridden not-really-rock-star D.D. who starts bar fights and gets beaten up for not returning a guy’s call. It’s a disservice to the years of character development as heroes they’ve undergone and, even more than that, it’s a disservice to all the readers who need and deserve to have heroines and role models that chose to make something of themselves, not ones whose actions and heroism are only reactions dictated by the forces around them.
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