anyway the most frustrating thing about Gretchen Felker-Martin's upcoming Red Hood run is how it feels next to impossible to express potential concerns over the run without immediately having your take bandwagoned and twisted by people who are running with the most bad faith interpretation possible of every single thing she says or does and refusing to give even a shred of a benefit of the doubt to a comic that, i cannot stress this enough, *is not out yet.*
i recently posted about my tentative excitement for the run and by and large, i do stand by what i said in that post. i still think GFM's novels are great works, i still think Beast World wasn't the worst Jason comic, and i still think the concepts for the run sound interesting. but given her recent interview and some reason bluesky posts, my excitement is certainly more hedged, i won't pretend otherwise. but it's wildly frustrating to see people twist her words in the worst way possible and share out of context screenshots of the interview they clearly haven't even read. how am i supposed to expect this fandom to read her run with an open mind if they can't read an *interview* to form their own opinion? any shred of valid criticism/concern is immediately muddled by misgyony and transphobia and people doing full on acrobatics to make assumptions about GFM and her run. am i concerned she hasn't read any Red Hood comics or Huntress comics? yes. am i concerned her frame of reference for Helena seems to be that god awful Birds of Prey movie? yes. and am i concerned that she doesn't seem to understand the root of either of these characters? also yes.
but given the fact these two characters literally cannot get any worse? i don't know what you think GFM is going to do, exactly. Jason and Helena have both been at rock bottom for characterization for literal decades. and i can't help but feel male/cishet writers don't get half of this heat for their garbage takes on these characters that set them so far back in the first place. GFM's run might be great, it might be garbage, but it's likely not going to be able to return either of these characters to their "peak era" that fans worship, which atp, was nearly 20 years ago, which seems to be the only thing fans of either character want in order to be appeased and not rip GFM to shreds.
i just can't help but feel like this fandom is setting GFM up to be this generation's Devin Grayson. ie: the queer woman who is their lamb to slaughter to lay every bad writing/character choice for the next ten years onto, regardless of her control and/or involvement of the choices. with the even deeper irony being that Devin Grayson's mythical Nightwing run was *actually good*, most people just either didn't read it, or read only the notorious highlights in incredibly bad faith. it seems like GFM has no room for mediocrity here. unless her run is literally perfection, you're all going to rip her to shreds for it and jump at the bit to be transphobic/misogynistic in ways that aren't even subtle.
