Reasons why you should drop your misogynistic hate of MCU’s Karen Page
Text courtesy of kissmywonderwoman.com
Karen Page (as played by Deborah Ann Woll) is really scary as a character in all the best possible ways. She is also the driving force behind season one of Daredevil, far beyond Matt or Foggy or even Wilson Fisk. Karen Page is the person calling the shots, it’s her crusade that the season hinges on, and it’s her character development that we most closely follow. Karen Page is the actual main character of Daredevil, and it’s freaking phenomenal.
Karen very effectively blow the whistle on Union Allied and then eventually finds her way to working as a secretary for Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law, but her story doesn’t stop here. With your average female character in this position, once she was introduced that would be it. Over and done with. But not with Karen.
Instead, Karen starts investigating her old company and the corporation that owns it. She digs deeper and deeper. She gets Matt and Foggy invested in cases they’ve never heard of because she thinks it might be related. She hides things. She lies. She suffers from a pretty horrible case of PTSD that she tries to keep a lid on around her bosses. She fusses over the boys and cares for them when they’re hurt and does secretary stuff, but that is by no means the sum total of her contribution to the story.
Karen digs so hard and so deep that she gets herself put on lists. She bands up with Ben Urich, star investigative reporter, to write the story of the century. She does corporate espionage. While Foggy and Matt are sorting out their emotional problems and Matt is off being frustrated at things as Daredevil, Karen is the only one driving the plot forward.
There is no takedown of Wilson Fisk without Karen. If Karen were just a nice normal girl who looked the other way more often, then Matt Murdock would probably be dead and Hell’s Kitchen would be razed to the ground. She is the actual hero of the show, and I’m sick and tired of people saying she’s there to just be eye candy.
Her crowning moment of badass (and terrifying) ends up being the only real reason that Matt is able to get one up on Fisk at all. After she manages to track down Fisk’s mother, visit her in a retirement home, and subtly interrogate her, Fisk’s righthand man, Wesley, comes to find her. He wants to know what she knows. He wants her to suffer.
In general, it’s a pretty by the books scene. Wesley is threatening, Karen is close to tears, etc. But it gets downright shocking when Wesley puts a gun on the table, and instead of backing down and tearfully admitting she can’t shoot anyone like the script demands of her, Karen picks up the damn gun and fires six shots into Wesley’s chest.
She’s even more scary because in that moment she implies that she’d shot someone before, and then she seems really comfortable covering the crime up. Not only that but as the season progresses, Karen doesn’t actually tell anyone what she did. No one knows. Karen is the sweet, pretty, blonde secretary with an apparent penchant for murder and designer dresses. She’s so nosy she nearly gets herself killed, but it’s not presented as “oh there goes that plucky secretary again”, it’s shown to be more like “Karen is going to single-handedly destroy a criminal empire using paperwork.”
But if I have to name the number one reason why Karen is kind of the best thing ever, it’s this: she cries. Like, she does all these things, she kills someone and she delivers devastating exposes and she is super competent sometimes, but she also cries. She cries and she has panic attacks in the night and she doesn’t let it be a source of weakness. She doesn’t call her fear or her sadness weak. She calls it what it is, and that is necessary.
It’s really sort of funny when I get down to it. Because the reasons I like Karen Page on Daredevil could just as easily be the reasons I hate her in something else. The deciding factor appears, in all honesty, to simply be the acting and the writing. Nothing else. Her character is entirely execution based.
On any other show, with any lesser writing, I would loathe her for being an encapsulation of all the traits that writers use to make women out as inferior. But I can’t hate Karen Page. She’s amazing. She’s amazing because the writers and Deborah Ann Woll took those characteristics, those seemingly sexist storylines, and forged them into a person. Karen Page isn’t just a strong female character, she’s a strong woman. She feels real. That’s why I love her. Because real women are allowed to be complex and contradictory and not all neat and tidy. And so is she.
