“Marvel has to make a decision: either include romances that get proper development or eschew romantic subplots altogether. The former choice would be preferable, at least in my book. When done right, romantic storylines are a good excuse (though not the only one) for the kind of complex interpersonal drama that all too often gets de-prioritized in major action blockbusters with so many other concerns.
Either way, the MCU needs to figure out a way to include more, better-developed female characters. It’s kind of an ongoing joke that Marvel doesn’t know how to treat female fans. It’s not all that funny because, unfortunately, it’s mostly true. (Pro tip: We like good writing, solid characterization, and well-choreographed fight scenes — just like the man-people do.) We also just want to see ourselves reflected on screen through a diverse representation of female characters (as in: roughly half of the cast — you know, just like in real life) who actually get to do stuff. And not just romance stuff (though some romance stuff, too, please).
Personally, I find Natasha Romanov’s character arc in The Winter Soldier much more interesting and better articulated than her character arc in Age of Ultron, which is largely shoehorned into a romance with Bruce Banner. The former is a great example of what male-female friendship can look like, and a story arc that laid a solid foundation for Steve and Natasha’s relationship in Civil War — a character dynamic that was about a million times more interesting than the apparently romantic one between Steve and Sharon.
This isn’t because non-romantic plotlines are inherently more interesting, complex, or valuable than romantic ones. It’s because, all too often, when female characters are given a romantic purpose within a narrative, that romantic identity is all they get to be. This is not only lazy characterization and storytelling, but a dangerous idea to continually reinforce for the girls, boys, men, and women watching these mainstream stories. It’s the kind of cultural pattern that leads to men thinking that a woman’s purpose in real life is to serve their needs and desires. It’s the kind of cultural pattern that makes girls and women think that, too.
Marvel should start with hiring more female writers. There’s a correlation between the lack of female heroines and underdeveloped female characters in MCU and the fact that, of the 21 writers who have been credited with penning the 13 MCU films so far, only one of them has been a woman: Nicole Perlman, the co-scriptwriter of Guardians of the Galaxy. (For five glorious minutes, I thought the number of female scriptwriters in the MCU might be two, before I realized that Ashley Edward Miller, aka a co-scriptwriter of Thor, is, in fact a man.)
The first film that will have an exclusively female writing team is 2019’s Captain Marvel — aka the first MCU film that will have a female lead (because women can only write for female characters). The MCU’s romance problem isn’t unrelated to its female character problem. When your best developed characters are almost exclusively men, and you insist on staying within heteronormative lines, then your romances are probably going to lack depth.
There seems to be a common idea in the Hollywood dream factory board rooms, like the ones where MCU film plots are pieced together from cut up comic books and the not-tears of fragile masculinity, that women only want to watch movies that have romance in them. The way I break this down is two-fold: It’s not that we enjoy the romantic genre above all others (though some of us do, as do some men). It’s that we are socialized to understand the world through the interpersonal relationships we are expected to nurture, understand, and prioritize in our own lives.
As a culture, women are often tasked with doing a significant majority of the emotional labor communities, families, and even workplaces rely on. To women (and men) who are socialized to do this emotional labor, stories that explore the complex, all-important web of interpersonal relationships are fascinating. They reflect the world as we have been socialized to see it. They are cathartic and representative in a way that stories should be. When a story is devoid of nuanced interpersonal drama, I am personally less interested in it as a viewer — and I think that many women (and men socialized to value the interpersonal) feel the same way.
This desire to see more stories that prioritize interpersonal themes and drama often gets conflated into romance by male creators who either don’t understand or don’t prioritize the nuance and richness of this kind of storytelling. There are so many different ways to explore the world of the interpersonal. Romance is one of them, but it is just a small sliver of the larger storytelling possibilities. The sooner mainstream storytellers understand this, the better for everyone.”
— Ranking the Romances of the MCU (via Den of Geek)
