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That whole opening narration and the classic Hulk throwback.... oh I loved that.
and then the literal 4th wall break, very nice reference to Bryne's run on the comic.
This show was a lot of fun.
I think that's fair criticism.
Me I enjoyed it a lot. I kind of enjoy seeing the absurdities of a superhero world, plus these days I enjoy stuff that is a little more light hearted
Plus I'm a bit bias cause I'm cheering the hometown girl.
Jen's central thru-line, voiced by her as part of her "closing argument" was that she was having trouble reconciling the She-Hulk and Jen components of her personality through the whole show. Was she though?
Part of that reconciliation was that She-Hulk was the "popular" one and that Jen is underappreciated. Ok, well... JEN has a best friend who comes to work with her in the form of Nikki. JEN has a mom and dad, and arguably a sizable extended family, willing to love and support her unconditionally, even if sometimes her ma gets her hero name wrong.
Also, JEN wasn't unpopular. In the comics there was this dichotomy that Jen was a bookworm in college and only got to cut loose for the first time in her life as She-Hulk; in the finale, video-evidence shows Jen being very rowdy and sociable in college.
Finally, She-Hulk is physically assaulted by The Wrecking Crew as part of the villainous plot in the show, but later JEN, not She-Hulk, is accepted by The Wrecker and other supposed "villains" in a support group that, by all accounts, isn't secretly up to no good but honestly and fairly want to support her in a time of crisis.
In short, JEN has a very healthy lid on her anger, her support network is near-fully formed as the show begins, and acceptance of her never wavers by anyone in the show. Where, exactly, are we SHOWN the internal struggle that Jen herself narrates?
People perceive their lives differently than they actually are all the time, both in the real world and in fiction. Jen's view of Jen is a distorted one, and reconciling She-Hulk with Jen is about accepting the reality of what is.
dirtypool isn't wrong. But I also think if you take it as a critique of a male dominated area (comic books) and look at from a woman's perspective...she makes some very salient points.
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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In addition to loving the finale for everything that's been said, I also liked the sly nods she gave to the audience about what we really wanted when she was talking with KEVIN. "When are the X-men going to come to MCU?" The meta wall breaking within the wall breaking was awesome.
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Folks... I think maybe I'm a bad person.
Not a good way to start. See my end for more, but it sounds like you're trying to deflect criticism by insulting yourself. My guess is that isn't your intent, but for future reference, I suggest not starting an opinion statement that way.
I enjoyed all of the things this show REPRESENTED, such as feminism in action, positive representation for women in business and media, and an open embrace of intimate freedoms and such, but like, I didn't laugh. I didn't get into the actual plot or characters.
While I hope there would be some appeal for everyone, this show had a pretty specific target audience and certain themes that are going to be noticed by some more than others. I am very definitely part of that target audience. I suspect you are not. This is okay.
Jen's central thru-line, voiced by her as part of her "closing argument" was that she was having trouble reconciling the She-Hulk and Jen components of her personality through the whole show. Was she though?
Yes.
Very long answer:
From the very first episode after she gets her powers, she is clearly terrified that she will lose her ability to pursue her dreams of working as a lawyer because of becoming a hulk. She rejects, initially, Bruce's assertion that, to borrow a phrase from a famous uncle, with great power comes great responsibility. She asks for an inhibitor. Rather than accept, initially, that being a hulk could be awesome, she initially sees it as a burden because it is keeping it from her goals and her self image as "just a lawyer." First she refuses her She-Hulkness outright. Bruce kind of forces her to deal with it, but her first instinct is to suppress what is now a piece of herself. Then, indeed, her fears are realized when she protects the courtroom from Titania: becoming She-Hulk makes her lose her job at the DA's office.
Then a new problem emerges. She gets a new job--great. But now it's because of She-Hulk, rather than in spite of it. Holliway clearly wants to use her and her superhero and relative-of-an-Avenger status. He literally says he doesn't want Jen Walters, he wants She-Hulk. Her skill as a lawyer is less the factor and more that she is She-Hulk. She-Hulk starts getting more and more attention. She wants, like many straight women in her 30s, to date. Hardly anyone swipes right. Anyone who does doesn't see her. But they want to date She-Hulk? She gets a sense she as Jen is worthless and they only want She-Hulk. This is even very clearly fed back to her during the courtroom scene with the lawsuit, and she is clearly and obviously dejected throughout this storyline.
And because She-Hulk gets all this attention she doesn't and gets the job and gets the men and she likes the attention and then hates herself because she's relying on a "cheat code" to get what she had wanted and didn't get before. So she is constantly at odds with herself and this, to me, seemed apparent throughout most of the season. And the irony of course is the Intelligencia hates her for the same reason she hates herself: she doesn't feel like she "earned" her power. I could go off on a lengthy tangent about internalized misogyny but this is already going to be a long post so I'll leave it be.
I see Jen as someone who masks a lot of her insecurity and frustration with false confidence. She seemed to me extremely obviously deeply insecure--usually folks who are as cocky as she is are insecure. But maybe I see that because in my life I am somebody who is deeply, deeply, constantly anxious and self-conscious and yet many who know me personally tell me they think I come off as confident and self-assured--largely because I've practiced a lot of public speaking and have performed (sang) a lot and am extremely practiced at hiding my stage fright. I'm not, IRL, cocky in the way Jen is but I can certainly come in with a booming voice and say, "I have an opinion!" and I do this, specifically, to be sure people can't tell how f##&ing terrified I am, and I am terrifed all the damn time. I so recognize her portrayal as someone who is trained to appear confident and speak assertively (as a lawyer must be) but who on the interior is a mess.
But I have seen you and others see how confident she poses herself as and think, Oh, she's fine, she's so cocky and prideful. I see this abject terror underneath her facade. Others just see the surface. Am I projecting myself onto her? Or are you and others missing something that's there? Is the terrified on the inside-confident on the outside dichotomy particular to women? Is something else going on there?
Part of that reconciliation was that She-Hulk was the "popular" one and that Jen is underappreciated. Ok, well... JEN has a best friend who comes to work with her in the form of Nikki. JEN has a mom and dad, and arguably a sizable extended family, willing to love and support her unconditionally, even if sometimes her ma gets her hero name wrong.
It's interesting how two different viewers see the same situation so very differently. I watched the whole show feeling desperately sorry for Jen because she only had one decent friend in the entire world. Mind, Nikki is an amazing ride-or-die friend anyone would be extremely lucky to have, but she is literally the only person who is there for Jen at the beginning of the show. Only one friend? Ever? I mean, better one great friend than several crappy ones, but still. I felt so bad for her. Pug comes along later, but while I adore Pug, their friendship was less developed so it's hard to see him as more than a colleague even if he goes out on quite the limb. He just seems like the kind of guy who wants to help everyone rather than has especial loyalty to Jen.
She doesn't get the relationship with Matt until after her big turning point at the Retreat, so I'm not going to count him for how she is established at the start.
Most people are pretty awful to Jen. Like up until the Retreat episode, every other character except her dad, Bruce, Nikki, and Pug are awful to her for the most part. Her co-worker from the DA's office who's just all around awful and lies about their relationship. Holliway, who is clearly using her for the image she lends the firm and disrespects her multiple conflicts of interest and concerns about the cases handed to her. Mallory and she kind of hit it off eventually but she still says an awful lot of cutting remarks (including one in the finale, even). Titania. The media. Her Matcher dates. Her godawful friend who invites her to be her bridesmaid and then forces her to do all the cleanup and then makes her walk down the aisle with a dog. Luke Jacobson (a great costume designer, but a terrible person and exceedingly unnecessarily nasty to Jen). The Intelligencia, of course, including the man who seduces her under false pretenses to steal from her even after spending several days with her and who could have decided to walk away without hurting her.
Jen probably when she gets outwardly cocky drives away a lot of people, which is probably why she doesn't have many friends. Then people who sniff out her true insecurity (Holliway, some of her dates, Titania, the woman getting married) all manipulate that to either use her or mock her. Others might be intimidated by her intelligence and her job as a lawyer. So yeah, she doesn't have a lot of non-relatives close to her.
As for her family: yeah, her dad is awesome. Truly good to her. And yes she is lucky to have that. And that serves for some good storytelling and provides relief for other things that happen. That her dad is a decent guy helps reflect that Jen despite her flaws is also a good and decent person.
But as for the rest of her family... did you actually watch the show? Her mom is awful. In every scene she's constantly belittling Jen, identifying all the ways she is not good enough. Nearly every one of her lines that I can recall are passive aggressive verbal jabs at Jen. In one of Jen's worst points of her life, she won't even move her gym equipment out of her bedroom? Her mom is cruel. I'm pretty sure she is the source of most of Jen's insecurity. The rest of her family is awful too. Remember the first family dinner scene? When everyone's just s+%!ting on her because she lost her job? Ched repeatedly using her for money making schemes?
The only other member of her family who is good to her besides her dad is Bruce. They clearly have a decent relationship. Even there, though, Bruce doesn't seem to really see her. He lectures her about being a Hulk and she counters with her best defense, her bravado, so he fails to dig deep and see how scared she is underneath. It would have been better if he didn't approach things through a lecture style and first just asked her how she felt and asked her if she wanted help rather than shoved it at her before she was ready (and she would likely have been less likely to be so ridiculous to him in return). Mind you, Bruce is a good guy and I think ultimately they had a good relationship there, but there's a reason why she didn't listen to him the way she ideally should have, perhaps. Also, she wouldn't have rejected his help so much if she were a secure, self-assured person. Secure, self-assured people don't talk about a brand new, scary situation they're in and say, "I've got this, dude, I'm better at this than you!" Secure, self-assured people listen to advice, take what they can use, and don't throw the rest back in the other person's face.
Also, JEN wasn't unpopular. In the comics there was this dichotomy that Jen was a bookworm in college and only got to cut loose for the first time in her life as She-Hulk; in the finale, video-evidence shows Jen being very rowdy and sociable in college.
How on earth does a video of her dancing at college suggest she's popular? Or not a bookworm? Let's pause a minute:
1. We see Jen cutting loose and dancing on the show, in the wedding episode. She is not dancing in that episode because she is popular and happy. She is getting herself utterly plastered and dancing like no one's watching because she is miserable. The bride has treated her like s%%! all weekend--and Jen has just taken it, which is not what a self-assured or self-satisfied person does. No one has come in for her defense. (And the one person who is nice to her turns out to be faking it for hire.) She decides to say f~&% it and get plastered. Because she's sad.
2. Ergo, one might reasonably assume that this video is also of a time she might actually be miserable given she is behaving exactly the same way.
3. Someone recorded her and she is very clearly embarrassed of it, which suggests Jen did not consent to the recording. Someone likely made it with the explicit intent to embarrass her, which suggests unpopularity, not popularity or sociability. (Also, her mom showing this video to Nikki is a great example of how cruel her mother is. Jen is reeling from a group of people who just showed a video of revenge porn to her colleagues and family and is clearly deeply upset still--I mean, she's got a f$~!ing yarnboard of vengeance, obviously she's upset--and her mom's response? Oh look, here's another embarrassing video of Jen I can share! *shudders* Awful. Just awful.)
4. It's college. Everybody gets drunk and dances at some point in college. I'm pretty bookish and nerdy and socially anxious and was all the more so back then. I definitely was not popular. I still went to parties in college, and one or two of them I got drunk and danced at. Thankfully it was in 1996 and we didn't have Youtube back then.
Finally, She-Hulk is physically assaulted by The Wrecking Crew as part of the villainous plot in the show, but later JEN, not She-Hulk, is accepted by The Wrecker and other supposed "villains" in a support group that, by all accounts, isn't secretly up to no good but honestly and fairly want to support her in a time of crisis.
Uh... the whole damn point of the support group is to be the turning point where Jen begins to accept herself. And part of that is because they urge her to share the insecurities she has not up until that point shared, and they feed back to her the importance of being vulnerable to be able to build true strength.
So yes, they are supportive of her. When this happens, the way they treat her is a marked contrast to the way most of the people (again Dad and Nikki and Pug excepted) have treated her to that point. (Again Matt doesn't show up until after.) And the fact that she gets this good treatment is also why she is able to seek this reconciliation--and is why she is so angry in the finale that the s*&! hit the fan just as she was just getting to figure it all out.
In short, JEN has a very healthy lid on her anger,
Nah, she's just really good at repression, like most women are socialized to be, and she only in reality has so much control, as the gala scene showed.
her support network is near-fully formed as the show begins,
One paralegal and a dad do not a healthy support network make.
and acceptance of her never wavers by anyone in the show.
Most people never accepted her to begin with as herself (and many at the end still don't, actually). Holliway only wanted She-Hulk and so did the men she was dating, and Josh was a mercenary who was using her. Could we have, say, seen Nikki question her a little or something? I don't know if that would have served the story. I can see that but it seems to me like so many other people were so constantly terrible to her that it didn't seem necessary, in my personal opinion.
Where, exactly, are we SHOWN the internal struggle that Jen herself narrates?
All the times she's complaining to Nikki "I just want to be a normal lawyer? The time she's looking so defeated in the courtroom having to defend her name by hearing her dates say terrible things about her in the courtroom?" I mean, I could go back and rewatch and try to get you several timestamps since... yeah... I'm kind of starting to think you just didn't watch this show at all. Or at least have a wildly different sense of what someone struggling looks like than I do.
One might argue that being used, filmed and exposed by Josh and The Hulkking may be the evidence of that struggle. I'd point out that in the closing minutes of the show it appears that Jen, by virtue of using her She-Hulk abilities and a Bryne-sian 4th wall break, has deflected any real danger from these threats and they're played for laughs. We as the audience are directed to point our fingers and mock the Intelligencia folks, and rightfully so, but this act drafts US, the audience, into the massive support network for Jen, reinforcing the fact that she was never, really struggling with an actual issue.
Actually, the idea that the audience through the fourth wall is part of the network Jen feels she lacks is kind of brilliant. Probably unsurprisingly, I disagree with the rest.
Otherwise, the final 4th wall break in the finale is basically an allegory for her finally accepting her power for what it is--she has accepted she is a Hulk and can incorporate that into her life and use her power to get what she needs and take control of her life, when she originally thought becoming a Hulk meant she lost control (As in losing control of her career, her sense of self, etc.). It's her moment of victory that she could not have attained prior.
Jen very clearly loves, respects and honors herself before she gets She-Hulk powers.
Oh. So you really do think people who act that cocky feel that way inside. They don't.
Truly confident people are pretty quiet about it, and are much better listeners.
I read a lot of things about that character but, until the ending, "person who clearly loves herself" is definitely not one of them.
Also someone who clearly loves, respects, and honors themselves does not drink as much as she does.
Jen continues to do so through her own actions after getting the powers.
If she loved, honored, and respected herself she never would have agreed to be that b+$~&'s bridesmaid. I mean I could provide plenty of other examples but that's the most obvious and brief example I can come up with. Really while I saw Jen struggling through the whole show, I'd cite the wedding episode as the best one to show how badly other people treat her and how miserable she is.
At every turn her adversaries are either revealed to be bloviating fools or an actual joke.
Fools, yes. And yet most of them are immensely powerful in society through wealth and standing. Scott gets to keep his job at the DA's office while Jen gets fired. Todd is independently wealthy and runs a website through shellcompanies and owns or funds a secret laboratory, and even though he has idiotic ideas, he can find a horde of people to support him in his idiotic ideas which makes him immensely powerful (which is why, as Jen argues, he did not need that to be manifested in physical superpowers). Leapfrog comes from a wealthy family and will no doubt get off light despite literally kidnapping someone. Titania is a wealthy entrepreneur and influencer and can get away with destroying a courtroom wall by pleaing low blood sugar.
And moreover, Jen is often helpless at many points against these powerful people. Yes, she gets her victories eventually--she is the heroine after all, and this is a comedy, not a tragedy.
But the complaint of the show is, ironically, indeed Todd's purported complant: that people who DON'T deserve power have it anyway. But those people aren't people like Jen. They are the wealthy and, excluding Titania, specifically wealthy men (and Titania is powerful because she works with creating an artifice of feminine beauty defined by male standards). It's not fair that extremely wealthy, bloviating idiots rule the world. But, in fact, in the real world as well as in the MCU they do, and we are often powerless against them. (If only in this world we could get big and green and angry about it... but it's probably better that we can't. Probably.)
The only times the character is brought low, after the video invading her privacy is shown at the reception or the subsequent life changes after that video dropped, her self-image never wavers. "is this what YOU want?" she asks the audience, or K.E.V.I.N., pushing that narrative off of herself. In the end, she's emotionally fine b/c the people who genuinely cared about her before still care about her; professionally she's fine b/c She-Hulk is seen going back into court in the final shots of the show;
In the end she is fine, yes, because it's the ENDING and she finished her journey, and again, it's a comedy, it isn't going to end with her throwing herself off a building while wearing her inhibitor.
She's brought low constantly throughout the series, from the first job loss through the wedding to the horrific revenge porn (and let's not gloss over the fact that she was sexually used and abused and then had numerous privacy violations on top of that) and was deeply unhappy and feeling awful. I'm not sure where you are getting that her self image never wavers? Like... I just... she's faceplanting into tables and having deeply unhappy facial expressions and talking about how she's struggling. I just have no clue what you're (not) seeing there. At all. Did it need to be less subtle? Did you need her to look at the camera and say, "My self image is wavering, Mark."?
financially she's fine b/c she's able to move right in w/her parents and get support that way.
Uh. Having to move back in with your parents in your mid-30s in our (American) society is not "financially fine." She's not living on the streets, and yes, she's lucky to be a white working woman probably with some savings so she's not going to end up on the street, but it definitely not what I would call "fine." Like, she isn't living in a low-income country as a prostitute, so like, I guess she's "fine" from that POV, but if I, in my life with my education and my expectations of life, had lost my job at her age and had to move back in with my family I probably... well, let's not go there, we're talking about a superhero sitcom, I don't want to get that dark.
I walked away just feeling confused, like I'd missed the joke. But then it hit me: I identify as a man, benefitting from the very culture being put on trial in this show. Maybe I'M the problem.
So like I said, maybe I'm a bad person. I thought it was clever, and did a lot to subvert tropes and shine a light on cultural and systemic issues, but I don't think I really GOT this show in total.
So. First: yeah, again, you're likely not in the primary target audience of this show. And maybe, as a dude, you're used to being the primary target audience so it's disconcerting when the people on the screen aren't talking to you--and they ARE talking to someone else who isn't you. I get that. You feel left out, and may not realize that's how everybody else has been feeling all along, and you're just happening to join the rest of the human race for the first time. That's not a good or a bad person thing, it's having to learn to see through a lens you're not used to seeing through and that takes time and practice. If you're willing to take the time to try and do your best that's all that matters.
Secondly: Do you beat or molest people? Do you go on the internet and tell children to kill themselves? Do you steal? Did you take the last donut in the break room when you already had one and I didn't get one yet? Do you actively, knowingly, do things that exploit and hurt people because you profit from it and you don't care about the pain you cause so long as you come out on top? Then you're probably a bad person.
If not, then drop the "bad person" s%+% because it's not true, and you know it's not true, and it sounds like fishing for compliments, and you risk falling down the slippery slope of "if I call myself a bad person then I don't have to improve," and don't do that to yourself, man. You're better than that.
As for not getting it: my takeaway reading your critique isn't that you've got some Big Bad Man-Blinders on. It's just that you appear to struggle to interpret the feelings of at least one fictional character and are reading that character on an incredibly superficial level. The character performs confidence and you see genuine self-pride while I see someone hiding behind a mask (that is sometimes 7 feet tall and green). Maybe, maybe you're not good at reading people in general (I can't say, I've never encountered you in real life). Or maybe you struggle to interpret dramatization of certain characteristics in general in fiction, or maybe the acting style in particular of Tatiana Maslany doesn't get through to you. As an editor, lit major, and trained mediator, I've had to learn how to read both people and texts with a lot of depth; it takes time, study, and practice. And ironically, the more you study either reading people or reading texts, the more you realize you can never be 100% certain in your interpretations of things, and even that conflicting theories and interpretations can both be true. And yet it also lends reasonable confidence in being able to see beneath the surface most of the time. If you do feel like you struggle seeing past the surface of people, I recommend a course in active listening. And if I've completely misread you, I apologize.
We are all human and we are all hot messes. Moreover many of us live with hidden or not so hidden power, such as possibly benefiting from systemic racism or systemic misogyny or systemic classism amongst other things, and we are shaped by having that power often without realizing it, at least at first. Whether due to these systemic hurts or other reasons, we will at some point be doomed to hurt someone, and sometimes we do it unintentionally and sometimes we do it intentionally because we ourselves are hurting. That's unavoidable. What matters is showing remorse for when that happens, holding oneself accountable, and trying to be better, and being kind (not permissive) to yourself when you f%@+ up because f#@&ing up is also unavoidable.
And that's what Jen Walters learned in her story. You think you have your life figured out, then life throws you a massive curveball. Suddenly everything's in question. You know the world sees you as this mighty, powerful being--which is kind of awesome--but you're terrified they'll find out how scared and lonely you are, really, and then all the awesome is over. And then you realize all you need to do is actually say to someone, someone who is being kind to you, how scared and angry and self-doubting you are to realize that you're actually okay. That you're going to be okay. And that terrible things happen and you will survive them. People will still do terrible things to you, and you'll do terrible things back... but if you back down when you know you're wrong, own up, and find another way forward, you can smash through the walls that hold you back and become bigger and better than you were before.
I also want to add a very late addendum, Mark, that your interpretation can be as valid as mine. I do see a disconnect--a large one--between how I see the character and how you do so all of the above is simply my saying what I see in the character by comparison, and I tried to back up what I saw with examples where feasible. I know this show isn't going to appeal to everyone and am clarifying why I find it appealing.
All I know is I think if it's down to me and DQ in a zombie apocalypse, I'm gonna do my best to go out first.
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All I know is I think if it's down to me and DQ in a zombie apocalypse, I'm gonna do my best to go out first.
Lol! Idk I think we established in that setting I'd just die from being slow moving. You'd just have to run faster.
Otherwise I'd hope we could cooperate. We might entertain ourselves passionately disagreeing about the tv shows we remember but hey, I can recognize many edible plants so I'm not completely useless. ;)
And indeed, I like arguing various things about pop culture... The hard part is just finding folks who will engage without getting too personal. And being happy to celebrate and agree as well as agree to disagree.
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DQ, as always, I'm really glad to have your feedback. Honestly, re-reading my own critique with your words in mind, I probably was using self-deprecating humor to deflect a bit. The fact is, I kind of thought I wasn't the target audience but I kept trying to see deeper in this show than I did and when I didn't connect with it I was embarrassed.
More than embarrassment though, I felt shame. I'll just say that in my personal life I've always tried to be supportive of women but I've made several misogynistic comments in my life and one in particular lives with me to this day.
No, I don't go out of my way to hurt people, exploit people and so forth, but I have to live with my default being unenlightened. I'm trying to unlearn that, make strides to change my default. I'm realizing I probably have more work to do than I thought,
There is a difference from seeing things through a privileged lens and actively being hateful. I don't want to dive deep into potentially political subjects on this board, but trying to draw a personal example: I am white. Systemic white supremacy has influenced and shaped the way I see things, and I have said and done things that reflect my whiteness, sometimes at the expense of a person of color, even if I didn't realize it. It doesn't mean I hate people of color--I don't, and have always been indeed drawn toward doing whatever small thing I can to build a more equitable society--but I know I have both benefited from the power I have as a white person and sometimes hurt persons of color, if unknowingly, in the process. I can't help my race or how I grew up. I can become aware of the systems that influence the way I think and do my painstaking best to unravel that influence from my being, which takes a lot of time and self-examination. In other words, like you, I am in a process of working to enlighten myself and shift the views of doing that.
Letting go of shame is critical in this process--especially as in fact a lot of that shame is tied into an expectation of perfectionism that comes straight from patriarchal white colonizer culture. A lot of time we can use shame to shield us from doing deeper work--"I feel bad so otherwise it's okay for me to have power." It's important to work past that. And of course it is not fruitful to feel bad for feeling bad either. ;) Instead, note that your shame is telling you something--that you're tying the way you see things based on your lived experiences into your perception of this thing and know there's a disconnect--and take it as an invitation to dig deeper, which in turn should make it easier to let go of the actual shame. :)
In other words, you come from a society that tells you as a man (and I think you are a white man, but forgive me if I am incorrect) that because you are of the "ruling demographic," you must always be right, you must always be a paragon. And so any time you sense that is not the case, you feel ashamed you are not fulfilling the role of rightness that you are pressured to serve--because society has told you to be that way. Recognize that your socialization is giving you unhelpful messages and pay attention instead to how you can work on unhearing those messages.
Now all this said: speaking as a woman who has studied feminist issues in depth, academically, religiously, vocationally, and avocationally: your words do not strike me as misogynistic. (And I've seen oh so very many misogynistic words on the boards over the years.) This is to say: I have no sense you have conscious or subconscious male chauvinist views, and no sense that you hate or wish to subjugate or objectify women.
Do I think you have some blinders based on your lived experiences? Yeah. I do too (but probably not about She-Hulk in particular). That's okay. You seem to me like someone who wants to live and learn, and that's all that matters. Really. (I also have blinders based on gender! Including internalized misogyny that society has embedded into my thinking.)
As to the thru-lines from this show DQ you're right: I only looked at the surface of Jen's cockiness as her having confidence rather than seeing the insecurity underneath. I didn't recognize the character UNDER the character shown onscreen.
I'm not going to rehash point by point above DQ. Bottom line, I've got my own lens I need to de-center from. Even with some of your feedback, I might still agree to disagree on a couple here and there, but in the end I appreciate your words and see where I missed A LOT of this show. For example, while the dismissiveness and "only She-Hulk" practice of Holloway is an obvious conflict and social commentary I picked up on, but it didn't actually register in my brain that this bothered Jen b/c, again, I wasn't seeing the character UNDER the character.
Phew, I have work to do. I apologize if any of the critique above was insensitive or misogynistic. I feel like I should go back and re-watch this show with a fresh look. Text on a forum doesn't do a good job of conveying stuff but I genuinely appreciate you taking the time with your insightful responses DQ! Thanks as always!
You and me both (on having work to do). :) And again I didn't see anything hurtful. My response would have been quite different if I did.
Well, cool. :) Maybe if you're inspired to do a rewatch you'll see some stuff you missed. I do hope to rebinge it and I will probably pick up on stuff as well. (And yeah, I don't expect you to necessarily agree on all my points, but I do think the "Jen is not as confident as she appears" thesis is worth exploring.)
I think I could actually write like a 20 page essay about the feminism in She-Hulk. I don't expect folks not of my background to pick up on some of the things I see there. But others may also pick up on things I don't. I appreciate folks being willing to throw an opinion out there and go back and forth; it's just a shame so often on the Internet folks have to turn it into a "I must convince you I am right and you are stupid" contest. You provide real discourse and I appreciate that. :)