A Chasing After Wind

When I was lurking in comic book fandom—this was several years ago now—the most bashed character was not female, as often seems to be the case in the fandoms I've been involved with, but was instead Iron Man (this was shortly before his first movie, when Iron Man was unpopular from his role in the Civil War storyline, where he supported the registration of superheroes and had a secret prison in the Negative Zone that was a blatant Guantanamo Bay analogue). But here’s the weird thing, even though Iron Man was one of my favorites, bashing of him didn’t bother me much. Maybe because the worst was passed by the time I became a hard-core fan of the character? Maybe I was sympathetic towards people’s reasons for disliking the character. Maybe I’m sexist; maybe female character bashing bothers me more.

But, you see, Cable bashing bothered me a bit. Cable (son of Cyclops and Jean Grey’s clone, raised by Cyclops and Jean in the future) was another character I liked who wasn’t very popular. He was at that time in the book Cable & Deadpool, co-starring with the far more popular Deadpool (brain damaged mercenary who breaks fourth wall). People who said they only read Cable & Deadpool for Deadpool and wanted Cable gone. So maybe it’s not character bashing that bothers me. Maybe it’s *relationship* bashing. So what bothers me about Torchwood fandom is not that they bash Gwen, but that they bash her relationship with Jack. And Buffy fandom, when fans bashed Buffy *because* they like Spike, they are bashing Buffy and Spike’s relationship. The same with Yoko Ono among Beatles fans, since I am invested in both her relationship with John Lennon and her non-relationship with Paul McCartney. In complaining that Cable & Deadpool has too much Cable, they were bashing Cable and Deadpool’s relationship.

At the the time Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was first broadcast (? Is that the proper term for an internet series?) in 2008, it received a lot of criticism from fandom for sexism because how Penny was written--especially her death, a classic case of refrigeration (i.e., a female character killed to advance the storyline of a male character). But while the blatant refrigeration can't be denied, I think the story is portraying the way guys like Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer view women like Penny in a much more critical light that than its reputation (at least, its reputation as I am aware of it) would lead you to believe. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in that little story.

( Dead girlfriends under the cut )