To Brie Larson & Company: Please Stop

I love me some butch female characters.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with more traditionally feminine characters. As a matter of fact, I think our popular culture nowadays needs to get over its fear of girly-girls and wrench its representation of womanhood into more of a My Little Pony-style balance. But since I've always been a bit more masculine in outlook, I've always felt greater affinity for the tomboyish sorts. Thus, when I took up a passion for Star Trek in junior high, for example, I basically ignored Counselor Troi but fell insanely in love with Major Kira.

What I'm trying to say here is that I'm the audience for a female superhero like Captain Marvel. And yet - and yet! - I have no interest in seeing her new movie because her marketing campaign has been a trash fire of epic proportions.

First of all, there's the deeply stupid year-zero mentality. Captain Marvel, you see, is a Very Important Movie^TM because it sends the message that Girls Can Be Heroes Too^TM! Okay: I was born in 1979 - the deep, dark Stone Ages, I know - and I've been hearing this message my entire life. Ripley appeared in theaters for the first time in my natal year, and Sarah Connor was a bad-ass before I hit my teens. Then there are my best girls on the small screen - the aforementioned Kira, of course, but also Susan Ivanova and Delenn on Babylon 5, Aeryn Sun on Farscape, and etc. - who accompanied me through high school and beyond. The upshot? Female heroes have been around for forty-freakin'-years (at least); they are not Important^TM, nor are they Groundbreaking^TM. Do you want to see more of them? Fair enough, but don't pretend that your generation is the first to come up with this genius idea -- or that, if not for Captain Marvel, rough-and-tumble girls would be bereft of cultural role models.

Second, there are the numerous attempts to insult people until they fall in line on the praising. Some were skeptical of Benjamin Sisko at first, but I don't remember the showrunners of DS9 berating fans for their supposed racism and "white privilege". They simply asked the audience to trust them and then focused on building the very best leading man they could -- and as a consequence, Sisko is now universally beloved by Trekkies of all races. Why can't Ms. Larson and her compatriots follow the same playbook? Captain Marvel is a popcorn flick, but Schoolmarm Larson is making it sound like homework. (Yuck!) Instead of the sourpuss complaining about "white male misogynists" on the internet, why not show some genuine excitement for the movie itself? Tell us - while avoiding spoilers of course - why this movie will be a joy to watch, and try to do so without referencing Captain Marvel's naughty bits. As it stands now, the constant retreat to "you just hate wahmen" makes me suspect that you put scant effort into making Captain Marvel a quality superhero film -- that, like many SJW's before you, you are using identity politics to cover up your deep mediocrity.

Less than two years ago, Wonder Woman hit the theaters. Between the ticket sales - more than $800,000,000 worldwide - and the audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, I think we can safely say that it was a smash hit with moviegoers and comic book fans. So no: nobody has a problem with "wahmen." The nitpicking vis-à-vis Captain Marvel is all because of Larson's scolding, non-critical hard-left politics. If she stopped tearing down "white men" and stopped marginalizing all criticism of her activism, the backlash would instantly evaporate.