The controversial declaration of the director of Superman James Gunn on women is completely correct
By Chris Snellgrove | Published
James Gunn was never afraid to express his opinion. In 2018, this did it via Disney after some of its former offensive tweets have become viral. As a new architect of the DCU, they do not crush as many feathers as in the past, but he recently made a controversial declaration on Peacemaker: the official podcast with James Gunn.
Gunn thinks that strong female characters are better when they have major faults. He considers this to be the best way to give the personality of these characters and avoid the bland archetype “Bad ** s”. While some have found it controversial, Gunn’s hot socket is completely correct.
The context of Gunn’s claim is that Jennifer Holland, who plays Harcourt Peacemakersaid: “As a woman, you cannot always play very three -dimensional and complicated characters.” Continuing, she said: “Either the women are really nasty and terrible, or they are really nice, soft and charming.” She put an end to her thought by praising Gunn, telling him that “you add a lot of dimension to your characters”.
James Gunn responded to Holland’s comments, noting that when he started making films, “mostly the female characters were perfect for the most.” This led to the “Bad * ss” cliché that it became that these characters “had no personalities” in the way in which male counterparts like Star-Lord and Deadpool do. Gunn estimated that the addition of defects would create more complex characters and was, from a creative point of view, “the coolest thing you can do.”
Naturally, some fans opposed Gunn’s comments because they considered his words as an attack on women, as if he were saying that the best thing that a writer could do to a strong female character was to make her lower. However, the Guru Dcu simply points out that the public finds more interesting characters when they have faults to overcome. Otherwise, you end up with a very static and very boring character who never has the opportunity to grow.
Gunn followed his own advice with regard to his male characters: Star-Lord has many heroic moments, but these moments feel special because most of the time, it is a stupid narcissistic loser that passes through life on nothing other than charm and luck. Peacemaker, too, is someone who wants and able to save the world, but he is stupid, arrogant, and his best friend is a murderous vigilante. This is also why Harcourt is such a popular character: thanks to her faults, she mixes with male characters PeacemakerAll of goods damaged in one way or another.
Anyone who lived the 80s and 90s knows what James Gunn refers to films with perfect (and perfectly bland) female characters. In the original Kombat Mortel The film, for example, the favorite character of Sonya fans is reduced to an archetype of hard girl without flavor; In the original films of Tomb Raider, the complex character of Lara Croft is transformed into a generic action girl. And both the original and the most recent Red sonja The films adapt a complex comic book character in a kind of bland madness Conan without any of the funny lines.
The most loved female action heroes all have defects that bring out their personality: Sarah Connor goes from her chance to be thrown into a mental asylum, which transformed it into a much more rewarding action hero. Ellen Ripley is initially presented as a traumatized and unstable woman with a wacky story on an extraterrestrial, which is why it is so great to see her spatial marine show to speak hard how to fight the xenomorphs. On television, Buffy Summers’ abilities to kill the living dead are offset by difficulties with school and relationships, which makes each heroic moment shine.
James Gunn is right that the faults do not make a female character less brilliant; Instead, they make it more human and, therefore, more relatable. When you consider the number of faults he adds to his male characters, it is clear that Gunn has adopted a really egalitarian approach to put imperfect people on the screen. This ultimately makes them much more pleasant to look at, and this approach could very well be what separates the DCU from the failing MCU, whose summer blockbusters fell flat while Gunn Superman Climbed.
