Stop Being Gross About ‘She-Hulk’ Before the Show Even Airs

Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Disney+ series brings Jennifer Walters from the comics to the small screen, and we get to see the premiere of the Tatiana Maslany-led series on August 18. But that doesn’t seem to matter to people online, who have already decided that the show is going to suck regardless of the fact that it isn’t even out yet.

I don’t know why I have continually seen TikToks or tweets saying that She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is a clear sign of the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe when the show hasn’t been released yet, but it’s time to talk about it. Imagine you’re logging onto Twitter and you see someone writing something negative about a show and how it is taking the MCU down as a whole and then making it about She-Hulk …

Now this, again, is particularly frustrating for one reason and one reason alone: the show is not out yet.

First of all, what does Iron Man posing like that have anything to do with the tone of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole? And also is this insulting Ginger Gonzaga’s Nikki simply because she’s wearing pink in a pink poster? None of it makes any sense.

And while this is just one example, this is a common thought online right now for some reason I don’t quite understand.

Is it sexism or something else?

What this all reads to me is just sexism—that no one likes that She-Hulk seems to be written and directed by women, and it is unapologetic about it from the trailers. It’s not women co-directing with a man, it’s unapologetically feminine and fun, and we’ve not really had that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet.

We’ve had plenty of male-dominated projects and we’ve started to have women more involved in the creation of things, but this is one of the first times that an MCU property is written and directed solely by women. Kat Coiro and Anu Valia both split directing duties, while the head writer for the show is Jessica Gao. It’s exciting to see, and it’s something that actually has me waiting for She-Hulk to come out in a way that I didn’t expect.

So to constantly see people online just tearing it down for their own warped understanding of comics? It’s bad.

She-Hulk has been here

One of the other arguments that’s been going around is this idea of giving women their own heroes rather than just gender-swapping them. First off, that’s not what’s happening. All these characters are their own heroes, they just are part of a shared family of heroes. Secondly, this isn’t a new character. She-Hulk has been around since 1980.

And the idea of “gender-swapping” heroes just means that those complaining don’t actually want to see female heroes because what does a character like Batgirl, who is her own character and just simply has the name because she’s part of the Bat family, have to do to prove herself? (Batgirl is often part of this conversation online, and it is so frustrating.)

The point is: Stop being gross about something you haven’t even seen yet. It happens time and time again. It happened with Birds of Prey, with Captain Marvel, with Ms. Marvel, and now it is happening with this.

(featured image: Marvel Entertainment)