Or, Why I Need Captain Marvel to Be Good

A few days ago, an interesting question came up in my Twitter feed: what is something you wished you liked, but don’t? After a minute of thought, I answered, “SFF books” — SFF stories, really — “with male-only protagonists. . . Whenever I read a book with no female POV, something feels off to me.”

I came to realize this when I finished Martha Wells’ The Edge of Worlds, the fourth novel in her Raksura series. Wells is a storyteller and world-builder par excellence, and I’d devoured her initial trilogy (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, and The Siren Depths) with gusto. All the books are written primarily from the perspective of the male protagonist, Moon, with only a few scattered sequences departing from it. When I read the first three, this bothered me not at all, but as I moved through the fourth one, I couldn’t escape the feeling that female characters had less to do than in the previous outings, and when, at the climax, only two female characters were active and both were villains, I decided I would not need to read this book again and put it in my sell-back pile.

What has changed between my loving The Siren Depths and my disliking The Edge of Worlds — the books, or my perceptions of them? The more I ponder the question, the more I suspect Wells’ books are not the problem. It’s me. I’m suffering from a case of Male Hero Fatigue.

This year I will turn fifty, and I’ve spent a good portion of my life consuming stories in which boys and men occupy the center of the narrative, make all the important decisions, and perform all the crucial actions. Some have had no female characters at all (e.g. The Hobbit). In others, women occupy small and/or incidental roles (The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, a big number of iconic geek-culture flicks from E.T. to The Last Starfighter to Ghostbusters to Back to the Future). Others, ranging all the way from the original Star Wars trilogy to last year’s Black Panther, have cast women as active, competent allies who get their moments to shine even though, at the end of the proverbial day, boys and men are still the saviors, the Messiahs, the Chosen Ones. In the last three decades I’ve found a better share of day-saving women, mostly in the pages of books, yet the balance of heroic leads has, throughout my lifetime, been skewed in favor of men. Perhaps if I were younger, if I hadn’t gone through my formative years in the 1980s, I wouldn’t feel this fatigue. But it’s there, and likely to lessen only as the balance is corrected. That’s why it is vital to me that Captain Marvel be good.

Yet some fans don’t want to see that balance corrected, and every move towards its correction (wait, Rogue One has a female lead? After The Force Awakens had one? Two female leads in a row? Feminists are ruining Star Wars!) upsets these fans no end. They don’t want Captain Marvel to succeed. They want the default lead for SFF and adventure stories to remain male, and my Male Hero Fatigue may be largely a reaction to their predictable, perpetual railing against change.

In the minds of these fans, more and better representations of women means less and worse representations of men. They cling to this idea despite overwhelming evidence that contradicts it. Back when they were railing at Mad Max: Fury Road, I wrote a post to show how this movie had not led and would not lead to a dearth of central roles for men in SFF and action films. Now it seems I have to do it again. Captain Marvel is but one adventure movie coming out in the first half of 2019. Let’s take a look at some of the rest.

April: Shazam!; Hellboy; Avengers: Endgame.

May: Pokemon Detective Pikachu; John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum; Aladdin.

June: The Secret Life of Pets 2; Toy Story 4; Child’s Play

And for the rest of the summer — Spider-Man: Far From Home; The Lion King; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw; Artemis Fowl; The Angry Birds Movie 2; Good Boys.

Every single title here has a male protagonist. Where will the women be? So far, the only things I know for sure are that the female lead in Hellboy is a villain and Artemis Fowl, if it’s true to its source novel, will feature a feisty heroine who gives the titular anti-hero a rough time (which he deserves).  But will there be awesome female allies to kick butt alongside Shazam? Will Avengers: Endgame and Toy Story 4 be as heavily driven by male heroes as their predecessors were? And will I be able to overcome my Male Hero Fatigue enough to enjoy them? As an MCU completist I will have to see Endgame, and I hold out some hope for Toy Story 4 despite my opinion that the third film had a perfect ending. Hellboy, John Wick 3, and Hobbs & Shaw I’ll stay away from. For the rest I’ll wait and see.

Yet as you can see, opportunities to see a woman save the world are thin on the ground. Men in Black: International will give us Tessa Thompson having fun in an action role, but she’s co-hero with a male lead. Dark Phoenix centers on a female supervillain and the men (if the franchise stays true to form) who have to stop her, so of course that doesn’t count. Up until Star Wars Episode IX appears, Captain Marvel is it. It has to be good. It just has to be.

Many rebuke this mindset. It doesn’t matter who the protagonist is, they say, as long as the movie tells a good story. A fair point, but I would take it more seriously if it didn’t so often come from the same people who complain about what they see as “too many” female protagonists. In their minds, Captain Marvel represents “radical feminism” because she occupies the sort of heroic role that has for so long been reserved for men. My good is their evil.

When the movie is finally released and the critics and wider audience have their say, we’ll see which side history will favor. In the meantime I will keep Martha Wells’ original Raksura trilogy on my shelf, waiting for the time when my Male Hero Fatigue subsides at last.