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Feb. 6th, 2019 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreA few months ago, it was announced that DC was going to be putting out a 6-issue Female Furies miniseries. The quickest way to get me to read/buy any comic book is to tell me that the New Gods are going to be in it so I, of course, immediately subscribed. I got the first issue today.
For folks who don't know about the New Gods, the Furies are a group of warrior women who work for Darkseid, the big bad, under the command of Granny Goodness*. They premiered in the original run of Mister Miracle in the '70s and have since been pretty consistently depicted as a small, elite fighting force - some of the best warriors on Apokolips. So I was thinking, "Oh cool - badass evil ladies doing badass evil things! This will be awesome!"
That is...not the book I got.
What I got instead was a story about Granny and the Furies dealing with constant blatant cartoonish misogyny from everyone around them. Ranging from a devaluing of their abilities to sexual harassment/coercion to being forced to take part in an actual goddamn beauty contest. Issue #1 ends with Aurelie (a new addition to the team retconned in for this story) killing a man who has been harassing her and hiding his body, so probably the rest of the story will be fallout from that.
And, okay, fine. That's a perfectly fine story to be telling. But (and I realize that this sounds a little ridiculous considering that everyone I'm about to talk about is a literal evil god), one of the things that I have always enjoyed about New Gods in general and the gods of Apokolips in particular is that particular evil doesn't seem to show up there. Granny has always been presented as an unquestioned member of Darkseid's elite - one of his two seconds-in-command. The Furies outrank every other fighter on the planet who isn't an actual god of war. Apokolips is full of cool badass female characters whose worth and prowess has never previously been questioned.
I'm absolutely not saying Fourth World has previously been a perfect feminist setting. There are a lot of cheesecake wardrobe choices. There aren't nearly enough good-aligned female characters and those we do have tend to be idealized sweet noncombatants. There's the occasional deeply fucked up relationship between villainous characters - let's talk about the whole thing with Mortalla** some time. But this kind of pervasive in-your-face turned-up-to-11 misogyny has never previously been in evidence.
I mean, I'm going to read the rest of the mini. It has the potential to be a good and interesting story about women dealing with adversity. It's just that I love a lot of these characters and most of this feels extremely OOC.***
Plus, I am disappointed that what I was anticipating being six issues of fun escapist fantasy about badass evil ladies doing badass evil things is instead yet another depressing story about how much it sucks all the time to be a woman.
In conclusion, I'll read the rest of the mini, but it's not going to count as canon for me.
*Yes, okay, everyone's name is ridiculous. There are about three New Gods who have non-ridiculous names and none of them will be appearing in this post.
**Though, it's difficult to know how much of her fucked up backstory is actually true, considering how the end of Orion turned out.
***Look, my boy Desaad is legit the worst person imaginable but if you think that he cares at all about any woman's appearance beyond what she looks like while writhing in pain, then we have been reading wildly different comics.
For folks who don't know about the New Gods, the Furies are a group of warrior women who work for Darkseid, the big bad, under the command of Granny Goodness*. They premiered in the original run of Mister Miracle in the '70s and have since been pretty consistently depicted as a small, elite fighting force - some of the best warriors on Apokolips. So I was thinking, "Oh cool - badass evil ladies doing badass evil things! This will be awesome!"
That is...not the book I got.
What I got instead was a story about Granny and the Furies dealing with constant blatant cartoonish misogyny from everyone around them. Ranging from a devaluing of their abilities to sexual harassment/coercion to being forced to take part in an actual goddamn beauty contest. Issue #1 ends with Aurelie (a new addition to the team retconned in for this story) killing a man who has been harassing her and hiding his body, so probably the rest of the story will be fallout from that.
And, okay, fine. That's a perfectly fine story to be telling. But (and I realize that this sounds a little ridiculous considering that everyone I'm about to talk about is a literal evil god), one of the things that I have always enjoyed about New Gods in general and the gods of Apokolips in particular is that particular evil doesn't seem to show up there. Granny has always been presented as an unquestioned member of Darkseid's elite - one of his two seconds-in-command. The Furies outrank every other fighter on the planet who isn't an actual god of war. Apokolips is full of cool badass female characters whose worth and prowess has never previously been questioned.
I'm absolutely not saying Fourth World has previously been a perfect feminist setting. There are a lot of cheesecake wardrobe choices. There aren't nearly enough good-aligned female characters and those we do have tend to be idealized sweet noncombatants. There's the occasional deeply fucked up relationship between villainous characters - let's talk about the whole thing with Mortalla** some time. But this kind of pervasive in-your-face turned-up-to-11 misogyny has never previously been in evidence.
I mean, I'm going to read the rest of the mini. It has the potential to be a good and interesting story about women dealing with adversity. It's just that I love a lot of these characters and most of this feels extremely OOC.***
Plus, I am disappointed that what I was anticipating being six issues of fun escapist fantasy about badass evil ladies doing badass evil things is instead yet another depressing story about how much it sucks all the time to be a woman.
In conclusion, I'll read the rest of the mini, but it's not going to count as canon for me.
*Yes, okay, everyone's name is ridiculous. There are about three New Gods who have non-ridiculous names and none of them will be appearing in this post.
**Though, it's difficult to know how much of her fucked up backstory is actually true, considering how the end of Orion turned out.
***Look, my boy Desaad is legit the worst person imaginable but if you think that he cares at all about any woman's appearance beyond what she looks like while writhing in pain, then we have been reading wildly different comics.
