TheQuartering [8/18/2022]
Disney+’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law now joins a long lineup of beloved Marvel properties to get attacked by “fans”—meaning that the series was review-bombed on IMDb before it even premiered. Why? Because I guess the people who did so want to waste their life away doing something useless. Why spend your time being a decent human being when you can, instead, spend it review-bombing something you haven’t seen yet?
According to The Direct, the series went from relatively positive reviews from critics to having over 40% 1-star reviews, mostly from men over the age of 30, prior to the show’s release. So unless a whole lot of critics who happen to be men in their 30s suddenly got screeners and watched the series and hated it, it seems as if the show was review-bombed by men whose age doesn’t match their maturity level.
Review bombing isn’t a new thing for Marvel. It happened with Captain Marvel because she’s a woman, with Eternals because it had a diverse cast and a homosexual couple in it, and it happened with Ms. Marvel because Kamala Khan isn’t a Christian white man. It is, at this point, predictable.
The thing is, this is just so those who want to hate something can point to it and say, “See? Fans don’t like it. It’s just the critics who do,” as a knock at critics despite the fact that this was done prior to the show even premiering, so it can hardly be based on the actual quality of the show. The point of review bombing is to make it seem like people do not want these stories when the opposite is true, and the demographic information proving that it was men in their 30s who are fixated on hating this show is honestly kind of hilarious.
The conversations around these new Marvel properties that center the conversation on “But how am I supposed to relate?” truly have my eyebrows rising. For years, women and people of color were forced to look to the white male squad of the Avengers (with a little dash of Natasha Romanoff and James Rhodes here and there) to find a “relatable” character. It is frankly why I think so many of us turn to these white male characters, because we didn’t have a choice.
Now that we’re entering a new era, we’re finding things to relate to in our media in a new and refreshing way. I loved watching Ms. Marvel because she was a nerdy girl who got to be a hero. I love what I’ve seen of She-Hulk because I understand the struggle of a single girl in her 30s. I now understand how all these men felt for years watching these superhero properties, because they always had something to turn to and relate to, and now that it is shifting, some are determined to go back to the way things used to be because they can’t conceive of relating to anyone else.