Why People Hate Most Female Superheroes

Over the past few years, there’s been a mainstream shift towards female superheroes that has left fans disgruntled. There are a few reasons why most; really all (except Wonder Woman) female superheroes don’t sell. First, the market for science fiction/fantasy stories is large men and I think I can speak for most men when I say; “we don’t give a fuck strong female characters”, especially if it’s at the cost of established well received characters. That leads to the second point, the “superhero arch” is fundamentally the story of men, not the story of women. For men to succeed in this world, we must go through the long process of failing at virtually everything, then struggling to learn and master whatever our endeavor is. Women for the most part do not have to involuntarily undergo this process. This is the reason why many of the detractors of these new iterations of shows are men, not because they’re “misogynists”.

Another reason these new films are so massively unpopular is, women don’t like them either! Sure there’s a small(very small) subset of women that may like these new portrayals of heroes but most women fundamentally do not. For most women the “hero” archetype is an object of respect and/or lust and seeing as most women are heterosexual, they don’t view themselves that way nor do they want to, they do want to view their potential partners that way. Lastly, while fantasy/sci-fi content is make-believe, there are still certain aspects that push the imagination too far. For example, when a 5’4′ female “hero” is taking on multiple 6′ tall villains and kicking all their asses easily, that may not have any appeal to your largely male fan base.

Lastly, I want to reiterate that, the backlash to female superheroes is warranted. in particular, the writers do not get enough of the blame for some of their decisions. The most damning of them being the decision to denigrate legacy characters as a way to prop up their female counterparts. Normally this would work, but lately, it hasn’t been working primarily because the new characters are poorly developed and written. Peace!