Trolls miss the secret to killing off Captain Marvel
The haters won’t destroy the superhero with their silly petitions but Marvel’s hairstyle tinkering could have.
Opinion
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Trolls around the world are celebrating the news that Captain Marvel 2 will be going ahead in 2022 — because it gives them another opportunity to attack actor Brie Larson.
They smashed her up before the first movie when she called for more women of colour to become film critics.
They destroyed Captain Marvel’s “want to watch” rating on internet movie critic site Rotten Tomatoes — so much so that the site changed that feature.
Then they piled into her for not smiling enough during the movie — and when she posted pictures of male Marvel stars such as Robert Downey Jr altered to have fake smiles during their movies — well, that was like a red rag to a bull.
Or, perhaps more appropriately in the case of these trolls, like a slow internet connection to a basement-dwelling porn addict.
None of this stopped Captain Marvel making a billion dollars and now work has begun on a sequel.
But the trolls were quick off the mark and this time they have got a bit creative.
As well as the usual bile, they have served up a petition calling on Disney to drop Larson from the movie and be replaced by a “gay woman of color” (the petition’s spelling, not mine). The petition also claims she doesn’t donate enough to cause-based charities and claims if she really wants to promote minorities and be an “ally of social justice”, she should stand down from the role.
The goal is 30,000 signatures and so far it’s got about 28,000.
They probably think that idea is kind of cute.
And I agree — if your idea of cute is a deformed, alien baby covered in vomit and oozing pus.
But if they wanted to be ironic, they should have gone further. Perhaps they should have demanded the next Captain Marvel be a person of mixed race — at least three obvious cultural groupings — who self-identifies their gender as “unicorn”.
Of course Disney is not going to listen to the ravings of a few thousand trolls. And, with Captain Marvel unlikely to hit cinemas until at least 2022, the trolls will probably move on to other things by then.
Bizarrely, at the same time as the woman-hating trolls were cooking up their silly petition, Marvel released a look at the alternate hairstyles they were considering for Captain Marvel in Avengers: Endgame.
Larson went from flowing locks in Captain Marvel to quite a military-looking clipped cut in Endgame. But Marvel was considering a variety of other looks, including braids and even a mullet. Thank goodness they didn’t go with the mullet. I certainly don’t think I could take Captain Marvel seriously if she was resplendent in an ocker mullet. Apart from anything else, surely it would keep getting in her eyes as she zoomed through the air?
No, for me it’s obvious. Forget Thanos and his Infinity Stones. Forget trolls and silly petitions.
If you want to kill off a character, have them appear with a mullet hairstyle.