Thread by @DrNerdLove

Alright I wanna talk for a second about one of the many (stupid) #CaptainMarvel memes that Sadboys are trying to stroke their hate-boners over.

Specifically the idea that the movie is a) man-hating in general and b) emasculates Fury in particular.

So. A thread. /1

The impetus of this is a ComicsGate adjacent site called CosmicNews or some shit. I'm not interested in sending traffic their way so you can read about it over at We Hunted The Mammoth. wehuntedthemammoth.com/2019/03/10/nic… /2

A lot of it is your basic "WE NEED TO BE ANGRY" bullshit twisting things out of all sense of how they actually happened or straight-up straw-manning into a weird Ship-of-Theseus version of the movie that only exists in their heads.

Then there're the complaints about Fury. /3

The Nick Fury in Captain Marvel isn't the scarred, war-weary bad-ass we see starting in Iron Man. Which isn't surprising because hey, this is a freaking origin story. Not just for Carol Danvers but for *Nick Fury*.

I mean, the seen-it-all-done-it-all-prepared-for-it-all superspy in The Winter Soldier is cool and all but he wasn't born like that any more than Captain America was always the confident leader he becomes by Endgame.

This is what we call "character growth". /5

We're seeing someone who hasn't been jaded by what he's seen and done, even after having been a spy during the Cold War.

But folks want to complain that the Kree scan him and say he's "no threat" and he *gasp shock choke* WASHED DISHES. /6

But honestly, if you want to talk about Nick Fury in this movie, you really need to look into the film's DNA and look at it's ancestor: Reny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Because (unsurprisingly) there're a LOT of parallels there. /7

(For the record, I'm saying these parallels are deliberate references, not weird-ass plagarism. Part of what makes CM fun is that it's shot, written and structured like a 90s film and you don't get much more 90s than Shane Black and Renny Harlin.) /7a

So in The Long Kiss Goodnight, you have Charlie: an amnesiac housewife who remembers her life when she washed up on shore.

Turns out, Charlie seems to have some bad-ass skills she never knew about.

/8

Charlie's been trying to figure out who she was, with no luck. She'd tried all the good private detectives and now she's down to the shitty ones. Specifically: Hennessy. Played by Samuel L. Jackson. /9

Thanks to a lucky break found by Hennessy's secretary, they get a clue to Charlie's real identity. So he and Charlie go on a road trip to find these missing links to her life.

Then shit, as they say, hits the fan. /10

Turns out Charlie's a former assassin for a blackbag CIA program that got broken up and she was never supposed to survive. Now she's starting to get her memory back etc. etc.

Like I said: deliberate parallels. Including the one between Hennessy and Fury. /11

Hennessy is a man who's seen some shit and done some shit. He's by no stretch of the imagination a soft guy who's gonna fold at the first sign of trouble.

But the trouble Charlie represents is WAY the fuck above his paygrade. /12

So it is with Nick Fury. He's been behind the Iron Curtain, he's been a full-bird Colonel. But up until the moment a someone took a pot-shot with a scifi gun at a crazy lady in a rubber suit, those were all TERRESTRIAL threats.

Now he's at ground zero for a space war. /13

But here's the thing: Fury is a survivor and - critically - a strategic thinker. He knows damn good and well that Carol Danvers knows more about the situation than he does and has skills and power that he can't match.

NOT letting her take point would be INSANE. /14

She represents the best, greatest hope of Earth not getting blown to fuckery by aliens that nobody believed existed two days before. Helping her means making an incredibly important ally/intel source.

Throwing his dick on the table would be opposite of helping. /15

And yet despite the fact that Fury is SO out of his element and weight class, dude comes out on top. He survives, which in and of itself is a damn miracle and testament to his skill as a soldier and covert agent.

But he doesn't just survive. He levels the fuck up. /16

By the time the THIRD technologically superior alien threat shows up (after Thor), he's assembled a strike force capable of turning back an entire goddamn alien invasion.

All because he's *already* such a bad-ass that he survived the Skrulls, Kree AND a fleurkin. /17

Yeah, the Kree scan him and the scanner declares a human male to be no threat. Diegetically, that's because Kree are arrogant dicks with superior tech, strength and endurance beyond human capacity.

Script-wise, it's dramatic irony based on what we know about his future. /18

And then hey, that zero-threat human helps curb-stomp a superior alien force and come through without a scratch.

The scratch came afterwards.

Ba dum tish. /19

But no. Fury isn't emasculated by SHIT in this movie. This entire movie shows that he's a calculating strategic genius and certified bad-ass who's able to follow a near-GOD into battle and come out on top.

That's not emasculation, that's ascending to Bad-Ass Normal. /20

So by the time Fury is playing Car-Fu with Hydra and taking on The Winter Soldier solo? That's all because of his taking multiple levels in Bad-Ass during his adventure with Carol Danvers. He was smart enough to play support when it was called for and it paid off in spades. /21

The fact that the goddamn *universe* is going to survive Thanos is directly due to the fact that Fury befriended and helped Carol Danvers when he really didn't need to.

Saying "he's emasculated" because he washed some dishes just betrays an utter lack of understanding. /22

In short: dudes had to work to miss literally everything that was laid out in the movie in order to find some material to try to edge their hate-boners over and all they can come up with is THIS weak shit. /FIN