Poll of the Day > What's the hatred for Gwen Pool about?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've seen a lot of hate for Gwen Pool, Squirrel Girl, and a few other female comic book heroes, but I don't get it.
I got one of the graphic novels for Gwen Pool, and it seems fine. I'm actually liking it a lot. Haven't given Squirrel Girl or any of the other ones a try, so maybe they do suck, but Gwen Pool seems pretty good.
---

I think it has to do with manchilds hating women taking over their media.

Gwen pool seems intresting. I wouldnt mind seeing her get added to the MCU.
---

quigonzel posted...

Dunno, a couple years ago I was trying to figure out why people were raving about Spider-Gwen so I picked up a copy of issue number 1 and thought it was a load of shit in terms of both art and story.

Best costume
---

quigonzel posted...

jedirood posted...

quigonzel posted...

Dunno, a couple years ago I was trying to figure out why people were raving about Spider-Gwen so I picked up a copy of issue number 1 and thought it was a load of shit in terms of both art and story.

Best costume

I'll admit the costume is pretty nice.

It is, hands down, my favorite. Like, all of the alternate Spider-Men look great, but she is... It's just perfect in every way.

Miles has great colors, and a unique pattern. 2099 has his own theme going on. Noir fits perfectly in his time. Homecoming is just a variation of classic.
---

People hate them? I thought those were popular characters
---

Mead posted...

People hate them? I thought those were popular characters

REAL comic book fans hate them
---

Squirrel Girl Rocks!!!

I miss Marvel Heroes sigh...I had so many heroes I owned but had not played yet. So not fair they just canceled it poof and didn't even warn me, give me time to play the rest of my characters I had already bought *sigh*.

SG was pretty sweet though and totally funny. Way better then JJ or LC in my opinion.
---

One of the recent Squirrel Girl books had objectively awful art.
---

Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Mead posted...

People hate them? I thought those were popular characters

REAL comic book fans hate them

No, sexist idiots hate them.
---

Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Mead posted...

People hate them? I thought those were popular characters

REAL comic book fans hate them

r/gatekeeping
---

Ogurisama posted...

I think it has to do with manchilds hating women taking over their media.

I feel like this is rapidly becoming the new Godwin's Law of the Internet. Straight up dismissing every criticism of a female character as sexist or any criticism involving a "PoC" as solely being racism just sort of makes the person look like an asshole, and makes me stop giving a shit about their opinions.

IS at least some of the criticism probably sexist or racist? Sure. But if someone can actually articulate valid reasons why they're annoyed by something, and your response is to just ignore everything they say and go "lol sexism", then you're kind of an idiot.

Personally, I think Gwenpool is a shit character. But I also like Spider-Gwen and Ms. Marvel, which kind of argues against the idea that the only reason I dislike Gwenpool is because she's female (or Tumblr-bait). It's almost as if people can have opinions more complex than the lowest common denominator.


---

Gwen looks so cute, hnnngh.
---

Is Spider-Gwen the same person as Gwenpool?
---

lihlih posted...

Is Spider-Gwen the same person as Gwenpool?

No not at all

Spider-Gwen is from another universe where Gwen Stacy got bit by the spider and Peter Parker died

Gwenpool was originally based on Gwen Stacey but they quickly retconned that and now her backstory is that she is from our world and has read all the marvel comic books so she has all sorts of insight
---

Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Mead posted...

People hate them? I thought those were popular characters

REAL comic book fans hate them

Yeah, but how many of said "real" fans are also incels?
---

Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Mead posted...

People hate them? I thought those were popular characters

"REAL comic book fans" hate them

Fix'd
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ogurisama posted...

I think it has to do with manchilds hating women taking over their media.

I feel like this is rapidly becoming the new Godwin's Law of the Internet. Straight up dismissing every criticism of a female character as sexist or any criticism involving a "PoC" as solely being racism just sort of makes the person look like an asshole, and makes me stop giving a shit about their opinions.

IS at least some of the criticism probably sexist or racist? Sure. But if someone can actually articulate valid reasons why they're annoyed by something, and your response is to just ignore everything they say and go "lol sexism", then you're kind of an idiot.

Personally, I think Gwenpool is a shat character. But I also like Spider-Gwen and Ms. Marvel, which kind of argues against the idea that the only reason I dislike Gwenpool is because she's female (or Tumblr-bait). It's almost as if people can have opinions more complex than the lowest common denominator.

thing is the majority of the time you do see people crapping on characters just because they are female and taking up space the reader feels isn't justified

some have legit complaints but usually it's just ranting "SJW's are killing comics" garbage
---

NightMareBunny posted...

thing is the majority of the time you do see people crapping on characters just because they are female and taking up space the reader feels isn't justified

Yes, when that's your preconceived notion and what you're looking for, then yes, that's what you're going to see most of the time.


---

lihlih posted...

I've seen a lot of hate for Gwen Pool, Squirrel Girl, and a few other female comic book heroes, but I don't get it.
I got one of the graphic novels for Gwen Pool, and it seems fine. I'm actually liking it a lot. Haven't given Squirrel Girl or any of the other ones a try, so maybe they do suck, but Gwen Pool seems pretty good.

Probably because it's a shitty-looking cash-in and fans are getting sick of them. As for Squirrel Girl, she was a joke character whose gimmick got old fast yet somehow built up a massive fanbase. The fact that she might be struggling now is more an issue with the fact she should have never become big in the first place.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ogurisama posted...

I think it has to do with manchilds hating women taking over their media.

I feel like this is rapidly becoming the new Godwin's Law of the Internet. Straight up dismissing every criticism of a female character as sexist or any criticism involving a "PoC" as solely being racism just sort of makes the person look like an asshole, and makes me stop giving a shit about their opinions.

IS at least some of the criticism probably sexist or racist? Sure. But if someone can actually articulate valid reasons why they're annoyed by something, and your response is to just ignore everything they say and go "lol sexism", then you're kind of an idiot.

Personally, I think Gwenpool is a shit character. But I also like Spider-Gwen and Ms. Marvel, which kind of argues against the idea that the only reason I dislike Gwenpool is because she's female (or Tumblr-bait). It's almost as if people can have opinions more complex than the lowest common denominator.

Pretty much.
---

When I visit discussion threads here for various comic book shows, I see almost nothing but (unwarranted) vehement hatred of many female protagonists. I don't have much reason to believe it would be much different for the actual comics.
---

To be fair, Marvel and DC have taken very different approaches in the whole sjw gnashing of teeth.

I get that the X-Men were always an allegory for the civil Rights movement, but on the one hand you have Cassandra, Barbara, and Catherine... meanwhile Marvel makes Jane Foster Thor.

If I'm being brutally honest here, DC wins the SJW battle before it was even a thing despite Marvel always trying to position itself as the winner in the virtue signalling department.
---

keyblader1985 posted...

When I visit discussion threads here for various comic book shows, I see almost nothing but (unwarranted) vehement hatred of many female protagonists. I don't have much reason to believe it would be much different for the actual comics.

As much as I like Supergirl, I can't deny the fact that every episode of that show has been hamstrung by a mandatory 10 to 15 minutes of lesbian drama ever since it folded into the arrowverse.
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

NightMareBunny posted...

thing is the majority of the time you do see people crapping on characters just because they are female and taking up space the reader feels isn't justified

Yes, when that's your preconceived notion and what you're looking for, then yes, that's what you're going to see most of the time.

But even when it wasn't my preconceived notion, I saw it a lot. That being said, I usually saw it on base. And my area was mostly guys. But I still saw it a lot.
---

WhiskeyDisk posted...

If I'm being brutally honest here, DC wins the SJW battle before it was even a thing despite Marvel always trying to position itself as the winner in the virtue signalling department.

DC went the same route - they just turned Batgirl into a hipster and backed off when people complained because they "turned Starfire into a whore". DC just looked like they were pandering less because they jumped off a cliff during the New 52 reboot, and most of their pandering was just rolling shit back to where they started.

In both cases, the companies are just desperate because comic sales are dying and they need to find new readers wherever they can - and pandering to minorities who previously weren't strong comic buyers seems like an obvious method for doing so. So you get Marvel pushing Black Panther while DC is soaking up praise for Wonder Woman in the film side, while in comics Marvel is pushing black teen girl Iron Man and lady Thor (with the narrator straight-up quoting SJW memes) and making Falcon into the new Captain America, but DC is pushing new Hispanic and Arabic Green Lanterns, and randomly creating "African Batman" and Chinese Superman.

The real problem is, both companies have sort of learned that, while SJWs are incredibly vocal about things they hate, when you do the things they claim to like, they won't actually BUY your books. So Marvel's already officially backed off on the Internet pandering, while DC has sort of quietly phased most of it out. But there's still a push to try and capture new fans, which is why a lot of comic stuff gets retconned just to fit better into the continuity of the popular movies, and why there's still a push in both comics and movies to appeal to the massive Asian audience, and why they'll still push the narrative of how progressive movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther are, in the hopes that they can parlay those things into future success.

A lot of people like to ascribe ideology to these companies, or say things like "Well, of course stupid younger writers living in a Twitter/Tumblr world are going to reflect those views into their writing", but ultimately, most of this stuff is purely motivated by money, pure and simple. If either company thinks pandering to a specific group is going to dramatically increase their sales, they're going to do it, period.


---

This board is so obsessed with sjws
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

they'll still push the narrative of how progressive movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther are, in the hopes that they can parlay those things into future success.

Black Panther and Luke Cage were always tokens if we're being honest and Sam Jackson Fury was late to the party...but holy shit we both know damned well that Wonder Woman is NOT the rabbit hole the SJW crowd wants to go down. Old school Wonder Woman is not the Rosie the Riveter that they think she is...by miles.

And if we're being honest, Black Panther jumped the fucking shark the second he married Storm, because why the hell not despite years of building up LoganxStorm going deep into pre-2099...
---

WhiskeyDisk posted...

As much as I like Supergirl, I can't deny the fact that every episode of that show has been hamstrung by a mandatory 10 to 15 minutes of lesbian drama ever since it folded into the arrowverse.

I agree with that, but that's not what I'm talking about.

At least that is more or less over now that they're broken up.
---

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Black Panther and Luke Cage were always tokens if we're being honest

Ehh, Luke Cage was straight up blackspoitation, and Black Panther was introduced almost before being a "token" would have meant anything at all. Sure, they've both kind of filled that role since, but I don't know if I'd say either started that way.

To be honest, that was part of what I always liked about Power Man and Iron Fist - they were two characters who were blatantly rooted in borderline offensive exploitation films of the 70, who somehow managed to work really well as a pairing and transcend their origins.

Which then went full-circle when people online decided to shit on Iron Fist because he was a white guy who learned martial arts, as if suggesting the only people allowed to be martial artists in movies are Asians isn't itself kind of racist.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

And if we're being honest, Black Panther jumped the fucking shark the second he married Storm

Ohh, I'll absolutely agree there, because that entire storyline was kind of shit. And kind of racist, considering it basically boiled down to "These two black characters who barely know each other have to get married immediately, because they're both black, and god forbid either of them have relationships with anyone who isn't the same color they are."

Storm was at her best when she was dating Forge anyway.


---

all the female copies of already established male heroes are crap.

i like rogue though (like the 90's cartoon version, not like the movie version where she does nothing)
---

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Sam Jackson Fury

Wasn't he white at first, too?
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Storm was at her best when she was dating Forge anyway.

Damn, I actually forgot about Forge in that whole love hexagon, I'm never really sure about where I stand on the whole 2099 timeline. It was a great space to experiment in and there are a lot of good stories there, but there are just as many stories there that Marvel cant backpedal out of fast enough because anything within 3 degrees of seperation from the batshit obsession with Scott and Jean is still a goddamned hot mess to this day and it poisons a lot of the X stories all around.
---

LinkPizza posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Sam Jackson Fury

Wasn't he white at first, too?

Yup. Regular Marvelverse had a white Fury, but the Ultimateverse based Fury on Jackson, and later black Fury showed up in regular as a son or something and took over his job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fury_Jr.

Original Fury showed up in a movie done with David Hasselhoff.
---

Krazy_Kirby posted...

all the female copies of already established male heroes are crap.

i like rogue though (like the 90's cartoon version, not like the movie version where she does nothing)

To be fair, given the established ages of Gambit and Rogue in the X-Men timeline of the movies ... I get Fox and Marvel's aversion to the squick factor there. I love 90s Gambit too, but they took him to damn weird places I'd rather forget.
---

^
they even took rogue out of days of future past. it was going to be her powers that they used for the sentinels.

instead they used mystique, which makes no sense because her powers don't work that way....
---

Unrelated to anything at hand, but I hate Rosie. The actually woman quit her job in the factory after 2 weeks to play the cello. She also had no idea what they used her image for until the 80s and was only 17 at the time of the drawing.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Scott and Jean is still a goddamned hot mess to this day and it poisons a lot of the X stories all around.

Jean dying as Dark Phoenix was an awesome story, and even though it wasn't originally what Claremont intended, and only happened due to editorial interference, even he admits it was a far better scenario.

Then Kurt Busiek ruined everything because he just couldn't let this fictional character go, and had to come up with the convoluted idea of it not really being her but an alien being that took her form, so he could bring her back, and John Byrne helped go along with it because by that point he basically hated Claremont, Shooter, and sanity in general. Pretty much every ridiculous, stupid aspect of Jean's storyline comes from that, with Morrison just putting the capstone on it later because Morrison is a terrible writer whenever he's using someone else's characters.

The only saving grace was that, after they killed Jean off again, they actually let her stay dead. But they ruined that again a few years ago when they brought the past teen selves of all of the original X-Men into the future, and then turned that version of Jean into turbo alpha bitch to kind of back-justify what they saw as the misogyny of how she was originally written. Pretty much everything they did with the young X-Men is blatantly terrible, though.

The X-titles have kind of been shit for years now. Which is a shame, because they were actually pretty good during most of the second half of the 2000s.


---

Morrison honestly is awful if he isn't writing his own characters. It's unreadable a lot of the time.
I'll give him credit for Doom Patrol and Animal Man, though. Granted, they were basically failed characters that he revamped.

Fine PO, I literally don't have the strength to go down this rabbit hole with you.

But can literally anyone explain Sinister's obsession with them since outside of the Phoenix Force there's arguably over 2 dozen more mutants with more useful powers than Scott fucking Sommers? I hate Cyclops as a character, I always have. I can't think of a single reason why his head wasn't separated from his body by anyone that could get within melee range for 30 years, and it seems like everything you can trace back to him is shit on every level.
---

keyblader1985 posted...

When I visit discussion threads here for various comic book shows, I see almost nothing but (unwarranted) vehement hatred of many female protagonists. I don't have much reason to believe it would be much different for the actual comics.

Overlooking that the writing can be dicey for many female leads on superhero shows (especially when the character is kinda shoehorned in as a gender-diverse sidekick), there are *countless* popular superheroines who have had phenomenal comic runs. And, rather annoyingly, many of the biggest names *never* received shows. More importantly, comic fans are chronic complainers so it rarely has anything to do with gender or race.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I get that the X-Men were always an allegory for the civil Rights movement, but on the one hand you have Cassandra, Barbara, and Catherine... meanwhile Marvel makes Jane Foster Thor.

Mutants have been a pretty blank allegory, useful for fitting whatever theme people choose to write.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

In both cases, the companies are just desperate because comic sales are dying and they need to find new readers wherever they can - and pandering to minorities who previously weren't strong comic buyers seems like an obvious method for doing so. So you get Marvel pushing Black Panther while DC is soaking up praise for Wonder Woman in the film side, while in comics Marvel is pushing black teen girl Iron Man and lady Thor (with the narrator straight-up quoting SJW memes) and making Falcon into the new Captain America, but DC is pushing new Hispanic and Arabic Green Lanterns, and randomly creating "African Batman" and Chinese Superman.

The real problem is, both companies have sort of learned that, while SJWs are incredibly vocal about things they hate, when you do the things they claim to like, they won't actually BUY your books. So Marvel's already officially backed off on the Internet pandering, while DC has sort of quietly phased most of it out. But there's still a push to try and capture new fans, which is why a lot of comic stuff gets retconned just to fit better into the continuity of the popular movies, and why there's still a push in both comics and movies to appeal to the massive Asian audience, and why they'll still push the narrative of how progressive movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther are, in the hopes that they can parlay those things into future success.

A lot of people like to ascribe ideology to these companies, or say things like "Well, of course stupid younger writers living in a Twitter/Tumblr world are going to reflect those views into their writing", but ultimately, most of this stuff is purely motivated by money, pure and simple. If either company thinks pandering to a specific group is going to dramatically increase their sales, they're going to do it, period.

It's a shame that these companies couldn't wise up sooner to the fact that SJWs migrate from thing to thing in a constant attempt to validate their self-worth by pushing meaningless campaigns that only annoy actual fans.

Mead posted...

This board is so obsessed with sjws

And people living in Mexico are so obsessed with cartels.
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Storm was at her best when she was dating Forge anyway.

But then he left her for Mystique!

Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
they even took rogue out of days of future past. it was going to be her powers that they used for the sentinels.

instead they used mystique, which makes no sense because her powers don't work that way....

Certainly would have made more sense, but Rogue wasn't in the reboot afaik so... meh.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Scott and Jean is still a goddamned hot mess to this day and it poisons a lot of the X stories all around.

Jean dying as Dark Phoenix was an awesome story, and even though it wasn't originally what Claremont intended, and only happened due to editorial interference, even he admits it was a far better scenario.

Then Kurt Busiek ruined everything because he just couldn't let this fictional character go, and had to come up with the convoluted idea of it not really being her but an alien being that took her form, so he could bring her back, and John Byrne helped go along with it because by that point he basically hated Claremont, Shooter, and sanity in general. Pretty much every ridiculous, stupid aspect of Jean's storyline comes from that, with Morrison just putting the capstone on it later because Morrison is a terrible writer whenever he's using someone else's characters.

The only saving grace was that, after they killed Jean off again, they actually let her stay dead. But they ruined that again a few years ago when they brought the past teen selves of all of the original X-Men into the future, and then turned that version of Jean into turbo alpha bitch to kind of back-justify what they saw as the misogyny of how she was originally written. Pretty much everything they did with the young X-Men is blatantly terrible, though.

The X-titles have kind of been shit for years now. Which is a shame, because they were actually pretty good during most of the second half of the 2000s.

They should have just left her alive. Killing her off "for good" the second time was just fucking stupid because nobody believed it would stick. Plus fucking Joe Quesada only did it because he hates redheads, which is also why broke up Peter & MJ.
---

they did what to iron man
---

@Zeus

And people living in Mexico are so obsessed with cartels.

They arent actually, thats just right wing news outlets in the US.
---

Zeus posted...

Killing her off "for good" the second time was just fucking stupid because nobody believed it would stick.

I agree with this. I feel like deaths in those worlds are pretty meaningless. They always either find a way to revive them, or you find out it wasn't them. They hardly ever stick...
---

Mead posted...

They arent actually, thats just right wing news outlets in the US.

Do you live in a bubble? Even John Oliver of Last Week Tonight has done multiple segments addressing the issue and noted that cartel violence is a major factor driving illegal immigration.

LinkPizza posted...

Zeus posted...

Killing her off "for good" the second time was just fucking stupid because nobody believed it would stick.

I agree with this. I feel like deaths in those worlds are pretty meaningless. They always either find a way to revive them, or you find out it wasn't them. They hardly ever stick...

The only real exception seems to be characters killed off during an origin story, and even then we occasionally get alternate-universe versions like the Thomas Wayne Batman.
---

Zeus posted...

LinkPizza posted...

Zeus posted...

Killing her off "for good" the second time was just fucking stupid because nobody believed it would stick.

I agree with this. I feel like deaths in those worlds are pretty meaningless. They always either find a way to revive them, or you find out it wasn't them. They hardly ever stick...

The only real exception seems to be characters killed off during an origin story, and even then we occasionally get alternate-universe versions like the Thomas Wayne Batman.

I remember that one. And there are so many alternate-universes, too. They can just grab a character from any and place them where they want them...
---

The future is female incels. Get over it.
---

Well...at the end of the day, at least on the Marvel side, if a character isn't shown on-panel with Death, they aren't actually Dead in the capital letter sense of the word.

In DC it's even more ambiguous since Death is Gaiman's thing and as far as I know he hasn't touched DC since The Wake and I'm not sure if anyone else is even allowed to mess with the Endless.
---

helIy posted...

they did what to iron man

they made "iron heart" the female version of iron man
---