Why THAT She-Hulk Scene Was So Controversial

i have an army we have a hulk although i'm somebody who actively keeps up with the mcu i've never really felt the need to consume every single bit of content related to the franchise to this day i still haven't seen thor one or two nor have i seen either of the ant-man movies i've never really felt like i'm missing much by just watching 95 of the content instead of the full 100 and with how popular marvel is i still consume that last five percent just by being around other people who have seen it i originally had no intention of watching she-hulk let alone making a video on it nothing about it really caught my interest seemed like just another marvel show nothing special but also nothing awful just standard mediocrity mid if you will but then i made the mistake of opening twitter hey follow me by the way and people were either acting like this show was the second coming of infinity war or acting like it killed their firstborn child the two groups were largely divided on the basis of sex with the extreme end of one side wishing death upon all men and the other side had alpha males taking a break from popping the reddest of pills and topping off top g to uh do a little misogyny and all of these heated arguments were primarily focused around a single scene in the first episode i had to see what all the fuss was about so i checked it out if you're looking for somebody who's gonna mindlessly [ __ ] on the show because hashtag woke you won't find that here but if you want to take a deeper look into she-hulk and why just the first 30 minutes of the series has been so polarizing let's dive into the first episode jennifer walters articular she-hulk is a lawyer and cousin to bruce banner we know this because she tells us no literally she looks at the camera breaks the fourth wall and gives us her origin story she gets her powers after a car accident with her and bruce in the car where some of bruce's blood enters her bloodstream through an open wound she wanders to a nearby bar and tries to get cleaned up when leaving the bar she gets hit on by a group of guys and hulks out before bruce knocks her out to prevent her from catching a triple homicide when jennifer finally comes to she's in bruce's beach bar laboratory and is here that the iconic scene takes place he brought jennifer here to isolate her after years of wrestling for control of his own body against a dangerous alter-ego capable of planetary devastation he's seen the kind of damage that can cause and he doesn't want that for his cousin bruce has already been through it all documented every single step of his journey there is literally no one better suited to helping jennifer with what she's going through than bruce understandably she's not too thrilled about suddenly having her life uprooted and forced into an anime training arc but she reluctantly agrees to let bruce guide her he begins training her both mentally and physically and she excels at everything she can transform in and out of her hulk form at will she's a natural at using her newfound superhuman strength she's got perfect grades in every class and is steady on her way to graduating from hulk academy and returned to her normal life but bruce urges her to continue training he reminds her of the great responsibility that comes with her great power and questions what she'll do with it a question that she herself posed in the opening lines of the episode what is the responsibility of those with power do they merely have an obligation to refrain from the misuse of that power or do they have a duty to protect those without it bruce has first-hand experience with the difficulties that come with the power like theirs and wants to be absolutely certain that jennifer is equipped to handle any challenges that may come up which brings us to everyone's favorite scene well here's the thing bruce i'm great at controlling my anger i do it all the time when i'm catcalled in the street when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me i do it pretty much every day because if i don't i will get called emotional or difficult or might just literally get murdered so i'm an expert at controlling my anger because i do it infinitely more than you so all of this just feels like projecting a lot of [ __ ] onto me on the surface there's nothing wrong with the things that she brings up it's what came immediately after that caused so much controversy you see jennifer just decided to play a game a game called the oppression olympics the misfortune matches even the the tribulation tournament if you will it's the never-ending competition between groups of people to determine who suffers the most the need to validate one's own problems by constantly one-upping someone else's to which i ask why are we comparing two bad [ __ ] no when i say bad i literally mean bad like all of these things are awful and comparing them doesn't help anyone new card what do you think very nice look at that it's very cool bateman but that's nothing look at this that is really nice you ain't seen nothing yet white impressive very nice hmm let's see paul allen's card look at that subtle off-white coloring the tasteful thickness of that oh my god jennifer mentioned some valid reasons as to why she might get angry and why she has to manage that anger and then completely derails her point to [ __ ] on bruce for no reason so i'm an expert at controlling my anger because i do it infinitely more than you no no that that's not why that had nothing to do with your point bruce has done nothing but try to help her out of fear of her hulk powers destroying her life fear born from seeing what those same powers have done to his own life having his relationships ruined and being hunted by the government growing close to a new group of people but ultimately being a liability and a danger to them he's incredibly strong but is also a loose cannon [ __ ] i mean villain causes hulk to go on a rampage is such a reliable strategy that they used it two films in a row he puts himself under intergalactic quarantine so he doesn't deal any more damage to the earth and is enslaved for two years forced to fight as a gladiator for people's entertainment the hulk suffers a crushing defeat at the hands of thanos and is given a permanent reminder of his failures when half of the universe is snapped out of existence oh and uh he tried to kill himself in case you needed to kill me but you can't i know i tried some people have also brought up things canon to the comics such as the abuse bruce suffered as a child and how his father killed his mother but that feels like really reaching to prove a point disney marvel are known to change things in the mcu so it wouldn't really make sense to compare across universes besides the films already give more than enough to drive the point home bruce banner has been through a lot whether it's more or less than jennifer has gone through isn't relevant there's absolutely nothing to be gained by comparing them much less trivializing one and for those saying that she isn't invalidating bruce's struggles she's just expressing her own are simply wrong i don't know how else to say it but there is no world in which you tell somebody that you do something infinitely more than them and are not trying to belittle that person beyond just drawing a line between bruce and jennifer the show also very clearly creates a divide between men and women up until this point aside from bruce the only other men that we've seen have solely existed to illustrate the problems that jennifer brings up the first guy that we see views jennifer as incompetent and tells her that she should just let a man handle the job the second group of men catcalling harasser that's the extent of their existence they weren't characters just vehicles for depicting the ultimate villain of this show what her problems are aren't the problem it's how they're presented unsurprisingly it's going to be pretty hard to get a lot of people invested in the character's struggles when she opens up by alienating i don't know maybe one two or literally half of the entire world's population imagine if the scene had gone something more like this bruce i i do i do control my anger just because i didn't turn into a big green monster every time i got upset doesn't mean i've never had to watch my emotions i've had to work just as hard if not harder than everyone else to get where i am and i will still have my skill and credibility called into question on the basis of nothing more than my gender do you know what it's like to constantly be made to feel lesser than to be hit on feel unsafe and not be able to act out because you have no idea what might happen to you if you do bruce i may not have been a hulk for the past decade but i don't need to to know how to control my anger but i'm not a scriptwriter the scene remains more or less the same but with a lot less of the whole demonizing everything with the penis when i first saw the scene i actually assumed that they were estranged cousins and so jennifer didn't know much about what bruce had been through but uh really oh so you didn't wind up alone hiding away on some remote beach with no friends no relationships never seeing your family and definitely not dealing with a decade's worth of trauma yeah she knows exactly what he's been through she just doesn't seem to give a [ __ ] making the dialogue all the more damaging but even if she didn't know much like how those female experiences she mentioned may be foreign to bruce men have their own challenges that are unique to them men are known to suffer in silence because they lack the proper outlets to deal with those emotions it's no surprise that they take their own life at a significantly higher rate from a young age they hear things like you shouldn't cry aren't you a man they're discouraged from liking anything that could even remotely be perceived as feminine out of fear of everyone going you're gay you're he's gay i'm not gay [Music] there's constant pressure for men to adhere to a certain image of masculinity and anyone who deviates is no longer a man this image is perpetuated by men and women alike i'm a six foot two black male and i'm willing to bet that the last image that comes into your mind when you heard that description is me opening up about my feelings and crying there's this fairly recent push for men to be more open with the ridiculous tagline vulnerability is sexy but the moment that they do that vulnerability is often taken and used against them during the metoo movement when terry crews publicly spoke about being assaulted a large portion of people mocked him they questioned how someone built like this could let that happen to him he should have reacted with violence because that's how a man handles things men are also affected by the toxic masculinity that jennifer so clearly hates but it seems like she can't spare a single ounce of empathy for her cousin just because someone suffers differently doesn't mean that they suffer any less when a friend of mine was asked how she feels about the phrase men are trash she responds with yeah i say it sometimes like when a friend is going through a breakup and i'm trying to lift her up to which i ask where is the lifting up in that statement is it really only possible to lift someone up by knocking someone else down no hell no but it's something that's been so heavily baked into everyone's vocabulary you can't be pro-black without being anti-white you can't be an ally unless you got a bone to pick with every cis-hat white male you can't play league of legends without being a disappointment to your family things like that it's always pick one side or the other with absolutely no middle ground and it's terrible for promoting any kind of productive discussion she-hulk caused controversy because that's the only thing that kind of approach is conducive to choose a hill and die on it no one cares to try and see where the other side is coming from because the show itself doesn't care to do that it takes sensitive topics and handles them with as much care as a crack addict going on their second week of withdrawals some people also took issue with jennifer seemingly contradicting herself by saying that she controls her anger when cat called despite very clearly not doing that earlier in the episode but i don't think that's necessarily bad it is contradictory sure but so are humans we often don't operate based on how things are but rather how we perceive them to be and if that's what she believes then that's how she'll describe herself it's not necessarily indicative of bad writing and could just be a character flaw that leads to development later in the story lord knows she could use more of those as things are right now she's just perfect at everything for seemingly no reason and any problem she does have is caused by which is also dehumanizing in its own way now forgive me for being so bold but women are still human they're not infallible beings and implying otherwise creates an unrealistic standard it's 2022 and some of y'all [ __ ] still think that women don't fart so maybe they'll do something to bring her back down to planet earth in the coming episodes i'm hopeful but i'm sure as hell not optimistic anyways that's the video i'll see y'all in the next one wait wait wait wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute she was driving the car when they crashed scratch the whole video top g was right women really can't drive commentate w let's go [Music] you

Channel: Nasu

Views: 853,883

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Id: Zuu45OE8GME

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022