The media continues to run to the defense of Captain Marvel as if Brie Larson and her fictional alter ego Carol Danvers need activists masquerading as journalists to white knight for her in order to preserve the integrity of her fragile sensibilities, like some kind of cosmic-powered damsel in distress. This whole escapade of puerility is best exemplified with an article from The Daily Beast that was published on March 6th, 2019, titled “How Brie Larson’s ‘Captain Marvel’ Made Angry White Men Lose Their Damn Minds”.

Author Melissa Leon ventures to run through the tired, rehired trope of citing the cartoonish villainy of “incels”, “white men”, and “#GamerGate” as the primary culprits standing in the way of Captain Marvel’s success like some kind of human wall of degenerate miscreants with arms chain-linked together attempting to prevent Larson’s turn as Captain Marvel from passing down the road of cinematic opportunities into the town of box office success. It started with a tweet, escalated into an article, and ended with stupidity.

The first female-led Marvel superhero movie has been targeted by men’s rights activists and incels—the Gamergate crowd—since the very beginning https://t.co/IdmfdNxSqR

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 6, 2019

Within Leon’s piece, she claims that the people up in arms about Marvel’s super hero film have been misinterpreting Larson’s quote about white men and have been using this to launch an all-out digital assault on the actress and the film, writing…

“In the same style of harassment internet campaigns that have targeted women and minorities in video games, comics, and geek-branded film franchises like Ghostbusters and Star Wars, reactionary trolls have burped up a deluge of content targeting Larson and Captain Marvel in recent weeks. Most of it claims to be outraged over the notion that Larson hates white men, which is what someone might take from the following out-of-context quote by Larson if it were relayed through a 30-person game of telephone in which everyone has cotton balls stuffed in their mouths and is also mostly deaf […]

 

“The quote was picked up by film sites last month and regurgitated under headlines that emphasized the words “white” and “male” rather than “inclusive,” priming men’s rights activists and so-called “incels” to mobilize online over an imagined slight. To them, a call for expanded access to opportunities for women and people of color in a space traditionally dominated by white men (like a Marvel film’s press junket) is not only an insult—it amounts to a threat to take away what they consider theirs. And at this point, five years after Gamergate established the playbook for how online harassment campaigns target those who advocate for diversity, websites and content creators have caught on, to their benefit.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

So first of all, the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters was mostly derided for its anti-male marketing campaign leading up to release. The director and the actresses spared no opportunity to throw their own audience under the bus, as detailed in a recap by Mundane Matt.

And it wasn’t like it was just “trolls” who didn’t like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, enough people were disgruntled with the film that they didn’t even bother showing up for Solo: A Star Wars Story. The fan disgruntlement was so high, in fact, that the Disney Studios president has to check in on the production of Star Wars: Episode IX every single week to ensure that the quality of the film does not devolve into Star Wars: The Last Jedi territory. In fact, the backlash from fans was so bad that there’s even a documentary about it in the works from director Marc John called Episode Backlash, which covers the growing rift between Disney and its fans over the Star Wars brand.

None of that had anything to do with “trolls” and everything to do with the ideological agenda ruining entertainment media.

Another go-to villain in all of this has been #GamerGate, which was recently blamed by Vox and NBC for the criticisms aimed at Captain Marvel. It was also blamed for the backlash against Star Wars: The Last Jedi by director Rian Johnson. And now we’re seeing the same, tired old cliché being rolled out again against the consumer movement from 2014, even though #GamerGate was all about retaking the gaming industry from SJW gaming journalists who had devolved into agenda-driven clickbait aimed at shaming developers into designing content that fit within their sociopolitical hegemony.

Heck, game journalists to this day still bully and shame developers who don’t fully commit to their ideology. But I digress.

The Daily Beast article continues to wax poetics about Captain Marvel while also celebrating the censorship surrounding the movie on Rotten Tomatoes, writing…

“Backlash cycles against films like this feel almost rote in 2019, familiar down to the disingenuous talking points and tactics of oversensitive men threatened by blockbuster franchise leads who do not look like them. We’ve seen it with the all-female Ghostbusters, Ocean’s 8, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Black Panther. At least one favorite tool of anti-diversity reactionaries has been disrupted on this go-round, though: the Rotten Tomatoes audience score. The review aggregate site will no longer allow audiences (apart from critics, who make up the site’s “official” score) to review and rate films before their release.”

Thankfully, Dissenter provided fans with an option to continue to comment on the Rotten Tomatoes page, and the honest feedback from average people makes it known that they aren’t buying into the agitprop… at all.

The article rounds out by trying to claim that there’s an unfazed mental gait for everyone in support of Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the media’s current disposition seems to be nothing short of a self-imploding white dwarf that has been kinetically orbiting conniption like an angry shrew lashing out because her ex-boyfriend decided to stop calling her after he found someone who wasn’t a boring, fat, angry, perpetually frowning wench, writing…

“Larson’s efforts to foster inclusion in film are a fig leaf for a movement grasping for any excuse to lash out. But the more I think about it, the more appropriate it feels that this Carol Danvers is in her twenties. Self-actualized young women unbothered by men with small minds and smaller hearts are our culture’s real-life obsession right now, too. And while the rest of us stew in the same tired discourse, they simply fly higher, further, faster.”

A lot of potential movie goers seem to be aware of the media’s tactics and have been attempting to formulate their own grassroots movement to support Alita: Battle Angel instead of Captain Marvel. Whether or not that will actually show up in the ticket sales remains to be seen, but as the media machine continues to shill relentlessly for Marvel’s female-focused super hero flick, using ridiculous buzzwords like “incel” and “GamerGate” and blaming white men for not wanting to see a film starring an actress that specifically targeted them with her vitriolic jargon, hopefully fans wise up and avoid surrendering to the media’s browbeating antics to put butts in theater seats.

(Thanks for the news tip Lyle)