"Walking back" implies a course-correction. There's a difference between that and a clarification. I offered the latter, albeit perhaps not expressed adequately.
Furthermore, there was nothing to "walk back", as I did not express my own viewpoint, except in several places in the clarification, which I took pains to separate from the text at large (the phrase "and I am certainly not" and the sentence about a Lady Sif show - both separated from the text at large by parentheses, and the clarification of my definition of "identity politics", which I explicitly separated from that of Midnight's Edge). I talked about the controversy that exists, but did not promote or criticize any side. I kept my language neutral. Sometimes, it's easy to mistake neutrality for agreement.
Years ago, I learned a lot of things that disillusioned me and caused me to have a different worldview than the one that I had held previously. Having changed worldviews gave me insight into how different belief systems worked. I even learned how to argue both sides of an issue with myself as a mental exercise. I came to realize that most people have highly unrealistic strawman views of what people who disagree with them think like and what motivates them. As such, I try my best to hear out people's views (whether I agree with them or not), and base my belief regarding what they actually believe on an analysis of that, rather than the strawman perceptions of those who never bothered to actually listen and figure out what makes them tick. And I also try to distinguish the reasonable majority from the extreme minority. It's very easy to assume the worst about people. It's not so easy to lay your cynicism at the door and try to "get in their heads" to figure out what really makes them tick. Most people want the same things. Where they differ is A: how they define them, and B: what they think is the right way to go about getting them. Ask almost anyone whether they support justice, equality, or freedom, and they will say yes. Ask them how they define those things and how they can be best achieved, and you'll get some drastically different answers - often downright antithetical.
My philosophy is that a large percentage of people who express opinions about a controversy have opinions that are not extreme (or are, at the very worst, based in misunderstanding or fear rather than anything more sinister), yet get lumped in with the extreme opinions of a few hateful loudmouths. If a number of people take a certain stance (whether right or wrong from a logical or factual viewpoint), and 5% of that group took the stance for indefensible reasons, the other 95% invariably get lumped in with them by people with opposing viewpoints, even though the motives of the 95% are generally very different and much more reasonable from those of the 5%.
There's even a pretty fascinating study of the complexity of political opinions and how very few people fit a strawman notion. It's called
Hidden Tribes.
Due to my philosophy on this matter, I try to present people's viewpoints in a fair manner, avoiding strawmen and the imputation of impure motives except when warrant for the latter is sufficiently evidenced by the available data. To those not familiar with my style of writing about such subjects, it can occasionally come across as a promotion of the ideas being described, but is not intended as such.
This is more of the same from fanboys who want their females in these movies in golden bikinis or not at all. Feeling threatened by women and minorities playing larger roles.
I'm having a hard time figuring out whether certain accusations in this thread are aimed merely at the people whose opinions I described in some of my comments, or also at me (in the possible assumption that the two are the same). This is one such case.
So to clarify regarding my own views regarding this particular matter, that may be true about a few men, but it's not at all not the case with me.
If you click on the link to my website/blog located in my signature, you will find that I have written multiple pages (ones that required months of research to write, at that) about Glenda Farrell, who became my favorite actress through her brilliant portrayals of strong, intelligent characters like Torchy Blane*, and who never once appeared in a bikini. (Heck, she refused to do the pinup photos that were considered part of the job back then, as she wanted to be known purely for her talent).
* Torchy Blane was a highly intelligent, wisecracking newspaper reporter who constantly outwitted the police and solved the cases first. She was the original inspiration for Lois Lane.
If you read
my posts in the "Agent Carter" thread in this very forum, you'll see that I have absolutely nothing negative and plenty positive to say about Peggy Carter. (Again, no bikini).
In fact, here are files of the two pages of an IMDb thread that I posted in back in 2015. If you read my posts in that thread (same username as here), I defended Peggy Carter as being a well-written character by debating someone who considered her a Mary Sue.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Zdw40vRupcHxh11JMGbJgGkySFslCj_t
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kx3P9JOim0mwZFlxOT8E3qLD0hzg8ySE
If you go back to my posts in this very thread before the (unwise in retrospect) post featuring the Midnight's Edge video, you will see a positive view of Carol Danvers as a character in general on my part, with my only negative comments regarding uncertainty over the quality of the movie itself and Brie Larson's performance in it (and even then, I wrote that I hoped that the movie and Larson would both be good).
Almost exactly 1 year and 1 month ago, I wrote the following in a thread on this forum:
I find it rather neat to see so many female heroes now, since it's making up for the years in which they were few and far between, and makes some stories feel a little more fresh or original than they would if they starred a male hero.
If you want a good overview of my opinions about action heroines in today's cinema, I direct you to
this linked post. In a nutshell, I have no preference between male and female action heroes, as long as they are well-written, believable enough within the established rules of their fictional universe, and don't fall victim to overused clichés.
As a classic movie buff, I am more than used to women having large roles, and even action roles. Many of the first cinematic action stars were women. Pearl White, Helen Holmes, Ruth Roland, and Kay Aldridge all played action heroines in 1910s serials. To someone like me, who has seen Linda Stirling in action hero mode in a 1940s serial, action heroines aren't some new, threatening trend.
And regarding your golden bikini comment, Leia is an excellent character, and I doubt that many fans who like her would like her any less without the golden bikini scenes (which were themselves the buildup to her defeating Jabba; she was by no means strictly or even primarily ornamental, and Jabba learned that the hard way).
What exactly did Larson say that was so controversial? That she felt she could do a lot for women portraying a female hero?
It's not so much about just
what she said, but how it came to be interpreted. She's not the only MCU actor/actress to get political. Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Chris Evans have all gotten
very political off-camera, yet none have faced as intense a backlash. We live in interesting times (as the old Chinese curse puts it), and comments can get blown up out of proportion.
It all started when she said the following at the Crystal + Lucy Awards:
I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color. Am I saying I hate white dudes? No, I am not. What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie, and review your movie.
In a nutshell, some people interpreted her statement as A: arguing for racial and gender segregation in film criticism, and B: singling out white men's opinions as not mattering and in need of censorship. The fact that she chose such a widely-panned movie to defend also added to the ire, and some people interpreted her statement, "Am I saying I hate white dudes? No, I am not." in a "the lady doth protest too much, methinks" sort of way. A number of people started to see her as an anti-white male bigot after the statement. Several other comments that she made during the "Captain Marvel" press tour came to be seen as confirmation of this (such as her statement that she wanted to avoid letting the majority of interviewers to interview during the tour her be white men).
What made the criticism get even stronger is when she said the following:
The movie was the biggest and best opportunity I could have ever asked for. It was, like, my superpower. This could be my form of activism: doing a film that can play all over the world and be in more places than I can be physically.
Now, couple that with the popular perception among some people that her activism was racist and sexist in nature, and you can see how some of them took that statement as indicative of controversial politics being included in the movie. Then several teaser trailers hinted at a subplot in which various men throughout Carol Danvers' life tried to hold her back from following her dreams and Danvers states a desire to prove that she can do everything they do and "further, higher, faster", and the whole thing reached a fever-pitch (with some believing that the movie would be a propaganda-piece villainizing men in general as oppressors and/or promoting female supremacism).
Now,
my viewpoint is that so far the MCU has stayed mostly apolitical, or at the most, included politics in an even-handed, non-preachy way (like in "Winter Soldier", "Civil War", and "Black Panther") in the movies itself, although it seems to be trying to more specifically target demographics in its marketing now, which only adds to some peoples' nervousness. For "Captain Marvel" to be propagandistic would be a large and unprecedented shift. So there's no proof that it will do any such thing. But in these politically divisive times, people on either side of the political aisle tend to be paranoid about what "the other side" is going to do next, and things get taken out of context and blown out of proportion. That's why actors who refuse to talk about politics (like Mark Wahlberg), are shrewd from a business point of view - if you don't say anything about politics, it can't be exaggerated and used against you, and you have a bigger chance of making more money. (You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.) Of course, some celebrities feel that they have a responsibility to use their clout to fight for what they believe. That is maybe noble in a sense, but it comes with its risks.
So when the news came that the box office projections for the movie were rapidly dropping (by a margin of about $80 million to $100 million for opening weekend), many people took it as a sign that the backlash against Brie Larson and the movie was so large as to significantly cut into the movie's profits. The Midnight's Edge video that I linked to took that possibility into account, but also postulated the more likely explanation that the difference in the projections was due to the differences in methods used by different companies. I found the video's take very well-reasoned (it being the first one on the subject which I had seen that took the difference between companies into account), and assuming that the whole controversy was familiar to some people here, posted it in this thread. And here we are... :s
What it feels like to me is white men starting to get defensive about sharing their toys.
You're entitled to your own interpretation of the phenomenon, but I personally don't believe that this is the case for the majority. I've taken the time to listen to a fair-sized sampling of the arguments of those who are part of the backlash against "Ghostbusters", "The Last Jedi", etc, through social media, forums, Youtube, and the like; and I'm inclined to believe that only a small percentage (less than 10%) have any problem with an increased amount of women and minorities in leading roles in and of itself . Now, you may find that laughable, and who knows - I might just be naive, but most of them make some pretty convincing arguments for their motives being otherwise, and most do seem to genuinely like female and minority leads in general, as long as they do not perceive them as being used in service of a political agenda. A large number of them seem to have even liked "Black Panther" as a movie (but usually dislike the hype surrounding it), and a significant amount are currently singing the praises of "Alita: Battle Angel" (now that I think of it, many of them profess to be big fans of James Cameron's female characters in general, especially Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor). (Plus, some of them, a decently-sized number from what I've seen,
are women and/or minorities.) There's often some tendency to make mountains out of molehills involved at times among them, but I believe that the truly hateful ones are the exception rather than the rule. It appears to me that there are a few (highly vocal) racist and/or misogynist jerks in the bunch, whose comments and deeds tend to get spread far and wide and used to paint the others with the same brush.