Whoa just had a revelation about Bobbi Morse-Barton’s character that I’d always clearly known without KNOWING, right? Cause I’ve always written her this way. And it explains why some writers have so much trouble with her 1/

It’s not JUST that a lot of dudes in particular have extreme problems writing funny women who aren’t in the manic pixie psychopath child mode or even more problems writing fully sexual adult women in general 2/

It’s that there’s a basic hook to her character—sorry, two hooks—that look like other things unless you’re really good at showing them.

1st: she’s not just a good fighter, she LOVES fighting. It’s appropriate she’s a stick fighter cause sticks are pure martial joy 3/

1st hook still: thing is it’s really hard, if you aren’t a fighter, to show ‘joyful combat’. Everyone defaults to ‘laughing psycho’, which in women gets you back to manic pixie. It’s based in the sexist ‘women aren’t aggressive’ reductionist BS. 4/

So we can have women as cold technical professionals, raving murders or reluctant angsty fighters. But Mockingbird—without loving cruelty or pain—loves fighting. It’s a PLEASURE. And man does that make folks UNCOMFORTABLE in a woman 5/

So either they don’t even try to write it or default to making her into ‘blond Black Widow’ ... But some of them got it 6/

Gruenwald and Mccann for instance 7/

This is, might I point out, a normal human woman who made herself into someone who could stand beside gods, fight super soldiers — not from trauma, but because she WANTED that life. 8/

So that’s the first part, that she’s a fighting woman who loves the act of fighting and will chose a physical fight if she has the option.

That leads into the second hook. 9/

Mockingbird is a planner, a strategist and tactician — but not in that rigid way a lot of people like to think of as ‘planning’. She doesn’t try to make the world conform to her plans. 10/

She knows she needs to get from A to G and has a contingency for getting there from B, from C ... from L. She’s a genius. She’s mentally flexible and she KNOWS things. She adapts to circumstances, swiftly. 11/

That’s hard to convey on a page — I’d like to do it sometime, show her running an op and having to adapt to failures on the fly, but making it look planned — but that’s not a mode, again, that a lot of female bodied heros are allowed. 12/

They don’t get the agency to run the plans on their own, or they don’t get the respect to lead or they aren’t allowed to show the initiative unless it’s the slow, sneaky spy stuff that so many are given as ‘personality traits’. 13/

Honestly, it why a lot of dudes had issues identifying with the Captain Marvel movie — seeing a woman’s hero’s journey being the motivating force for narrative, and the primary antagonist to her being ‘men trying to control and diminish her’ —that makes’em uncomfortable 14/

Mockingbird SHOULD make those same people uncomfortable (oh, and she doesn’t need to be single or celibate in the process either, let’s kill that trope dead), but she needs to be given the room to grow into those hooks on the page 15/15