Admittedly, the image itself is cute.

The shirt itself doesn't harm anything by existing. I don't object to it any more than I'd object to seeing a T-shirt featuring Jenny Sparks, the Engineer, and Swift that says "I love to see women in Authority." It's a cute idea. I do have serious problems with it being alone in that article. Well, not alone. It's on display with some heart pendants featuring Spider-man/Gwen Stacy and Spider-Man/Green Goblin (which I predict will be a surprisingly good seller) and lip gloss tubes featuring unrecognizable characters kissing. And that begs the question... Where are the female superheroes in this superhero merchandise aimed at female people?

There's just no good reason to launch a women's superhero clothing line with a sleepshirt professing attraction to four male characters. "Marvel has no recognizable female characters" does not work as an excuse. The company's Silver Age formula was teams with at least one girl. Where's the X-Apparel with its variety of well-known female characters? How about the Fantastic Four? A simple image of a blue baby doll shirt with a big 4 logo in the center sends a pretty clear Sue Storm message. Hell, how about an Avengers T-shirt with some fricking female Avengers on it?

Of course, the real problem is that Marvel has no recognizable solo female characters. They have no merchandizing equivalent to Wonder Woman or Supergirl, and this is their own damned fault. Wonder Woman didn't spring fully formed from the Golden Age into the hearts of little girls in the 60s. The only reason she's known to the country at large is because she had a TV show and was in Superfriends. Because someone a few decades went "Yeah, we can go mainstream with this" and they took the leap. It paid off, and now DC has a feminine cash-cow no matter how few women pick up the actual comic books.

No one at Marvel really pushed solo female adventurers like Ms. Marvel or She-Hulk or Black Widow during the live action shows of the 70s or the animated shows of the 90s or even the live action movies of today. All summer long we read articles asking "Where are the female superheroes?" and what does Marvel announce for women in future films after making bank on the up-til-then unknown Iron Man? There's a woman named Natasha in the Iron Man sequel.

They don't have the guts to put out a female James Bond without attaching her to a major male lead. What hope does the poor Wasp have?

Honestly, I wish I could be commending Marvel for this. Even though I'm disgusted that they had to do cootie testing to see if they'd offend their "core audience" with marketing towards women, I'm glad they want to market towards women finally. But I'm underwhelmed. (And I'm not alone.) This offering of groupie-style apparel, little heart pendants and flavored lip gloss is weak, and unless behind it lies a treasure trove of Ms. Marvel tank tops, Valkyrie sundresses, and Black Widow lipstick Marvel is in trouble here. This is just asking girls to attach themselves to the heroes as a love interest. Even Disney doesn't make that mistake. See, it's not the pink and sparkles that appeals to girls with the princess and fairies lines. It's being the hero of the story that appeals there. It's the one who looks like you taking center stage. The one you could be.

For this to really take, Marvel needs a superhero brand for women. They need a brand women identify with and want to emulate. The sort of logo that women get tattoos of so they can feel powerful as women. They need their own equivalent to Wonder Woman, and they've got plenty of characters in the stable with the potential without having to try a cheap knockoff. They just need to pick one and put her out there competently enough.

THERE IS NO NEUTRAL ZONE WHEN IT COMES TO IDENTITY.

It's the way human society is set up.  Sex--the physical characteristics--isn't really a binary, but gender--the social construct--is an either-or deal.  We're taught from birth via stories and songs and interaction with relatives (and really, no matter how neutral you try to raise your kids odds are you have some relative who fucks things up somehow, or the neighbors introduce traditiuonal gender types) that girls are this way and guys are this way.  This is something that affects our lives from very young ages, affects how we see ourselves and how others see us.  When discussing social interaction of any sort, gender is an angle that's always open for discussion.  Always.  Because it has an effect more times than it doesn't.  It's part of our lives, whether we're male or female.

While I'm at, guess what else we're taught about at a very early age?  Race.  You know why?  Because guess what everybody gets categorized into somehow.  Guess what everybody sees the effect of in stories and interactions with other people.  Our society is still set up for race to have a factor.  That's because we're multicultural, and we're making our way through generations of setting the value of one of those cultures above the others.  There are people who are consciously aware of race, and people who aren't, but the messages of our culture--told in stereotypes in the media and in "common knowledge" from our elders--are affecting how we deal with each other.  This goes even if you have people of the same race interacting, because the chance that the conversation would be different if it was one white person and one Asian person rather than two white people makes race a factor in how they interact.

So when discussing social interaction of any kind, race should be open for consideration.  No one should get eyes rolled at them just for bringing a subject that has such a major impact on their life to the table.

Class, sexual orientation, nationality...  All of these are things everyone has!  All of these are things that cultures place value on, things we get fed stereotyped messages about constantly, things that are the very building blocks of our identities.  These are things people take into account when we look at first impressions.  These are things that affect how people interact with each other.

And yeah, it happens in different levels and there's circumstances where things would happen the same way anyway but there's a lot of circumstances where they don't.  We might end up dismissing it as a notable factor.  But it's an natural thought, and odds are even when the primary reason has nothing to do with the demographics of the players, the identities of the people involved are still a secondary or tertiary reason.  And really, if we're trying to get past snap judgments and prejudiced behavior we have to entertain the possibility that it might be affecting how we deal with each other.  We have to at least fucking talk about it.

I understand that there is precious little female space out there, and I understand that Scans_Daily was a community that began with a very female vibe as stated here:

A friend (in a private post) grumbled today about the dismissive attitude of certain commenters (”oh well, it was full of bitching and slash anyway”), declaring that reaction to be part of a broader discomfort that many male fans have with the feminine form of fandom. In response, she more or less said “a man in S_D feels like a woman in a comic shop.”

[Edited to add: I should clarify that the comments below use S_D as a jumping-off point for a broader discussion -- I admit I haven't visited the community in at least a year, and I can't defend or attack whatever it may have become recently, or the reasons for its removal.]

I remember being pretty shocked at the culture of S_D when I first discovered it years ago. It was a thriving community of fans interacting with superhero comics in an entirely different manner than I was used to. But it didn’t feel like “this is how they do it on the internet,” it felt like “this is how they do it when women are in charge.” I soon decided that superhero-comics-fandom (as represented by S_D) was a subset of fandom as a broader entity — that these folks were performing more or less the exact same practices (fanfiction, slash, icon design, roleplay, claiming) on Green Lantern that were being performed on Harry Potter and Stargate Atlantis and every other entertainment property in the world, to some degree.

(I also understand that Leigh's post, as in the editor's note, was not specifically on Scans_Daily right now but on Scans_Daily back then and male versus female space, that's why I'm addressing this here and not in his comments.)

Now, putting aside the fact that in recent years this community had become the female-dominated equivalent of the Official DC Forums--full of griping and misery and hatred and nasty things said about the parentage of writers--there's a factor much more prevalent than demographics. There's the ongoing internet copyright legal fight.

I'm seeing a lot of denial among Scans_Daily defenders. A lot of people who think that what they were doing wasn't the same as the guys on Pirate Bay because the files weren't loaded to their own computers. And that little bit of nitpicking is really annoying me. Yes, personally I found the community harmless to the industry but this "we're better than the file-sharers, we were actually doing marketing's job for them" argument is bullshit. Everyone with a sense of sanity knew this community would get in trouble if the companies ever got a good look at it. This is the one that stretched the fair use law to the limit. That's the one where posters routinely broke the limit on how much of a story they were supposed to scan and nobody mentioned it. That's the one where a story was assembled across several posts. That's the one that people cited whenever I asked how they knew what was happening in a book they were boycotting. You can easily find many bloggers linking there with "Now I won't give Dan Didio any of my money but look what his writers did to Kyle Rayner" in their rants.

I know copyright law is a huge debate in female fandom, but I'd be far more sympathetic to the "we're helping sell more books" argument if were it a large fanfiction and fanart site that got taken down rather than the internet equivalent of reading the books in the comic book store and then putting them back on the shelf.

Sure, it wasn't a download site. There weren't any torrents passed. There were rules against posting the whole book (that were stretched to the limit). But it was Piracy Lite. It was where people went when they didn't know how to find the real internet pirate market and didn't want to leave the safety of livejournal. It was for people who knew a full torrents were illegal but still wanted to catch the books for free. People without the intestinal fortitude for actual piracy. Now I can't speak for the rest of Robot 6, but I'm personally not going to judge someone who passes a file or two anymore than I'm going to judge a jaywalker or someone who walks home with a box of pens from the office supply cabinet. (But if you go to the struggling local comic book store each week, scan the titles on the wall but buy nothing because you download the ones you want from your $60 a month broadband internet connection, I will judge you harshly.) But don't go and argue that ten pages in one post with commentary explaining the continuity behind the story and ten pages in the next post with commentary explaining the continuity behind the story falls under fair use for critical writing or parody. We all know the opinions of "This plot idea sucks" or "You should totally read this miniseries" don't usually need 50% of the artwork reproduced to support them (the movie clips you see on movie reviewer shows are less than 5% of the actual movie, and they tend to support them fine). I know there were full scenes scanned and issues spoiled in order to legitimately argue someone acted out of character or a creator had set something up in a horrible manner, and I know there were a lot of "OMG this scene is so cool you must buy and support this SERIES!!!" posts (one of those posts got me to pick up Manhunter) but that doesn't change the fact that no one made a peep when the point of the post was just to catch you up to date by reproducing the product so you wouldn't actually have to buy the book.

Scans Daily may have gotten some people back into comics, and good for them. And Scans_Daily may have allowed people a look at classic books that they wouldn't otherwise see, and good for them there. (If I may point out, illegal file-sharing sites also let you look at out of print books. Doesn't make them less illegal, unfortunately.) But the more vocal of the community's link referrals seemed to be from the refuse-to-pay-but-can't-look-away variety. The majority of comics criticism is negative, after all, and Scans_Daily was an easy place to link the negative criticisms in and explain why someone who hated the book knew so intimately what was happening between the covers. And this wasn't just outside community, this was in the comments. This was in the member's livejournals. "I'm boycotting DC because they killed my favorite character, but can you believe they did THIS?" "I wouldn't let a penny go to Brian Michael Bendis, but you'll never believe where he's taking the Avengers NOW..." Yeah, the community was diverse--the linkers, the lurkers, the posters and the commenters all came from different attitudes with different goals--but you have to accept that people on the dark side of Scans Daily--the pirates-in-denial--were present and in many cases they were the ones dominating the discussion. The entire concern was in a murky legal space, and a murky moral space. It's easy to see where Livejournal got a bit worried.

And yes, we all know this is not the only place that did this we're-not-actually-pirates thing. We all know this is not the worst place that did it. But this was on Livejournal, owned by a company that is trying desperately to turn a community of female fans into revenue generators for advertising dollars without getting sued by anybody. This was linked to by bloggers and message boarders to explain what they were complaining about in a book they refused to buy. This community was the site of many creator-fan fights.

That's not a masculine-feminine distinction. That's a "Hey, we're the most open group on the internet doing this" distinction.

The reason for such a backlash against the community defenders from retailer-types is not because of the gender of the defenders, but because so many of them seem to be in severe denial about just what they were actually doing on this site. It was reproducing the most important parts of a copyrighted product, and doing so on a site that gained money through advertising revenue. It doesn't matter that it was fun, that you liked each other, that good communities are hard to fin, and that many of you went out and bought the stuff. A lot of your fellow community goers were "sticking it to the Man", and bragging about not buying the books but still knowing what was going on. This entire "we weren't a download site" argument is like saying "oral sex doesn't count towards losing your virginity." Wussy pirates are still pirates.

There's some pride, perhaps, in the visibility Scans_Daily had in a subculture where women are mostly invisible, but that doesn't really help keep Marvel's Mighty Lawyers away from Livejournal, does it?

That said, I do think that if Scans_Daily were a male dominated community it would have not been suspended like this. Why? Because I don't think it would have been on a site like Livejournal. In my experience, that's where the male-female distinction seems to be. Female fans populate social network sites run by panicky male-dominated corporations who want to make money from selling advertising to women, but don't really have the brass ovaries to deal with hosting female interaction on the internet. It's like they expect feathered sugar with a hint of spice and are shocked to discover girls have locker room talk and smoke in the bathroom. Male fan communities seem to be owned and operated by like-minded males, the male-dominated comic company itself, the comic creator who gathers his own fans to his side, or the self-style Pirate King who set up the torrent site specifically for illegal activities and searched around for an ISP that wouldn't check on him too closely. Livejournal's jumpy about their fanbase. They know they need them to keep the traffic up, but they are scared to death to be held liable for what goes on on their site. There've been a few instances with this in the past with fanart and fanfiction, and it was only a matter of time before they freaked out about scans. I don't think male fans are completely safe from legal repercussions for the various degrees of piracy, but they seem to hide better from people who find them unacceptable. They find more sympathetic hosts. Actual pirate sites have their own servers so jumpy ISPs won't slam down on them. Why female fans are so tied to a corporate-run social site that doesn't share their interests I can't say for certain, but that dependency is what leaves female communities more vulnerable to being shut down than male communities.

Mary Sue--for those of you wondering what the hell I'm talking about (though I'd have to wonder what internet you guys have been surfing for the last ten years if you've never heard the term)--is a word used to describe a character that is "too exceptional." It started out innocently enough as a way to deride an insipid character made for Star Trek fanfiction that constantly saved the day and was beloved by all the other characters but was not in the actual show. It was a way to say "Hey, Author, your fantasies are showing" in a little as two words.

As the term spread to other parts of the fan community began to get out of hand. Now "Mary Sue" is still used for something approaching its original purpose--to describe fanfiction characters who manage to save the day in the story, fanfiction characters that are beloved by the entire character and fanfiction characters with overly complicated/angst-filled/fate-defying backstories. But it's also used to describe a character in the actual show/movie/comic book who is a recent cast addition and outshines the rest of the cast, or a character who has been in the cast for a long time but starts to become considerably more awesome as they mature.

All too often it is used to describe the main character of a series.

And way too fucking often is it used to deride any character that isn't a straight white male but turns out to be just as competent or more central to the story than the straight white male characters are

Here's the thing, folks. This is fiction. Yes, there are forms of fiction where someone needs to be as normal as possible, but I'm reading these rants about comic book characters. I've seen the term Mary Sue leveled at Superman, Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Reed Richards, Hal Jordan, Luke Cage, Bucky Barnes, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Rogue, Storm, Black Panther, Renee Montoya, John Stewart, Batwoman, Cassandra Cain, Supergirl, Barbara Gordon, Bruce Wayne... Generally anyone in Gotham City, the Green Lantern Corps, the X-Men, the Avengers, the JLA... Any character worth reading about has been called a "Mary Sue" or a "Gary Stu" or whatever nauseatingly cute rhyme the cranky online fans can come up with.

Comic book characters were designed to be the exceptional soap-operatic angst-filled fate-defying odds-beating fantasy-fulfilling author-self-inserted centers of attention from the most unlikely corners of the universe! That's why they're comic book heroes! They're exceptional! Otherwise, they wouldn't be in the freaking book!!

Of course they're somebody's fantasy! The point is that the writer's fantasy overlaps with the reader's fantasy and we all get a good imaginary adventure out the experience!

Of course they have complicated backstories! It's a serial form of storytelling and you need some twists and turns!

Of course this isn't what your average woman is like! She's a superhero!

And here's the considerably more infuriating thing. As I said above, superhero characters were created to be exceptional. Since most established characters in superhero comics will answer "A" to most of the above after being created to be the center of attention and then spending a few decades in the spotlight, we have a lot of characters fall into some sort of "Grandma Sue" clause. And because most of the old center of attention characters are straight white males, we have a lot of straight white male Grandma Sues running around. Now, because most of the characters who aren't straight white males are either rescued from an incompetent/useless or simply very small side-role in the past or are new creations, we have a bunch of people bashing female, minority and gay characters because they don't pass the Litmus test. (The stupid fucking useless Litmus test that the straight white male characters would bomb even more miserably but they get a pass on since they've been around fifty-plus years.)

So not only are the people complaining about "Mary Sues" in ongoing comics missing the point of superheroes, they are also disproportionately rejecting and deriding characters who aren't straight white males.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is such a thing as specialness overload. There are characters with just too much crap behind them, too much suspension of disbelief involved. There are characters that just don't connect with the reader. There is such a thing as the writer displaying his/her fantasies all over the page and draining the story of all life. But you know what that is? That's bad writing. We know there are writers out there who can handle these kinds of characters well. We know there are writers out there who can balance their fantasies with the necessary suspense and conflict needed for a good story. That's about the skill of the writer, not the composition of the character.

People use this Mary Sue thing like they can come up with a formula for a good or bad character. Geeks seem to want to measure and weigh the soul and subjectivity out of everything. (That tendency is probably how the rules for D&D came about.) We want to be able to say that if the character has more than 20% angst in their backstory, they're a wash no matter what the setting or plot is. We want to be able to take a test that says if you answer "A" to all of the above, no one will like your story but if you answer a mixture of "C" and "D" you will be an instant success. But writing doesn't work that way. Art is subjective.

Honestly, either we have a bunch of superhero fans just don't like a part of the genre--the "super" part"--or we have a bunch of fans translating "Mary Sue" to mean "character I don't like." The latter is just fucking lazy reviewing. If you don't like a comic, give a real reason why. Say you think the character acts like a jerk. Say the character is superficial. Say you don't think the other characters would react to them that way. Say the backstory comes across heavy-handed. Say they whine too much. Say they're out of character. Say you can see the writer's hand behind the character and their thought process, and that is ruining the ability to immerse yourself in the character.

But for heaven's sake, when you say a character is a "Mary Sue" you're telling us that the character is too much of a superhero. That's not saying anything when you're discussing superhero comics.

Our movie reviewer picked up that startlingly unoriginal insight like a chunk of fecal matter hardened by an early January frost (which to say a number of us are wondered just how he brought himself to actually write and post that thought on the internet) and chucked it into the deceptively still waters of female fandom. The result was a beautiful rippling mess of nearly unanimous disapproval, from readers of superhero comics and superhero fans who prefer other media. The young man is still buried under a wave of comments trying to explain that he was just using generalizations. (Please note that a generalization is a logical fallacy, so that's not a good defense.)

The second matter is currently being discussed on this very blog. I'm referring to Bill Willingham's editorial against what he saw as the cause of wicked superhero decadence, a de-emphasis on old-fashioned values of certain Superheroes that include favoring the USA as a country specifically representing those values. Willingham has pledged to go all out in this matter, which should hopefully only have a positive impact on his run on Justice Society of America. The editorial has drawn many fine and interesting comments on this blog, on the original editorial, and is now filtering out to the blogging/podcasting communities. The comments that get my attention here are the ones wrapped up in losing "the American Way" as the source of decadence and complaining about things like the Avengers being sponsored by the UN or the JLA using an abbreviated name.

And the last matter that drew my attention was the Obama-Spiderman special story, produced in honor of the Inauguration. That's received a certain amount of derision from the conservative side of fandom (on their blogs and in comment sections) including those who feel a need to state that the President-Elect is only a "collector", and judging by the context of the conversation I can only guess that they feel that a center-left political does not count as a Real Fan. (Do they think he's only saying he reads Spider-man to make himself look cool?)

Now, what do these three incidents all have in common?

Well, let's boil down superhero stories to their inherent traits. You have a person who obtains through either luck or their own hard work (or a combination of hard work backfiring on them but luckily not killing them, such as with Reed Richards) extraordinary abilities. They choose to use these abilities to combat a force of evil and make the world a better place. There, we've got the "super" and the "hero" covered.

There's nothing in there about what gender you are, about what nationality you are, or about what politics you practice. It's very simple, someone decides to use their powers to fight against evil and use their powers for good.

Yes, the stories are made up and angled based on factors of background, actual politics of the writer sometimes deciding what's good and what's evil, moral relativism or the lack thereof, character mechanics, narrative mechanics, plenty of times when gender, nationality, politics, race, sexuality, religion, and other such categories come into play. But that varies from character to character and story to story.

The thing about all these incidents that caught my attention was that they seemed to all be discussing superheroes and perhaps heroic action literature in general. And the superhero genre at the base doesn't have a political agenda, or identity traits, it stems from the common human desire to be able to wriggle out of your lowly position and right what you perceive as wrongs, and be able change your life--your world, even your universe--for the better.

That's a universal desire right there. I've seen three instances this week alone where people have forgotten that the genre embodies a universal aspect of humanity and assigned traits that aren't inherent to the genre as inherent to the genre or assumed that only people from certain backgrounds might share this desire.

And that's flat-out wrong.