Here’s a crazy idea:
Reiterated plot device (Rape advances male character’s position) makes the very feminist point that such is inevitable in a strictly patriarchal system.

I dont think they are using rape “to advance a male character’s story.” This is a woman who lives in a castle populated by rapists and murderers. The fact that she hasn’t had attempted rapes every day is pretty surprising. I think they are just trying to show what would realistically happen given that environment. Not…

It’s time to accept what kind of show this is.

Nope. Easily dealt with, frankly: walls. Or if you want to be nasty, mesh walls made of carbon monofilament.

Maybe the issue wasn't that you were planning to write a rape scene, but that the only purpose for your rape scene was to motivate a male character. It's not the rape scene that's the problem. It's the fact that you, the author, should have more respect for your characters than to simply make them objects that you use…

I just want to say Lance Hunter on Agents of Shield is pretty much Hawkeye from the comics but without the arrows. He’s divorced from Mockingbird, he’s sarcastic, and he reacts to weird stuff the same way Hawkeye does.

You know... there’s a lot of hype from the comics’-fanbase, and the internet-interest for that short played a big part in getting this movie made, but if no-one goes out to watch it and it tanks, then the movie-studios won’t be making many more films based on fan-noise for quite a while.

Agreed. Though in fairness, it was hinted at *EVERSOSLIGHTLY* in the Red Room flashback scene, when the handgun target was replaced with a bound/hooded victim.

To be fair, she did literally call herself a “monster” because she can’t have kids. That’s pretty bad now that I think about it.

When she was referring to herself as a monster I took it as her being turned into an assassin as a kid was what she was referring to and not that she had been sterilized. Too much parsing and not enough taking into context out there.

Also, are we really picking apart the fact that the calm-Hulk-down move is called a “lullaby”? Hulk is like a giant, raging child. It makes total sense. The fact that Natasha is the key just speaks to their relationship.

Never saw her actually shoot him, but yeah, there was a guy with a bag over his head tied to a chair, that she had to kill.

She can’t just be the coolest aunt, or have made the valid choice that, as an assassin and spy, maybe kids are not in the cards for her. Or even the more radical choice that she just doesn’t want them. No, she can’t ever have babies, so her life is ruined. She is an incomplete woman.

People keep bringing this up. I think the reveal of her sterilization had more to do with her relationship with Banner than it being the crowning moment in her backstory. And as others have repeated, the tragedy of her sterilization isn’t that she can’t have kids, it’s that she had that choice taken away.

There was no “red ledger reveal” that we were promised. Period.

And 14 year old me — a girl. To see that a muscles and small breasts and no make up was beautiful went a long way toward my self-acceptance.

This is why I loved it as a 12-year-old boy.

I agree with what Eric said. And to add to it—to the best of my knowledge, Alien was the first true horror movie to take place in space. Yes, it has science fiction trappings and tropes, but at its heart, it's a story about The Bad Place—The Haunted House.

Hey man, don't let all the joke haters get you down. Stand your ground.

Despite not being in any sort of physical danger, Zimmerman still plans to shoot DMX.