Captain Marvel's gender exchange and the problematic story of Heroes' "Girl Versions"

By Meg Downey

Full spoilers follow for Captain Marvel.

The MCU is certainly no stranger to major character revisions – some historical superheroes simply do not translate well from screen to page. These are usually relatively innocuous things: change strangers into friends, tweak superpowers, revise bad guys. But with Captain Marvel, one of the changes to Carol Danvers' original story is anything but minor. This is perhaps one of the most important updates made by the MCU to a hero since the launch of the franchise almost 11 years ago.

Wendy Lawson, of Annette Bening, is and is not a character in Carol's comic book story. This was a Kree scientist named Mar-Vell based on Earth in secret who played a direct role in Carol's story. But in comics, Wendy was Walter – still secretly Mar-Vell, but a soldier and scientist rather than a woman, and the original Marvel captain. On the surface, this seems to be a fairly simple pivot. Carol and Walter were major characters in Carol's life before their actual identities as Kree infiltrators were revealed. They both played a direct role in Carol's story. They both inspired him to become a hero. as Mrs. Marvel, the female counterpart par excellence of Captain Marvel. For Wendy, this meant that Carol became a direct Captain Marvel herself.

The trope of male heroes discovering "girl versions" of their own is not an invention of Captain Marvel. Far from it, the phenomenon can go back to the age of money and money when superhero comics introduce characters such as Supergirl and Batwoman in order to support sales across multiple demographic groups. The formula was repeated over and over again for the same results: a male hero would have some sort of original story, an adventure for a moment, before stumbling upon a woman – a loving interest, a distant relative or a colleague civil – who inevitably fall into the superheroic lifestyle by their side. Sometimes this meant that the woman had her own accident that reflected the original, at other times she discovered a secret identity, fell into the hands of a villain or learned a strange secret truth about her. -even. No matter how it happened, the end results have always been the same: a series of female spin-offs succeeding their well-established male counterparts.

Carol summarized the formula in more ways than one. She was empowered directly by Walter himself, as a result of an abnormal accident that married their DNA. His original costume was an inexplicably more revealing version of Walter's body suit and even his name – Mrs. Marvel – was a lesser variation than Walter's. own code name Captain Marvel.

But the real problem, beyond all the clumsy external markers of a "one-on-one" character, was what it meant for the stories that these new female heroes were able to spotlight. This is no secret, the history of comics has its share of narrative problems – rhythms that now seem embarrassing or deaf for modern readers – but the life of the female derivative characters was a mark particular of weird. With their identities almost completely devoted to everything that would serve the story of their proverbial ancestors, the story of heroes like Mrs. Marvel quickly became a complex and contradictory canvas that embodies the comings and goings between their own independent narratives and anyone's ones they were based on. It meant touch-ups, original story reviews, power changes, costume changes, identity changes – really, you name it. These were women who were designed to be as elastic and liminal as possible so that they could integrate where and when they needed to motivate, reinforce, fall in love or annoy the men in their lives. Even at the best of times, it meant an inherent lack of accessibility; To truly understand Ms. Marvel's stories, one had to understand Mar-Vell and all the luggage that came from it.

But the MCU has indeed broken Carol's cycle and her complex and troubling story. By surgically removing Walter and replacing him with Wendy, Carol's story has been transformed into an element that actually serves her, rather than serving the hero who preceded her. Wendy was never Captain Marvel, but she was Mar-Vell. She inspired Carol to surpass herself, faster, as the movie's slogan says, but she never put Carol in a position where she was beholden to Mar-Vell's legacy. In the MCU, Carol may have to sort through her personal story, but this story belongs to her completely, not to Wendy or any other hero in Carol's life.

This may seem like a small change, but the simplest medicine is sometimes the most effective. Carol Danvers is finally released from her published history as a maze, rid of the complexity that accompanied her before, and escaped the headache-inducing history that was integral to characters like she's been in the comics for decades. And all it took was Annette Bening, a name change and some MCU magic.

To learn more about Captain Marvel, check out our review, watch the cast selection that Avenger Captain Marvel could beat in a fight, find out why Nick Fury did not mention Captain Marvel before, find out how the movie pays tribute to Stan Lee, and learn all you need to know about Captain Marvel's cat goose.