you are iron; and you are strong

Excuse, tumblr!Dad, but what's the big fuss over Ant-Man? Why do people hate it so?

Well, the movie is the nexus of a lot of super problematic shit Marvel has pulled for decades, so there’s a lot to hate.

One: Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, is a domestic abuser. There’s really no way around it. There was an arc in the comics in the…sixties? I’d have to check, I have it in my files, but sixties or seventies, where he was about to be thrown off the Avengers. He invented a robot to attack the Avengers so that he could charge in and save them. His wife Jan found out and tried to stop him, and he beat her. This was unequivocal in the comics: he hit her, and everyone acknowledged that he hit her, and she divorced him explicitly for being an abusive spouse, which carries with it an implication that this may not have been the first time. (In Ults, he’s a straight-up habitual abuser, and nearly murders her before she leaves him.) For a comic book, in the mid-20th century, for a woman to leave her husband because he abused her was AFUCKINGMAZING. But we don’t get that movie – we get the movie about the abuser, instead. 

This is tangled up in another problematic aspect, which is that in order to retcon a lot of Hank’s super erratic behavior, he was written as having undiagnosed bipolar disorder in the (I think) late 90s/early 2000s. This is not only a sort of weird retcon apologia, like it’s somehow okay that he hit Jan because he was mentally ill, but also plays into the trope that people with mental illness are abusive and violent, when it’s actually the case that people with mental illnesses are HUGELY more likely to be abuse survivors than abusers. 

So Ant Man, conceptually, is an incredibly inappropriate character to get his own film to begin with. 

Two: All of this is only semi-relevant since Hank Pym isn’t the Ant-Man of the film; he’s an older man in the film, and he’s presumably mentoring Scott Lang, the second Ant-Man of the comics who has a more sympathetic arc in that he was a thief who became a superhero. Scott Lang is the current Ant-Man in the Ant-Man comics, which are appalling for unrelated reasons. But here’s the upshot: Ant-Man was announced at a time when fans were campaigning really hard for a) a Black Widow movie and b) ANY MOVIE, EVER, WITH A LEAD WHO WASN’T A STRAIGHT WHITE GUY. ANY MOVIE AT ALL, MARVEL. COME ON WORK WITH US HERE. 

Three: To add insult to injury, the ONE GROWN WOMAN in the usual Ant-Man story, Jan van Dyne, a fantastic multiracial fashion designing diva superhero, is dead before the movie even starts. Her entire role, forever, in the Marvel Universe, will be as the retired hero’s dead wife. And that’s fucking pathetic. Jan is one of the best female heroes to come out of the classic Marvel pantheon, she’s cheery and feminine and perky and still kicks ass, she is one of the original Avengers, SHE NAMED THE AVENGERS TEAM, she divorced an abusive husband and became leader of the Avengers, she dated Tony Stark and dumped him for lying to her, and she’s dead. Before she’s even in any movie at all. Leaving Scott’s daughter Cassie Lang as the only woman with any apparent presence so far in the film. Cassie Lang is a child. 

So you know, fuck Ant-Man.

Four: Edgar Wright, of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead and Spaced, is an amazing director, and he walked off the project. Do you know how fucked up this movie probably had to be to get Edgar Wright to walk away from it? PRETTY FUCKED UP. 

Five: Of the many stupid comic book hero concepts to come out of Marvel, “Ant-Man” is widely considered one of the stupidest. I’m not sure I’d 100% agree with this in theory, but it’s a reason many people dislike the film. Because it’s a guy who talks to ants and can make himself really small. 

And I’m not gonna lie, a lot of the footage I’ve seen so far looks very “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”. 

So, that’s five reasons people hate Ant-Man.