Brie Larson has vanished.
A star of Avengers: Endgame, one of the biggest movies of all time, was completely excised from a modified pirated version of the film — along with everything else in the film seen as feminist or gay.
An anonymous fan edited out shots, scenes and characters in a "defeminized" version circulating now on an illegal streaming site. As well as losing Larson's character, Captain Marvel, the defeminized edit is missing a scene where Hawkeye teaches his daughter to shoot. ("Young women should learn skills to become good wives and mothers and leave the fighting to men," the editor opined in an accompanying document.) The role of Black Panther is minimized. ("He's really not that important.") Spider-Man doesn't get rescued by women characters anymore. ("No need to.") And male characters no longer hug.
"I think what we've seen, as fan culture and geek culture moves from the margins to the mainstream," [Suzanne Scott, a professor of film and media studies at the University of Texas] says, "is that a particular set — and I should note, a small percentage — of predominantly white straight male fans feel like their culture that they had ownership and claim over for many, many generations is sort of slipping away from them, as that culture gets bigger and inevitably more diverse."
A similar "chauvinist cut" of 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi removed key scenes of women making decisions, giving orders, having ideas and fighting in battle.
Edit: I see some people saying this shouldn't be signal boosted, but I want to stress three points why I think it's worth mentioning, even on this site. First, people should be made aware that this continues to happen; it happened with The Last Jedi and it's happening still. Second, that this is a thing that happens, as the University of Texas film professor points out, in "fan culture and geek culture" communities, which we have abundantly here. And, third, that because we have those communities here, that good people in those communities should police them, report users who keep bringing up how everyone hates Brie Larson, that she "broke the law" in Captain Marvel, that Holdo in The Last Jedi "acts irrationally", "is wearing a dress and not a military uniform," or "has purple hair, and who could take that seriously" as legitimate criticism, all of which has appeared here.
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