The “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” finale came and went to much fanfare…from the media. Everyone else doesn’t seem to be too impressed with the show, nor should they be. Disney/Marvel’s bastardization didn’t just happen to the beloved character of She-Hulk, but to a multitude of characters that appeared within the show, especially Daredevil.
While the show masked itself as a semi-solo outing for a superhero, what it really was underneath the flash and bad CGI was a self-insert by the writers who have revealed themselves as man-hating feminists who, somewhat ironically, want nothing but a good man. As the writers recently said, “She-Hulk” was meant to be a show about navigating a sex life as a career woman, but also something that kids could watch. Like a “Sex and the City” with superheroes.
(READ: Disney’s ‘She-Hulk’ Writers Wanted to Make a Show Tackling Sex That Kids Could Watch)
It didn’t work, and despite professional critics trying to hold the show up as some sort of masterpiece, audience scores (the ones that actually count) continue to display low approval numbers.
The best after-season takedown came from Nerdrotic, and if you’d like to know more about how badly this show failed, I advise you to watch Gary Buechler’s video on the subject.
But a more interesting point about the show after it was all said and done came from Variety where the head writer was interviewed about the show. It was there that quite a bit of the writer’s intentions with the storyline was laid bare.
In the interview with Variety, head writer Jessica Gao wanted to create a show that attacked the “trolls” that hate on shows like “She-Hulk”:
Our writers room opened three years ago. The fact that we were able to predict what the reaction was going to be, what a lot of the trolling comments were going to be, really shows how very tired and unoriginal these trolls are. That really tickled me because the little troll that lives inside of me really loves trolling the trolls.
Lead actress Tatiana Maslany heaped praise on Gao for her troll-baiting:
Jessica Gao is a genius and knows about the culture we’re living in and her position in it when she’s writing these stories about a woman superhero. She knows what that response is going to be. As a cast, it was delightful sending each other these troll responses, like “Oh my god, give them a week and then they’re going to literally see this pop up verbatim in the show and become the villains of the show.” It was thrilling.
To be clear, the main focus of this Variety article was about trolling “trolls.” This means that this was, in effect, one of the main points of this show. They wanted to make something that would make people angry.
This tells us quite a few things and none of them look good for the She-Hulk writers. Moreover, this doesn’t look good for any writers that are injecting woke ideologies into programs.
For one, when creating a show your aim is to appeal to as large a group of people as possible. Especially with superheroes, you want that character to become a beloved figure that people talk about, quote, and also very importantly, buy merch around. What the writers of “She-Hulk” admitted is that they wanted to create a divisive show that would anger people on purpose. They made a conscious effort to be divisive.
Right off the bat, they set this show up for failure, but this lean into trolling the “trolls” looks like a cover for a failure they knew was coming down the pipe. The writers admitted to not knowing much about what they were creating a show around be it courtroom dramas to She-Hulk herself. Their true aim was to create a feminist show that denigrated men and promoted the writer’s personal life choices. It’s been pretty clear over the past few years that these kinds of shows don’t exactly sell well, but political ideologues can’t help themselves. They’re creating failures because they feel like they need to for the moral health of society.
In short, they created the “troll the trolls” aspect of the storyline to hide behind their show’s inevitable failure and make it seem like they’re getting the best of their critics. They think it’s a win for feminism. Sadly for them, it didn’t work. The show still failed in terms of audience rating and viewership. I’m going to guess merch sales will probably be abysmal too.
But most importantly of all is the reveal that this strategy was only taken because of the audience’s disapproval of this kind of injection of politics into escapism. We’re now buying the narrative and vocally opposing it. They hate that we’re not willingly putting the hook in our mouths, and “She-Hulk” was an example of them lashing out at the audience for it.
The bitter truth about these “trolls” that Gao and Maslany refer to aren’t actually trolls. These people are fans of the source material, regular television consumers looking for a good storyline, or just people looking to find a show that lets them get away from it all for a minute. Gao and her writers took a well-known character and transformed it into a message delivery system for their own politics, beliefs, and lifestyles. It’s the same thing that’s happened to many characters and franchises before it that flopped miserably.
The “trolls” the She-Hulk team thinks they’re lashing out at are really just regular people who want something better than message-first storytelling and socio-political tantrum-throwing disguised as a fresh entry for a well-known IP. While some of these audience-born critics are more well-known than others, they represent a growing resentment and rejection of the woke intrusion into entertainment.
Studios and entertainment companies would do well to mark these failures and understand what audiences actually want. Some seem to be catching on, but as far as Disney/Marvel goes, they seem clueless and they will fail until the company can financially stand to fail no longer.