Tag: karen page

the5thyearfreshman:

Karen Page is so important like really

• In the comics her character is the worst example of “fridging”, which is where a female character is put through trauma to cause angst for the male hero
• Karen goes through plenty of trauma in the series however none of it is to facilitate Matt’s angst (he doesn’t even know about most of it???) it’s all to make Karen grow as a character and build her up as a hero
• The kind of trauma Karen goes through is not the sort of shit you typically see a love interest endure
• Literally: Karen goes through so much shit and it never even goes near rape-territory. She is proof that you can write a strong female character who goes through horrible things without having to sexualize her trauma 
• On that note, there is this stereotypical scene in films where after a female character is raped, you see her washing off the shame in the shower. It’s a cliche, and it has sexist connotations because it implies that women should feel dirty after they are raped. Meanwhile, men will get this washing off shame in the shower scene after they do something terrible, like kill someone: they’re washing off the literal or metaphorical blood.
• KAREN GETS A (NON-SEXUAL TOO!) SHOWER SCENE WHERE SHE WASHES OFF THE METAPHORICAL BLOOD AFTER KILLING A MAN. 
• She definitely cannot be replaced by a sexy lamp – much of the plot is actually instigated by her investigating.
• Which is really important? Because Matt has an actual legal parter who the writer’s could have chosen to push the non-Daredevil side of the plot forward and have him doing the investigating with Karen occasionally helping him out, but instead the writers decided to make Karen be the instigator
• And they do it in such a way that they somehow avoid the “stupid nosy girl who gets in over her head and the hero has to save her from her own messes” cliche. Karen’s investigations are never portrayed as her being nosy, but rather her being tenacious and driven. Plus she gets herself out of her own messes.
• Again: she kills a man. By shooting him. Several times. In a self-defense yet morally ambiguous way.
• She’s morally ambiguous in a way women are often not allowed to be in fiction without being painted as a “femme fatal”, yet is still one of the most moral characters on the show.
• There’s this roundtable that Emma Thompson was on where she said she wouldn’t do roles where the woman says to the man “don’t do that brave stupid thing.” Which is something you see in comics all the time. Yet in Daredevil, we often see the reverse of Matt telling Karen “don’t do that brave stupid thing.”
• She is a strong character without being written with only qualities that are typically reserved for men. One of her most important qualities is her compassion, something that usually is shown as a weakness but in Karen it drives not only her plot line forward, but the entire plot line of the show.
• It needs to be reiterated: WITHOUT KAREN PAGE THERE IS NO PLOT. Fisk would have razed Hell’s Kitchen with little to no problems  if Karen hadn’t investigated him and given Matt the information he needed to go after Fisk both legally and as Daredevil
• Usually when a woman develops a sympathetic relationship toward a serial killing man, it’s because she falls in love with him. But Karen’s odd friendship with Frank was a result of her empathetic abilities and the fact that she killed a man and was projecting her guilty conscience onto him. Which is so much more interesting and compelling, and  typically the sort of well thought-out writing reserved for relationships between two men.
• And Finally: 
• “I believe in protecting women”
• *dryly* “Thanks. From all of us.”
• So in summation, Marvel movies need to take some serious pointers from Marvel netflix shows about how to write women. 
• Also Karen Page is fucking incredible.