Be it the epic fantasy world of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon or the sci-fi sphere of Marvelverse – female characters can’t catch a respite from misogyny anywhere. It does make for compelling and layered storytelling, especially in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, where Jennifer Walters’ Hulk becomes the perfect vessel to tell the story of the price women pay for legitimate anger. Hulks being literal rage monsters, turned superheroes, plays into this exploration stupendously well.
Even though Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk would insist the show is a legal procedural, it does get to play around strict confines of labels. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is a feminist satire, an origin story, and an overall fun show that manages to break away from many regular MCU tropes.
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How She-Hulk Establishes Its Tone Right off the Bat
Marvel Studios
In a lot of ways, She-Hulk is a lesson in Feminism 101. She-Hulk’s biggest villain is big ol’ patriarchy. But a lifelong experience in dealing with this all-pervasive oppressive structure has also given Maslany’s Jennifer Walters an edge over her cousin Bruce Banner, the OG Hulk. Banner spent years trying to control his Hulk rage and reconcile his two personalities. He went through despairing phases of isolation and dejection. But barring the initial freakout, Walters doesn’t have to go through any of these struggles. While her explanation is reductive, it works because She-Hulk is a comic book story come to life in TV format.
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Right off the bat, Walters lets Banner in on her secret, saying:
There are no mincing words with setting the tone of the show. Here we have a superhero who has toed the line all her life and shrunk herself like society expects its women to do. The MCU heroes have faced everything from intergalactic threats to enemies across parallel universes. But She-Hulk ends up being the target of puny incels, showcasing how even a superhero cannot escape the wrath of toxic masculinity. When the group that calls itself Intelligentsia leaks a non-consensually made private video of hers, Jennifer Walters has a very human reaction; she gets furious. But the one time she unleashes her legitimate anger, she ends up potentially losing it all.
“I’m great at controlling my anger. I do it all the time: When I’m catcalled in the street; when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day because if I don’t, I will get called emotional, or difficult, or might just literally get murdered. So I’m an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you.”
She becomes a media spectacle, ends up facing character assassination, and her professional reputation is besmirched in front of everyone. Walters is also forbidden from turning into her Hulk avatar as a consequence – a punishment far harsher than what Banner ever had to face, even though he has repeatedly wreaked havoc on far grander scales.
How Jennifer Reclaims Her Own Narrative
One of the coolest abilities She-Hulk has is that she can break the fourth wall and speculate along with the viewers about what is happening on her show. After all, she is the first Marvel superhero who broke the fourth wall for comic relief. In the season one finale episode “Whose Show Is This?,” Walters takes things up a notch when she climbs out of her screen to enter the real world She-Hulk writer’s room through the documentary series Marvel Studios: Assembled on the Disney+ platform.
RELATED: Why She-Hulk Is the MCU’s Most Daring Show Yet
The audiences might have assumed that a man must be running the show, but it turns out to be even more farcically absurd than we thought. Patriarchy is not always a literal man out to ruin things for all the women in this world. Sometimes it is just a non-sentient system put in place that keeps running like a well-oiled machine all on its own.
A hilariously meta interaction with K.E.V.I.N. (Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus), an artificial intelligence bot claiming to be the one running everything at MCU, leads She-Hulk, aka Walters, to do something astounding. She reclaims her narrative by convincing K.E.V.I.N. to rewrite the finale ending.
Creator and head writer of She-Hulk, Jessica Gao, had written almost 20 versions of the finale. She had a classic dilemma that she worked right into the show:
Instead of a chaotic fight involving Todd Phelps’ Hulk, Abomination, Banner’s Hulk, and Titania thrown into the mix of a bunch of incels baying for She-Hulk’s blood, we get something almost reasonable. The ending is not entirely unpredictable, but it gives Walters room to exert her agency and get justice for herself on her very own terms.
“I started feeling like, ‘Well, this is a Marvel show, I better give them the classic Marvel ending. Big villain fight, big finale.’ But it never felt right because I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”
After her interaction with the baseball hat-wearing AI, Walters returns to her show, where we see Phelps getting arrested and her vowing to see him in court to hold him further accountable for criminally harassing her.
This is the utopian version of fairness most women dream of in the real world. Everyone knows that, realistically, a few bad eggs – aka horrendous injustices and those who enjoy inflicting them on others – will always exist. But as long as due process comes through and the court of public opinion doesn’t turn our private pain into public amusement, it is a win for feminism.
