itsmeyouidiot said:
Think about it: when was the last time you'd heard of a female superhero that wasn't either related to an existing male superhero besides Wonder Woman?
Compare that to the number of female supervillains that aren't related to other characters. Even if it isn't intentional on the part of the creators, it's still a harmful message.
There are a few problems here, and the first is two-fold: how do you define "unconnected", and how does that standard apply to the rest of a given continuity's characters?
If we're going to say, for example, any connection (team or romantic), to a character of the opposite sex, then very few heroes of
either gender meet that standard. Particularly if we allow for a certain flexibility in when such connections are allowed to have occurred. A given character might be single and unaffiliated
now, after all, but have been in a relationship or on a team at some point in the past. Wonder Woman included. That, incidentally, is the standard that Bob appears to be going for.
Now, the second problem is distinguishing between connections, and simple franchise branding. Sure, there have been several Spider-Women over the course of the past few decades. None of them has ever been all that connected to Peter Parker except through that franchise branding (well, the Ultimate Universe Spider-Woman
is a gender-swapped Peter Parker clone). There are an enormous number of female mutants (X-men Franchise as a whole) or other team members (Team Franchise) who are themselves unique characters, otherwise unconnected in a franchise sense to any male hero.
Ignore franchise branding for iconic characters and teams, and it's not so much a matter of "good"
female characters being connected to male characters, as "good" characters being connected
to other "good" characters. Account for franchise branding and it's not a "patriarchal" requirement that good female characters be connected to male characters, but rather a cold truth that genuinely
new characters generally don't have the draw to carry a book. So they're typically introduced as a part of a new team, a new member of an iconic team, or in connection to an existing character, which given the era in which most of those iconic characters originated, is typically male.
To flip the argument for the sake of argument: Villains are most often loners; unaffiliated with any teams, without personal connections, and
male. What's the message we're sending there?
, and who doesn't love a good villain songs?
