Anonymous asked:
asocialjusticeleague answered:
Terribly, severely underrated. And for a reason. Faora is the one part of this film that mainstream feminists cannot assail in their quest to prove that this movie has misogynist bones (it doesn’t, it exists within a misogynist genre, but the film itself practices some outrageous feminism they would rather not notice.)
Faora is everything they asked for. She’s a female villain with complicated and understandable motives, her armor is functional and feminine, and sufficiently protects her throat and vital organs, she gets to kick the heroes ass HARD and is never punished for it by relinquishing her dignity, and she’s in a position of power relative to her commanding officer. She is the strong female character, she is made to order for women who believe that putting women in ass-kicking roles is the pinnacle of feminism in the action genre.
And yet, I never hear a damn thing about her, and that is simply because she doesn’t support their arguments that Snyder is a misogynist toolbag who makes Michael Bay movies from a Michael Bay perspective. It doesn’t support their arguments that women are just damsels in the DCEU (neither does what Lois is doing in this film, but it’s easier to twist that way.)
So we really don’t talk about Faora, but we should, because she does some of the coolest shit in the movie in my opinion. I am OBSESSED with her “evolution” speech. Like, that’s more than just trash talk. She is a direct product of a culture that Jor and Lara literally thought was better off dying out.
Her belief in the purity of her motives, that “evolution always wins,” is a classic philosophical debate with not just implications of a society that was totally cool with hypothetical or literal ethnic cleansing through genetic engineering. I asked my students to think about the whiteness of Krypton and while I was not surprised that not one of them really questioned it, none of them imagined that it might be intentional either.
The more I hear from misogynists who hate this movie the more I believe that people fail to understand these films simply because they are not in the habit of paying attention to the actions or motives of the female characters, because if you watch and listen to Foara, it tells you A LOT about Zod. It tells you a lot about what the conflict at the climax of this film is really about.
I have seen this movie hundreds of times, so I may have an analytical edge on most folks, but I also see that a vast majority of those reactions pretend like characters like Foara ARE just there for aesthetic, when they’re all in fact intergral parts of the story being built.
