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Remember the whole #WheresGamora thing where they left Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the one female team member off most of the Guardians of the Galaxy shirts and backpacks? Remember how the male toys for Star Wars Rebels came out first? You know how hard it is to find Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) toys in Target when all the guys are easy to find? Now consider what that does to little girls — and to little boys when we’re thinking about who’s important on the team.

Our friends over at TheMarySue noticed that Marvel Canada may have forgotten that Black Widow when they tweeted about Avengers: Age of Ultron last night. They said, “The demi-god, the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist & the super-soldier – who are you most excited to see in ?” The Internet response was overwhelmingly that everyone wanted to see Black Widow. And Scarlet Witch.

What else do we have to do to get the powers that be to remember that representation does matter? Even in silly things like tweets. Even as a little kid, I knew that it wasn’t right that Princess Leia was pretty much the only woman in Star Wars. When it manifested a few years ago with a public outcry from geek around the world when first grader Katie Goldman was bullied for carrying a Star Wars water bottle because Star Wars was for boys, it was obvious how little progress we’ve made. This makes a difference. Stop forgetting female fans or we’ll go elsewhere for our geek entertainment. Or better yet, we’ll make it ourselves.

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Jenna Busch

Jenna Busch is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Legion of Leia and has hosted and written for sites like Nerdist, ComingSoon.net, Metro, Birth. Movies. Death., IGN, AOL, Huffington Post and more. She co-hosted Cocktails With Stan with the legendary Stan Lee and has appeared on Attack of the Show, Fresh Ink, Tabletop with Wil Wheaton, in the documentary She Makes Comics, on NPR and Al Jazeera America, and has covered film/TV/gaming/comics for years. She's currently a co-host on Most Craved. She's been published in the comics anthology Womanthology, is a chapter author for Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind, Game of Thrones Psychology and Star Trek Psychology and more, and owns a terrifying amount of swords and 20-sided dice. There are also those My Little Pony trailer voice overs that give one nightmares.

1 CommentLeave a comment

  • Well, to be fair, they did leave out Hulk, Hawkeye, Vision and Quicksilver as well. I think that whoever wrote that was simply assuming people only cared about the “Big Three” (Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America).