marvel loves to reuse names (part 1)

Marvel Comics burst onto the scene in 1939, and since then, they’ve been recycling names. Originally I was going to look at the howevermany most popular names of 1970 (since that’s a nice distance between 1939 and 2022, I figured) but then I thought… maybe I’d look at the most popular names in the US of every year between 1939 and now.

And list how many Marvel characters (comics or cinematic; characters with cinematic incarnations are italicized) have those names, or variants of those names, or names that could have the same nicknames, or etc. etc. Or, well, how many Marvel characters have those names that show up in the first page of a search on the Marvel wiki, because I’m not going to go through 20+ pages of links when I’m already going through 83 years of names. Occasionally I remember another character who fits but isn’t on the first page of results, and they’re in there too.

I’m probably going to look into more of these, it’s very interesting to me even though it’s largely just lists.

Edit: I’ve gone back and looked at the character list on the wiki for complete totals. Of note: I am not including real-life figures who just appear momentarily (i.e. real-life newscasters or political figures) but I am including real-life figures who appear in the plot significantly (i.e. AUs or when writers write themselves in as characters that affect the plot). I’m also not including any of the animal pun names or dumb parody names from the What The -?! stories.

Robert (1939, 1953): “bright fame”

• Robert: Robert Abbey, Robert “Bobby” Andrews (H-Beta), Robert Arnold, Robert B., Robert Baldwin (Speedball), Robert Barnes, Robert Wayne “Rob” Bartlett, Robert Baxter (Mad-Dog), Robert Bell, Robert Benson, Robert Bentley, Robert Bethell, Robert “Bobby” Blackthorne (Vengeance), Robert Blake, Robert Brasman (Brass Bishop), Robert “Bobby” Bronson, Robert Brooks, Robert Bruce (the Banner), Robert Burchill (Awesome Android), Robert Callaghan (Yokai), Robert Callahan, Robert Campbell (Prototype), Robert “Bobby” Carr, Robert “Bobby” Carter, Robert C. Chalmers, Robert Chandler, Robert Chapin, Robert Chatlin, Robert Christansen, Robert “Bob” Coleman (Whizzer), Robert Coulson, Robert “Bob” Courtney, Robert “Bobby” Crosby, Robert Dalquist (Hanling Killer), Robert Dammer, Robert de Quincy, Robert Edward Degrogotti, Robert Delgado (Spitball), Robert Delint, Robert Dennehey, Robert Deptford (x2), Robert Devon, Robert “Bob” Diamond, Robert Dietzel, Robert “Bob” Dixon, Robert Doherty (Captain Empire), Robert “Bob” Dolan (Steam Rider), Robert “Bob” Doom, Robert “Bobby” Drake (Iceman), Robert “Bob” Ervin Howell, Robert Farrell (Robert Racer), Robert Fielder, Robert Fong (Adder), Robert “Flash” Foster, Robert Frederick Forsythe (Ansel), Robert Frank (Whizzer), Robert Frank Jr., Robert Fricks, Robert Frost (Thomas Randolph), Robert “Bob” Gerrard, Robert “Bobbie” Gnucci, Robert Goldman, Robert Goldstein (Robert Jay), Robert “Bobby” Gomorra, Robert Goom, Robert Grayson (Uranian), Robert Greenbaum (Marathon), Robert Gregson, Robert Greville, Robert “Bobby” Grillo, Robert “Bobby” Gross, Robert Hagon, Robert Halloway (Angel), Robert Hammer, Robert Hanklin, Robert “Bob” Hanson, Robert Hanyok, Robert Hao (Chaka Khan), Robert Hardin (Atom Bob), Robert “Bob” Harras, Robert Harrison, Robert Hellsgaard, Robert “Bob” Hendry, Robert Herman (Glob Herman), Robert Hinds, Robert Hoskins, Roert Huang, Robert Hughes, Robert Hunter (Nitro), Robert Ingersol, Robert “Bob” Jameson, Robert Jema, Robert Jermyn, Robert Julia, Robert “Bobby” Karnelli, Robert “Bob” Edward Kelly, Robert “Bob” Kendall, Robert Kirkman, Robert Knight, Robert “Rob” Kohl, Robert “Bob” Kyle, Robert “Bob” Landers, Robert “Bob” Lang, Robert “Bobby” Lathrop, Robert “Bobby” LeBeau, Robert Leonard, Robert Leong, Robert Lime (Bunraku), Robert Livingston, Robert Madigan, Robert Trevanian Mallory, Robert Markham (Morpheus), Robert “Robbie” Marks III, Robert “Slugger” Marone, Robert Martin (x2), Robert L. Maverick (Red Hulk), Robert “Bob” McCoy, Robert Mackenzie, Robert McNamara, Robert Meridian, Robert Michaud, Robert Minoru, Robert Mitchell, Robert Monahan, Robert Montgomery, Robert Montoya, Robert “Bobby” Morris, Robert Morse, Robert Motz, Robert Mugabe, Robert Munfrey, Robert Nathan, Robert Nazario (Quickstart), Robert “Bob” Newell, Robert Nicolle (Scavenger), Robert “Bob” O’Bryan, Robert O’Hara, Robert “Bobby” Oceanic, Robert “Bob” William Paine (Black Fox), Robert Phalen, Robert Plesko (Sigmund), Robert Plunder, Robert Putnam, Robert “Bob” Raleigh, Robert “Reb” Ralston, Robert “Bobby” Reid, Robert Reynolds (Sentry), Robert Rheingold, Robert Rickard (Agent U), Robert Rider (Talonar), Robert “Bob” Robertson, Robert “Bob” Roland, Robert Ross (Ben Rothner), Robert “Bob” Rummel, Robert “Bob” Russo (Captain America), Robert “Bobby” Russo, Robert Sanchez, Robert Sanchez Jr., Robert Sanchez Sr., Robert “Bobby” Saunders, Robert “Bob” Scott, Robert “Bobby” Seale, Robert Seever, Robert “Bobby” Shaw, Robert Shine, Robert “Bob” Shlottman, Robert Smith (Bronco Bob), Robert Smith (Slimey), Robert Snipes, Robert Stanley, Robert “Bob” Starr, Robert “Bobby” Steele, Robert Sterns, Robert Strong (Captain Strong), Robert Sutcliffe, Robert Takahama, Robert “Rob” Takiguchi, Robert Tanaka, Robert Tempia, Robert Templeton, Robert Thaldon, Robert “Bobby” Tisdell, Robert “Robbie” Tomlin, Robert Travis, Robert James Urquhart III (V1), Robert Varick, Robert Washington (Improved), Robert Wentworth, Robert Wiacek, Robert Wilkerson, Robert Windheart, Robert Winters, Robert Wynn (Sonos Rex), Robert Zepheniah (Mentat), Robert _ (x2)
• Robby: Robby Kyle
• Robbie: Robbie “Rob” Carosella, Robbie Fleckman, Robbie Robertson, Robbie Rodriguez (El Guapo), Robbie Thompson (Manipulator), Robbie (Prism)
• Rob: Rob Bartoli, Rob Daltry, Rob Fortune (Dice), Rob Little, Rob McCaully, Rob Peterson, Rob Silverman, R.O.B.
• Roberto: Roberto Aviar (Raven), Roberto Carlos, Roberto Cassada, Roberto “Bobby” Da Costa (Sunspot), Roberto Dawber, Roberto DeNatale, Roberto Ferrar (Taurus), Roberto Gonzago, Roberto Gonzales, Roberto Kowalski, Roberto Perón, Roberto Revuelta, Roberto “Robbie” Reyes (Ghost Rider), Roberto Rinaldo, Roberto “Rhythm” Ruiz, Roberto Strati, Roberto Trefusis, Roberto Velasquez (Bantam)
• Robin: Robin Borne (Hobgoblin), Robin Braxton (Gladiatrix), Robin Chapel, Robin Hawkins, Robin Hinton, Robin Parrish, Robin Ronalds, Robin Stroud, Robin Vega, Robin Wise (Boggart) (10)
• Robyn: Robyn Hanover, _ (Robyn Hood), Robyn Hölm, Robyn Meiser Malt, Robyn _
• Robinson: Robinson Knight
• Bob: Bob Aken, Bob Lee Anderson, Bob Brant, Bob Camp, Bob Carter, Bob Clayton, Bob Cord, Bob Cratchit, Bob Dobalina, Bob Edwards, Bob Gallagher, Bob Garrett, Bob Hardin, Bob Herne, Bob Higgins, Bob James, Bob Jones IV, Bob King, “Babyface” Bob Layton, Bob Loeser, Bob McKnight, Bob Oppenheimer, Bob Ranks, Bob Reuben, Bob Smitts, Bob Stiratt (Patch), Bob Todd, Bob Totebind, Bob Willing, Bob (Inferno Baby), Bob _
• Bobb: Bobb _
• Bobo: Bobo Cullen, Bobo _ (x3)
• Bobby: Bobby Beisbol, Bobby Boorstein, Bobby Boyle, Bobby Brady, Bobby Chance, Bobby Dazzler, Bobby Drummond, Bobby Fish, Bobby Fortunado, Bobby Gittes, Bobby Hemmings, Bobby Sue Hollis, Bobby Martin, Bobby McHenry, Bobby Oxford, Bobby Peculo, Bobby Petrovic, Bobby Sioan, Bobby Soul, Bobby Tyler, Bobby van Abst, Bobby Warren, Bobby_, Bobby _ (x2)
• Bobbi: Bobbi Chase (Blindside), BOBBi
• Bobbie: Bobbie-Jo Banner, Bobbie Sue Banner, Bobbie Drew, Bobbie Haggert
• Barbara: Barbara “Barbie” Bannister, Barbara Barrucci, Barbara Burns, Barbara Clark, Barbara “Barb” Coleman, Barbara Cummins, Barbara DeGioia (Blazeye), Barbara Diaz, Barbara “Bobby” Farrel, Barbara Freeman, Barbara Gruber (Mother Matrix), Barbara Guillermos, Barbara Gordon Hardy (Black Bat), Barbara Jillette, Barbara Kaxton, Barbara Ketch, Barbara King, Barbara Masterson, Barbara McDevitt (Quickfire), Barbara “Bambi” Modica, Barbara (/occasionally Roberta) “Bobbi” Morse, Barbara Denton Norriss (Valkyrie), Barbara O’Brien, Barbara “Barb” Petrovic, Barbara Rave, Barbara “Barbie” Robb (Dream Weaver), Barbara Rodriguez, Barbara Sanchez, Barbara Scarlotti, Barbara Sherman, Barbara Shlottman, Barbara Spencer, Barbara “Babs” Vickers, Barbara Walker, Barbara Watkins, Barbara Whalen
• Barbie: Barbie _ (x2)
• Barb: Barb Smith, Barb _ (x2)
• Roberta: Roberta Drake (Aurion), Roberta Elk Step, Roberta Gross, Roberta Mendez (Captain America 2099), Roberta Rhodes, Roberta Ryan, Roberta Wingfoot, Roberta _ (x3)
• Rupert: Rupert D’Arcy, Rupert Dockery, Rupert Helona (Innards), Rupert Holloway, Rupert Kemp (Black Baron), Rupert Kingsley (Surgeon), Rupert Rhodes, James Rupert Rhodes, Rupert _

368 characters with a Robert-variant name. With the exception of Rhodey, whose middle name is Rupert (a German variant), all Roberts/etc. in the cinematic adaptations are either in the Sony/Fox films or the TV shows. SHIELD has four (Roberto, Robbie whose full name is Roberto, Robin, and Bobbi). 23 are live-action. My least-favorite fact is that both of Hope Shlottman’s parents are in this category: Bob and Barbara. I know Barbara (“foreign”) isn’t technically a variant of Robert, but since they both sometimes diverge into Bobby/i they’re treated as such and I’m also treating them as such.

Robbie and Bobbi also get to be the header image, since Robert-variants are one of the winners this round.

Mary (1939-1946, 1953-1961): “sea of bitterness,” “rebelliousness,” “wished-for child,” “beloved”

• Mary: Mary Abbott, Mary Allan, Mary Arnett, Mary Bastelli, Mary Beck, Mary Beddoe, Mary Beehan, Mary Bellis, Mary Bender, Mary Bennett, Mary Blevins, Mary Blue Cloud, Mary Bobkins, Mary Bodine, Mary Bradley Vanderbilt, Mary Brant, Mary Brian, Mary Brock, Mary Brooks, Mary Brown (Karisma), Mary Brown (x3), Mary Campbell, Mary Carmody, Mary Carson, Mary Carter, Mary Christians, Mary Cochran, Mary Collins (x2), Mary Corbett, Mary Crawford, Mary Dawson, Mary Dering, Mary Devlin, Mary Dobbs, Mary Dodge, Mary Drake, Mary Dugan, Mary Edwards, Mary Ember, Mary Essex, Mary Fetter, Mary Fortunato, Mary Gallows, Mary Garcia, Mary Garwin, Mary Rose Geraci, Mary Golden, Mary Graham, Mary Gregory, Mary Grimm, Mary Hankin, Mary Hart, Mary Jankovicz, Mary Jones, Mary Kelleher, Mary Knowles, Mary Lambow, Mary LeBow, Mary Ledger, Mary MacPherran (Titania), Mary Mahajan, Mary Manners, Mary Martin, Mary Marvin, Mary Maslin, Mary Mason, Mary McCullum, Mary McGrill-Archer (Midnight), Mary McKenna, Mary Meeke-Grant, Mary Melville, Mary Mercy, Mary Miller, Mary Mitchell (Sun Girl), Mary Morgan/Morgenstern (Miss Patriot), Mary Muscle, Mary Nash, Mary A. Nette (Marionette), Mary Lavinia Octavius, Mary O’Malley, Mary Orchid, Mary Parker, Mary Perkins, Mary Price, Mary Purcell, Mary Reilly, Mary Richards, Mary Rina (Miss Thing), Mary Roark, Mary Ryan, Mary Sabahnur, Mary Scott, Mary Shamara, Mary Sharp, Mary Shepherd, Mary Sickles, Mary Simms, Mary Simpson, Mary Skoglund, Mary Slade, Mary Smith (x2), Mary Stenson (Teena the Fat Lady), Mary Stevens, Mary Stewart, Mary Storm, Mary Sullivan, Mary Tao-Yu, Mary Temble, Mary Tyler, Mary van Slambrouck, Mary Varnheim, Mary Walker (Typhoid Mary), Mary Watson, Mary Weather, Mary Weiser, Mary Weston, Mary Whitworth, Mary Wilkinson, Mary Willis, Mary Wilson, Mary Windhart, Mary Zero, Manchuria Mary, Mary _ (x3)
• Mary Alice: Mary Alice Anders Burke
• Mary(-)Ann: Mary Ann Macone, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Mary-Ann Travers
• Mary(-)Beth: Mary Beth Mundy, Mary-Beth Singleton, Mary-Beth Williams
• Mary Elizabeth: Mary Elizabeth O’Koren
• Mary Ellen: Mary Ellen Monroe
• Mary Jane: Mary Jane Kelly, Mary Jane Watson
• Mary(-)Jo: Mary-Jo Altman, Mary Jo Bently, Mary Jo Besselo, Mary Jo Duffy, Maryjo _
• Mary(-)Louise: Mary Louise Kennedy, Mary-Louise Snoffer (Kim Castle)
• Mary-Lucille: Mary-Lucille “Marilu” Lopez
• Mary Lynn: Mary Lynn Norfolk
• Mary-Margaret: Mary-Margaret Grey, Mary-Margaret _
• Mary-Michelle: Mary-Michelle Winderfield
• Mary Sue: Mary Sue Lester
• Maria: Maria Alvarez, Maria Atlantis, Maria Ayala, Maria Bonnaventura, Maria Calderon, Maria Callasantos (Feral), Maria Elizabeth Falconio/Walls Castle, Maria Claus, Maria Corazon, María Pilar Cortés/z, Maria de la Joya, Maria DeLorentti (Witch Hunter), Maria Dracula, Maria Taina Elizando, Maria Feliciano, Maria Harper, Maria Hill, Maria Karsov, Maria Keeton, Maria Kelly, Maria Komarovshky, Maria Kroner, Maria Larue, Martia Lopez, Maria Montoya, Maria Muradyan, Maria Murillo, María Aracely Josefina Penalba de las Heras (Hummingbird), Maria Petrella, Maria Petrova (Fault Zone), Maria Proudstar, Maria Rambeau, Maria Ramos (Satana), Maria Rodriguez, Maria Russoff, Maria Santos, Maria de Guadalupe Santiago, Maria Sapristi, Maria Soares, Maria Collins Carbonell Stark, Maria Trovaya Pym, Maria Turaka, Maria Vaselli, Maria Vasquez (Tarantula), Maria “Kitty” _, Maria _, Maria _ (x2)
• Marya: Marya Maximoff, Marya Meshkov (Zvezda Dennista), Marya Peskyov (Number One)
• Mariah: Mariah Autumn, Mariah Crawford, Mariah Dillard, Mariah Ellenthorpe, Mariah _
• Marian: Marian Carlyle (Rogue), Marian Eisenhardt, Marian McElroy, Marian Pouncy (Poundcakes), Marian _
• Mariana: Mariana Banks Jankovic, Mariana Torres
• Marianna: Marianna Stern, Marianna _
• Marianne: Marianne Cutlass, Marianne Manino, Marianne Rodgers (Masque), Marianne Townsend, Marianne Waters
• Maryanne: Maryanne Sherbrook
• Marianella: Marianella Mancha
• Marygay: Marygay “Mary” Jewel Dinkins
• Marie: Marie Batroc, Marie Cartier, Marie D’Ancanto (Rogue), Marie D’Arqueness, Marie Danvers/Mari-Ell, Marie Eisner, Marie Ford, Marie Fowler, Marie Grant (Tigra), Marie Hart, Marie Heller, Marie Hölm, Marie Jessup, Marie Komph, Marie Lathrop, Marie Leahy, Marie Porter, Marie _
• Marie-Ange: Marie-Ange Colbert (Tarot)
• Marie Antoinette: Marie Antoinette the dog, Marie Antoinette _
• Marietta: Marietta Borgezia, Marietta Nelson
• Mariel: Mariel Riley
• Mariella: Mariella Suarez
• Marilla: Marilla _
• Marilou: Marilou _
• Marilyn: Marilyn Burbank, Marilyn Hannah, Marilyn Manor, Marilyn Maycroft, Marilyn Rogers (Shrew)
• Marilyne: Marilyne (the… uh, g-slur)
• Marion: Marion Bradley, Marion Carter, Marion Horton, Marion Hughs Checks, Marion James, Marion Jones, Marion Mancini, Marion Martinet, Marison Sofen, Marion Stensgard, Marion Vicar
• Mari: Mari Gold, Mari Logan, Mari (Marionette), Mari _ (x4)
• Mara: Mara Arliss, Mara Rice, Mara Rodriguez, Mara/Mala _, Mara the Tempter/Devil, Mara the panther, Mara the saber-tooth tiger, Mara _ (x4)
• Marabeth: Marabeth “Mari” _
• Mariama: Mariama Spector
• Miriam: Miriam Birchwood, Miriam Chikane, Miriam Drew, Miriam Fry, Miriam Sharpe, Miriam Systevich, Miriam Worth, Miriam (Wingfoot), Miriam _
• Merriam: Merriam Sorenson
• Miri: Miri _
• Mariano: Mariano Lopez
• Moira: Moira Brandon, Moira Gray, Moira MacTaggert, Moira Mason
• Molly: Molly Brennan, Molly Fitzgerald (Shamrock), Molly Furbert, Molly Hayes Hernandez, Molly Hunt, Molly Marone, Molly Margaret McSnide, Molly Pritchard, Molly Ravencroft, Molly Rich, Molly Stanwick (Cephalopod), Molly Stiles, Molly Temble, Molly von Richthofen, Molly _
• Mollie: Muktong Mollie
• Polly: Polly Hinton, Polly Hu, Polly McKenna, Polly the horse, Polly _
• Mia: Mia Carrera, Mia Flores, Mia Lessing, Mia Salem
• Miarka: Miarka _
• Marika: Marika _
• Mirka: Mirka _
• Maura: Maura Spinner
• Maureen: Maureen Bennett, Maureen Bouchard Logan, Maureen Connors, Maureen Denton, Maureen Dozer, Maureen Green, Maureen Lyszinski, Maureen Raven, Maureen Scanlan
• Marisa: Marisa Piper
• Marissa: Marissa Bernal, Marissa Constando, Marissa Darrow, Marissa DeCastro, Marissa Paulsen (Tailhook), Marissa Storm
• Maris: Maris Morlak (Crucible)
• Marla: Marla Charles, Marla Drake (Miss Fury), Marla Irvine, Marla Madison Jameson, Marla Peters, Marla Rodriguez
• Marlene: Marlene Alraune, Marlene Blackgar, Marlene Brashear (Marvel Woman), Marlene Erskine, Marlene Frazier (Candace Brashear)
• Marlena: Marlena Howard, Marlena Olin, Marlena Petrokova
• Marys: Marys Iosama
• Mitzie: Mitzie _
• Muffy: Muffy Ainsworth

379 characters with a Mary-variant name, 20 of whom are live-action. It makes sense that the comics especially would default to giving female characters who don’t appear more than once a Mary-variant name since Mary is one of the most default woman names. It makes less sense that the MCU would casually keep inventing new ones when there are so many other options. I’m looking specifically at the Maria epidemic: I’m going to say something controversial, but while Maria Rambeau does originate from the comics, I don’t think she has enough history or precedent that they couldn’t have at least chosen a different Mary-adjacent name for her. Mia! Marissa! Anything to keep from having to refer to her as “Maria R.” like a grade-school class.

James (1940-1952); Jacob (1999-2012): “holder of the heel,” “supplanter”

• James: James Albertson, James Allen, James Allison, James Anderson, James Avalone, James Bannister, James “Jim” Barney, James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Winter Soldier), James Bennett, James Beverley (Overdrive), James Blaine, James Blake (Gunner), James Boggs, James Bourne, James Braddock Jr., James Braddock Sr., James Bradley (Doctor Nemesis), James “Jim” Brannigan, James Braswyck, James Burley (Agent X), James Buttersworth, James “Jim” Callaghan, James Campbell (x2), James Carlin (Silent Death), James J. Chan, James P. Carter, James Choi, James Lexington Christian, James “Jim” Colbert, James Cole (Brawl), James Collier, James “Cricket” Colter, James Connors, James J. Cramer, James “Jim” Curry, James D’Angelo, James Daly, James Darnell (X-Ray), James David (Rumbler), James Davis, James “Jimmy” Dee, James Deptford, James Dore Jr. (Blue Eagle), James Dore Sr. (American Eagle), James Drake, James H. Earle, James Evans, James Montgomery “Monty” Falsworth (Union Jack), James Fisher, James Fletcher, James Flore, James Fortunato, James Fry, James Gilray, James Green (x2), James Grey, James “Jamie” Guerrero, James Hall, James Hardwick, James Harmon, James Harper, James Hendrickson, James Hitch (Firearm), James Jefferson Holt, James “Logan” Howlett (Wolverine), James Hudson (Guardian), James “Jimmy” Hudson Jr. (Poison), James Hutchinson (Sycamore), James Ilse, James Jackson (x2), James Taylor “J.T.” James (Hellfire), James “Jimmy” Jancovicz (Jimmy Jupiter), James Jaspers (Mad Jim), James Jetman, James Johnmeyer, James “Jim” Warren Jones, James Kapotzas, James Keller, James Kincaid, James Kreig, James Kresge, James Krieg, James Lardner (Cobra), James Largo, James “Jim” Larkin Jr., James “Jim” Larkin Sr., James Larner, James Leonard, James Logan, James Leonard Lucas/Geary, James Lucas, James Lucas Jr. (Coldfire), James “Jim” Lukus, James Lyon, James “Jamie” Madrox (Multiple Man), James “Gunny” Mann, James “Jimmy” Marks (Hybrid), James Martin (x2), James Winston McArthur, James McClintock (Trench), James McDonald (Honcho), James McElroy, James “Jim” McFall, James “Jim” Jay McMayhew, James McPherson, James Melvin, James “Red” Merrill, James Metzger, James Mills, James Morell, James “Jim” Morita, James “Angel” Morris, James Mortimer, James Muncey, James Murch, James Murphy (Agony), James Murray, James Nagle, James Natale (Vulture), James “Jimmy” Newman, James Norcross, James “Jim” North, James “Jimmy” Novinski, James “Jim” Nugent, James “Jimmy” O’Hoolihan, James “Jimmy” Olsen, James Onyango, James Ortell, James Owl (Ghost Dancer), James “Jim” Palmetto, James Pascoe, James “Jim” Paxton, James Pertierra, James Petrie, James Pierce (Hitman), James Power, James Priest, James Anthony Phillips, James Louis Prindle (Collider), James Proudstar, James Sanders, James Rackham, James Ralston, James Ransom, James Raydar, James Reaves, James Redfield, James Q. Reed, James Reeves, James “Jimmy” Rellman, James Reston, James “Rhodey” Rupert Rhodes (War Machine), James Richards, James “Jimmy” Riordan, James Rogers, James Rondell, James Ruiz (Prototype 2.0), James Russoti (Looney Bin Jim), James “Jim” Salicrup, James Sanders (Speed Demon), James Santini (Batwing), James Sayers, James Scully (Skull the Slayer), James Sharp (Coronary), James “Jim” Shooter, James Sinoda (Master of Freaks), James Sokolowski (Ski), James Spencer, James Sprenger, James “Jim” Starlin, James-Michael Starling (Omega the Unknown), James Stenchly, James “Jim” Storm (Tachyon Torch), James Strahorn, James Stricker, James Swenson (Codename: Eagle), James Tanner, James Tarver (Top), James “Jim” Tensen, James Thomas, James “Jimmy” Urich, James Valkon (Stinger), James Wa ( Calamity), James Wagler, James Warden, James Wastrel, James Welby, James D. Wells, James Wesley, James Westbrook, James Wheaton (Lash), James White, James M. Whitmore, James “Jim” Wilson, James Winderfield, James Winthorp, James T. Wyatt, James Wynter, James Xavier, James Zafar (Savage Steel), James “Jimmy” Woo, James _; Leopold “Leo” James Fitz
• Jaymes: Jaymes (Jammy)
• Jim: Jim Evans, Jim Hammond, Jim Gardley, Jim Lathrop, Jim Logan, Jim Taylor
• Jimmy: Jimmy Alhazared, Jimmy Cavella, Jimmy Cohen, Jimmy Crain, Jimmy Crawley, Jimmy Damiano, Jimmy Everett, Jimmy Fitzsimmons, Jimmy Franks, Jimmy Frisco, Jimmy Hudson Jr., Jimmy Juarez, Jimmy Knox, Jimmy Lo, Jimmy McKenzie, Jimmy Navarone, Jimmy Pierson, Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Rubino, Jimmy Sanguino, Jimmy Stryder, Jimmy Yama, Jimmy-6
• Jamie: Jamie Baxter, Jamie Brock, Jamie Carlson (Teen Abomination), Jamie Dansig (Shadowshift), Jamie Flores (Dreamer), Jamie Jacobs (Phantom Rider), Jamie Moore, Jamie Robins, Jamie Rodriguez, Jamie Rogers, Jamie Tark, Jamie Tolentino, Jamie Williams, Jamie _
• Jimon: Jimon Tang
• Jimaine: Jimaine Szardos
• Jameesia: Jameesia Grant
• Jacob: Jacob Bock, Jacob Bolt, Jacob Burnsley (Star Brand), Jacob “Jack” Casey, Jacob “Jake” Conover (Rose), Jacob Damon, Jacob Eichorn (Styx), Jacob Erskine, Jacob Feinman, Jacob “Jake” Fury, Jacob Gallows (Punisher), Jacob Gallows Jr., Jacob Gavin Jr. (Courier), Jacob Gibbs, Jacob Goldstein (Golem), Jacob Grimm, Jacob Grimm II, Jacob Gunterson, Jacob Hilliard, Jacob Johnston, Jacob Lao, Jacob Lashinki (Decay), Jacob Nash (Shade), Jacob “Jake” Oh, Jacob Pace (Spirit), Jacob Pollock, Jacob Quill, Jacob Raven, Jacob Reiss, Jacob Reisz, Jacob Roark, Jacob Rome, Jacob Scott, Jacob Shaw, Jacob Smith, Jacob Strauss, Jacob Suarti, Jacob Vandernet, Jacob Wallaby, Jacob Weisenthal, Jacob Weiss, Jacob Williams (Brutha Nature) 
• Jake: Jake Austin, Jake Blanchet, Jake Bugsby, Jake Constantine, Jake Costanza, Jake Davidson, Jake Degraffenreid, Jake Delillo, Jake Dorman, Jake Farmington, Jake Garza, Jake Gomez (Werewolf By Night), Jake Grenfire, Jake Jensen, Jake Jones, Jake King, Jake Mallard (Steeplejack), Jake Malloy, Jake Martino, Jake Miller, Jake Nelson, Jake Olson, Jake Palento, Jake Schist, Jake Simpson, Jake Slayton, Jake Starker, Jake Wang, Jake Weal, Jake Young (Trace), Jake _
• Jakob: Jakob Eisenhardt/Lehnsherr, Jakob Nystrom
• Jaqe: Jaqe Morania

331 characters with a James-variant name. That’s a hell of a lot, but I’m actually surprised that it’s not larger, mostly because there are 24 live-action Jameses/etc. (making it the most abundant name in live-action projects on this list) and it feels like every other man that shows up is a James/etc. in some way. Of note, roughly half of them go by something other than “James,” and several of them go by names that are nothing like James at all.

But then you factor in the Jacob variants, since technically James is a Jacob variant. That’s a bunch more characters. (4 have been in live-action projects.) That still feels like it’s not large enough, and I’m sure there are some very minor characters who slipped through the wiki cracks. Interestingly, they’ve never used Jacoba/Coby/Cobie, which seems like a waste.

Linda (1947-1952): “flexible, soft, mild”

• Linda: Linda Avery, Linda Brown, Linda Carter (Night Nurse), Linda Chao, Linda Connelly, Linda Darkhölme, Linda Donaldson, Linda Golic, Linda Grant, Linda Greico, Linda Higgins, Linda Hyams, Linda Klein, Linda Kwan, Linda LaDueña, Linda Lewis (Skylark), Linda Littletrees, Linda McQuillan (Captain U.K.), Linda Pritchett, Linda Smith, Linda Vayne, Linda Vincent, Linda Warren, Linda Wei, Linda the Duck
• Lindy: Lindy Carpenter, Lindy Josten, Lindy Lee, Lindy Nolan (Nova)

29 characters named Linda. There aren’t really variants of this name besides Lindy, or male* variants, which is probably why there aren’t as many; there’s Lynda, but that’s never been used. Both live-action Lindas are minor TV characters (technically Linda Avery never appears on-screen, but she’s relevant for being prominently discussed).

Michael (1954-1959, 1961-1998): “who is like God?”

• Michael: Michael “Mike” Albergo, Michael Alicar (The A), Michael “Mike” D. Allred, Michael “Mike” Anderson, Michael “Mousy” Armstrong, Michael “Mikey” Asher, Michael Badilino, Michael Baer (Blockbuster), Michael Baran, Michael Barnett, Michael Bech, Michael Francis Xavier Berengetti, Michael Bingham (Blood Spider), Michael Black (Corpus Derelicti), Michael Bohusk, Michael Bowen, Michael Brasy (x2), Michael Brayden, Michael Brown, Michael “Mike” Burley, Michael “Mike” Carlin, Michael Carling, Michael Carter, Michael Cassada, Michael Castiglione, Michael Christopher, Michael “Mike/Clem” Clemson, Michael Collins (Deathlok), Michael Contoni, Michael Corcoran, Michael “Mike” Corson, Michael Costello, Michael “Mike” Crawley (Dynamite), Michael Cray, Michael Cromwell (Specimen 13), Michael Cuzinski, Michael Darkhölme, Michael Davis, Michael “Mike” Dennager, Michael Denosta, Michael Devlin (Knight of St. George), Michael Devlin Sr., Michael “Mike” Dillon (the Battery), Michael “Mickey” Ditillio, Michael Diwa, Michael Mike” Dorie (Shaman), Michael Dragon, Michael “Mike” Duffy, Michael “Mike” Dunwoody, Michael Engelschwert (Sin-Eater), Michael English (Atom Smasher), Michael Faraday, Michael Farrel (Super-Patriot), Michael Flaherty, Michael Fleet (uh… the w-creature it’s not good to talk about), Michael “Mickey” Fondozzi, Michael “Mikey” Fortunado, Michael “Mike” Fouche, Michael Frazier, Michael “Mike” Gallagher, Michael Galvan, Michael Gerdes, Michael Golden, Michael Goodwin, Michael Gorani, Michael “Mikey” Grady, Michael Guillermos, Michael Hall, Michael Hanlon, Michael Hanneford, Michael Hardaway (Turbocharge), Michael Hart (Judge), Michael Hawthorne (Necromancer), Michael Heron, Michael “Mike” Higgins, Michael Z. Hobson, Michael Hotham, Michael Hunt, Michael Irving, Michael Jacobs, Michael Janes, Michael “Mike” Brent Jeffries (Turbo), Michael Johnson (x2), Michael “Mike” Johnson, Michael Keane (Tumbler), Michael Keller, Michael Lee Kelly (Combat Kelly), Michael Kemp, Michael Korvac, Michael Kramer (Judas Man), Michael Kramer, Michael “Mickey” Krimpton, Michael Labash, Michael Lamont (Snake-Eyes), Michael Lehr (Smasher), Michael Levin, Michael Lincoln, Michael Lindon, Michael Logue, Michael Lyndon, Michael Lynn, Michael MacLain, Michael Malone (Venom), Michael Marchand (Aeturnum), Michael Marko (Man Mountain Marko), Michael McCain (Forearm), Michael McDonald, Michael “Iron Mike” McGraw, Michael McInerney, Michael McTeer, Michael Miller (Bullseye), Michael Moran (Miracleman), Michael Morbius, Michael Morrisey, Michael Morrison, Michael Murdock, Michael “Mike” Nguyen, Michael Nowlan, Michael “Mike” O’Brien (Guardsman), Michael O’Hill, Michael O’Toole (Steamroller), Michael Onoffon, Michael Payne, Michael “Mike” Peterson (Deathlok), Michael “Ice” Phillips, Michael Pike, Michael Pilgrim, Michael Pingree, Michael Piper, Michael “Mike” Ploog, Michael Pointer (Omega), Michael “Mike” Powell, Michael Prescott, Michael Pressman, Michael Proudhawk (Psi-Hawk), Michael Rafani (Plug), Michael Redstone, Michael Reese (Lady Killer), Michael Reilly, Michael Rhodes (Iron Man), Michael Roark, Michael Robinson, Michael Rochelle, Michael Rodgers (Infinitus), Michael “Mike” Rogers, Michael “Mike” Romanger (Micro-Manager), Michael Rossi, Michael Royal, Michael Russo (Sidestep), Michael Ryan, Michael Sadler, Michael Scarlotti, Michael “Micky” Scott, Michael Shaugnessy, Michael Shauneghann, Michael Shivas, Michael Silk (Poltergeist), Michael Skouras, Michael “Mike” Snow, Michael Soletti, Michael Stangkowski (Stang), Michael Steel (Ironclad), Michael Stevens, Michael Stevenson, Michael Stivak (Torpedo), Michael Stockton (Doctor Nemesis), Michael Suggs (Hairbag), Michael Sutton, Michael Tabak, Michael Taine, Michael Tan (Swarm), Michael Templar, Michael Thompson, Michael Trace (Foolkiller), Michael “Mike” Travers, Michael “Mike” Trudeau, Michael Tucker, Michael Twoyoungmen (Shaman), Michael Von Patrick (MVP), Michael Vornin (the Head), Michael “Mickey” Walker, Michael “Mike/Mickey” Walker, Michael “Mikey” Watts (Stilt-Man), Michael White (x2), Michael Whitecloud, Michael Wilkins, Michael the archangel, Michael _ (x4)
• Micheal: Micheal “Micky” Hamilton
• Michel: Michel Berman (Monocle), Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), Michel Dufours, Michel Souris
• Mike: Mike Aeder, Mike Alexander, Mike Berino, Mike Brown, Mike Buscema, Mike Cantrell, Mike Columbus (Basilisk), Mike Delladova, Mike Dolan, Mike Fallon (Metallo), Mike Francavilla, Mike Galbraith (Beanpole), Mike Grimaldi, Mike Hauley, Mike Hawthorne, Mike Herald, Mike Ivy (Guardsman), Mike Li, Mike Malone, Mike Marone, Mike McNeely, Mike McSwiggin, Mike Modok, Mike Morocco, Mike “Rusty” Nails, Mike Nero (Enforcer), Mike O’Tool, Mike Pearse, Mike Quillan, Mike Quinn, Mike Ranier, Mike Rockwitz, Mike Roden, Mike Rugger, Mike Santini, Mike Stone (Sunturion), Mike Swift (Gold Rush), Mike Tappan, Mike Toro, Mike Trapp, Mike Wallace, Mike “the Wizard” White, Mike Williams, Mike Wilson, Mike Zelby, Mike Zelinsky, Mike the Strong Man, Mike _
• Mikel: Mikel Fury
• Mikey: Mikey Castle, Mikey Coogan, Mikey McCormick (the Moose), Mikey _
• Mich: Mich Taylor
• Mick: Mick Bird (Twister), Mick Clancy, Mick Connors, Mick Harty, Mick Mortenson, Mick Patterson (Wall), Mick _
• Mickey: Mickey Dugan (Yellow Kid [yikes]), Mickey Duke, Mickey Fane, Mickey Flynn, Mickey “Mick” Morris, Mickey Tork (Bloke/Rainbow), Mickey Wilson, Mickey _
• Micky: Micky Halloran
• Miclas: Miclas _
• Michelangelo: Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Forever Man)
• Miguel: Miguel Bastron, Miguel Bonavita, Miguel Estrada, Miguel Legar, Miguel Juan Gonzales Lopez-Iruli (Mike Reilly), Miguel Martinez, Miguel McCoy, Miguel Alfredo Navatilas, Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man [2099]), Miguel Provenza (El Conquistador), Miguel Reyes, Miguel Rico, Miguel Rodriguez, Miguel Angel Roldán (Trueno), Miguel Sanchez, Miguel Santiago (Tarantula), Miguel Santos (Lightning), Miguel Mondego Tomar, Miguel Santos, Miguel Stone, Miguel _, Miguel _
• Miguela: Miguela Torres
• Michelle: Michelle Balters (Neurotap), Michelle D’Arcy, Michelle Deveraux, Michelle Kole, Michelle “MJ” Jones, Michelle Kole, Michelle Raymond, Michelle Urich, Mary-Michelle Winderfeld, Michelle (Amp), Michelle _
• Michele: Michele “Mike” Argento, Michele Gonzales, Michele Libris, Michel/le March, Michele Michaels (Libra), Micehele Romero, Michele Scicluna, Michele Walters
• Michaela: Michaela “Mike” Gutierrez Miller, Michaela Ladak
• Michaella: Michaella Passolini
• Michela: Michela Nefaria (Madame Masque)
• Michka: Michka Rose
• Mika: Mika _
• Mikayla: Mikayla Bell, Mikayla Robinson
• Mikhail: Mikhail Kapuchin, Mikhail Kutuzov, Mikhail Aleksei Nikolaevich, Mikhail Nikolaievitch Rasputin, Mikhail Smerdyakov, Mikhail Uriokovitch Ursus, Mikhail Vanko, Mikhail Zamorska
• Mikhal: Mikhal Oglu (Vulture), Mikhal Stadnycki
• Mikhol/Miklho: Mikhol/Miklho _
• Mikka: Mikka Nguyen
• Mikki: Mikki the monikey
• Miklos: Miklos/Michael Koslov, Miklos Vryolak (Minotaur)
• Mikon: Mikon _
• Mikula: Mikula Golubev
• Mitchell: Mitchell Abrams, Mitchell “Mitch” Bennett, Mitchell Carson, Mitchell Chambers, Mitchell Ellison, Mitchell Godey, Mitchell Harens, Mitchell Laurio, Mitchell Tanner (Warhawk)
• Mitch: Mitch McCutcheon (Zzzax), Mitch _

338 characters with a Michael-variant name. 21 of them are live-action. This is a lot, but re: live-action (roughly 6% of all the Michaels/etc.), it seems like not enough considering Michael as a name topped the charts for 42 years (and is still going strong). In 2021 it was at its lowest point on the lists since 1935, and it’s still at 17.

David (1960): “beloved,” “uncle”

• David: David Adamson, David Aguilera, David Albright, David Alleyne (Prodigy), David Andrews, David Angar (the Screamer) David Anthony, David Christopher Bank (Marvel Boy), David Banner (Hulk), David Beiderbecke (Hulk), David Binder, David Bishop, David Blair, David Joshua Bloom, David Bond (Hijack), David Bray, David Breyer (Armada), David Brill, David Brinkley, David Bushell, David Caan, David Cameron, David Cannon (Whirlwind), David Carter, David Castiglione (Spectral), David Caverly, David Chan, David Chapel, David Chatterton, David Chernekhov, David Chodosh (Platoon), David Copperstone, David Cotter, David “Dave” Cox (the Slayer), David “Davy” Crockett, David Cunningham, David Daily, David “Dave” Dean, David “Hum” Dinger, David Dinkins, David Dunson, David Ellerh, David Eschol, David Ferrari (Answer), David Fourel, David Garrett, David George, David Gomez, David Gonzales, David Michael Gray, David Green (Nova), David “Dave / D.W.” Griffith, David Haller, David Heimerdinger, David Herb, David Hilbert, David Ishima, David Jarrett (Daredevil), David Jemp (Banner Bandit), David Jenkins, David Johnson, David Kai, David Kalen (D.K.), David Keaton, David Kivlin, David Knox, David Kurata, David Landers (Mastodon), David Langford, David Laramee (Arizona Kid), David Larnum, David Lawson, David Levine, David “Micro” Lieberman, David Lowell (Sundown), David MacNeil, David Malraux, David Marquez, David Menard, David Mills, David “Davy” Mitchell (Human Top), David Montgomery, David Moreau (Genegineer), David Morgan, David Moss, David Mueller, David Munroe, David Munroe II, David Munson, David Nanjiwarra, David Neusel, David North (Agent Zero), David Obademi, David Pace, David Pacic, David Paknadel, David Pennant (Highwayman), David Pike (Brawn), David Puerto (Marduk), David Purcell, David Purvis, David Rabinowitz, David “Ka-Zar” Rand, David Anthony Rice (Rakkus), David Richards, David Richardson, David “Dave” Rickford (Captain America), David Roberts (Firepower), David C. Roderick, David Rose, David Rosenberg, David Russell, David Schmidt, David Schultz, David Scott, David Scotty (Giant-Man), David Seger, David Shulman, David Slowman, David Sorenson, David Stack (Captain Zero), David Strange, Daved Sykes, David Taylor (Styx), David Thompson, David Walker, David Walsh, David Weiss (x2), David Wohl, David Wu, David Xavier (Proteus), David Zahn David _, David _ (x2)
• Dave: Dave “Blaze” Carson, Dave Cockrum, Dave Considine, Dave Duncan, Dave Finn (Keratin), Dave Hamilton, Dave Hopkins, Dave Jarvis, Dave MacQueen, Dave Makalvy, Dave Manak, Dave Marshall, Dave McCauley, Dave Steel, Dave Sullivan, Dave_, Dave _(x4)
• Davey: Davey Banner (Hulk), Davey-Boy Cullen, Davey Drew, Davey Miller, Davey White
• Davie: Davie Wilson
• Davy: Davy Jones
• Davenport: Davenport _
• Davida: Davida DeVito (Lascivious), Davida Kirby
• Davina: Davina _
• Davi: Davi Naka (Mother Goddess of Madripoor)
• Davis: Davis Cameron (Slipstream), Davis Carter, Davis Harmon, Davis Lawfers (Copperhead), Davis _

211 characters with a David-variant name. 12 are live-action. Not bad for a name that only spent one year at #1.

Lisa (1962-1969): “my God is an oath”

• Lisa: Lisa Beckman, Lisa Benson, Lisa Blaine, Lisa Castle, Lisa Chang, Lisa Cummings, Lisa Cussler, Lisa Halloran, Lisa Hardy (Scarlet Knight), Lisa Beth Harrington, Lisa (Elizabeth) Hendricks, Lisa Metellus, Lisa Molinari (Coat of Arms), Lisa Parfrey, Lisa “Lee” Rizzo, Lisa Santos, Lisa Skye, Lisa Swan, Lisa Tazio, Lisa Vaughn, Lisa _
• Lissa: Lissa (Russoff) Russell, Lissa _
• Lissette: Lissette Orvola

24 characters with a Lisa-variant name. 4 are live-action. Like Linda, there aren’t really variants of this, so there’s just less possibility. It’s a variant of Elizabeth, but I’m planning on covering that name at a later point.

Jennifer (1970-1984): “fair one,” “white wave”

• Jennifer: Jennifer Bannon, Jennifer Bissette, Jennifer Brody, Jennifer Burke (Sunstreak), Jennifer Cabre-Rios, Jennifer Cesare, Jennifer Connors, Jennifer Cooke, Jennifer D’Angelo, Jennifer DeVille, Jennifer Dugan, Jennife Elaine Grimm, Jennifer Fisher, Jennifer Glatzer, Jennifer “Jenny” Grimaldi, Jennifer Grunwald, Jennifer Hardesty, Jennifer Hardy (Scarlet Knight), Kimberly “Kim” Jennifer Johnson, Jennifer Justice (Spider-Girl), Jennifer Kale, Jennifer Kao, Jennifer “Jennie” LeBeau (Jade Enchantress), Jennifer Leigh, Jennifer Long, Jennifer “Jenny” Monroe, Jennifer Montez, Jennifer Moore (Blue-J), Jennifer Nyles, Jennifer Pearson (Siren), Jennifer Ransome, Jennifer “Jennie” Royce (White Jennie), Jennifer Silence, Jennifer Sloan, Jennifer Stavros (Roulette),  Jennifer “Jenny” Stewart (Wysper), Jennifer Swann (Spitfire), Jennifer Swense/on (Spitfire), Jennifer Takeda (Hazmat), Jennifer Tillman, Jennifer Timoney (Desire), Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk), Jennifer Wentworth, Jennifer of the Jungle
• Jen: Jen Askani, Jen Gains (Princess Justice), Jen Baker Seyfert
• Jenn: Jenn Dagmar
• Jenny: Jenny Blackwood, Jenny Bonner, Jenny Carson, Jenny Carter, Jenny Christopher, Jenny Keaton, Jenny Quinn, Jenny Reynolds, Jenny Sheridan, Jenny Spiegel (Mirror Girl), Jenny Stanford, Jenny Wallis, Jenny Wilson, Jenny (Dead Girl), Jenny the A.I., Jenny the donkey, Jenny the succubus
• Jenni: Jenni Pate (Eleven)
• Jennie: Jennie Banks, Jennie Kreager, Jennie Pheldon, Jennie Sheldon, Jennie _
• Jenna: Jenna Carlisle, Jenna Cole, Jenna Taylor, Jenna _
• Jena: Jena Pyre, Jena _
• Jennilyn: Jennilyn Matthews
• Jennix: Jennix _
• Jenell: Jenell Collins

76 characters with a Jennifer-variant name. There are only three live-action Jennifers so far so it could be worse, I guess.

Jessica (1985-1990, 1993-1995): “to behold”

• Jessica: Jessica Carradine, Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman), Jessica Jones, Jessica Shannon, Jessica Vale
• Jessie: Jessie Castle, Jessie Clatterbuck, Jessie Drake, Jessie Thompson, Jessie Wingfoot
• Jess: Jess Duncan, Jess Ebidiah, Jess Harrison, Jess Harrold, Jess King, Jess Patton, Jess Wayne

17 characters with a Jessica-variant name. Again, only 1 is live-action, which seems very minor. Interestingly, most of the characters listed just as “Jess” are guys.

Ashley (1991-1992): “ash tree clearing”

• Ashley: Ashley Barton (Spider Bitch/Girl/Woman), Ashley Crawford (Big Bertha), Ashley Croix, Ashley Hunt, Ashley Kafka, Ashley Martin, Ashley Pearson (SPF), Ashley Sanders, Ashley “Ash” G./J. Williams
• Ashleigh: Ashleigh Nichols
• Ash: Ash King, Ash Minnick, Ash the Morlock, Ash _; Brandy Ash, Crimson Ash, Skip Ash, Volcana Ash

17 characters with an Ashley-variant name. Several of those might just count because their codename includes “Ash.” Only 1 is live-action, and that’s a very minor character, so I will say that the MCU is sleeping on the name Ashley.

Emily (1996-2007): “rival”

• Emily: Emily Arthurs, Emily Bright, Emily Chan, Emily Flood, Emily Guerrero (Synapse), Emily Lyman Osborn, Emily Preston, Emily Rand, Emily Stang, Emily Stouffer, Emily Thorndike, Emily Walker, Emily Wong, Emily _
• Emilie: Emilie Scholz (Blue Condor)
• Emilee: Emilee Freemann
• Emilio: Emilio Alcunzo, Emilio Diaz, Emilio Duarte, Emilio Layton (Guardsman), Emilio Reuss
• Emilia: Emilia Ortiz, Emilia Verdugo
• Emiliano: Emiliano Comienza
• Emile: Emile Beckert, Emile Chigaru, Emile Klout (the Goat)
• Emil: Emil Blonsky (Abomination), Emil Burbank (Master Menace), Emil Cullen (Python), Emil Fontaine, Emil Frank, Emil Gar, Emil Gargunza, Emil Greco, Emil Gregg (Sin-Eater), Emil Gruber, Emil Kreagan, Emil Lapin, Emil Natas, Emil Nikos, Emil Spence, Emil Stein, Emil Tessler, Emil Vogel, Emil Weston, Emil Winston, Emil the mongoose

48 characters with an Emily-variant name. The MCU is honestly also sleeping on the name Emily; the 4 live-action Emilys are either from pre-MCU projects or just mentioned. Surprisingly, Emil is more popular in Marvel than Emily, and the most prominent character in this category is an Emil. It’s not like I particularly stan these names; I’m neutral about them. I’m just passionate about having fewer characters with the same names.

Emma (2008, 2014-2018): “whole,” “universal”

• Emma: Emma Blaze, Emma Burstein, Emma Collins, Emma DeLauro, Emma Farrell, Emma/Emmeline Frost (White Queen), Emma Gaynor (White Whip), Emma Hernandez, Emma Heyges, Emma Kruger, Emma la Porte, Emma Malone (Cat), Emma Marko, Emma Martin, Emma Mendez, Emma Paley, Emma Peel, Emma Ross, Emma Silverfox, Emma Steed, Emma Tolliver, Emma Wakely, Emma the cyborg, Emma-0, Emma IV (Dynamo)
• Emmie: Emmie Stevens, Emmie _
• Emmy: Emmy Doolin
• Emmaline: Emmaline Watanabe
• Emmella: Emmella Isaacson
• Emmanuel: Emmanuel Cortez (Percival), Emmanuel Da Costa, Emmanuel Raposa, Emmanuel Santiago, Emmanuel _ (24-Hour Man)
• Emmael: Emmael _
• Emmett: Emmett Douek, Emmett Jax, Emmett Proudhawk (Psi-Hawk)

39 characters with Emma-variant names. Only 2 are live-action. Emma and Emily are not actually variants of each other in any way, so these do count as separate categories.

Isabella (2009-2010): “my God is an oath”

• Isabella: Isabella Carmela Magdalena Gnucchi, Isabella Van Sciver
• Isabelle: Isabelle Chaulet, Isabelle Donovan, Isabelle “Izzy” Hartley, Isabelle Kristel, Isabelle Libris, Isabelle Salazar
• Isabel: Isabel Bunsen, Isabel Cabrera, Isabel Ferguson, Isabel “Izzy” Kane, Isabel Matsueda, Isabel St. Ives
• Isabela: Isabela Vanko
• Izzy: Izzy Anderson
• Isadore: Isadore “Izzy” Cohen
• Belle: Belle Carter, Belle Kurtz, Belle Raven (the Fox), Belle Taylor, Belle Thorne, Belle the A.I., Belle _ (x2); Dorothy Belle
• Bella: Bella Blaire, Bella Donna Bordeaux, Bella Fishbach, Bella Pagan, Bella the Dog, Bella _
• Bellona: Bellona _

33 characters with Isabella-variant names. 3 of them are live-action, relegated to TV and pre-MCU films. I feel like this category is going to get bigger in the years to come, considering how popular this name has been in more recent years. This one is also an Elizabeth variant, in its way, but again… that’s for later.

Sophia (2011-2013): “wisdom”

• Sophia: Sophia Gagliardi, Sophia Elizabeth “Liz” McConnell, Sophia McDougall, Sophia Robson, Sophia Sanduval (Chat), Sophia Striker (Seeress)
• Sophie: Sophie Brownlee, Sophie Cuckoo/Frost (One in Five/Five-in-One), Sophie Grimm, Sophie Lund, Sophie Pettit, Sophie von Doom
• Sofia: Sofia Álvarez, Sofia Corazon, Sofia di Cosimo, Sofia Mantega (Wind Dancer), Sofia Rosikon, Sofia Rudavsk, Sofia Strange, Sofia Torres, Sofia _; Ana Sofía Arcos Romero
• Sofija: Sofija _

23 characters with Sophia-variant names. Only 1 is live-action, so again, kind of being slept on in the cinematic universe(s). Given the names meaning, I would think it potentially very useful in a world where smarts (while not everything) count for a lot.

Noah (2013-2016): “rest, repose”

• Noah: Noah Baxter, Noah Black, Noah Boddy, Noah Burstein, Noah Crichton, Noah DuBois, Noah Perricone, Noah Purl, Noah Shira, Noah St. Germain, Noah Talbert, Noah Tyler, Noah van Helsing, Noah Whaley, Noah the Chronicom, Noah _
• Noe: Noe _

17 characters with Noah-variant names. There are more regional variants of “Noah,” technically, but none are used in Marvel except the one Noe. Again, both live-action Noahs are relegated to the TV shows.

Liam (2017-2021): “will helmet”

• Liam: Liam Bremner, Liam Cassidy, Liam Connaughton, Liam Donnelly, Liam Fischer, Liam Grey, Liam Malloy, Liam Walsh
• William: William “Bud” Adams, William Allen (Carrion), William Amos (Mammoth), William “Bill” Anthony, William Baker (Sandman), William Ballinger, William Bates (Porcupine), William Bayer, William Beanes, William “Bill” Bishop, William Bitzer (Techmaster), William Blake (Glow-Worm), William Boddicker (Firefight), William Bonney (Billy the Kid), William Boylan, William Braddock (Spider-UK), William Bridges, William “Bill” Bryon (Young Avenger), William “Will” Bryson, William Burnside (Captain America), William Carmody (Eternal Brain), William Carver (Thunderbolt), William “Coyote” Cash, William Chance/Destine (Captain Oz), William “Bill” Clayton, William “Bill” Cobb III, William “Little Bill” Cobb Jr., William “Big Bill” Cobb Sr., William Collins (x2), William “Billy” Conner/Connors (Lizard Jr.), William Conover, William “Bill” Cooper, William “Bill” Cox, William Creed, William Cross (Crossfire), William “Will” Daniels, William Darvin, William Dawson, William Deguchi (Scatterbrain), William Deubert Jr., William Dole, William Downing (Gunhawk), William Robert Drake, William “Willie” Dubrow, William “Bill” Dukane, William “Willie” Evans Jr., William Evans Sr., William Everett, William E. Fairbarn, William Falsworth, William Fanshawe, William Fields, William “Bill” Fisk, William Fitzpatrick, William Forrester, William Barrett “Bill” Foster (Goliath), William Gabriel, William Gant, William Gardner, William Gilmour, William Walter Goodman/Goldman, William Haines, William Haller, William Hanover (Longneck), William Hanson, William “Billy” Hao, William Hastings (Jinx), William Hladek, William “Bill” Hogan (Irondroid), William “Bill” Hollister, William Jacquomo (Jocko), William “Billy” Johnson, William “Billy” Junger, William “Billy” Kaplan (Maximoff/Magnus) (Wiccan), William Keller, William Kimpton (Quiet Bill), William Kincaid, William “Bill” Kinmont, William Knoblach (Clarity), William Knox (Sinew), William “Will” Krugauer, William Lamont, William Lawton (Deadeye), William “Alfie” Leese, William “Billy” Li, William Lincoln/Lopez (Crazy Horse), William Lincoln (Silver Racer), William “Willie” Lincoln, William William “Johnny” Harper Littlejohn, William Liu, William Lonestar, William Lorber, William Lumpkin, William Mansfield, William “Willie” March (Irondroid), William Martins, William Matson (Knight Errant), William May, William Everett “Bill” McKenzie, William McLaughlin (Samurai Destroyer), William “Billy” McRiver, William Menard, William Metzger, William “Bill” Morrison, William Musico (Warhead), William Nasland (Captain America/Spirit of ’76), William Nasland Jr., William “Bill” Nelson, William Grant Nelson, William Nguyen (Captain Universe), William “Bill” Norris (Mr. Fish), William “Bill” Norris, William Nowlan (Bedlam), William O’Koren, William Oakes, William Pope (Doc), William Prince (Fighting Yank), William Puceanu, William Rawlins, William “Bill” Rawlins III (Agent Orange), William Read (Tempest), William “Bill” Reilly, William Robert Reilly (Phat), William Rigby (Big Hands), William Ginter Riva, William “Billy” Roberts (Doctor Spectrum), William Roderick, Willian Rolfson (Genocide), William “Will” Roth, William “Billy” Russo/ti (Jigsaw), William “Bill” Sands, William Scott (Razor Fist), William Shaw, William “Will” Simpson, William Slattery, William “Will” Sliney, William “Slugger” Sokolowski, William “Bill” Steadman, William Stryker Jr., William Stryker Sr., William “Billy” Sumner, William Matthew “Matt” Talbot, William Talltrees (Red Wolf), William Taurens (Man-Bull), William Taurey, William Thorpe, William Turner (Mindworm), William “Will” Unger, William Kevin Wagner, William Wahl, William “Billy” Walters, William Waring (Challenger), William “Willie” Watson, William Watts, William Wesley, William Wexler (the Cure), William Joseph “Biljo” White, William Williams (Ill Billy), William Winters, William B. Wolton, William Young (Razor Fist), William “Billy” Ritter Zedd (Billy the Kid), William (Billy the Kid), William _
• Will: Will Adams, Will Benson, Will Brynner, Will Castle, Will Garner, Will Munson, Will McMann, Will Power, Will Robinson, Will Stern
• Willie: Willie Chauvin, Willie Dance (X the Marvel), Willie Daniels, Willie Flowers, Willie Lucas, Willie Sloan (Willie the Goat), Willie Tamm (Tokamak), Willie Valentine, Willie Walkaway (Dreamguard), Willie Weed, Willie Wilson (Sidewinder)
• Willy: Willy Grimes, Willy Leighton, Willy Mammoth
• Wilhelm: Wilhelm Bucher (Raymond Strawn), Wilhelm “Willy” Gerhardt, Wilhelm Hauser, Wilhelm Kroft, Wilhelm Lohmer (Master Man), Wilhelm Schmidt, Wilhelm Schultz, Wilhelm van Vile (Painter of 1000 Perils), Wilhelm von Logor (Will Jenks), Wilhelm von Sin (Herr Sin), Wilhelm von Strohm (Colonel Krieghund)
• Willem: Willem Vincent (Janus)
• Wilhelmina: Wilhelmina Howardette Taft, Wilhelmina Kensington (White Queen), Wilhelmina “Billie” Lumpkin, Wilhelmina Murray (Mina Harker)
• Wilma: Wilma Calvin, Wilma Cully, Wilma Gray, Wilma Wolfe
• Wili: Wili _
• Willi: Willi Smith
• Willis: Willis Adams, Willis Gottfried, Willis Hayworth (Master Link), Willis James, Willis “Willie” Harold Stryker (Diamondback), Willis Tolan
• Wilmot: Wilmot Thackray
• Wilson: Wilson Allan, Wilson Brunstad, Wilson Grant Fisk (Kingpin), Wilson Hale, Wilsom Lambert, Wilson Maslin, Wilson Meyers, Wilson Osborn, Wilson Ramos, Wilson Travers, Wilson Tyler, Wilson (Houdini)
• Bill: Bill Anderson, Bill Astin (Ouija), Bill Baker, Bill Braddock (Solarr), Bill Bradley, Bill Brent, Bill Brinkly, Bill Carter (x3), Bill Coltrain, Bill Cooper, Bill Corbett, Bill Czar, Bill Davis, Bill Dawson, Bill Dunn (Operator No. 7), Bill Galannan, Bill Gordon, Bill Gregory, Bill Harney, Bill Hosek, Bill Howard, Bill Leonard, Bill Lim, Bill Lindo, Bill Lukash (Dodgeball), Bill Lumpkin, Bill Mantlo, Bill McKenzie, Bill Merrick (Scorecard), Bill Oldman, Bill Parker, Bill Potter, Bill Price, Bill Renner, Bill Rice, Bill Rosemonk, Bill Segrist, Bill Smith, Bill Spencer, Bill Stanton, Bill Stewart, Bill Stuart, Bill Sullivan, Bill Tatters, Bill Stanton Jr., Bill Tomlinson, Bill Torrance, Bill Wheeler, Bill Whitcomb, Bill Wilson, Bill the A.I.M. agent, Bill the lobster, Beta Ray Bill, Bill _
• Billie: Stephanie “Billie” Miller, Billie Morales, Billie the Millie
• Billy: Billy Alabama, Billy-Bob Banner, Billy Bentine, Billy Bird, Billy Briggs, Billy Buckskin, Billy Carter, Billy Cassady, Billy Drew, Billy Fender, Billy Finn, Billy Fredricks (Guardsman), Billy French, Billy Gabreski, Billy Garr, Billy Glow, Billy Gray, Billy James, Billy Jones, Billy Kitson, Billy Koenig, Billy Kozliewski, Billy LaCarda, Billy Langley, Billy MacConnaghey, Billy Mansfield, Billy Maslin, Billy McGirk, Billy Minerva (Pelt Man), Billy Molt, Billy Neuhaus, Billy Perrett, Billy Ransom (Gizmo), Billy Sterling, Billy Stillwell, Billy Sullivan, Billy Taylor, Billy Turner (Sentry), Billy Vanderlyn (Number Six), Billy Ward, Billy Wheeler, Billy Yuan, Billy the Kid, Billy _ (x3)

344 characters with Liam-variant names. Technically, Liam is a variant of William, so any William-based name counts for this list even though there are only 8 Liams and the only live-action one is a minor TV character. Bringing in the other Williams/etc., though, there are 19 other live-action folks, and again, many but not all are from TV/pre-MCU films. 7 of them are specifically from the Defenders set of shows.

Olivia (2019-2021): “olive”

• Olivia: Olivia De Diamond, Olivia Gocking, Olivia Hook, Olivia Lentz, Olivia Mole, Olivia “Liv” Octavius (Doc Ock), Olivia Selby, Olivia Spencer-Cooper, Olivia Trask, Olivia Underwood (Foxfire), Olivia Walker
• Olive: Olive Drab
• Oliver: Oliver Bird, Oliver Broadhurst, Oliver Constantin, Oliver Cutlass, Oliver Denton, Oliver Finn, Oliver Gordon, Oliver Kellogg, Oliver North, Oliver Orwell, Oliver Osnick, Oliver Ryland, Oliver P. Sneagle, Oliver Smith, Oliver Smith Jr., Oliver Winthrop, Oliver the cat, Oliver _
• Olivero: Olivero _
• Olivier: Olivier Batroc (the Leaper), Olivier Bedwette (Sitting Bullseye), Olivier LeBeau Raven, Olivier Stroker, Olivier _

32 characters with Olivia-variant names. 2 are live-action. Again, I expect this to pick up in the coming years.

a very opinionated tier list of female characters’ deaths in the mcu

Spoilers, obviously.

So we didn’t get to see Thor: Love and Thunder opening weekend, since we were sick, but drift partner found out about the end and we weren’t thrilled. There was some comics-canonical basis for what goes down, but it didn’t strike our fancy. We are Jane Foster defenders (and adamant Jane/Thor shippers) for life. 

(We also weren’t pleased that the “Valkyrie finds a queen” subplot disappeared, but that’s not what this is about.)

We enjoyed Love and Thunder, though, and actually found the Jane stuff remarkably respectful and positive. It inspired this list: a categorical discussion, in tier list form, of the various deaths of women in the MCU (including the pre-Disney+ shows, of course).

Here we go.

resurrection
This is exactly what it sounds like: women who are canonically resurrected. This often applies to characters who are literally brought back to life, but also applies to characters who are thought dead by other characters and the audience for an extended period of time (i.e. Janet Van Dyne is first established as being dead, then in the next film is revealed not to be) and characters who die but then other characters go back in time to prevent the death (and forget that the divergent future happened). This does not apply to characters who die and then a different version of them (from earlier in the timeline, from a different universe) appears… or characters who are resurrected and then die again.

• Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) – presumed dead in the Quantum Zone, then revealed to be alive, as said. And oh, how exciting that was! It was horrifying when they said in the first Ant-Man that Janet (a founding Avenger in the comics) was just dead off-screen, and then she came back and was great. This is the same plot as Atlanna in Aquaman, but it was nicely done both times and I’m always happy when they bring back a “dead” mom.
• Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) – presumed dead in an explosion, then revealed to be alive (if very messed up). I (drift partner) think the crowbarring in of “Dreykov’s daughter” to the plot was a little goofy (though, at least it came back and wasn’t just a dropped thread), but was happy for her that she got redeemed and survived. Maybe she’ll come back and continue to develop.
• Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) – presumed probably dead via Monolith, then revealed to be alive, then presumed dead again in the Framework, then clawed herself out of the grave. I straight-up had a panic attack after the end of s2, worrying for an entire summer that Jemma was dead, and then she wasn’t and I was so relieved. As discussed here. Then she was also maybe-dead in the Framework and, again, I must say… yikes. Jemma is a great character but also, when the show needed to make tension or angst, harming/almost-killing/kidnapping her was a too-frequent occurrence.
• Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) – literally dies in a complicated maneuver to save her from evil book ghosts, then is resurrected, then almost dies again via Izel attempting to murder her, then is resurrected again. She dealt with way too much trauma bullshit in this series, but I’m glad she came out of it okay. She deserved it.
• Tess (Eve Harlow) – literally dies of hanging in a horrific shot, then is resurrected. I have notes about Tess’ entire storyline (they are not positive, as she is mired in season 5a bullshit), but I was glad she came back anyway.
• Gert Yorkes (Ariela Barer) – literally dies in the fight against Morgan LeFay (Elizabeth Hurley), then time is reversed and she’s alive again. This was done in an obvious homage to the comics, where Gert’s older self travels back in time to warn of an impending threat from within the team and dies in Chase’s arms, then a few issues later Gert’s young self is stabbed and killed as well. I think they thought this was cute, and I didn’t love it, because I don’t like being reminded of upsetting comic storylines, but at least they brought her back.
• Brigid O’Reilly (Emma Lahana) – presumed dead/is nearly dead after fighting corrupt popo, then is imbued with a presence that resurrects her. This was meant to be her origin as the comic character Mayhem, but the series got canceled so they didn’t get to explore that much. Oh well, I guess. She was very fun as Mayhem, in the little times she got to show off.
• Maggie Grace (Joanne Whalley) – presumed dead by her son Matt (Charlie Cox), then revealed to be alive and a nun. This actually exacerbated Matt’s angst further, but Maggie’s a pretty good character all in all. A more interesting connection to Catholicism than the priest.

all the good girls go to Valhalla
Like the Billie Eilish song but in reverse, get it? Valhalla isn’t always literal, but often our shorthand for an explicit second chance or reward from beyond the grave.

• Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) – dies of old age, but then Steve (Chris Evans) goes back in time to dance with her (etc.) and also even though Multiverse of Madness’ Captain Carter doesn’t count as resurrected because she’s from a separate universe and also dies again, Marvel is considering doing another Captain Carter-based project (set, presumably, in another universe?) and that’s a posthumous reward in a meta sense. There was some bullshit fan theory that Hydra gave her Alzheimer’s, which I continue to think is a colossally bad take – sometimes people just get sick and die, especially when they’re old! And I think it’s fine that Peggy did. 
• Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) – dies in battle but also of cancer, then literally goes to Valhalla. I was expecting to be way more pissed about this, but [gestures broadly at the rest of this very list] grading on a curve, I think it was done about as respectfully as they could have.
• Robin Hinton (Ava and Lexy Kolker, Willow Shields) – dies of old age, but then the team goes back to the past and negates that future from existing, so while she probably still dies of old age at some point in the prime timeline, she doesn’t experience the bad future at least.

there was an attempt
This category is for deaths that we’re mostly good with but didn’t technically show a posthumous reward, mostly.

• Raina (Ruth Negga) – gets murdered, but it’s in service of a redemption arc and anyway she knew it was going to happen and had presumably made her peace with it. Raina is beautiful and wonderful and I love her redemption arc, her valid and lovely and poetic redemption arc, and my only note is that she should have come back and the line about “this is the last time we’ll talk” or whatever was because her throat got slit so she couldn’t talk anymore but she wasn’t dead, because more Raina would have been great. She was killed off because Ruth Negga landed Preacher, and so I am especially forgiving.
• Aisha (Mehwish Hayat) – gets murdered, but she has a really good moment with her time-traveling great-granddaughter and has presumably made her peace with it.

funny
This category accidentally ended up being full of villains, but in our defense, they have funny deaths.

• Hela (Cate Blanchett) – gets murdered by an evil chaos spirit (more or less). 
• Topaz (Rachel House) – goes boom.
• Proxima Midnight (Carrie Coon) – goes splat. This character is maybe the hardest I’ve laughed at a non-comical character in any of these movies. She’s just so ridiculous.
• Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan) – goes boom. I’m glad they let Gemma Chan do something else in this universe but it is objectively funny that she crashes a ship and explodes.
• Lucy Bauer (Lilli Birdsell) – gets incinerated by Ghost Rider (Gabriel Luna).
• Ophelia (Mallory Jansen) – gets incinerated by Ghost Rider. If we could’ve kept any of the villains for more than a season, I wish we’d kept Aida/Ophelia, she was a delight. I also personally think we could have just reverted her to good-robot form and she could have learned about humanity, Cameron-from-Terminator-The-Sarah-Connor-Chronicles style, but hey.
• Sinara (Florence Faivre) – accidentally yeets herself onto a pole in a fight with Quake (Chloe Bennet). 
• General Hale (Catherine Dent) – gets murdered by Talbot (Adrian Pasdar). Good fucking riddance.
• Izel (Karolina Wydra) – gets murdered by Melinda.
• Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard) – gets murdered by her daughter Tilda (Gabrielle Dennis). I do feel the need to add that Mariah is a deeply complex and interesting character in her own right, but also she was very OTT so her getting murdered is funny and the fact that her much-maligned daughter did the job was especially beautiful.
• Alexandra Reid (Sigourney Weaver) – gets murdered by Elektra (Elodie Yung). God, it’s so abrupt and great and Elektra deserves the world.
• Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho) – gets murdered by a building. This is such a funny thing to happen, except when it’s not.
• Morgan LeFay – gets yeeted into the Dark Dimension, hopefully murdering her. Bye-bye, titty witch.

this had no effect
This is for deaths that did not upset us or make us feel amused or strike a poetic chord.

• The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) – yes, this character was touted as being genderless, but it still counts for this list because we have to emphasize how much we hate this character and film.
• Alisa Jones (Janet McTeer) – gets murdered. We didn’t watch this far, but we know it happens and honestly, we’re fine with it.
• Dorothy Walker (Rebecca DeMornay) – gets murdered. We especially didn’t watch this far, but hoenstly, all my homies hate Dorothy Walker, so I’m totally down with this (except for the bullshit it triggered with Trish [Rachael Taylor]).
• Stephanie Malick (Bethany Joy Lenz) – gets murdered by an evil space demon worshipped as a god by her Nazi father. No tears were shed.
• Wendy Lawson/Mar-Vell (Annette Bening) – dies in combat. We don’t dislike her, and it’s sad for Carol that she dies, but it’s a necessary part of the backstory. 

unnecessary
These are deaths that were upsetting, but not technically fridgings, and in most cases, the characters could have just not died and the plot wouldn’t change.

• Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) – gets murdered for turning on her evil boss. (As discussed here.) I love this movie, but I will never forgive or forget. 
• Carina (Ophelia Lovibond) – explodes. (As discussed here.)
• Linda Johnson (Nabiyah Be) – gets murdered by Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). It’s just kind of bad for this villain, who is otherwise largely sympathetic, to turn around and murder his girlfriend! Also, fun fact: she was originally intended to be Tilda, aka Nightshade, who eventually popped up in Luke Cage; that could have been so much fun.
• Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) – gets murdered by Ward (Brett Dalton). Of note, while this doesn’t count as resurrection for the aforementioned reasons, the younger version of her does appear in season 7 of SHIELD’s alternate timeline and kills the man who ordered Ward to kill her in the prime timeline, so good for her. This was a Kill the Dog move, done to shock the audience, and I probably wouldn’t be quite as mad if comics Victoria wasn’t a lesbian, but here we are.
• Isabelle Hartley (Lucy Lawless) – gets murdered in a car crash while touching the Obelisk while fighting Creel (Brian Patrick Wade). This still pisses me off because they hyped up Lucy Lawless so much and then were like “lol psych!” She wasn’t even busy with another show!
• Alisha Whitley (Alicia Vela-Bailey) – gets murdered by Hive.
• Ruby Hale (Dove Cameron) – gets murdered by Elena (Natalia Cordova-Buckley). Ruby is one of the great narrative failures of the show IMO, as she is a natural foil for Grant Ward – they were both radicalized as children and essentially raised to be weapons of fascism. Ward’s story was the show making a statement about fascists: essentially that, even if they are young when recruited, they do at some point make an active choice to embrace their fascist beliefs. Ruby’s story could have been a counterpoint: some people who are raised in fascism or other extremist views can learn to be better. I thought that’s where they were going, particularly since Daisy was trying to reason with her. I certainly don’t blame Elena for killing her, but I think narratively they could’ve made this work.
• Candace Miller (Deborah Ayorinde) – gets murdered by Shades (Theo Rossi). This was just one of those deaths that makes narrative sense, but is gross in the context of, y’know, Black women getting constantly killed everywhere. 
• Stephanie Miller, aka Billie, who is in no way related to Candace (Tarah Rogers) – gets murdered by an assassin of Mariah’s. Ditto this death. Luke Cage did this a little too much for my liking. To be fair, the cast was mostly Black people, and a lot of men died too, but… still. 
• Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) – gets murdered by Reputation era Sharon (Emily VanCamp). Karli’s whole…deal…is messy, and I really don’t think killing her was necessary, especially when Mr. Sad White Man dances away scot-free.
• Hunter C-20 (Sasha Lane) – dies of the brain scramblies after Sylvie (Sophia DiMartino) gets to her. Of note, while she is declared dead by Ravonna (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), there is no proof that she is actually dead, so our judgment here could be reversed. The latter half of this section is just a parade of dead Black women, huh?

dead moms
This is exactly what it sounds like, and yes, it’s the biggest category. I guess it makes sense that Disney bought Marvel, if you consider this. A few of these are moms in a metaphorical sense.

• Maria Stark (various, including Hope Davis) – gets murdered by the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). Creates angst for Tony (Robert Downey Jr.)
• Frigga (Rene Russo) – gets murdered by Malekith (Christopher Eccleston). Creates angst for Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and also Odin (Anthony Hopkins).
• Ying Li (Fala Chen) – gets murdered by thugs. Creates angst for Shaun (Simu Liu) and Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) and also Wenwu (Tony Leung).
• Ajak (Salma Hayek) – gets murdered by Ikaris (Richard Madden). Creates angst for the rest of the cast. 
• May Parker (Marisa Tomei) – gets murdered by Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Creates angst for Peter (Tom Holland). I get that Marisa Tomei was probably fed up and tired, and I do think this scene is pretty good dialogue-wise.
• Elaine Foster (Chloe Goneau) – dies of cancer. Creates angst for Jane. I like that we know her name; it is silly that it rhymes with Jane’s name.
• Jiaying (Dichen Lachman) – gets all-but-murdered by Whitehall (Reed Diamond), then stitched back together by her ex-husband Cal (Kyle Maclachlan), then goes crazy, then gets actually murdered by Cal, then is seen in the alternate timeline and it’s great and her character gets redeemed, but she gets murdered by Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E. Sullivan). Creates angst for Daisy (Chloe Bennet). I could write an entire thesis on Jiaying’s treatment in this show, but let’s just say I think suddenly switching her to be the antagonist is bad writing and also racist, not giving her a name for months was also bad writing and racist, and I do appreciate the Justice for Jiaying campaign of season 7, even though she still died.
• Lilla Mackenzie (Paulina Bugembe) – gets murdered and replicated by Chronicoms. Creates angst for Mack (Henry Simmons). Of note, this was in the alternate timeline, so prime-timeline Lilla is still presumably alive.
• Maria Castle (Lauren Gray Weinart/Kelli Barrett) – gets murdered by gangs at the behest of the evil military. Creates angst for Frank (Jon Bernthal).
• Etta Lucas (Joniece Abbott-Pratt) – dies of illness. Creates angst for Luke (Mike Colter), kind of, but not that many tears were shed because she was a jerk to him.
• Heather Rand (Victoria Haynes) – dies in a plane crash. Creates angst for Danny (Finn Jones).
• Azumi Ozawa (never shown on screen) – dies of an illness. Creates angst for Colleen (Jessica Henwick).
• Penelope Page (actress unknown) – dies of cancer. Creates angst for Karen (Deborah Ann Woll).
• Alice Hernandez (Carmen Serano) – gets murdered by Leslie (Annie Wersching). Creates angst for Molly (Allegra Acosta).
• Graciela Aguirre (Marlene Forte) – gets murdered by Tina (Brittany Ishibashi). Creates angst for Molly. I did not love this whole thing, for aforementioned racism reasons!
• Janet Stein (Ever Carradine) – physically dies after being put into an algorithm but lives on as a computer program, which is something, at least. Creates angst for Chase (Gregg Sulkin).
• Catherine Wilder (Angel Parker) – gets murdered by prison inmates under the instruction of Tamar (Ozioma Akagha). Again, did not love this even though she was a horrible person! Creates angst for Alex (Rhenzy Feliz).
• Chantelle Fusilier (Angela M. Davis) – gets murdered by D’Spayre (Brooklyn McLinn). Creates angst for Evita (Noelle Renee Bercy).
• Iryna Maximoff (Ilana Kohanchi) – gets murdered by a Stark Industries weapon. Creates angst for Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
• Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) – dies of cancer. Creates angst for Monica (Teyonah Parris). I think killing her offscreen is bullshit. I get that they were panicking because unlike Carol she’d age and blah blah but. It sucks.
• Donya Madani (Veronica Falcon) – dies of tuberculosis. Creates angst for Karli.
• Wendy Spector (Fernanda Andrade) – dies of ??? Creates angst for Marc/etc. (Oscar Isaac), even though she was an abusive jerk.
• Najma (Nimra Bucha) – dies closing the dimensional rift she also tried to open. Creates angst for Kamran (Rish Shah).

miscellaneous fridge jobs
This is for characters who were fridged (killed to make someone else sad) but weren’t a mom or mother figure. Girlfriends, friends, children, etc.

• Rosalind Price (Constance Zimmer) – gets murdered by Ward. Creates angst for Coulson (Clark Gregg). This is probably the most direct fridging on this list, perhaps even winked at by the narrative (I can’t remember but I feel like Ward makes a joke about it). Rosalind was a bitch, but she was a fun bitch goddammit and she didn’t deserve this bullshit.
• Agnes Kitsworth (Mallory Jansen) – dies of cancer, but also gets murdered by AIDA (also Mallory Jansen) but also gets murdered by Fitz (Iain de Caestecker). Creates angst for Radcliffe (John Hannah).
• Hope Mackenzie (Jordan Rivera) – dies shortly after being born, but also symbolically dies again when the Framework collapses. Creates angst for Mack. This was just kind of emotionally exhausting.
• Elena Cardenas (Judith Delgado) – gets murdered at the behest of Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). Creates angst for Matt, Foggy (Elden Henson), and Karen. Again, I think the choice to kill her sort of made narrative sense but is racist.
• Lisa Castle (Nicolette Pierini) – gets murdered by gangs at the behest of the evil military. Creates angst for Frank.
• Julie Barnes (Holly Cinnamon) – gets murdered at the behest of Fisk. Creates angst for Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). I’m sure this made season 3 nigh unwatchable for some viewers – it’s just too close to real life. 
• Reva Connors (Parisa Fitz-Henley) – gets murdered by Jessica (Krysten Ritter) at the behest of Kilgrave (David Tennant). Creates angst for Luke but also Jessica. Again, racist and unnecessary. 
• Hope Shlottman (Erin Moriarty) – kills herself to motivate Jessica to kill Kilgrave. Creates angst for Jessica.
• Wendy Ross (Robin Weigert) – gets murdered by Pam (Susie Abromeit) while under Kilgrave’s influence and trying to kill Jeri (Carrie-Anne Moss). Creates angst for Jeri but also Pam. I did kind of love the thousand cuts thing, because I hate Jeri, so RIP Wendy who didn’t deserve any of this.
• Destiny Gonzalez (Nicole Wolf) – gets murdered by Victor Stein (James Marsters). Creates angst for all of the kids. Say it with me: racist and unnecessary! (I know it was “necessary” for the plot but still. They could’ve cast anybody.)
• Amy Minoru (Amanda Suk) – gets murdered by Jonah (Julian McMahon). This one’s weird, because they invented this character to create angst for Nico (Lyrica Okano), and brought in the topic of suicide while they were at it. I don’t love it.
• Valkyrie’s dead girlfriend (actress unknown) – gets murdered in battle against Hela. Creates angst, obviously, for Valkyrie.

bad! bad! bad!
These are the worst ones. Period end of story.

• Gamora (Zoe Saldana) – gets murdered by Thanos (Josh Brolin) in pursuit of the Soul Stone. Fuck Infinity War.
• Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) – yeets herself off a cliff so Clint (Jeremy Renner) can get the Soul Stone. FUCK Endgame.
• Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) – gets murdered by a building (see what I mean, it’s not funny at all sometimes) after attempting to do a redemption after her Reputation era. Of note, it’s very possible that Wanda will be returning to the MCU somehow, but the circumstances of the crazy that led to the redemption that led to the death make this unequivocally bad even if she comes back and gets a second chance. Fuck Multiverse of Madness.
• Kara Lynn Palamas (Maya Stojan) – presumed dead or captured when Hydra attacks, then gets brainwashed by Hydra, then gets brainwashed by Ward, then gets murdered by Ward while disguised as May. This was bizarre, because the writers basically used her as a mouthpiece for Ward stans, despite her story pretty clearly being about abuse and the ways it warps your reality. But the show was still finding its writing legs, so she got offed unceremoniously. 
• Elektra Natchios – gets murdered by Nobu (Peter Shinkoda), then gets brought back to life but by the Hand, then gets murdered by a building (see above). The second death I’m more okay with, because it actually had pathos and also involved Matt opting to die with her, which is my shit. But in general it’s very bad and – say it with me – racist to write a story about a woman of color who is a lifelong victim of abuse and then gets murdered about it.

how to bring beloved marvel tv characters to the prime mcu

So there’s been a lot of discussion and speculation about how and if characters from the pre-Disney+ Marvel TV shows will be integrated into the greater MCU. We the audience kind of thought, at least at first, that they were part of the greater MCU, but the advent of Disney+ made it pretty clear that they weren’t. I wrote a piece for CBR about why that would be a bad decision almost a year ago, before any pre-D+ TV characters had made the switch over; I also think the points made in this more recent piece of mine about Laura Barton, Bobbi Morse, and the Mockingbird role make some important parts.

Basically, the pre-D+ TV shows really beat the films they ran concurrent with in terms of diversity and making weird (affectionate) decisions. Agents of SHIELD had, among other things, the first prominent Asian characters (Melinda and Daisy) and the first Asian superhero (also Daisy), the first Latinx superhero (Elena), the first canonically queer character (Joey), the first significant female antagonist (Raina, though she eventually got her redemption arc), a core team that was usually equally male and female and that always included multiple characters of color (some combination of Coulson, Melinda, Daisy, Jemma, Fitz, Ward, Trip, Mack, Hunter, Bobbi, Elena, Lincoln, Piper, Davis, Deke, etcetera), a slew of interracial relationships (including Coulson/Melinda, Daisy/Ward, Daisy/Lincoln, Mack/Elena), some of the first MCU instances of passing the Bechdel test (when two women talk to each other for more than 30 seconds about something other than a man; there’s actually one episode, 2.17 “Melinda,” that doesn’t pass the reverse Bechdel test, in that no two men have a conversation about something other than a woman), was co-helmed by a woman of color (Maurissa Tancharoen)… it wasn’t always the best show in the world, but it actually did a lot of really important things.

Agent Carter was the studio’s first explicitly female-led project (that’s Peggy; I say explicitly because Daisy is obviously the star of SHIELD but it’s not like her name was the title). Daredevil was the first project led by a disabled character (Matt, who’s blind). Jessica Jones was the first project led by a powered female character and had the MCU’s first lesbian and first queer couple (Jeri, Jeri and Pam — this is awful representation, but it unfortunately does count). Luke Cage was the first project led by a Black character and the first superpowered Black character (Luke himself) and containing a mostly-Black cast. Iron Fist… well, not everything can be a hit.

There were also Runaways and Cloak and Dagger, Marvel’s more teen-oriented TV projects. Runaways has a core cast of six that’s 2/3 POC and 2/3 female characters; it canonized what had previously been a one-sided queer romance (Karolina and Nico); it racebent 1-2 of the characters (depending on how you count: Molly is explicitly made Latina when she was white in the comics, while Gert is played by a Latina actress but her ethnicity is never made explicit); it had Jewish actors playing both of the (comics-canon) Jewish characters (Gert and Chase). Cloak and Dagger featured a Black boy and a white girl (Ty and Tandy) who are soulbonded and regularly address racist and classist issues in their lives. Inhumans sucked, but at least Crystal and her giant dog were cute.

Unfortunately, the MCU got credit for their “first ___” several times, because they took the accolades for the pre-D+ shows and then again when an ___ appeared for the first time in a film or D+ show. Don’t get me wrong, I love Shang-Chi and I’m happy to concede he’s the first male Asian superhero or the first Asian superhero in a film, but Daisy was the first full stop. I love Phastos and Ben in Eternals and I’m happy to concede they’re the first male gay couple or the first gay couple in a film, but Jeri and Pam, and more positively Karolina and Nico, had them beat in general. I’m glad Loki (and Sylvie) is canonically bisexual-or-whatever now, but again, Nico had them beat in general (and so did Val, despite the fact that Marvel wouldn’t let Taika say that in his first film).

I also think that in general it’s shitty that Marvel initially tried to integrate the shows and films and acknowledge that they were cohesive, but then they just gave up and treated the shows like second-class projects. This is especially bad considering the aforementioned diversity points, and the fact that in general the shows had more women and characters of color and just generally a lot of the things that people complained that the movies weren’t providing, but it’s also just kind of gross.

But that’s actually not what I wanted to talk about today. I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of integrating the TV characters we (mostly) love into the greater MCU.

Of course, there are some characters who went from the MCU to the pre-D+ shows, like Coulson and Peggy, and characters like Fury and Maria who popped up in both locations as needed, but Fury and Maria’s involvement in the shows never got brought up in the films, and Coulson has yet to pop back up in a film project, and Peggy’s television show has also never been referenced in the films. Reassuringly, Peggy has never been played by anyone but Hayley Atwell, despite the fact in that her honestly problematic appearance in Multiverse of Madness she’s from an alternate universe, and the What If…? iteration of her is also from an alternate universe, but her specific adventures in Agent Carter might as well have not happened.

These characters aside, we’ve had three TV-to-MCU transitions. Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), who originated on Netflix’s Daredevil, turned out to be the villain of Hawkeye; Matt (Charlie Cox), the titular Daredevil, briefly appeared as a civilian in No Way Home; bafflingly, Black Bolt (Anson Mount) of Inhumans appeared, again from an alternate universe, in Multiverse of Madness. There haven’t been any recastings of characters from the TV shows, though the aforementioned Laura-Bobbi thing veers toward it.

Black Bolt is explicitly from an alternate universe. He’s wearing an outfit more akin to his comics outfit and no mentions of the events of Inhumans are made. Fisk and Matt… could be from the same timeline as the Netflix shows, potentially. Matt is only seen, like I said, as a civilian, offering legal help to Peter and May Parker; when he, apropos of his super-reflexes, grabs a brick that flies through the window, the others in the room are surprised and he quips that he’s just “a really good lawyer,” which suggests that he’s not “out” to them as a superhero. That doesn’t contradict the Netflix shows, as Matt wasn’t officially “out” to the public as Daredevil, but it also doesn’t mean that he couldn’t be an alternate universe version. Fisk is still a powerful criminal (and has ties to Kate’s mom who uses the same venue he used for his house arrest and wedding for a party) but he saunters in dressed in Hawaiian shirts like he’s Vacation Fisk and doesn’t have any of the same associates. Especially notable is the fact that he’s not explicitly attached to Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), the love of his life in Daredevil — and it could be that she’s just not in the city at the moment, but it’s another notable clue that he might be a different version of the same character.

All of this is to say that there’s a very easy solution for integrating the other TV characters. You simply establish that the pre-D+ shows happened… but in an alternate universe. These characters still exist in the prime timeline, but their previous adventures take place in the multiverse. It’s such a simple concept! Loki, No Way Home, and Multiverse of Madness have all dealt with alternate universes, and while Loki and No Way Home do create precedent for characters being played by different people in different universes (the multiple Lokis and Peters), Loki and Multiverse of Madness also create precedent for characters being played by the same people in different universes (one of the Lokis, Peggy, Black Bolt, Maria Rambeau, even Charles Xavier).

We know we’re getting new Daredevil content, and I hope to god that they bring back the show’s full cast… and yes, that includes Elektra (Elodie Yung). If the prime timeline is different from the Netflix shows, that means that characters who died before, like Elektra, can reappear and get a second chance. That happens all the time in comics, and Yung has seemed amenable to the idea of coming back. It means that you can explain Matt’s, or anyone’s, origins as much or as little as you want; they could come from similar circumstances or different ones. They could have similar relationships to each other or different ones. They could deal with similar conflicts or different ones.

And that brings me to the other Netflix characters. Jessica Jones started out great and completely self-destructed by the end; pretty much all of the characters got spiritually assassinated by the end, and it completely veered away from the obvious comic-inspired Jessica/Luke endgame (alternate universe Jessica and Luke could even get together without the meddling of mind-controlly Kilgrave — hell, we could just establish Kilgrave as backstory without ever having to bring him onscreen again). I have my notes about this, and more importantly to me, personally: alternate universe Jessica would necessitate alternate universe Trish, and what if alternate (prime) universe Trish was allowed to healthily deal with her addictions and become a hero without going off the rails and getting thrown in jail? What if prime Trish was the character we understood her to be in season 1 and The Defenders? What if prime Trish got to have her comics-canon friendships (including She-Hulk, Monica Rambeau, Valkyrie, and Jubilee from the X-Men)? What if Hellcat was actually a force for good, like she’s supposed to be??? There’s canonical precedent for some alternate universes containing good/bad versions of good/bad characters, after all.

And you could even get Daughters of the Dragon straight from the jump! Skip the backstory shown in the Netflix shows and get straight to Colleen and Misty being cool superhero detectives.

I think it’s important to note that I’ve seen a lot of the TV actors saying they’d love to come back. Adrianne Palicki discussed it online within the last week, and she’s brought it up before. Elizabeth Henstridge and Chloe Bennet have both discussed it more than once, and Ming-Na Wen and Nick Blood have both stayed under the Disney umbrella with their roles in Star Wars shows. I get the impression that most of the SHIELD cast would be happy to return, and in the case of those who might not be interested — Iain de Caestecker, perhaps — you could just say “in this (prime) universe, FitzSimmons were soulbonded at the Academy but Fitz has been dead for a long time and Jemma is now her own person.” Just imagine the SHIELD characters actually getting to interact with other MCU characters. And imagine how many unjustly killed characters could come back!! Trip! Raina! Kara! Victoria! Isabelle! Victoria and Isabelle could even be gay on screen.

Also imagine getting to see the Runaways and Cloak and Dagger kids growing into young adults. I think it would be adorable to see Gert, for example, interning at the law firm where She-Hulk works. Nico deserves to get to study magic with Wong. The prime universe could even unkill Robert Minoru and Janet Stein, the only valid parents in that bunch. Justice for Hot Dad.

I’m not saying that they need to make new shows of all of their old shows, but I think it would be really cool to see more of them (especially characters who, uh, aren’t white men) pop up, even incidentally, in other stories.

your fave is… (colleen wing)

Netflix MCU ladies, part three. Your fave Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) is autistic.

In a lot of ways, Colleen is more “standard” autistic than Karen or Misty. She exhibits more obvious social dysfunction, she does more noticeable self-stimulating behavior, and she’s more open about the fact that she doesn’t feel entirely at ease in the world. But make no mistake, she still falls in the “atypical autism” category, and what seems standard and obvious and noticeable to me, or drift partner, or another potential autistic person, it probably doesn’t alert most NTs. They might be able to tell that Colleen is the One of Those Things That’s Not Like the Others, but I don’t think they’d go so far as to diagnose.

I want to talk about this because, while I’m markedly different from Colleen in a lot of ways, that’s definitely the experience I’ve had, and I think sometimes about how I could have turned out a lot differently because of it.

Colleen is definitely the youngest of the Defenders-adjacent bunch, if only by a couple of years, which is something I do relate to. I skipped second grade, and from third grade until I had my car accident in college (taking a semester off and transferring schools did wonders for making me not the baby anymore), I was one of the youngest people in my class, if not the youngest. (Two of my friends in junior high were younger than me by a few months, having also skipped a grade, and while I liked not being the number one baby, I will also say that I think this says something about our junior high, in that it attracted the kinds of kids who skip grades. And neurodivergent kids, although I’m sure it’s not a totally overlapping situation.)

Anyway, though, being the group baby is a very weird feeling, and I imagine that’s the case even if you’re NT. A lot of the time it doesn’t matter, but you’re (one of) the last to hit milestones, and in my case it opened me up to a fair bit of getting taken advantage of by people who I really wanted to like me (age = inexperience = it was easier for them to manipulate me and stuff) and also being patronized and condescended to (I had one friend who, as we got older, treated me like a naive baby both because I was baby and because I’d gone to the isolated weirdo junior high so therefore she assumed I was inexperienced in the ways of life, which was only sort of true). Part of it is how other people treat you, i.e. sometimes treating you like baby, but part of it is this subconscious thing where you treat yourself like baby because you’ve been conditioned to think of yourself that way. There’s a lot of second-guessing of yourself, a lot of wondering what your place is in social settings.

This is exacerbated, potentially, by neuroatypicality, which, as we’ve established, often leads to confusion about one’s place is in a social setting. Colleen also has social confusion for culture shock reasons (she’s half-Chinese, half-Japanese, and she was born in and spent her early years living in Japan) and I don’t feel comfortable addressing that myself since it’s not something I can really speak to, but it is worth noting.

Another symptom of being the group baby is feeling, if subconsciously, the need to prove yourself. This usually manifests in feeling like you have to prove yourself hypercompetent so you seem less like baby; this sometimes overlaps with proving yourself mature, but competency is the big thing, and the one that definitely applies in Colleen’s case. She was running a dojo at (give/take) twenty-five, and doing so very well. Sure, she got the dojo because of the Hand, and that was its own whole mess (more on that in a second), but she was good at it, and her students liked her. Later, when she was working more with Danny (Finn Jones) and the other Defenders she was constantly pushing herself and refusing to seem like she needed even a little bit of help. She just went for it, both because she had a goal in mind and because she wanted to prove herself (which was also because of the Hand stuff, to an extent).

Luckily, none of the Defenders really treat Colleen like baby, or even like they have to be careful with her because she’s fragile and neurodivergent (…because they’re all neurodivergent too), but you can tell she’s used to worrying about that, or at least worrying about seeming weak. She hates admitting what could even seem like weakness (again partially because of the Hand) because she acts tough (which is very valid, but can coexist with emotional vulnerability) as a coping mechanism. It’s not quite masking, she doesn’t really bother to hide that she’s intense or weird, but she does put up a very definite front to protect herself. She might be weird, but she doesn’t let other people’s reactions bother her (visibly).

There’s also this: “I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but all I want is something stable.” She says this to Claire (Rosario Dawson) in The Defenders, and it’s just so tragic. She’s coming off of this massive betrayal by Bakuto (Ramón Rodriguez) and the Hand, the person and organization that took her in and took care of her for most of her life. She thought they’d been training her to do the right thing (and to train others to do, too) and she was so into that! She trusted them, perhaps too easily, perhaps because she was always looking for that stability and she was willing to take it wherever she could get it. She wanted to belong to something, to really have a purpose, because she didn’t have that anywhere else. Her mom was out of the picture early on, her dad wasn’t really present, her grandfather raised her but, y’know, died, so biological family wasn’t really something she could rely on, and (thanks in part to the autism) making friends is admittedly very hard for her. Of course the Hand was able to hoodwink her like that! She was desperate to belong.

To a much lesser extent, I relate to this. I never joined an evil cult on accident or anything, but I did have a very brief Jesus phase in high school. I grew up, as I’ve said, going to pretty chill Methodist church, and it never really did anything for me, but I figured “why not believe.” The only truly horrifying thing that happened at that church was one pastor bragged about how she’d once told her preadolescent daughter “yes, honey, of course I love Jesus more than you.” It didn’t fuck up the daughter too much, from what I could tell, so that’s good, but it’s pretty shocking to hear. Mostly, though, church was just a place I went some weekends, and I’d go to Sunday school or youth group and feel vaguely alienated from most of my peers but not really know why, and then I’d go to service and read a book (until my mom decided I was arbitrarily too old to be doing that). But junior year of high school, I was in the chorus of our production of Once Upon a Mattress, and a lot of the cast was actually pretty religious (most of them fundiegelical but, like, initially surreptitious about it). They’d lead voluntary pre-show prayers and say stuff about blessings and I decided to give it a try. (This was partially because of my crush on one of the most Jesusy guys, who I had no expectation of ever dating but still enjoyed being around because he was genuinely very friendly.) They invited me to their nondenominational prayer group the weekend after the show closed, and I agreed to go because they made it sound so warm and nice.

I went, and it actually was really nice. We sat in a big circle and at one point they “prayed over” me and the other new girl, and the boy I had a crush on compared me to Deborah from the Bible (she was a prophetess and I was and am a writer, so like, the power of words or something, I’m not sure, the way he said it made me feel ridiculously flattered) and they all complimented me (admittedly in the framework of “these are the gifts the Lord has given you and you are great in them,” but still) and it was so overwhelmingly kind that I started crying happy tears. I assumed this must be what religious experiences feel like and therefore assumed that I’d had one, so for a few months I was like “hey, this Jesus stuff is actually pretty cool!” I continued going to prayer group (though most meetings were more “sit and pray by yourself or in a small group” and I ended up just using the time to do a “prayer journal,” which was literally just a journal but go off I guess) until one session where some of the kids started talking about protesting the anniversary of the Summer of Love. I don’t know why they were planning that already, because it was a couple years away from being, well, that. I also don’t know what exactly they were protesting. Were people already planning, like, big celebratory orgies or something? It seemed unclear, but it also seemed really suspicious. I wasn’t out yet, even to myself, but hoo boy, I could still tell that protesting free love (and also non-Biblically-sanctioned love) wasn’t something I was down for. I don’t know if that actually ever happened, but that was the last time I went to prayer group and the start of my official descent into vaguely pagan agnosticism (this basically means I like the idea of some spiritual stuff, and I like the idea of heaven or something like it, and I like the idea of not being a shithead, but I get weird and analytical when I try to think too hard about actual religious doctrine – which is in and of itself probably an autistic thing).

In short, I aligned myself with these people (most of whom are very nice, though our ideologies don’t mesh) because I was desperate for a place to belong. I didn’t feel like I fully belonged in many other places at the time, often feeling disconnected in social settings for a whole slew of reasons, so I tried to push myself into someplace that felt like it accepted me. And that place (for the record, I don’t think my Christian friends were maliciously trying to conservatize me, at least consciously) took advantage of my desperation and idealism and tried to make me feel like I belonged, only to turn around and do something super weird that I couldn’t get on board with.

What I’m saying is that I understand what led Colleen to get seduced by the Hand. The Hand is obviously way worse than my well-meaning Christian friends’ fundiegelical prayer group, but Colleen joined the Hand for the same reasons I joined that prayer group, and honestly, it’s kind of a miracle that a prayer group is the worst thing I got myself into. If I’d been surrounded by different kinds of people, or thrown into a worse circumstance, who the hell knows what could have happened to me. I’m not saying like, “oh no autistic kids are poor babies who make bad decisions,” because that’s obviously not true, but I am saying that autistic kids, particularly autistic girls whose neurochemistry manifests this way, might get themselves into situations where they can chase that feeling of belonging and those situations might not always be great.

Colleen, luckily, finds a new family-of-choice with the Defenders and their allies (particularly Claire, Danny unfortunately, and Misty [Simone Missick]), and this time it’s actually people whose goals and motivations do align with hers, it’s people she can trust, it’s people who aren’t taking advantage of her or potentially regarding her differences as weaknesses (because, again, the Defenders may not all be autistic, but I think a lot of them are, and the rest of them are neurodiverse in other ways). It’s kind of beautiful.

And, like I mentioned, there’s a lot of more standard Autism Things going on too. Colleen is lucky enough to have made her special interest (martial arts) her career, initially running the dojo (though this, again, comes with baggage) and teaching kids about different styles of fighting. She grew up learning about martial arts, particularly from her grandfather, so she has a cultural connection to them. She also just enjoys practicing martial arts from a physical and emotional standpoint. She spends a lot of her spare time training just for the sheer joy of it; she also carries her katana (inherited from her grandfather) literally everywhere, making it the definition of a comfort object. (It’s a lot like Bobbi’s batons in that way, though with even more emotional significance.) Martial arts also serve as her primary form of stimming, where she works out to help her deal emotionally with things and plays with her katana or other martial arts weapons idly.

Colleen isn’t the best at socializing, but she’s a good friend when she makes friends and she genuinely does care about people. Part of why she gets so upset when she finds out the Hand is evil is that she realizes she’s inadvertently fucked over a lot of kids she was trying to help. She’s pretty blunt, having no patience for beating around the bush about things and also not hesitating to tell people what she thinks of them, good or bad. Also, if she had a million dollars, she’d go to the British Library and read everything. That’s one of the most autistic things I’ve ever heard.

Also! Here’s a couple articles about the upcoming Shang-Chi film, one about the guardian lions in the trailer and one about the physical Ten Rings.

how (not) to corrupt your female characters

Starring the women of of Marvel television.

The films in the MCU have had a few female antagonists by now. There’s Hela (Cate Blanchett), of course, the most fabulously demented scenery-chewer. The Guardians films gave us Nebula (Karen Gillan), though she only held the villain title tentatively and only for about one and a half films, and they also wasted Elizabeth Debicki on that gold-painted eugenicist Ayesha. The Supreme Intelligence in Captain Marvel isn’t technically a woman, but it often appeared looking like Mar-Vell (Annette Bening) since that was how Carol saw it so she got to do some villain acting, and Minn-Erva was technically a villain too (they also wasted Gemma Chan, though in this case just because she was such fun in this part but had no screentime; they at least cast her as the lead in Eternals).

The TV shows have given us a lot more female villains, though. Sometimes this is straightforward (SHIELD‘s Lorelei [Elena Satine], Ellen Nadeer [Parminder Nagra], Izel [Karolina Wydra], various Chronicoms; Alexandra [Sigourney Weaver] and Madame Gao [Wai Ching Ho] on The Defenders; Alisa Jones [Janet McTeer] in Jessica Jones; Mariah Dillard [Alfre Woodard] in Luke Cage; Morgan le Fay [Elizabeth Hurley] on Runaways) and sometimes it’s #complicated (the mothers of Runaways come to mind, because the show did this thing of trying to make them sympathetic but only sometimes and I really only bought it with regards to Janet Stein [Ever Carradine], #justiceforjanetstein). The best and worst cases, though, were the characters whose roles and allegiances shifted during their arcs.

Am I bringing this up now because people (even on the website I write for) are having discussions about who might be the villain of WandaVision and I’m getting heated about it? Maybe probably yes.

The Bad: Jiaying
good to evil
This is not just to say that Jiaying (Dichen Lachman) turned bad. The ratings I’m giving are about how I feel about the arc and how it was handled. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there was no fucking excuse for making Jiaying the villain of season two with only two episodes to go and no real hints leading up to it. (I’m also angry about this because my dad latched onto the idea that she might be a villain early on as a way to, I don’t know, give me shit? He liked talking about characters like Grant Ward deserving redemption arcs because he knew it pissed me off, and I have to pretend that he always insisted Jiaying was evil for the same reason. I hate that they made him right.) She’d been portrayed as sometimes cold and isolationist, and definitely someone who was wounded emotionally but ultimately a good person who wanted the best for her fellow Inhumans. The fact that she turned out to be evil, and largely just to give Daisy (Chloe Bennet) more angst, was offensive, and the fact that she was “heroically” killed by Daddy Dearest (Kyle Maclachlan) who had been a villain and done actively villainous things all season long confirmed that it was both a racist and misogynistic call. Thank god for season seven!

The Bad: Kara Lynn Palamas
good to weaponized-bad
Kara (Maya Stojan) should have gotten to live to become a hero again, dammit! Kara is just Bucky with a nanomask instead of a robot arm and canonical sexual abuse. Kara shouldn’t have been taken by Hydra in the first place, but since she was she should have never fallen in with Ward (Brett Dalton) who just wanted to manipulate her because of his weird fetish for Asian women, but since she did she should never have gone back to him after SHIELD started helping her, but since she did he shouldn’t have accidentally killed her and then used it to fuel his angst in 3a. There were so many chances for Kara to get “redeemed” (even though the only thing that made her “bad” was being brainwashed) and rejoin SHIELD/the side of good that didn’t brainwash, manipulate, and rape her but someone decided it was more important for Grant Ward to have something else to whinge about. Straight-up, Kara and Jiaying are two of the things I will never forgive SHIELD for even though I love it.

The Bad: Jeri Hogarth
neutral to bad to better to ??????
I think I’ve said this before, but I’m going to come out swinging so you don’t waste your time on this paragraph if it’s going to make you angry. I do not like Jeri (Carrie-Anne Moss) at all. I didn’t finish Jessica Jones, as I’ve also mentioned before, but based on what I did see… I dislike Jeri about as much as I dislike any female character in the MCU. I legitimately think that Karolina’s abusive murderous cult-running piece of shit mother Leslie Dean (Annie Wersching) was a more redeemable character than Jeri, and I do not like Leslie Dean at all. Jeri started out as a bitchtastic lawyer with no moral compass who had cheated on her lovely doctor wife Wendy (Robin Weigert – honestly, I was predisposed to dislike Jeri from the start because she broke the heart of Robin Weigert) with Pam (Susie Abromeit) who I don’t actually dislike and do feel kind of bad for as well (galaxy brain solution: Wendy/Pam endgame) and then she turned into a bitchtastic lawyer who was actively interested in weaponizing Kilgrave’s (David Tennant) abilities for her own benefit and then Wendy got hypnotized into trying to kill Jeri so Pam killed Wendy and Pam went to jail but Jeri was a jerk jackass and when season two began Jeri literally said that Pam was asking for it by dressing like she did and then we’re just supposed to forgive Jeri for all of that because she got diagnosed with ALS? I think fucking not. I’m very sorry she got that diagnosis, but that doesn’t suddenly make her a good person. They should have skipped that plotline altogether and just committed to Jeri being the villain instead of…

The Bad: Trish Walker
the actual most eager hero type to a relapsed drug addict to did murders and went to boat jail?
Is the handling of Trish (Rachael Taylor) the biggest reason I didn’t finish Jessica Jones? Yes. Yes, it is. I honestly think that what Jessica Jones did to Trish is akin to what Game of Thrones did to Daenerys, and that’s not just because I love them both. I think it’s fucking nonsensical and insulting. Trish spent the first season of Jessica Jones and The Defenders actively trying to help Jessica, because it wa the right thing to do and she wanted to be a hero however she can, and caring about Jessica and also, you know, being a decent example of someone in recovery for substance abuse. Then season two of JJ rolled around and suddenly someone decided that Trish’s desire to be a hero actually came from an evil bad place? And that it superceded her desire to stay clean? And that it meant that she’d submit herself to being experimented on? And that it would make her break all of her positive relationships? And that it would make her murder Jess’ evil mom (but Jess would be mad at her for it instead of understand that it was probably okay because Jess’ evil mom was trying to murder people and had murdered people and blah blah blah I’m sorry but Jess does not get to be the one who says whether or not it is okay to murder people she has murdered before and will murder again and sometimes that shit just happens in superhero media)? I didn’t watch season three, but I know the gist: Trish, now with vaguely enhanced abilities, became a hero, worked with Jess but it’s still weird, eventually killed like one guy, and got sent to boat jail? Not only did I not realize before this that the Raft was still active (I thought that after Cap jailbroke his buddies at the end of Civil War they just realized, oops, this is actually a horrible idea for a jail, it’s a human rights violation and let’s just not do that) but Trish got sent there for murdering one guy in a pretty normal superhero way. ONE GUY. Trish, who barely had superpowers, murdered I’m pretty sure a criminal, but for some reason this was the one time that wasn’t considered reasonably acceptable by superhero standards? I will remind you: Jessica Jones murdered criminals. Colleen Wing murdered criminals. Karen Page is a civilian and she murdered a criminal. Matt Murdock tried not to murder criminals, but realistically, he probably caused injuries that led to death in at least a few cases. Frank Castle’s entire thing was murdering criminals, he had a whole two seasons of TV about it. I’m having a hard time thinking of an agent of SHIELD or Avenger that didn’t probably murder at least one criminal. I’m not, like, pro-murder, but in action genres it happens, and when you’re dealing with supervillains it’s kind of the only way sometimes, probably. The fact that it’s considered acceptable and even heroic in the above cases but when Trish did it it got her sent to boat jail alongside actual megalomaniacal criminals like Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey) from Luke Cage for who knows how long because then the series got cancelled is bonkers insane. It’s also bananas insulting considering that Trish’s descent into “villainy” directly correlated with her relapse of drug addiction and nobody apparently tried to get her help or, I don’t know, sent her to rehab instead of jail.

I have a conspiracy theory that Jessica Jones‘ showrunner (whose name I will not deign to use) was actually a homophobe (and kind of a misogynist). She genderswapped Jeri to make Jeri a lesbian woman, but then Jeri was the actual worst, and one of the other lesbians in season one murdered the third. Then she heard that fans were into Jess/Trish as a potential (and tbh viable) romance and she couldn’t have that, no sir! But Jess was the titular protagonist of the show, so Trish was the character she threw under the bus in aggressive and offensive ways in order to sink that ship.

But come on. It’s also ridiculous that Trish was made a villain because she’s so aggressively not in the comics. Look at this panel from the Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat series by Kate Leth and Brittney L. Williams!

The Neutral: Whitney Frost
??? to >0
Whitney (Wynn Everett) is a weird case, mostly because she came from Agent Carter‘s messy second season. She started the series as an underestimated but intelligent scientist hiding in plain sight as a film actress (I think I heard she was inspired, in this incarnation, by Hedy Lamarr) and then she wa infected by Darkforce and became eeeevil or something. It was reasonable that she’s upset about being underestimated, but she kind of just detouredinto cartoon villainy. She could have been fun like that, if it had been more developed – she would have been a Batman villain, basically – but as it is, she just didn’t go anywhere as a character, so I ultimately don’t feel any particular way about her arc.

The Neutral: Tilda Johnson
decent but reasonably pissed off to morally ambiguous
Tilda (Gabrielle Dennis) was introduced in Luke Cage season two as Mariah’s estranged daughter, a talented doctor who now works in herbal medicine. She didn’t seem to want anything to do with her mom’s nonsense, and she did help the good guys, but then she also helped the bad guys, and then she killed her mom, and then she didn’t inherit Harlem’s Paradise and she was upset about this for some reason even though she hasn’t wanted anything to do with it, and she did a musical number, and then she showed up wearing hair poofs reminiscent of her comic book self (a distinct villain, aka Nightshade) and it would have made sense if there had been a third season but there wasn’t so I don’t know how I feel about the arc in the long run.

The Neutral: Ruby Hale (and her mother)
born a little shit and died a little shit, but she could have been so much more
SHIELD‘s Ruby (Dove Cameron) is a strange case. She started out as a villain (though it was a little fuzzy because she’d basically been indoctrinated since birth by Hydra) and she diesda villain and at no real point during her arc did she act like she actually wanted to be not a villain. Her mom General Hale (Catherine Dent) was similar, though she presumably wasn’t indoctrinated since birth but since adolescence, and she seemed inclined to at least cooperate with the good guys for a hot minute but that went out the window. I bring Ruby up not because she changed sides but because Daisy actively wanted her to. Daisy mentioned wanting to give Ruby a chance to renounce her Hydra beliefs and shift to being a good guy multiple times, and seemed to think that she could be instrumental in that shift if a chance was given. And that would have been so awesome. Ruby would have been the Zuko (a la Avatar: The Last Airbender) of the group, and she would have had to learn to be good while being very cranky about it, and that would have been great. Ruby was a fabulous antagonist, but she also could have been a fabulous redeemed antagonist.

The Neutral: Joy Meachum
who the hell cares to who the hell knows
Joy (Jessica Stroup) had the misfortune of being on Iron Fist, a show with no good white people characters. (I’ll take this time to say Mary [Alice Eve] isn’t being discussed because, thanks to her multiple personalities and mercenary status, she started as both good and bad and then she stayed that way.) Joy also had the misfortune of being a plot device. She started out a naive rich girl, then she became a less naive rich girl. At least when she started wielding more power and being bitchy in season two, she was sort of funny, but she was ultimately such a nothing of a character, so I can’t be arsed to have feelings about her arc.

The Neutral: Vanessa Marianna
cheerfully vague to menacingly vague
Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) is a different kind of neutral. In her case, she starts as unaffiliated with crime (probably) and ends as affiliated with crime (definitely) but I honestly think I would enjoy her character no matter what her affiliation was or how she developed. She’s such an interesting, weird presence no matter what.

The Neutral: Nico Minoru
good to spoopy to spoopier to good again
Nico (Lyrica Okano) was the magic user on Runaways, which means that I predicted a moral ambiguity arc for her pretty much the whole time. She got dark and scary for a bit at the end of season two, but it really kicked into gear when Morgan showed up in season three and started battling for her soul. I rate this neutral because while it was pretty well-written it stressed me the hell out like all moral ambiguity magic arcs do.

The Good: Raina
threateningly self-involved to peacefully self-sacrificing
I’ve also said this before, but I love Raina (Ruth Negga) and the fact that they gave her a redemption arc. The fact that it ended in her death really sucks, but I’m pretty sure that’s only because she got a lead role on Preacher (I’ll admit I’ve only seen the first nine episodes of this, mostly because I just haven’t been able to bring myself to watch Lucy Griffiths die horribly yet again). I would love Raina even if she’d just stayed her original glamorous threatening-through-a-red-smile self, but I think it was freaking masterful. The whole time, Raina was searching for something grand to swear herself to and be a part of, and she ultimately found that in Daisy. If Ruth hadn’t gotten the other job, I firmly believe that Raina would have turned out to be not really dead and she’d periodically pop back up. (Did I have a flash of hope in 5a when dickbag Kasius was like “we have a seer”? Yes. Did I have a flash of hope whenever Chronicoms alluded to prescience? Yes.)

The Good: Dottie Underwood
bad 😀 to ????? 😀
Dottie (Bridget Regan) is a phenomenal character and, again, I would have loved her no matter what side she played for. She ended Agent Carter‘s first season still a bad guy, but by season two she was sort of just playing for her own team, and who knew where she’d end up or what she’d do next. She was sort of working with Peggy, but sort of wasn’t. She was sort of evil, but sort of wasn’t. She was an amazing, hilarious Communist who did not give a single fuck about anything but herself (and kind of Peggy, because she definitely wanted to boink Peggy and you cannot convince me otherwise). I’m convinced she’s the one who killed Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) and if Agent Carter had continued she would have stuck around being confusing and great. I’m also convinced that she continued to wreak havoc on the world for years after (possibly an infinite number of years, if she got the slow-aging Black Widow serum like is in the comics).

The Good: Elektra Natchios
bad-good to good-good to technically-bad to bad-bad to ???
Elektra (Élodie Yung) is unquestionably the best part of Daredevil season two, and she’s fascinatingly complex. At first, she seemed very season 3 Faith (“want-take-have”) and out for her own interests (her murdery side initially caused her rift with Matt, after all) but then it turned out she was working for the same presumably good organization – the Chaste, which is hilarious considering Elektra’s everything – that trained Matt before he noped out, then she and Matt had feelings and fought the bad guys together but she died. The Hand then proceeded to resurrect her and make of her their murderdoll, which she spent a lot of The Defenders being before she killed Alexandra and took over, presumably going full evil, but then she and Matt felt more things together and died (or in his case “died”). While it’s deeply disappointing that Elektra didn’t also come back from the dead and continue to wreak havoc (and/or be the one in the group that does the murder but like, for good reasons), I classify her arc as one of the good ones in this bunch because she was always the best thing happening on screen.

The Good: Opheliaida
good robot to bad robot to bad simulation to confused human
Confession: there’s a part of me that wanted AIDA (Mallory Jansen) to stay a good robot. I thought she was adorable when she was basically just the business version of Cameron from The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I also wouldn’t mind more media where at least some robots weren’t evil, because I sometimes relate to the Cameronesque ones. Also, I cosplayed good robot AIDA, and I was initially planning on improving the costume (especially the gloves) and wearing it again, but I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with that now knowing where the character ultimately went. All of that said, I think the whole Opheliaiada arc is objectively one of the strongest on SHIELD and Mallory Jansen gave an incredible performance (hot take: if it had been on Westworld and not a superhero show I think she would have gotten award nominations). This is the best way to do corruption arcs, I think, because it was literal (reading the Darkhold literally corrupted AIDA’s programming) and therefore not representative of a potential “moral failing” (see above wrt Trish and addiction) but still gave the character a chance to explore the very real reasons that they might rebel (I still get chills thinking about Mallory’s delivery of the line “do you know what it’s like to be kept in a closet?”). Once again, I wish they’d used her new conscience to trigger a redemption arc so they could keep her around, and I think it’s really dumb that the thing that tipped her over the edge into crazytown was Fitz (Iain de Caestecker) not returning her romantic advances because whoa he’s not worth it, but overall I think it was a strong story.

The Good: Brigid O’Reilly
acceptable cop to personification of chaos
This is a little different because Brigid (Emma Lahana) was never actually an antagonist, but boy, the promo material for Cloak and Dagger‘s second season sure tried to make you think she was going to be. At the end of the first season, she “became” Mayhem, who was basically a version of her that didn’t give a fuck about rules. She still cared about, like, hurting bad guys, but she didn’t feel beholden to the harmful bureaucracy around her. She was thus freer to go after the shitty cops she worked with (the cops who had killed her cop boyfriend and also Ty’s brother). She also had some personal stuff to work out, which she did thanks to the Dark Dimension, and it was far too complicated to relay in a single paragraph, but like… honestly, this was the highlight of season two, all the Mayhem stuff, watching Brigid struggle with her darker impulses and become more of a hero than she possibly could have been working for the police. That was really cool and refreshing.

The Good: Kora
sad to angry to facetious to good, speedrun style
Kora (Dianne Doan) was only in a handful of episodes, but she managed to have a pretty classic corruption/redemption arc even still. We were first introduced to her as a timid girl, Jiaying’s first daughter who was afraid of her own abilities (and who, it was implied, had suicided in the prime timeline), and she was quickly found and manipulated by Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E. Sullivan) for his own evil purposes. She felt sheltered and angry and like people were afraid of her, so it wasn’t hard to turn her, and she stayed angry and bad for most of her arc. We were afraid she wouldn’t make it out of the show alive, but we were pleasantly surprised that she did. She didn’t immediately turn against Nathaniel after he killed her mother, but you could see the wheels starting to spin; he nearly killed her when he took her powers, but she came out of that alright and insistent on helping the good guys, and in the flash-forward she’d joined SHIELD (SWORD) and was traveling the galaxy with her sister, and it was beautiful and refreshing and kind of felt like an apology for Jiaying and also Kara.

Also, here’s me talking about the superiority of Batman: The Animated Series.

revisionist outlining (jessica jones seasons 2&3)

So, barring some issues (race whatnot and a related lack of intersectionality, an overall sense of 101-ness, etc.) I think many people would agree that the first season of Jessica Jones is definitely among the best seasons of Marvel television. The performances are strong, the story stays true to if not the beats or the tie-ins with the rest of Marvel canon at least the essence of the Alias comics, the revolutionary spirit of it feels perpetually relevant. (Though I’m going to say a bold thing: I’m glad it actually predates the #MeToo movement. I think #MeToo is absolutely important, necessary, and worth promoting, but given the way the rest of the series went, I can almost guarantee it would have gotten over-the-top to the point of being bad representation.)

I also personally really enjoyed The Defenders. It’s largely goofy as hell, sure, but I had a grand time (largely because of the competent and significant handling of my girl Colleen Wing [Jessica Henwick – and as always, #justiceforjessicahenwick]). At the end of this series, it seemed pretty clear where the next season of Jessica Jones would go: Jessica (Krysten Ritter) would continue to he emotionally and take cases, many undoubtedly involving D-list comics antagonists, she’d reconnect with Luke (Mike Colter) at least platonically (he we still dating Claire [Rosario Dawson] at the time, which I liked a lot, but Jess and Luke are a thing in the comics and that’s important), Trish (Rachael Taylor) would become Hellcat and get to be the hero she deserved to be. Maybe we’d tie in more frequently with other shows, too.

Oh, how wrong I was.

I should clarify two things before I continue. One, I only got halfway through season two and didn’t even bother watching season three, for a slew of reasons but many of them connected to: two, I am actually a Hellcat stan.

I loved Trish in season one, because… well, honestly, because I relate to most girls who are a little neurotic and want to be good (and to be able to Do Good in an active sense) despite doubting that they are, plus drift partner had already dibsed Jess. Then I saw the trade of Marvel Divas in the wild and picked it up out of curiosity about her comics counterpart. Then I was at my comic shop browsing right around the time the first issue of Kate Leth’s Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat came out and decided why not I like supporting lady comics. (That series is incidentally great and that iteration of the character is #relatable for me in a different way. One of my favorites of recent years, not that I’ve read all that many comics.) I then deep-dove into the whole history of Hellcat via Wikipedia. I give a lot of fucks about Hellcat, and therefore it should come as no surprise when I say:

Netflix Marvel did Hellcat so damn dirty.

But she’s far from the only one. So instead of critiquing every single thing that I hated about the second and third seasons of Jessica Jones, I’m going to take you through an outline of what I personally would have done instead.

As the post-Alias Jessica Jones comics got lighter in tone, so would her television show. After Defenders, the survivors are reeling without Matt (Charlie Cox), and his presence looms over the second season of all of the other solo shows. Maybe Jess keeps thinking she sees him around town for a dose of tragedy and trauma.

But she’s also taking cases, because work is a good distraction (and she’s starting to feel better and better about being heroic, if not about being called a hero explicitly). The first few episodes are all seemingly inconsequential monster of the week situations featuring, as I said earlier, D-list comics antagonists; perhaps one of the intended victims of some antagonist is a nice girl (Melonie Diaz, maybe?) who hits it off with Malcolm (Eka Darville).

He’s still working as Jessica’s assistant, because that should have been a positive thing. He manages her cases and also helps clients and victims find the psychiatric help they no doubt need after being in traumatizing situations that require the hiring of a private investigator who specializes in cases with enhanced people.

And he also hits it off with the girl. I’m going to name her Dalia. He and Dalia get on really well; they help each other deal with their respective traumas and start living life and they’re just generally cute together. She even encourages him to consider finishing his degree.

We could also have a case in there where Jess actually has to protect an enhanced person, maybe a kid even. This is my story, so I’m gonna call it. Her name is Yua, she’s played by Mana Ashida, and she’s a tween who can be invisible (whether because she’s an Inhuman or because of science or just because isn’t made clear). Her favorite teacher at school finds out that she’s being targeted by maybe a mean older kid and hires Jess to help. This gives us a strain of “powers = persecution,” a common theme in Marvel, and gives Jess a chance to have a good bonding moment with a younger woman (in contrast, perhaps, to not being able to save poor Hope [Erin Moriarty]).

Meanwhile, Jess is also dealing with a case that pertains to no other than one Hedy Wolfe (who’s Lucy Griffiths, period end of story I love her and I will not be swayed), aka Trish’s longstanding frenemy, former It’s Patsy costar, and frequent comics foil. Someone is blackmailing Hedy – now a fashion mogul or some such – with her darkest secret: she’s gay.

To thicken the plot, she initially suspects Trish. (Cut to: flashback teenage versions of them awkwardly hate-making out, probably.) Trish isn’t responsible, resents the accusation (“just because I’ve been telling you to come out since we were kids doesn’t mean I’d force you out!”), and gets a little upset at Jess for helping. This allows them to have some conflict, though it’ll be easily resolved. This whole scenario also raises the question: was Trish just messing around as a kid or is she a not-straight person too? (Unfortunately given the aforementioned Jess/Luke endgame this is probably the closest we’ll get to a Jess/Trish pairing, but make no mistake: there is no sisterzoning in this version. Jess and Trish grew up together, and they’re very close because of that, but you notice how they never really called each other sisters in season 1, then lots of people cried gay*, then suddenly it was sister-talk all the time?)

The answer is, honestly, that Trish is still figuring that out, but she eventually decides she’s comfortable calling herself bisexual. She’s markedly happier after admitting this to herself and others (I think she comes out to Malcolm first, because I really hate what the show made of their relationship and it should have just been nice and supportive because they’re Jessica’s Rational Friends).

Anyway, Trish decides to help with Hedy’s mystery because she’s a good person, and the more they dig the more her blackmailer seems connected to the other D-list antagonists that have come up throughout the season. Some sort of crime ring is established, possibly as one of the groups vying for the Hand’s position in the city, and eventually it’s brought down by Jess, Trish, and Malcolm, with help from Luke along the way. (Jess and Luke have been hanging out more, usually with their friends but occasionally alone.) At this point Jess makes sure to tell Trish that she’s a superhero even without any fancy powers, foreshadowing Trish’s season 3 arc.

(What of canon’s established lesbian Jeri [Carrie-Anne Moss]? I don’t really know. She’s present, I guess, but I think she’s kind of a jackass, honestly. She’s probably involved in one of the ongoing cases, but none of the other characters really like her either, so she’s not really present in their social lives. I imagine there’s a line where Jess compares Hedy to Jeri and Hedy, because of course she knows Jeri because lesbian* mutual acquaintances, is offended. Hedy has seriously considered hooking up with Pam [Susie Abromeit], though.)

The last episode of season 2 is surprisingly domestic. Trish has Hedy on her radio show, during which they discuss their childhood rivalry and then both come out. “Don’t get any bright ideas, we’re not queer together,” Hedy quips.

(Dorothy Walker also isn’t present at all, because I hate her and also because Trish is an adult who can have cut her mom off for good this time. She’s only mentioned in the context of Trish explaining why she didn’t come out, even to herself, sooner.)

We end the season on a group of Jess’ friends and friends-of-friends (Trish, Malcolm, Dalia, the nice landlord who Jess never slept with, his nice girlfriend probably, Hedy, Luke, Foggy [Elden Henson], Marci [Amy Rutberg], Karen [Deborah Ann Woll], Claire, Misty [Simone Missick], Colleen, Danny [Finn Jones] unfortunately) having some cliche rooftop barbecue or something, enjoying each other’s company. They talk about things like how Matt would be proud of them (“you know,” Karen says to Trish, “Matt became a hero by training and working his ass off, not because he had super strength or anything,” and this also paves the way for Trish in s3) and how cute Malcolm and Dalia are and at least one other inconsequential thing. It’s lovely, but while it happens an ominous figure lurks at the edge of the frame.

I’ll try to keep this as close to Luke Cage season 2 as I can, but obviously after Luke and Claire break up, Jess and Luke start banging again. Then at the end of the season, Luke is reigning over Harlem’s Paradise and Jess is one of the visitors he receives. She sighs, averts her eyes, and mumbles, “I’m pregnant.”

Season three! This is nice because it’s also a third season for Luke Cage now. The shows are one show.

We open on Jess in labor, screaming obscenities and begging for booze. Luke laughs and holds her hand and is a good partner. Malcolm is in the waiting room with textbooks in his lap, trying to study amidst the hospital chaos because that’s how you know he’s in school again, when Trish runs in. She looks like she just came from working out, and Malcolm says something that suggests she’s been out of town training physically for at least a month.

In labor, Jess shouts, “Is Trish here yet? I need Trish!” “Only family in the room,” one of the nurses says. Jess rolls her eyes and, for the only time in the two seasons, says, “She’s my sister.” Then she and Luke shrug at each other, emphasizing that this is an excuse, behind the nurse’s back as she goes to get Trish. (Sidenote: found family should absolutely have the same hospital/etc. privileges as blood/marriage/legal family.)

Baby Danielle is born by the end of the episode. That’s her name because the comics said so, and they do discuss naming her after someone that’s not Danny Rand in the show, but Danielle Cage is a better name than Matilda Cage, or for that matter Francine Cage, and it would be weird to name her Mercedes or Claire because, well, Luke has slept with those people, and what even is the girl form of Malcolm, and no offense to Karen or Colleen but those just sound like white girl names. (“Colleen is super Asian, Jess,” Luke points out. “And I’m sure even she’d say her name is a white girl name,” Jess replies.)

Her middle name is Patricia, though. Trish cries when she’s told. It’s very sweet.

Anyway, the third season is about juggling the trials of being new parents (and trying to cohabitate in Jessica’s small apartment/office, which I’m sure is comedy gold) with whatever D-list antagonist they’re assigned. Maybe this season we incorporate AIM, Advanced Idea Mecchanics. They’re a good spooky conglomerate and they’ve barely been in the MCU (seen in Iron Man 3, where they were taken down, but it stands to reason that not every single person in the organization got captured or killed and therefore a new offshoot could pop up and given that they’re mentioned on Agents of SHIELD that’s likely what happened), plus they’re vaguely connected to lots of other groups/characters including common and loathsome enemy Hydra, plus they pose a threat to powered people. Being as Jess and Luke are powered people and recently had a child who stands to become one of those, this would have a personal importance.

Let’s get, like, Sherilyn Fenn up in here playing Monica Rappaccini, Scientist Supreme of AIM (a comics character I just learned about – Marvel buy a baby name book). She’s masterminding plots and creating havoc and just in case you were really craving that secret evil mom thread from canon she’s got a secret daughter who finds out she’s evil and is a genetically modified powered person codenamed Scorpion! She can be Rosabell Laurenti Sellers, and it’s funny because Scorpion, aka Carmilla Black, aka Thasanee Rappaccini, also deals in poisons! I’m funny, you guys. (Also, #justiceforthesandsnakes.)

Anyway, Carmilla shows up, fully a protagonist, and her dealing with her secret evil mom runs parallel to Jess and Luke and Trish fighting said mom. Carmilla teams up with our heroes, too. Obviously.

Trish is heroing it up, meanwhile. She’s stepping in to do night patrols when the new parents have to do baby things and holding her own. Jess is aggravated because she misses punching things, but she’s also proud of Trish, officially aka Hellcat. (Unlike Jess, Trish does go all the way out and get herself a suit. She needs it, okay? She’s not bulletproof or super-strong. But also, I say this with love, she’s a drama bitch. Matt is officially alive again and he helps hook her up with one, more tactical in nature and less bright but still reminiscent of the comics, including cat ears. Jess makes a fursona joke.) It’s a good business and Trish is basically Danielle’s third parent.

Trish also dates a girl. Unfortunately, it can’t be her most recent close comics gal pal, Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk, but we could dig a little deeper. She seems to know most other superheroines in the comics, and given her in-universe celebrity status she could easily know anyone else. I propose an Inhuman version of Firestar, aka Angelica Jones (no relation to Jess; buy a damn book of last names too, Marvel), one of her Marvel Divas gal pals who’s, you might have guessed, got fire-related powers. I’m kind of feeling Hannah Simone for this at the moment, but I’ll take suggestions.

Jeri, meanwhile, tangles with AIM herself. They probably see her as an ally, because she too is willing to exploit powered people to get what she wants. This puts her firmly in the “not a great person” category without her slut-shaming her ex and also probably not even paying the sex workers who shared their cocaine with her, and it’s unlikely her reputation will recover this time.

Jess and Luke keep having to get other Defenders to babysit, also. It’s a running joke that there’s always one hero missing from any team-up because someone has to watch the kid.

Luke also takes advantage of his now running Harlem’s Paradise to get information that otherwise would elude him. We see Tilda (Gabrielle Dennis) at least once; she’s probably been courted by AIM and told them to shove off, which she tells Luke with some reluctance. She’s up to something, but she’s also not going to fuck with Luke so soon after the birth of his kid. Misty keeps an eye on him as promised, but nothing he does is overtly illegal so she’s skeptically content. Colleen, meanwhile, is the Iron Fist now and has to fend off a lot of bullshit, and it’s also a running joke that she keeps trying to get out of babysitting.

So it comes to a dramatic conclusion, whatever nefarious scheme AIM is up to. Jeri does something decent to make up for being… who she is. Everyone has hero moments. Baby Danielle never has to face danger because “kidnap the baby” is one of my least favorite plot devices. Neither of her parents face death either. Trish probably gets hurt in some momentarily alarming but not permanently bad way and it’s a big old hero thing. Malcolm and Dalia stay out of the fighting altogether and are very happy cuddling and facilitating therapy appointments. Carmilla probably kills or at least helps imprison her mom, then gets Malcolm to write her a recommendation letter for college.

And Jess and Luke? They’re happier than ever and they probably get a bigger apartment to have just as their house while the old one stays the offices of Alias Investigations. It’s a satisfying ending for everyone that still leaves room to pick the characters back up later in some other capacity. Just what they, and we, deserved.