is she ever enough?

[pantomimes]

♡

i recently sat down to watch mickey 17 with my best friends. it was a beautiful movie—both in its writing and visuals—and i have to admit that i ended up enjoying it way more than i initially thought i would.

see, i'm not usually fond of movies that fall under the "boring white guy goes to space and has to fight the other bad guy" trope, but this one has a lot of charm. not just that—a lot of love, too, despite the various shitty situations the characters find themselves in.

and here is where i start to get annoyed.

nasha and mickey are a god-tier m/f couple—nasha is, in mickey's own words, "an all-in-one elite agent", which translates to her being a fucking badass, and mickey... well. let's just say he's a sad submissive poor meow meow. being a black woman myself, i spent the whole movie afraid that they were going to pull the disposable black girlfriend trope on nasha, especially when a white character in the movie starts to get interested in him, but that didn't happen. nasha is one of the coolest depictions of a black woman i've seen a movie and from what i've seen, i'm far from being the only black person who agrees with this sentiment.

so, as i usually do when i get brainrot from a piece of media, i went to ao3. i open the mickey 17 category and—oh. m/m is the top tag. mickey 17/mickey 18 is the top ship. oh.

some context for those who haven't seen the movie:

"Adapted from the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, this stars Robert Pattinson as an "expendable" - a disposable crew member on a space mission, selected for dangerous tasks because his body can be reprinted if he dies, with his memories largely intact. With one regeneration, though, things go very wrong.*"

"(...) Specifically, Bong responds via Mickey’s romance with Nasha (Naomi Ackie). Mickey and Nasha grow together despite their challenges of the harsh conditions of the new world they are tasked with colonizing and the large ego of the disgraced politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), who is running the mission."

* things go very wrong: during a mission, mickey 17 doesn't die, but the scientists that reprint him whenever he dies think he did. therefore, they print another mickey, aka mickey 18-however, "multiples" are illegal, therefore one of them has to die.

so, what exactly is annoying about all of this?

well, what's that one discourse that happens every other month on twitter, tiktok, tumblr...? something about people not being as interested in female characters because, and i quote, "they're underdeveloped"?

bullshit.

this isn't a direct attack at the people who are into mickey/mickey exclusively—fuck, write and read whatever you like, i'm not here to dictate anything, that's not the point. what really bothers me is this: even in a situation where you find yourself thinking that there's no way that the female character in the story isn't going to be ignored because she's so well written, it still fucking happens.

and look, mickey 17 is just an example. not the best one, i'm aware—there aren't even that many fics about the movie to begin with. i'm just using a recent piece of media that i really liked to illustrate a bigger problem that's been bothering me for as long as i've been in fandom.

the usual arguments that people bring up (the classic underdeveloped one, the sexualized one, the male gaze one, the "people don't write about them enough" one which never fails to fucking kill me every single time) fall flat when, time and time again, they're given the opportunity to get invested in a female character and they choose the men—over and over and over until the end of the fucking world, apparently.

"where are the good female characters?" they are here. they've been here. you just don't care.

tldr: people should just admit they're afraid to work through their internalized misogyny (and oftentimes racism and lesbophobia too when we get into the whole yaoi vs yuri debacle, oop!) instead of writing thousands of threads on twitter about how justified they are in their obsession with male characters/mlm couples. there is nothing wrong with it, for the love of god—look around, you're not alone in it and you'll never be. you don't need to be an asshole to anyone that points out your biased views on the topic, though.