[ SECRET POST #4072 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4072 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #583.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

it's always so weird to me how nasty people get towards this character, sure she's not amazing, but the way people act it's like she personally murdered their pet in front of them or something.

she's a quirky, sarcastic side-character, a bit annoying if you don't like the archetype but nothing so erroneously egregious that warrants the label of the Scourge of the MCU that some people seem to think she is.

hell i can think of loads of male characters that are exactly the same and are adored for it.

[(Anonymous)]

She's the scourge of the MCU because for awhile, she was in every fic about the MCU as a stand-in for the reader. Even parts of the MCU she had no business being in, like 1940s Captain America stories. It was ridiculous. I only read stories with her in them if they're Thor related. Otherwise, it's an automatic back button.

[(Anonymous)]

Relatable. There was a time when 1940s CA stories were the only things I read in the MCU, as a reprieve from Avengers-era fics where, yes, Darcy was quite ubiquitous.

[(Anonymous)]

clint/coulson was similarly everywhere and shoehorned into every fic no matter the pairing, where was the outrage for that?

[(Anonymous)]

Plenty of people were massively annoyed about that and had it as the back button trigger if it was included in a fic background for no other reason than "it's popular, everyone likes it".
It also wasn't quite so obviously a thinly disguised author proxy.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

True, but I don't think that translated into intense dislike for Coulson as a character the way that it seems to have done for Darcy

[(Anonymous)]

Because Coulson is just ... so ridiculously bland and boring in the movies. Darcy on the other hand is this OTT quirky loud and kind of obnoxious character who's just a tiny sliver away from a manic pixie dreamgirl trope.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure. But at the end of the day, I can't help but feel that the fact that Coulson is a male character and Darcy is a female character played some role in those reactions and perceptions.

[(Anonymous)]

As soon as you show me a male character who's actually comparable to the Darcy brand of obnoxious I might agree. This one is comparing apples with oranges.

[(Anonymous)]

But "how subjectively obnoxious you, personally, find a character" isn't something that exists in a vacuum. That's my whole point.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Obviously not, but if you want to say that that's the problem here, the blame is better placed on the creators' end than on the fans' end.

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking as someone who likes Darcy and only cares about Coulson if he's being slashed with Fury...

I definitely saw intense dislike of Coulson in some circles, it just faded because Coulson's role in canon became larger so people who continued to complain about his popularity were regarded as kind of petty and bitter, so they all either bit their tongues or stopped caring. Darcy's role has gotten smaller if anything. She never had a major emotional impact on the plot and didn't get her own TV show the way Coulson did, and doesn't even appear in the most recent Thor movie. So where Coulson ended up becoming a decently developed character (by MCU standards) and retroactively justifying his popularity, Darcy remains a lolquirky audience stand-in. And that remains her role in the vast majority of fanfics, in an era where self-insert fics are often frowned upon and pair the spares porn (a la Clint/Coulson) are basically a fandom tradition. (Though this may be changing now that character/reader blogs are ubiquitous and more people are decrying porn as #problematic and slash as racist/sexist)

Also, Coulson started out with not much personality, which made him boring but mostly inoffensive. Darcy definitely had a personality, but it wasn't one that everyone necessarily liked, so it made her a bit polarizing.