‘Agents of SHIELD’ Proved MCU Movies Don’t Care About Female Friendships
Obviously, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a huge cultural phenomenon, and it’s easily the biggest franchise in all of Hollywood. With that said, the same isn’t true when it comes to Marvel’s TV shows, most of which have already been canceled.
In fairness, most of Marvel’s TV shows were made with Netflix, and Netflix canceled them after Disney created Disney+ and started making Marvel shows for Disney+ instead of Netflix.
However, one Marvel TV show, Agents of SHIELD, has been pretty successful, and it’s easily the most successful Marvel TV show to date. While Agents of SHIELD has its flaws, it does do one thing better than the Marvel movies, and that’s actually developing the friendships between women.
The friendships between women in the MCU
In short, as fans on Reddit discussed, there simply aren’t that many female friendships in the MCU. There are several reasons for this, but it all boils down to simply not having many women in the cast to begin with. For example, in the Phase One movies, most women in the MCU were simply the significant other of the main character.
Tony Stark had Pepper Potts, Thor had Jane Foster, and so on and so forth. There were few female superheroes too, and even fewer who ended up joining the Avengers.
As a result, in the early Marvel movies, most women simply didn’t have much screen time with other women.
Because of that, the women in the MCU rarely had a chance to become friends with one another. One fan simply summed it up by saying that the Marvel movies, “barely even let their female characters talk to each other.”
The friendships between women in ‘Agents of SHIELD’
On the other hand, this was simply not true when it comes to Agents of SHIELD. Even in its first season, the principal cast of Agents of SHIELD was split evenly between the men and the women.
By its seventh and final season, the main cast of the show grew to include another woman. This pushed the show to have a majority female main cast, which can’t be said about the Marvel movies.
Due to that, the three female characters who’ve been in the show since it started, Melinda May, Daisy Johnson, and Jemma Simmons, have all had plenty of time to interact with one another and become friends with each other. Some fans think that this was just a result of the fact that Agents of SHIELD was a TV show, but other fans quickly shot that idea down.
There have been 23 Marvel movies so far, and they’ve been able to develop the friendships between the male characters just fine.
The fact that the MCU didn’t develop the friendships between its female characters as much as Agents of SHIELD did is a testament to the idea that Agents of SHIELD simply cared more about the friendships between all of its characters than the Marvel movies did.
What the MCU could do to fix this
Some Agents of SHIELD fans are hopeful that the cast of the show will join the MCU properly. If this happens, then the Marvel movies gets an injection of women who are already good friends with each other.
However, this may not happen either, as Marvel has been on the fence about whether Agents of SHIELD is part of the MCU or not.
What’s already happening though, is the fact that Marvel has started giving its female characters chances to talk with each other and become friends with one another.
Like fans on Reddit said, that’s what happened with Gamora and Nebula, and their friendship has become pretty solid. This trend could continue to the other Marvel superheroes, but that remains to be seen.
