After the first season, I was originally excited to see how Jessica Jones would take on Hellcat for a lot of reasons, and one part of the appeal was getting to see Rachael Taylor, real life domestic abuse survivor and public advocate, being a goddamn superhero on a show that was fully aware a significant portion of its audience was made up of abuse survivors and that prided itself (not to mention actively sold itself) on being empowering to them.

Of course, we just can't have nice things. Instead, the Hellcat this show gave us was so destroyed and broken by the violence and physical-emotional-sexual-financial abuse she'd endured since childhood that she twisted and turned into The Bad Guy despite her best intentions and desire to help people. So cool. Very edgy.

I don't expect TV shows to be Very Special Episodes With Very Important Messages. I don't expect creators to teach audiences lessons of morality and how to behave in a society. I don't want or need characters to be Good Role Models. But there is still such a thing as responsible storytelling. And luring in your audience with "pssst, hey kid, heard you liked empowering feminist stories that also realistically depict the emotional impacts of abuse, want some?" and then going LOL NOPE sure doesn't meet that standard.

I was just going about my day, minding my own business, and then out of the blue, I was suddenly overcome with UTTER RAGE about how damn dirty the writers did the concept of Trish Talk.

It made so much goddamned sense for Trish Walker to work in radio. After her childhood of being forced into the public eye and exposed to intrusive media attention, there's no way Trish wants to Be Out There, that she wants To Be Seen, that she wants to experience The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known. S2 & S3 may try to suggest otherwise, but I don't fucking buy it.

Radio, though. Radio is perfect for Trish. Radio gave her A Voice, which she had never been allowed to have despite being in the public eye for so long. It gave her a platform to effect change in the world and to give other people who had never been allowed a voice a chance to be heard too. Most of all, it gave her an opportunity to continue to be a public figure in a way that was cultivated and curated and controlled by her. She could interact with people and the world in an organized, guarded, safe manner. She could exist, she could matter and have worth, while being physically and visually removed.

And yes, okay, Trish herself called Trish Talk a lifestyle show, but JJ S1 and Luke Cage S1 and Defenders showed us how it could be and how it was something more. We saw that Trish Talk was able to serve as a platform for social and current event discussion within the community, that a journalistic bent could be successfully incorporated, and that Trish had a base of thoughtful, engaged listeners.

But then S2 took all that back and decided Trish Talk was only ever and could only ever be fluffy pop culture bullshit that had no meaningful impact, and Trish was still just a voiceless, powerless punchline, and I HATE IT.

I choose you e v e r y d a y.

i hadn’t quite grasped it in these terms before this moment, but it occurs to me that the majority (or possibly all?) of the extended MCU’s canonical childhood abuse survivors are women. and yeah, there’s now a pattern of those women 1.) having been the “bad guy” at some point and 2.) meeting some kind of unhappy (and narratively unsatisfying) end. which is... kinda yikes? and worth exploring, though not something i have the energy to analyze further atm. 

but man, it feels like another life when i wrote my above rambling. i suppose it might as well have been. i haven’t even verbalized my endgame feels about nat. if it was a few years ago, i’d be in a lot more pain, a lot more angry. these days it’s just weary disappointment and taking comfort in other people’s meta.

when it comes to natasha, i never had any trust in the writers to do right by her in the first place, and i especially found myself pulling back in my emotional engagement after civil war because it didn’t give me a lot to chew on and because it became very clear to me that winter soldier was a happy accident in how they handled her. putting that distance between me and trish has been harder. i had to make it as clean a break as i could. because as imperfect as jj s1 was, it was still on a level that i managed to develop trust in the writers to at least do reasonably right by jessica and trish, the beating heart of the show. s2 cleared that foolishness up for me. and i suppose it did change the way i engage with media. it certainly wasn’t my first tv betrayal, but i think (and hope) it was the last.

but i guess the biggest difference for me with these two characters i’ve emotionally invested so much in is that natasha can still give me joy, even when she’s done dirty by the narrative, whereas anything trish related just makes me sad, made harder because it’s impossible to engage in anything about her without seeing people call her The Worst. this is wandering into all kinds of different directions, so i’ll stop there, but i have many think-y thoughts. 

You know how in Agent Carter we saw the Red Room girls learning about American culture by watching and reciting along with Snow White?

Please consider: the Red Room, fifty or sixty years later, Natasha one of many girls obediently imitating It’s Patsy!

in theory, i’ve never been opposed to trish completely going off the rails. i read the potential for a storyline of that nature in s1.

i could always tell trish was a highly traumatized, reckless, obsessive, rage-filled disaster of a human with massive identity issues and self-destructive tendencies and an intense hunger to make her life meaningful to herself and the world. i knew she was desperate to finally feel safe, to have power and be in control of her life, and that she felt envious of people that could protect themselves in ways she could never protect herself. i could tell that, jessica aside, she kind of hated people, though she still cared deeply about them and had a great need to make the world into a place where no one could get hurt like she did. i knew she could be unintentionally thoughtless and careless and egocentric, that she lacked self-awareness because her concept of self had been so warped by her abuse, and that she had no real clear picture of who she was, just an idea of who she wished she could be.

and i knew all of that could lead to disaster, in very specific circumstances. it isn’t that all of her behaviors and actions in s2 and s3 are impossibly outside of her character, in the worst case scenario. the biggest problem, for me, is that the writers made an active choice to create the darkest, most awful scenario when it was absolutely unnecessary and unwanted, and they wrote it in such a way that a majority of the audience has come away feeling wholly unsympathetic towards trish and finding her to be insufferable, instead of tragic and worthy of empathetic consideration. it’s not like it’s just solely down to viewers lacking in empathy or being uncomfortable when confronted with messy, complicated, mentally ill women. this is a failure of the writers to tell the story they claimed they wanted to tell with compassion and care and understanding. instead, what they did to trish was reckless and thoughtless and mean and spiteful, and a huge fuck you to the fans that have been invested in her.

again, in theory, i was never opposed to a storyline exploring trish’s darkest impulses and her emotional issues, with the caveat that it maintained the integrity and strength of her bond with jessica. but in practice, the actual execution… well. i have no interest in going to the darkest places if the only point is to wallow in the darkness.

existentialdredd replied to your post “i poked my head in the trish tag and just... fucking wow. i'm so glad...”

dufe...it's in the comics.

i’ve read a lot of hellcat comic appearances. comic patsy is a self-made superhero with generally useless powers. she’s high-energy, goodhearted, and a walking human disaster that has lived in a literal office closet. she enthusiastically and recklessly inserted herself into the crimefighting lifestyle because she’s an adrenaline junkie, but also because she very sincerely cares about people and wants to help them. she’s died and been to hell more than once and made it back home. 

but you’ll have to remind me of the time she went off the rails, repeatedly hurt her loved ones, started killing people in cold blood Punisher-style, and ended up in a high-security jail for superpowered criminals??? because i’m pretty sure that never happened in the comics. 

i poked my head in the trish tag and just... fucking wow. i'm so glad i managed to disengage myself from this shitshow. s2 was a big enough fuck you, but s3 is just laughing at and spitting on anyone who dared to emotionally invest in and identify with trish.

absolutely not watching and not even gonna bother gifwatching either. but if you have any meta criticism savaging the writers for what they did to trish and the jessica/trish relationship, please send it my way, because it's nice to know i'm not alone in this.

based on everything i’ve seen and heard about s3 so far, this post does not lie.

i had a dream i was watching s3, and the only thing i remember is trish screaming, “why do I have so many fire irons?!” based on that detail alone, i know my dream is far superior to anything the actual s3 could offer.

hi folks, i still live here. just been watching shows that don’t make me feel like my fingernails are being ripped off and mostly managing to keep my emotional investment to a minimum because i guess s2 was the straw that broke the camel’s back in regards to me having any level of trust in tv writers not to completely fuck up the things i love. so haha imagine me punishing myself by watching s3. definitely... definitely not gonna do that... no temptation at all...

remember when dorothy walker was quite literally two-faced in a suuuuper subtle framing choice? good times.

sometimes i think about a jj/buffy crossover where everything is the same, except trish is a potential and gets powers after sunnydale becomes a crater

Rachael Taylor in Summer Coda (2010)

*me watching GLOW* hi, excuse me, is this a problematic disaster blonde that grew up poor with a single mom, got fucked over and spit out by the entertainment industry, needs to always be the one in control, embodies multiple identities, and has a desperate need to project an appearance of perfection and shit-togetherness even though she’s more often fucked up and messy and mean, wildly discontent and restless over the box she’s been living in on behalf of other people, vibrating with a sometimes righteous but just as often self-righteous wrath that occasionally leads her to hurt other people but especially herself, and has a hard time understanding all of this about herself because she’s super shitty at self-reflection? i see, yes, okay. she’s mine now.

i had a dream i was watching s3, and the only thing i remember is trish screaming, "why do I have so many fire irons?!" based on that detail alone, i know my dream is far superior to anything the actual s3 could offer.

hi, i still exist and i'm having wistful feelings over these s3 set pics and cursing my newsfeed for continuously throwing them in my face and trying to lure me back in

So anyway, this is still the most offensive thing Trish has ever done. 

You know what? I put up with A LOT of problematic behavior from Trish, and I still love her anyway, but this is honestly the most offensive thing I’ve ever seen her do. I can’t in good conscience let this go. Bottled water? I’m going to delete this blog, and Trish Walker is going on my block list. 

i also love/hate how they made sure to capture this, The Worst Thing In The World, in still form specifically