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Glowy and Powerful

'Captain Marvel' Spoilers Ahead

By Aja Published 5 years ago 8 min read
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Right now, I’m holding my stuffed dinosaur, Muhammed, trying to decide whether or not I’ll let people read this. The only way for me to get this out is to be personal and emotional, but I’ve been led to believe that I can’t be taken seriously like that. Yet here I go, about to compare myself to a superhero while spilling my heart-guts for as many people who’ll read it.

I have these little moments of sad, moments when I feel like nobody likes me and if people do like me, it’s probably just because they don’t really know me. I went to see Captain Marvel for the second time as an intermission to these moments and my god, do I have a lot to say.

I’m autistic. I was diagnosed less than a year ago and I’ve spent so many moments of sad on my couch, wondering what was keeping me from everyone else. I’ve felt out of place, ridiculous, burdensome, and weird for the majority of my short life, searching for myself in novels and movies and shows in hopes of feeling validated. As I watched this woman—holding her own against dangerous odds and fighting for her life with grace—respond to a threatening roar from a foreign creature with her own roar right back at him, I thought, "what if she mimics sounds just like I do?" I watched her speak directly, thinking only of her objective, and get irritated when the people around her were taken aback or dismissed her. I thought "that makes sense." I watched her remember things about her life in flashbacks, just like mine. I laughed at her jokes and her sarcasm wondering if she used it to lighten the tension she felt when facing obstacles, just like I do. I saw her fight, and feel, and remember, and I couldn’t help but feel like my heart was being pulled toward the screen, longing to be understood.

Carol had been manipulated and lied to in order for her people to succeed, but they had never been her people. She was something else entirely and her mentors told her that using the strengths that came with her differences was a sign of some inner weakness. In order to truly be strong, she had to beat everyone on their level even when she could go onto bigger challenges, to better challenges, be a better person if she used her advantages—there have been a lot of times when I’ve been told to shut up, to calm down, to go away because my mind functions on a different frequency than everyone else. When I take charge in stressful situations, it’s seen as disrespectful; when I get really excited about things and want to talk about them, it’s seen as obnoxious; when I get upset because things go wrong, I need to take a break because my emotions would be of no help. The main parts of my personality have been abrogated to fit the needs of the people around me, some of them not even knowing they’ve done it. It seems as though I need to be toned down in order to be considered human. No one could possibly assign meaning to words they heard from such a childlike voice. No one would listen to someone who’s holding a stuffed dinosaur, even though it’s there to help them focus. No one will care about me if I outwardly act like who I am—garbage. Straight-up trash.

I didn’t understand why these messages go through my head so frequently, these intrusive and invasive messages that hurt me so much that I can’t help but sit with Muhammed and analyze them. But now I understand that they’re caused by the uneasy state I put people in once I enter a room. The people around me genuinely have no idea what I’ll do and even though I would never purposefully hurt anyone, my unpredictable nature of honesty and directness makes people think I could cause problems. I’m constantly left to figure out what truly makes me who I am and what parts of me only exist to make others feel more comfortable.

I recognized this confusion in Carol. She’s told by her supposed superiors that she needs to “keep her emotions in check” in order to be a good fighter or a hero. In the first fight scene with her mentor, Yon-Rogg (played by Jude Law), she gets angry with him and hits him with a photon-blast that sends him flying through the air and smacks him against the wall. And that’s not the right way to fight? She basically super-yeeted her opponent, instantly debilitating him, and that’s supposed to be incorrect? Why are emotions seen as the antidote to success? Why is being genuinely yourself unfair to everyone else? I am an autistic, LGBTQ+, mentally ill, woman of color and for my entire life I’ve been told that unapologetically displaying those congenital and irrevocable traits makes me wrong. I’ve been held to the same standards that my peers have been held to despite my clear advantages. I’ve been subjected to the same hardships my peers are subjected to despite having to face multiple others on a daily basis. I’m sixteen years old and I’ve been writing stories and analyzing things like this since elementary school. I’ve also been having emotional, and sensory based meltdowns since I was a toddler. Both of these things have been ignored and would have stayed that way if I hadn’t raised hell when I recognized I was immensely enlightened and undeniably anxious compared to those around me. I understood that what I dealt with was different from other people and instead of continuing to accommodate them by shutting up, I’ve decided to stop caring about how they feel at my own expense and start to figure out what made me who I am- my interests, my behaviors, and mostly my strengths.

When speaking with the Supreme Intelligence (the ruler of the Kree: the alien race that found Carol Danvers and turned her into a soldier for their war), Carol says “I want to serve” in response to the AI asking if she’s ready to put her emotions and her past behind her in order to fight for her the good of the Kree race. She had been a soldier on earth before she was turned into a hybrid Kree-Human. She had always been ready to save lives and fight for others, but systems used her and suppressed her to execute their offensive agendas. She was reminded of her true calling when she got to her old home, with her old family and new friends; it was there that she learned the cause she had actually been fighting for was genocide and xenophobia. She has no idea who she is or what she is until she has to undeniably face it. The people who have always loved her were there to remind her of who she was, but she had to fight what the Kree had made of her to make sense of herself at her core. I have to face myself in these moments of sad. I have to evaluate my character because I get brought down by what the world has made of me.

In her inevitable battle with the Supreme Intelligence, it tells her that without everything the Kree gave her, she would only be human. She proceeded to radiate powerful energy and fight her way out of the Supreme Intelligence’s trance to save a large group of oppressed individuals from Kree domination (seems pretty human to me). I think people forget that there are differences in humans. We all have moments when we feel like we need to be like other people and we’re always warned against it. The thing about that is no one says what to do when you want to be yourself (besides saying no to the sinister ninth-grader who has just offered you a joint), so you fall back on the basics of being “human.” But the basics of being human are varied and trying to practice those leads me to become as invisible as I can be so no one will ever guess that I’m (actually five muppets in a trench coat) trying so hard to be normal.

But Carol gave up on trying to be what other people wanted her to be and blasted them off into space knowing that there was nothing she had to do or be but her.

Maybe I’m actually a mix of human and an alien species and I just haven’t accessed my full potential power yet (probably not, but who knows). Maybe we’ll find out within the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that Carol Danvers is autistic (again, most likely no, but who knows). Hopefully, we’ll have characters who are blatantly and actually autistic so I don’t have to reach so far for representation, but until then, I’ll get all the merchandise and fangirl over Brie Larson because I feel this character. I understand Captain Marvel, and honestly, I feel like she understands me too.

humanity
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About the Creator

Aja

Hi, I'm Aja. I'm a sixteen year old writer. I like to write about autism, mental illness, superheroes, television, LGBTQ+ culture, feminism, history, and music.

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