#clint barton fans please add more of your mcu criticisms! so we can all be sad together!

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Clint being happily married makes you cringe?

Hi anon! Lol I was being more dramatic than I probably could’ve been, but yes, it does make me cringe a *little* bit. 

It’s nothing against MCU Clint Barton because I know it wasn’t his fault he ended up the way he did -- between Joss Whedon and a little bit on Jeremy Renner’s end -- he really just isn’t the Clint Barton that so many of us fell in love with. A lot of the time, when you hear comic book stans criticizing why Clint just isn’t “comic book accurate” (to use kind of a patronizing phrase, so please excuse me on that end because I don’t always think that comic book accuracy is entirely needed), it’s because most of us have read Matt Fraction and David Aja’s 2012 character defining, Eisner Award winning, New York Times best selling comic book, once-in-a-generation run on Hawkeye. Fraction’s inspiration for the character, making Clint delve into issues of depression, his disability with impaired hearing, the familial entanglements between him and his older brother, Barney, while simultaneously balancing the fact he’s 100% human compared to all of his superhero counterparts, is an incredible look into a very complex, kinda sorta sad, peak chaotic Avenger. Not to mention that Aja’s work in this comic book, with its simple line art, as well as Matt Hollingsworth’s colors, brings a sort of melancholic, cartoonish quality to the characters and the world they live in. Under Aja’s direction, it gives the viewer the effect that the characters Fraction is weaving into the story are all a little sad, or at least deal with something heavy, despite their basic inking. If nothing else, it makes the characters inherently human. All that to say, out of all the adapted Marvel characters in the “OG 6 Avengers,″ comic book Clint is the least likely person to get his life together and do the “family and kids” thing. 

As someone who studies adaptation as a grad student, I love depictions of characters who are different and I love it when directions go off book and shove it in the fandom’s face. That’s my favorite! However, and I’ll admit this is my own bias, Clint’s story is...not what I wanted. He’s a complex character for as simple as he seems in Fraction’s run. It’s what makes people love Clint -- he’s the guy with a million bandaids on his face, but despite his emotional disaster energy, he still gets up to be the hero, the Avenger, the Hawkeye. There are, of course, glimpses of this in the MCU (like when he has a funny rapport with Quicksilver in Age of Ultron), but nothing that’s entirely “Clint” as many of us know and love. 

This is mostly due to the fact that Clint has never been given a chance to be a “character,” so to speak. In the first Avengers movie, he’s brainwashed; you can’t exactly do character development when the guy has a space rock taking over his brainwaves. :) Age of Ultron, however, is the real heartbreaker for a lot of comic book fans because Clint was given his “family-man” plot point. Where, apparently, he has children and a wife and the whole 1950s suburban nuclear family thing goin’ on. That’s cool, but especially for that movie, it becomes more of a reference point for the other characters. You find out Natasha can’t have children and refers to her femininity as a “monstrous” (another shitty directorial decision on Whedon’s part), Bruce can’t have children because of his “Hulk-ness,” Steve doesn’t think he wants a family anymore, and Tony comes to believe that this is what he wants at the end of the day. So, even if it is a plot that works for the sake of the movie, it’s really only so the other characters can have a moment of self-reflection. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with Clint himself! 

Because of Whedon’s decision (as well as Jeremy Renner’s refusal to read any comics about the character), a lot of his further development in the MCU was hindered by Clint’s family plot point. We don’t ever get to see “disaster” Clint or the “human” Clint or the “almost got it, but not quite” Clint. We only see Clint as this white guy farmer who is married and has kids, which is more or less the diluted, heteronormative “1950s American dream.” The guy literally has a picket fence. To me, that’s not complicated enough. Whedon didn’t ask harder questions of this character, he didn’t care enough to, or maybe he did, but he just didn’t know how to. Either way, that’s not doing the character justice and that’s not giving Clint what he deserves. I’m all for doing something different with a character -- Clint can be married! Give em’ those kids! -- but make sure when you do it, that you’re not sacrificing the heart of the character for a one-off storyline that will hinder this cinematic depiction forever. After all, there’s a difference between preserving the “substance” of the character in the process of adapting comic book to film, and erasing their soul entirely in the process of trying to be different. 

So, in case you didn’t want to read ALL of that, which understandable because I wrote a lot, yes, Clint being happily married makes me cringe. :) 

Thanks for your question! :) 

#clint barton #hawkeye #matt fraction #long post #david aja #hawkeye 2012 #mcu clint barton #anti jeremy renner #general marvel #MCU #age of ultron #marvel #also #clint barton fans please add more of your mcu criticisms! so we can all be sad together! #marvel comics