In case
you couldn’t tell by how long it took me to get around to her, Jane is fairly
low on my list of MCU characters.
Although she has definite good points, Jane pales in comparison to a lot
of other characters in the franchise, particularly other female characters
(even without factoring in all the TV awesomeness, there’s Natasha, Peggy, Shuri,
Valkyrie, and Hope, and those are just my top favorites!) A few Jane-related spoilers for Thor and The Dark World.
Jane’s
most enjoyable trait for me, unsurprisingly, is her mad astrophysics
skills. I really do love to see how
she’s all about the science. Her drive
to know and learn pushes her to some serious gutsy-or-crazy recklessness, like
driving into the storm created by the Bifrost to see what’s happening or
agreeing to chauffeur what she believes to be a crazy homeless man to a
cordoned-off government site so he can retrieve the equipment and research
SHIELD took from her. This is a woman
who will risk basically everything in her quest for knowledge – case in point,
her curiosity about the Aether in The
Dark World, which nearls leads to her making like Fred on Angel – and while it doesn’t speak well
of her sense of self-preservation, there’s still a kind of foolhardy admiration
to be found in it. I enjoy watching her
throw her inconsiderable weight around when SHIELD raids her lab in the first Thor film, standing her ground even
though it’s clear to all involved that this faceless government entity has all
the power, and her best contribution to the franchise is the way she
manipulates Erik’s Convergence devices (I don’t remember what they’re actually
called – technobabble isn’t my forte) to combat the Dark Elves during The Dark World’s big final blowout.
This is
what I like about Jane – her curiosity, her drive, her intellectual spark, and
the genuine joy she takes at seeing things she’s never experienced before. When Thor takes her to Asgard, I just love
the satisfied way she whispers “quantum field generator” to him, pleased with
herself at having figured out what the Asgardians’ “soul forge” was. However, the further you take her from the
science stuff, the less interest I have in her.
I’m not
quite sure what the movies are aiming for with Jane’s general social
awkwardness. Obviously, socially-awkward
science geniuses are nothing new, in fiction or real life, but Jane isn’t really awkward in a way that I
associate with that type of character.
She comes across less like an adult who isn’t used to talking to people
without multiple PHDs and more like a skittish teenage girl trying to figure
out how she should act. Part of this is
the “giggly school girl” thing that comes and goes in her interactions with
Thor. I get that he’s a god and has the
arms to prove it, but it’s both weird and weirdly-inconsistent. She’ll go from talking shop with Thor in one
scene to practically twirling her hair in the next to impulsively slapping him
then apologizing for it in the scene after that. She’s all over the map, and I can’t get a
handle on it.
Which is
too bad, because naturally, there are plenty of ways to do “socially-awkward
genius” tropes well. I’d prefer to see
this trait of hers written more consistently and/or organically, but even
contextualizing it a little would go a long way toward smoothing it out. A few lines about understanding numbers but
not people, always having struggled with knowing how to act, or even how
Asgardians aren’t any harder to figure out than humans might feel trite or
obvious, but for me, I think they’d help to flesh Jane out and let me see that
she’s kind of unsettled as a person rather than distractedly-written as a character.
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