thassalia:

kernezelda:

taiey:

Now we get to what will inevitably be remembered as the signature character of her career: her nuanced role as Black Widow, the chief protagonist of the single most successful film franchise ever. Here’s why her character is the main protagonist of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: She is the primary character advancing the plot, she is growing and changing as an individual, and she’s the character that the audience most identifies with.

Look at Natasha Romanoff and what she does over the course of the films. She’s the one who personally disables the Chitauri wormhole generator. She’s the one who busts S.H.I.E.L.D. wide open while Cap is punching helicarriers until they explode. She’s the one who tames the Hulk and helps found the New Avengers. She’s the one who decides the outcome of the Civil War. While the other guys are busy punching the baddies, Widow’s moving the ball forward, arc-wise. While the tanks may run interference, the real work of saving the world is Johansson’s.

And among her higher-billed co-stars, she’s the only one who serves as an audience stand-in. Sure, there’s Hawkeye, but between the psychic possession in “The Avengers” and the family-man backstory established in the subsequent films, he doesn’t directly influence the good-guy game plan the way Romanoff does in the main storyline. She’s the one making sense of the incongruous team-up in “The Avengers,” she’s the audience surrogate who gets a romantic arc in “Age of Ultron,” she’s the one experiencing the same moral journey as the audience in “Civil War.”

Romanoff is also the only character who discernibly grows or changes over the course of the franchise. She’s alone here in part because the medium requires it; comic-book characters work best as stand-ins for ideas, so Tony Stark and Steve Rogers can grow only in their relationships with others and not internally. Stark’s engineer-it-till-it’s-fixed personality ossifies over the course of the franchise, and Rogers only gets more morally stubborn. But Romanoff? She’s reacting and growing with the changes in the world around her. Her arc is practically out of Joseph Campbell — a reluctant hero called to adventure and thrust into a world of supernatural powers, who is guided by a mentor who “dies” too soon, and who prevails as a common person against supernatural enemies. Stark, Rogers and the rest of them are the supernatural world she’s thrust into. They may be the protagonists of their individual trilogies, but only Johansson’s Widow could be considered the protagonist of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Four Types Of Scarlett Johansson Movies by Walt Hickey.

@handypolymath, @thassalia

I feel this so deeply!!! And it’s certainly how I experience these films;)