'Supergirl’ Actress Milly Alcock’s Remarks About Fan Treatment Of Women Shows Hollywood Doesn’t Want To Change—And That’s Just Fine

Supergirl’s Milly Alcock reportedly insinuated that fans treat actresses in major franchises harshly simply because they are women. Perhaps other cast and crew will make similar remarks about the film’s potential audience. Even if they don’t, it’s the latest incident showing that Hollywood doesn’t want to change. And that’s just fine. It has created a massive opening for others to craft new tales—ones filled with shocking ideas and situations that Hollywood would never dare touch.

Vanity Fair asked Alcock if acting in House of the Dragon readied her for fan backlash over the upcoming Supergirl movie. “It definitely made me aware that simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on,” she supposedly replied.

Hollywood telling people what it thinks of them is quite welcome at this point. It also serves as a reminder that it doesn’t own storytelling. People can create new superheroines and feature them in new stories that would be both massively fun and completely horrifying to the legacy entertainment industry. As an example, instead of a girlboss superheroine who’s the toughest and roughest one there is, let’s imagine a perky and bumbling superheroine who manages to foil villains through clumsiness and sheer ineptitude.

The Magnificent Magnifi-Girl, Episode 1

Daphne Woods is a freshman at Evans State College in Broadton, New York in the mid-1960s. On her first day of classes, she’s walking on campus and notices someone who has slipped and fallen. She rushes to help her. As she assists, wind kicks up strewn paper and she lunges to grab it. In doing so, she trips a passing student, who falls into another, starting a chain reaction of pratfalls and culminating in someone dumping food on the prized car of the upperclassman jock, infuriating him. Daphne brightly blushes.

A bit later and Daphne is again walking through the campus. As she passes some swell chums gathered around a table and listening to the hot new portable radio developed by industrialist James Rock, she overhears a news bulletin about a fire raging in nearby Harbor City. Daphne Woods may not be having a good day! she thinks. But, golly, Magnifi-Girl sure can help on this!

Magnifi-Girl flies to the fire, noticing that it has fully engulfed a three-story building. Despite the incident commander assuring her that it’s under control, she takes a hose, flies to the top of the building, and begins spraying water. She eventually extends it too far, ripping it out of a fire hydrant, causing water to gush everywhere on the street. “Without another hose, the fire’s going to engulf the rest of the block!” the incident commander advises her. “Then we’ll just have to take drastic measures!” she replies, zipping away. “No, wait! You didn’t let me finish!” he yells back. But she is not paying attention to him.

The peppy superheroine uses her super strength to punch away brick walls of the adjacent building’s ground floor until a loss of structural integrity causes it to collapse. She returns to the incident commander with an enormous smile on her face and boasts about her feat. The incident commander looks at her while other firemen surround him with another hose. “We had another hose on the way,” he replies. She apologizes and inquires as to how it started. He mentions that a supervillainess named Queen Janine has taken credit for it. The block of buildings belong to James Rock, whom Queen Janine has denounced as being arrogant and a menace to the city.

Embarrassed by the mistake but still upbeat, Magnifi-Girl zips back to college and changes into Daphne Woods. She realizes she’s about to be late for her first class and hurries to it, rushing to it and directly into her professor, knocking her onto the floor. Students laugh. The professor is furious.

Elsewhere, Queen Janine is in her secret headquarters, raging to her minions about how Magnifi-Girl stopped the fire. She then makes a public announcement about how she is launching a campaign against Harbor City, promising to inflict millions of dollars in damages unless it pays her a ransom and removes Rock’s influence from it. Her minions have launched an attack on a large warehouse at that very moment.

Magnifi-Girl rushes to the attack and disrupts it through her clumsy ways. She learns about another attack going on at another property owned by Rock.

Rock is using his private security to fend off Queen Janine’s minions. Magnifi-Girl arrives and he observes her clumsiness and buffoonery, with it at first irritating him. But he changes his mind, eventually sees it as an opportunity when he observes her incompetence ends up foiling the bad guys. He devises a plan on how to use her to draw out Queen Janine to face him in person.

Queen Janine takes the bait, but is surprised to find Magnifi-Girl with Rock, with the superheroine repeatedly disrupting her attacks through her maladroitness. To make matters worse, Magnifi-Girl rebuffs Queen Janine’s calls to switch sides and join her. Rock watches with amusement as Magnifi-Girl’s perky awkwardness leads her to victory. Queen Janine melts down into impotent fury at being defeated by sheer ineptitude. Rock congratulates Magnifi-Girl and offers her a deal.

Daphne returns to Evans State College, with excitement in her eyes. She goes to the registrar’s office where she drops out of school. As she departs, distracted by her own giddiness, she wanders into the midst of a protest against “American imperialism,” which she manages to completely shut down when she accidentally steps on a sign, causing its wooden handle to pop up and strike a student protester in the jaw. That sets off a chain of events that ends with the leader of the protest being knocked off a soapbox and falling head first into a trash can, causing everyone to laugh at him.

The comic book issue ends with Daphne at Rock’s headquarters, showing the deal he made with her. Daphne will now work as his personal secretary and he will use his resources to find problems for Magnifi-Girl to solve. Rock and Magnifi-Girl make a public announcement about their “partnership.” Queen Janine witnesses this news while in prison and loses her mind over it.

In future issues, Magnifi-Girl’s rogues gallery will include a significant number of people she and/or Daphne accidentally embarrass and/or offend with her clumsiness—including the jock, professor, and student activist she humiliated in issue number one. Hijinks will ensue, and the tales will be a complete change from the girlboss superheroine stories that Hollywood can’t help but tell.

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