In Defense of Allison Green
Anonymous asked thewebcomicsreview a question
I dont see how Allison from SFP is a good flawed protagonist. 1. She is invincible. Nothing can physically effect her, so there is little weight to her actions. 2. Allison is only wrong because of her extremes, not for faults in her beliefs. Like, her allies will point out how self-righteous and hypocritical she is, but her enemies are always wrong. Allison is only flawed in her extremes, never that her politics she believes in are flawed.
Let’s start with 1.
On one level, Allison being invincible doesn’t actually matter. The reason invincible protagonists are bad (to the extent that they are) is because nothing threatens them. But since the comic is never about Allison being in physical danger, the fact that physical threats have no weight is insignificant. It’d be like if she was unbeatable in pie-making. It doesn’t come up.
On another level, having her physical invincibility next to her morality like you do gets to the core of things. The most important character in SFP, after all, is the one who’s never mentioned
Superman (specifically, the Golden Age version) is invulnerable, super-strong, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound (which later just became flight). His main villain was a mad scientist/supergenius, who later morphed into an evil business tycoon. He was primarily concerned with social justice (or at least the 1930s version of it).
Allison Green, by contrast, is invulnerable, super-strong, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound (which later just became flight). Her main villain was a mad scientist/supergenius, who later morphed into an evil business tycoon. She was primarily concerned with social justice (or at least the 2010s version of it).
So Allison is pretty clearly an ectype of Golden Age Superman, and her goal is basically to become Silver Age Superman, making the world totally awesome and peachy and devoid of any problems solely on the strength of her own personal awesomeness. Anything short of this goal is considered a failure
This is Allison Green’s core character flaw. She wants a perfect solution to all of life’s problems that doesn’t make her feel uncomfortable, and rejects any nuance.
The general story cycle of Strong Female Protagonist.
Allison has some kind of moral epiphany as a result of the previous storyline. In the most recent case, it was that she shouldn’t try to solve all problems on her own, but get allies and work on smaller problems. She sets up Valkyrie, which is kind of vaguely explained as a bodyguard service for women in domestic abuse situations, using Superheroes.
She goes into this work wholeheartedly, but, eventually….
She sees one of her friends actually doing something to fix a perceived problem, but Allison finds this icky (Feral’s organ donating), abhorrent (Moonshadow turning into the Punisher), or only a partial solution (Brad here running a program very similar to what Allison is thinking for Valkyrie, but not being able to solve literally everything).
And Allison drops her epiphany in favor of a moral mission creep because she has to be Superman. She can’t solve any problems unless she solves every problem, so she goes from Chapter to Chapter accomplishing fuck all while all her friends become great heroes and leave her behind. This is what makes her an interesting protagonist. She wants to be the greatest hero of them all, but her very desire is the fatal flaw that keeps her from changing the world, and the comic is simply building to her figuring this out (and, presumably, realizing the Patrick is behind this by planting the all or nothing idea into her head to begin with).
And while I admittedly have a bit of a soft spot for comics about a yellow-haired young women whose desire and drive to improve herself lead to a repeating cycle of failure building up to a big epiphany
She’s still a complex and interesting protagonist, not the Author Avatar SJW she’s often criticized as.
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