The Lore of Women

For some considerable time, I actually suspected that Peggy Carter was Tony Stark’s mother. After all, Tony’s mother was never mentioned in the MCU, and while I know much of comics lore, there’s much more to know. It’s also true that the MCU does not, clearly, consider itself tied to comics except when it chooses to be. It would explain some of Tony’s resentment of Cap, too, knowing that Cap was his mother’s first love. I built scenarios in my head. But eventually it became clear that wasn’t true, and in Captain America: Civil War, Hope Davis played Maria Stark.

It’s true that lore is full of all sorts of dead parents, male and female. However, the dead mothers do tend to outweigh the dead fathers, don’t they? Dead girlfriends, wives, and sisters abound. Worse, women seem to only exist if they’re dead or in some other way gone. Mentors are always men. Figures of inspiration are always men. Even childhood friends are boys, not girls. Even female characters seem to have more men in their pasts than women.

Let us consider Samantha Mulder. At eight years old, she was apparently abducted by aliens and never seen again. She is cloned repeatedly, with clones appearing on the regular when they’re needed for plot reasons. It turns out she was abducted by humans, and there’s a lot of plot, and she wasn’t killed by the Paper Hearts killer but anyway she’s dead now. She drives a large amount of plot, but it’s never really her, and she never really gets a personality because she isn’t there to.

I never really watched Supernatural, but the boys have a dead mother who comes back in season eleven with all kinds of Supernatural-type shenanigans. She, of course, initially sacrificed herself to protect her children. In Lonesome Dove, there is a dead sex worker implied to be the only person Woodrow F. Call ever loved, who has an unacknowledged son. Heck, Ozma of Oz has a dead father and no mother ever mentioned that I remember. Though I don’t know; it may work differently with fairy births.

Mothers in fairy tales exist to die in childbirth and be replaced with wicked stepmothers if at all. Mothers in comic books exist to be beaten, an astonishing amount of the time, and then to die. In any ongoing story, you will learn about characters, or at least in most of them, and it will not, for the most part, be the girls and women that matter to them about whom you will learn. Unless, of course, they’re dead or may in some other way influence the characters into action.