Anita Sarkeesian Claims Ant-Man and The Wasp’s Main Plot is “Saving a Damsel in Distress” – She Gets Rebuked!

Janet Van Dyne

**Warning Spoilers for Ant-Man and The Wasp Below**

Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who founded the website Feminist Frequency in 2009 and would go on to crowdfund a YouTube video series Tropes vs Women in Video Games decided to air her opinion on the latest Marvel Studios film, Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Sarkeesian would claim, “The ENTIRE MAIN PLOT IS ABOUT SAVING A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS!”

She would even agree that the subplot is about a damsel in distress as well.

Many folks quickly rebuked Sarkeesian and set the record straight on exactly what happened in Ant-Man and The Wasp.

The North Valley Grimoire author Blake Northcott would add her own take.

Others chimed in to correct Sarkeesian’s take on the film.

And if you actually watched the film. You’d realize just how wrong Anita Sarkeesian is with her take on Ant-Man and The Wasp. As many of the folks above clearly noted, Janet Van Dyne is anything but a damsel in distress. Is she trapped in the Quantum Realm? Yes. Is she distressed? It doesn’t appear to be that way at all. In fact, she turns Scott Lang into an antenna so she can communicate with her family to help them find her. She then even shows just how powerful she has become by taking control of Scott’s body and plugging in an algorithm that will allow Hank and Hope to find her. Even when Hank gets to the Quantum Real, he begins to lose himself. Janet actually saves him and the two reunite before ascending out of the Quantum Realm. Does that sound like a damsel in distress?

But what makes Sarkeesian’s take even worse is the fact that Janet knowingly sacrificed herself in order to save thousands of people from a nuclear weapon. She put herself in that situation.

And not only did she survive, she appears to have thrived and become even more powerful than before. She’s so powerful, she’s able to channel Quantum Realm energy and temporarily repair Ghost’s cellular structure using her mind. Janet Van Dyne is anything but a damsel in distress. She’s a survivor, a brilliant scientist, and above all a hero.

But even if Janet Van Dyne was a damsel in distress as Anita Sarkeesian claims, would it take away from the film? No. There would definitely be different plot points, but it wouldn’t take away from the film.

The damsel in distress motif is an absolute classic of storytelling. It appears in the Greek myth of Andromeda and Perseus, the Indian epic Ramayana, and classic European fairy tales like Snow White and Rapunzel. We even see it in the well-loved Shrek film. It’s even featured in one of my favorite films, Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington. As Blake Northcott points out, it’s not about the motif or trope, or character type, it’s about the execution of it.

Ant-Man and The Wasp is currently in theaters. It has grossed over $284 million worldwide.

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