BW Media Spotlight

I wasn’t going to talk about this trailer, honestly. Not because I’m an adult white male, and certain elements on the internet tell me I’m not allowed to talk about it. That’s bull. I’m allowed to have opinions and I’m not just examining storytelling for one group, even though my story preferences will by nature limit my audience. A good story is where you find it, and it’s rare to hear about a good story attached to Ironheart.

Remember, this girl’s backstory is misunderstanding a quote from astronaut Sally Ride about how the more people told her she couldn’t be an astronaut the more determined she was to prove them wrong. However, being an astronaut was already her dream. Riri took it as she needed someone to tell her what she couldn’t be and that would become her dream. She’s a girl who never had a dream who got one because she forced some old white woman teacher to tell her what she’ll never be. The teacher just happened to choose Tony Stark instead of Martha Stewart. That’s already pretty weak if your goal is to convince black girls to give science and engineering a try just to fill a quota count instead of encouraging black teens to follow their dream whether it leads to Tony Stark or Martha Stewart.

So now we have a trailer for Disney Plus’ Ironheart, a show that was kept in mothballs for years after her poor reception from Wakanda Forever despite principle photography already being done. Poor Dominque Thorne (who probably ALSO deserves better and is being convinced by Disney+ that the critics are just sexist racists) is probably too old to play the character now and you know they’re going to shove her into the next Avengers two-part movie, which is probably the only reason the SIX episode show came out five years after it was announced, with the first three going to be dumped at the same time and the other three presumably coming out weekly. This was such a non-entity to me that I wasn’t going to bother with it, but then I heard the usual suspects insisting that to put down this show was to be racist/sexist against intelligent black teen girls. If you ask me the opposite is true. Is this really the best you can give girls of color who want to be engineers?

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