This very week marks one year exactly since She-Hulk: Attorney at Law made its streaming premiere, and immediately seemed destined to remain the most divisive of Marvel’s Disney Plus shows. Thanks to its meta humor, mockery of online fan culture, and well, basically just by having a female lead, it was always going to rub a certain subsection of the MCU fandom up the wrong way, but 12 months later it seems like the series has undergone an even more incredible transformation than Jennifer Walters herself.
Impossibly, it now seems that fans… like She-Hulk? After Secret Invasion uniformly underwhelmed, with its finale going down as the worst-rated Marvel (Studios or otherwise) product ever made, the Tatiana Maslany vehicle is now going on a journey of critical re-evaluation, with a Reddit thread on the r/MarvelStudios sub getting folks talking by claiming that “She-Hulk is not a bad show!”
In their argument, the OP defends She-Hulk for being superior to Secret Invasion, which is something that many of the literally hundreds on comments on this thread seem to agree with.
Especially when it comes to comic book accuracy. While SI bungled its source material, She-Hulk captured the flavor of Shulkie’s adventures on the page perfectly.
Also, She-Hulk gets extra points for ripping SI‘s finale to shreds ahead of time.
In many ways, She-Hulk was ahead of the curve, considering how well the equally meta Barbie movie is doing this summer.
The depiction of the Intelligencia as a Reddit-like social media group earned a lot of criticism back in the day, but as one commenter argued, being offended by this accurate portrayal of toxic fandom means you might need to take a long look in the mirror…
She-Hulk‘s unlikely to ever rival the likes of Loki and WandaVision to be the most universally popular of Marvel’s streaming shows, but clearly time is going to be kind to its unique approach to MCU storytelling. Still, I can’t see Bob Iger commissioning a second two anytime soon, for obvious reasons.