Of course, the repulsive Mary Jane (Watson? Parker? Watson-Parker? what if she's not wearing a wedding ring?) statue from Sideshow's Comiquette line is old news to those of us who first saw it previewed back in March. But the recent massive outrage over the statue is certainly deserved, albeit a bit belated.

And you know what?

The statue sucks. It makes me angry as hell. But seeing this sort of reaction all over the blogosphere is, well, awesome. And that doesn't suck. That makes me happy as hell. Watching Fandom_Wank tear the poo-pooing OP in this post a new one was delightful. As was watching them deal with the trolls that showed up. Also delightful was reading Greg Morrow's defense of his completely justified criticisms of the statue in the comments on his blog post.

Well, actually, I should qualify the above by saying that it hasn't all been warm fuzzies. I could do without the bloggers and commenters who feel that they need to use words like "skank" and "bimbo" and "whore" to describe Mary Jane's outfit. Like Ami said, "I wear stuff like that and I'm not a whore... am I?" Oh, and bonus sexism and classism coming from the "trailer trash" and "What trailer park does she live in?" comments. Look, people, there is so much wrong with that statue, finding something to criticize about it is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. So easy, in fact, that there should be no excuse to resort to sexist slurs about MJ's clothing.

And likewise, I have a gut feeling that the next batch of When Fangirls Attack links will include the inevitable "OMG there's nothing wrooooong with this statue!" backlash, because there's always a backlash, even if it takes a couple of days or weeks to get going. There's already been a handful of posts linked, but only one of which has gotten any comments.

But yeah, compare the paltry number of supportive comments on Sideshow's website to the sheer amount of wholly justified kvetching that the statue has generated elsewhere. That warms my little heart, it does.

Speaking of warming hearts, I'm going to take this totally random opportunity to plug Love Letters, the lovely section of Girl-Wonder.org where you can write in and gush about your favorite good comics, good artists, and good comic book characters. If the MJ statue has you feeling down, why not write to Love Letters about how awesome MJ is in the comics? (After sending an angry letter and/or a printout of this to Marvel, of course.) And yes, I am shamelessly plugging Love Letters because even though it was kinda-sorta my idea, only four people have submitted articles so far, and one of those four was me. I have drafts of submissions about Devi, Bone, and W.I.T.C.H. sitting on my HD, but I don't want Love Letters to become the all-Nenena column or anything. So... Y'all should write something!

And novel_tea I am sorry that I wanked on your livejournal, because something about the internet brings out the latent ten-year-old mentality in me.