#but it's different because the women act like GIRLS which is inherently less likable

[harocat]

'women are ruining Cdramas, and that's why people prefer BL shows and bromance shows' is not the take you think it is.

[ijaws]

My Captain Marvel Review

Before I do this, I want to clarify a few things. There are going to be both personal opinions on the character and simple objective observations from a different perspective that what most people are doing in defense of this character.  I am not sexist. I am not racist. I am not misogynistic. I do not identify with the Alt-Right and consider myself a centrist. I believe that modern Feminism (Contrary to Classical Egalitarian-Feminism) is a toxin in society and now it has translated into the MCU through her movie. 

I just wanted to put this out there first because any time I make any sort of evaluation of her movie or her as a character I get bombarded with hate, personal attacks, and people telling me why I hated the movie or something when they don't personally know me and aren't me. (You just hate strong female characters! Bitch, go look at my profile. I fucking LOVED Rescue, SCARLET FUCKING WITCH, and Nebula is literally one of my most favorite characters in the MCU... They were ALL badass in End Game)

So if you like her as a character and if you like her movie, please do not think that my observations of her or her movie are a personal attack against you. I've had so many people take my viewpoint personally for some reason and it no longer is a debate as they close their minds off to anything I say and start becoming immediately dismissive. I mean no disrespect in any of my viewpoints. I just feel like I needed to put this out there because... again... more often then not I'm dealing with some radical feminist that will foam at the mouth and protect her beloved character from any opposing viewpoint irrationally.

Lastly...

PLEASE. DO. NOT. REBLOG. WITH. A. REBUTTAL. AND. BLOCK. ME. LIKE. A. COWARD. 

FUCKING. @. ME. 

I’M JUST LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WITH A BRAIN TO GIVE ME A GOOD COUNTER ARGUMENT TO THIS.

Okay, so, I personally believe that Captain Marvel and her movie were a toxic addition to the franchise. This is going to be a little long, obviously, but I would appreciate it of you read through. Clearly you don't have to because it is a huge ass wall of text but taking in viewpoints that aren’t constantly validating your own is HEALTHY... So please read?

Firstly, they retconned the Skrull, that are one of the most recognizable villainous races in all of fiction like Klingons and Orcs, to be refugees of a war that they'd lost. In the comics they have 100% control of the Andromeda Galaxy as one massive Empire and the Kree were definitely not in the position to eradicate the Skrulls. They could put up a good fight, but I feel that the Skrulls were too well fortified in Andromeda to really be defeated by the Kree. That's the first, shortest, issue I disliked about the movie. They nerfed the hell out of the Skrulls to being simple refugees... and innocent. I'm sorry, but no... This is like going into the Star Trek Universe and retconning the Klingons to be some peace loving hippies. They were also some of the most human characters in the entire movie besides Nick and the Black Best friend. (I can't remember her name... she didn't stand out to me.) They were DEFINITELY more human than Carol Danvers herself. The moment when Talos goes to his family on Mar-Vells ship and hugs them was definitely the most human part of the entire film and it cemented my thoughts on the character. My favorite character in the entire movie was Talos. A lot more likable, interesting, and funny than Carol Danvers was... I wish the movie had entirely about him at this point because it would have been a better film by FAR.

Secondly, the themes. There was a clear message that this movie was trying to sell long before it even hit theaters, and that was Modern Feminism. The Air Force advertisements featuring female pilots, the girl-power advertisements, and so on. The movie was clearly trying have a target audience of young women or young girls and there's nothing wrong with that. However, I started to feel a bit off put by the movie when it showed literally ever male human character that wasn't Nick, Coulson, or the Skrull Leader, Talos, was a sexist prick. LITERALLY every single one of them were sexist. Even her Father. I understand in the comics her and her father never got along or something of that nature, but I personally feel that if they wanted to push the whole sexism narrative that they should have lead it with her father and kept it with her father. Instead they extended the narrative to every male in the entire movie and in her flashbacks.

I feel there needs to be a specific section on the flashbacks alone. Okay, so, in her flashbacks quite literally every single bad thing that happened to her was because of a man.

Carol was riding in that Go Kart and the boy told her she was going too fast. Of course in a feminist movie we can't have a girl listen to what a boy has to say, even if he may know more about what she was doing than she did, and so she goes and crashes horrifically. I thought it was a brutal crash.

A second later and her Dad appears looking down at his busted up and bleeding daughter, that I'd be taking to a hospital in a heartbeat, saying that she didn't belong there.

Okay, that alone is unrealistic to me to begin with. There are a VERY few fathers out there that would have the first words coming out of their mouth being that she didn't belong to be out there. It would be about her health, asking if she was okay, and they would be looking her over as best as possible. However, I will agree with the Father's initial comment that she didn't belong out there on the track. Why? Well I wouldn't want my daughter, who was too stubborn to listen to a boy that was giving good advice when she was doing something dangerous, to do anything dangerous again. Damn right she doesn't belong in dangerous, male, situations and jobs if she's going to act that way. The girl is going to get herself killed.

Then there's the whole, 'You know what it's called a cockpit, right?' scene and that alone, while not improbable, was unneeded at this point. We already had two male characters expressing their inherent, evil, sexism. Oh, but they went even further than that and got the motorcycle guy in there as well telling her to smile and everything. (Woulda been the first smile in that movie so far at that point for Brie.) While that does happen they’re continuing to beat a dead horse… Then later on it shows her being bullied on a beach when she’s REALLY little by BOYS he knock her down.

Then in Basic Training they’re all yelling out to her that she’s gonna die or and things of that nature are more or less unrealistic as well. My father was in the military and was going through basic around the same time that she was and he went into the same branch. The Air Force. When you go into the military they tell you that you are to be colorblind. That you are to be ONE force. ONE unit. You are a team and NOTHING should stand in the way of that. The means that racism, sexism, or any sort of predisposed idealism that puts on person down while raising another up is to be crushed and blown away like dust in the wind. It has no place in the Military as it reduces its effectiveness. So in that training scene where they’re yelling at Carol that she’s going to die and that she’s going to fail is NOT a proper representation of what happens in basic training. Maybe the Drill Instructors to stress you out or drill it into you that what your doing is dangerous and the military itself is dangerous, but not by your fellow team members. If anything your fellow team members are supportive because there are group punishments for your weakest link in your unit… If they fail, you all fail. If one person is stupid, you ALL get punished for their stupidity. So for her fellow trainees to be putting her down like that makes next to no sense and it is CLEARLY intimating the issue of women in the workplace not being able to do what a man can do or women simply being put down in the workplace for simply being women.

So, I don't necessarily agree with the route in which they went about the topic of sexism. The execution and presentation were not done well in my opinion. While you may have felt it resonated with you, what about the boys and the men?

Marvel Movies have always been oriented towards everyone. They've been family movies. Not one Marvel Movie has been solely and strictly for men. Why? Because movies with male leads don't focus on the fact that they are MALE leads... There's nothing special about a male lead or male actor in a film. They don't feel the need to point it out or make the male actor into a champion for men and masculinity.

So, again, what does this film tell you about men? It tells you what I've described. That men are sexist oppressors that want nothing more than to see women fail, smile, and do what they say. That men think women can't do the same job that a man can and that women aren't as strong as men. That's a message that is being conveyed here... and that's the ONLY message you get on the subject. That's the bottom line. There's no, 'but not all men-' in this film. There's no redemption act, representation (I know a lot of you love that word so here you go... You won’t like it cause I’m using it in a way you disagree with it.), or presentation of the fact that men will stand for women in face of true sexism. There isn't any sort of male role model to learn from in the film. Nick is there for comedic relief, Coulson is barely in the film, and the Skrull isn't even human. There's no outreach to TEACH boys and young men that sexism is bad. It simply states that men are sexist. That's literally it. This movie was for girls and girls alone, which is a failure in and of itself on the side of Marvel, and it is simply teaching them that men will do this. That boys will do this. There's nothing there to teach boys to not do that or any sort of redeeming quality for men in the film at all. Is this wrong?

So, yes, if you think it presented the female experience realistically, which I felt it did not in certain scenes, than I am not one to try and change your mind. I've never been in a woman's shoes and I've never experienced sexism from men like that. I'll let my opinions stand for themselves.

While I agree that sexism is truly a problem in society and still lingers, I simply feel that it wasn't presented well enough. That's my main issue with sexism in this film.

On a personal level I felt that if you’re a guy going to see this movie that you should prepare to feel like an asshole. The entire film is intimating that men are oppressing women, that men see women as objects that need to smile more, that women aren’t as strong as a guy or can’t do what a guy can do. It puts men in a bad light and sort of validates the Modern Feminist talking points and agendas that all men are evil, shallow, vile creatures that want to oppress women because they think that they are objects and aren’t as tough, strong, or brave as men.

(If Marvel had made a Movie about a Man that acted arrogant, cold, emotionless, and super super super strong and made all the female characters in his past trying to put him down, were annoying, were emotionally manipulative and controlling, were emotionally abusive, were using men for their wealth or income, and were lying cheaters with no sort of redemption character for women to prove things differently I think that this movie would have tanked.)

Thirdly, a shallow Carol Danvers. With all that being said up above, I feel like that all that made her character VERY shallow. The ONLY reason she’s a pilot, the ONLY reason she’s ‘strong independent woman’, the ONLY reason why she’s a hero is because she’s a woman that’s been put down by men her entire life. To prove that she can be a strong independent woman, and that men can’t keep her down anymore. It’s a consistent attitude of hers to challenge men regardless of who they are or to act arrogant towards them as when first seen by Nick Fury. Immediately upon seeing him she acts a bit sassy, or arrogant, because Nick isn’t knowledgeable about the alien conflicts that exists or doesn’t believe her about the shapeshifting Skrulls. This entire issue sort of cheapens the character as well because if you created the character with the sole purpose to be a conduit or avatar for feminism and feminist talking points… where do you go from there? All of her personality traits, all of her history, and everything that made Carol Danvers who she is about the oppressive nature of men. Once that is solved, which it is in her movie after she gains the full scale of her powers, where do you go from there?

For example in the Amazing Spider Man movies with Andrew Garfield his story was that his parents had died a long time ago and he knew nothing about them. After discovering some papers belonging to his father it becomes a story about self-discovery. To learn about his parents and what happened to them. To understand and connect with them in the only way he could which was through Dr. Conners. Later, since he is on this journey of discovery about his father and mother’s demise, he forgets to walk Aunt May home and Uncle Ben is mad at him for not remembering to do this and that he needs to start being responsible. Peter gets frustrated because this relates to his own past and current journey of understanding. To his father. Why did his father die? Why was he sent to his Aunt and Uncle's house when he had a responsibility to Peter and to be a father? Peter leaves out of this anger and selfishness and Ben attempts to follow. Peter had made his way to a convenience store and was trying to buy some milk but is a few cents short and lets a thief rob the place due to the cashier being somewhat of an asshole about it. While on his search for Peter, Uncle Ben encounters the thief and tries to stop him and that gets him shot. Uncle Ben dies and Peter realizes that it's his fault. That he had the power and strength to do the right thing but simply stood there and did nothing. That is what begins his quest as a Superhero. If a good person has the power to do something to save someone’s life, but doesn’t, are they really a good person? Are they just as bad as the man that pulled the trigger by letting someone die? So that becomes who Peter is. Peter isn’t a hero because he’s a strong white kid who got bit by a weird spider. Peter isn’t a strong hero because he’s a man or because women or men were keeping him down. Peter is a strong hero because he learned the HARD way that if you have the power to stop someone from doing something that could cost an innocent person their life, and do nothing, you’re just as bad as the guy that pulled that trigger…

Hell, Shazam’s is, ‘If you can’t save your family, what kind of Hero are you?’ I’m not sure if I got the wording perfect, but even the REAL Captain Marvel here stands for something that has deeper meaning and truth. Shazam is ALL about family and fighting for them...

That is a much deeper, much BETTER, character traits than the simple feminist argument that Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel stands for. That she’s a strong because she’s a woman. That she’s strong because she won’t let men keep her down anymore. That she can do whatever a man can do and do it even better. I simply feel like that cheapens the character and is a very boring, shallow, and limited origin story because throughout a Hero’s career they will be challenged on their morals and the reasoning behind what they do.  (And GIRL POWER is already something that has been established in Cinema for well over 50 years...) Batman’s is vengeance versus justice. That is a HUGE topic for the hero and he has been struggling with that issue for decades. An argument could be made towards Shazam that his reason for being a hero and doing good, to protect his family, isn’t FOR his family or BECAUSE his family… it’s because he’s scared to be alone again. That could be a good inner struggle for Shazam. So what sort of personal beliefs are going to be challenged when it comes to Captain Marvel? What sort of personal dilemma or inner struggle can she possibly go through? Why is she a hero? Cause even if you extend her origin story away from her childhood and to the Kree Empire where she was being trained to be used as a weapon against the Skrull that goes back to the issue of oppression and ties in with the rest of her history. Carol has been oppressed by men, told what to do by men, and has been controlled and used by men (Yon-Rogg is the face of this issue, and once again he’s a man.) for their personal gain and desires.

I’m sorry, but it’s just weak and shallow. There are no further storylines that you can have that sort of validate her reasoning of being a hero without making it some gigantic feminist issue. If the issue isn’t about feminism then she’s simply trying to do the right thing to do the right thing… and ANYONE can do that. It doesn’t make her special. In fact, there’s nothing really special or ultimately heroic about her. All she is a woman that achieved powers and saved a couple of refugees and declared war on a corrupt Empire. It’s… weak. Steve Rogers fights for Freedom and fights against Tyranny and was forced to reevaluate America and Shield during Winter Soldier and Civil War. These CHALLENGED his very meaning of being a Hero and what he stood for... The Hulk and Bruce Banner fight because they’re constantly being hunted to be exploited for their power, and not just by people who want to use him for evil, but also by people that want to his power for good… the bottom line is Bruce and Hulk fight to escape being used as a chess piece. They just want to be left alone. In this sense they aren’t even a hero, and that makes it even better for them as a character because it makes their choices and issues interesting to say the least… Black Widow fights because she’s trying to make up for the evils of her past. Tony fights because he wants to protect who he loves most and that he feels he has an obligation to Earth and to protect innocent people from being killed like the ones that were being killed by the weapons he designed to protect them in Iron Man 1.

I’ll leave that there though. I think the last thing I want to talk about is the Mary Sue aspect of captain Marvel. Just so people don’t immediately hate me for calling her a Mary Sue I’m going to copy and paste the definition.

Mar·y Sue

noun

noun: Mary Sue; plural noun: Mary Sues

(originally in fan fiction) a type of female character who is depicted as unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses.

"she was not a ‘strong woman’ so much as an insufferable Mary Sue"

So Captain Marvel is a Superhero and Superheros, in order to make them appealing and relatable, are ALWAYS shown to have flaws, weaknesses, and things about them that make them more human to the target audience. That’s what makes them lovable and likable. That you can relate to them and understand where they are coming from and sympathize with them. That you can watch them grow as a character and enjoy their Hero’s Journey. In this movie Captain Marvel has no character growth. Carol Danvers is literally the same as she was in the beginning as she was in the end except she has all her powers and now she hates the Kree. Carol Danvers has no personality flaws whatsoever except, maybe, arrogance and trust issues, and those aren’t exactly traits you want to share with her. They aren’t healthy character flaws. Besides that she barely has a personality to begin with for there to be any sort of flaws. ‘She’s spent six years learning to control her emotions,’ I’m sorry, but no. That argument is weak. Just because you learn how to CONTROL your emotions doesn’t mean that you sacrifice your personality in the process.

So with that being said she has no sort of personality flaw about herself and it is shown in the movie that she has no physical or emotional weaknesses either. In the entire movie the only time she was beaten was because of a surprise attack by Talon. From then on out she has consistently kicked ass, NEVER lost a fight, and NEVER physically struggled against any enemy. Carol was super strong and could NOT be stopped. It sucked any sort of drama or any sort of tension out of the movie. You knew she was going to win and be the hero because at that point nothing could stop her. Carol is a badass woman that could not be stopped. Yay Girl Power!

The best opportunity for her to have been given a weakness and a struggle was when she unlocked her full potential and had access to ALL of her power. To make her struggle to control it for the entirety of the battle except towards the end when she takes out those nukes sent down from Ronan. Even Peter Quill had issues controlling his powers and was CONSTANTLY being beaten by Ego until Yandu finally told him that he doesn’t control his inner strength and power with his head… he uses his heart… and that Power Up that he gets after that, after struggling and losing the ENTIRE movie, is extraordinarily satisfying. You LOVE it when he gets that power up. It’s like how in Wonder Woman she gets that power up after losing Steve and she goes ape shit… There’s a huge emotional lead up and tipping point in those scenes, but Captain Marvel doesn’t even do that. Instead she simply closes her eyes, and opens them and has complete control of her powers. It was ridiculous too because she hadn’t trained with even a decent percentage of her powers at her disposal before! For six years she just trained with a small itty bitty bit of her powers and then suddenly she has full control over ALL of her power as soon as unlocking it? That’s like a Fireman being trained to put out fires with a garden hose for six years only then to be dragged out to use a full on fire-hose at full power that usually requires more than one person to control and expected to do just fine…. Like, I’m sorry, but that’s not how that should have worked. After that point she’s basically Superman and cannot be stopped. There’s no fun to it anymore… it’s just a boring overpowered character being overpowered simply because she’s a woman… and this is only going to lead her up to being the hero that fans want to see lose. A LOT of people don’t like Superman because he’s a sort of Gary Stu in a sense and they ALWAYS love seeing him get his ass beat. By Batman, Shazam, Wonder Woman. Everyone enjoys seeing the most powerful man of all get taken down… Especially if they’re on their high horse like Captain Marvel is with her arrogant ass.

Oh yeah, the last thing I wanna add… They had to sex change Mar-Vell, the ORIGINAL Captain Marvel, because, of course, we can’t have a feminist movie with a feminist character that we’re trying to make into a feminist icon look up to a man after all. They had to have her looking up to a female Amelia Earhart sort of character instead of a Red Baron or Wright Brother sort of figure… That kinda peeved me as well.

So with ALL that being said, I simply think that she’s toxic because her entire character is based off of feminism. Modern Feminism at that. (I draw a line between Classical Egalitarian Feminism that I actually agree with, and Modern Feminism.) The issue is that not everyone agrees with the agenda of Modern Feminism and since she’s now the face of it, they’re just going to see an agenda they hate rather than a character they dislike. They’re going to see the Feminist Icon that they despise and won’t pay attention to her as a character. It’s going to cause a rift in the fan base, as it already has, and if she’s going to be made the face of Marvel like they want her to I can bet you that people are going to be finished with Marvel. Real, TRUE, fans of the MCU, not blue haired normie feminists as I’ve heard them described, are going to feel ostracised for not agreeing with Captain Marvels Politics and the fact that she’s so powerful simply because of girl power. I feel that with the introduction of her as a Feminist Icon that any movie she’s in is going to allude to that and buy into her Girl Power - Ex Machina stuff… Into the Mary Sue in her and it is going to cheapen every movie forward that she’s in. I mean, people are already talking about not seeing End Game because she’s in it and that they’re afraid she’s going to be the sole reason why the Avengers win… and frankly I’m afraid that she may be the reason why the Avengers win too and that would bother me a LOT. Not because she’s a woman, not because I hate women, but because she’s a terribly written character with no personality and is beyond arrogant. Especially in the, ‘Lets get Thanos.’ End Game clip that Marvel Released… It bothers me a lot…

EDIT: https://youtu.be/6byj_uqzGh8 Here's more proof that she's a Mary Sue in the MCU films... They buffed the fuck out of her over the MCU Thor who has been nerfed to hell.... "Captain Marvel is MUCH WEAKER than Thor."

[airagorncharda]

The Mary Sue, and internalized misogyny:

I agree that the types of characters nowadays who are accused of being a “Mary Sue” are usually just... women... 

Or at the very least, they’re not worse characters than male counterpart characters by any stretch of the imagination. Nowadays that term is thrown around to mean “She’s TOO GOOD AT STUFF!!” But... when I first got into fandom (early 2000′s) the term Mary Sue had a very SPECIFIC meaning, and it wasn’t “This woman threatens men with her competence!”

To my memory, a “Mary Sue” was a character 

who’s only flaws were superficial-- insignificant, cutesy, and stated but never shown, 

who was hyper-capable in literally all ways imaginable with no limits, and yet still needed to be rescued and cared for, 

who was described as “plain” by the author while actually being described as highly conventionally attractive in every way, 

etc., etc., you get the idea.

Mary Sues were BOTH highly attractive/competent/skilled/independent/etc., AND none of those things at once. And I don’t mean in the nuanced way of someone who is emotionally together in one context but not another, or skilled at certain things. I mean their skills, attractiveness, competency, and ultimately their character changed drastically to fit the narrative, rather than the other way around.

Mary Sues basically checked every box, while having no cohesive personality or depth. 

They remind me of the two dimensional love interests seen in so much of our media, except for one key difference, which is that Mary Sues are the main character. 

Being written by women and/or trans people raised with internalized misogyny (most commonly young women or teenage girls) in fandom, they’re a character written to fit all the impossible standards placed on women and girls at once-- which is of course literally impossible without making a character that is inherently a contradiction. Self conscious but conventionally beautiful, hyper-capable but needs to be saved-- in every category she is literally the best, while also being not Too Much. She’s feminine AND a tomboy. She’s outspoken AND shy. She’s “not like other girls”. If she’s rash and stubborn, then she’s also always right. 

The Mary Sue is everything society tells girls they have to be in order to be valuable, and as a result, she’s something sort of superhuman and also has no discernible personality or identity. 

Mary Sues were (and are) characters that I suspect are cathartic to write, and are also very hard for young first time female writers to NOT write. 

They’re dealing with misogyny from all sides, and they want to write a story about a character they WISH they were. They WISH they could be everything our bullshit patriarchy tells them they should be, and tells them that they’re worthless if they’re not. This is also why so many Mary Sues are self inserts; they wish they could be part of their favorite stories. 

It’s a perfectly reasonable response to our society to write about a character who is ALL of those things, and it’s not fair or reasonable to have a problem with people who do so.

I still, however, think there’s worth in at minimum being able to describe the type of character this term was critiquing, because while it’s absolutely valuable for the author to be able to WRITE it...

It can be frustrating and boring to read.

It’s not compelling to read about a flawless two dimensional character, and characters like these tend to fall into other frustrating tropes as well, such as Obliviously Beautiful, the Invincible Hero, and Protagonist Centered Morality to name just a few. And while the act of writing a Mary Sue may be a feminist act for the one doing it (creating a female main character who feels personally empowering), the tropes and traits utilized to create characters like this come directly out of a misogynistic society. Women do not have to be beautiful or hyper-competent to be likable, and they don’t have to be likable to be worth reading about. Women do not have to be superhuman, and people are less interesting when they don’t have flaws.

That’s why people came up with the term to begin with, to be able to describe something they saw in fandom that they found frustrating or didn’t want to read. 

I don’t, personally, think there’s a problem with Mary Sues existing, but I do think the term has value. 

It’s frustrating to me that the term Mary Sue may have been irreparably corrupted  Being able to say “This fic feels like a wish-fulfillment self-insert written by someone who is either young or still full of internalized misogyny, and if that’s not something you enjoy then I don’t think you want to read it” HAS VALUE and is IMPORTANT to be able to say in fandom spaces. 

For the record, I’m also not saying that most people who used this term back in the day did so with self awareness of everything I’ve just outlined. It was a sort of nebulous definition based on how people felt about a character (and has only become more so), and a lot of people knee-jerk reacted to other people’s female OCs that they didn’t like with slapping “Mary Sue” onto them. However, as I’ve said, I still think the tropes it was most often critiquing deserve to be at minimum labelled if not outright critiqued. 

We may not ever get this term back to it’s original meaning, but I hope that if we can’t, we are at least able to come up with a succinct term to replace it. 

[aion-rsa]

Hamilton: Thomas Jefferson Controversy Explained

https://ift.tt/3e6HpMC

After Alexander Hamilton, no character has a bigger entrance in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical than Thomas Jefferson. For if Hamilton’s intro begins Act One, then Jefferson opens Act Two. And for those who are discovering Hamilton for the first time on Disney+, it’s a hell of an arrival as Daveed Diggs leaps across the stage with boundless confidence and swagger.

Clearly intended to be an antagonistic force, Jefferson enters stage right with an announcement that “someone must keep the American promise, you simply must meet Thomas, Thomas!” Yet even as the show depicts Jefferson as a prima donna, he is also an endearing one, draped in purple threads intentionally modeled after Prince and a glee from Diggs that’s infectious. He thus comes across as ultimately likable—and no less petty than the show’s main character who winds up dying in a duel. Jefferson is an intellectual equal to Hamilton and thereby an audience favorite. After all, Hamilton sides with this political foe over Aaron Burr in the election of 1800 for Jefferson’s overall good intentions toward America.

And yet, it’s these good, if smug, intentions that Jefferson displays in Hamilton which have come under scrutiny as of late. Because while much is made in the musical about Jefferson’s renown for writing the Declaration of Independence—which wasn’t actually well-known to the public until the 19th century—as well as his determination to protect farmers from moneyed interests, the show only lightly acknowledges his hypocrisy as a slave owner. Sure, Alexander calls him out for basking in the supposed agrarian ideals of Southern planters while willfully ignoring his paradise is built on the backs of Black slaves held in bondage. But like the real Hamilton, that hypocrisy is only used as a political cudgel during a larger argument on government. Otherwise Hamilton, and his 21st century musical, turn a largely blind eye. More upsetting still for some is how the musical characterizes Jefferson’s relationship with a Black woman he kept as property after returning from France: Sally Hemings, who was aged 16 when she got back to Monticello with the 46-year-old master.

“Sally be a lamb, darlin’ won’tcha open it?” is the lone winking acknowledgement Hemings is given by Diggs’ Jefferson. Now five years since Hamilton’s first Off-Broadway performance, this is being viewed in a different light as more Americans confront the systemic racism that’s allowed anti-Black violence to fester and be normalized for centuries.

In fact, Hamilton or not, Jefferson himself is at the forefront of this discussion with some voices calling for the general celebration of the founding father to end. Known by most products of the American education system only as the author of the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence—and it’s then-radical vision of these self-evident truths that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—his obvious hypocrisy on not extending those ideals to the 200 people he owned at Monticello at the time can be overwhelming. So much so, even two of his own descendants, one descended from his white wife Martha Jefferson and one from his Black mistress, and Martha’s half-sister, Sally Hemings, have recently called for the possible removal of the Jefferson’s statue at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.

Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s Thoughts on Slavery

Judging historic figures by modern social standards can often be an illusory task, but in the case of Jefferson and the issue of slavery, even he was aware of the evil inherent in the South’s “peculiar institution.” A self-styled philosopher and American thinker, his habit for analyzing and self-reflection in the mold of post-Renaissance humanism was immortalized by the mansion on a hill he designed for himself: Monticello, Italian for “Little Mountain,” sat at the center of his 5,000-acre plantation. There he’d be seen as the great Enlightenment figure pacing his balcony at dawn each morning, stewing over radical ideas about the separation of Church and State, the need for a decimal system in U.S. currency and measurements, and the swivel chair (yes, he invented it). Yet the proud man was blind to the fact that his intellectual leisure was made possible by the hundreds of Black bodies around him toiling in Monticello’s fields and picking his tobacco, or serving his guests under fear of punishment.

Still, he was aware enough. Hence a passage in the Declaration of Independence where he attempted to blame the British crown for being responsible for the slave trade in the North American colonies—South Carolina and Georgia’s delegates forced him to take it out—and the fact he proposed in 1781 that Virginia emancipate its slaves by 1784, moving them into the interior North American continent (he considered separation necessary in part because he viewed Black people intellectually inferior to whites). He even proposed in 1784 that the Congress of the Confederation (under the pre-Constitution Articles of Confederation) prohibit slavery in all future states created out of the Northwest territory. While his fellow Southern representatives defeated his proposal that year, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made it so, preventing future states like Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan from becoming slave states.

Nevertheless, he committed what we now call rape when he made Sally Hemings a lover in France, likely when she was 14 and he was 43. It was at those ages when they met, with Hemings being sent as a companion for his daughter Polly on a voyage across the Atlantic. At the time, Jefferson had already been Minister to France for years, pursuing multiple affairs of state and the bedroom after his wife Martha died in 1781—extracting on her deathbed a promise from her husband to never marry again. But when Sally arrived in France, here was the much younger half-sister of his dead wife, a girl known by other slaves at Monticello as “Dashing Sally” because of her light skin and straight hair. Just as Jefferson would take Sally as a lover, his father-in-law John Wayles had taken Sally’s mother Elizabeth Hemings as his own coerced mistress. And Elizabeth was likewise the daughter of another white man and Black slave.

The way Madison Hemings, one of Jefferson and Hemings’ four children to survive to adulthood, tells it:

“Their stay was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called home she was enceinte by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be free at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father.”

As Madison’s account suggests, Sally and her brother James Hemings considered themselves free in France, and Jefferson wrote privately of them as such. So as a way to continue his physical relationship, he lured her back to Virginia where she’d officially be his property again with promises of special treatment and emancipation for their children.

At least on that count, he held true. Of their seven children, four lived to age 21 and they were freed—better than the fate of the more than 600 Black men and women Jefferson owned as property over the course of his life. The eldest two who lived to 21 before his death were given $50 and a free carriage ride to Philadelphia to live their lives among white society. Jefferson even invented a tortuous logic late in his life to argue that as they were mathematically pure and not “mulatto.”

Only Madison lived his life as a Black freedman, a fact he never appeared to fully forgive his siblings for. Of his older sister who was freed before him, Madison said, “I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered. Harriet married a white man in Washington City, whose name I could give but will not.”

But it was around the time of enticing Sally back to Virginia that Jefferson became much quieter on the need of emancipation, and ultimately fearful of it. While welcoming the French Revolution to the point of self-denial about how violent and chaotic the mob became, Jefferson shuddered at the simultaneous Haitian Revolution, whereupon self-liberated Black men and women violently overthrew French colonists. He wrote to dear friend James Madison that “if this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have fear of it.” And as President of the United States, Jefferson and the U.S. Congress refused to acknowledge Haiti becoming a republic for Black Haitians in 1803.

Beyond Just a Declaration

Jefferson was undeniably a flawed man whose hypocrisy as the writer of sweeping rhetoric that is still cherished and quoted around the world is in direct contradiction to the Black lives he owned and often destroyed, including the 130 Black bodies auctioned off after his death to pay outstanding debts. Yet, unlike the Confederate generals deified in marble as warriors for the cause of maintaining slavery, Jefferson’s contributions are far more difficult to ignore or dismiss—both for the American experiment and the world history that followed. Because in addition to the Declaration and his ultimately damning silence on the original American sin of slavery, he contributed to many of the rights and precedents we hold dear to this day.

When Jefferson wrote the Declaration—which he penned almost by happenstance during a summer when he was primarily focused on writing the Virginian Constitution—he was considered remarkably quiet by peers like New England firebrand John Adams. That summer the slight in size, but boisterous in presence, Adams characterized the six-foot and two-inch, red-haired Virginian as a staunch advocate for independence who “never uttered more than two or three sentences” while sitting in committee. Nevertheless, Jefferson found with the pen a statement not about the right to declare war, but the right to self-govern. Historian Jill Lepore astutely notes for context in These Truths: A History of the United States that English philosopher Jeremy Bentham called it “absurd and visionary” in 1776, and “subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government.”

And Jefferson’s contributions extend beyond that rhetoric. While he was not present for the framing of the Constitution at the constitutional convention in 1787—he was in France with Sally—he used his pen to almost derail it, lest a Bill of Rights be added. “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth,” he wrote. And what he qualified as a bill of rights included protections for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom from arrest without evidence, and freedom both of and from religion. When Jefferson colleague James Madison authored the Bill of Rights, he modeled the First Amendment on Jefferson’s Virginian Statute for Religious Freedom from 1786.

A Deist by description, and possibly an atheist by modern standards, Jefferson is more responsible than most for a new nation in the 18th century separating religion from government. The astonishment of such an idea is put into clarity when one considers that at the time of the constitutional convention, 10 of the 13 states had official state religions—and almost all states had been founded in the previous century on religious grounds. Yet Jefferson was a man who when founding the University of Virginia would build the school’s campus around a library instead of a church, as was the custom of his age.

Even before the Constitution was written without a word mentioning God, Jefferson was already warning Virginians in 1781 to avoid the trappings of letting religion dictate governmental policy. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god,” Jefferson wrote—much to his later political woes when Hamilton’s Federalist Party tried to derail his candidacy in the election of 1800 on religious grounds. “GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT,” wrote a Federalist newspaper. “JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!!”

It is because of Jefferson’s lobbying that the first priority of the First Congress was to pass 10 of Madison’s 12 amendments, forming the federal Bill of Rights. Their second priority was of course to ignore petitions to abolish slavery, including one signed by Benjamin Franklin on his deathbed.

What Hamilton Left Out

On the subject of Alexander Hamilton, the musical named after him aptly demonstrates Jefferson’s folly to not see the need for a stronger federal government that can compete and trade on an international scale, yet the show leaves out Jefferson’s more pointed critique about the danger of speculation for lower-income Americans created by Hamilton’s financial plan. Indeed, Hamilton’s own corrupt assistant William Duer was embroiled in a scandal that triggered the first U.S. stock market crash in 1792. Thousands of Revolutionary veterans were ruined by the ensuing debt crisis, with one debtors’ prison in Philadelphia being so overstuffed with inmates it began publishing its own newspaper, Forlorn Hope.

In the long run, Hamilton created our modern capitalist system in the “room where it happens,” which according to Jefferson was hatched in his own private Manhattan quarters over a gentlemanly dinner and bottles of wine. But the reason to believe some version of this account is true is because Jefferson remembered it, and the 1792 crash, with woe. They were events that forced the U.S. to write its first bankruptcy laws and New York brokers to agree to a ban on private bidding—and thus the beginnings of the New York Stock Exchange.

Other elements of Jefferson’s legacy left out of Hamilton and most grade school history classes is Jefferson’s role in undoing the Alien and Sedition Acts: Laws passed by Hamilton’s Federalist Party that eventually won Hamilton and President John Adams’ approval. The new laws allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens without a trial and to punish newspaper printers the POTUS deemed dangerous. Yes, Hamilton came to support policies that allowed the executive branch to unilaterally diminish and exclude immigrants because he dreaded Irish transplants were sympathetic to France and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. Of the 25 arrests made under the new laws, there were 10 convictions. Of those 10, seven were Jefferson-friendly newspaper publishers.

It was this policy that ruined Jefferson and Adams’ lifelong friendship for decades to come and also caused Jefferson to not inaccurately view the election of 1800 as a contest between republicanism and aristocracy. The musical also leaves out that in addition to being the president who acquired the Louisiana Purchase—bringing in territory that would make up land from New Orleans to modern day Montana—Jefferson also wound up defending it from Hamilton’s other tragic protagonist, Aaron Burr.

After being vilified as the man who cut down Alexander Hamilton in a duel and fleeing as far south as Georgia, Burr decided to embrace his new status as villain and commit himself toward being what Jefferson called “an American Catiline”—the name of a Roman senator who attempted to overthrow the ancient republic before Caesar. Admittedly, the details of Burr’s plan were not fully known at his trial for treason in 1807, nor are they fully grasped today, but Burr connived with the ministers from England and Spain to sever the United States along the ridge of the Allegheny Mountains.

Consider that Burr shot Hamilton on July 11, 1804, and by Aug. 6, Anthony Merry, British minister to the U.S., sent word to London that Burr was offering his services to the British crown to help “effect a separation of the western part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantic and the mountains, in its whole extent.” According to Jefferson biographer Fawn M. Brodie, by March 1805, Burr offered a plan to conquer New Orleans with the aid of a British squadron. And thanks to William Eaton, a critic of Jefferson nearly roped into the plot, we know Burr even planned to eventually invade Washington, take Jefferson prisoner and “Hang him! – throw him into the Potomac!” before robbing the mint and sailing to New Orleans. Burr even enlisted the aid of young Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay by suggesting his plans for the North American southwest were merely intended to steal Mexico from the Spaniards and aid the Jefferson administration.

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The British and Spanish turned Burr down, though he still lied about their aid as he attempted to orchestrate an armed invasion of New Orleans in December 1805. Instead he was arrested and brought up on treason by the government, with the gallows’ rope as his final reward. And honestly, Jefferson’s former vice president would’ve probably hanged if not for a typically brilliant political performance in the courtroom by Burr and a sympathetic ear from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall… Jefferson’s cousin and estranged political foe who invented judicial review in large part as a check against Jefferson.

Facing a Complete Legacy

Jefferson lived a life full of great historic achievement and heavy moral failing. On some level he knew slavery was America’s original sin but couldn’t divorce himself from the institution any more than he could let young Sally Hemings live free in Paris. But even in his remote mind, he was aware of the inescapability of human fallibility. Consider the Alien and Sedition Acts ended his friendship with Adams, a man he came to love during the summer of 1776 and then as fellow foreign ministers in Europe during the 1780s. Yet they then renewed their affection in 1824 after Adams’ son ascended to the White House.

Decades of acrimony and a sense of betrayal gave way to old camaraderie and intellectual admiration in their extensive correspondence over the next several years. Their letters were so heartfelt that each was apparently on the other’s mind when they died on the exact same date: July 4, 1826. Fifty years to the day that the Declaration of Independence was ratified, Jefferson died in the afternoon, surrounded by Black faces he never freed, and Adams passed in the evening. The latter incorrectly whispered as his final words, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”

But he did not. Nor did the familial bonds of the Black men and women who served him best. In his will, Jefferson freed only five slaves, all of whom were relations to Sally, including their two other children who still hadn’t reached the age of 21. But while Sally was permitted to discreetly disappear to nearby Charlottesville without being mentioned in the will—keeping Thomas’ eyeglasses as the sole memento of a man she lived with over 35 years as more than a servant but less than a wife—the other 130 slaves left in Jefferson’s possession were sold off to the highest bidder in an auction designed to settle his sizeable debts. Unlike George Washington, who belatedly emancipated his slaves in death, Jefferson would find ways to deny freedom to the Black bodies around him, separating families among as many as seven or eight slave owners.

One such life he ruined after his last gasp was Joseph Fossett, Sally’s cousin and Jefferson’s enslaved blacksmith. Jefferson freed Joseph in his will, but the man’s oldest child had already been given to Jefferson’s grandson as a present. As for Fossett’s wife and six other children, including three daughters, they were all auctioned off. Fossett was able to raise the money to buy back his wife and he thought a son, but the owner reneged on the deal, leaving Joseph and wife Edith to retreat to Ohio for the rest of their days—a state arbitrarily made free by one of Jefferson’s other, more benevolent ideas.

Jefferson is a man made up of immense contradictions and a moral paradox as jarring as the one in the nation he helped found. His brightest and most passionate ideas are the kind we still cling to, protecting protestors from further abuse by corrupting forces in the government, just as his sins helped pave an enduring path forward for Black marginalization, abuse, and ultimately institutionalized violence. Both are part of the full picture of the man, and it’s an image I personally do not think needs to be torn down. Jefferson himself loathed the idea of venerating the founders, writing in 1816, “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. [But] They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.”

Yet Jefferson’s visage, warts and all, is in many ways the face of America. He helped create a government that in pursuit of a more perfect Union was able to end the vile and insidious institution Jefferson personally profited from. And in the process it aspired closer to these self-evident truths Jefferson immortalized as the pursuit of happiness. Showing both sides of that legacy, including learning stations, plaques, and even statues of the people he owned, and the woman he tried to hide from history’s eyes, at his monuments is a better way of learning our full history… instead of trying to sweep it under the rug.

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