#eve deserves better than to constantly get fridged or side-lined for more mark-angst

[justmenoworries]

This was originally a response to a post expressing similar sentiments, but I decided to make it into its own thing.

Atom Eve/Samantha Eve Wilkins is my favorite character in Invincible (the show) bar none.

Which is why her romance with Mark annoys me. Because whenever Mark is around, Eve gets reduced to his caretaker or, even worse, a damsel in distress for him to save.

She gets taken as a hostage in the Flaxxan invasion so Mark can hulk out through the power of love. She gets taken over by the sequids and Mark has to EMP her back to normal. Her alternate self can't do shit against her version of Mark, then gets paralyzed and basically taken in as a pet by him (which btw, all levels of gross, there was no need to make the character suffer this much.)

And don't even get me started on the S3 finale. They did her so dirty in that one.

She goes up against an alternate Mark and gets her leg broken and now she's out of the fight for good, apparently, so Mark has a reason to get depressed and sit the rest of the Invincible War out. Let me remind you that heroes like Rex and even side-characters/minor villains like Powerplex got to have a W against an alternate Mark. Not Eve, though.

And what makes this more frustrating is that she could have at least gone down like a badass. Girl can make herself a full-on mechsuit and construct functioning weaponry but the only thing she actually does in the fight against alternate Mark are some glass walls and weak hammers???

This is the girl who went into a 5V1 fight against a group of unstable metahumans when she was in her early teens and won. She's literally Dr. Manhattan if he was a woman and liked pink but whenever Mark is involved she gets nerfed into the ground and her constructs might as well be made of paper mache with how easily the bad guys get through them.

This set-up is never reversed, by the by. Eve is occasionally allowed to be a great assist to Mark in battles, but there's never a moment where Mark is actually the one in peril and Eve has to dramatically save him.

And that sums Eve up pretty well when it comes to how she's written in her relationship with Mark: Always the support, never a main player.

Eve is shown to have goals and dreams and issues and problems of her own before she gets with Mark. But once their relationship is official, she just becomes his side-kick. His problems are her problems. She's the one who raises Oliver for him. She's the one constantly comforting him. All they talk about are his issues. The one time Eve's abusive parents come up, Mark actually has the gall to go "Well my dad is worse", like it's a competition.

When they found a superhero agency together, they call it "Invincible Inc." Not "Invincible and Atom Eve Inc". Just "Invincible Inc". Even though Eve is the one doing all the paperwork, organizing stuff and getting jobs for the two of them, while Mark puts in the bare minimum.

Nice./s

TL;DR I'm not a big fan of Eve getting reduced to the Supportive Girlfriend as soon as her and Mark get together. Or the fact that her pain is frequently used for his angst. It does her character a great disservice and I genuinely hope the writing improves on that front.