when you say "characters are allowed to be problematic" you don't seem to recognize the fact that said characters are written as good people and as role models who many children end up looking up to... like as an adult you can recognize the moral ambiguity or whatever else but when children see a superhero behaving in a way that is misogynistic or racist, they end up learning that that's okay.

No. This is really fucked up. Good people DO say and do fucked up things and it is really important for people to acknowledge that and normalize that.

I say fucked up things. You say fucked up things. We ALL do. People are still good people even though they do and say fucked up things. When we teach children otherwise, we come away with the polarized view of humanity that allows people to believe that only people who outright claim to be racist or sexist are racist or sexist, and that’s when we end up having people say “oh, no that thing so and so said ISN’T racist, because THEY aren’t racist, they have black friends!!!!!!1!111!!” “This PERSON isn’t sexist, so the thing they said COULDN’T be sexist.”

I have a fuckton of awesome male friends who occasionally say sexist things. The sooner kids learn that the best people in the world occasionally say sexist things, the better.

Real characters have flaws. Good people have flaws. The world isn’t a fucking morality play and we can’t reduce media to that. It is wrong to reduce media to that. We teach children that good people only do and say good things, we are teaching them the wrong fucking lesson, because it is going to teach them to judge the people they interact with the wrong way.

We’re also talking about Tony Stark here. You know…the guy who hired Natasha to be his assistant because he wanted to ogle her. If we wanted him to be a perfect model of feminist humanity, we probably should have started on that five movies ago. He isn’t that. He shouldn’t be that. He was never written to be a role model and no one should consider him one. The entire point of MCU Tony Stark’s character is he is in essence an asshole who becomes a hero in spite of that, and that’s part of why he’s a great character.

Furthermore, we are talking about a line in Latin in a PG-13 movie. One, no child should be at that movie without an adult. Two, I don’t know that many twelve year olds who know Latin without the benefit of an adult to translate for them.

I don’t know that many adults who knew what that line meant until they went home and looked it up. I know some. I did– because it’s a plot point in the 1995 film Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson. That’s the only reason I knew it. Let’s not pretend that we are an entire culture of adults who are well-versed in feudal practices and the Latin names for them. We’re not. My friends googled it or knew what it was because they’re seen angry tumblr posts about it. And most of the people I know who googled it were horrified and learned something about history and patriarchy and that awareness is something new for them and has informed their view of the history of women’s oppression.

Thirdly, are you really, really committing yourself to a “what about the children” argument here? We spend all our lives fighting “what about the children” arguments coming from conservatives who want to erase sexuality and violence and political messages. “What about the children” arguments are our rhetorical enemies. Children are best educated and exposed to everything. Always. In environments where adults can talk to them about it, like PG-13 movies where they have to ask an adult what a Latin phrase means, and their adult has to say, “You know what, that’s in Latin, I don’t know what it means, so let me look it up and we’ll discuss it together.”

Media can’t protect children. You go that route, and we’re going down a path to some super Fahrenheit 451 shit.