The trope just couldn’t be escaped.

Despite Marvel’s new woke entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Captain Marvel, it would appear that Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) needed to be rescued despite being a strong feminist woman.

As I previously covered, Captain Marvel released to scores on the website Rotten Tomatoes in the low 80th percentile despite consistent reviews suggesting the movie was mediocre. The audience was a bit less forgiving, as it dipped into the low 30’s in terms of approval, making it the most disliked Marvel movie in the MCU’s history.

The thing about movies like Captain Marvel, however, isn’t that the movie being good is the primary focus. The film had a message attached, and that message needs to be treated as holy. The religion of feminism demands it.

At some point, Rotten Tomatoes purged thousands of reviews, which was noticed by Redditor “PadaV4,” who posted a sudden change in the audience review score numbers on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Nothing fishy going on here,” posted PadaV4 in the “KotakuInAction” subreddit.

As you can see by the screenshot, there were around 58,000 reviews on Friday from 11 am to 4 pm. At 6 pm, the number of reviews suddenly drops to 4,000. It steadily climbs again, then sees an upshot of 72,000 reviews at around 5 am, subsequently followed by another drop to 23,000.

The film has now climbed to 58 percent in the audience reviews, still making it a failure in terms of Rotten Tomatoes scoring system, but even that 58 percent is an artificial number.

It’s true that many fans went into the movie ready to hate it due to Larson’s racist, sexist comments about “white men” leading up to the film, however much of the reviews say a lot of the same things professional critics noted. The films was “okay” at best, with the supporting cast being the most enjoyable part of the movie, and Larson delivering a wooden performance.

The truth seems to be that the movie and Larson’s comments left a bad taste in the mouths of viewers, who felt sour about the movie beforehand, which then added to the rejection of an already dull movie upon viewing.

If it was any other kind of movie, it would be safe to bet that the film would have been left alone, but with Captain Marvel’s political messaging being what it is, the film had to be protected. Green Lantern, also a film about a pilot who is given powers by an alien, has an abysmally low score that had no intervention on the part of Rotten Tomatoes.

It’s the narrative Rotten Tomatoes they care about, not the film.