Anonymous Avengers “Fan” #sexist #homophobia #racist npr.org

Brie Larson has vanished.

A star of Avengers: Endgame, one of the biggest movies of all time, was completely excised from a modified pirated version of the film — along with everything else in the film seen as feminist or gay.

An anonymous fan edited out shots, scenes and characters in a "defeminized" version circulating now on an illegal streaming site. As well as losing Larson's character, Captain Marvel, the defeminized edit is missing a scene where Hawkeye teaches his daughter to shoot. ("Young women should learn skills to become good wives and mothers and leave the fighting to men," the editor opined in an accompanying document.) The role of Black Panther is minimized. ("He's really not that important.") Spider-Man doesn't get rescued by women characters anymore. ("No need to.") And male characters no longer hug.

This particular defeminized edit is just the latest example of a trend, says Suzanne Scott, a professor of film and media studies at the University of Texas. A similar "chauvinist cut" of 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi removed key scenes of women making decisions, giving orders, having ideas and fighting in battle. So much was trimmed, Scott says, that only about 30% of the original film remained.

"It is borderline incomprehensible," she says. "It has cut out a lot of story that you need to make the whole narrative cohesive. So what's on the screen plays like an avant-garde film."

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