First off, let me say I don’t know if this leaked news about Silk is true. It seems true-ish but also is perhaps tailored to cause a certain kind of uproar, at the expense of Asian Americans, particularly Asian American women. Supposedly, the Amazon series focused on Silk (the Asian American Spider-Man-Type-Person-Hero), led by showrunner Angela Kang, is being retooled, as per an article from The Ankler which reports that a “source close to the series claims that Silk was being refocused with a more male-skewing audience in mind.”

The phrasing of this leak seems a little sus(picous) to me. Now, I don’t know who is on the Silk writing staff as currently constituted (apparently, there’s Angela Kang and Kai Yu Wu, and cool, great). The first two things I thought were, “That seems stupid” and then “If the show were about a white woman, could they afford to leak that male-skewing part without risking a Gigantic Internet Uproar Thing?”

A little background: Silk a.k.a. Cindy Moon is a poignant case in the long history of Asian Americans’ misconceived “Model Minority” status, Asian American comics-pop-culture fandom, and the whole Asian American gender-dynamic sexy-vs-not-sexy problem. To be clear, a lot of us Marvel fans really love Silk, because some of us love the idea of an Asian American Spider-Hero! Here’s the BUT.

But, when Silk first debuted in Marvel Comics, one of her initial plotlines was to be a super-hormonal hookup for Peter Parker. Not primarily to use her great powers in a responsible way or whateve, she (at first) seemed to be there literally just to kiss Peter Parker and wear a silky-sexy version of the Spider-Suit. GAAAAAH. Her origin story is a weird one that deviates from traditional Spider-Person Origin, it’s somewhat copped from the plot of the film Oldboy, and involves Ezekiel, the para-mystical villain from everyone’s favorite current Spider-Film Madame Web. So, just to say, Silk IS a Spiderverse hero, but she’s kind of an outsider, unless she’s making out with the male lead character. SOUND FAMILIAR AT ALL?

(Marvel writer Dan Slott, whom I like a lot as a comics creator, co-created Silk and has taken a share of heat for the above-mentioned issues. Was it sufficient heat, I dunno, the point is now we have a new problem that’s the same problem.)

So, Silk/Cindy Moon started her fictional life as an unfortunate football between a Male Gaze Stereotype (Asian women are hot and available and a little ninja-y) and a very earnest wish for an Asian American superhero! (Cf. the Batman Fam’s Cassandra Cain has a little bit of a similar problem.)

So just to thwip out the thread, let’s imagine, and PLEASE JUMP IN IF I’M WRONG ON THIS: In 2024, if there were a show top-lined by, say, Tina Fey or Florence Pugh or Brie Larson and it became publicly known that the show was being retooled for a “male-skewing” audience, DO YOU THINK THEY’D EVEN TRY TO GET AWAY WITH THAT?

Asian Americans, especially Asian American women, are NOT some test case for seeing what you can get away with, Patriarchy.com. We know you THINK we are, because we’re the model-adjacent-minority or WHATEVER, but we are not that football. If you look at, I dunno, the phenotypic population of the planet Earth, we are the whole game. (Remember that “China market” you’re all supposedly so concerned about?)

But the good thing is, this is a problem with an easy solution. Just focus on making an excellent Silk show, and favor the writers who will do that. (To be clear, it’s unclear as of this writing whether the Silk writing staff is still on it, or on pause, or being replaced, or what. There was that whole WGA strike, and many TV show things are still in flux.)

Just throwing this out there, I’m an Asian American writer, and I’m a male Marvel/Spiderverse nerd, and I know a lot about what “males” like. I might even know how they skew. But if I were working on Silk — which by the way would be my dreamiest dream job apart from working on Secret Wars or Green Lantern but that’s neither here nor there, I bet I could contribute to a show that a.) dudes will like and b.) women will like and c.) is not egregiously insulting to its own lead character.

How would this hypothetical magic even happen? I’m gonna say lived experience counts. Not the lived experience of being a woman, of course. But living as an Asian American person, aware of the gender dynamics and how they’ve evolved, following the Marvel comics and films and observing how they’ve grown (remember, Black Panther and Shang Chi started with a lot of stereotypical tropes, they were not always the paragons of multiculturalism expressed through a popular movie, that came over time, with craft and attention), and shouldn’t she really fight Lady Scorpion instead of Ezekiel? ‘Cause you already have Ezekiel in that Madame Web thing, and I just think Scorpion is a visually-cool Spider-Villain.

It’s really not impossible to present an Asian American woman hero who is a fantasy (as in, has superpowers) but isn’t a fantasy (as in, a sexy dragon lady we’ve seen a thousand times). Put bluntly, you can end up with this person:

But what you want are these people:

AND IT’S LUNAR NEW YEAR, FOR FLERK’S SAKE. Asian American people would like to feel good about themselves this month. Could you not have waited a month to upset all our hopes for Silk? AI YO.

Oh and BTW, that Cindy Moon character in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 video game? LOOKS VERY PROMISING.