I was thinking this morning about the Captain Marvel makeup controversy I keep seeing on my dash.
There has always been a bit of a lack of female avengers but with Okoye likely opting to stay in Wakanda Natasha is probably the only woman at the compound. So Carol turns up in her rubber laser-tag outfit :p after 15 years away from Earth.
Natasha offers to hook her up with a change of clothes and after Carol has changed Natasha offers her makeup. Because to Natasha it’s like a form of armor. The Natasha that asks “who do you want me to be”, who knows the power of expectations, of offering people what they want to see, of being able to protect herself and hide her true self away.
Maybe Natasha tells Carol this but not in so many words. The world is in chaos, all those people gone, many more dead due to car accidents, planes falling out of the sky, caregivers vanishing etc. At the end of the first Avengers movie there was that guy who said “Where are the Avengers? This was their fight”. The world will blame them for losing, the compound might be the only safe place for them and being able to hide oneself in plain sight…
OR maybe Carol just accepts as it gives their hands something to do while she gets caught up on 15 years of Earth history. It makes the conversation less intense. When Carol looks in the mirror afterwards she wants to wipe the itchy gunk off her face but when she talks to her team, they compliment her, say she looks better which makes her roll her eyes. It’s not until afterwards she learns about NoMakeup Selfies and how makeup is the default for a lot of people now, so much so that no makeup seems pale etc.
After all Carol is hiding too. Why didn’t she come back to Earth for 15 years? Maybe it was because she realised she wasn’t aging and what that meant for her newly-remembered relationship with Monica. It made it easy to justify keeping her family safe by staying away. She would lose them no matter what, and if she returned she could never stay anyway. So putting on a face for the world, hiding her true self behind some armor, not so out of character after all.
