Geek Syndicate Issue 7 | Page 38

Geek Syndicate
Why Hit-Girl is my hero
Image © Marvel Comics, 2010

with a pair of nunchucks - she’s frigging Bruce Lee in a purple wig. How could you not warm to her? How could you not want to be her? Of course, there’s a whole group of people who haven’t warmed to her at all, particularly after seeing a young Chloe-Grace Moretz drop a C-bomb in the film adaptation. The palaver is pretty hilarious, when you consider how many people the heroine violently dispatches over the course of the movie. But anyway. Whatever. Back to my mushy ode. I get that it might seem strange. A grown woman who thinks that a violent, borderlinepsychopathic eleven-year-old is the best thing since Ripley booted the alien queen out of the airlock. But look past all the effing and blinding and mass slaughter for a second. See it for what it is - caricature and hyperbole. And stop thinking about it so damn much. Here we have, as Moretz herself has said, an intelligent, powerful, take-

“So, you wanna play?” I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. (That’s right, I said when.) I went through the intellectual Egyptologist phase and spent some time dreaming of becoming a hacker, while the more realistic ‘journalist’ always floated around in the background. And, sometime in 2002 I saw the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode ‘Grave’ and decided that being Xander Harris would be as good as it could possibly get - la-

tent superpowers notwithstanding. But then I read Kick-Ass, and I met Hit-Girl. And I fell in love with her. Not romantic love, you understand. I’ve saved that for Mr Rochester. It’s more an awed devotion. Here was a character - a kid, no less - who swore like a navvy, fought like a ninja, had a sense of humour as crude and dark as any fictional character before her and a heart of gold. Plus, she knows what she’s doing
Image © Universal Studios, 2010

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