The best thing about this show is how awesomely female-centric it is.
It's amazing, and it only hit me about 3 episodes in: how the show revolves around female characters. It is so refreshing and exhilarating.
It felt a leeetle bit like returning to school for me, being from a girl's school and all. It reminded me how in girls' schools, because there were no boys, we never expected anything less of ourselves: the project boss is a girl, the videographer/photographer is a girl, the techie is a girl, the director is a girl, logistics was girl's work too. We never saw anything really as gender-typed, and it is only as an adult looking back that I realise the immense value we had in our education being in girls' schools. It was unconscious, it was subtle -- but because our formative years were spent in a space we could grow whichever way we wished, we subconsciously allowed ourselves to be ambitious and strong in our lives and careers. Jessica Jones as a show gave me that same feeling: our awesome hero is a woman; she's not always smiling and rarely sweet and kind -- it's normal. Women are not always sweet, happy, and kind or otherwise cease to be women; we get angry, we get confused, we make mistakes, our function is not simply to serve men. We have lives, we dream. We can fix our problems and not wait as damsels in distress. We demand to be respected. We have best friends who are girls, and we love them. We may love men, but we love each other very much too.
Not until I watched this did I realise how much this perspective was generally lacking in mainstream media. I especially love the friendship between Jessica and Patsy! They love each other as girl best friends do. And they're not always catty like girls are typically portrayed in high school scenarios (I'm thinking of Blair/Serena from Gossip Girl, ahah). Girls can be amazing best friends whose lives do not revolve around men, thank you. This is normal female experience somehow not portrayed enough, I feel. (Just the other day, Datin S was contemplating that girl friendships possibly lacked compared to guy friendships because of the famous tropes of girlish bitchiness and bullying and I agree it exists; but so do amazing girls who are far from bullies or bitches -- they don't just get portrayed enough. Instead we get Blair Waldorfs and Kardashians as examples. I have amazing girlfriends I would literally die for. If you don't know such women, you don't know enough women.)
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