Captain Marvel’s new posters have big heroine energy

The three latest posters for Captain Marvel ask you not to focus on how attractive Carol Danvers is, but on how much she looks like a boss.

Even if you don’t have a name for it, you probably recognize the pose that many female comic book characters are put into: their backs to the camera, with just enough angling so that you can see their chests, however oddly drawn, as well, thus maximizing their attractiveness. TVTropes calls it the “Boobs-and-Butt Pose,” and it’s appeared even in posters for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Here’s Black Widow modeling it for The Avengers, a slightly less-obvious variant for Avengers: Age of Ultron, and for Avengers: Infinity War, using her hand to draw attention to her derriere. Poor Mantis has a more classic version in her own Infinity War poster.) However, in the three latest posters for Captain Marvel, the pose is nowhere to be seen.

Instead, Carol Danvers looks like an action hero. Even the close-up one-sheet, which does ask you to focus on the sigil on her chest, doesn’t feel exploitative so much as asking you to focus on that all-important star, the one that heralds her imminent arrival when it appears in Avengers: Infinity War.

Check out all three below:

Granted, two of the three use the same pose, although with different backgrounds and Carol using another of her powers — those energy blasts — in one. In all three, though, she looks ready for action, flying towards her next foe or even just looking at them in the second.

Nor does she look excessively touched up. With a costume like that, we’re sure there’s some editing happening. But actress Brie Larson, and, by extension, her character, actually look like they could take you in a fight. For a character who’s supposed to be an Air Force pilot and so strong that she’s the only person Nick Fury calls to fight Thanos, that’s important. We need to believe that Captain Marvel could overpower anyone — that she could, in fact, go “higher, further, faster” as her film’s tagline promises she can.

There’s still more to unpack with these posters, including how the first looks like an old-school propaganda poster like some of Captain America: The First Avenger‘s posters, but the big takeaway here is that Carol Danvers did not come to play. She came to fight.

Captain Marvel hits theaters March 8.