The Public Humiliation of the Once Incredible Hulk

 The Public Humiliation of the Once Incredible Hulk

There was a time when few characters came close to the strength of the Incredible Hulk...

And when I say strength, I am not talking about raw lifting power alone. I am not talking about holding continents together, resisting planetary-scale tectonic collapse, or punching holes through time itself. Impressive as those feats are, I would argue they pale in comparison to the true core of the character: the strength of Bruce Banner.

That was always the quiet truth at the center of the Hulk mythos. Long after the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno television era cemented the Hulk into mainstream consciousness in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it wasn’t spectacle alone that carried the character forward. What sustained him—through decades of comics, reinterpretations, and tonal shifts—was the endurance of the man trapped inside the monster. That throughline stretches cleanly from the tragic restraint of David Banner to the operatic rage of Planet Hulk and World War Hulk in the mid-2000s, one of the character’s most powerful creative renaissances.

Yes, the Hulk’s physicality was the initial draw. The green skin. The impossible musculature. The instantly recognizable silhouette. The purple pants. These were the visual hooks—the promise of power, destruction, and spectacle that pulled readers off the rack and into the story. But those elements were always the surface. Window dressing. What kept people invested for the better part of a century wasn’t “green man smash tank.” It wasn’t even the violence. It was the tragedy. It was the man within the beast, struggling to survive himself while being blamed for his own survival.

But as of the beginning of 2026, that character—once one of the most emotionally resonant figures in popular fiction—has been reduced to a hollow imitation of himself. What once stood as a testament to human willpower, perseverance, trauma, depression, and emotional resilience has been flattened into something unrecognizable. The Hulk is no longer treated as a survivor of suffering, but as a masculine male problem that needed to be corrected, softened, or joked away.

What remains is an emasculated and publicly humiliated version of the character, repurposed as a cultural poster for what “men in the 2020s are supposed to be.” Castrated. Tamed. Emotionally muted. Stripped of rage, stripped of pain, stripped of the very contradictions that gave him meaning. Once a figure defined by internal conflict and unbearable emotional weight, the Hulk has been transformed into a stoic punchline—the exact opposite of what the character was, and the exact opposite of what his most timeless stories stood for.

So today, I want to step up onto one of my well-worn soapboxes and talk plainly about what was once one of fiction’s most powerful and enduring characters—and how, through a steady erosion of meaning, intent, and respect, he has been reduced to one of the most disappointing character assassinations in modern storytelling.

When I was in my early teens, I wanted to be the Hulk...

Now, at the time, I didn’t really understand what any of that meant—not in a real sense—but I knew exactly what it looked like. I loved transformations. I was obsessed with werewolves. The idea of unleashing the part of yourself the world tells you to keep locked away—the part that could triple in size, shatter mountains, and answer cruelty with force—was intoxicating. Characters like the Hulk didn’t just appeal to me; they called to me.

At that age, anything that even whispers resistance or freedom speaks louder than it should. It’s why we fall into punk and emo, why we raid our dad’s ’70s rock records. It’s the idea that somewhere out there, someone is screaming for us—shouting back at the universe that tried to make us smaller. And in the Hulk’s case, that scream wasn’t a lyric or a power chord. It was a fist.

And it’s important to get this right: it’s not the sense of power that draws us in. It’s the freedom that power seems to promise.

Of course, as kids and teens—and hell, even as adults—how much do we really understand? I saw the Hulk let loose, watched him turn into a monster and beat the ever-loving hell out of anything in his way, and thought, yeah, that’s it. That’s my jam. I wanted to be the Hulk based on the version of him I could understand at the time.

Now? I would never want to be the Hulk.

Why?

Because I’m old enough, and hopefully smart enough, to see past the surface. To see Bruce Banner. And to understand that no amount of strength—no matter how cosmic, no matter how absolute—is worth the life he was forced to live just to earn it.

Banner didn’t just “have anger issues.” He survived things that would have broken most people outright. He watched the woman he loved die because of what he was. He was labeled a danger, a liability, a hassle, and quietly exiled from Earth by the very people who called themselves his allies—shot into space not to save him, but to get rid of him. He found peace once, briefly, and it was torn from him. He was cast into Hel itself and condemned to relive the worst moments of his life again and again, an eternity of punishment layered on top of a lifetime of suffering.

And long before any gamma bomb ever went off, Banner’s childhood was already a horror story. Years of canon have made it painfully clear that Bruce grew up in a home defined by violence and terror. His father was abusive—physically, emotionally, and in some versions, sexually. His mother was murdered in front of him. The trauma didn’t create the Hulk; it gave him a place to grow.

Bruce Banner has tried to kill himself more than once. And each time, the Hulk stopped it. Not gently. Not mercifully. The gunshot spat back out. The fall undone. Death denied. Imagine surviving not because you chose to live, but because the monster inside you won’t let you die. Imagine being trapped in your own body, forced to endure existence because your pain has become someone else’s fuel.

And look, I’m not going to trauma dump here—but I’ve been through enough to recognize suffering when I see it. A bad father. An abusive relationship that ended with a knife. Court battles over kids. Divorce. Obesity. Suicidal thoughts. Nearly losing everything. I ran the gamut. I also had to confront the fact that I was at the center of many of my own problems and fight my way out of that hole.

Even with all of that—even with all of it—I wouldn’t trade places with Bruce Banner.

Because the Hulk’s physical strength, as awe-inspiring as it is, is not worth the emotional cost Banner paid to carry it. Not the endless fear. Not the isolation. Not the guilt. Not surviving side by side with a part of yourself that exists only because you were hurt badly enough to need it.

And that—that—was the tragedy that once made the Hulk matter and in the 2020's no one fucking understands...

This GIF right here was in an actual LICENSED Marvel show... If you can believe it...

And I don't know if I've ever been more angry at an entertainment property, ever. Maybe Resident Evil Raccoon City's casting choices but that's a different conversation for a different time.

This GIF, this terrible, character changing moment, destroyed any credibility that the character of Bruce Banner still had, and that character already had very little left.

And it didn't start with this GIF, it ended with it...

At some point—quietly at first, then all at once—the Incredible Hulk wasn’t defeated by an enemy, outmatched by a god, or undone by his own rage. He was dismantled by the very people responsible for stewarding his legacy. Not by accident. Not through neglect. But through a slow, deliberate process of erosion carried out by Marvel and Disney themselves.

Let’s be clear about one thing upfront: Mark Ruffalo is not the problem. Ruffalo is a solid Bruce Banner. He understands the nervousness, the guilt, the hesitation. In isolation, his performance works. The issue is that he was never really allowed to play the Hulk—not the Hulk as a character, not the Hulk as a tragedy, and certainly not the Hulk as a force shaped by decades of pain and survival.

From the moment the MCU found its footing, the Hulk began to shrink—not physically, but thematically. What started in The Avengers as something terrifying and barely contained was gradually turned into comic relief. Each appearance sanded down another edge. Each joke undercut another ounce of menace. His anger stopped being treated as a survival response and started being framed as a personality flaw—something childish, something embarrassing, something to be corrected.

Then came the shortcuts.

Entire arcs that once took years of storytelling—Banner’s internal war, his attempts at control, his uneasy coexistence with the Hulk—were skipped, solved, or resolved off-screen. “Smart Hulk” didn’t feel like growth; it felt like erasure. Decades of struggle reduced to a throwaway line and a new character model. No cost. No reckoning. No acknowledgment of what it should take to reconcile with something born from lifelong trauma.

And even that wasn’t enough.

Because the final nail didn’t come in a movie. It came in a television show that didn’t just misunderstand the Hulk—it openly dismissed him.

She-Hulk didn’t simply sideline Bruce Banner; it reframed him as fundamentally inferior in the very struggle that defines him. The moment that crystallizes everything wrong with Marvel’s handling of the character is the now-infamous line: Jennifer Walters explaining—without irony, without nuance—that she’s better at controlling her anger because she does it infinitely more than he does. This, immediately after explaining that she’s angry all the time because she gets catcalled.

Read that again.

Bruce Banner—the man who survived an abusive childhood, watched his mother be murdered, was hunted by the military, exiled from his home planet, lost the woman he loved, died and went to Hell, tried to kill himself only to be denied even that release—this man is told that he just hasn’t had enough practice being angry.

Not that their experiences are different.
Not that anger manifests differently.
Not that trauma takes different forms.

No. He’s told—functionally—that his suffering doesn’t count.

This wasn’t a misunderstanding. It wasn’t clumsy writing in a vacuum. It was a thematic statement, and it landed like a slap in the face to anyone who understood what the Hulk was ever meant to represent. His pain is trivialized. His endurance is reframed as incompetence. His defining struggle—surviving with rage instead of surrendering to it—is dismissed as a lack of emotional maturity.

That line doesn’t empower She-Hulk. It diminishes the Hulk.

And more importantly it diminishes every single person who ever related to Banner, his trauma, and his struggles. Walters demolishes not only the character of Bruce Banner, but belittles every single person going all the way back to the Bill Bixby era who saw themselves and their pain in Bruce Banner. She effectively looks at every man who has ever struggled as Banner does and says:

"Yeah, okay, but have ya been catcalled?"

And that’s the real tragedy here. Hulk didn’t need to be stronger than everyone else. He didn’t need to win every fight. What he needed—what he always needed—was respect for the weight he carried. Respect for the idea that some anger is earned. That some rage is the product of survival, not a failure of self-control.

Instead, Marvel chose to neuter him. To tame him. To turn one of fiction’s greatest metaphors for trauma, repression, and emotional endurance into a safe, smiling, harmless accessory—rolled out when convenient, laughed at when not, and corrected when he dares to take up space.

The Hulk wasn’t dismantled because his story was outdated.

He was dismantled because it made people uncomfortable.

And rather than confront that discomfort, Marvel chose to erase the very things that once made him matter which was the relatability of being human and trying to remain human even when the world is strangling you.

That moment was the death of the Incredible Hulk...

He’d been dying for a while by that point, bleeding out slowly across appearances and punchlines, but that moment—the one in She-Hulk—was the final bullet for our dear Taquito. No open casket. Nothing left recognizable enough to mourn. (+10 points if you caught that.) What happened there wasn’t just another fumble or misstep. It was the kind of moment that ends conversations, the kind you can’t walk back from.

That scene stands, to me, as the single worst character assassination in modern fiction. Worse than Indiana Jones being quietly replaced in his own mythology. Worse than Geralt being stripped of his moral gravity and turned into a passenger in his own story. Worse—somehow—than Luke Skywalker tossing his father’s lightsaber over his shoulder like it was a beer can and not the symbolic spine of an entire saga. (And yes, even typing that still makes my eye twitch—maybe that’s a separate rant for another day.)

Because what was done to the Hulk wasn’t just disrespectful to continuity or tone. It wasn’t just bad writing. It was personal.

The Hulk’s humiliation hits harder than any of those other examples because the Hulk was never just entertainment to a lot of us. He wasn’t escapism in the shallow sense. He was recognition. He was a mirror held up to pain most people don’t want to look at for too long. I’m someone who has lived with trauma—from bullies, from relationships, from my father, from authority figures, from my own worst impulses. I’ve sat alone in dark rooms wondering if the support beams could hold my weight. I’ve replayed my worst memories until they felt like they were happening again in real time. I’ve been to my own version of Hel more than once.

And the only “Hulk” I ever had inside me—the only beast that kept me moving forward—was willpower. Not rage. Not violence. Willpower. The same quiet, grinding endurance that Bruce Banner was always really about.

That’s why that line lands like a gut punch.

When She-Hulk looks at Bruce Banner—looks at the Hulk—and says, “I’m an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you,” I don’t just see a beloved character being talked down to. I see a dismissal aimed outward. I see that line looking past the screen and into the faces of people like Chester Bennington, like Kurt Cobain, like Jason David Frank. I see it looking at anyone who survived abuse, loss, depression, and the long, silent war of existing day after day with something broken inside them.

What that line communicates—whether intentionally or not—is that all of that suffering counts for less. That decades of trauma, exile, grief, suicidal despair, and sheer stubborn survival mean less than a shallow comparison dressed up as empowerment. That anger born from being hunted, abused, abandoned, and punished by existence itself is somehow less valid than anger born from everyday indignities—because one can be packaged as a punchline and the other makes people uncomfortable.

That isn’t just unforgivable for what it does to the Hulk as a character. It’s unforgivable for what the Hulk represented.

The Hulk mattered because he said this: that surviving unbearable pain takes strength. That endurance is not weakness. That rage is sometimes the scar tissue left behind by wounds no one else had to live with. By flattening that into a smug one-liner, Marvel didn’t just “kill” the Hulk—they told an entire audience that our struggles don’t matter. That they don’t register. That they don’t count until they fit a more palatable narrative.

You didn’t just dismantle the Hulk that day.

You told everyone who has ever questioned the strength of a rope or the count on a pill bottle that their pain was secondary. Inconvenient. Less than.

And that is a Hel that we can never come back from...