In She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Episode 4, "Is This Not Real Magic?," Jen Walters (Tatiana Maslany) fights her toughest battle yet, dating random strangers from the internet. For this leading lady navigating the dos and don'ts of a dating app and a series of tragic first dates is far harder than anything else she has faced so far in Season 1. She has gained superpowers, lost her job, and fought some unkillable, flying hell demons from another dimension without breaking a sweat, but none of that is even half as scary as the men she meets. While audiences are used to seeing romance and relationships in the MCU, they have never seen any that are so ordinary and relatable. It makes a nice change of pace for a character not to accidentally trip over the love of their life and magically get to live happily ever after with little to no effort.
Viewers first met Jen in Episode 1, "A Normal Amount of Rage," and watched her make the jump from ordinary deputy District Attorney to not-so-ordinary, incredible, and green. When she wakes up in a Mexican lab/tiki bar owned by her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Jen puts on a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and gets busy rocking her new hulk persona. All she wants to do is to get back to normal, and she does it so quickly that it makes Bruce more than a little jealous. Jen takes to being a hulk with ridiculous ease, learning to make the transition to hulk form and back with almost no effort, and without anybody ever having to sing her a lullaby.
In a ridiculously short time frame, she is holding her own in a fight against the hulk (albeit smart hulk who isn't really trying to hurt her) and managing to trick him into revealing how Cap lost his V-card. Usually, the main character's journey to learn and use their powers safely takes an entire movie or a full TV season, but Jen is no ordinary hero of the MCU, she has everything under control promptly in time for the next episode.
In Episode 2, "Superhuman Law," Jen's biggest battle is finding herself a new place to work after the DA's office unceremoniously dumps her for losing the case with her big superhero reveal. After feeling "sad and lonely" for a second and facing a few disheartening interviews, she gets a new job, with a lot more money and impressively large windows. As a lawyer for GLK&H, Jen kicks major butt in Episode 3, "The People vs. Emil Blonsky," when she easily gets her seven-soulmate having, haiku writing, client Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) a.k.a. The Abomination released on parole after a televised prison break. It is practically unheard of in a superhero show, for a new power not to be negatively affecting a character's life. Her secret is also not a secret for very long (it's revealed to the world in the first episode). This means there are no lies, or misunderstandings that could lead to her loved ones getting hurt. She doesn't even have to live a double life or grapple with her identity, and apart from a slight bout of imposter syndrome, Jen is totally killing it. Her old life and new life have melded together seamlessly and without any drama or personal losses.
Jen finally comes up against a challenge that is not so easily solved in Episode 4. As one of a seemingly endless list of tasks she has to do, including buying and reading How to Make Friends and Influence People, signing up for Big & Tall membership, and ordering more chopsticks, Jen has to finish her dating profile. She immediately skips to and completes this task by adding her corporate headshot to her bio and then smiles at the audience and calls it "perfect" in a way that tells us to sit back and watch the boys line up for some of her sweet candy. We might be waiting a while, because if her best friend Nikki (Ginger Gonzaga) is right and dating is a numbers game, then she is not qualifying for the Olympics anytime soon. Jen gets only one match with her "regular old Jen" profile, and he is a big ol' dud. Alan a.k.a the cliché is banned from Canada, hates LA, is a "New Yorker through and through" (after living there for 14 months), is an entrepreneur in a field still to be decided, checks out young girls, and is a terrible listener. He is also clearly using her for free drinks, so it's not surprising that after this total bummer of a date, Jen is willing to break her own rule and set up a She-Hulk Matcher profile.
She-Hulk takes a cute pic, swipes like crazy, and gets a shit-ton of matches. First up on her dating roster is a guy, let's call him Deadlift, who is very yell-friendly and seems more interested in challenging her to an arm wrestling contest than dating her. Next up is Sundance, the artsy guy in a flat cap and a scarf who talks with his hands, about his super lame script. Then comes Superfan, and unlike the last guy, he is definitely interested in her and asks lots of questions. Unfortunately, they are all about her indestructibility, super speed, night vision, and impenetrable skin. You've got to think that this guy would love to get her alone, so he can cut her up and see what her organs look like. Last up is the worst of the bunch. This guy is super jacked and allegedly a pediatric oncologist, but as he gives big player vibes, he is probably unemployed. This smooth talker uses all the right buzzwords, like "soulless avatar" and "dehumanizing" to reference dating and starts off by saying how he hates talking about himself and asks her to tell him more about how she felt when she got fired (barf). He also manages the oh-no-I-just-spilled-something-on-my-shirt-and-now-have-to-take-it-off move like a seasoned pro. Not-so-shockingly, In the morning when she is back in regular Jen mode, he splits — presumably without leaving a contact number.
This is the most in-depth look audiences have had at dating in the MCU. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) does very casually "date" some different alien lifeforms in Guardians of the Galaxy, but we never get to see him set up a Star-Lord Tinder profile. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr.) also "dates" some beautiful ladies before he takes up with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). In Spider-Man Homecoming, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) briefly goes to prom with Liz Allen (Laura Harrier), which is technically dating, before he settles on MJ (Zendaya) as his one and only. Mostly, the romances and relationships in the MCU follow the principles of movie love (it is a cinematic universe after all), where two beautiful people are put in situations where they are forced to interact and they quickly fall in love. Unfortunately for Jen, unlike her movie counterparts, there are no attractive, hetero normative partners conveniently located in her orbit that she could trauma bond with during a super-heroic adventure. It'll be interesting to see if Jen continues to slog it out on Matcher, or if she'll start taking up the offers from creepy dudes in bars. It seems that for Jen, finding true love or just someone whose presence doesn't make her want to jump out a window is going to take more than one 30-minute episode.
New episodes of She-Hulk premiere each Thursday on Disney+.