Having both strong male and female characters featured prominently strengthens the entire Marvel U. In the real world, there are more men than women. Comics should correlate to that and have at least as many strong female leads as male ones. It makes everything seem slightly more plausible. I think readers, both male and female, would respect that.
There are more different personalities between the various female characters as well. If the only time readers were exposed to Carol Danvers, Betty Ross, Vakyrie, etc was in books like Avengers where they were just in the background punching stuff, those characters would not be liked. Having stories where writers can create nuance gives each character meaning and gives the reader understanding into how and why a character acts and reacts the way they do.
X-23 is probably my favorite female character comic. X-23 was Wolverine's clone, in more ways than one. Yes, she shared similar genetics to Wolverine, but her back story was almost the same too. She was experimented on and tortured by a secret government agency. She had a tormentor(Kimura is her Sabretooth). She started to evolve a bit during New X-Men, but it was ultimately subverted by making her into a killing machine again in X-Force.
However, when Marjorie Liu wrote X-23, she evolved Laura into a full character. She wasn't a monster bred in a lab to kill, but a very deeply damaged young woman who was trying to find her place in the world. She had all these bad things happen to her in her life which she obviously had emotional issues from; we see this in her self mutilation that Gambit quickly attempts to halt. From there, the series goes as Laura slowly finds self-worth, friendship, and trust; all things that made her feel like she didn't have a soul in the beginning.
Everyone benefits from having characters and stories like this. Yes, the Avengers fighting the X-Men looks pretty on paper, but it doesn't really pull the reader into the story. The only way to get people to buy comics is if they really enjoy the stories and care about the characters. There is no reason female characters can't or shouldn't have the loyalty of characters like Batman or Wolverine, they just need to be given a fair chance.
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