Watching the trailer for Thor: The Dark World that was released yesterday, I was struck by a sense of how annoyed I would be if my boyfriend went missing for an exceedingly long time, and then showed up only to port me to an alternate universe without even giving me time to let my kicky astronomy colleague Darcy know where I was going. And it got me thinking about what women are allowed to do—or at least what movie studios think audiences will be psyched to see women doing—in trailers for the action movies that will be released this year.

Thor: The Dark World: If you’re a lady in Asgard, you apparently get to be anxious, get kidnapped, and walk around tables. On the upside, you also get to be in battle, which is a great setting for having your hair whip artfully around your face.

Fast and Furious 6: Appear in black-and-white surveillance photos. Be counted among the crew when the gang gets back together. Hang out with The Rock in a professional capacity. Attend parties where they wear miniskirts. Hang from jeeps. Shoot guns. Specifically at Vin Diesel. Have fist-fights in subway stations.

Man of Steel: Kal-El’s mother gets to be pessimistic about her son’s chances on earth. A neighbor lady gets to be perceptive about his abilities. Faora gets to stand near General Zod, though it’s a blind-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance considering she’s supposed to be a significant villain. And in a rare exception, Lois Lane gets to talk about her reporting.

It’s absolutely true that the Kick-Ass franchise is cartoonishly violent, and the plotline in the first movie in which Dave saves a white girl from menacing black drug dealers was downright racially irresponsible. That said, I’m really relieved that there’s at least one franchise out there that’s focused on the problem of escalation between superheroes and supervillains:

In a way, the arms race between superheroes and supervillians is like the real-world cycle in which police forces get more militarized in response to the perception that they’re outgunned by criminals, something that’s been a glancing subtext of pop culture since Hans Gruber took out the LAPD’s armored truck with a rocket launcher. In the end, nobody wins. You just get fireballs. Or two women in a pickup truck getting shot up by the cops, and a police department that then can’t even be bothered to replace their vehicle. Kick-Ass 2, like all superhero movies, will end up shying away from the idea that shutting down this escalatory cycle is a good thing, if only because the entertainment value—or, shall I say, kick-ass value—of it is so high. But more than most other franchises, Kick-Ass is comfortable at least acknowledging that there’s real ugliness there, and testing how comfortable we are embracing that.

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I have some ambivalence about watching privileged white kids play at being gang members, and Best Coast is way to tween for me, but I love me some Chloe Moretz who is (along with Abigail Breslin) my favorite young teenage actress working today, so I kind of dig this video Drew Barrymore directed for “Our Deal”:

There’s something nice about the acknowledgment that girls can commit physical as well as emotional violence, too, that they’re actors, not just acted upon. Moretz has carved out a real little niche in Kick-Ass and Let Me In as an actress who can do very bad things while remaining sympathetic. I’ll be curious to see if she develops into that rarest of all female action stars, as commenters suggested in our conversation last week, one who can not only dish it out but take it.