Is Captain Marvel written to be a person or is she written to be an object of female empowerment?

I think it's totally a case of the later. The first issue Deconnick wrote is just a bunch of trite Girl Power cliches. It starts with Absorbing Man showing up for no reason other than to say stupid, pig-headed sexist garbage and then get his ass handed to him -- a scene which, oddly enough, was recently repeated in an issue of Thor.

That's such a trite and cliche way of showing that a female character is "empowered." Create a Straw Sexist, have her knock him down, and then this is supposed to prove something? Here, now, in the 21st Century, all scenes like this prove is that the writer is a hack relying on cliches.

And then just to drive how exactly how tired that cliche is, the story immediately has Carol travelling back in time to encounter the heroic female pilots of WW2 who bravely struggled against Patriarchy, complete with even more Straw Sexists to be knocked down, and in doing so the story practically admits that overt, institutional sexism is an artifact of the past and not an actual contemporary problem (except, perhaps, amongst the dregs of society as represented by Crusher Creel). It's just shit writing, too polemic and with nothing interesting to say.

And it's not even that stories about female empowerment are bad or anything, they can be quite good -- Adam Warren's Empowered is a really challenging book that viscerally confronts the predominately male readership with issues of objectification and sexualization of women, and Emily's struggle to become empowered is much more textured and nuanced than simply beating up idiots who spout stock quotes from the He-Man Women Hater's Club.

But fuck trying to have that conversation online when feminists are about, they're incapable of anything resembling a nuanced conversation. Just mindless parroting and the snide, condescending passive-aggression of the terminally self-righteous. That's why I just call them shitbags and tell them to fuck off. They're utterly useless and poison fandoms.