X-Men In General

I'd have been happy if she stayed Kitty, or if she stayed Kitty until near the end of Krakoa.

It just feels like an odd backward step when the name change wasn't connected to the recent events (and I quite liked the first Marauders run).

I've seen someone compare Kitty's decision to reinvent herself during Krakoa as her going through a mid-life crisis, and I don't really disagree there.

Feels like she's trying way too hard to sound adult when she already is an adult.

Edited by slimcoder on May 10th 2024 at 12:21:30 PM

That really is what it felt like.

Like, the intent the writers seemed to be going for was furthering Kitty's character development of growing from the team rookie to a veteran X-Man, but the way they did it mostly made her come off as weirdly insecure and immature, less like a woman who had come into her own and more like that sad douchebag at work who takes everything way too seriously, is desperate to seem "proper", and is grinding themselves to an early grave through a mixture of over-work and self-induced misery.

That was…a pretty specific comparison. I mean I get the type, but still.

Edited by CheapMarzipan on May 10th 2024 at 4:38:02 AM

That example made me sad and self-reflective. You hurt my soul there.

I won't comment on the other stuff she was doing, but going back to a nickname you had as as kid sounds more like an act of an adult going through a midlife crisis than doing the opposite.

Notably, a male New Mutant ALREADY had dated a pop star....and she was intergalactic.

....planetary, planetary intertergalactic!

What's Lila been doing lately?

Ms Marvel recently helped Lila get her fanclub back after Mojo tried to make her an exclusive performer.

Finished reading Children of the Vault and damn thay ending is insane.

Bishop and Cable alone managed to defeat an entire society of Godlike superhumans with nothing more than wits, pragmatism, and good old tons and tons of firepower. Managing to sick Orchis on the City so the Children don't realize Cable infected the entire City with a super Phalanx techno-organic virus and for good measure Bishop threatens to bomb all their infant clone backups if they don't free humans of The Message mental plague and head back into the Vault.

Which if your feeling sympathetic the Children, here is their intention with planet Earth and humanity had they won.

I hate that the Children got punted off into a mini-series and effectively thrown away like that. They were yet another one of those things that Hickman seemed to be building up to be one of the big bads of Krakoa, and they would've been the perfect final boss (certainly better than Enigma); human, mutant, and robot all at once, a unified blend of all three subspecies that threaten to out-compete all their predecessors. That would've been a really cool finale, the Vault opening up and the Children pouring out to conquer the world, forcing everyone to team up against them. And I really dug the way Hickman wrote and depicted them, the arc with Synch, Laura, and Darwin making their way through the Vault was one of my favorite parts of Hickman's run.

To the mini's credit, it did do a pretty good job depicting the Children as more alien and strange than evil plus leaving them open for later writers to use, which is better than Orchis being flanderized into one-note mutant haters and butchered. Still, it's all very "checklist".

Edited by immortaleditor on May 11th 2024 at 8:49:14 AM

I feel the Vault was always a bad idea because it gives Weapon X way too much power.

"They made godlike superhumans in their own dimension that have evolved over centuries."

I never felt that impressed by the Children. Though I liked the irony. Weapon Plus thought Mutants were a threat to humanity. But then they made superhumans who really are a threat to humanity.

Because that is the real role of the Children. To show what Mutants would be like if they really thought of themselves as superior.

OTOH, one of the points concerning them is that the Children are not as superior as they believe. They even note that they keep losing despite all their power.

Edited by M84 on May 11th 2024 at 10:12:24 PM

I mean, between the Children and the Sentinels, humanity in Marvel is sure good at creating things that want to destroy them.

....which I guess including Mutants quite often as well.

Recently read the new Astonishing X-Man collection, so the first 12 issues. Pretty good, I like it.

Any thoughts on the Kitty Pryde/Colossus romance? I know it's a controversial subject.

It was creepy and inappropriate in the '80s, and it got brought back because nostalgia means people are unable to let go of shit they grew up with.

Kitty was 13 and Piotr 18 when they met. That is an inappropriate age difference. Her having a crush on him was fine, people get crushes, but he shouldn't have returned her feelings.

Them getting together in the Whedon/Cassaday run was because they were each other's first romantic interests, back in the Claremont days.

So, yeah, I'm not a fan of that ship, at all.

How old is Kitty now?

And yeah, why the hell did they make her that young in the first place? What made them think this relationship was ok?

Kitty being 13 was initially fine - she wasn't one of the X-Men, she was a kid who was only just manifesting her mutant powers, who they were trying to save from the Hellfire Club's manipulations.

Kitty moving to the mansion as a student (not part of the team) and crushing on Peter wasn't a complete red flag, either.

But Peter reciprocating and the two of them eventually getting together and almost getting married... that's problematic.

An important thing to note is that originally there wasn't a relationship between them. Kitty had a Precocious Crush on Colossus which he didn't reciprocate expressly because she was far too young for him. But then for some reason they seemed to try and mine it for drama or something as a May–December Romance (probably due to Artistic Age reasons; they weren't really thinking about the specific ages they gave the characters in random lines of dialogue how long ago, just that they were both written as teens with Piotr as the slightly older teen) and Jim Shooter - in one of his many instances of being the at-times Only Sane Man at Marvel - intervened to say "fuck no" and put an end to it before it could go any further than that.

Where things got messy was the Wheadon run because Comic-Book Time zaniness and Piotr being dead for awhile meant that Kitty had aged into adulthood while he was still the twenty something he had grown to be when he died. So now their relationship worked perfectly fine since they were both adults and you could easily imagine it as "high school sweethearts finally acknowledge their feelings"... if you forgot or ignored the numbers given for Kitty and Piotr's ages way back when. Certainly that was how Wheadon wrote and depicted them; not as having any notable age gap, just as two people who grew up together and fell in love as they did. Them being kinda sorta a thing when that generation of writers came into their own didn't help as it brought nostalgia into the mix.

A lot of the problems with it frankly arise with the Artistic Age thing I mentioned above. There was no real reason to give exact ages for the two since said age was inevitably going to change and do so in ways that were hard to track due to the nature of the medium. They should've just said they were both teenagers with Piotr being marginally older and left it at that. But they didn't and so it's been a source of contention in the fandom ever since.

Edited by immortaleditor on May 13th 2024 at 8:31:44 AM

It probably doesn't help that the two writers most associated with Kitty's relationships are Warren Ellis (when she was dating Peter Wisdom) and Joss Whedon (for Kitty and Piotr Rasputin).

Both of whom are now known for problematic behaviour as well as their writing.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 13th 2024 at 4:47:21 PM

granted a lot of the writers seemed to have a real crush on Kitty tbh?

Because she was the main girl character their age when they were growing up. Literally no different from thinking Sailor Moon is hot when you're a kid going through puberty. And as they grew up, the character grew up with them and became an attractive woman, both because fictional characters are objects and can be whatever you declare them to be and because time passed in-universe as well as out. She's the waifu of a lot of people who read the comic as they were growing up in the 80s, it's not that deep.

Edited by immortaleditor on May 13th 2024 at 9:49:28 AM

I remember they did a bit about how Bendis was obsessed with Kitty Pryde by having her randomly show up in a book she had no reason to be with, but I forget which one that was.

Bendis is known for loving Kitty and going to great lengths to include her whenever he can. His Ultimate Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy runs being the most notable instances of it, particularly the latter. Cosmic Marvel fans still shudder when they think of Star-Lord and Kitty in the same room.

Of course everyone Bendis' real one true love is Luke Cage.

New books announced for from the ashes, dazzler and storm Also a mutant will join the avengers called the mightiest mutant, I'm guessing it will be synch.