Sexuality, Wolverine, and Ice King

That title is why the Oxford comma matters, folks. No one wants to read that slash fic.

This is going to be a bit of a grab bag. I don’t really have in-depth thoughts on any of this – at least, not yet – but I want to at least signal boost these things.

Also, I decided to post this with basically no editing. Someday I will start integrating more images into the blog, and proofread the hell out of everything, but for now I just want to keep momentum going and keep posting.

Subtext Sexuality

Did you know that the first appearance of the Morlocks and Callisto was heavily influenced by the sex-positive sci-fi romp Barbarella?

There’s a lot going on in the margins of old comics, almost all of which I didn’t notice. The biggest example that I missed was the queer subtext of Storm and of Kitty Pryde in Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men – there’s an excellent essay touching on it, and the Miles and Rachel X-Plain the X-Men podcast has been pointing out specific instances of this.

It’s fascinating to me, like tilting a painting and finding it’s got a whole other dimension you never noticed. When I first read most of Claremont’s stuff, in early college, all of this flew right over (under?) my head – the only piece of sexuality that made me think was Kitty’s relationship with Colossus (which is its own can of worms). Now that I’m going back through, queer sexuality is another perspective to read it through for a better understanding, just like race relations and Professor X being completely awful.

Wolverine and Kitty?

“There’s a story that I’ve heard told more than once about the fact that Claremont had said that Kitty was Logan’s true love, that that’s where he was going with it.” – Greg Rucka. (23:40, source here,)

Ewwwwww.

Even setting aside the extreme morale problems, it would be a massive betrayal of both characters, unless Claremont changed a lot of both characters.

Logan’s well-written romantic relationships have always been either about running to something, or running from something. Mariko Yashida represented the honor he was running towards; Silver Fox represented the past he was running away from, when he was an assassin. The Jean/Logan relationship didn’t work because Jean was just The Unattainable, and pursuing her was at most the desire to have the humanizing love that Cyclops had.

Pursuing (adult) Kitty wouldn’t even be that, because while Kitty is a good person, it was always her age and innocence that made other people value her idealism. The other X-Men wanted to make the world safe for idealists like her – they didn’t believe in everyone living as idealists.

And so, I continue to maintain that authorial intent is bullshit, for reasons exactly like this. (So no, they aren’t “jiffs”.)

The Ice King

You know a creator that does handle creepy relationships well? Pendleton Ward.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on this subject, but I’m consistently impressed by how nuanced the writing is for the Ice King in Adventure Time. After the first few episodes, it’d be easy to write him as just a bumbling villain with a heart of gold: “Aww, he kidnapped another princess, and is trying to force her into a non-consensual marriage. That’s our Ice King!”

Adventure Time doesn’t do that, and it’s to Ward’s credit. From the beginning, the show treats Ice King with a mix of pity, humor, and genuine acknowledgment of his creeper status. Even when the show pushes Finn and Jake to feel bad about hurting the Ice King, it never pretends that that pain is equal to the pain he causes with abductions.

I don’t really have anything to add beyond that. I just appreciate that Adventure Time doesn’t make light of abduction… like, er, that one song from The Fantasticks.

You know the one.

It pains me that that song is so (*%$in’ catchy.

[Note: I’m only three seasons in, so there’s still time for things to get screwed up, I suppose.]