To revisit the Psylocke thing

That being said, I also don't know what they're going to do with Psylocke. I have zero idea what makes Betsy interesting, because Betsy's been Psylocke for so long, and even then Psylocke wasn't that interesting. You say she "caught on" when she was turned into an Asian ninja, but she only showed up in 2 (4th season) cartoon episodes, the last of the 6 movies, in Ultimate Alliance 2, and MvC2. She just never seemed that popular to me. BUT I am looking online and seeing a lot of people voting for Psylocke in polls and such, and i'm kinda stunned. What do people like about Psylocke, other than her aesthetic?

Eh. I got no problem with Black Cat as a villain. Also Black Cat at a Spider-Man love interest is great - I like your work - but it's also something that won't ever last in the comic books, just like Peter & MJ can't ever seem to last. Slott's version was just... dumb. It took everything that was cool and interesting about Black Cat and replaced it with a bland, generic villain. Black Cat's one of my favourite characters because she's Peter Parker's nemesis, not Spider-Man's: she embodies irresponsibility and hedonism, oozes sexuality and confidence, she's petty, vindictive, shallow, and detached, and she does it all while quipping faster and funnier than he does. She can't beat Spider-Man in a fight, nor does she want to; she "defeats" Spider-Man by fucking with Peter's head. And none of that was present in Slott's Black Cat. She was just a generic-ass homicidal terrorist villain with an irrational grudge. You could have literally just replaced her with a random crazy woman who also thought Spider-Man jilted her. (Not to mention, that in itself sounds like it should be a one-shot character from the 70s or whatever.) Black Cat as a crime boss though? That was interesting to me. It didn't get played out as much as I think it could have, but that was an interesting place to take the character, and she retained some of her Black Cat-tiness in the role. If Black Cat's going to be a villain in the Spider-Man comics, I think that's a much more interesting way to do it. (But also, I'm not at all sure that would last, cuz some writer or editor would want to "fix" Black Cat back into being a love interest. There are only so many female costumed characters in Spider-Man.) (But wasn't Black Cat always a Spider-Man love interest? Just going off Wikipedia: "Despite her antipathy towards men, Felicia feels a kinship with this lone hero; Spider-Man is the first man she felt she could trust and she grows to believe herself in love with him.[9] Felicia looks for a way to earn his trust and continues with the Black Cat persona as a misguided attempt to attract his affection.")

Arguably the 'Slott' take was 'fixing' her back to her status as a villainess before she became an actual Spider-Man love interest--one of those "catching on" moments I talked about.

Mobofair

Actually, you know which character I am mad about getting changed? Black Cat. Can we all agree on that, that post-Superior Spider-Man Black Cat sucked, and that "fixing" her back was the right thing to do?

If there had been something going on with Psylocke before, and they just terminated that for this, I might be mad about it. And I'm mad about Peter and MJ being brought together and broken up and brought together and broken up over and over again because it's just so fucking tired and could we please just move the character on a bit or maybe just retire him for a few years if not? But re-British-ized Betsy is at least new, and maybe I won't like it, but withholding judgement for now. (Now, if they do a whole Brexit Civil War thing with Betsy and Brian, that'd be something.)

Oh, I'm not saying that I'm... pro-changing Betsy back. I'm just not against it either. For Marvel to say, you know what, Betsy being in an Asian body looks bad on us and is rough on our public image, let's just swap her back and move on I'm not any less okay with it than the original swap in the first place. It's almost purely an aesthetic change. Betsy's character has never been a white woman in an Asian woman's body. That her body wasn't her own never seemed to impact her much at all, nor was her cultural appearance ever really made relevant. It's like they just dyed her hair, and now are dying it back. But that's also why I don't really get why anybody would be upset about it. Even if you're a young Asian girl, you probably aren't/shouldn't be looking at Psylocke as your favourite character. Who is so attached to Psylocke's being outwardly Asian when her being outwardly Asian has had nothing to do with her character at all? Who likes Psylocke because she looks Asian and then wouldn't if she had never been body-swapped? Psylocke's not even a popular X-man: they didn't even bother putting her in the first five movies (outside anonymous cameos). Someone wants to reenvision Psylocke again... sure, whatever. Like you've noted, it's not that different from how other characters also get changed when a new writer takes over. Why are they doing it, is it a "fix," is it actually a good idea? I dunno. They just cast Olivia Munn as Psylocke in the X-Men movies, annnnd now what, they're going to get rid of her when Hollywood's blowing up over Asian representation? Or just have a white comics Psylocke and an Asian movies Psylocke? What I'm more interested in is, are the stories they spin out of this going to be any good? The initial ideas and beats that writers spit out often have nothing to do with the final quality of their work. (Like, superficially, I think House of M and the Hope Summers Messiah arc sound crazy awesome, but they turned out to be shit!) It's kinda looking like no - because why is Kwannon suddenly also back, and why is it that Betsy's psychic katana skills seem to be tied to her skin complexion - but it's not like they were doing anything with Psylocke before this, so I'll see, I guess.

For me, what particularly made me angry is apparently Betsy's response to being revived in her original body is, "Now I feel like me again." I don't remember that being a big part of her character, and Marvel often had their characters bitching in their internal monologue. It's the same bullshit where characters who've never been hinted at as being evil suddenly turn out to be EVIL ALL ALONG (I'm looking at you, Maxwell Lord and 90s Iron Man). Or my favourite example of Doctor Doom suddenly being racist towards Black Panther, despite Doom traditionally not being racist at all (since all races are inferior to him). It's that whole 'fix' thing again.

Ai Muhao

Well, it's Marvel, so they're probably going to body-swap her with a Mexican woman to make some sort of point, *then* make her Asian again, at which point everything will be ten times more convoluted than before and far more people will have been offended than ever cared in the first place.

Mobofair

To be fair, all of the X-Men's backstories are pretty gratuitous. Scott has a second brother who's an emperor in space. Wolverine is the prince of a species of wolf-people. If Marvel was doing some kind of Ultimate X-Men 2.0 and they decided to streamline all that by making Betsy the daughter of Daddy Braddock's marriage to an Asian woman (and Brian the product of another marriage), then that'd be fine, but at this point, it's just kind of awkward to go back on Psylocke's development. Especially when there's a 90% they're going to either introduce a suspiciously similar substitute or un-re-body-swap Betsy. Possibly even keep her Caucasian but put her back in the leotard and give her a katana again. Because honestly, how often do these 'bone claws' sort of overhauls take?

Mobofair

My Non-Amusement with Psylocke's mind-swap was just because... it's not amusing. Again, if you want a sexy Asian ninja lady in your comic book then just... make a sexy Asian ninja lady. There's no need to swap a white lady into the body of a sexy Asian ninja. Just... make a new character, and shelve Captain Britain's sister for some future plotline. Whether there should be sexy Asian ninja ladies in comic books, whether comic book writers (in the 90s) can do a sexy Asian ninja lady character justice, whether sexy Asian ninja ladies should be representative of Asians in comic books... those are all just other questions, sorta irrelevant to the sheer unnecessity of Psylocke's body-snatching back-story. Comic books have done this for a long time, been caught between old characters and new stories. Clairemont doesn't know what to do with Psylocke but knows he needs to keep her, and he also wants to tell stories with a sexy Asian ninja lady and sell comics with a sexy Asian ninja lady, but rather than squaring off one problem before picking up the other, he mashed them together in a way that's just unnecessary. Honestly, it's not that different than your complaint about Iron Man: rather than just making a new character to tell the new stories they want to tell that they can't with Tony Stark, well we'll just have this minority character take over Tony Stark's identity. It's just the mirror image of it. In a vacuum, how can one be okay with Betsy Braddock taking on Asian traits but not be okay with War Machine taking on trans traits? Other than the nonsense magic comic book logic explanation for how it happened... which, by the way, did not exist back when Psylocke did her body-swap; that was retconned in later. To me, both just seem like writers/editors wanting to take advantage of socio-cultural trends by forcibly rewriting an existing character to become cooler, and to do so in the laziest, most conservative manner possible. It reminds me of all the fanfic out there with gender/race/sexuality swaps, and as good as fanfic can be, I typically expect more creative exertion from primary creators. If you don't think you can write a new sexy Asian ninja lady character and make her compelling to your readership... well, then you're probably just not good/qualified enough to write a sexy Asian ninja lady character (yet), so don't even. Don't retcon a pre-existing character to be gay or trans or whatever just because it's easier than to write a new queer character and popularize them. It doesn't really do a service to queer people anyways. And if you're an editor/manager/owner, and you want more queer characters, but none of your writers can create any authentically... then maybe it's time to get new writers. Or you can sit on your butt and take the risk that others will do it better than you and steal all yo' business. (In contrast, Miles Morales is an independent character. They didn't turn Peter Parker black, or body-swap him into a black body, or retcon him as always having been black, or whatever. That seems to me a much better way to approach it... though now the Ultimate universe is gone and Miles is just another of the million Spider-Mans out there, so....)