Never really sure why people have a problem with Psylocke

Hey, Hickman is going to reboot the series soon, right? Maybe one of the details he could throw in is some adventure years back where Brian Braddock fights against the Hand and in the aftermath comes across an orphan baby who he takes back to England and raises among the rest of his children. Simple enough

Jack Charlotte

Ai, that has always been one of my biggest pet peeves, writers "fixing" past additions to stories. One of my favorite books as a kid was New Warriors; the original writer never intended to make Firestar and Justice a couple, but then he left and the new writer went hard into the two of them, but once the original guy came back one of his first decisions to was to break them up, even though by then it made absolutely no sense.

Jack Charlotte

I haven't followed X-Men comics for a long time. I just tend to read whatever I can pick up. So this is news to me. But I can understand your frustration.

Spartans300

Amadeus has shown up with Wolverine before, hasn't he? Before he got Hulk-ed, I thought he did some nerdy sidekick stuff with Wolverine. Or maybe that was Wolverine being an Avenger stuff.

Eh. In retrospect, even Clairemont thinks Psylocke has become problematic. Apparently his plan was never to keep Psylocke Asian; it was a temporary thing for a Mojo - Lady Deathstrike thing, but then Jim Lee made Psylocke look really hot and fans loved the cheesecake, so he kept her like that longer, then he got fired (?), and Psylocke got stuck the way she was with some retconning about The Hand performing a body-swap. It's not really a narrative choice anybody should be staking out as a hill to die on. Whatever the hell Bendis was doing, at least it was intentional. Also, a lot of the shit that happened in the 90s X-men comics was pretty messed up. Putting Jean Grey behind them was probably one of the best things Marvel's ever done. And every time they try to bring her back, it ends up kinda disastrous (young Jean Grey, Hope, etc..) Psylocke's Asian-period might not have been the strangest thing to have happened, but I don't know how much that really says for it.

I don't remember much of a fuss with the Psylocke thing, though. Like Mobofair said, in a world with clones and aliens, where "I didn't do it, it was my evil clone" is a legitimate legal defense, it wasn't exactly the strangest thing to have happened especially in the time when it happened. Of course, there was no internet back then.

Ai Muhao

If I remember correctly, it was part of a supervillain's scheme. Mandarin, I think. But I do dislike that idea of 'fixing' a perceived wrong. It's how we got that shitstorm over in IDW Transformers, when a writer 'fixed' Arcee's origin because she felt the origin given for Arcee in that version of Transformers was 'problematic'. Needless to say, the original writer was quite displeased. I mean, she explained her reasoning to him and he was okay with it afterward, but claiming to 'fix' something always kind of sounded smug and condescending to me.

Ai Muhao

I presume the maybe is cuz since when is Amadeus and X-character?

Shendude

Honestly, whenever the X-Men get involved with anything Asian, I kinda throw my hands up and settle in for a ride of awkward cultural othering. 90% chance the important Asian character is going to be a female, the 10% of the time you get a male Asian character, they're gonna be a villain. (Sunfire being the exception, and maybe Amadeus Cho.)

It's... pretty darn squicky, honestly if you think about it. I'm not sure I have the entire history correct, but originally, they swapped Betsy Braddock's mind with a Japanese woman's, and then killed the Japanese woman (in Betsy's body) to prevent a swap-back. So a pretty gratuitous fridging (or two, even) pretty much for the purpose of being able to draw a sexy Asian babe in a comic book. I think that got retconned into Betsy being genetically manipulated into looking Asian. Which is also... like... wtf, is it that important to be able to draw sexy Asian ninja babes but also not write an actually Asian character? Elektra and Jubilee are, like, right there. Having Betsy recreate a Caucasian body for herself's an interesting choice, especially having her voice that she finally feels like herself once again. It's a little incongruous, but obviously they can't rewrite the old comic books to make Asian Betsy express that discomfort. Seems like trying to right an perceived wrong originally committed in an era of major "yellow fever" in the 90s when a lotta martial arts movies and Asian movie stars were crossing over into North American media.

Aren't they both considered unacceptable? I don't know "who" we're really talking about here, but there were a lot of pretty critical censures of both, Psylocke for casually "erasing" a female Asian character to appropriate the mystic ninja mystique for a white character, Iceman for having the most ridiculous forced outing ever, with a psychic teenager forcibly outing his time-traveling younger self and then casually retconning his entire past as a result. Neither story was considered handled well by the female/Asian nor queer comic reader demographics.

People have a problem with Psylocke? I genuinely had no idea. And I've never forgiven the X-Men writers and editors with okaying that Iceman story. I was there back in the 90s when Ice Man had a massive crush on Rogue and really wanted her to be happy.

Ai Muhao

Struck a nerve, huh Jeff? XD I agree, going this route with Bobby could have worked...unfortunately, Bendis doesn't seem to think bi is a thing, as all the prior female relationships he had in the past were made out to be totally insincere, despite everything to the contrary. But I guess you've since unsubbed because you got your feelings hurt over someone else's opinion, so whatever.

Jack Charlotte

Iceman was actually mindfucked into turning gay by Emma Frost if iirc. One comic he was straight and the next he was full blown gay. It's one thing to find out you were gay over a period of time and another to be made gay by someone else as a way of punishing the person as was done to him.

Warslick

My point is that a character turning into an ethnically Asian person is no sillier than a character effectively turning into a gay person from a straight person. They're both highly unbelievable--why is one acceptable and one not?

Mobofair

I was already thinking about cutting my sub for a while and this sealed it, good job

Jessie W

Figuring out your sexuality as an adult is a thing that happens to actual people in the real world, what the fuck

Jessie W