cannonfodder wrote: ↑2 years ago
Ms. Marvel, Jubilee, Shadowcat They've always had some young new mutant to bring in new readers.
Oh, they've had a lot more young new mutants than that! There was a whole team called "New Mutants". And another book called "Generation X".
And then there were the Morlocks who had young members. Readers had more than their pick of role models.
Yes, Kitty Pryde was introduced as a young character the teens reading the book could identify with. I can attest to this - Kitty was one of the main reasons I read the X-Men in the 80s - I thought she was very cute, and her adventures were worth following. But it's not surprising, considering that Prof X ran a SCHOOL for mutants, so at some point they would have had to focus on the character development of a new recruit at that school, and Kitty just happened to be the first.
Ms. Marvel, however, does not belong on that list at all. Because she was not even identified as a mutant until this year!
For the first ten years of her comics, she was identified as an *Inhuman* who had a fan crush on the *Avengers*. Not much mention of X-Men
at all, which makes sense, since generally the X-Men are not a super-team admired by fans. Rather, they are reviled by mutant-haters.
Kamala was not a character to "bring in new readers" - she was a self-insert by Sana Amanat to provide income for her, and representation for her religion and ethnicity. Except for the woke libraries who bought all the Ms Marvel TPBs for their graphic novel section, Kamala Khan did not bring
a whole lot of new readers to Marvel. Certainly a lot less than Shadowcat or Jubilee did.
lionbadger wrote: ↑2 years ago
shevek wrote: ↑2 years ago
How to drain all the possible sexiness out of your woke character:
I find it hilarious, like laugh out loud funny, at how the ideology has flipped in the US
5 years ago this would have been (and still is in most of the world)
"how to make your sexy character more conservative"
I wonder how long the cycle is for it to flip back, 10 years? 20?
Ummmm...."how to make your sexy character more conservative" is the SAME THING as "how to drain all the possible sexiness out of your woke character."
A hardcore conservative would look at the 1995 drawing of Pocahontas and say "she shouldn't be sexy because church God Bible morals religion corrupting young minds blah blah blah claptrap from the pulpit."
A hardcore progressive looks at the 1995 drawing of Pocahontas and say "she shouldn't be sexy because cultural appropriation male gaze decolonization objectification claptrap from academia."
Both of them don't want her to be sexy, but for different reasons which actually both amount to some kind of extreme doctrine.
The only way to avoid this is to constantly advocate for actual truth and facts in the center for what is popular and beautiful: "She looks great! And the vast majority of people think so. Keep her the way she is."
----------------------------------------------------------
Also: I watched this shit.
Or, at least, I watched the Kohhori episode, and the Avengers 1602 episode.
The Avengers 1602 episode was somewhat entertaining because they tried to make the super-team into the characters of a Shakespearean play or other classics.
Thor is brooding King Lear, Loki is foppish Hamlet, Hulk is the raging Man In the Iron Mask. There was lots of swashbuckling swordplay in Three Musketeers mode.
The drawback, though, is the way that Peggy Carter is the center of this entire season of What Ifs. She looks like a man from the neck down. She's super strong and defeats everybody, and she is always proven to be right (like the woke version of Babylon 5's Susan Ivanova, who was way hotter and feminist enough for anyone). The only reason that character is there is to virtue signal woman power - I mean, she's certainly not even an Avenger.
Also, the Watcher talks to people (Peggy, for one). He's not supposed to be doing that. He's the Watcher - he just WATCHES and narrates.
As far as the Kohhori episode, this Mohawk Indian superhero character was created for one purpose - to push the 'decolonization' narrative.
I don't recommend you watch it. In fact, I'll give you the whole plot just so that you don't have to:
In the Kohhori reality, the Tesseract landed in a lake in Mohawk territory. All the natives who fell into the lake got superpowers and were transported into a paradise dimension where nobody dies, and everybody dances around all day and eats gems for nourishment. Meanwhile, back at Kohhori's village, the evil Spaniard colonizers invade looking for the Fountain of Youth (which is the rumored power in the lake) and when they can't access it like the Mohawks did, they start enslaving her entire village and dragging them back to the ships to take to Spain. Kohhori plunges into the lake and gets superpowers. Unlimited Mary Sue powers like super speed, powerful blasts, super strength, even the apparent ability to teleport. She beseeches all of the immortal Indians to come back to the village and help her defeat the Spaniards but they don't want to leave. So she tries to defeat them herself and is doing a good job until getting overwhelmed by too much cannon fire. Then the immortal Indians come to her aid and pretty much kill most of the Spaniards, leaving a few to escape. A little while later, there's a scene in Queen Isabella's court where she is a grumpy evil woman who wants to kill and enslave the natives and is mad that she is being opposed by those natives. Suddenly, Kohhori and her friends TELEPORT ALL THE WAY TO SPAIN, levitate Isabella in the air and destroy her throne, and force her to make peace with the New World. Doctor Strange arrives and comments "World Peace in record time".
Apparently, all it takes is giving 'marginalized people' superpowers and world peace is achieved by force. The theme of this episode is decolonization, and that's also the purpose of Kohhori and her Mohawk friends. She's not a well-developed character - she's an ideological stance made flesh, like many of these woke 'creations'. She's there to smash the West and teach it a lesson. The writers of this episode probably have Palestinian flags displayed in their offices.
Do I have another complaint? Yep. The whole Fountain of Youth quest had to do with Ponce De Leon, and he was searching FLORIDA for it, where he came into contact with the Seminoles and other southern tribes. The Mohawks, on the other hand, were allied with the Iroquois Confederacy and were located in what would become upstate New York about 1500 miles away. The Spaniards never came close to that area. It would have been considered New France and was right in the middle of the battlegrounds of the French & Indian war, which the British and their colonies and Indian allies won over the French and their Indian allies. The TV show should have depicted evil French colonizers instead, but then that wouldn't have provided an excuse for a Tesseract to give the Mohawks their powers because the French were mainly just there to build forts that enabled them to trap furs. In their zeal to spew their ideology, the writers completely fucked up early American history. Congratulations.
SKIP THIS FUCKING MESS.
