salarta

Thanks for asking! Here’s my answer.

As a fan of Polaris, like everything else I’m a fan of, my priority is seeing Lorna treated well by Marvel. That is the most important thing to me. Lorna as a team leader, Lorna beating Havok or some other character, etc, none of that matters unless Lorna is getting treated well at the same time.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario that I hope makes it clearer. Lorna’s a team leader. But she’s depicted as a raging asshole that constantly abuses her team members, spouts racist lines, and runs away in terror any time she has to fight. Should a book with her depicted like that still be read because she’s the team leader?

Treatment of Lorna is currently overall good from what I’ve seen and heard, but there was a lot of bad stuff before, and a bad cover for Blue #28 coming up, that cause me to not read it yet until I trust that it’s safe.

I could also describe how things were for me Lorna on All-New X-Factor, the first time Lorna got to be a team leader in her own right, by ANXF #6. I almost dropped that book for the same reason, and only ANXF #7 kept me from doing that.

As for why I don’t read it anyway, under the thinking of “you need to know the intimate details of what’s happening to her,” I have two reasons.

The first reason is about the message sent. If you say “this book is awful, why do this to her,” and so on but then read it anyway, you’re sending a message that it must not really be as bad as you say it is. You’re saying no matter what they do to her or how bad it gets, they’ll get your money anyway, so what you have to say doesn’t really matter.

The second reason is that if it’s bad, I don’t want it anyway. In the pure financial sense, I can spend that money on something that I actually want. Get a nice sandwich, or let it add up and commission an artist to draw something I really want. In the broader sense, there’s no fulfillment in the feeling that I’m throwing my time/money away on something I know I won’t enjoy.

In the case of Blue, my reason isn’t about current quality of writing anymore. It’s that I don’t yet trust future quality. I might if Blue #28 turns out to be much better than the cover makes it look like it will be.

Too much has happened for me to think this sort of stuff visually happening is not an intentional snub.

First there was Enchantress made to look more like Lorna with Wanda on a heavily-promoted Axis variant cover, while an ANXF cover that actually had Lorna and Wanda together was kept offline and out of view until the Friday before the issue’s release.

After Axis and its forced retcon on Wanda and Pietro being Magneto’s kids, there was the blatant attempt to give Wanda and Pietro a “replacement sister” in the form of Luminous, using an all-blue color scheme instead of a green one to be slightly less obvious about it.

And then there’s the X-Men anniversary covers that all connected into one big image. They had Havok fighting alongside 4 of the original 5 X-Men for one cover, but they excluded Lorna completely, even though she also become an X-Men member (its second female member at that) AND was introduced before Havok.

This is on top of how the Avengers side of Marvel went out of the way to exclude Lorna from everything she had a right to be in, from Avengers vs X-Men to Axis and more. During Children’s Crusade, they even went as far as removing Lorna from a recreated picture from House of M that she was originally in.

Having talked a little with Kelly Thompson, I believe she had good reason to use Brand (she said Kitty and Brand have history together and I’ll trust her on that), and nothing necessarily “required” Lorna to be there.

Yet, visuals are an entirely different story. Brand was drawn with long loose hair and no glasses, wearing purple – the color second most commonly associated with Lorna – and positioned between two women who happened to be wearing green dresses.

All the visual cues that are always associated with Lorna were present. There were no visual cues to suggest Brand. That’s why everyone thought it had to be Lorna until Kelly Thompson said it wasn’t.

And one possible argument to be had on visuals might have been that there were no mainstay costume features for Lorna present either, but any right to that argument was lost when Marvel decided to give her costumes on ANXF and now X-Men Blue that have none of those iconic costume features.

In ANXF and now Blue, Marvel has basically said “you should recognize Lorna by the fact she’s a woman with green hair and nothing else.”

If Marvel’s not going to let Lorna have iconic costume features that stick with her across costumes, like Brand does with her glasses, then they have by default said any woman with green hair and no other distinguishing features must be assumed to be Lorna. Which means Brand is visually invading Lorna’s territory here.

So, again on Thompson’s end from what she said, it looks like she’s in the right. However, there’s a problem with whoever decided on visuals for the issue. There’s too much recent history and there are too many factors involved for me to treat it as unintentional.

There’s another scene of the issue that Kelly Thompson, I think part-jokingly, said she considers a dancer in the back to be Lorna. I’ll talk about that more later. The short of it is that given history of treatment toward Lorna and how Brand looks, saying “I believe that dancer is Lorna” means nothing. It’s fanon. It’s not Marvel actually saying it’s her and making people aware it’s her. Without real official backing, it’s just another random green-haired woman, like Carmilla Black.