salarta

On CBR, someone asked why everyone liked Polaris. I felt my answer was worth reposting onto tumblr.

The short answer, in the words of Pietro in All-New X-Factor #14:

The long answer, everything about Lorna pings my interests as her own character and as a symbol of progress both for female characters and for professional writing, especially comic book writing.

As her own character, she has been through so much. The genocide on Genosha is a major, powerful moment that gets at the gravity of survivor’s guilt and trauma she experienced nearly dying and living through it. Not only did she survive where most others had died, but she did so after failing to save all those people that believed in her, trusted her, and held her up as their Genoshan princess and heir to Magneto. She tries to do what’s right, and part of the grim insanity she expresses after Genosha is a struggle between how she wants to be the kind of hero that saves and protects people in need, yet completely failed to do that when they needed her most. Her strong identity crisis after Wanda stripped Lorna of her powers, to the point where Lorna was willing to nearly die because she thought doing so might bring them back, is an extension of that. It shows she cares so deeply about both her identity as a mutant and about having the power to potentially help others that she’s willing to sacrifice herself for the slim chance of reactivating her X-gene that way. Another aspect of why I love the character is that I think she perfectly embodies the struggle between the traditional Xavier and Magneto philosophies. Do you kill to protect mutants, or do you turn the other cheek? There’s an excellent internal conflict there, and I think Lorna being willing to kill depending on circumstances is a good thing. Yet another thing I personally like is when Lorna has something along the lines of “playful internet troll” moments, such as ribbing Crystal by asking if she referred to Ronan as “Lord Ronan” in bed.

The last one I want to mention is Lorna’s relations with her family. I especially think her relationship with her sister is awesome and full of potential. I have the TPB of Exiles, and I bought that way back when it first came out. There are so many potential dimensions to their relationship, all of which can be reached through natural story evolution. We can have Lorna and Wanda hanging out and having a good time like in All-New X-Factor #14, we can have Lorna and Wanda supporting each other like their AU counterparts in Exiles, but we could’ve also had something like Lorna and Wanda duking it out in Avengers vs X-Men (if the Avengers books cared more about potential stories than about their personal biases against characters like Lorna). All of the above is just highlights, but it’s not ALL the things I love about the character.

As for her progress as a character, Lorna started out as a very progressive female character for her time. But over two decades, she got treated like a punching bag, regularly demoted and denigrated to the point where today, people at Marvel seem to think of her as a C-lister or D-lister when she’s actually an A-lister that keeps getting treated like one of the other two. She keeps getting segregated from events she should be part of, and treated like she has no value despite everything she’s done and all the potential there is to her character that no other character could provide. Or at least, that no other character could provide anywhere near as well. I’ve been seeing a lot of strong female protagonists in video games get treated poorly lately, getting remade into emotional wrecks and weak submissives to men when they were originally made to be awesome, tough women in their own right. I see that in Lorna. She was made to be awesome, got stripped of those awesome qualities, and now it’s a struggle to get Marvel to let her be her awesome self again.