Ash vs Evil Dead was canceled, and I’m sad now. It was one of few things that was consistently awesome and that I had few to no complaints about.
I guess one thing I could hope for is that maybe someday we’ll see that crossover idea once thrown out there of Mia from the Evil Dead remake and Ash Williams teaming up.
This is one of those cases I’ve seen among several where Marvel shows a long history of bad behavior that they keep repeating. As one spot puts it:
Together, they enforce conformity on a multitude of individuals tasked with creating garbage, solely because “that’s the way it’s always been and always will be!”
Which is at the heart of any time there’s a problem at Marvel with the company/people working at it insisting on doing the exact same bad things over and over again for nostalgia sake, rather than providing actual improvement.
Actually, I wanna say a little more about this, Polaris-specific.
“That’s the way it’s always been and always will be” is a negative attitude that’s held Polaris back for most of her existence.
The attitude of “Polaris has always not been Magneto’s daughter and that’s the way it always should be” is an attitude held by Brevoort and people like him. That attitude is why it took nearly 10 years for Lorna to not only have Magneto as her father confirmed, but to get to interact with him at all.
The attitude of “Polaris has always been beneath Havok and that’s the way it always should be” is why he gets to be in things while Lorna’s excluded, and why Lorna’s presence on X-Men Blue (especially her return after a two year forced limbo) gets kicked down to put Havok on a pedestal at her expense.
The general attitude of “Lorna is a lesser character compared to the men in her life” is why most of her interactions lately with male characters (Havok, Magneto, Gambit) have been getting written as if the men are better than her and she needs to be mansplained to on a regular basis.
Your typical Marvel fanboy/fangirl might say Starlin’s remarks are just sour grapes, or point to progressive things like Kamala Khan, but the first argument is just being dismissive about complaints instead of looking into them, while the second argument is Marvel doing some good things and figuring that lets them get away with stuff that looks bad.
“You can see how good I am for X, you should let me get away with Y.” It’s how they trick fanboys/fangirls into accepting poor treatment of characters they don’t care about by briefly giving them good treatment of their favorites in the same place. Take legit complaints and concerns and try to diminish them into fan fights where one character supposedly needs to suffer for the benefit of another.
What Marvel should do is try to treat all their characters well, regularly, not screw over good characters to boost their favorites or their nostalgia. But then that would be going after “the way it’s always been and always will be.”
Marvel tries to act like they’re all for change, but they’re really not. They have some impressive stuff to show on the surface, but go any deeper and you see repression and slow turning of gears that mean things that should change immediately take 10 years – or never happen at all.
This is one of those cases I’ve seen among several where Marvel shows a long history of bad behavior that they keep repeating. As one spot puts it:
Together, they enforce conformity on a multitude of individuals tasked with creating garbage, solely because “that’s the way it’s always been and always will be!”
Which is at the heart of any time there’s a problem at Marvel with the company/people working at it insisting on doing the exact same bad things over and over again for nostalgia sake, rather than providing actual improvement.
Did you guys know about this? I had no idea. Here’s an article written by Jameelah Nasheed.
An excerpt:
In the late 18th century, new economic opportunities and growth led to an increasein the free African and African-American populations of New Orleans. This was because some people of African descent were newly able to make money, buy their freedom, and subsequently increase the free Black population. And with that came an increase in interracial relationships, to the dismay of colonial authorities. As Ze Winters notes in The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic, “Charles III of Spain demanded that the colonial governor of Louisiana ‘establish public order and proper standards of morality,’ with specific reference to a ‘large class of ‘mulattos’ and particularly “mulatto’ women.”
During this time, women of African descent were known to wear their hair in elaborate styles (yes, we’ve been fly for centuries). By incorporating feathers and jewels into their hairstyles, they showcased the full magic and glory of their gravity-defying strands, and appeared wealthier than they actually were. As a result, these enticing styles attracted the attention of men—including white men.
To address this “problem,” in 1786, Spanish colonial Governor Don Esteban Miró enacted the Edict of Good Government, also referred to as the Tignon Laws, which “prohibited Creole women of color from displaying ‘excessive attention to dress’ in the streets of New Orleans.” Instead, they were forced to wear a tignon (scarf or handkerchief) over their hair to show that they belonged to the slave class, whether they were enslaved or not. In The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, historian Virginia M. Gould notes that Miró hoped the laws would control women “who had become too light skinned or who dressed too elegantly, or who competed too freely with white women for status and thus threatened the social order.”
In response to the laws, Creole women did cover their hair, but they did so with intricate fabrics and jewels (think Angela Bassett in American Horror Story as real-life New Orleans sorceress, Marie Laveau). As Baton Rouge curator Kathe Hambrick put it in a recent interview with The Advocate, “they owned it and made it a part of their fashion.” Instead of a cover-up, the wraps became a symbol style. And, of course, the women continued to attract men with their extravagant hairdos.
The only reason I’m making this a link post and not a text post is to give more visibility to the thing I’m writing about.
This post is not in support of the article. It’s calling attention to what’s wrong with it. Simply put, this article is bad. I originally wasn’t going to say anything at all, so it wouldn’t get any more clicks, but I resolved to say something for two reasons.
It falsely represents Polaris.
It proves the point I’ve made about not overemphasizing how Magneto’s her father to a fault.
I’ll be fair as I get started here: it’s kind of a given that a vast majority of people at the present time would have said Magneto was cooler than Polaris. A majority of people know who Magneto is, know his history, everything else, while they don’t know Lorna and Marvel hasn’t made any real attempts to make the most of her potential.
However, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how this person wrote Lorna up.
In this writer’s incredibly brief summary, he deliberately ignores all the developments and complexity Lorna has gone through. He ignores how Lorna survived the Genoshan massacre. He ignores the trauma she lived with afterward. He ignores the major identity crisis she had when her powers were taken from her. He ignores the horror of her origin story plane crash when her powers manifested.
Instead, this writer relegates her exclusively to “she’s been possessed or mind-controlled a lot therefore she sucks.” He rushes right past her time as a leader and fighting alongside the X-Men to focus squarely on that terrible aspect of her history.
This writer failed to properly explain who Lorna is and what she’s been through. Maybe because the writer is woefully ignorant about Lorna’s history (though I doubt it). Maybe because they disregard her history in favor of seeing her as poorly as certain people out there always want to diminish her as supposedly being.
Regardless, the writer pulls this in an article where he hypes up Magneto and then proceeds to try to make Polaris look and sound bad compared to him. As such, this writer is proving for me that it’s dangerous to put too much emphasis on how Lorna is Magneto’s daughter.
Yes, as I’ve said many times, explore their relationship. Make use of it. Lots to work from. But if you emphasize it too much, then guys like this writer decide to act like Polaris is a worthless character with no value compared to her dad. Guys like this writer will insist that everything Lorna has to offer is bad if it’s not about making her exclusively a supporting character for Magneto’s stories, never her own.
A balance needs to be found. This article is a warning sign of what attitudes can take hold if that balance is not found.
Frankly, the best bet would be restoring Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver as Magneto’s kids so Lorna can interact with them too. More family equals more consideration for the collective rather than just Magneto. But barring that, Lorna does have other things to her outside Magneto that need to be explored too.
A teenage Lorna Dane watches a fight between the X-Men and Magneto on TV and wonders: why can’t she be one of them?
Author’s Note: This chapter takes a tense shift from past to present tense. I realize this is generally a bad idea, but I think present tense works better for what I’m trying to do. Anyway, this is a ‘fanon’ chapter, and I explained its inspiration on AO3 if you wanna see what it is there.
She watches them on TV. These superhumans. These homo superior. These X-Men. Their faces play over and over on the screen in sheer radiant glory, blasting debris, icing roads, tossing boulders. One majestic mutant soars to heights under his own power that only an Angel could dream to reach. Each of the boys – and one girl, she reminds herself – take to action with a youthful rebellious zeal only teens could bring.
An apocalypse. A revolution. The dawning of a new age filled with awe and wonder. People call these strange times many things, but as she looks on, Lorna Dane asks herself one simple yet important question.
Why not me?
She hides herself in hair dye. Chestnut waves roll down her shoulders, obscuring the painful truth of an emerald lie teasing her with the idea of becoming something more, something different, something special and better than a meek girl sitting in her living room. She wonders why her hair couldn’t stand for more than a rare condition inherited from a father she couldn’t even remember. Just enough strangeness that people might mistake her for a mutant. Not enough to be one.
A pitched battle between good and evil rages on the tiny box in front of her. Lorna bears witness to a scowling man in red and purple as he lifts whole cars off the ground. She imitates his motions, dreaming of the power to make them sail skyward as he did. The thrum in her fingers dissipates when she sees the Angel weave between those cars. Darting up, dodging right, all with the grace and finesse of an avian god. His gloriously fluffy feathery white wings pin to his back as he spin-dives into his foe.
For a moment, this Magneto looks finished. He topples over, rolls backward, electricity sparking along his body. Another lad’s crimson optic blast rushes toward him at the speed of light. Blink of an eye. But then, Magneto recovers at the very last second. A wave of his arm sends the blast into Angel, knocking him out of the air.
In her mind’s eye, it’s her deflecting that blow. Her feet lifting off the ground. Her cape billowing in the wind. She sees green all around her, on her, inside her, rippling like a force of nature.
Then, her mind drifts to other thoughts. Kinder thoughts. Gentler thoughts. She wouldn’t have to use such a wonderful gift for fighting. She could build things. Create things. From the tallest skyscraper in the world to the most elegant statues of these mutant heroes she could imagine, Lorna could mold each scrap of metal into precisely what she imagined. She could show everyone what a boon these mutants were.
… If she had the parts. She doesn’t have the parts. Her hands shake because her heart can’t. Tears stream down her face. She doesn’t understand the hole buried in her chest. Why she can’t fill it. Why the images playing in front of her press upon that void but don’t quite fit, tapping at the edges, slipping at the corners.
In those moments, she thinks about the man in red and purple. An outcast among his own kind, she knows he wreaks havoc and causes trouble for his fellow mutants. The X-Men wouldn’t fight him if they had no reason. Yet, she can’t help seeing some part of herself in him. His defiance. His rage. His spirit, burning as if guided by some higher calling. He glows so brightly that she finds it hard to believe all those horrid things people call him on the news. Murderer. Monster. Despite them all, one insidious label sticks out most of all: Mutie.
That word. The M-word. The reason her parents insisted she hide her green to make herself look normal, mundane, ordinary, like everyone else. The reason she sits inside the house while bigots and haters march along city streets, denouncing the future.
Not her future, of course. Her little quirk of color means nothing. ‘Minor detail’. Even Dr. Moira said so.
But it doesn’t stop her from wishing, and dreaming, and thinking. Her eyes light up. What if she could be part of something greater? What if she had the power to set an example, to right the world’s wrongs, to become her best self while standing beside friends who saw her green hair and loved her for it? She reaches out to the screen… and pulls away when it crackles.
When it spits sparks. When the picture flickers in and out with fiendish abandon. She mentally chides herself for not remembering her mother’s warnings about how sensitive these so-called technological wonders truly were. One wrong touch or one hand in the wrong place set them off in a smoldering heap. Like a good girl, she leans back in her couch and waits for her chance to see her mutant heroes once again.
The article itself, in mentioning Malice possessing Lorna, puts primary emphasis on what that can do for the stories of other characters – primarily Magneto. Not what it can do for the 50-years-and-going story of Lorna Dane.
I don’t know whether this is just the writer’s take, or the writer is doing this off things Bunn has said behind the scenes.
Either way, it’s heavily informed by how blatantly Bunn’s priorities are all about what benefits characters he actually cares about, including Magneto and Havok, even if it’s at the expense of Lorna and other characters he clearly doesn’t care about.
salarta 