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Topic: Rachel Summers, love life of Kitty Pryde? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Rebecca Jansen
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

The longer a character has been around and showing opposite sex attraction the more likely it's not going to come off when they seem to suddenly change. If there was something that suggested something earlier, like say Iceman with Cloud of The New Defenders they ought to probably recap that to at least try and win over longer term readers. If a bad character can become a good character it is possible for an apparently straight character to change that way, but with kitty all her interaction with Colossus would have to be explained as extreme over compensation, or else she was always bi just for whatever reason never acted on it.

Or it could just be one of those times where something doesn't work and it comes off as dopey.

I can believe Claremont imaging the women he wrote all being bi, but I chalk that up to there are fair number of guys who think that, what was it described as in a movie once... for guys it's like imagining two pieces of candy unwrapping each other. :^D

Actual lesbians or bi women frankly aren't going to be their fantasy of it. This doesn't ruin my regard for his writing female characters, and specifically Spider-Woman in the '80s... in my mind's theater Jessica Drew is not having it off with either the airheaded actress roommate, the police detective woman nor Morgana LeFay. I'm glad he left that out, but did include love interest David, so I could have that version; sometimes less can be more (Hitchcock), which isn't saying there is no place for something that is spelled out.

Robert Heinlein original skinny novel of The Puppet Masters versus the unedited full-on kink edition much later... I know which one I'd be likely to recommend to most people.
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Mike Benson
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

I struggle with this one.  Even as a gay dude, I hate it on its surface.  MY Kitty wasn’t gay or bi.  Like many of you, I want to point to more than 30 years of history and say it doesn’t make sense, as the character has never shown any attraction to girls.  Then I think of the sliding time scale.  Kitty hasn’t been around for 40 years.  She’s been around for 20.  Bobby isn’t 60, he’s barely a grown up too. Believe me, it’s something that happens all the time in real life, people that have never shown any “tendency” join my team.  And I have many, many friends that will tell you they didn’t even know it themselves.  I’m torn and can see both sides of this one.  Doesn’t  matter anyhow I guess. I have no intention of buying an X-Men book anytime soon.  
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Jim Burdo
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Posted: 17 September 2020 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

I was thinking about this myself. Here's the podcast interview where Chris Claremont says he always intended her to be bi and for Rachel to be her true love, Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men
This doesn't really make sense, since Kitty appeared in January 1980 and Rachel in January 1981. When they did appear in Days of Future Past, they didn't appear that close, only speaking a couple of lines to each other. Rachel was with Franklin, and Peter was presented as Kitty's true love. When Rachel was brought into the mainstream Marvel, she remembered the adult Kate as a mentor and best friend, but that seemed to be it. They didn't seem especially close there either, with Rachel going on an adventure with Magma, not Kitty. In Excalibur, they were roommates, with Kitty slightly jealous of Rachel.There was a miniseries called True Friends about the two, but in it Kitty fell in love with a man called Alisdhair Kinross. When Claremont wrote a story for Kitty before her planned wedding to Colossus last year, she wasn't thinking about Rachel, but had a vision of Kinross urging her to "embrace the moment and the man".
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Petter Myhr Ness
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Posted: 17 September 2020 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

Must be "always intended" in the George Lucas sense then. 
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Jim Burdo
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Posted: 18 September 2020 at 10:31am | IP Logged | 5 post reply

[Quote=John Byrne]Even when we were working together, I grumbled that ALL of Chris’ female characters we Bi.[QUOTE]

Well, you're their co-creator. Was Kitty intended to be bisexual? Was Rachel even conceived of then, let alone being her true love?

I hope ELSEWHEN isn't accused of straightwashing if Kitty isn't shown attracted to girls.

About the Excalibur panels posted here with the Alan Davis quote, remember that he wasn't the writer then, he was giving his spin on what Claremont was writing, who he says had his own ideas. That isn't Courtney Ross, it's an evil dimensional counterpart called Opal Lun Sat-Yr-Nin (she's not a lesbian, being obsessed with Captain Britain). Notice she has hypnosis powers. Claremont idea seemed to be something he'd previously done with Emma Frost, another White Queen, where she tried using her mental powers to groom Kitty into a mental duplicate of herself. Their scene ends with them driving off looking almost like mirror images. When Davis took over the writing, he resolved the subplot without any evidence of attraction between them.

Claremont did have Kitty briefly attracted to a woman, Karma of the New Mutants, in the 2003 Mechanix miniseries. It's hard to tell if he created it in response to the fanon or vice-versa.
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Rebecca Jansen
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Posted: 18 September 2020 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

I'm not sure most comic books (especially originally dreamed up as far back as fifty+ years ago) are able to really carry the amount of thinking some fans/fanpros put into them. They were never meant to be a substitute for reality with all minute details elaborately synched. Can't they be light entertainment? If they want to 'deal' with adult issues it's going to be a real tightly balanced dance, and to think ahead to where do you go from wherever that dance ends ought to be part of it. Just say The Thing moves out of the Baxter building could be something from that point on that might have to be explained. If they get to a point where there has to be a page or two explaining changes every issue...

Not specific to Kitty going bi, that's been a pretty standard modern soap wrinkle for quite awhile now, just generally. If you want to fantasize about whoever, fine, you are innocent when you dream as Tom Waits sang, but the more they cast it in stone explicitness the less aerodynamic and wide in appeal. The actual readership does keeps shrinking. I hope they incorporate such elements organically as a positive, but often these things seem more to hook publicity or make comic book history.
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Peter Martin
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Posted: 18 September 2020 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | 7 post reply

JB is the creator of the Kitty Pryde character, not co-creator.

Edited by Peter Martin on 18 September 2020 at 1:11pm
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