Shameless Pondering Over a Comic I Haven't Read...

Over on kali921's livejournal, on a post entitled Marvel & Interchangeable Female Characters, Summers Edition she discusses a recent event from X-Factor which kind of puzzles me. As I don't really want to go trolling the comment section of someone who's engaging in their perfectly justified right to vent, I thought I'd blog about it here.

I've quoted the pertinent point:

Suffice it to say that I'm extremely disenchanted with David, X-Factor, and this is the final straw.

Yes, that's right. Scott and Emma have a dystopianfuture!AU kid.

We already have three awesome dystopianfuture!AU Summers kids, that being Nate Grey, Nathan Grey, and Rachel Grey.

I'm going to quote the very awesome [info]aj's thoughts on this:

"WHY THE EVER LOVING FUCK did you kill off Jean if all you wanted to fucking do was replace her with a blonde. There is such a goddamn thing as hair dye, you unmitigated asswipes. You know what!? I would malign your ancestry, Marvel PTB, but that would just be completely inadequate and unfair to people who can't defend themselves.

God fucking damnit.

And the worst part is that you're doing everything you can to make Emma Jean. You are doing a violent disservice to both fucking characters and basically telling me that women don't matter because they're replaceable by some other set of boobs in hot pants who is 'owning' her sexuality by dressing like a goddamn lingerie model."

Okay, I'm going to admit I haven't read the issue. Peter David is not usually to my taste and there's no character there that I particularly adore enough to buy the book. But there's a hole in this logic somewhere for me.

First of all, isn't the whole point of Cable*, Nate Grey and Rachel Summers that they're from dystopian alternate futures?

And the whole thing about alternate futures is that occasionally you see the results of different match-ups for characters. Given how tied in Scott Summers is with dystopian off-spring, it seems only natural to me that at some point he'd have a dystopian alternate future child with Emma Frost.

Honestly, I'm surprised he doesn't have an alternate future child with WOLVERINE somewhere in the Marvel universe.**

*Isn't Cable Madelyne Pryor's kid anyway? That kind of puts a wrench in the Emma=Jean thing, I'd think.

**I would totally read this comic.

I do acknowledge that the plotline isn't terribly original, but I don't think it marks anyone "turning Emma into Jean". For one thing, if they really wanted to replace Jean with Emma, why bother creating a NEW alternate future kid. Just retcon her INTO the timeline as the character's mother. Maybe her genes somehow got included in the mix. Or she was secretly an Askani. Or she adopted Rachel when she was five. Something like that. Yeah, they're all stupid ways to do it. But honestly, it's comics. Much as I love Marvel and DC, we've all seen them do stupider things.

Creating a NEW child, seems to me, to be a fairly clear way of distinguishing her from Jean. Emma Frost is obviously not going to react in the same way Jean is. This new child is invariably going to end up interacting with and contrasting with the other kids. This is setting her apart from Jean and adding an interesting wrinkle with Jean's upcoming nine-millionth resurrection.

We all know it's coming.

I definitely sympathize with being frustrated that apparently David feels the need to recycle plot points for female characters who are involved Scott Summers. But I do feel like it's a far cry from acting like the two characters are interchangeable.

But given that I've not actually read the issue, I really don't know. Maybe David IS writing Emma exactly like Jean, for all I know. Anyone who's actually read the issue, how is it?