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selenakMore thoughts on Astonishing X-Men, which, now that the „Torn“ arc is concluded, seems to kick off a lot of meta everywhere – witness ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
likeadeuce’s splendid essay here.
With the exception of works such as Sandman by Neil Gaiman - invented, written and concluded (as in really concluded, no more sequels) by a single writer – comics are a multiple author affair. Which makes the definition of canon and in character or out of character writing fiendishly difficult (witness Magneto, who seems to be a tragic hero or raving lunatic depending on the whim of the author in question). It also means that each time a new writer tackles previously established characters, readers, not surprisingly, will look at his or her own previous repertoire and draw conclusions about how X is going to handle this particular universe.
In the case of Joss Whedon, this meant, among other things, that throughout his run of AXM so far there has been, along with praise, distrust and/or accusation along the following lines:
1) Joss can’t handle adult women and sexually mature relationships.
2) Therefore, what he’s doing with Emma must be the vilification of an adult woman and a sexually mature relationship.
Leaving alone charge 1) (which I don’t agree with, but discussion of the Jossverse in its three incarnations would lead too far from the subject at hand) , 2) has led people to overlook how Joss has actually been writing Emma, Kitty, Scott and the rest of the gang. Because above all, and this has been clear even before #18 came out, Joss takes Emma seriously. Her backstory, spawned by multiple authors - all her backstory. Emma the villain, Emma the teacher, Emma the survivor of a horrible genocide, Emma the woman who fell in love with Scott Summers, Emma the manipulator and Emma the heroine.
Emma has been introduced to the Marvelverse at the same time Kitty Pryde was, during the Dark Phoenix arc, in the same issue. I have no doubt that one of the reasons Joss included Kitty in the cast for AXM because he loved the character as a teenager, but that doesn’t mean it was the only one. Kitty and Emma, Emma and Kitty: they are each other’s foils, parallels and contrasts, and they are eminently suitable for this. “Nothing has changed,” is the first thing we hear, err, read Kitty say, in “Gifted”, as she returns to the school she had been as a teenager; she also says, a few panels later, that she feels surrounded by “smaller pieces; shards of me”.
Flash forward to near the end of Torn, and who is surrounded by smaller pieces, shards of her? (Visualized literary that way by John Cassady.) Emma. Kitty, who insists nothing has changed to reassure herself (it’s a sentence she repeats several times, and it becomes less true each time), is in many ways the past to Emma: the unforgiving past. Now that’s not an endearing role. But an important one. In my essay about Londo Mollari, a Babylon 5 character, I mentioned that one of the unusual features about Londo’s storyarc is that his fall gets equal screentime to his redemption, whereas in most cases, if a character is meant to be redeemed, the misdeeds get a few flashbacks at most, with the result that characters in the present-day storyline who hold them against the currently-in-the-process-of-redemption person usually get resented by the audience. A similar reaction if new viewers/readers join an ongoing saga and get to know a character only after the character in question has made the switch from villain to hero. (Case in point: Spike and the “why do the Scoobies take such a long time to trust/accept him?” complaints. You can usually tell which part of the audience saw him first in s2, and which ones got their first impression from s5 onwards.) With a decade-spawning saga, you have to be aware that a great many of your readers won’t have read the issues that present Emma in her White Queen days. With Kitty, however, you have a character who remembers it all, because she had a front row seat when it happened: Emma kidnapping, torturing and killing people, with glee. “I learned more about good and evil in that one day” (that she met Emma) than I ever have before or since,” says Kitty to Emma. “I was thirteen. When I think about evil, whenever I think about the concept of evil, yours is the face that I see.”
Yet if Kitty is the living reminder that Emma isn’t just a sharp-tongued woman with a heart of gold whose only misdeed was to conduct a psychic affair with a married man, she’s far from being the narrative point of view, or able to understand Emma in her entirety; nor are her accusations always on target. This gets made clear quite early on as well, in the same conversation, when Kitty accuses Emma of causing Scott to question himself, which isn’t just silly if you know any X-men continuity (when has Scott done anything else?) but if you’ve seen Emma, only a few panels before, bolstering his confidence. (Now later in the storyline we’ll what Emma does when she wants/needs to destroy Scott’s confidence, and it’s not pretty. And about as far from what Kitty imagines as it can get.) Kitty, who insists nothing changes, is put through a rapid series of changes, starting with her discovery of Peter Rasputin – the first of many escaping-my-prison images/motifs which show up throughout three arcs, with Danger doing just this in the second one and then everyone having to do it in the third, locked in themselves as they are, to foil Cassandra, who plots and schemes to escape from her prison throughout the entire run. For Kitty, this climaxes in the horrible irony of experiencing something which, in pure technical terms, doesn’t happen – nothing changes, indeed, to the outward world, it’s just a matter of a few minutes, but to Kitty, it’s three years of having a child, being betrayed by everyone else and losing that child. And afterwards, she can’t go back and pretend this didn’t happen, that nothing changed between her and the other X-men, notably Peter: to her, it did.
Kitty’s relationship with Peter seems to be the counterpart to Emma’s with Scott: the young, happy couple, lovers long separated finding each other again, as opposed to the older, messed up couple, with their collective emotional baggage. (Incidentally, if you want to look for evidence of the accusing kind re: Joss and sex, Scott and Emma are the wrong tree to bark at altogether; check out Kitty and Peter having wild sex the entire night and all hell breaking loose in the X-mansion the morning after.) But all their shared and individual issues enable Scott to understand Emma and get through to her at the end; all Kitty’s happiness with Peter falls apart because he can’t understand what happened to her, and she is (yet) unable to tell him. Kitty, early on, defines herself as someone with a protective, not aggressive power, and in one of the set pieces at the start of the “Dangerous” arc, we see her and Emma use both their powers that way, in tandem, as the X-men fight a monster: they both work to get civilians out of the battle line and make sure they’re not harmed by the superheroic goings-on. Yet by the time Torn ends, we’ve seen quite how aggressive Kitty’s power can be – she used it to threaten Emma, to threaten Peter in her false reality (that image with the axe in his brain, only not materialized because she’s holding it, not only picks up her threat from “Gifted” but is one of the scariest I can think of), and she’s come that close to killing Emma, who, of course, at that point has used her own powers to hurt left, right and center. Kitty, literary, smashed through the mirror in which Emma looked, and out came a killer – who, ultimately, does not kill. Kitty’s power to phase are intimately connected with death and resurrection throughout AXM. When she rescues Peter whom she didn’t look for as she didn’t know he was alive, she had to sink deep first, and when he sees her, he takes her for something else altogether: “Finally… God.. Am I – God, please… am I finally dead?” Now look at Emma, seeing Kitty in the final issue of Torn, when Kitty dives down again to do what Scott asked her to do: she doesn’t see Kitty, either. She sees what she wants, much as Peter did: “Death.” (“Cry me a river, bitch,” says Kitty in one of those Joss moments of puncturing pathos, “we’re going up”.) Emma didn’t bring you here to open the box, Scott tells Kitty, that was Cassandra’s reason. Emma brought you here to be her death. Kitty, who dreams Emma’s dream of Genosha full of corpses and the accusation “why did you let us die?” before all hell breaks lose, seems eminently suited for the role. Because that is what the unforgiving past does. It kills you.
Only it doesn’t. Why not? Because everything does change, and so much has happened in the meantime. “What have we learned?” Emma asks her new students in the first issue. “They will always hate us.” Well, yes and no. Her students don’t. Emma taking the fact she’s a teacher very seriously is something that seems to stay true no matter who writes her – and it was true even in her supervillain days. Even the dead student, the one with whose dead body she was found in Genosha, the one who is never there at all but by Cassandra-manipulated Emma manifesting her brings it up: “You’re the teacher, and not me,” says Nagasonic Teenage Warhead. What does she teach? Ethics, among other things, to Kitty’s indignation. Charles Xavier’s old subject, that topic at which ambiguous characters excel. Two sides, shades of grey. The only one aside from Kitty who has a similar simple view of Emma is Cassandra Nova, who tells her, in what is presumably the start of the mental manipulation, that (fake?) memory opening the “Torn” arc: “You’re a predator (…), at the end of the day, you will do what’s best for you.”
Scott Summers, who knows Emma best of all the characters in AXM, has a different take on her. In my review of #13 and #14, I compared the panel in which Emma shows up in Jean’s costume (well, mentally anyway) to the Wesley-Lilah scene from Apocalypse, Nowish, but aslikeadeuce mentioned yesterday to me, the AtS relationships Scott and Emma come closest to aren’t really Wesley and Lilah at all. Angel and Faith, she said, and Angel and human Darla, with Wesley/Kitty as the onlooker. And there is much to this. It’s not that Scott is in denial about Emma’s past (he doesn’t reply to Nick Fury’s pointed “and how’s Miss Frost?” question apropos harbouring dangerous criminals at Xavier’s), or unaware that in the present, she still prefers the ruthless and not necessarily humane route (witness his outburst when she’s defending Charles at the end of “Dangerous” about her “elitist crap”); it’s that this is part of the package, of Emma entire, much as Jean and his own failings are part of his. In a scene from “Dangerous” which is fascinating when read with the knowledge of “Torn” because it prefigures so much, you have Scott talking to temporarily unconscious Emma (who got knocked out along with every other psychic in the building by Danger). We know, though he doesn’t, that there is another voice talking to her at the same time. “Come on, Emma,” says Scott. “Hank says there is nothing wrong physically, no reason you can’t wake up, which means something is shutting you down. That may work on these kids… but you’re Emma Frost. Do you hear me?”
The voice, which we now know to be Cassandra’s, comments: “Honestly, since for once you can’t actually interrupt, I have to ask: …Summers? Really? I know you wanted to cement your standing in the group, but if that geek was sharing my bed, I think I’d try not to wake up.”
Emma does wake up eventually, of course. And what shut her down to begin with might have been more than Danger; the simultaneous demands of Scott and Cassandra who talk to very different Emmas, and the awareness of what was to come. But she wakes up, because she’s Emma Frost.
Memories, true and false, and the changes of memories and what this says are important here. Check outlikeadeuce’s essay for an analysis of how crucial the desert scene that opens issue #14 is and what the change between the actual dialogue in the Dark Phoenix arc and the way Scott remembers it signifies. There is another difference between actual event and memory within “Torn” itself. In #14, when Emma has led Scott to the “bug room” in his mind, she says: “Your private little hell, courtesy of Cassandra Nova. Mine’s much more upscale – you should come find me sometime.” While saying this, she looks at the bugs, the invented monsters, while Scott looks away from them, saying “I’ll fail you”. When Scott remembers this part of his mental ride through hell in #18, though, he remembers it as Emma looking away from the monster, directly at him, and him looking back at her. In #14, he asks her what she’s trying to do – destroy him? That this was done before. She replies she’s trying to find him, and then comes the scene in which she asks him to find her. In #18, this is what he does. He finds her. Based on his knowledge of her, that intimate knowledge which goes far deeper than sexual issues, and which can be used to destroy – or to save. One of the crucial features of the Dark Phoenix arc – and one of the reasons why the movie version is a let down in comparison – is Scott’s ability to keep faith with Jean. Not in the sense of “I love you so much that I don’t care you’re falling apart and killing people by the millions” but in the sense of “I love you, and I won’t let you do this, but I won’t reject you or leave you, either”. And there we are indeed closer to Angel with either Faith or human Darla than Wesley with Lilah, because Wesley, as opposed to what he’s telling himself in “Salvage”, never tried to “save” Lilah or to persuade her she could save herself, that she could stop.
The Phoenix Force - in the comics, as opposed to the movie – was not something that originated within Jean herself, it came from outside and was alien, but it became part of who she was later. What happens with Emma is a mixed affair as well; it reminds me of nothing as much as Garibaldi’s season 4 storyline in Babylon 5. Wherein the telepath Bester, who needs Garibaldi for his own purposes, uses something which is present in Garibaldi – Garibaldi’s distrust of authorities, his paranoia – and heightens it until it overwhelms all else, which turns Garibaldi against his friends and causes him to commit an enormous betrayal. Similarly, Cassandra uses what is present in Emma – it wouldn’t work half as well if it was something alien – and heightens it to the nth degree: her survivor’s guilt, her awareness of her past, her fear that the past and that past self is really all there is to her; her predator instinct, her ruthlessness. But Garibaldi doesn’t get back to “normal” until Bester lets him go, after he accomplished the mission Bester needed him for; Emma, on the other hand, comes to the breaking point in “Torn”… and sends someone to hell. Cassandra? Herself? We won’t know until the next arc, but as I said in my review of #18, the way it gets presented augurs more for Emma being able to do what Cassandra so smugly has declared her unable to. Because she’s more than any one of those shards of the past, because she is so many things, and a survivor with a death wish is just one of them. In summation, though? She’s an adult woman with a past and a future. And a complex relationship. Written by Joss Whedon.
likeadeuce’s splendid essay here.With the exception of works such as Sandman by Neil Gaiman - invented, written and concluded (as in really concluded, no more sequels) by a single writer – comics are a multiple author affair. Which makes the definition of canon and in character or out of character writing fiendishly difficult (witness Magneto, who seems to be a tragic hero or raving lunatic depending on the whim of the author in question). It also means that each time a new writer tackles previously established characters, readers, not surprisingly, will look at his or her own previous repertoire and draw conclusions about how X is going to handle this particular universe.
In the case of Joss Whedon, this meant, among other things, that throughout his run of AXM so far there has been, along with praise, distrust and/or accusation along the following lines:
1) Joss can’t handle adult women and sexually mature relationships.
2) Therefore, what he’s doing with Emma must be the vilification of an adult woman and a sexually mature relationship.
Leaving alone charge 1) (which I don’t agree with, but discussion of the Jossverse in its three incarnations would lead too far from the subject at hand) , 2) has led people to overlook how Joss has actually been writing Emma, Kitty, Scott and the rest of the gang. Because above all, and this has been clear even before #18 came out, Joss takes Emma seriously. Her backstory, spawned by multiple authors - all her backstory. Emma the villain, Emma the teacher, Emma the survivor of a horrible genocide, Emma the woman who fell in love with Scott Summers, Emma the manipulator and Emma the heroine.
Emma has been introduced to the Marvelverse at the same time Kitty Pryde was, during the Dark Phoenix arc, in the same issue. I have no doubt that one of the reasons Joss included Kitty in the cast for AXM because he loved the character as a teenager, but that doesn’t mean it was the only one. Kitty and Emma, Emma and Kitty: they are each other’s foils, parallels and contrasts, and they are eminently suitable for this. “Nothing has changed,” is the first thing we hear, err, read Kitty say, in “Gifted”, as she returns to the school she had been as a teenager; she also says, a few panels later, that she feels surrounded by “smaller pieces; shards of me”.
Flash forward to near the end of Torn, and who is surrounded by smaller pieces, shards of her? (Visualized literary that way by John Cassady.) Emma. Kitty, who insists nothing has changed to reassure herself (it’s a sentence she repeats several times, and it becomes less true each time), is in many ways the past to Emma: the unforgiving past. Now that’s not an endearing role. But an important one. In my essay about Londo Mollari, a Babylon 5 character, I mentioned that one of the unusual features about Londo’s storyarc is that his fall gets equal screentime to his redemption, whereas in most cases, if a character is meant to be redeemed, the misdeeds get a few flashbacks at most, with the result that characters in the present-day storyline who hold them against the currently-in-the-process-of-redemption person usually get resented by the audience. A similar reaction if new viewers/readers join an ongoing saga and get to know a character only after the character in question has made the switch from villain to hero. (Case in point: Spike and the “why do the Scoobies take such a long time to trust/accept him?” complaints. You can usually tell which part of the audience saw him first in s2, and which ones got their first impression from s5 onwards.) With a decade-spawning saga, you have to be aware that a great many of your readers won’t have read the issues that present Emma in her White Queen days. With Kitty, however, you have a character who remembers it all, because she had a front row seat when it happened: Emma kidnapping, torturing and killing people, with glee. “I learned more about good and evil in that one day” (that she met Emma) than I ever have before or since,” says Kitty to Emma. “I was thirteen. When I think about evil, whenever I think about the concept of evil, yours is the face that I see.”
Yet if Kitty is the living reminder that Emma isn’t just a sharp-tongued woman with a heart of gold whose only misdeed was to conduct a psychic affair with a married man, she’s far from being the narrative point of view, or able to understand Emma in her entirety; nor are her accusations always on target. This gets made clear quite early on as well, in the same conversation, when Kitty accuses Emma of causing Scott to question himself, which isn’t just silly if you know any X-men continuity (when has Scott done anything else?) but if you’ve seen Emma, only a few panels before, bolstering his confidence. (Now later in the storyline we’ll what Emma does when she wants/needs to destroy Scott’s confidence, and it’s not pretty. And about as far from what Kitty imagines as it can get.) Kitty, who insists nothing changes, is put through a rapid series of changes, starting with her discovery of Peter Rasputin – the first of many escaping-my-prison images/motifs which show up throughout three arcs, with Danger doing just this in the second one and then everyone having to do it in the third, locked in themselves as they are, to foil Cassandra, who plots and schemes to escape from her prison throughout the entire run. For Kitty, this climaxes in the horrible irony of experiencing something which, in pure technical terms, doesn’t happen – nothing changes, indeed, to the outward world, it’s just a matter of a few minutes, but to Kitty, it’s three years of having a child, being betrayed by everyone else and losing that child. And afterwards, she can’t go back and pretend this didn’t happen, that nothing changed between her and the other X-men, notably Peter: to her, it did.
Kitty’s relationship with Peter seems to be the counterpart to Emma’s with Scott: the young, happy couple, lovers long separated finding each other again, as opposed to the older, messed up couple, with their collective emotional baggage. (Incidentally, if you want to look for evidence of the accusing kind re: Joss and sex, Scott and Emma are the wrong tree to bark at altogether; check out Kitty and Peter having wild sex the entire night and all hell breaking loose in the X-mansion the morning after.) But all their shared and individual issues enable Scott to understand Emma and get through to her at the end; all Kitty’s happiness with Peter falls apart because he can’t understand what happened to her, and she is (yet) unable to tell him. Kitty, early on, defines herself as someone with a protective, not aggressive power, and in one of the set pieces at the start of the “Dangerous” arc, we see her and Emma use both their powers that way, in tandem, as the X-men fight a monster: they both work to get civilians out of the battle line and make sure they’re not harmed by the superheroic goings-on. Yet by the time Torn ends, we’ve seen quite how aggressive Kitty’s power can be – she used it to threaten Emma, to threaten Peter in her false reality (that image with the axe in his brain, only not materialized because she’s holding it, not only picks up her threat from “Gifted” but is one of the scariest I can think of), and she’s come that close to killing Emma, who, of course, at that point has used her own powers to hurt left, right and center. Kitty, literary, smashed through the mirror in which Emma looked, and out came a killer – who, ultimately, does not kill. Kitty’s power to phase are intimately connected with death and resurrection throughout AXM. When she rescues Peter whom she didn’t look for as she didn’t know he was alive, she had to sink deep first, and when he sees her, he takes her for something else altogether: “Finally… God.. Am I – God, please… am I finally dead?” Now look at Emma, seeing Kitty in the final issue of Torn, when Kitty dives down again to do what Scott asked her to do: she doesn’t see Kitty, either. She sees what she wants, much as Peter did: “Death.” (“Cry me a river, bitch,” says Kitty in one of those Joss moments of puncturing pathos, “we’re going up”.) Emma didn’t bring you here to open the box, Scott tells Kitty, that was Cassandra’s reason. Emma brought you here to be her death. Kitty, who dreams Emma’s dream of Genosha full of corpses and the accusation “why did you let us die?” before all hell breaks lose, seems eminently suited for the role. Because that is what the unforgiving past does. It kills you.
Only it doesn’t. Why not? Because everything does change, and so much has happened in the meantime. “What have we learned?” Emma asks her new students in the first issue. “They will always hate us.” Well, yes and no. Her students don’t. Emma taking the fact she’s a teacher very seriously is something that seems to stay true no matter who writes her – and it was true even in her supervillain days. Even the dead student, the one with whose dead body she was found in Genosha, the one who is never there at all but by Cassandra-manipulated Emma manifesting her brings it up: “You’re the teacher, and not me,” says Nagasonic Teenage Warhead. What does she teach? Ethics, among other things, to Kitty’s indignation. Charles Xavier’s old subject, that topic at which ambiguous characters excel. Two sides, shades of grey. The only one aside from Kitty who has a similar simple view of Emma is Cassandra Nova, who tells her, in what is presumably the start of the mental manipulation, that (fake?) memory opening the “Torn” arc: “You’re a predator (…), at the end of the day, you will do what’s best for you.”
Scott Summers, who knows Emma best of all the characters in AXM, has a different take on her. In my review of #13 and #14, I compared the panel in which Emma shows up in Jean’s costume (well, mentally anyway) to the Wesley-Lilah scene from Apocalypse, Nowish, but as
likeadeuce mentioned yesterday to me, the AtS relationships Scott and Emma come closest to aren’t really Wesley and Lilah at all. Angel and Faith, she said, and Angel and human Darla, with Wesley/Kitty as the onlooker. And there is much to this. It’s not that Scott is in denial about Emma’s past (he doesn’t reply to Nick Fury’s pointed “and how’s Miss Frost?” question apropos harbouring dangerous criminals at Xavier’s), or unaware that in the present, she still prefers the ruthless and not necessarily humane route (witness his outburst when she’s defending Charles at the end of “Dangerous” about her “elitist crap”); it’s that this is part of the package, of Emma entire, much as Jean and his own failings are part of his. In a scene from “Dangerous” which is fascinating when read with the knowledge of “Torn” because it prefigures so much, you have Scott talking to temporarily unconscious Emma (who got knocked out along with every other psychic in the building by Danger). We know, though he doesn’t, that there is another voice talking to her at the same time. “Come on, Emma,” says Scott. “Hank says there is nothing wrong physically, no reason you can’t wake up, which means something is shutting you down. That may work on these kids… but you’re Emma Frost. Do you hear me?” The voice, which we now know to be Cassandra’s, comments: “Honestly, since for once you can’t actually interrupt, I have to ask: …Summers? Really? I know you wanted to cement your standing in the group, but if that geek was sharing my bed, I think I’d try not to wake up.”
Emma does wake up eventually, of course. And what shut her down to begin with might have been more than Danger; the simultaneous demands of Scott and Cassandra who talk to very different Emmas, and the awareness of what was to come. But she wakes up, because she’s Emma Frost.
Memories, true and false, and the changes of memories and what this says are important here. Check out
likeadeuce’s essay for an analysis of how crucial the desert scene that opens issue #14 is and what the change between the actual dialogue in the Dark Phoenix arc and the way Scott remembers it signifies. There is another difference between actual event and memory within “Torn” itself. In #14, when Emma has led Scott to the “bug room” in his mind, she says: “Your private little hell, courtesy of Cassandra Nova. Mine’s much more upscale – you should come find me sometime.” While saying this, she looks at the bugs, the invented monsters, while Scott looks away from them, saying “I’ll fail you”. When Scott remembers this part of his mental ride through hell in #18, though, he remembers it as Emma looking away from the monster, directly at him, and him looking back at her. In #14, he asks her what she’s trying to do – destroy him? That this was done before. She replies she’s trying to find him, and then comes the scene in which she asks him to find her. In #18, this is what he does. He finds her. Based on his knowledge of her, that intimate knowledge which goes far deeper than sexual issues, and which can be used to destroy – or to save. One of the crucial features of the Dark Phoenix arc – and one of the reasons why the movie version is a let down in comparison – is Scott’s ability to keep faith with Jean. Not in the sense of “I love you so much that I don’t care you’re falling apart and killing people by the millions” but in the sense of “I love you, and I won’t let you do this, but I won’t reject you or leave you, either”. And there we are indeed closer to Angel with either Faith or human Darla than Wesley with Lilah, because Wesley, as opposed to what he’s telling himself in “Salvage”, never tried to “save” Lilah or to persuade her she could save herself, that she could stop. The Phoenix Force - in the comics, as opposed to the movie – was not something that originated within Jean herself, it came from outside and was alien, but it became part of who she was later. What happens with Emma is a mixed affair as well; it reminds me of nothing as much as Garibaldi’s season 4 storyline in Babylon 5. Wherein the telepath Bester, who needs Garibaldi for his own purposes, uses something which is present in Garibaldi – Garibaldi’s distrust of authorities, his paranoia – and heightens it until it overwhelms all else, which turns Garibaldi against his friends and causes him to commit an enormous betrayal. Similarly, Cassandra uses what is present in Emma – it wouldn’t work half as well if it was something alien – and heightens it to the nth degree: her survivor’s guilt, her awareness of her past, her fear that the past and that past self is really all there is to her; her predator instinct, her ruthlessness. But Garibaldi doesn’t get back to “normal” until Bester lets him go, after he accomplished the mission Bester needed him for; Emma, on the other hand, comes to the breaking point in “Torn”… and sends someone to hell. Cassandra? Herself? We won’t know until the next arc, but as I said in my review of #18, the way it gets presented augurs more for Emma being able to do what Cassandra so smugly has declared her unable to. Because she’s more than any one of those shards of the past, because she is so many things, and a survivor with a death wish is just one of them. In summation, though? She’s an adult woman with a past and a future. And a complex relationship. Written by Joss Whedon.
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 06:40 pm (UTC)I must point out though, reading the concern over Emma as solely down to Whedon fan issues is an over-simplification. (On those Whedon fan issues, I agree that a lot of it is down to pissed-off Wes/Lilah shippers and people who don't know the difference between "naughty" and "evil", but I do think there's a kernal of truth about older or less "innocent" women suffering more violent and irrevocable fates after sex than younger women or men in Whedon's shows.)
There were also the facts that X-Men has form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madelyne_Pryor) for gratuitous and arbitrary villainising of women who get in the way of the fated love of Scott and Jean, that Grant Morrison fans already had reasons to be pissed off about the indecent haste and tortured plots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorn) with which Marvel retconned controversial aspects of Morrison's run and suspicious that Whedon had an editorial mandate to make Emma simply bad again, and that there was and still is general upset in superhero comics circles about recent years' arbitrary villainisation of female characters seemingly for the sake of it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_Cain) or to support (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Loring) implausible plots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_Witch).
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 06:54 pm (UTC)(Incidentally, I've read Red Son now and will probably post a few thoughts at some point.)
I'm looking forward to your thoughts about the three arcs!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 07:43 pm (UTC)Yeah, there's. . .really no defending any storyline involving poor Maddie (except maybe the issue of Cable where Maddie and Jean fight on the astral plane over who is Cable's real mommy -- OK, there's really no excuse for that either, except that I'm addicted to Summers family dysfunction and thus find it cracktastically awesome).
I don't know how much you've read, Selena, but by analogy, Maddie is the original Lauren Reed, except that at least Vaughan didn't fall for Lauren because she looked exactly like Sydney. Also, JJ & Co at least cut the scenes where Lauren hypnotized Michael into loving her (whereas Marvel actually went back and ADDED same re: Scott/Maddie).
no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 07:12 pm (UTC)Going off to reccomend it to people now.
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Date: 2006-11-18 10:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 07:39 pm (UTC)I particularly like the observations about Kitty's arc (what changes, what doesn't) and the aggressive potential of her power. Interesting that "I can phase you into something and kill you" was first mentioned to Emma in "Gifted" -- in an exasperated "God, woman, won't you hold still?" way -- and then turns into a real threat which she uses not against Emma but (terrifyingly, as you said) against Peter -- only in the dream, yes, but it's a dream that's extremely real to her.
It's really fascinating to look back and see how Kitty's point-of-view functions throughout the three arcs -- Joss has variously mentioned Kitty and Scott as the characters he identifies with in writing AXM, which is interesting because when it comes to Emma these two are pretty much diametrically opposed, from the start. Kitty comes in with "you can't change who you are and you'll show your true colors one day" while Scott, as I mentioned before, doesn't actually deny Emma's former villainry, but doesn't really factor it in. As far as he's concerned, she's proved her true loyalty.
"Torn" initially seems to confirm Kitty's point-of-view and refute Scott's, and ending issue 15 with Kitty's echo of the Wolverine line in Dark Phoenix (now it's my turn! -- which, hmm, sounds vaguely familiar if one has seen Serenity) seems to confirm that, in fact, nothing has changed. I think the Wolverine panel is actually from the Xmen's confrontation with the Hellfire club, if not with Emma herself (will have to check the book when I get home). Most of issue 16 seems to confirm that it's all going to be about Kitty going Ninja and coming back to kick ass and then. . .it turns out it's all part of the plan and Kitty is going to be victimized by the White Queen, once again. Issue 17 goes further to get the reader sympathizing along with Kitty (it worked on me, anyway) and the last panel (together with the first few of 18) suggests that even Scott has come around to Kitty's point of view. And then. . .the last half of the book ends up being about overcoming the instinct for vengeance, represented by Kitty, and see that Scott was coming from the right place all along.
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Date: 2006-11-17 07:43 pm (UTC)It is not, I think, going to matter that everything Kitty did in her hallucination was not real; she is always going to know that she did it. Without hesitation.
And this makes her and Emma each other's Dark Mirrors even more so -- Emma has faced her entire life with no regret until guilt and regret crush her. Kitty has avoided facing her life in any meaningful way until she is forced to face Emma, and now her future is darker, more complex, but potentially more alive that it was before.
oh, yay.
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Date: 2006-11-17 07:48 pm (UTC)I'm totally willing for this storyline to end up with Kitty/Emma if Scott can end up with Logan.
Which I guess means poor Peter has to die again.
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Date: 2006-11-17 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 11:16 pm (UTC)That is, if you're a century old and have done loads of ill-advised and socially disapproved stuff, you must surely have experimented at some point, if only be able to say you had.
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Date: 2006-11-18 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-10 06:25 pm (UTC)... Tease. :(
I was quite mollified by the wrapping up of AXM, and the justifications involved. This, along with what we see from Emma Frost (15-18) really sort of helps flesh Emma out into a more three dimensional character, which I love. I just don't have the words to analyze it nearly as well as you have.
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Date: 2007-03-10 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 12:17 pm (UTC)Because one of the things that was annoying about later seasons of Buffy was that Whedon never had his "good" characters who had done truly evil things really forced to face what they'd done except by characters who were dismissed as having no moral leg to stand on because they were bitterly vengeful or evil themselves. Eg Anya and Stewart in Hells Bells, Willow and Amy in The Killer In Me, and Spike and Wood in Lies My Parents Told Me. As opposed to Angel who constantly got it in the neck from his friends, let alone victims. I'll always see Angel-Holtz versus Spike-Wood as showing gross authorial favouritism to Spike because Holtz's actions are far more sadistic, cold-blooded, and damaging to innocent people than Wood's, yet unlike with Wood the story never suggests that Holtz doesn't have the right to feel angry.
I haven't read the comics yet, and will probably wait until this story comes out in collected form to read it, but it sounds as if Kitty versus Emma is rather more two-sided and less minimising of past crimes.
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Date: 2006-11-18 12:50 pm (UTC)it sounds as if Kitty versus Emma is rather more two-sided and less minimising of past crimes.
That was where I was going with a lot of the entire post, yeah. Kitty's in the Holtz/Wood position, only she's not a bad guy. (Perhaps Xander position vis a vis Angel in s3 would be a better comparison?) And Emma is definitely Angel there.
Oh, and another thing, re: evil tart accusations: this is one of the most glaring cases of people projecting. Because at no point does either Kitty nor anyone else insult Emma with sexual slander. At no point is Emma presented as promiscuos. (Including when Sebastian Shaw shows up via manifestation - if you read just AXM, you wouldn't know the two had a sexual past, they never touch nor allude to it.) Emma and Scott having sex is presented as a part of their relationship, but by no means the main part. (Another reason why I like it better here than in Morrison's run.) Meanwhile, Kitty is presented as a young woman with an active sex life. Definitely no virginal heroine. So we're about as far from even the slightest insinuation of madonna versus whore as we can get.
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Date: 2006-11-18 02:03 pm (UTC)As I am advocating, this is not Joss's old Coming of Age Story; this is his newer Redpemption is Hard and Hurts Like Hell Story.
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Date: 2006-11-18 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 04:22 pm (UTC)That's my favorite season -- all about the redemption -- Willow, Faith, Spike, even Buffy in some ways.
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Date: 2006-11-18 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 04:43 pm (UTC)Looking back, making Scott/Jean explicitly sensual in the flashback also relates to your statement that Scott is able to open up to Emma not in spite of but because of his previous relationship with Jean - he doesn't separate emotionally and physically intense relationships.
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Date: 2006-11-18 04:08 pm (UTC)Just friended you, hope that's OK - no need to friend back, I just don't want to miss any of your insights after this amazing post.
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Date: 2006-11-18 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 04:38 pm (UTC)Nifty!
Date: 2006-11-18 05:31 pm (UTC)Re: Nifty!
Date: 2006-11-18 05:45 pm (UTC)Not before you pointed it out, but...
.........
!!!!!!
......
Re: Nifty!
Date: 2006-11-18 06:42 pm (UTC)Nifty!
Date: 2006-11-19 07:23 am (UTC)......
Came in late
Date: 2006-12-28 09:32 am (UTC)(Now later in the storyline we’ll see what Emma does when she wants/needs to destroy Scott’s confidence, and it’s not pretty.
Surely that conversation, in a twisted way, also has its therapeutic aspects? ("You hear one thing in this room that isn't at least a little bit true...")
I can't help but read that as one action serving many agendas, like a good chess move. "The Hellfire Club" wants to remove Cyclops, an X-Man, from the field; Emma Frost is helping the man she loves deal with his issues, but can't be completely dispassionate or self-effacing... she helps as she can. And I don't mean to reduce everything to easy dualities- I think there are more interpretations, and I think of the crowd of Emmas on the cover of AXM 18- but it's very late....
Anyway, as I said, great essay.
Re: Came in late
Date: 2006-12-28 10:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-12 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-12 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-12 06:10 pm (UTC)Emma Frost fascinates me too and is my favorite Marvel character. I know, it sounds lame compared to the other characters out there like Wolverine, Spider-Man, the Cap, and who else but Emma is freaking amazing and a very relatable character.
Regarding this subject, I also thought one of the reasons why Emma started the 'psychotic fit' (lol) was because she was having post traumatic stress while on Genosha. Cassandra Nova knew exactly what she was doing and then struck Emma at her weakest point.
I wondered why Scott didn't tell Emma that 'she didn't have to go there,' unlike what Peter told Kitty.
Just a little thought I'd share. Talk to ya later. :P
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Date: 2008-03-02 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-03 05:28 am (UTC)And Moose!Logan will never stop being funny, but that's another aspect I couldn't cover in this particular essay.*g*
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Date: 2008-03-03 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-03 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-03 07:23 am (UTC)Thanks for the Chandler, though!
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Date: 2008-03-03 07:24 am (UTC)