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I can’t remember where I heard about Iceman dating Pyro (Just in case what inspired this interaction) but I was instantly like “C’mon man… fire & ice? Really?” I’ve never had a problem with Bobby being gay. Even when he was written as straight he had kind of a gay vibe. Maybe that sounds weird, but when they went that direction I was like “Yeah, I can see that.” As far as Pyro goes I don’t know enough about the character. I have a vague memory of him being Australian, and a dick, and that’s about it. The idea of various characters being gay and hiding it in X-Men books makes sense on so many levels. You’re already a mutant and you have to kind of make these other mutants your surrogate family, but this blue dude is way into god and you’re worried he’ll flip out if you come out as gay on top of having ice powers, or whatever. That’s an interesting story in my opinion. Layers of bigotry to deal with even within your community? Could there be real life parallels? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

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I mean, if you’re going around calling yourself “the Flamer”, people only have themselves to blame if they can’t figure out where your preferences lie.

I HATE the “I want to criticize this but everyone else who hates it publicly is a bigoted ass” situation. There were some really interesting decisions made with The Last Jedi, some of which worked, some of which don’t, and some I’d really love to dig in and discuss because I know I don’t have the right perspective. I will never have that discussion in public, because the instant I do, someone named “Whitesaber” is going to show up and agree with me about the plot being overstuffed and blame it on “too much time spent with the whiny women” and then I’ll set something on fire with my mind.

There were some truly insane choices made in that film. Holdo being the martyr for example, which only has any emotional impact if you read the Leia book where they explain their relationship. The way they lead the rebellion is totally batshit insane & flies in the face of any kind of tactical thinking. Those are the things I instantly think of when I think of problems with the film. Framing the issue in this weird gender focused way is counterproductive. In some ways I think Rose’s arc makes sense because her character clearly doesn’t make choices based on logic at any point. She’s emotionally motivated and stays that way throughout the film. Finn starts that way, but by the end he starts to move into the realm of doing what’s best for the group only to be stymied by Rose’s actions. To me that kind of shows the warring philosophies presented in the film as a whole.

There are also several actual editing errors throughout the big fight scenes. Like Phasma suddenly teleporting out of the hanger just as its being destroyed, only to return at the head of an army. Then the prop department forgetting she had a blaster only to give her a blaster that she immediately loses as if it explains why she didn’t shoot at Finn earlier.

That’s why a lot of people don’t understand the movies. This series has – to it’s detriment – relied on a lot of books between movies to explain a lot of things that would be otherwise boring (or make a movie longer) to portray in the movies. Everything – from Finn’s motivation to Holdo’s role to Luke’s absolute disillusionment with the Force – is basically spelled out in the books that have been written in conjunction with the trilogy.

And if you think this is going to stop at a trilogy, you’re not paying attention. They are hinting at this currently storyline taking possibly 5 movies to play out.

I very much feel ya. Like, some of my favorite things in that movie were female parts, but there were other things that nettled me something fierce.

I didn’t see Last Jedi, because I didn’t like The Force Awakens. I’m too old to get invested in ANOTHER bad Star Wars trilogy.
But I shall always be fond of princess Leia’s badassitude. Anyone who thinks Star Wars is supposed to be about manly men doing manly things… clearly never watched the movies.

It was a great Jedi movie and a shitty shitty rebel movie. I live in San Diego where the actress who plays Rose is from, so she’s a female minority hometown actress in a major motion picture and I can’t talk about how shitty her writing was.

Yeah, the actors did fantastic at making the steaming pile Johnson served up watchable. Unfortunately there’s only so much that could be done on their end to salvage his fumble on the pass from Jackson.

Frankly, I don’t care about false perceptions of bigotry. I resent characters suddenly emerging as gay where they weren’t before. I also resent semirandom gender changes, race changes, or anything similar. I also resent changes in backstory or in previous events.

I am no bigot! I hate all retconning equally.

The thing I didn’t like about the whole “hey look, Bobby’s gay now!” thing was that it was simply handled so poorly. The way they went about it made a lot of people think (and with good reason) that he was mind-raped into being gay by the alt-timeline Jean Gray. They may not have intended it to come across that way, but that’s how it did to me, and to a lot of other people. So right there you’re laying the foundation for a gay character based on possible mental manipulation.

And then when they did have his own series, he came across as so petulant, whiny, and self-centered it was insane. And randomly meeting his love-interest on a street corner because the guy saw him reading a book on “how to be gay?” Seriously? Jesus, that’s dumb.

Oh jeez. I dug up the “coming out” scene because I was curious how bad it could actually be, and… wow. Just wow. It is multiple levels of bad.

There’s a whole spectrum of awful there, ranging from “wow, Jean Gray, that’s incredibly rude” at the best case, on past “did she seriously just talk him out of trying bisexuality”, and straight to “you’re gay because I used my mind powers on you!”

But even taking it as charitably as possible…
We accept that this is all on-the-level. We give Jean credit for forcing this exchange in private. We accept that she is just trying to help him avoid a lifetime’s worth of mistakes and unhappiness by saying what he already knows and just refuses to acknowledge.
But then we turn around and deduct a load of points for her being SUPER ham-handed about it and forcing a conversation he CLEARLY didn’t want to have.

Best case is “Iceman didn’t come out, Iceman was outed by his friend”, and that is a problem all on its own even without the whole mind powers thing anchoring the worst case in an entirely different class of problems.

I can understand that with Bobby being gay, but in reality, this Pyro is not John Allerdyce. This one is Simon Lasker. The biggest difference being that Simon can not only control fire, he can create it as well. John could only control fire already there, which is why he had a giant flamethrower attached to his back and jets on his arms.

Poor Simon, however, can’t get a break because the other mutants don’t care about the subtle difference in their powers, and call him PYRO anyway. Even though he wanted to originally be called something else. He’s just begrudgingly adapted to being called Pyro.

Agreed. Hell, I don’t like it because it becomes obvious they’re doing it for reasons other than “That’s the character.”

Want an original X-Man to be gay! We can’t use NorthStar. Not an original X-Man and no one knows of him! We need name recognition.

It was so obvious it was bad.

Then people going “Yay! Recognition!” ignoring all the other gay characters already out there, as if Iceman was the first.

But no, if you hate how something is done, people automatically go to bigot, racist, sexist, whatever. It’s all retarded.

Not to mention, the one I read I thought they were going cliché. Seriously, why not just have Bobby be the Bobby everyone knew and have him like guys?

It was stupid and now it’s stuck, because there is no way they’ll change this mistake.

Well, technically if you use Northstar, Bobby being gay makes more sense, since Northstar had a crush on Bobby and flirted with him a lot (even hinting he thought Bobby could change teams easily).

Bobby turned him down a few times, although the last time was a little less “I’m not gay,” and more, “I’m seeing someone else right now.”

Frosty Bob is the best superhero name ever, and I desperately want to read this comic now.

Not to be confused with Chilly Robert.

Chilly Robert runs the ice cream shop in town. He’s always busy getting something from the basement when Frosty Bob shows up, which is a shame. He’s gotta be the only person within ten miles who hasn’t gotten a chance to see Bob in action.

I remember that Northstar of Marvel’s Alpha Flight was one of the first gay mainstream comic superheroes. I was already getting away from comic books at the time and didn’t follow the story lines.

It’s a different Pyro. The original character Pyro has been dead for a while I think, the current one was just introduced within the last year.

Correct, this Pyro is Simon, who can actually create the fire he controls. The original Pyro (John) died of the techno-virus and he could only control flames that were generated by other means.

Simon only took the name because the other mutants wouldn’t stop calling him that, because they thought – rightly at first – that he was the old Pyro.

Also isn’t Pyro a supervillain? I think the whole “superhero having a relationship with a supervillain” should be left for more silly comics, fan works, and emo comic heroes like Batman. It just doesn’t make sense. Maybe Pyro has reformed at some point which is another ridiculous cliche so that’s two right there. As for the “they’ve never been depicted as gay before” criticism… that’s a legit one. You may not like it but it is and it also isn’t bigoted. They came to know a character, love him and respect him as he is. Suddenly a fundamental part of the character changes in a huge way. That’s going to create a divide. People didn’t like Spider-Man undoing his marriage using a deal with the devil, they can not like their beloved character who has had relationships with women suddenly being gay. Plus there were some rather annoying political motivations for doing it so that compounded the issue… it was just a big mess.

Besides, Cyclops was clearly the secretly gay one. I mean, all of his successful relationships were with women who were powerful psychics. Forget how their bodies looked, you get him near a woman with psychic abilities and suddenly he’s a barely controllable horn dog. It’s almost like the attraction is something being projected into his mind.

As I said above:

Pyro is not John Allerdyce. This one is Simon Lasker. The biggest difference being that Simon can not only control fire, he can create it as well. John could only control fire already there, which is why he had a giant flamethrower attached to his back and jets on his arms.

Poor Simon, however, can’t get a break because the other mutants don’t care about the subtle difference in their powers, and call him PYRO anyway. Even though he wanted to originally be called something else. He’s just begrudgingly adapted to being called Pyro.

” People didn’t like Spider-Man undoing his marriage using a deal with the devil”
Actually, Mary-Jane was the one that made the deal to super-annul the marriage.

Wha?
She went to a devil, to end her marriage? If she wants to adopt kids, what will she do?
Will she go to some Leprechauns? O.o

Ah yes, people who call others “bigots” for criticizing stupid ideas until someone gives them an argument

Well, you see… when someone sees a bigoted argument repeated ad nauseum, they tend to assume anyone who shares the core belief of the bigoted argument (In this case, Frosty Bob being in a relationship with The Flamer is stupid) is using the same reasoning.

It happens all the time in real life, and it doesn’t make the person assuming a bad person, it just means they’re used to seeing this kind of thing.

Next DC will hook up Fire & Ice.

…there’s got to be a massive AO3 tag for that, hasn’t there?

Does anyone remember Beatriz de Costa (Fire) and her friend Tora Olafsdotter (Ice)?

That was hella cheesy, and just another example of how far the Justice League/Superman story-lines had fallen. At least Ice is now dead (although she keeps coming back as a ghost under the geise of Steam – I kid you not).

I’m a complete outsider, I’ve never really read comics, so i can’t attest to the “always felt sort of gay” vibe from iceman. i guess, it sort of makes sense, if you a reader think so, but when I found out about it, i could only look back at all his failed relationships, and kids, then see the issue where Jean tells him he’s always been gay, from the outside. So to me it just looked like the new regime at Marvel Comics was pushing another agenda driven story.

That’s a reasonable assumption, partially because a lot of comic writers are pretty ham fisted, misogynistic, and tone deaf.

I have even less knowledge about it as you, because I stopped paying attention to the X Men when the cartoon was cancelled, and then briefly paid attention to them again just for the first two Fox movies, and none of the comic events that went on around that time.

Besides… fire and iron? You can do some terri-good lines derived from smithing… Striking while the Iron’s hot… Tempering the Iron’s blade…. Eh eh? -_-;

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