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Fantastic Four #7 - “The Enemy of the Good” (2023)

written by Ryan North art by Iban Coello & Jesus Aburtov

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i don’t give a shit that he’s 6’2 i want him MOANING and WHIMPERING

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I've been catching up on the latest Fantastic Four issues and I kind of say that it irks me how they can easily joke about the 'Johnny accidentally marrying a skrull' It just seems a sensitive situation that really messed with Johnny. But now I see people saying that Lyja and Johnny are on their way to getting back together. That's messed up right? Even if she's a better person it doesn't fix what she did to him. It's messed up right?

Yeah, it’s messed up. I think there’s a series of things to going on here that haven’t been addressed in the comics, with the first being that Fantastic Four as a series has never been consistently upfront and honest about what Lyja did to Johnny. I mean, she does it, it’s on the page, they literally keep writing it -- there’s even an interconnected Namor issue where he mistakes Lyja for his shapeshifting rapist and that issue is much more open about what exactly the act of sleeping with someone else for nefarious purposes while disguised as a person they trust is, but still not great about transferring that label onto Lyja. So it’s hard to blame a lot of readers, especially casual readers or readers who are coming from a background where sexual assault isn’t something they’ve personally experienced or been under threat from, for not connecting the dots when the book doesn’t directly say, hey, this is bad, this behavior is wrong, and instead plays it both ways: it’s a horrific villainous assault and it’s romantic drama. Which it’s not, it’s just the first one, but the book needs to directly say that. And it doesn’t. 

So if you have Johnny stuck in a dynamic where he’s explicitly gaslit and kidnapped (Fantastic Four: Secret Invasion) but at the last second you say, oh, she was doing it to protect him, without explaining any of the behavior that came before, what do you about that? If you have him harassed, if you have him explicitly stalked by someone who knows he wouldn’t want to see them in their own form (Fantastic Four: Unplugged and Avengers: Unplugged), but you say, oh, it’s okay, because she’s in love with him, what do you do about that? If you explicitly parallel the scenario against Namor’s rape down to Namor at first suspecting Lyja is his rapist, but then you don’t take that final step by saying these two situations actually are the same, if you twist it last second to try and make Lyja look sympathetic by having her weep over the egg baby she’ll later reveal she knew was fake, what do you do about that? And for me that’s tougher than the actual content of the Lyja arc. It’s one thing to depict a nonconsensual relationship, stalking, abuse, etc, in your work, but it’s another to continually refuse to label it as what it is.

It becomes a question of “are you actually writing this story as a fully fleshed out narrative where there are consequences” or “are you writing some kind of weird fantasy where your human wife turns out to be a hot green space babe in assless chaps”? And with Lyja we usually end up with the second and it just keeps perpetuating itself in a cycle, down to recently when Jeremy Whitley responded to criticism of her inclusion in his Future Foundation book by saying that Lyja redeemed herself for everything she did to Johnny when she “died” (she never died) saving him in Fantastic Four #359. Except the problem with that is that a huge amount of what Lyja does to Johnny (the attempt on his life that ends with ESU burning down, both pregnancy lies, stalking him as Laura Green, etc) happens after that. Not to mention that it’s just bad form to say that someone’s abuser is automatically forgiven for everything they’ve done to them because they did one good thing once. 

The other kind of bigger picture problem is that Fantastic Four as a series has a lot of trouble when it comes to the topic of Johnny and the portrayal of his romance arcs. I have a lot of additional feelings about this -- I think at a certain point with incredibly long running characters they kind of take on a life of their own, and I think if you continually push a certain kind of subtext it rises into the text, and I think both of these things have manifested Johnny as a character who, intentionally or not, has been written as a gay man for decades now -- but they’re not my main point here, which is that Fantastic Four has a history of writing sexual assault narratives for Johnny and then completely brushing them off. You have the incident with Nebula/Ravonna Renslayer in Simonson’s run where he’s bodyjacked by her in what is shown to be an incredibly painful fashion and where she uses his body to, among other things, make sexual passes at Gladiator (a whole other thing for the subtext section) and where afterwards it’s compared to him losing control of his powers, a thing that is explicitly linked to his loss of control. So you’ve got all that on top of the fact that bodyjacking stories are, a lot of the time, sexual assault metaphors. And then several issues later the book has him be like “wow that blue woman who invaded my mind and used my body to hurt people sure was beautiful, even though when she tried to kiss me I initially reacted with horror.”

(FF #337)

You have the Lyja storyline, where even when Johnny tries to permanently cut ties and tells Lyja he never wants to see her again, nobody else in his life takes him seriously and she’s just allowed to violate his wishes to be away from her. You have the Dark Reign: Zodiac miniseries where a homophobic attack on Johnny (this is text, not subtext -- I don’t really recommend reading this miniseries for various reasons, but one of them is that the attack on Johnny is a fairly explicit gay bashing scene) is pretty deliberately paralleled against his attacker having sex afterwards with his girlfriend. It’s not subtle at all. 

And then we have where we are now in Slott’s run with the whole Sky and Spyre “soulmate” plot, which started off with Johnny waking up naked in Sky’s bed with no idea how he got there and the soulmate arm band put on him without his knowledge or permission, hit its mid-way point when Sky declined to take it off of him even though he asked her to, and is now just kind of wading around with the book pretending this is all normal flirtation or something. It’s like a weak Lyja 2.0 happening over here and it’s so frustrating. Because all of this happens and then the book doesn’t address it, or if it does, it does it how you’ve mentioned, with people Johnny loves making jokes at his expense about his Skrull marriage. And it sucks! It’s really bad writing and it’s tonally awful and it just sucks. 

I think ultimately another contributing problem is that there are kind of two very big weak spots in Fantastic Four canon when it comes to emotional coherency -- do these characters act in a way that make sense? Do they display empathy for each other? Do they respond to situations in ways that are informed by their histories and relationships with each other? And those weak spots are DeFalco’s run, where the Lyja retcon happened, which is like. Okay, it was the ‘90s. A lot of things were messy. But you have things like Johnny quitting the team because he can’t bear to be around Lyja in the wake of her lying about an egg being their child when it was a man-eating monster that was going to maybe kill his family and then Sue inviting Lyja to live with them. Which is just nuts even when you take Johnny out of the equation because there was a man-eating monster that was maybe going to kill Sue’s family and Sue is inviting the person who brought it into the building and lied about it to stay. This is not how any realistically written character reacts to that scenario. And then you have the other big weak point which is, unfortunately, right now with Slott’s run, where everyone is written with the emotional depth of flattened cardboard, which is why Johnny’s family is currently making fun of him for traumatic incidents that were totally beyond his control and acting like he married Lyja after getting drunk in Vegas instead of being deliberately targeted by an alien spy. It reduces Johnny to the irresponsible playboy stereotype that he’s never been for the sake of filling up page time with easy jokes because Slott’s run doesn’t actually have a story worth telling here so he’s falling back on Skrull jokes and stories about how if we just talked to big oil they’d be our friends. And it’s just all extremely frustrating. 

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sakura and ino being canon for ten slides (“straight”)

i love my girlbosses

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I didn't ask if it made sense to keep going. I said I'm going to kick your twisted evil ass.

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The amount of anarch simps you're going to get lol

Camarilla. They're the only choice that gives a damn about the masquerade, the safety of vamps and humans in the area and unlike everyone else whos kind of just sitting on their asses doing nothing, lacroix is at least trying to get shit handled. Otherwise, independent, just because the game gives you an out from the writers failed political understanding.

Don't get me started on the bastardisation of the camarilla and the ventrue clan this game does. Just. Oof.

Also don't @ me anarch simps I have no patience and I'm also not looking to have arguments or conversations about this-block me if I make you mad xD

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I miss cosplaying.

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Michael Gough voicing both Beckett and Gimble in Bloodlines and then voicing Vilkas, Jarl Balgruuf, half the guards in the game, and Ralof in Skyrim...

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I haven't purchased a HP item in close to a decade - I use the books I already had as doorstops or to prop a laptop up for meetings nowadays.

There is NO "death of the author" with JK Rowling - she controls and continues to profit from her IP, and uses that money to fund hate groups.

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if there's one thing legitimately wrong with cr that needs discussion, it's the rampant fatphobia in its character descriptions. every single villain that is fat has their fatness treated not as incidental to their evil, but an extension or proof of their evil. for a few examples: the evil landlord in molly's comic, armand treshi, the exemplar in laudna's book, and kerrion's redesign in the cartoon. artagan basically wears a magical fatsuit as garmelie. yasha is stick thin despite being described as huge and muscular, which she logically would need body fat to... be. chetney is the sole heroic player character that's not a twig with his beer gut. gilmore's great and all but one single heroic fat guy does not make up for it.

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Vampires in 2020: *Shitting themselves because phones and CCTV are everywhere*

Vampires in 2025: My Prince, I know my childe slipped up and their Masquerade violation is now on Reddit, but I think you should let this one slide because half the commenters are saying it's staged or AI

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im going to be honest and frank with y'all.. some of you guys are so determined to hate the harmless things you hate that you start hating the people that like that thing and it's kind of really embarrassing

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naruto isn't about who's morally right or wrong, it's about who's your favourite child soldier perpetuating the cycle of violence

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I understand the value of artistic liberties but what exactly is Yugio's haircut supposed to be. I've wondered this since childhood

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Why do people in fandom get so upset when someone says they don’t like something? It can literally be anywhere from “I’m critical of elements from this show” to “I fucking hate this show” and people act like these are both lies that need to be disproven rather than just…some guys opinion

Parasocial relationship with art.

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Why did you have such a problem with Luz in the last season?

Luz's depression arc relied extremely heavily on passivity that sacrificed character work for dramatic third act twists.

Same thing with her Palisman. She gets the wood and decides to hold off on carving it. Then she decided to carve it, but carves it into an egg to hold it off even more, and then it finally does hatch but then it's still obscured for a little while.

Luz's depression is addressed and dealt with... Then it's dealt with again. Then again. Then again. She has an episode about her plan to stay in the human realm, it gets dealt with that episode... Then in the next one it's still there because she was bullshitting.

And this isn't a problem with Luz, it's a problem with the writing.

A big problem I've had with television since the shift to hyper-serialization is "shit or get off the pot." Back in ye olden days this would have been a one episode plot, and that episode would have been extremely memorable. But nowadays writers set things up with the intention of addressing it 'later' and the end result is "Well, if we're addressing this later... what are we doing today?"

Instead of serialization resulting in more complicated stories with more moving parts, the existing stories just got stretched with a lot of doing nothing in Acts 1 and 2 of every episode.

And people argue with me about this with "Um... she's depressed?! HELLO?!" But the problem isn't that it's unrealistic, it's that it's boring. You're not really doing anything but running the clock until the 3rd act because things aren't allowed to happen until then.

And it's telling that the series' sycophants have no rebuttal to that other than to act as if I'm chastising a real teenager for not having entertaining enough mental health issues.

Luz is actually irrelevant to that issue. They do the same with Hunter. He rehashes the same stage of breaking free of abuse multiple in the same way, and does nothing else for Acts 1 and 2 of every episode he's in.

Look past the reflexive knee-jerk fandom crap and see what the real issue is: Why is a single-episode plot being stretched out to the length of a film? And why is the extent of that stretching just:

"I lied to you," Luz said. "Stop lying to me," Amity said. "Okay!" Luz lied.

If you don't know how to make a story last 2 hours without making a character who has previously been very good to her girlfriend into someone who lies to her face constantly, maybe the story doesn't need to be that long.

Luz starts creating this web of lies, planning to ghost her friends and girlfriend, tells nobody because she knows they'll object, and even in the face of Belos' primary victim and accomplice saying "You were tricked, it's what he does" Luz still just boneheadedly ignores all of it.

The kind of moment where the secret gets out, she thinks everyone hates her, but surprise everyone sees her as a victim because they love her and know she wouldn't do such a thing without being manipulated is a big, important moment. It's a big emotional moment for any story. So to have it go completely in one ear and out the other just to continue the same martyr act like a dickhead is weirdly anti-climactic. It makes Amity's heartwarming echo of Luz asking her out and makes it into something hollow and meaningless.

Luz is not supposed to be stupid. Her intelligence is a fundamental and critical part of the story. Wasn't the whole reason for serialization in the first place specifically to NOT completely erase character development next episode?

And that's the problem with serialization. They take what were previously very densely packed single episode stories and stretch them out to several hours long. And they do it for no reason than because they think they can, and that because they can... they have to.