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newx-menfan · 20 days ago

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Laura Kinney isn’t the “Goodie Two Shoes” her fans make her out to be…and other thoughts…

Part 2: “Identity Crisis”

After Craig Kyle’s minis and the original “NYX”… Laura’s character kind of ends up in a bizarre sort of limbo…

I’m not going to summarize Claremont’s version of Laura…because truthfully…no one really cares and not a lot happened in those stories that affect anything…all people REALLY remember is Laura in the “Fang” outfit and meeting Spider-Man anyway…

Laura became “Captain Universe” at some point after Claremont….(that kind of becomes important later in Liu’s solo)…but was kind of a mediocre story…

Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost are then put on the continuation of “New X-Men: Academy X” after “Decimation” and “House of M”…aka Scarlet Witch has a breakdown, creates a false universe, then says “No More Mutants” (that’s a really short summary of events…but whatever…).

(“Tsunami” Marvel’s Manga-esque line’s logo)

This WAS the modern X-Men teen book, that was essentially modeled after “slice of life” mangas and “Harry Potter”. It was the “happy-go-lucky” teen book, that Marvel suddenly decided now needed teens getting blow up in a bus to spice things up….

This isn’t really uncommon; “New Mutants” technically did get darker from its original premise, as the series went on. So did the original “X-Factor” and “Power Pack”…

But a lot of fans objected to the extreme amounts of violence. The original writers of the series, DeFillippis and Weir, have talked about how they were taken off guard by some of Marvel’s choices and not adequately warned that their characters would be horribly killed.

Laura was tacked on as a last minute addition…and did objectively take away a lot of the focus.

Fans have accused Laura for being the reason Wind Dancer was ultimately depowered…(so Hellion could now be her love interest)…Wallflower was killed (“Laurie” sounded too similar to “Laura”) and many other accusations and complaints…including that “NXM” had more or less become a stealth “X-23” solo….

And…I do objectively agree with people that a lot of the focus was on Laura…KYOST DID use this title to sell her to fans that HADN’T read the mini’s or to bring in people put off by “NYX”….and they totally used this book to focus on making her look “cool”…

The question that haunts “Academy X” is basically this- would other characters have been potentially more popular/not inevitably become wallpaper…if Laura HADN’T been added TO that book…

But I do feel like you could, ultimately, have the SAME question about Quentin Quire…how many more interesting Morrison characters like Beak, Fantomex, Ernst, or Angel…ultimately got sidelined, because he was the most popular one out of that era?

But QQ at least started in Morrison’s book- people take objection with Laura because she was tacked on by her creators to another book when they took over… she felt forced into a book that ALREADY had a pretty set cast and story.

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This BECOMES a pretty common re-occurring problem for Laura…

In MANY ways I think you can argue…Laura wasn’t really successful outside of “Innocence Lost” and “Target X”…

Claremonts version and NYX technically came out in 2004, before Craig Kyle’s minis.

She didn’t fit well into Claremont’s writing and truthfully was kind of overshadowed by Kitty, Rachel, and Psylocke…she was just kind of awkwardly thrown onto that book, and frankly, wasn’t very interesting. She couldn’t really hold her own to complex Clarmontian characters…at least, not at that time.

With “NYX”, while she was the break out character…it wasn’t really a book Laura would have ever become very popular FROM. She barely even uttered a word in that story. I think…honestly…she would have ultimately BEEN lost and forgotten…if Kyle and Yost HADN’T done the minis and hadn’t had the brilliant idea of putting her in NXM…which was ALREADY a pretty popular book, even before “Decimation” happened.

In many ways…I would say…it’s funny to me that SO MANY X-23 fans and writers HATE ON “New X-Men”…because Laura AS A CHARACTER really needed that book. She needed peers and characters to bounce off of, and frankly at that time, she wasn’t a strong enough character or concept to really be on page with iconic characters like Kitty Pryde.

Even WITH her connection to Wolverine, the TOP selling character in X-Men….She 100% would have probably been the next AU “Wild Thing”…or “Jimmy Hudson” in “Ultimate X-Men”…if it wasn’t for “New X-Men: Academy X” giving her more grounding…

That book probably saved Laura from irrelevancy.

And that is what’s KIND OF ANNOYING ABOUT IT- writers AND SOME FANS refuse to acknowledge her HISTORY of NXM AND BEING PART OF THAT TEAM…even though THAT BOOK WAS REALLY WHAT SOLIDIFIED that X-23 COULD even be in team books and BE a sellable character.

As much as Marjorie Liu trashed “NXM”…Laura wouldn’t have probably even had that solo…if it wasn’t FOR “NXM”…

Part of the reason “NXM” worked…was because it was essentially a “darker” version of “X-Men Evolution”…where X-23 ALL STARTED…

“NXM” really was the LAST solid teen book, that felt on par to “New Mutants” and the original “Generation X”. All other teen books and YA comics in the X-office have basically relied on NXM’s popularity and character appearances since then…

And YET…”NXM” kind of became this weird, double edged sword for Laura….

When she would inevitably join new teams- “Avengers Academy”…”All New X-Men”….the main “X-Men” line-up; writers would have to find creative new ways to immediately “disavow” her time with the NXM.

Suddenly Laura’s old team was “childish”, “mean”, and not “the big leagues”…the problem with that being, it kind of leaves Laura perpetually herself undermined and not seen as very capable, or childish…despite having the moniker of “Wolverine” now…

It’s no accident that in the “Fallen Angels” revival, Kwannon takes on a “mentor” role to an adult and fully trained Laura….

In “All New X-Men” teenage, wet behind the ears, time displaced CYCLOPS is the leader…not the more qualified and newly christened “Wolverine” Laura.

Laura is in this perpetual weird limbo of not really being a “teenager,” so she’s discredited from books like “Wolverine and the X-Men” or “Gen. X” vol.2, that her NXM peers always seem to fall under…but she’s not really allowed to be with the adults either, which is why she’s tied to characters like “Kamala” or “the Stepford Cuckoos” in the upcoming revival of “NYX” or teen Angel in “All New X-Men” or teen Cable in “Fallen Angels”…

When she is in team books, she’s not really treated as an official A-Lister; “X-Men” for example, literally had to create an older copy, “Talon”, in part because the original twenty year old Laura wasn’t deemed “serious” or “adult” enough to be seen as a leader or an authority…

The problem with Laura is, she’s a character that is perpetually trapped by her original “teenage” youthful appeal- “X-Men Evolution”….and “New X-Men”….

Where characters like “Nightwing”, “Kitty Pryde”, or “Bucky Barnes” have kind of managed to escape that trap…I don’t really know if Laura CAN, in part because that requires writers willing to give her more mature story lines….

Where Tom Taylor tried to do just that in “All New Wolverine”, by adding Gabby and aging her up…the biggest problem was…Laura kind of became boring.

In many ways…I don’t know if Laura can “exist” as a more “mature” character any more than “Superboy” can…or “Kid Omega” can…

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Another double edged sword is the question of love interests AND secondary characters…

Hellion is still objectively one her most popular ships and I would argue one of the last well written romances in modern X-Men comics.

And yet his original BIGGEST relationship before that was with the character Wind Dancer…which was really building up, until Kyle and Yost undid that relationship when they took over the book….

Because x-books barely last a year anymore and writer shake up is SO common- most current romances don’t really even make any sort of real impact.

No one seemed to really ever strongly LOVE Chamber/Jubilee, Psylocke/Blob, Cable/Esme Cuckoo, Daken/Aurora, Psylocke/Rachel…for example….

The love stories feel essentially akin to wallpaper- you’re just “supposed” to rip it off when such and such book ends. It’s tacked on more or less because it’s expected but you’re not really supposed to care about which character is used in what relationship or really become attached to any of the romantic storylines…

I don’t personally feel like people are attached to “Rachel and Psylocke” together, for example…what people objectively like about that relationship is because it’s LGBTQIA+ representation and they look cool together … there’s no actual real development in the recent “Excalibur” line or “X-Force”… where people genuinely LIKED Kitty and Illyana, or Kitty and Rachel together, or Mystique and Destiny, because the writing WAS consistently there….

I think a lot of the resurgence of classic x-relationships like Cyclops/Jean…Rogue/Gambit…Mystique/Destiny…and even Kitty/Colossus a few years ago…is because whether you liked those relationships or not; actual time was taken by the writer to develop it.

Hellion and X-23 was one of the last relationships that seemed possibly lasting. It wasn’t just a wallpaper relationship to say the book had a romantic subplot and to check off a box…but was actually meaningful to the storyline and built up over time. People WANTED to know what would happen…which became a detriment when Marjorie Liu and other writers didn’t really want to continue it…

The simplest answer for future writers was to break up the “will they/won’t they” relationship and sever Laura’s ties to “NXM”….but the problem with that was because Laura was in “NXM”…many readers OF X-23 were also fans of Hellion, and felt upset about his representation in that book.

Fans ARGUE that “X-23” was LAURA’S BOOK…NOT HELLION’S…so essentially character assassination doesn’t really matter…whether Hellion’s representation is accurate or not is not fundamentally important because it’s objectively LAURA’S STORY…

The problem with that is, again, many fans felt like Laura hijacked “NXM” from its original storyline…essentially Hellion and the rest of the characters helped cement Laura’s success…only to then be horribly written in Liu’s solo when they were no longer needed for Laura’s success…

It’s the equivalent of having Logan trash talk Nightcrawler in an “Avengers” book… or Kitty complain about Magik and the rest of the “New Mutants”…it just feels like a low blow for fans…

The very SAME thing happened in “Nightwing” in the 90’s; fans got PISSED when Chuck Dixon and other “Nightwing” writers underplayed the role of “The New Teen Titans” and Dick’s relationship with Starfire in the comic…they felt like the writer kind of betrayed fans of the older era just to prop up Barbara Gordon…

The problem with Laura is, she is so tied to “NXM” that it was kind of hard to “remove” her from that book and its influence completely.

So the next thing to do, was to put Laura in “new” relationships and on “new” teams….the problem was, the writing wasn’t half as good as Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost….

Where Laura was more or less on equal footing in “NXM” and was equally developed in her relationship with Hellion…Laura wasn’t equal with Angel in “All New X-Men”…even the teen version. Ultimately it became his STORY.

The current love story with Synch…is more or less the same thing. Hickman and Duggan were more concerned with how the relationship impacted Everett and developing him for newer “non-Generation X” readers, than how it ultimately affected Laura as a character.

Laura essentially…became a plot device to develop characters Marvel WANTED to push onto the market and more or less just a sales gimmick.

The problem with Laura is writers can’t just give her some “Trevor Barnes” Wonder Woman type of love interest, because she’s too popular as a “female Wolverine” gimmick to date some minor character that only shows up in her solo….

Fans don’t like the new love interests and in some ways I would say it’s quickly becoming a detriment to her character…people dread her inclusion in big team books anymore because they know she will now be used as “the love interest”…but writers won’t pair her back with Hellion, because he’s not a big enough name character and they don’t want her connected to “NXM” anymore…

Liu may have wanted to pair her off with Jubilee and Craig Kyle has talked about him originally wanting Laura to be LGBTQIA+ on twitter; but I would say the problem with this is similar to the problem with Kitty.

Kitty is too much of a “waifu” for male readers and writers…that you end up possibly alienating certain fans. Colossus and Kitty do have some nostalgia with older fans and writers…but that may be wearing down as new fans come in and their old relationship is now viewed as problematic because of the inappropriate age gap…

Yet, Kitty’s most popular ships tend to arguably be with women and fans weren’t happy with Kitty being paired with random male characters (usually named “Peter”…) either and many felt like it was homophobic of the writers to ignore the previous subtext…

Many Colossus fans resented feeling like Piotr was being misrepresented to make Kitty look sympathetic…a similar issue to Gambit and Rogue….

The biggest problem being, AGAIN, is that Kitty and Colossus ORIGINATED in “Uncanny X-Men” and Gambit and Rogue in “X-Men”….team BOOKS…not solos…

You can’t really character assassinate one of them for the other without controversy…

The other problem is, if Kyle makes Laura LGBTQIA+… like he WANTED to initially…isn’t it even worse that he purposefully broke up Wind Dancer and Hellion…for essentially NO REASON…a plot point that affected both characters for YEARS…(Wind Dancer only JUST got her powers back and returned to X-books; Hellion’s character development is VERY different from what DeFillippis and Weir wanted, along with his character being viewed negatively by a lot of Laura fans AFTER Liu’s solo…)…JUST to then point out that it was all pointless because ultimately Laura was supposed to end up with Jubilee, Mercury, Dust, or Kiden, or someone else?

Doesn’t that just kind of ADD to the resentment that Laura more or less hijacked the book for fans?

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The same issues more or less crops up in “Avengers Academy” and “All New X-Men”.

“Avengers Academy” went super dark after the initial run was over, merging into “Avengers Arena” shortly after Laura and several other characters inclusion. While I don’t feel like it was necessarily the addition of her character that did it…so much so that it was just comic book mandates, a new writer, and the popularity of “The Hunger Games” influencing the change…it’s also not hard to see why this would immediately give readers flashbacks to “NXM”…and this book OFTEN had an overlap with “NXM” readership…

Laura…kind of developed a reputation of dread for certain fans when she was added to a popular teen superhero books afterwards. Her addition in said books made fans immediately assume that this indicated it was going for an “edgier” and “darker” premise from the original context of the previous story.

I KNOW people will argue with me that Laura DIDN’T change the tone of “ALL NEW X-Men”…that it was still light and campy and fun…but I would argue Bendis PURPOSELY added her BECAUSE he wanted to set up that his run would be darker than previous representations of the “Original Five”.

Laura is LITERALLY there to add “edge” and “romantic tension”. To highlight that this isn’t “the soda pop shop world and wacky hijinks the O5 once KNEW”…. You see it immediately when they find an amnesiac short haired version of her at the Facility attacking them. Laura’s “darkness” as a character juxtaposes with the O5’s nicer, more idyllic version of “Xavier’s School for the Gifted”. This version of the O5 loses their innocence; forced to see the future that awaits them- Dark Phoenix, Scott’s extramarital affair, Angel Becoming “Death”, and the schism between Cyclops and Wolverine. That was the only reason Bendis bothered to include her; to add “grit”. There’s a reason Bendis didn’t really BOTHER to do any research on Laura or write her in her old personality or voice- because HE DID NOT CARE. Laura’s JOB was SOLELY to be a gimmick.

Ultimately Laura’s representation in this book ends up as a wash. Initially meant to be a twist on the Wolverine/Jean/Cyclops love triangle…Bendis found his plans soon derailed when Scott gets picked up for a solo mini (AND this is the constant problem with writers only wanting to use the same five characters…but I regress…). With no idea WHAT to do with her…he ultimately just throws her into a boring relationship with Angel…despite the characters having literally zero chemistry and very little previous panel time…

Eventually Laura isn’t “edgy” enough for the storyline purposes…and is replaced with Jimmy Hudson to fulfill this modern twist on the original X-Men love triangle, while she has adventures in her own solo book…

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There are a LOT of Wolverine based characters and derivatives…yet LAURA is consistently the best written and most sustainable one….

But she also has a lot of the same failings Logan does:

Overexposure. “Edgy” and “dark” characterizations. No consistent supporting cast. Continually taking over books. Used ROUTINELY as a “sales gimmick”…

If you Google- “Laura is a better Wolverine than Logan”…these are the kinds of results you will get:

“SHE'S NOT ON EVERY TEAM”…”LESS BAGGAGE”…”LESS VIOLENT/EDGELORD GRIMDARK STORYLINES”…”FOOT CLAWS/HEALS FASTER/ECT (which some people might call “overpowering a character”…similar to Logan having a GOD LEVEL healing factor…)”

This isn’t to say Laura is a terribly written character… but I DO FIND IT FUNNY that people constantly mention these kind of flaws with Logan as a character to justify Laura somehow being a “Better Character”…or a “Better Wolverine”…when she’s ultimately…has most of the same problems?

Isn’t Laura quickly developing…ALL of the problems people criticized Logan for??

#Laura Kinney #x23 #x 23 #laura x23 #marvel #x men #new xmen #new x men #academy x #new x men academy x #bring back the new x men #brian michael bendis #Dennis Hopeless #Marjorie Liu #Craig Kyle #Chris Claremont #Christopher Yost #Part 2 #Laura Kinney isn’t the “Goodie Two Shoes” her fans make her out to be…and other thoughts…

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newx-menfan · 20 days ago

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Laura Kinney isn’t the “Goodie Two Shoes” her fans make her out to be…and other thoughts…

Part 3: “Laura has Become Boring”

Like many popular writing tropes and commentaries- “Women in the Refrigerator Syndrome”…”Manic Pixie Dream Girl”…”the Reader is the Villian”…”the Male Gaze”…

“The Mary Sue” is another trope that has become so simplified, critiqued, criticized and overused by writers, readers, and viewers; that it has essentially become totally meaningless.

Tropes ARE inherently neutral. WiTRS doesn’t have to be (in my opinion) inherently sexist or bad storytelling; how writers use it determines if it is that way or not.

“The Dark Phoenix Saga” IS WiTRS…but I don’t agree that it is sexist or bad writing. The storyline IS still about Jean more than Scott; while her death does further Cyclops storyline, it also affects pretty much everyone in the book after. It’s about Jean’s relationships as a whole- not just with men, but with characters like Storm as well. “The Dark Phoenix Saga” has an obvious effect on the development of Kitty Pryde, for example; it sets Kitty’s whole life on a different path.

Jean ultimately keeps her autonomy by choosing to die and the focus of the story is essentially on the examination of the darkness lurking within ourselves…or it’s about female sexual repression, depending on your personal analysis… (remember, Claremont didn’t initially represent “Phoenix” as necessarily “good” or “bad”…it’s only modern writers who made the force “evil”…)

The original movie adaptation of this story however is DEFINITELY WiTRS…and kind of sexist…Jean’s autonomy is completely gone and the focus is more on how this will affect Logan, than on Jean’s personal growth as a character.

The point of this example is to highlight the fact that tropes AREN’T ALL BAD. It’s just when they become too common and too poorly written…do they become BAD.

The Mary Sue trope WAS initially defined as:

noun

noun: Mary Sue; plural noun: Mary Sues

(originally in fan fiction) a type of female character who is depicted as unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses."she was not a ‘strong woman’ so much as an insufferable Mary Sue" Origin

1970s: from the name of a character in A Trekkie's Tale(1973), a parody fan fiction story based on the US television series Star Trek .

While the definition purposefully LISTS “female characters”; many male characters have since been labeled as “Mary Sues”, yet this trope was initially deemed as sexist and a straw man argument against female characters in general and the term has been more or less done away with…

Yet again; tropes are, in my opinion, typically neutral, and as many have pointed out over the years, many characters that were considered “Mary Sues” are still decent characters; I don’t think creating the trope to point out a lack of development or story believability was wrong, but I do get readers frustrations in it being predominantly only applied to female characters.

I am also not arguing Laura *IS* a Mary Sue… but I will argue that Marvel and fans have kind of made her one…. and that’s why recent “X-23” books have been so boring.

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When Craig Kyle initially wrote Laura, Laura had clear flaws: her whole story WAS described as “A Samurai sword, trying to be a ‘real girl’”…

Laura’s internal struggle was essentially- “man vs. self”; what does it mean to “be” human?…am I even “human”?…do I have a “soul?”…what does “autonomy” look like?… What do I really even “want” from life?

Laura WAS Frankenstein’s monster…trying to be human…

Laura HAD clear desires…but was socially unable to really act upon them…

Laura desired to have a parental attachment…but was denied that with Sarah Kinney, her sensei, and Logan essentially rejecting her or dying….

Laura desired to have a family…but was forced to lose them when the Facility tracked down Debbie and Megan and they went into hiding…

Laura desired to leave the facility and violence behind…but is still ultimately forced to kill…

Laura WAS a truly complex character; which is why even when some readers accused her of being “A Mary Sue” when she was initially introduced…it never really stuck.

It’s really interesting to me that fans often reject Laura being sexual… or flat out admit that they don’t like it…when on panel, it’s shown to be another clear desire for “humanhood”…

In “NXM”, there is a clear scene of Laura watching Hellion sleep- Hellion is naked except for wearing a pair of pants and is obviously dreaming of another girl. The scene clearly indicates through voyeurism, that Laura desires Hellion sexually as well as emotionally…but is too socially unaware to formally initiate anything…

The central theme of Laura is she desires things…but does not have the ability to access them…

A lot of the complaints around making Laura sexual is her status as a sexual assault survivor- which I personally disagree with.

I would argue it connects to Laura central conflict of longing for human experiences… and ultimately struggling to achieve them…to return to the analogy I made in Part 1, this desire fits in with the proto-origin of “X-23”; in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, the monster longs for a companion and tries to force Frankenstein’s hand to make him one, after being continually rejected by the rest of humanity…

The struggle of wanting a healthy sexual relationship…despite having experienced rape and abuse…IS a relatable struggle… and l often truthfully feel a tad bit uncomfortable with some fans veering into wanting Laura to be asexual SOLELY because of stereotypes rather than real textual representation of her being asexual in her stories…

Laura isn’t the only character that continually gets this stereotype- Illyana is often represented by some fans as asexual solely because of childhood trauma, despite clear sexual subtext in stories with Kitty Pryde.

It’s essentially telling certain SA survivors: “You have to be THIS WAY, to be considered authentic”…and I just frankly don’t think that’s fair.

Besides struggling socially, Laura often struggles emotionally.

Laura under KYOST is often subtly arrogant; in “X-Force”, Laura sets off a series of explosives that she purposefully withheld from her teammates. Laura’s commentary on Angel being on the team is both brutal and hysterical; she always assumes she knows tactically what’s best.

Laura assumes her methodicalness and calculating behaviors make her immune to being emotionally compromised…and yet Laura’s continual chink in her armor is her emotions.

Laura either attempts to repress her emotions entirely through self harm, or finds herself acting out on them. There is no real emotional control.

This is shown with Laura breaking the mirror in the girls restroom after Surge’s kiss with Hellion, losing her cool when Deathstrike harms Hellion, or her vaguely suicidal behavior when she’s infected with the Legacy Virus and later her suicide attempt with vampire Jubilee…

As much as Laura yearns to escape the violence of her childhood…there’s oftentimes also a subtle pride in her skill. Laura often recedes back into violence…because that is what is most comfortable to her. She understands it. She doesn’t have to “grow” or deal with complex situations like love, if she just stays “a weapon”. There’s a vulnerability into having to resist her training and to try and be a “real” person…

So Laura often chooses the “easiest” path- which is why she joined “X-Force”…

On some level- Laura IS proud of her skill. She is proud of being “the best”…

You see it in “Mercury Falling”. You see it in “X-Force”. You see it in “Target X”. Whether Laura will admit it or not- she feels pride over her abilities. At times, it DOES feel like Laura is showing off.

James Mangold did a nice job with this in his representation of Laura in “Logan”; from the film centering around the iconic Western “Shane”, to Laura and Logan’s conversations about killing. In the film, Laura struggles consistently with the questions about killing and whether some killings are “right”.

“The killing. There’s no going back from it. Right or wrong is a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back. Now, you run on home to your mother and tell her … tell her everything’s alright. There aren’t any more guns in the valley.”

The line at the end is especially grabbing, because the tragedy of Laura is… she can’t really go back either; no matter how hard she tries…

She ultimately isn’t “Pinocchio”, who can become a “real boy” at the end… she is “Frankenstein’s monster”, who on some level is always wandering the world alone.

The problems started when writers wanted Laura to fit a more and more a generic superhero role; especially when Laura took on the role of “Wolverine”; she was either written as a “female Logan”…or a much more simplistic female hero archetype instead of “Frankenstein’s monster”…

Liu, Hopeless, Bendis, Taylor, Hickman, and other writers decided to essentially explore the question of- “What would happen if Laura GOT all the things she desired?”

Laura desires a parent…and she gets that with Gambit, and later Logan fully accepts her as his progeny.

Laura desires a family- and she gets that through Jubilee, Gabby, Daken, ect…AND the return of Megan and Debbie…

Laura desires to stop killing- and she does.

Laura desires a relationship- and multiple writers try to make that happen with Jubilee …Angel…and Synch…

The problem with this is, there’s little to no real conflict in Laura’s life now. Laura essentially has no goal to work towards.

”Pinocchio” ends when he becomes “real”… because the harsh truth is… no one’s interested in following the story of “a real boy”…

The main focus in Laura’s storytelling was essentially “man vs. self”…but now that there is no “self” to be in conflict with…what do you do??

Frankenstein has been accepted and welcomed thoroughly, with open arms…so what does he do now??

Laura’s rogues gallery…is frankly dismal, and with no internal conflicts left to face now… it is nearly impossible to really create a clear foil TO Laura…

Gone is Laura’s debates whether she was human. Gone is Laura’s social awkwardness and introversion (writers tried to textually justify this in-story, but it was frankly lackluster and poorly done). Gone is Laura’s moral struggle with killing and gone is Laura’s goth and edgier clothing.

Everything that made Laura is essentially slowly removed; including her flaws and weaknesses…making her a “Mary Sue” bland character…

Liu at least attempts to keep some of the initial flaws and tribulations in Laura’s initial jealousy of Jubilee, her struggles with her emotions and the question of whether she has a “soul”, her struggles with coming to terms with her past…yet Liu oftentimes removes Laura’s emotions and arrogance and the parts of Laura that make Laura interesting… at times Liu’s Laura just feels… flat…robotic…too perfect and too sympathetic, with none of the sharp edges that made KYOST’s Laura so interesting.

Laura is somewhat always the “poor pitiful bullied girl” in Liu, instead of a complex character that makes complex decisions. Where Kyle hints that partially Laura joined “X-Force” not just because of Cyclops and her feeling she couldn’t say “no”…but because on some level Laura is somewhat scared of fully abandoning her violent past, for a new hopeful “unknown”…Liu purposefully represents anyone questioning Laura being on “X-Force” as just “jealous and mean”…

Laura is more or less represented as needing “protection” in Liu’s version in the form of Gambit and Jubilee; where KYOST’s Laura grew from interactions with peers and Megan. There’s a more of a childlike and helpless element to Laura that KYOST didn’t really have. Laura is represented as needing “cared for”, in a way that almost feels infantilizing.

Bendis more or less created an entirely new character, complete with “Whedon-speak” and the generic “spunk” all female teen superheroes are routinely given anymore. Laura’s struggle with desiring sex and intimacy but unable to initiate are also gone…Laura now openly hugs Cyclops…she has a one night stand with Angel and her trauma is more or less hand waved away because it’s “uncomfortable” and doesn’t fit the mold comic writers now want (notice how around this time writers ALSO removed Mockingbird’s history with sexual assault…)

Hopeless tries to represent Laura’s desire to be human, by saying that her change in personality is an attempt to escape from her past…to not be labeled as “damaged”…yet the problem, besides the arc centering more on Warren’s “angst” over becoming “Death” and reading as Warren feeling more upset about Laura emasculating him than genuine concern for Laura…is that it ultimately feels inauthentic…

Why didn’t Laura attempt this in “NXM”? Or in “Avengers Academy”? Or in “Target X” while at school with Megan...or with the “NYX” kids?…

Laura DID, at times, attempt to fit in- but I would argue she ultimately refused to adjust to norms because she desired more than anything to be her “authentic self”…Laura HAD to have enough social training to blend in on “missions”…she is capable of “fitting into social norms”…we see that both when she kills the presidential candidate and when she tracks down Megan from the kidnapper…she ultimately just didn’t WANT TO consistently pretend to be someone else.

We see Laura going along passively with David’s pseudo “Danger Room” games to fit in, in NXM…and then ultimately breaking decorum by repeatedly rescuing Hellion and treating him as “helpless”, much to his annoyance…

Laura on some level HAD to know people don’t talk repeatedly about murder or challenge adults in “Target X”….and yet she utterly breaks decorum again after arrogantly telling the teacher that their data is “flawed”…

While Laura may not grasp spying is wrong, I am sure she was told not to be in students rooms at certain hours…she ultimately breaks the rules and watches Hellion while he sleeps, not out of misunderstanding, but truthfully for her own personal desires…

Laura had always WANTED autonomy…to be her “full self”…as flawed or awkward as that “self” may be…so it makes no sense that she would suddenly try to change her entire personality just to “fit in”…

You can argue Laura doesn’t fully commit; putting herself in constant danger despite Warren’s criticisms and having to listen to him accusing her choices of being akin to self-harm…and while there’s still some arrogance in Laura’s representation, seeing herself as invulnerable, I think ultimately this representation negates previous representations of Laura (along with making everyone hate Warren while reading it…)

Taylor in my opinion, struggled with writing Laura just as much. There were times, like Laura ultimately killing Kimura, Laura seeing the similarities between abandoning Gabby and Logan abandoning her, or Laura finding her dead mother alive…that were solid and interesting and authentic to previous representations of Laura.

The problem with Taylor, is that I think he ultimately wanted Laura to be a simpler, easier character to write for.

Neither Taylor nor Liu, I felt like could write Laura as flawed. The Laura in their books was always sympathetic, always represented as a tad bit too perfect. Taylor even makes a religious allegory out of Laura in “Immune”, with Laura literally being “Jesus” to Wolverine’s “God”…

Where Liu’s version veered into “pitying” Laura too much…Taylor seemed flat out hesitant to give Laura any real narrative conflict; Laura’s khaki wearing clothes more or less physically reflected the boring, bland turn writers had ultimately made for the character.

Laura AND Gabby…on some level, become one note…feeling more akin to watching a sitcom, than a representation of real siblings…

Tamaki, despite having the weakest run, I feel actually did the best job with this question…“What would happen if Laura GOT the things she desired?”

Where Tom Taylor looked at all of Laura obstacles as something to remove so Laura could have an easier, happier existence…Tamaki is the only writer to showcase that even “getting what you want”…is objectively…unpleasant and hard…

Laura doesn’t just perfectly get along with Gabby, like they are living in some sitcom.

Gabby is given very human desires that often DON’T match up with Laura’s…to have a birthday…to protect her robot sisters…to be an individual…and Laura often doesn’t really know how to handle that.

I would say the most compelling and truthful moment we’ve gotten of Laura in a while, is Laura unable to handle her anger and blowing up at Gabby.

Laura is selfish in this moment. She lets Gabby “go” and pouts about it…internally justifying her actions as “right”. In that moment, Laura just sits there and feels bad for herself; not caring about Gabby’s feelings around the robot clones or the trauma Gabby experienced losing her other sisters.

Tamaki wasn’t afraid to represent Laura as, at times “wrong”. Laura doesn’t perfectly make every correct decision or have some witty one liners about “Nazi Stomping boots” while being some infallible moral paragon…

Gabby is equally allowed “personhood”, by having desires that oppose Laura’s. The tension in Tamaki’s storytelling is the opposition of Gabby’s and Laura’s desires.

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Ultimately, when people ask “Why was Hellion the most popular love interest”…OR “Why was the trigger scent such an interesting plot point”…I would answer… because they added TENSION in the story…

Because no one knew if Laura would ever overcome the influence of the Trigger Scent or if she would ever end up with Hellion…

The difference between Craig Kyle and all the other authors mentioned, is Kyle understood that readers don’t REALLY WANT characters to be happy…

No one wants Beast to turn into the prince at the end of the Disney movie, or Frankenstein to make his monster their “mate”, or for Pinocchio to become a “real boy”…

Those stories END the minute all the conflicts are resolved…

The fans that chronically go off on writers for giving Laura strife…also tend to be the fans that are unhappy with how boring Laura has been since YKOST and Liu…not realizing that those things are connected…

That fandom has kind of made Laura… a bit of a Mary Sue.

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