#britskani

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“So gathered the Knights of X.”

[amageish]

From X-Men: The Wedding Special

Love this take on a classic Betsy look - and Amazing Baby got a bowtie! It's a little funny that we're narrating about the potential of marriage one day in what I believe is Betsy and Rachel's seventh appearance on-panel together as an unambiguously romantic couple; they are not beating the U-Haul allegations...

[cool-lets-try-this-again]

One of my favorite panels of modern pre-official Britskani is just this. Just Rachel being like, "You're acting like you don't have responsibilities here... like our DOG. Are you forgetting that we have a dog?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

[amageish]

From X-Force #1 (2024) Preview Written by Gregory Thorne, Art by Marcus To

I love Betsy not wanting to join while also still being committed enough to show up to this meeting in a full suit while Rachel is all-in on joining the team while looking like she threw on whatever was lying on her bedroom floor.

Part of me thinks the pink outfit Rachel is wearing under the jacket is supposed to one of Betsy's old costumes, but I don't think she's worn anything that looks exactly like it... It's just a similar vibe, I think.

[amageish]

So, James Somerton's brought his Wiccan and Hulkling video back online and I feel a need to just yell into the void for a moment about it.

In that video, Somerton says a lot of really dumb things and exaggerations to make the Young Avengers MLM power couple of Wiccan/Hulkling and the gay X-Men Iceman seem more important to comic history then they are. They are incredibly important, of course - Iceman especially is, to my knowledge, the only Lee/Kirby character to be textually out - but their writers were not fighting tooth and nail as Somerton claims they were - and they certainly weren't acting on spite against a homophobic Marvel who would never let queers into their flagship franchise. They were stories, pitched and approved like any other...

Hell, Bendis had already written a queer woman in the form of Ultimate Spider-Woman a fair amount of time before Iceman came out... Somerton's commentary makes no sense - it's well-delivered and no shade to anyone who was fooled by it, but (like a lot of comic book discourse online TBH) it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

That said, I think it's important to remember that Marvel Corporate does still need to approve queer coming-outs. There are actual times where characters were intended to have come out as queer, but ended up as subtext in the final draft or had their arcs abandoned entirely. Hell, in the Marvel Pride special last year, Marvel writer Tini Howard alluded to the challenges that can come from writing queer stories while not knowing if they can be officially queer - mentioning how she's been "writing Rachel and Betsy falling in love before [she] knew [she] could."

So like. If you see something queer happening in a Marvel comic and it remains confined to subtext, then please do not immediately jump to "Well, Somerton lied about corporate resistance to Wiccan/Hulkling, so therefore this writer totally had a choice to do a queer story and just chose not to"... Not everyone has the sway of Bendis! Not every queer coming-out is approved. They often take time.

Queercoding is also, for better and for worse, often the route to queer canon in a collaborative medium like comics. There's a lot of queercoding and queer implications from the Jim Shooter era (where queer stuff was actually firmly prohibited at Marvel) that are only now becoming canon. Northstar, Marvel's first openly-gay superhero, was coded for years before it was hard canon. Chris Claremont, one of the main architects of the X-Men as we know them today, wrote plenty of stuff that was subtextually gay that Marvel is still playing catch-up with to this day - ex/ Mystique and Destiny only became Nightcrawler's biological parents, as was his original vision, last year and we still haven't had Kate Pryde do anything more textually Sapphic then kiss a tattoo artist one time...

Being frustrated is cool - I am also often frustrated with Disney and Marvel, as my blog can attest - but please do direct your frustration at the corporation and don't jump to being mean to authors/artists... as I'm pretty sure they're often just as disappointed as we are!

[braddocklegacy]

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Knights of X #2 (2022) Variant by Mateus Manhanini

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Retsy in Space

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Knights of X #2 variant by Mateus Manhanini

[braddocklegacy]

Steve Foxe likening Rachel to M is a perfect parallel. Betsy as Bond is a natural extension of that and it’s something we’ve seen glimmers of like in the 2013 X-Men run.

[braddocklegacy]

This is such perfect example of how Betsy and Rachel work together. Rachel is the Askani, watching all and surveying for threats. Betsy is the Captain, jumping into action and stopping the bad guys.

[braddocklegacy]

Uncanny X-men #462 (2005)

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[braddocklegacy]

“That’s the deal. For as long as I’m able, I’ll watch her back.”