"The Scarlet Witch and Marvel’s Gay Power Couple" Transcript
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Feb 11, 2021
First published.
Dec 07, 2023
Privated post-callout.
Feb 26, 2024
Unprivated with apology 2, claiming no plagiarism
May 8, 2024Channel deleted
As of Feb 11, 2021
How did Marvel accidentally create a gay power couple? And what exactly does the Scarlet Witch have to do with it?
Patreon: [link]
Twitter: [handle]
This video contains copyrighted material. The use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making this material available in my efforts to further bring to light the history of LGBTQ+ representation in film and television. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
#Marvel #disney+ #Kang
00:00 Introduction
03:04 The Kids Are Not Alright
07:23 A Witch Called Wanda
19:26 The Wizard and the Warrior
28:58 Identity Marketing
As of Feb 26, 2024
How did Marvel accidentally create a gay power couple? And what exactly does the Scarlet Witch have to do with it?
Patreon: [new link]
Twitter: [handle]
This video contains copyrighted material. The use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making this material available in my efforts to further bring to light the history of LGBTQ+ representation in film and television. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
#Marvel #disney+ #Kang
00:00 Introduction
03:04 The Kids Are Not Alright
07:23 A Witch Called Wanda
19:26 The Wizard and the Warrior
28:58 Identity Marketing
hello everyone my name is james and today i'm going to explain to you how marvel comics accidentally created a gay power couple and despite their best efforts to avoid it how disney might be giving us our first big screen gay superheroes going from the holocaust to superheroes nothing like tonal whiplash well that's not entirely true there's a sort of connection since we will be talking about the scarlet witch who is sometimes a mutant and occasionally the daughter of magneto who is usually a survivor of the holocaust let's get started [Music] [Music] i wasn't always a fan of comic books outside of a batman trade paperback here and there you know self-contained stories i wasn't ever really interested in the ongoing developing stories of comics that have stretched from now all the way back to the 1930s but all you really need to become a lifelong fan is one character and because these universes are interactive that one character can expose you to other characters who can then expose you to larger stories and then before you know it you know more about marvel or dc characters than your own family i mean there are worse habits all things considered meth keepsakes or dental problems marvel comics over the years doesn't have the best track record when it comes to gay characters though well most comic book companies don't really northstar barely gets any attention at all loki's queerness is swept under the rug at every opportunity they get and iceman's recent gay revelation was more of a screw you from brian michael bendis to isaac perlmutter than a well thought out storyline though what a wonderful up yours to pearl mudder it was if you don't know who isaac perlmutter is don't worry i'll get to him so you'd probably be kind of shocked to find out that in current marvel comics the most powerful magical person in the marvel universe is a gay character and his boyfriend is literally the king of space and those two characters billy kaplan and teddy altman better known as wicken and hulkling are the most shipped couple in all of marvel fandom and they are the children of some very powerful and very weird marvel characters [Music] there aren't many marvel kids as in characters who were born to existing characters in the marvel universe which is weird because comics are soap operas and that [ __ ] usually gets eaten up but children in comics create a bit of a weird problem namely the timeline most things in comics and marvel uses this especially are left ambiguous as to when exactly they happen it makes sense for thor to look the same after 40 years but iron man's only aged maybe 5 or 10 years since the 1960s marvel comics loves to use a sliding scale of time for instance references to tony stark's capture and creation of the mark 1 iron man suit change depending upon when the particular story was told this could be the korean war vietnam or conflicts in the middle east which you'd think they'd use that as a theme about the omni presence of the american war machine and the role that technological innovations and weapons profiteering plays into that you know like stanley intended that was before marvel corporate decided that having a conflicted heroic character was a bit too spicy okay thank you nick anyway children of existing characters rock this flexible time scale because they put hard dates on parents ages the parents minimum age must become the age that they were when the child was born plus however old the child becomes so what does that mean for billy and teddy whose prominent marvel parents are the scarlet witch the vision and marvel aka the first captain marvel and especially how do these very strange parents factor into how the characters are built for teddy this is easy imagine romeo and juliet set in space only juliet is a shape-shifting green alien the doomed relationship was tied to a much larger event in marvel the kree skrull war we've already seen both of these species in the movies featured prominently in guardians of the galaxy and captain marvel but in the comics the script is flipped the skrulls were the evil devious bad guys and not an analogy for refugees like they are in the mcu and also the kree scroll war started specifically because marvel impregnated princess inel of the skrull empire it should be noted that marvel was never really that popular though marvel tried to push his significance to the credit of a small cult following the real reason he was kept in publication was because dc had their own captain marvel and marvel comics didn't want to let them have the copyright to the name dc's captain marvel would eventually become shazam but as soon as dc threw in the towel on their captain marvel marvel comics seem to give up on keeping marvel regularly published which is why he more or less vanished from publication history culminating in his canonical death in 1982 his real contribution to marvel was his legacy both in the way the title of captain marvel was shuffled around to a number of different major characters and in carol danvers who began as a girl power spin-off to captain marvel ms marvel and ended up eclipsing the original's popularity eventually becoming the current reigning captain marvel and of course he left behind that dangling thread about what happened to his wife and child when they ran away together at the end of the crossover event because the princess was never seen again by the time the young avengers come around teddy altman is introduced as a mutant with shape-shifting abilities not out of the ordinary for mutant powers really but there's a twist it turns out that the skrull princess actually sent her cree skrull hybrid son then dorak viii renamed as teddy with his skrull nanny to hide him away from her father she remained with the autocracy and eventually perished furthermore as marvel himself was a significant figure in the kree society and the princess was the sole heir to the skrull empire that places teddy precariously in a singular spot of importance in two of the most significant galactic societies in marvel and if it's starting to seem like there'd be literally nobody in his dating league just wait billy kaplan is the son of the scarlet witch sort of he like her is a mutant though how he came to be is a okay timeout you missed a pretty big pretty significant part of her development okay right but that doesn't really play into bill let me finish the scarlet witch may be a mutant and her parentage has been in question for most of her publication for a large part it was believed that magneto was her father though this would change depending on the writer or the decade and whether or not disney and fox were in a spat nick let me finish just come say this to the right camera so i don't have to do back and forth editing so much that means i have to put on pants yes this is youtube and i don't want to be demonetized again so you do have to put on pants all right give me a second what did you just do i put on pants james jesus the things i do for you so as i was saying before being rudely interrupted by the pants please it's not entirely clear if she is or isn't a mutant as per details in her most recent solo title regardless of her status as a mutant her mutant powers called hex magic are secondary to her status as both a nexus being and a genetically altered conduit to the primordial god kithon which grants her access to his reality rewriting chaos magic which itself is ambiguous and it is because of this magic as well as her own study of witchcraft and not necessarily her potential mutant powers that she was able to conceive her children and then cast them through time and space to be raised uh separately by two completely unaware families oh thank god all right so very few characters in marvel have had as many changes and tweaks made to their powers as the scarlet witch originally yes she started out as a mutant but she was rescued by magneto who recruited her and her twin brother quicksilver into the brotherhood of evil mutants at this time her powers were as nick said hex magic after abandoning the brotherhood she joined the avengers with quicksilver her powers were basically the most silver age thing ever essentially the avengers would get caught in a sticky situation with a bad guy and would then depend on her hexes as a last-minute ex-machina moment in every issue because comics unlike other characters villains and heroes in which meticulous care was given to explaining how their powers worked wanda's abilities were left as vague as possible even sometimes to the extent of becoming a liability to the team over time however it seems that wanda and quicksilver's abilities were inconsistent and sometimes failed altogether deciding to return to their home the fictional nation of transia with the key landmark of wundergor mountain the maximoff twins learned that they were not as they thought born to romani parents but rather adopted they were born in a genetic facility inside wunderguard mountain both of them were taken from birth and genetically redeveloped by the high evolutionary i need to explain who he is please don't james i need to maybe in another video anyway due to genetic re-encoding by the high evolutionary wando is accidentally made into the living conduit and avatar of the primordial god chithon who functions as sometimes a god of chaos other times just a god of the underworld but he's usually overshadowed by other demonic figures such as mephisto who features later this was the first time that it was really indicated that the scarlet witch was more powerful than it originally seemed this was pivotal when chithon possessed wanda to try and return to the world so that he could unmake it this plan was thwarted but it was very clear that wanda was a potential threat so the avengers began looking into options of how to safeguard her eventually in a crossover with the fantastic four wanda encounters agatha harkness who is kind of america's number one witch agatha believes she has a solution for wanda's unpredictability where she uses witchcraft as a conduit to first of all help wanda focus her powers and have more control over them secondly witchcraft gives wanda a connection to the natural world where she can prepare hexes in advance and have much more control over the outcome though she was unnatural in witchcraft wando's priorities were always the avengers and she never devoted much time to the study of witchcraft with agatha agatha however served as a guide to assist her with her abilities whenever she could oh now's a good time to mention a mortise right no nick it's in the script though i'm sorry okay ongoing problem for the avengers was kang the conqueror a time traveler but there's a version of kang where he goes so far into the future that he becomes immortus who is kind of a morally ambiguous micromanager of time sometimes friend sometimes foe depends on the version of immortus because there are many and after much will they won't they the scarlet witch gets married to the vision because comics but it's not like all of this happened over two issues these are stories that have been crafted over two decades of weekly titles granted this was when comic books actually took their time to pay off plot lines instead of trying to cram everything together into eight issue runs that just changed the status quo every month by the time the vision and the scarlet witch get married on the urging of a mortise all of the pieces have been adequately set in place for years before this so wanda and the vision get married and things are going okay but then there's this big pocket of magical energy that some evil witches want to use to make a evil spell gonna do bad stuff and again is like hey wanda this is a this is a bad idea i need you to channel the energy so they don't get it and rwanda's like what's the worst that could happen so this power makes wanda so well powerful that she's able to actually rewrite the very fabric of reality and because wanda's newly wed to a man with no genitals she uses it to make herself pregnant this is also when magneto shows up for the birth of the children and he reveals in a true mooring moment that he was the father of the maximoff twins you are the father but wanda doesn't just want to be a homemaker like sue storm she wants it all she's going to be a part-time avenger and a full-time mom so when the west coast avengers need a reserve member to help out wanda and vision tag along but the thing is weird things start happening with wanda's twins billy and tommy the sitter sometimes just can't find them for instance meanwhile after the vision tried to take over all the computers in the world to become the human version of the cree's supreme intelligence a couple of world governments decide that he's a bit of a threat capture him and completely disassemble him which you know wanda's not that pleased with the avengers then gaslight her into thinking that she has nothing to be upset about because the vision was a robot anyway you can't fall in love with a robot synthesizoid right so with the vision rebuilt as little more than a catatonic zombie wanda comes under a vast amount of duress because he then agrees with the avengers telling wanda that her feelings for him are irrelevant and then he dumps her wanda now has nothing but her beloved children who it is revealed vanish when wanda isn't thinking about them that's why the babysitters were so stressed out cue agatha harkness so megan is like okay girl sorry but your kids don't exist turns out that the energy you absorbed was two fragments of mephisto's soul who who's like the satan of marvel oh okay there are a few satan analogies in marvel and they all hate each other but yes mafesto is the big one he was fighting franklin richards son of reed richards from the fantastic four and franklin's like super powerful and he managed to split mephisto's soul into six fragments with mephisto himself only possessing one-sixth of his power sounds like a certain lord of the voldemort variety like many things jk rowling writes it appears in the comic book decades earlier and all the while wanda and the west coast avengers have been fighting a villain named master pandemonium a man who after a car crash made a deal with mephisto to do his bidding as long as he could survive mephisto decides he's going to replace this guy's arms and legs with demons and that in order to keep his abilities master pandemonium has to reclaim the five fragments of his soul which have been lost in the car crash you see mephisto the king of lies was deceiving master pandemonium into finding his own soul fragments because he didn't want all of hell to know that he'd lost so much of his power two of these soul fragments were the children of the scarlet witch which is how we get baby arms right master pandemonium while the scarlet witch was distracted snuck into her house and absorbed her babies into him which mephisto then proceeded to absorb back into himself to regain his full power which master pandemonium was not happy about but then the breaks so then billy and tommy sol somehow managed to be distributed back into the world as two children in the greater manhattan area well kind of first what happened is agatha erased all of wanda's memories of her children which kind of worked but she still ended up going into a brief spiral cue the rest of the avengers who were like why is this happening and because they all collectively get the world's worst friend award they basically just ignore her grief ignore her in general which allowed magneto to step in and offer her fatherly support in this trying time but instead he uses her to help him create a new brotherhood of evil mutants because of course he does but this doesn't even matter because the whole thing was a ploy by immortus so that he could use her to safeguard the earth 616 timeline the normal marvel comics timeline from converging with other timelines and alternate realities he planned to put wanda into an eternal hypnotic trance so that he could use her as a nexus being and by proxy of her he could choose which timeline was true and filter out which ones were false the whole ordeal with the vision wanda's children the vision's dismemberment her ensuing mental duress and now magneto's ploy was all puppeteered by a mortis so he could have wanda in this state of emotional fragility it was during this time while under the control of immortus by proxy of magneto that she briefly created a reality where she still had her children demonstrating that she didn't even really need mephisto's power to do this it's believed that it was at this point that the twin souls were sent out to two separate expecting mothers meaning that they are the children of the scarlet witch and not actually shards of mephisto now maybe it's not clear don't think too much about it because marvel hasn't really made a convincing explanation or any explanation i mean i could make one that's convincing marvel call me and all of this took place from the 1970s to the early 1990s eventually in the 2005 mini-series avengers disassembled wanda got her memories back it was none too pleased that the avengers took them from her and blamed them for the loss of her children in her rage she killed multiple avengers before falling into a catatonic state and being whisked away by magneto for safe keeping before this breakdown though she'd actually met a bullied young teenager named billy who idolized her what wanda hadn't realized was that this boy was the reincarnated soul of one of her lost sons who once the avengers disbanded after the events have disassembled went on to help create a new team of young avengers [Music] we meet billy and teddy as we know them today in young avengers issue number one released in april of 2005 immediately after wanda's major breakdown the pair have joined the young avengers in hopes of picking up the slack left behind after the avengers proper disbanded the team is originally comprised of wiccan hulkling kate bishop patriot and iron lad later on in this run the team would also be joined by cassie lang ant-man's daughter a young version of the vision and tommy wanda's other son their first story sees them facing kang the conqueror with advanced knowledge from the time traveling iron lad who is actually a young version of kang who is a younger version of immortus i never said this got simpler the biggest news getter of this initial run was of course the introduction of billy and teddy we didn't know that they were the ultimate power couple just yet but they were a teenage gay couple smack dab in the middle of a marvel comic so they got a lot of attention that almost wasn't the case though when alan heinberg the creator of the team initially pitched the idea to marvel execs they weren't too fond of the idea of having a gay couple in an avengers title in fact word came down from isaac perlmutter the reclusive ceo of marvel known for being an arch-conservative racist homophobe that there should absolutely not be a gay couple in an avengers title they did like the idea of a young hulk and thor though billy's original superhero title was the asgardian so the compromise was that teddy hulkling being a shapeshifter would actually be a girl who shifts into the big tough hulkling when it's time to fight this is the only reason that wicked and hulkling actually made it into publication but there was a wrinkle see ellen heinberg was a well-known gay writer who had written for sex in the city so when word got out that he'd be writing the new avengers series the gay press interviewed him as much as possible and he made sure to tell them that he would be writing a gay couple so now the media was flush with stories about how marvel would be featuring gay avengers and how awesome and progressive marvel was they practically got handed a glad award before a single page was printed so now marvel editorial was in a pickle keep going with the agreed-upon shape-shifter angle or revert to the original idea and have gay characters one decision would massively piss off their ceo but the other would massively piss off a segment of the population that was currently making queers folk the most expensive show on tv to buy ads for gays have a lot of buying power you see with the whole no children thing so they decided that teddy would remain a boy oops but then word came down from perlmutter to stop the run at six issues he would not have gays queering up his comics bit of an overreaction considering billy and teddy were only a small part of a large ensemble team the thing is though money trumps hate almost every time and when the pre-sale numbers came in for the young avengers the run was extended to 12. and this time with leverage alan heinberg decided that he'd make these six issues all about billy and teddy's relationship the super skrull arrives and kills teddy's mom after revealing to teddy that she wasn't in fact his birth mother refer back to the cree scrawl war shenanigans now the super scrub not important the super scroll is a skrull who was made to fight the fantastic four on top of being a shapeshifter he also has the abilities of the fantastic four an insane amount of things were actually introduced in that fantastic four that would later have importance in other areas of marvel this created a problem for disney when fox owned the team as that meant a very wide range of characters that were important to the rest of marvel actually belonged to fox which is why we didn't get captain marvel until disney bought fox furthermore super skrull himself isn't very well known he doesn't have an interesting publication history and he actually isn't really that important and why are we talking about him even though marvel continues to publish him without any backstory as if we ought to know who he is okay i'm finished anyway the super skrull kills teddy's mom but then feels bad about it after the cree armada show up on earth to kidnap teddy and take him back to the kree empire where he will be the prince of space the skrulls also want him though and a mini episode of game of thrones plays out until the super skrull agrees to shapeshift into teddy and submit himself to the invading forces so that teddy can stay on earth with billy and his friends after this run completed again with fantastic sales marvel editorial wanted heinberg back to do more but he was a bit busy producing episodes of grey's anatomy and writing wonder woman for dc he'd eventually go on to write the good wonder woman movie so there was a long period in which marvel would insert the young avengers especially billy and teddy into other titles in order to draw attention and sales secret invasion civil war dark rain siege if there was a marvel event worth reading our boys made it into the pages somewhere finally in 2010 heinberg agreed to come back to marvel to write the children's crusade a direct sequel to his young avengers run that would also bring back the scarlet witch after five years of not being in publication in this series magneto learns that the young avengers are going to search for wanda who had vanished after the events of house of m when she completely rewrote reality to give everyone their best life and eventually eliminated the vast majority of mutants from the marvel universe magneto also learns that wiccan and speed are reincarnations of wanda's children he tracks them down and informs them that he is their grandfather and that he's going to help them find wanda because he wants to try and be a good dad now they do eventually find her or so they think but the avengers attempt to apprehend her before wiccan teleports magneto wanda and the young avengers to wundegor mountain they soon realize though that the scarlet witch is actually a doombot robots made by doctor doom in case that was an obvious prompting the young avengers and magneto to journey to latveria with the avengers following close behind wiccan eventually finds the real wanda apparently devoid of her powers without any memory of her life and engaged to marry dr doom but of course it turns out that dr doom only wants wanda for her incredible power and has been keeping her lost in a brain fog until he could figure out how to transfer the power to himself he finally manages this a battle ensues he's defeated and it's revealed that he was controlling wanda when she committed the horrible acts of avengers disassembled because if wanda is doing something bad she is absolutely being controlled by someone else always this was also alan heinberg's way of retconing the scarlet witch into being a hero again since he'd idolized the character since he was a kid what he's gay gay stan the scarlet witch i don't make the rules though the avengers offer to let her rejoin their team she rejects them stating that after years of defining herself as magneto's daughter quicksilver's sister or the vision's wife she wants to find out who she is on her own terms the only label she does embrace is mother wrapping her arms around the children she never knew this was actually one of stan lee's favorite moments in marvel comics along with the death of gwen stacy as the decades-long saga of the scarlet witch finally ends with her being allowed to just be happy the saga of the young avengers is left wide open and the series ends with an image that's become so iconic you've probably seen it even if you've never held a comic book in your life billy and teddy having been through so much finally kiss a full page panel making comic book history and creating a generation of shippers across the internet and around the world the young avengers would return a few years later now written by kieran gillen here it is revealed that not only is teddy the king of space but billy is the demiurge the sentient life force of earth's biosphere that seeded the earth with pieces of its own essence giving birth to the elder gods eons ago essentially the creator of all life on earth so we have the king of space and the embodiment of life itself and there are a couple only in comics but this run didn't sell as well as the originals whether it was disinterest in the storytelling style the fall of comic book stores or the fact that marvel didn't market it worth a damn didn't really matter it was enough reason for pearl mudder who was already losing his grasp over marvel to disney to shove billy and teddy to the sidelines while most of the other young avengers got solo titles or were featured prominently in other teams billy and teddy were mostly ignored they'd pop up here there but never make a real impression until they recently became media darlings once again when 15 years after their introduction they became featured players in 2020's empire storyline in this teddy literally does become the king or should i say emperor of space coronated null and though the imperial court was not altogether pleased with his relationship with billy forbidding it at first because billy's from earth not because they're gay they did eventually have a giant royal wedding in the middle of space a happily ever after for marvel's premier gay couple but is it really [Music] so one thing i talk a lot about in my videos is the representation of queer people in media marvel has had a bumpy road actually presenting us queer characters that stick around there's been a few previously established characters at marvel coming out over the last couple of years on top of existing bisexuals like dawkin wolverine sun and deadpool hercules was alluded to be bisexual in the past and is now in a same-sex romance with novar also a young avenger wolverine himself is bisexual in an alternate universe and colossus is gay in an alternate universe alternate universe being important contexts here iceman both the old and young version were outed as full on gay in a storyline that some found touching and some found toxic basically jean grey a psychic outs him to himself this was mostly a parting [ __ ] you from brian michael bendis who had been trying to add queer characters to marvel comics for years but pearl mudder wouldn't let him so as he was fixing to leave the company he made a mainline x-men character gay and following the outline made by heinberg whipped up a storm of publicity about it so that marvel would receive maximum backlash if they tried to shove him back into the closet tommy scarlet witch's other son is also now gay or bisexual and in a relationship with prodigy who at one point tried to snatch teddy away from billy america chavez is a lesbian also you keep forgetting about that other x-men the new one the little green one whose straight friend misses new opportunity to bring up his sexuality yeah what's his name i couldn't tell you which is part of the problem right marvel loves pushing identity but not personality you may hear about any number of queer marvel characters on whatever geek.com website but they quickly fade into obscurity once the sales bump has flattened the press has gone away and marvel shifts back to focusing on iron man spider-man and wolverine at the end of the day it's also disingenuous beyond that it seems to be presenting queerness with a heteronormative objective that is when queer characters are presented as queer either from being outed or from being out upon creation the objective seems to be to make them as straight as possible that way they're queer but they don't offend the straights and this isn't just a thing in comic books queer characters seem to always have their queerness revolve around another character you see this a lot in television where given that a cast will usually only have maybe two gay characters they will inevitably be drawn together it's the media version of oh my god i have a gay friend you'd be perfect together this idea is so permeative in culture that many queer people try to force themselves into a relationship with potentially toxic partners because they think the only way to properly be queer is to be mated with a fellow queer and due to the fact that the gatekeepers of media are still largely heterosexual white men when they do deign to present queer characters their limited understanding of queer identity is exclusively linked to white cis gay relationships rather than the internal process of thinking outside of the hetero-hegemony the queer people gay cis men and women specifically are being badgered into which don't get me wrong many people earnestly do want to get married and have a normal white picket fence life with you know two and a half kids and a dog the problem is that this kind of suburbanization is favorable to corporate interests as people like this are easy to develop marketing strategies for specifically mortgages loans cars and other domestic products needed to keep up with the joneses as someone who works in marketing i know that my fellow straight sis marketers banged their heads against the wall trying to figure out how to appeal to the city queers they've figured out the white sis gays gaycations gay baby clothes and rainbows rainbows rainbows but everyone else well marketing executives look at every other letter in the lgbtqia 2 plus spectrum and think uh they're just too hard to sell to and they don't have that much money anyway and if there's no companies trying to convince you to buy their stuff there's not likely anyone making media for you but they haven't given up instead there is a vested corporate interest in convincing queer people of all shades to want the lifestyle they've already figured out how to market to come pride month if you're friends with the right kind of people you'll hear these friends call this phenomenon rainbow capitalism and well there's a whole video on that coming later another factor behind the push to marry off gay characters in fiction stems from the need to de-sexualize queer characters gay men especially keep in mind that the gay panic of the 20th century was rooted less in the idea that homosexuality was unnatural the real heart of these modern phobias stemmed from the idea that gay men would use sex and gratuitous sexual pleasure to corrupt otherwise proper citizens and neighborhoods it was called the lavender panic the gays are coming for your husbands girls but there's a separation between the discrimination of gay men and gay women lesbians are of course discriminated against but it's a bit different for gay men specifically because cis gay men possess the threat of penetration though anal sex is far from the only act the two gay men can get up to it seems to be the only one that straight people are obsessed with whereas a homophobic person may have a hatred of lesbians with gay men there is the threat of anal penetration and as a result demasculinization and even if a fictional character's sex life never factors into the plot or components of their personality the idea of penetrative sex still exist as a subliminal factor in the viewer's mind single gays therefore are not cute or wholesome like their gay dad counterparts they are seen as sexually deviant and especially after the 1980s threats to a person's health whereas straight single characters are allowed to be as single and promiscuous as they come look at wolverine iron man she-hulk daredevil gambit spider-man i mean the most i've ever felt seen in a comic book was dc's new 52 run of midnighter where he was literally on grindr having on panel gay sex with hookups and living his best single life i mean i wish that was my life single gays men and women seem to represent this kind of freedom sexual and otherwise that older creators and readers are really uncomfortable with so now that it's okay to get gay married they can remove this element of freedom by forcing them into a historically heterosexual institution suddenly scary gays are just like the straits in the same boring sexless marriages the fight for equal rights and representation should not be focused around convincing the heteros that hey these outsiders are just like you and that means they're okay because then we're on a very slippery slope when the hegemony encounters an outsider who isn't just like them and making no attempt to be the outsider is rejected or pressured to assimilate the focus of representation needs to be focusing on appreciating individuals differences rather than focusing on finding areas of common ground take billy and teddy for instance even they fit the mold of high school nerd and high school jock they just happen to be gay and superheroes but over the years as more and more writers have gotten their hands on them they've become only that gay superheroes gay characters have their personalities stripped away i'm not sure whether it's because the straight writers tend to view gay as a personality or whether it's because they're so occupied making the character presentable to editors and audiences that they forget to make them interesting as a result the character is made to be as sterile as possible so that the majority straight white sis audience isn't offended think of it like how people say that carol danvers is a [ __ ] but tony stark is just snarky and determined traits as they are seen in straight white cis men are charming but they are more negatively received in women queer folk and characters of color something else that's very important is how marvel and dc still sell their comics to comic book stores store owners get the feedback from the customers they see in store not necessarily the majority of people who buy comics especially now that they're available widely through apps the people you're most likely to see in a comic book store are heteronormative white guys in fact the culture of most comic book stores is considered so toxic that readers who aren't white straight guys have gravitated toward buying their comics on apps like comixology to avoid it like full disclosure i used to follow billy and teddy religiously when they would pop into the background of a comic i would buy it and then i would invest in the whole series they weren't even involved i was just so starved for the characters but the reason i kind of fell out of touch with these guys is because i started to recognize that they were essentially ciphers that i was superimposing myself onto as i developed as more of a distinct person i stopped identifying with these characters because they were presented in such broad strokes that without me imagining myself in their places billy specifically and without an actual distinct personality to reel me in i didn't really have anything to keep me interested and that's because when these characters are written at least most of the time they're not being written by writers who love them who want to expand upon their identities and build a mythology around them they're being written by writers for whom they are just another wrong on the ladder they want to write spider-man iron man thor deadpool make the jump to dc and write for batman the characters they grew up idolizing and because queer media is so starved for representation organizations like glaad will give an award to any writer who features queer characters a nice feather in their cap and a quick boost to getting to the characters that they actually want to write looking back at billy and teddy's publication there isn't a whole lot of character there except what the reader places upon them we know for a fact that marvel is uncomfortable with separating them whenever you do see them apart they're basically a tool to be used by a team and nothing more there's no singular development for them they only really exist to be put back together so that they can be the gay couple essentially they're gays who are character baited when straight creators write them and characters like loki they write them from their own heterosexual frames of reference they have internalized the message of they're just like me and don't seem to make a significant attempt to make them like actual queer people and in this feedback loop queer readers of comic books develop their own concept of queerness as what a straight creator is trying to depict and when queer creators are brought into marvel they're given a quick stint with a given character like chavez or iceman and then when the title comes to an end they're quickly shut out from any further role in the company even as they're writing their queer characters they have editors breathing down their necks making sure this is the most palatable depiction of queerness possible they can't authentically even tell stories about their queer experience because they have to write queerness that is directed at appealing to homophobic editors meanwhile this whole process focused so hard on making gay men and women as straight as possible that we forgot to acknowledge that trans people exist and since media has focused on almost exclusively portraying trans people who fit the binary gender mold we're ignoring non-binary and genderqueer people society convinces us to take what is different and extraordinary about us and try to hide it so that we can be normal and ordinary but doing so we lose what makes us special we lose our superpower because trust me queer people have superpowers we have the superior durability to withstand years of torment and abuse we have the telepathy needed to find each other no matter where we might be we have the super strength needed to fight back against systems set up to crush us we have the power of mind control influencing entire societies even when they don't acknowledge that we exist we have the ability to transform and become the people we were always meant to be and we have the power of regeneration to close wounds believe too deep to heal and go on with our lives every queer person who gets up in the morning and goes out into the world is a superhero we may not wear capes though some of us might but we accomplish shocking feats whether we're out and proud or hidden surviving in a land that tries to exterminate us like so many of marvel's x-men we are amazing astounding fantastic spectacular super and i think people like that need to show up in comics or movies or tv shows queer superheroes who are every bit as astounding in everyday life as they are when they're fighting crime or saving the world it can be done maybe that will be the mcu's billy and teddy or maybe it's a hero yet to be created by a queer artist using their power to tell stories maybe it's you because we all have a superpower and we need to use them to make life a little bit easier for every queer kid across the world who needs a hero to look up to i know it's a lot to take on but we have to because as a great man once wrote with great power comes great responsibility [Music] [Music] [Music] you
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