What are your thoughts on Zora? and also her and Johhny and Doom relationship? I feel like at the end it wasnt their fault, she was not cheating on Doom and while Johnny did cheat on Sky, I felt like he was forced to be with her
It's defend the blond man hours on Traincat's tumblr again.
So overall I would say that I like Zora. I'm always fond of the Doom's righthand woman position, and Zora's a fun addition to that. Sidenote, they should bring back Lancer. I would like to see additional writers take on the character -- in general, I think Slott creates interesting characters and then wastes their potential, so I would love to see her rescued by a more competent writer. (For the record, before I get into all of that, I also think a different writer could do interesting things with Sky, especially given the Planet Soulmate environment she was raised in.) I think Cantwell had a good voice for her in his 2019 Dr. Doom book, although I read it a while ago, and I'd like to see what other writers would do with the character.
Doom throwing himself like a loveless lavender political marriage and inviting Reed to be his best man is also just like hilarious on paper. I famously don't love Slott's execution on most of his ideas, but I can't deny he comes up with fun stuff. I wish he just did fun stuff with it instead, you know, all of that.
I have complicated feelings about the use of the word "cheating" to apply to Johnny sleeping with Zora behind Sky's back, so to speak, because it's not as simple as him being in a relationship. If Johnny and Sky had just met on an alien planet and felt a genuine connection with no strings and she'd followed him back to Earth, and then he'd slept with Zora, that would be cheating. But that's not what happened, although I allow it may be what Slott thought he was writing.
As evidenced by this tweet. Which is wrong, by the way -- Johnny pursued Julie Angel, but notably backed off the one time she kissed him, and he and Sharon never dated. He actually freaked out and ran away the one time Sharon kissed him. And Ben and Alicia had broken up when Alicia and Johnny got together (pre-retcon)/Lyja initially pursued Johnny in the guise of Alicia (post-retcon), so everyone was a free agent. There's years and years between Johnny dating Crystal and Johnny dating Medusa, so it's not quite the own Dan thinks it is, and none of these are the same thing as cheating, which was what people took umbrage with when the issue happened, saying that Johnny wouldn't do that and it was out of character. Which -- again, I think it's not that simple. I think this is lot messier than "X cheated on Y" and I don't think Johnny is inherently in the wrong here. But what Dan is essentially saying here is that it wasn't out of character for Johnny to sleep with Zora while still in a relationship with Sky, because he thinks Johnny is a slut. Which again, this is a really interesting example of how Johnny's in-universe and out-of-universe reputation precede him, and how people are unwilling to view Johnny as a victim because of that reputation.
Slott's setup betrays him. So does Johnny's preexisting canon. Personally, I can't view this incident as having happened in a vacuum. The beginning of Johnny and Sky's relationship matters, as does his previous relationship with Lyja, who made a reappearance immediately before Johnny's one night stand with Zora. So I'm less interested, personally, in viewing the Johnny and Zora situation as something in which someone has to be wrong, and more interested in looking at how it happened, because I actually do think it makes a lot of sense given Johnny's history.
So, I want to take it back to the Lyja thing first, because I think that's where this actually starts, and for me at least it's important that Lyja makes a reappearance at this point in canon. I'm not going to rehash the whole Lyja saga. I have longer posts on it here:
The Long Lyja Writeup
Lyja Reading List
An overview of Johnny Storm’s history as the victim of sexual abuse and how Lyja fits into that
Johnny and "Alicia" Before the Retcon
Johnny's relationship history pre-and-post-Lyja
tl;dr: In the 1980s, Johnny and "Alicia" had a brief relationship and married in Fantastic Four #300, after Alicia and Ben had broken up. The "Alicia" Johnny married was later retconned to be a Skrull named Lyja, whose mission had been to infiltrate the Fantastic Four. Lyja died, came back to life, threatened Johnny's life to the point he went Nova to same himself, lied about being pregnant twice, and stalked Johnny in a separate identity after he told her he never wanted to see her again. Some comic book writers are convinced this is the best relationship he's ever had because it is the longest.
Lyja accused Johnny of being "unfaithful" to her repeatedly, after he had told her he never wanted to see her again, which, you know, necessitates not being in a relationship. And while she was dating him in a separate disguise as a woman named Laura Green, an identity she used to insult him, calling him trite and simple-minded and taking him to art galleries in a strange imitation of the relationship they'd had when she was pretending to be Alicia. And it's interesting because if we're going to talk about Johnny and cheating, his emotional affair with Crystal at the start of his marriage should be brought up. Right off the bat, almost immediately after he married "Alicia" and Crystal joined the Fantastic Four at Ben's invitation (explicitly an attempt to break Johnny and "Alicia" up), Johnny was open with himself that he was still attracted to Crystal, something he even said to her -- but he refused to physically act on it because of his marriage. So we know his stance here -- or at least, we know his stance in what was supposed to be a committed, genuine relationship.
Johnny tends to internalize things. One of the things I've pointed out repeatedly is that I don't think "playboy Johnny" exists before Lyja, not in any serious way. If he has a reputation, it's unearned -- before he got married, he had exactly three relationships, including his high school girlfriend, and one or two short flirtations. Compare him here to Peter Parker, who lived it up as the focal point of love triangles up until his own marriage in the same year. Debatably, playboy Johnny doesn't really exist afterwards, either, but it's not until after that relationship ends in the 90s that Johnny starts playing into that idea of himself. No one's ever explicitly depicted this, but for me, the timing is too coincidental not to view Johnny's playboy persona as a response to the trauma of the deception of his marriage and the aftermath. Everyone says he's a playboy, a skirt chaser, a womanizer. Isn't it easier to let them be right? And if you're always with a different girl every night, can you escape being deceived again? Like, I do think this shift in characterization makes sense. It's just never been addressed.
Anyway, fast forward to the Sky situation. We're in Slott's run now, which was shaky from the get go, but which really flings itself, lemming-style, right off a cliff with the Planet Soulmate arc. That's right, it's Dan Slott soulbonding time once again. I don't know how this keeps happening, either. But basically, and this is a very fast and loose summary, the Fantastic Four crash land on an alien planet while trying to recreate their fateful spaceflight, and on this planet, everyone is magically assigned a soulmate by a big tower.
Look, I'm not saying Slott is a frustrated trashy romance writer, but between Planet Soulmate and the Spider Pheromones That Make Us Take Our Clothes Off, it's just getting a little suspicious. I think Planet Soulmate is an interesting concept, I just don't think Dan executes it well. The clear narrative build up here is that the Spyre is wrong, that it's a dystopia, that the big eye in the sky cannot calculate your perfect soulmate. You get to choose who you love. That's... not what happens.
Reed and Sue are each other's soulmates, of course, but a beautiful winged girl codenamed Sky realizes, gasp and shock, that Johnny's her true soulmate. Okay. (Ben is apparently Too Ugly to have a soulmate and banished to the lower levels of society with the rest of the dregs, which you know, seemed to indicate that this whole soulmate thing is a scam, but okay. Whatever. It's a Slott plot, we can't expect payoff.) Soulmatism, here, is found in the giant shiny gold armband, a bracelet clamped around the bicep area. Johnny meets Sky when he faints into her arms, classic Johnny Storm style, and then wakes up naked in her bed except for his shiny new accessory.
(Fantastic Four (2018) #16) Lest we thought he was only shirtless, you can see that he's not. So already this arc was off to a bad start -- there was no reason to strip Johnny of all his clothes, or to put the bracelet on him while he was still unconscious. Oh, by the way -- he can't take the bracelet off.
Supposedly, only your "soulmate" can remove the bracelet, so only Sky can take it off Johnny. He can't take off himself. It's more of a metaphor, and I would argue probably an accidental one on Slott's part, but there again there's that complete loss of autonomy on Johnny's part. He has no control of this situation, and no one is helping him, and it again ties into this image of him as a player. "It's funny because he's always the heartbreaker. We don't need to take it seriously because Johnny's a playboy."
"What?! Like marry a Skrull?" (Fantastic Four (2018) #12)
There's this kind of repeated thing where, if it was one writer, I would let it go as bad writing, and I still think it's bad writing, but that nobody in Johnny's family steps in for him here has to be so isolating, even more so than this situation. It becomes a joke, even though it's really not funny -- at least in the case of Lyja's second lie about a pregnancy, the egg she passed off as a baby actually contained a man-eating monster, so you know, it's not like only Johnny was in danger here. The real Alicia, the Fantastic Four's close friend and Ben's wife at this point, could have been lost forever if Lyja hadn't been found out. We focus a lot on Johnny's part in things on this blog, but what happens to Alicia is genuinely horrific, that she has her life and identity usurped, and she's a victim, too. There's not a lot that's funny about this situation, and certainly nothing worth teasing Johnny. But this one thing writers seem to fall down on when it comes to Johnny's family. Granted, comic book writers are famously bad at addressing male victims of sexual violence after they write said sexual violence or domestic abuse. Johnny is not an isolated case. But he's also not a well-addressed case.
For the record, I don't think anything with Sky is as bad as it is with Lyja, but I think there was a pretty big missed opportunity to explore the differences in communication when one person grows up in a culture where your soulmate is completely predestined and out of your control, where the idea of your soulmate is everything and you're raised to accept that above all else, and where you never expect to have any say in it, and someone who is from Earth. What I'm saying is that as much as I enjoy a good soulbonding fic, there's a really good "soulmates as dystopia" plot in here. That's not what we got. Instead, Sky comes back to Earth with Johnny, because He's Her Soulmate, and he proceeds to ignore her and be uncomfortable with this situation.
(Fantastic Four (2018) #20)
No one kind of says to Johnny, hey! This isn't normal and you can have a say in your own relationship! If Johnny and Sky are together, it's because it's just accepted by everyone that this soulmate thing is real and that they're now in a relationship, beyond some very cursory discussion between Johnny and Sky about how she shouldn't have placed the bracelet on him without his consent and how he's "never" felt this complete before over ten issues later. (Johnny frequently says that about new relationships, so take that with a grain of salt.) Everyone just kind of accepts that Johnny has a soulmate now. If he's uncomfortable in the beginning, it's because of his supposed commitment issues. I wonder where he would have gotten those.
(Fantastic Four (2018) #32)
Oh, right. The green elephant in the room. Lyja comes back, to make everything even more complicated.
Because no one is willing to address the Lyja issue, we end up in another situation where Sky is jealous over her presence because she's framed as Johnny's ex-wife. Despite Johnny telling Lyja that he never loved her, Lyja only leaves because Alicia uses her stepfather's clay to force her. (Which I love as a character decision, by the way. I love that it's Alicia who steps in and resolves the situation by any means necessary. I love when they let her be a little unhinged.) Alicia has to do this, because it's clear that Johnny's words and wants hold no weight. He can say he doesn't want to be with Lyja, but Lyja hasn't taken that seriously since the 1990s, so why would she start now. The Lyja situation is "resolved," but the Sky situation isn't. Then Doom's wedding happens and the Fantastic Four end up in Latveria.
(Fantastic Four (2018) #32) "After last night, you most definitely must call me... Victorious." I think he's as difficult to top as it is to boil water, but still, good for her. Anyway, this is another classic Johnny Storm Sex Scene where we don't actually see him having sex and don't know whether he had a good time or not. We only see the regretful aftermath. You know, regular playboy stuff. That's how it is with all the lady lovers.
I think whether it was right or wrong doesn't matter -- what matters, from my perspective, is why he did it. Again, we're in interpretation territory, but what the hell. I think Johnny sleeping with Zora makes sense as a way to kind of wrench back whatever control of his life that he can. It's about Johnny making decisions for himself, even if they're bad decisions. It makes sense for me that he would make reckless choices post-Lyja, because I think that's what he did the first time around, too, when that initial playboy persona stopped being something people put on him and something he could actively embody as a defense. All of that Lyja trauma just crashed down on him, he's still trapped in a relationship where he fundamentally has no say -- remember that he can't remove that bracelet himself, and is dependent on Sky removing it and not just offering -- so it makes sense that he isn't thinking straight and just reacting. It makes sense that he's making bad decisions. I think a lot of Slott's run is shaky, but this choice works for me, from a characterization perspective. It's just that it's not as simple as a case of infidelity where two people are mutually agreed upon a relationship and then one of them steps outside the bounds of that relationship. Whether it's cheating depends on your personal interpretation of what cheating entails. Either way, I don't think it makes him a character who did something "bad" -- I think it just makes him a character in a bad situation.
So, I don't think it was bad writing, but I do think there wasn't good build up to it, especially because Slott didn't seem consistent in how he wanted to depict Sky and Johnny's relationship, or in any attraction between Zora and Johnny before they sleep together. It's clunky, but I think it's a decision that makes sense for Johnny emotionally.
