From diamonds to coal: the (non) Fridging of Ms. Emma Frost.
Ok. I wanted to get some distance from the events of last Wednesday, a few snippets of snark aside, before putting down my thoughts to keyboard about...well there’s really no better way to say it...the character rape-ification that happened to Emma on IvX # 6. So now a few days later. I think my thoughts have settled. And that viewing of Hamilton last night buoyed my spirits and reassured me that good things still exist in the world. Let’s go.
I think one of the most awful truisms in life is the notion of having to take one’s own advice. It sucks. Particularly when it comes to comics. I’m usually the one to tell folks, right after their favorite characters get nuked because some writer thinks awful writing choices means ‘genius’ or something, that one of the only constants in our hobby/culture/life is the constancy of change. Status quos last only rarely and even something seemingly permanent can be rebirthed, rebooted, forgiven, recast, retconned, whatever. That’s a long winded way of saying that...even though things are bleak at the moment, to quote Avenue Q, ‘this is only for now’. I know it’s small, fleeting comfort fellow Emma fans. I feel you. But...it’s the only silver lining I can see emerging from this hot mess of a fucked up sitch we’re in right now. It’s hard to swallow. I find it difficult to accept it at times still. At the end of the day though, I think it’s also important to assess and realize that look, at the end of day, and as much as we all love her, she is just a fictional character. Her status quo now, as awful as it is, hasn’t killed anyone (as far as I know) or made the Trump regime even worse (again as far as I know). So we’re ok.
....but you know? It still sucks. I’ve been reading comics for a long time before Grant Morrison’s Emma came along (which is when I absolutely fell in love with her), so it’s not like having her around, in a way that’s palatable and compelling, is the sin qua non of me reading comics. But she’s been #1 to me for close to two decades now...so what happened still smarts. It’s as if a close friend suddenly became a serial killer for no reason whatsoever, other than some hack in the sky were pulling their strings.
So now that the confessional is out of the way...let’s get on with the nitty gritty. I’m not gonna summarize the plot of IvX, as that’s available plenty of other places. And if you’ve read the story...well you know.
I don’t think I’m unhappy about Emma’s reversion to an out and out villain. Honestly, after the events of Death of X and the earlier installments of IvX, any other kind of conclusion, or hell even having her returned to the X-Fold wouldn’t make much story sense. Lemire and Soule have laid down enough story real estate that having it end any other way than that would just be silly or horribly contrived. And you know what? That’s fine. That’s totally fine. Why not? It might even be interesting. What would an anti-hero Emma, skirting on the darker sides of the gray lines she already inhabits, look like? What would an Emma-ized notion of Magneto’s previous ideology look like? Would that even be her motivation? Or would it just be (and to me far more interesting plot-wise and commentary wise on the X-franchise as a whole) more of Emma finally saying ‘FUCK IT’ to all the endless thumb-twiddling the X-folks have been doing ever since Bendis took over? Or hell, she can just go full on Black Cat and just be an international jewel thief coz she is so sick and done with the X-Men’s perennially regressive approach to things and the endless Uncle Tom-ing they all seem to be doing lately. All of these options are cool to me and they would be interesting to follow.
But that isn’t what we got. What we got instead is Emma literally assuming the identity of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and without the wit or awesome musical numbers that you get from the CW show. Her motivation for turning the heel is literally, and I wave my fist to the sky as I type this, ‘my boyfriend died and I’m nothing without him’. A notion that Soule (and Lemire too? It isn’t clear which of these two editorial puppets came up with the notion, though most seem to argue that it’s Soule) ratchets up to a level beyond creepy when he has Emma don an outfit THAT LITERALLY IS HER PUTTING ON HER EX-BOYFRIENDS SKIN. What in the fuckity fuck fuck fuck is this? How/why does this make sense? As many other fans (and non fans) have said...we are talking about a woman who a) watched many iterations of her students die b) survived the 9/11-ing of Genosha by Sentinels (more on that FUCKITY FUCK plot point in a little bit) c) killed her sister for killing one of her students d) lost her brother, whom she cared for deeply to insanity because of an abusive father e) literally started from the bottom to build up a massive financial empire. I can go on. The point is, in the grand scheme of traumas that Emma has experienced, losing Scott would probably just amount to a small paper cut. The fact (that Soule and Lemire forgot about?) that she and Scott ALREADY BROKE UP BEFORE DEATH OF X makes the notion of this crazy, stupid love even more ridiculous. This characterization of Emma as jilted lover, turned all the way up to level 100 gazillion, is just idiotic writing borne out of some editorial mandate.
And look ok, fine, let’s make Emma unstable. Sure, why not, I can go there too. But seriously? You’re going to show that by having the woman who, when she got god-like Phoenix powers (which, by the way also maybe made her a little crazy?) MADE IT HER FIRST PRIORITY TO LITERALLY DESTROY EVERY SENTINEL ON THE PLANET. How does this even fucking work? If Emma is really all ID now and she’s gone off the rails, and is now doing whatever the fuck she wants...why in the hell would she want to create Sentinels? It makes no sense....even if the aim was to show her instability. It also lacks the kind of deeper, elegant hurt that she’s capable of and prefers to inflict. This Sentinel shit is amateur fucking hour, and she is anything but. See, for contrast, the way she handled Laura’s previous handler Kimura. That wasn’t the kind of mustache twirling fuckery we got handed. That was Emma going for the elegant kind of pain: one that’s long lasting and deliciously poetic. If Emma is going to be a baddie, then that’s the kind of next level shit they need to show her being capable of, not this two-bit hysterical monologuing bullshit we got.
Why is all this happening? Why did it have to happen this way? My completely unscientific (and admittedly conspiracy theory-leaning) argument is that it all has to do with nostalgia. This RessurXion nonsense seems to be banking of regressing everything back to the 90s...the time when the X-Men were walking around in tights, constantly playing baseball, and involved in 30 plus year subplots that don’t ever get resolved. And look, there’s nothing wrong with that. But, why does that shiny new reboot have to be bought and paid for by throwing both Cyclops and Emma under the bus? Why does this have to come at the price of wiping away so much of the compelling additions that the Scott/Emma era of the X-franchise created? The notion of mutants as a tribe, as one people; of mutants being an actual political minority that exists in the larger Marvel firmament; the notion of an X-character, who not only is a compelling, multi-layered female character, who doesn’t go for the usual liberal/assimilative platitudes the X-People usually spout. Why does all this need to be wiped away? Are the new writers just not good enough to create something that the nostalgic mouthbreathing focus groups want (and is this even a real demographic? Who exactly did this development please? Other than godawful Jean partisans and non-intelligent comic readers?) while being respectful of and keeping (mostly) intact the import of stories that have already been told. The fact that what happened happened feels like a slap in the face to all the fans who are rightly asking these questions.
Secondly....I think this development also owes a lot to the kind of demographic Marvel is targeting, and the kind of female characters that that demographic is interested in reading and supporting. That is, the kind of female character who is a modified distillation of the manic, pixie dreamgirl: spunky, ‘strong’, sexual (to a degree), feminist (to a degree, but also only in a very specific second wave kind of a way) and of course have to be tumblrflower, Bleeding Cool and Mary Sue approved, lest the wrath of twitter be provoked. I’m talking of characters like America Chavez, Kamala Khan, Kate Bishop and Carol Danvers. Strong, feminist, etc. But, not threatening, not overtly sexual, not swagger-y, and god forbid, not sexual only for the sake of sex. Emma, in my view, represents one of the last few fabulously written female characters that counters this second-wave feminist tendency in current comic writing/production of female characters. She has an unproblematic relationship with sex for pleasure and she isn’t here to make you feel good about your goddamned feminist struggle or your sophomoric need for representation. And for that, she had to be punished and made the bogeywoman of all the twitter warriors who insist that female characters be feminist-strong...but only in the way that they find palatable and ‘relatable’. I’ve always been very aware that Marvel is a business (a point I belabor to anyone who thinks Marvel OWES them something)...and of course they have to go where the money is. But, it doesn’t make this direction for Emma, or the character assassination she and we have endued, any more palatable.
Which brings us full circle to the essay’s title. She may still be alive, walking around the Marvel U in an outfit that can only be described as ‘too garish, even for pre-Joanne Lady Gaga’, but for all intents and purposes, Emma Frost has been fridged. Not physically, and in a way this is even far more cruel to her fans. They could have just taken her away from us cleanly, ending her story, not in the best of places, but at least it would have ended (for now) and we can go on, missing her, but at least with the comfort that it couldn’t get any worse. But that isn’t what happened. Instead, they took her away from us, one sordid, horribly mandated development at a time, until all that’s left is this ghoul-caricature of a character, walking around; sapped of all of her vitality and that je ne sais quoi that made her so unique, endlessly compelling, and the source of such pure comic joy for me. That woman is long gone. And what’s in her place now is just a zombie that Soule and Lemire should have just put out of her misery.
It’s fine that Marvel needed an X-Men reboot. Hell, in many ways as a fan, I might have welcome it with much more enthusiasm than my tepid ‘oh great I guess I’m obligated to read it’ feeling that I’m having right now. If only, this shiny new future for the merry mutants didn’t have to bought with the merciless, cruel, and absolutely unnecessary, and far worse, character fridging of one Emma Frost.
At least, we’ll always have the trades fellow Emma fans.
