....Uh..... okay, one word for this, lemme just dredge it up, oh yeah, that would be- NO.
When? When, exactly, in their long involved history of being such dear friends and teammates, did Rogue and Sentry- OH WAIT THEY WERE NEVER THOSE THINGS. Hmmn. Back to the drawing board.
It's this sort of irresponsible bullshit that clutters up a canon to the point where Peter David has to be hired to come in and fix it. I am stunned that in the middle of Mike Carey's extraordinary work with the character, the years, now, he's spent bringing Rogue back to a place of real characterization after she was drowning in a sea of muddled unhealthy 'romance' plots, Paul Jenkins (with the influence, I would image, of one Brian Michael Bendis) would pull a bush league move like this. It's crap.
I want a timeline. I want a backstory. I want citations. How dare you make something as important to Rogue's character as physical intimacy a punchline in a book that has nothing to do with the X-Men or their lives. It is so disrespectful to the fans, and to the writers who actually love and are writing the character. This is nonsensical. This is LAZY. This is stupid. This is detrimental to both of their characters. This is sloppy, thoughtless retconning at its worst. And you should be extremely disappointed in yourself.
Addendum: I want Mike Carey to respond to this, and then I want him to fix it, and I believe he CAN.
Addendum Redux: HE DID. Reader and my new best friend James sent us an email that contains Mike Carey's response from his facebook wall.
Mike Carey: Wow. I need another cup of coffee.Does it bother me that Mike is, to an extent, going gentle into that good night? Yes. It absolutely is. Because I want him to be as vocally disdainful and outraged as I am. But Jenkins is, in the loosest and only most technical of terms, Carey's peer and so he can't call the dude out. No matter how I wish he would. Alas. Still, knowing that he disagrees with this on the most fundamental basis of the character reassures me that he'll deal with it- or not- as is appropriate and make it somehow work. Mostly I feel this because, post-Nicieza, Mike Carey is the only one who has.
Okay, guys, I'm going to comment here in a fairly circumspect way. I've responded to some of you in one-to-one message threads, and I'm going to ask you not to come back to me on this, because there won't be anything I can add.
As everybody knows, I try not to do ret-cons - and as I type that, my nose just ... grew by about a foot and a half. What I try not to do is "type 2" invasive ret-cons that erase things that are commonly supposed to have happened. I'm shameless about type 1 ret-cons, where stuff happened but you just didn't know about it until now. The whole of the Professor X incarnation of Legacy was made up of stories of that kind.
This is a type 1: it happened, because Rogue says on-panel that it happened. It was behind the scenes, invisible, and the chronology isn't clear, but it happened. Is it surprising? I think so. In terms of Rogue's behaviour in relationships, her sexual morality insofar as we can infer it, her personal history up to this point, this revelation is hard - on the face of it - to reconcile.
But as someone says above (sorry, thread is too long to find the reference again quickly) what we know is minimal, and we can fill in an infinite number of stories around these few details. There are ways it could have happened that would make sense. I won't be the one who tells the story of how it actually did happen, but I'm accepting that it happened and the story is there to be told.
Characters in a shared fictional space are created by a kind of consensus. Someone dreams them up and puts them onto the stage, but a whole lot of someone elses then fill in the blanks. When you get contradictions, or apparent contradictions, fans build their own conception of the character from the parts they like most or believe in most.
This is a dangerous and frivolous analogy, but look at the Bible. I'm an atheist, but I'm happy to acknowledge that there's a core of teachings in the Bible that vast numbers of people base their lives on - but crucially, it tends to be a different core for each of them. You take what makes sense to you, and you view the rest with some mixture of tolerance and caution.
I think you have to do the same with shared universes.
Oh, and: Come on, Fraction. EMMA FROST got to speak at Kurt's funeral over Rogue? EMMA FREAKING FROST? And then the one funeral she shouldn't have even BEEN AT, let alone spoken up during, and away we go. Good Lord, Marvel, get it together.
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