198 – How to Destroy the Universe Without Really Trying

I must admit that I’m not entirely comfortable with “Warlock is an individual.”

I’m a bit worried that’s the same argument as “Starfire chooses to go around naked. Because she’s comfortable with her body, and that’s her choice. As an individual who’s proud of her Tamaranian culture! Who are you to tell her she can’t do that?”

Which is based on ignoring the detail that Starfire isn’t a real person. She’s a creation of male creators and while she, in-story, isn’t trying to titillate readers of the comic, that doesn’t mean that she’s not an exercise in titillation.

Now, Warlock doesn’t represent anything like as culpable as that. But I do tend to think that the reason why Warlock was represented as identifying as male when created has something to do with male being tacitly assumed to be the default norm. And that’s not automatically something that one has to respect and preserve — just as the fact that Sue Storm was endlessly going on about her “female intuition” in Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four does not mean that one has to replicate 1960s sexism as part of her depiction nowadays.

This is a reasonably easy retcon, with free bonus metatextual commentary: just say that Warlock used “he” because the other New Mutants assigned it to Warlock, for the same reason that Claremont did.

On the other hand, there’s the question of what was done with Warlock as identifying as male and whether that makes it a bad idea to undo that. I thought you brought up something important in your reply to Si about the ways in which the Doug-Warlock relationship is coded as a same-sex romantic relationship. Redefining Warlock as genderless probably does involve some element of erasure, and that’s not a road one should go down.

Another place where it may matter that Warlock identifies as male is that so much of his character is built around heightened Oedipal stuff. Since one of our hosts has a degree in psychology, I’ll quickly shove in the note that, from an empirical point of view, Freud’s theories about childhood development have proven, let’s say, questionable. But from a storytelling perspective, that they’re invalid just makes them important in a different way, because it means that the immense success and popular acceptance of the Oedipus complex as an idea is a tremendously important cultural fact about the 20th century. It was a story that for decades we liked to tell over and over again, because it spoke to something about where we were.

Obviously, the son overthrowing his father is a much older narrative, one that goes back to some of our earliest surviving stories from the ancient Near East. It’s a twisted coming-of-age narrative, obviously, and as such is ideally suited to the New Mutants. Freud purported to be explaining such stories as psychological universals, but (in my opinion, anyway – apologies to any remaining Freudians out there) what he was actually doing was retelling them and recasting them in forms updated to reflect the 20th century’s tensions around gender identity. That makes Oedipal stuff not only meaningful to explore, but great fodder for the New Mutants in particular.

(The title is shot through with problematic fathers and father-figures. Magus is just the most extreme. Damn, I am talking myself into liking what Simonson did with Magneto.)

One thing that concerns me, though, is when you put the Oedipal elements together with the coded same-sex relationship. At that point, this is open to the Freudian reading that Warlock is gay because he’s defined by his bad relationship with his father, and, yeah, there’s some Bad Stuff there.

This comment is already far too long, but the next thing is obviously to layer in that Warlock is a vampire, and vampire stories are pretty much always about sex.