28 – What’s New, Shadowcat? (Featuring Greg Rucka)

I can’t get behind the “Kitty as fan-service girl-next-door” theory. It’s got a lot of holes. First of all, one of the things I’ve found refreshing about her as a character is that they make her smart at the traditionally masculine pursuit of computers and electronics but otherwise they do nothing to tomboy her up. Aside from computers and sci-fi fandom, she’s still very stereotypically girly. She likes dressing up and dancing and figure-skating and the like. Typically, exemplars of the trope you’re claiming for her are tomboys or “cool girls”. The sort who only have male friends, who are proud of being “not like other girls”, etc. But not only is Kitty girly, she has tons of female friends: not just Ilyana, but also Rachel, Rogue, Storm, and Stevie. Doug is really her only close male friend among her peers.

The other problem with Kitty as fan-service is that her love interests aren’t really stand-ins for the hypothetical gawky teenage fan. As Rachel mentions, Doug Ramsay is the on panel analogue for the readers that Kitty is supposedly pandering to. But Kitty never hooks up with him, or even has any interest in hooking up with him. If Kitty is supposed to be wish fulfillment for the real-life Dougs out there, it has to have back fired spectacularly, because Nice Guy(TM) Doug Ramsay has been stuck in the Friend Zone(TM) for decades while Kitty pined over the Colossus the Dumb Jock and Pete Wisdom and Peter Quill, the Assholes Who Get All the Girls. Iceman is the fan-serviciest love interest she’s had, but as you note, their romance has also been the shortest-lived. Arguably Ultimate Peter Parker would qualify too, except that Ultimate Kitty Pryde doesn’t have much in common with 616 Kitty; she’s a lot closer to a typical Peter Parker love interest, except for the superpowers. But Kitty’s fans don’t really resent her for not getting with Doug, or even breaking up with Iceman. Most of them ship Colossus and Kitty, despite the fact that he isn’t much of a stand-in for the kind of fan who would be into her.

I’d go even further and say the runner about the problematic aspects of Kitty, Jubilee, Armor, and Pixie ‘s role on the X-men is completely off base. It’s hardly unheard of for male characters to be used as audience surrogate/novice characters who come in fresh and have to learn the ropes from a mentor. That also describes Jason Todd and Tim Drake (pretty much every sidekick, but those two in particular). It’s also true of Kyle Rayner, Sam Alexander, and Miles Morales. If we confine ourselves just to teams, Cannonball’s relationship to Cable certainly fits the bill, and Falcon’s role in the Avengers Assemble cartoon does too.

Even in X-men, it’s not that common a trope. Jubilee’s role in comics is completely different. She doesn’t really receive much in the way of mentorship from Wolverine in the same way that Kitty does. She doesn’t become more Wolverine-like from her interaction with him. He leans on her for the first year or so of their relationship more than the reverse. Armor kind of combines the Jubilee and Kitty relationships to Wolverine, in that, like Jubilee, their bond is founded on her helping him when he was vulnerable and not himself and like Kitty in that she does take Wolverine as an explicit role model and learn to be more like him. Pixie just doesn’t fit among this group except in the superficial “younger girl in the X-men” way. She has no particular bond to Wolverine, and wasn’t really mentored on the team by anyone. Aside from her miniseries and maybe one arc in Uncanny, she’s little more than a shuttle service for the X-men.

I think the reason this trope seems more common than it really is is that writers saw how well it worked with Kitty and lean on it when they adapt X-men to other media. Jubilee in the animated series and Rogue in the movies really were a recapitulation of the trope and read like they were explicitly modelled on the Kitty/Wolverine relationship. Most of the rest in the actual comics feel too different to be full on trope examples, so much as superficially similar because of the genders of the characters.