For DC and Marvel Pride Month June 2024, I’m surprised there’s only been one character retcon as queer this year so far:
X-Men Academy’s Indra.
With pay reveals from Iceman to Jon Kent to Rachel Summers to Tim Drake, I thought we’d get way more this year?
What happened?
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>What happened?
turns out when you write shit no one wants, it doesnt sell.
Gay fatigue.
I think people are just losing interest in Pride Month.
There's a shopping plaza/park nearby me that for the last two years spent all of June with Rainbow flags hanging everywhere and kiosks set up with Pride-related activities, which also closed off one of the primary roads involved in getting from one major area to another. This month though, it was only like that for one week, then went back to normal. I wondered if that was a sign.
>t losing interest in Pride Month.
i live in a tiny town and this years pride march was way bigger than last years, in comics yeah its probably wading away because no one cares anymore. irl its probably another kettle of fish
>another kettle of fish
the frick does this mean?
imagine typing that out and not just highlighting the text and left clicking for the search engine function
No one who buys comics gives a shit about identity politics, and constantly preaching to a choir that doesn't actually exist, while shaming and ridiculing your actual consumer base, hurts sales.
They can't just reveal a character is gay/trans/whatever every year, they only have so many characters and they can't just make all their big recognizable ones LGBTQ, but they also don't really gain anything from making unimportant D-Listers gay.
They already have a full set and don't use them. At this point adding additional gay characters is going to piss off the gays because it means yet more time spent not showing the characters they want to see. The last few years were just a little more noteworthy because some more prominent characters were involved, but at this point they aren't making a production out of that anymore and the anthology itself was missing a bunch of the bigger names (and the Jon story was turbo stupid and had the wrong characters), so who cares?
>had the wrong characters
And who would be the "right" characters?
If Ray and Bunker are hanging out together with a more prominent new lgbt character and his boyfriend, the correct answer is Tim because he actually knows them, unlike Jon.
Kinda weird that Tim didn't show up in the special at all.
Eh, he was just one of a number of fairly big names who sat this one out. It was a pretty missable issue overall. Kind of highlights the problem of having a bunch of characters who never get used or are clearly underused having to fight for scraps in one short anthology per year.
Still need to have someone revealed from the Fantastic Four (typical American family self insert) as queer. One of the 4, or one of the kids. Till then, it won’t stop.
Even Power Pack, the most white bread team of a conservative heroic family, has one character as queer.
But which one will it be?
Reed/Susan and Ben/Alicia are married.
Johnny is the resident dude bro/frickboi/
That leaves the kids.
You just know it's gonna be Valerie.
But they’ve shown she’s attracted to Ka-Zar and Shanna’s son Matthew.
Unless she’s bisexual, which actually fits.
>Unless she’s bisexual, which actually fits.
Exactly, and bisexuals in comics only form lasting relationships with the same sex.
The only two exceptions are both men and were established as bi a while ago.
It's basically illegal to have a bisexual woman in a stable heterosexual relationship in modern comics.
>The only two exceptions are both men and were established as bi a while ago.
and those men are?
Daken and Constantine, though this may have been changed in recent years.
I didn't know Daken and Constantine had been established as being in long-term relationships before.
i assume this is similar to how we're pretending catwoman also doesn't count
Best case scenario
Nate will start dating Alex Power.
Nate? Reed’s dad? Doubtful.
And they won’t make Alex gay when Julie Power already is.
my bad, for some reason i mixed him up with franklin
there's always the question of who to pair them up with. nobody wants an iceman situation where there's no good love interest.
I’m surprised these comic characters haven’t been revealed as queer, when their live action movie adaptation (and more widely known) counterparts were already:
Marvel
Rahne Sinclair
Dani Moonstone
DC
Pedro the Latino Shazam kid
>Pedro the Latino Shazam kid
I mean, pretty sure he's probably meant to be gay in the comics too, it's just that the Shazam lore has recently put the diversity kids into the background, they don't even have powers anymore.
Freddy also doesn't have powers, but is still more active than them, for obvious reasons.
With Pedro, that means each of DC’s major superhero “families” have one or more LGBTQ character.
Though notably these don’t:
New Gods (unless I’m forgetting one)
Birds of Prey (none of the major members are queer). Unless you count…yuck….Harley
>that means each of DC’s major superhero “families” have one or more LGBTQ character.
Pretty sure that's the idea.
]>New Gods (unless I’m forgetting one)
I wouldn't consider the New Gods major at all, they're a pretty niche concept.
>Birds of Prey
Same with Birds of Prey, they're just a team, each individual member usually has their own "family" that already has one or more LGBTQ tokens.
Yeah, but New Gods is not just a franchise but a whole race. With the way DC is nowadays, I’m surprised not one of the New Gods have retcon queer as such. Not even the Forever People.
They're not important or marketable enough for anyone to be gay, DC doesn't need them to have a gay token because they're just very irrelevant nowadays.
That said, they did show up in the newest DC Pride special, and I think there were some non-specific gays there, so gays probably do exist there, they're just not important enough to get some big push.
Captain Marvel/Carol and/or Spider-Woman not being made officially LGBT yet straight characters like Iceman getting retroactively made LGBT will never stop fricking me up.
that's just what happens when you get near kitty's magical poison vegana
Carol’s current normal human counterpart, Yuna, is queer.
>Captain Marvel/Carol and/or Spider-Woman not being made officially LGBT
This wouldn't be any different than ruining Iceman. Female characters don't sell, making them gay would further exacerbate that.
>Rahne Sinclair
Yeah no if I remember correctly when Shatterstar and Rictor revealed they were a gay couple Rahne had a fricking meltdown
That’s just that religious hypocrisy she was raised with.
I think companies are giving up on rainbow capitalism. I'm seeing less random rainbow stuff in stores, less corporate accounts with progress flag profile pictures.
I wish.
It might be because it's an election year and we all saw what happened with Bud Light
What happened with Bud Light?
harley is the only one recognizable. who the frick know or cares about the rest.
Should have been StephCass
I just want the big two to fail at this point so just keep throwing more moronic homosexuals into the mix. Lots of boring stupid dykes too, because while the books wont sell at least i'll get some hot tuna-on-tuna fanart action.
Pride Month is subdued hard
I don't see rainbow logos at all
Hell, when Halo celebrated Pride Month everyone laughed because they were the ONLY ones doing it
I filter any words related to pride month out of my Twitter feed so I don't know anything about that, is it really just not getting much attention now?
I see Pride month stuff, I think it’s now just a thing rather than an excuse to gay wash a corp.
I guess
corporate posturing has never actually been particularly effective with the gays, who might buy some of the novelty merch but are still quite happy to shit on the company for it's actual practices. it's like the weird narrative that somehow disney has become a creature of the left when it was for decades and continues to be almost persona non grata among them because all of its actual messaging contained in its products, not its marketing, is just mild heterosexual tradshit. the token gestures it makes to gay characters are immediately recognized as such and rejected.
DC just sent out emails today shilling pride merch.
If they actually had a sexy coffee cup with an Apollo Midnight image somewhat similar to this (just an example of recent images they slapped on merch - posters to be specific) which wouldn't work with coffee mug, even a tall one would look meh), I'd buy one.
I know some dykes who have Ivy Harley posters on their wall but don't read comics. I've tried to get them into it, but the most you can do is get them to watch clips of that stupid HBO Max cartoon. But these are people that don't even watch Pixar or the big animated movies from Universal or will even go see Corpse Bride or Nightmare for the holidays.
On the other hand, I've see people get excited about X-Men '97 who are gay who aren't interested in necessarily having Logan be gay in the cartoon but like fan art of say that Logan with that Scott. These are people paying for Disney Plus. But they would probably pay for it even without an X-Men cartoon.
Weird
Most gay people older than their early-20s remember that corporations, at best, didn't give a single shit about them until around a decade ago and respond accordingly. Lesbians don't love Subarus because they started slapping a rainbow on adverts in June two years ago but because they walked the walk since the 80s. However, in general I think corporations are cutting back on Pride Month because the novelty has worn off and they have enough data to see the exact value they get out of engaging it allowing them to adjust to maximize profitability.
Then why does DC and Marvel still do Pride specials each year?
Because they still think Twitter is a good metric for the consumer base.
Capitalism
>Judaism
FIFY
Your complete misunderstanding of the Pride specials.