Bendis makes Teen-Iceman gay in All-New X-Men

It's not the same as Sam Wilson or Lady Thor(and I like both of those characters in those rolls). The only objection I ever made to any of that was to the reaction people were having to Falcon getting some kind of a 'promotion' by being Cap, and some speculation that a preexisting female marvel hero was getting 'upgraded' to Thor. It sets a dangerous precedent to consider a preexisting minority superhero taking on the mantel of a white male to be some kind of advancement. I saw more kids talking about Falcon coming out of the last Cap movie than I did about the main character, and I would like to see more done to advance women and minorities as their own preexisting characters than donning the guise of someone else's. I love the Black Widow, but if Marvel decides at some point to make her the new Captain America to say they have a woman in the part, I will feel insulted, not least of all because the Black Widow is a far more interesting character than Captain America.

This story didn't happen in some kind of vacuum. Imagine fore a second that internet trolls from a prominent message board spent ten years saying Storm was a man to insult the character and troll her fans. That it got so bad you could no longer even really discus anything about Storm on the main forum there. That Marvel started catering to those trolls by putting jokes about her gender into the comics to be used as scans to troll her fans on that message board. That those trolls started courting the writer of a series supposedly featuring her younger self on social media, and trying to get things put into the comic about her being a man to try and troll her fans with it. That that writer then said in an interview that those fans had convinced him Storm was a man, and had another character 'out' young Storm as a man to cater to those trolls in the comic he was writing.

This isn't the case of straight people being victims, it's a case of about of decade of trolling, harassing and cyber-bullying, with internet trolls saying a character is secretly gay as an excuse to hurl insult after insult at him for it(he's pathetic, a joke , a loser, not even a real man); and saying they would not stop doing that until he 'comes out', as a way to attack his fans. And them then getting a writer to cater to their wishes.

This is being perceived as an attack by Iceman fans because of ten years of history on CBR and the fact the trolls who were attacking Iceman and his fans there were the driving force behind all this.

Well said.

I knew some X-Men fans and some Iceman fans in real life before I stared pursuing online fandom, and none of them gave any thought to Iceman being secretly gay. My first encounter with it was in an Iceman fan group, where a few(a very small minority) were convinced Iceman was closeted and were fixated on bringing him out, usually through the love of some male character. The members of this group were basically girls and young women from their mid-teens through their twenties. Most of the rest of the group thought their fixation was a little odd, but relations were amiable enough. It's basically the same sort of group you see with Supernatural, with a portion of the young female audience obsessed with the idea that Sam and Dean, the two leads who are brothers, are actually gay and gay for each other. Obviously, that's not how the majority of Supernatural fans see the characters, but the shows does do things to acknowledge and play to that portion of the fanbase, all while acknowledging that is not who the characters actually are(Since Marjorie Lu has given two different and contradictory interviews about what she thinks Iceman's orientation is, who knows which is actually true, but she is/has been in the right gender/age range to fit into that kind of group). It's all in good fun and harmless.

Then I came to CBR, and discovered a whole other group who espoused the belief that Iceman was secretly gay. This group was dominated by boys and young men from their mid-teens through their twenties. When I first got to CBR, it was done in a rather good-natured and joking fashion, and was the kind of thing that while it got a little annoying when you were trying to discuss something about the character and they would try to hijack the thread into a "he's gay debate" or make trolling comments, for the most part could be ignored. And anything put into the comics to play to them was good-natured and also similarly ignorable. Over time that changed. The people making the comments were NOT fans of the character, and over time that group came to be domiated by trolls and haters, who started to use saying he was gay as a way to hurl insults at the character and troll his fans.

Iceman was hardly the only character undergoing a trolling barage like that at CBR(though it at least seemed he was perhaps getting the worst of it), and eventually the appreciation threads got segregated to a sub-forum to try and give fans of certain characters a 'safe place' to talk about them in some peace. While initially helpful, that actually turned the main board into a free-for-all. Any older threads about Iceman got compeltely derailed by the trolls into 'debates'(and I used that term loosely) abut Iceman being gay, any female characters he was currently or had previously been in a relationship with got labeled as 'beards', (with those characters generally getting insulted, too) and any new threads about Iceman died under trolling usually before reaching the second page. The trolls then started making incursions into the new appreciation area, and I vivdly remember at one point feeling like I was back in the old west, deep in 'Indian country', and wishing we could circle our apprection threads like wagons for defense.

The trolling got cruder and nastier on the boards, and the stuff being put into the comics to play to that got cruder and nastier too. In the comics, Scarlet Spider shot Iceman in the face with webfluid, with Iceman going "I've had dreams...I mean nightmares...like this"(I don' think I need to explain that to anyone, but if anyone doesn't get it, shoot me a PM and I will explain it to you). In a discussion thread about one of the issues of Astonishing focusing on Iceman in the Frozen arc, Juggernaut Punch actually posted in the thread that Iceman fans needed to stop posting on the main boards entirely and "stick to blowing each other in the Iceman appreciation thread". There was at that point an active push to have the only discussion about Iceman be about his sexual orientation, to have the only opinions expressed be in accordance with him being secretly gay and to portray that in a negative light to insult him, and to confine Iceman fans to discussing him only in the Appreciation thread or drive them from CBR entirely. Iceman fans had always left the board as a side-effect of the trolling, now there was a push to get all of us to leave. I was actually considering asking the mods at CBR to create a separate general discussion sub-forum for those of us who wished to talk about the X-Men away from the trolling, and realized if things had gotten that bad(and they had) some of us just need to be posting somewhere else(so I created this place ).

Then the trolls at CBR got so bad some of them hacked a woman's financial accounts and threatened her with rape, and CBR rebooted and tried to turn over something of a new leaf(with mixed results). Some of the worst offenders finally got banned(although their are plenty of trolls still there, trying to float by under the rules), and created their own troll forum. Some of the banned trolls and some of the trolls still there stared courting Bendis via social media, trying to sway him to their wishes and viewpoint, and apparently after YEARS of it finally met with success(or at least they are crowing about it like a victory) against Iceman fans.

The things is, if they 'out' adult Iceman, the group of young women who see him as a tortured romantic soul stuck in a closet will lose interest the minute he gets outed, because the appeal is not the idea that he is gay, but the idea that he is closeted. The same with the trolls who are saying they are only insulting him because he is closeted, and will stop insulting when he 'comes out'. If the adult character is outed, they will lose all interest and move on to the next target, and if they continue to insult him after he is 'made gay', it will be seen as gay-bashing.

They have pushed what was a harmless fantasy and good-natured jokes into the realm of something so nasty it is going to have to be addressed on-panel, and whether it results in making adult-Iceman gay or confirming he is straight, they will have taken a harmless fantasy and good-natured jokes away from people, and have no one to blame but themselves.

And, as you pointed out in a previous post, it will now be a wait for Uncanny X-Men #600. The issue was originally supposed to ship May 20th, in just a couple of weeks; it's now slated to be released June 24th. I honestly think the only real reason for the delay is to try and get more advanced orders, and let interest build, to justify a larger print run and push sales. Seriously, what else did they have to even push sales for a milestone like issue number #600 for the title? Prior to this, I had no interest in Uncanny X-Men #600 at all, with the exception that Beast's recent years of reckless behavior would be addressed in some way.

The 05 from All New can't be sent back without a massive mind-wipe, and they have spent so much time in the present at this point there would be ethical implications in doing that. Warren is actively trying to be different than his older version, Cyclops too. Jean and Bobby are different, Beast is about the only one who seems much the same at this point, and he is minus the mutations and life experience of the older version. Making them from an alternate timeline would allow the '05' to remain in the present, as the stories told with them would be very different than that of their older counterparts.

This actually could end up being beneficial, as it addresses Iceman's orientation in a very 'meta' way, much the way Supernatural finally had to address, in the episodes themselves, the perception among a segment of the fanbase that Sam and Dean were gay lovers. Unfortunately, given Bendis's love of trolling, his association with the trolls from CBR, and Marvel's own history of playing to this in a way that has been actually detrimental to the character(making a character the target of jokes, if not held in check, will turn a character into a joke), I am not hopeful.

While this blog article doesn't really touch upon the original topic, it does provide food for thought. Because, it is how social media is handled and again, where fans can be difficult.

It's not about the writer/producer/editorial. It really how poorly behaved people can be.

www.salon.com/2015/05/07/joss_whedon_is_right_twitter_is_a_loud_shallow_waste_of_time_%E2%80%94%C2%A0and_im_leaving_too/

This topic was addressed in the X-Position with Bendis.

www.comicbookresources.com/article/giant-size-x-position-bendis-ties-up-all-new-x-mens-loose-ends

Uncanny Xmen #600 is delayed by 5 months. This is the issue that is suppose to follow up with Adult Iceman after Teen Iceman's forced reveal.

www.comicbookresources.com/article/uncanny-x-men-600-delayed-until-after-secret-wars

I wonder why ... could be to grab headlines with Iceman. Or to have the issue re-written or ... I dunno. Or its too big of deal to let it get buried by Secret Wars.

I find it interesting how long the delay is.