What
has me upset is this quote in particular: “While there seems to be little
chance of explicit LGBT romance in this entry, one can hope Singer (Bryan
Singer, the film’s director) will be more inclusive in his already-announced
sequel, X-Men: Apocalypse.” Although the comic, through all its various
story arcs, broke boundaries for featuring Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual characters,
the film have yet to include a single LGB identified character. Well, that’s
not completely true, some of those characters have been in the films, such as Mystique
and Colossus (Ultimate X-Men), just without their LGB identities. I don’t
believe that the X-Men franchise should continue to be praised for its “nod at
queer fans in the audience” when it could be doing so much more.
I
do, however, believe that the underlying issue here is that the mainstream
movie industry just is not were it needs to be. I believe that mainstream comic
book industry has been outpacing the movie industry for years, which is truly unfortunate
because it is through these films that a large segment of the population gets their
only glimpse at these incredible characters and story arcs. The X-Men comics, in
particular, have undergone a pretty intense transformation in an effort to be
more inclusive; after all, the mutants of X-Men were always intend to represent
all the segments of the population who were ever seen as being “different.” Here
are just a few of X-men’s most recent developments:
Personally, I love X-Men because it features bisexual
characters, which I feel are constantly underrepresented in movies, books, and
television. X-Men’s Mystique and Rictor are still open to being hot messes,
however, the X-Men movie franchise’s straight Mystique is still open to being a
hot mess for entirely different reasons (Come on Mystique! Where did your clothes
go!?!). I find X-Men's inclusion efforts to be a positive step forward and I am excited to see X-Men’s
cast of LGBTQ identified characters expand and diversify. X-Men continues to
question societal norms and what it mean to be labelled as “different” and I
for one am glad that LGBTQ community can be a part of that inquiry. I just find
it incredibly sad and unfortunate that this aspect of the comic book seems to consistently
get left out of the film adaptations.
There is much work to
be done with regard to how LGBTQ identified individuals are portrayed, or in
this case, excluded by the mainstream movie industry. Let’s hope that some of
that work can be accomplished before X-Men:
Apocalypse starts production!
Excelsior!
<3
Mylo
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