[Dr Kain]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

I'm actually going to break from my standard convention and respond to you...

Apu? Yeah, I'm going to shelf that for a minute.

40, some odd, years of comics can often get muddled together ultimately representing a big blob, or information dump in a cloudy recess of the mind. You're right, the Shadow King stuff originally surfaced during the Claremont/Byrne run, but like so many other X-men (Wolverine, Kurt etc) her background was considerably nebulous. However, the retcon that I referenced was from a Storm mini that lead up to her wedding with BP which tried to create a meaningful link between Ororo and T'Challa that went beyond 'two African heroes who, to that point, had never really demonstrated any interest in one another have actually always been secretly smitten with each other since childhood'. In this story the two met for the first time before Storm's rents are killed and she's enslaved by Shadow King. It was at the point of reading that story that I realized Storm was largely a hollow character that did need an actual backdrop to explain why a king would marry her because the tropes used to shape her background made for a mismatched pairing between her and the Wakandan sovereign. I began examining my recollections of Storm as a character, realizing a nearly 30 year old (at that time - 2004) popular hero was a weird collection of familiar fetishized concepts about 'exotic' cultures. Who was she really? What made her relatable to me? Where in Africa was she even supposed to hail from? Why do her hair and eyes not reflect the diaspora? Has she been an idealized (which can take on both positive an negative connotations depending on the creative talent) stereotype that I've allowed myself to accept unquestioningly due to being hungry for any characters that even remotely relate to me as an African American??? As demonstrated in my first post, I'm still working my way through all of that, but it ain't anything I'm losing sleep over either.

Honestly, I don't expect you to understand where I'm coming from at all. After all, part off why I don't generally respond to you is because of your sharing with me your belief that my culture is represented, by and large, by thieves. A system of belief you established on your anecdotal experiences in retail with black Americans. Back to Apu: you seem to traffic comfortably in stereotypes, so of course you don't care when they find their way into storytelling. I imagine you might even prefer it that way. When we had that conversation, I tried to tease out the flaws of thinking that way, but that was as much an effort in futility as is the time I just spent explaining something I didn't have to...

Well excuse me. I wasn't actually being mean or anything dude, I was explaining why I didn't notice the premier stereotype because Storm is such a well rounded character. She's my favorite X-Man.

However, I have no fucking idea what this means:

Quote:

your belief that my culture is represented, by and large, by thieves.

The fuck?