Originally Posted by
Tiamatty
I saw a few people bringing up the "Lance" panel when Iceman first came out. And I've other panels mentioned. And not a single one of them was the least bit compelling. (Emma joking about him becoming an interior decorator, for example.)
It's fine with it just being "a feeling." I never really got that vibe from Iceman, but then again, I've never cared about Iceman. I will say that about the only romance he's had that I bought was with Opal. And that was only during X-Factor - once X-Factor ended, the relationship really stopped mattering, and was ended as soon as they remembered it existed. Which was a shame. Other than that, I actually do agree that there was a real vibe of him wanting a girlfriend because he was supposed to have a girlfriend. I can definitely see that. I don't agree with it being about competitiveness. He started pursuing Lorna before Havok came on the scene. In the early days, he pursued Zelda without it being a competition with other guys. Early on, he wasn't competing with anyone for Opal. When he macked on Kitty, there was no one he was competing with. I don't think it was ever about competition. I do agree that it's very easy to read his romances as being him trying to get a girlfriend because he feels he should have a girlfriend, though I don't think any of them were intended to be read that way, and I think it's a reading that's at least somewhat based on an existing assumption that he's gay.
Though really, my biggest problem with it is purely from a narrative standpoint. It's a big enough reveal that I feel like Bendis should've had some foreshadowing of it ahead of time. I know that plenty of people in the real world never dropped any hints about it and their coming out was a big surprise to everyone who knew them and all that. But dammit, this isn't the real world, it's fiction, and in fiction, things get foreshadowed. As it is, it feels like Bendis made a completely spur-of-the-moment decision to do it, and I feel like that was a poor way to go about it. It needed foreshadowing. Things that wouldn't have meant anything on an initial reading of the series, but on a re-reading, would have people going, "Oh, hey, yeah! I can see what that was getting at now!" Really, that's just how pretty much any story should be. Little threads being laid out as the story progresses, rewarding multiple reads by having more that the reader can pick up on. Little threads laid as the story goes along that seem to mean one thing at the time but turn out to mean something else later on. Bendis failed to do that with Iceman being gay, and that's a big, disappointing writing failure. That's sincerely my only actual problem with the reveal.