[Criticism Corner] Because Comics: Psylocke (Patreon)

Hey guys.  This is a video I've been working on for a while about Psylocke and the weirdness surrounding her body swap.  There is a LOT going on in this episode and I'd love to hear what you think about it.  Does the script flow right to you?  Do you think the discussion about representation at the end should be included?  Anyway, here it is!

Psylocke is a really fascinating character to me as she’s a character that only really exists due to non-stop tweaking, but a lot of people don’t really know all that much about her despite being a recognizable member of the X-Men.

So to start things off, let’s go back to the beginning.  Betsy Braddock is the twin sister of Brian Braddock, better known as the British superhero, Captain Britain, the flagship superhero of Marvel’s UK publishing imprint, something that I might actually need to give its own video sometime in the future.

Betsy mostly served as a supporting character in her brother’s book as a pilot, but she later become a supermodel and a special psychic operative of S.T.R.I.K.E., Britain’s version of S.H.I.E.L.D.  Interestingly, these developments helped gain Betsy a sizable fanbase with Marvel UK’s audience and although she seldom took a leading role, she was getting close to matching her brother in popularity.  There was even a VERY brief period where she actually took over as Captain Britain when Brian was stuck in the past by... donning a uniform from an alternate universe version of her brother that she killed when he tried raping her.  Okay, wow.  That took a dark turn.

If that wasn’t dark enough, Betsy’s time as Captain Britain was cut short when the villain Slaymaster gouged out her eyes and Brian took up the mantle once again.

This was certainly tragic, but Braddock’s psychic powers gave her the ability to sort of see.  This wouldn’t last long though since her vision was fully restored about a year later when she was taken prisoner by the villainous Mojo who gave her new mechanical eyes, brainwashed her, gave her the name Psylocke, and used her as a puppet against the New Mutants who managed to break her free.

This storyline is more or less what transitioned Psylocke from a character that only had notoriety in British comics to a major player in the broader Marvel universe.  She quickly became a member of the X-Men, something that ended up biting the team in the butt a little bit when it was discovered that the eyes Mojo gave Psylocke were being used as living cameras to document the daily lives and activities of the X-Men.

However, all of these tweaks and developments over time pale in comparison to the single weirdest thing to ever happen to Psylocke.  Have you noticed that Betsy was a white girl for all of this and yet she’s typically depicted as an Asian woman?  Well here’s how that happened.

After walking through a plot device called the Siege Perilous, Psylocke washed up on the shores of Japan with amnesia where she was discovered by Matsu’o Tsurayaba, a member of a ninja clan that’s responsible for a lot of crazy stuff that happens in the Marvel universe, The Hand.

By using a combination of technology from Mojo’s assistant, Spiral, and technology from Iron Man’s villain, The Mandarin, Betsy swapped bodies with a Japanese ninja assassin named Kwannon,  Matsu’o’s recently injured lover.  In a twist of events though, it turns out that Spiral sort of fused Betsy and Kwannon’s minds together, giving each of them memories of the other.

These new memories gave this new Asian bodied Psylocke all of Kwannon’s martial arts skills and allowed her to develop her now iconic psychic dagger, but she was also brainwashed into being an assassin of The Mandarin under the name Lady Mandarin...  Despite the fact that Braddock’s new body is Japanese.  Yeesh.

Anyway, during a fight with Wolverine, Psylocke plunged her psychic dagger into Wolverine which then caused her to become flooded with memories of her old life, snapping Betsy back into her right state of mind and allowing her to rejoin the X-Men.

Alright so that was a little complicated, but relatively straightforward.  However, I’m sure there’s a couple of you that are currently wondering “So what happened to Psylocke’s old body?”  Don’t worry, there’s a super contrived comic booky explanation for that as well.  A few years after getting her new bod, Kwannon showed up at the X-Manor with her mind inside of Betsy’s old body.  There’s one problem though.  Kwannon was claiming to be the REAL Betsy Braddock, and that Psylocke was an imposter.

Yeah, remember how I said earlier that Betsy and Kwannon swapped bodies?  Well that was me jumping the gun a bit.  See originally when Psylocke was turned into Lady Mandarin, writer Chris Claremont just wanted to change her race with the martial arts and psychic knife not being explained… at all.  In fact, this was only supposed to be a temporary race change like the time that The Punisher became a black dude.  In an interview with writer Claremont, he said 

“In the case of Psylocke, it was something we had originally just intended for the “Acts of Vengeance” three-parter, the rationale being that the Hong Kong gangs would not accept an Anglo, a pure Caucasian, as the Mandarin’s emissary, as a Lady Mandarin; therefore, the Mandarin had to take steps to make her more physically acceptable to his people. Then Jim did such a bang-up job. It was such an effective presentation of her and it seemed to strike such a powerful chord in the audience. We figured, “Let’s go with it and see what happens.” And from the reader response, it seems to be an extremely positive move.”

I mean yeah, it’s not much of a surprise that readers liked this new Psylocke design considering that she went from this to a scantily clad ninja bombshell.  With the core of comic book readers being teenage boys, it’s not hard to put two and two together.

When Fabian Nicieza came onboard to take over writing the X-men comic, he introduced the character of Kwannon and the whole body switching thing because he never actually read Claremont’s work before writing this new imposter story!  As he said

“So I started a storyline about the two different bodies because I screwed up the research and no one else in editorial noted it. In fact, no readers noted it until many issues after the storyline had started (don’t forget, this was before the instantaneous fact-checking and hating that can be accomplished on the internet today).”

So with Fabian’s body swap retcon, all the loose ends all tied up.  There was just one issue.  There are pretty much TWO Psylockes now!  Thankfully, this was made easier to keep track of with Kwannon in Betsy’s old body taking up the codename Revanche and then even easier with Revanche contracting the Legacy Virus and dying, purging Psylocke of Kwannon’s memories once, but letting her keep the martial arts powers and the ability to speak Japanese… Because comics.

Look, there’s more I could talk about in terms of Psylocke’s crazy history including when she almost died and was restored by a magic elixir that gave her new powers or when she temporarily became a horseman of Apocalypse, but with how much time I had to spend just explaining the body swap, I might need to save those for later.

Here’s the thing.  All the craziness with the body swap happened decades ago back in the 90s which makes sense considering that those were a weird time for comics, but the reason I’m bringing it up now isn’t  just so I can talk about clickbaity comic book nonsense and have an excuse to put a sexy ninja in the thumbnail,  At least, it’s not the only reason.

In the Hunt For Wolverine series, Psylocke was seemingly killed, but she was able to reconstruct herself a new body through sheer force of will.  Even crazier though is that this new body is her original British one and Kwannon was seen brought back to life in her original body at the end of the issue!

When I posted about this on Twitter, there were several people who never knew that Psylocke was originally white and it leaves me with a question that I’m somewhat conflicted on.  Was this a good move?  There’s no way to deny that Asian representation in mainstream superhero comics is lacking and Psylocke was one of the most recognizable Asian women in the genre, but this is a weird case. 

Psylocke is definitely more than just a skin color and her value as a character should fall more on her writing, but with so many people not knowing about her British origins and with Olivia Munn playing her in the movies, is this taking away representation even though she was somewhat of a trojan horse?  I legitimately would like to hear your thoughts down there in the comments below, but please.  Be civil.