#ch: betsy braddock

[xmenuniverse]

Betsy Braddock in Betsy Braddock - Captain Britain #1 (2023), art by Vasco Georgiev.

[roguestorm]

Betsy/Rachel things I think are interesting

Betsy’s Spiral stuff parallels Rachel’s Hound stuff. A lack of bodily autonomy that leaves them both determined to never be helpless again.

Fucked up family inheritances. Betsy’s father who lied about who he was her whole life versus Rachel who has the wrong versions of her parents. AND the wrongness of Captain Britain (which should be portrayed as a complicated and fucked up legacy!!!) versus dark Phoenix.

Neither of them takes orders well. I think this means that they would also have tension if they were on a team and one of them was supposed to be the leader.

In conclusion, I think they could be good, I just think that in order to be good, they would have to be written in-character by someone who actually cares about them. 💜🧡💜🧡💜🧡

[xforcesource]

I'm concerned about you, Elizabeth. You've changed since X-force. I don't want you to fall back into... "Destructive habits."

[616rogue]

psylocke / kwannon.

source: wolverine: weapon x (2009) #9, by yanick paquette.

[bynightafangirl]

“There is a reason the sky is bright and clear after a storm. Lightening purifies. ”

FEMALE AWESOME MEME- [1/5] Warrior Characters

Ororo Munroe/Storm - Marvel

[uncannysource]

Psylocke in Nightcrawler #10 (2015)

[roguestorm]

My headcanon has always been that Betsy's mother was French; this is undermined slightly by Excalibur v4, where her maiden name is revealed to be Hartwood, which sounds pretty English to me.

I think about Elizabeth Braddock (née Hartwood) a lot; she was chosen to be "genetically compatible" with James Braddock, so that she could give birth to good and heroic children. (Her first child was Jamie Braddock, so clearly that didn't work out so well.) We don't have any idea what this selection process was like, how much agency James had in falling in love with her or she with him. We also don't know anything about how much she knew of James's past.

She has extraordinarily few appearances, and all of them relate to Brian, and most of them relate to Brian's guilt over the fact that he was making out with a girl in his car while his parents were being murdered by his father's supercomputer. There's no information on how Betsy feels about her mother. There's no information on who Elizabeth really was, outside of her role as dutiful wife and mother.

I'm not mad at this exclusion; Betsy and Brian have enough going on without getting too into their mother's history. But I find it a really fun space to play in, to play with the idea of her living with her husband's secrets. Her husband exists at this weird space where he is on the cutting edge of technology, even while he is steeped in magic. What does it mean to stand outside both of those, to be human, but to be just outside it, so that it affects your life and your children's lives in ways you can't imagine?

I think I like her as French because it marks her as an outsider in a way that parallels the way she is outside magic and technology but also parallels how deeply enmeshed she is in all those things that she is outside. The histories of France and England are very much intertwined; to the English, France is an enemy or an ally, a great nation or a weak one, an economic partner or threat, depending on the time period, but it's always been very important.

I also like Elizabeth as French because if she isn't British, then Betsy and Brian are 0% British by blood. One way of saying that is that they are the children of immigrants, but I think that's a weaker and more boring reading; the framing I want to put on it is that the Braddocks are playing at being British, that they are trying to be like what they think old-money British aristocracy should be like. They are stereotypes of themselves whose entire history is lies, and, yes, they are representative of Britain itself.

In my dreams there's a gothic fantasy graphic novel (illustrated by Stephanie Hans) about the young French woman who comes to a foreign country to marry a brilliant inventor who is building something strange in his basement and who believes in other worlds and whose family no one will speak about. I love the idea of this incredibly unsettling world, with a first son who wants to drive too fast and has a strange gleam in his eye, and what it would have been like for the woman who was asked to navigate it her whole adult life. It would also be like a tragedy, with an end that was terrible but unalterable, where the eldest son grows up to be a supervillain and the invention in the basement does come alive and kill her.

[xforcesource]

Okay, Bets. We’ll lie to each other. Best foundation to rebuild a relationship. 

[xforcesource]

Angel and Psylocke 

Art by Jae Lee

[xforcesource]

You, my love? You... I would spare and all it would take. All it would need... Is a single word.

[xforcesource]

BISEXUAL VISIBILITY DAY

PSYLOCKE, SHATTERSTAR, & MYSTIQUE

[xforcesource]

[xforcesource]

[xforcesource]

Domino, X-23, and Psylocke. Art by Kris Anka

[616rogue]

don’t worry about me. i wouldn’t dream of digging too deeply in that brain of yours.

psylocke establishing telepathic contact with magneto.

source: uncanny x-men (2016) #3, by greg land.

[xforcesource]