My favorite superheroine, Storm
Seth Thomas is used to boys being asked about their favorite superheroes. But what about their favorite superheroines?
Avoiding spoilers in the lead up to summer blockbuster season is tricky business. Between the millions spent on advertising, the spiraling vortex of endless speculation published on the Internet, and the way social media users tempt others to peek at posts labeled *SPOILER ALERT* — it’s nearly impossible to walk into a movie without some prior knowledge of the film’s plot. I had spent the first half of 2014 taking special care to avoid “X-Men: Days of Future Past” rumors. My mission to arrive in the theater spoiler-free was carried out with utmost intensity. It was as if accidentally clicking on the wrong link might make my laptop explode.
Finally, the movie opened this weekend, and I could have all of my questions answered. But despite my over-zealous evasion of spoilers, there were really only two questions I needed answered: 1. Is Storm in this movie? 2. Does she do something totally awesome?
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Comic series are a strange medium in that they’ve been around longer than most of the people who read them. Fans of Marvel and DC superhero comics jump on board at different stages during the never-ending saga, and it’s likely that one’s personal entry point is what they’ll remember most fondly. As a millennial, I first encountered X-Men as a child in the early ‘90s by way of the popular Saturday morning cartoon. The show featured a roster of nine mutants, who were all prominently featured in the books at the time, with a revolving door of special guests.
In the cartoon-version of “Days of Future Past,” the two-part story arc that the new movie is based upon, features a moment that occurred often on the show. While the X-Men rally together to fight the monster-of-the-week (in this instance, it’s the futuristic death-robot Nimrod), the heroes are defeated one after another until Storm calls upon the Arctic winds to stop the villain in its cybernetic tracks. In other episodes, she freezes The Blob or Sebastian Shaw or Omega Red. While the X-Men are billed as a team of heroes, they consistently are saved by the one-woman army that is Ororo Munroe.
As the ‘90s pressed on, and folks my age grew up under the influence of third-wave feminism, the way these super-powered women were portrayed became the source of countless think pieces. Was their strident over-sexualization creating impossible standards for women? Were men incapable of creating female characters that went beyond cleavage and great legs? Shouldn’t we be judging a woman by her actions and not by the way she chooses to dress? Can men honestly create a self-actualized woman who bares a ton of skin and poses seductively on magazine stands? These are important questions, and it’s a fantastic thing that we live in an era when they’re debated every which way.
But before all of that, there was my love for Storm. And looking back, I wonder how much having her on my pop culture radar affected the person I am today. She was part of a team that was half female, but she wasn’t like Jean Grey who, upon exerting herself, needed to faint onto Cyclops’ burly biceps. Nor was she Jubilee who needed Wolverine to act as a father figure to guide her through life. And she certainly wasn’t flirtatious and boy-obsessed like Rogue. Storm was a leader who knew that, if everything else failed, well… she was going to save the day.
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I recall when I was a boy, and my childhood friend and I would play in his garage. Our X-Men action figures would team together against whatever nefarious stuffed animal dared cross them that weekend. Cyclops would use his eye lasers. Wolverine would punch them over and over. Gambit would come out of nowhere and give them a mighty spin-kick. But then it came time to finish them off. My friend and I didn’t have a Storm action figure, though, so we didn’t know what to do.
Absent the ability to call upon the Arctic winds, our manly-man action figures could, at best, hope to uppercut the dastardly villain into an Igloo cooler, trapping them inside with an ice pack. The fact that two young boys felt their arsenal of super heroes were inadequate without a strong female hero to save the day speaks volumes. When we talk about the way super heroines affect men, we often do so in negative terms. The images of curvaceous, sexed-up women must surely be a corrupting force on boys. But maybe it’s possible that some boys don’t just look at them — they look up to them.
This weekend, when I crammed into a packed theater to watch the new X-Men movie, and *SPOILER ALERT* Storm was there and did something totally awesome *END SPOILER*, it made my inner-child want to jump up and cheer. As the credits rolled, I could only think one thing: When we ask young boys “Who’s your favorite super hero?”, we should follow-up that up by asking “And who’s your favorite super heroine?”
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