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sammysdewysensitiveeyes · 3 years

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Marauders and Kate’s (Lack of) Leadership:

One more salt post, partially inspired by this issue, but something I’ve been thinking about the series for awhile. Not bashing on Kate here, just feeling that Duggan is, to some extent, doing her dirty just like the rest of the group.

So, Kate is the Captain of the Marauder, but much like Bobby and Christian’s relationship, or Pyro’s reputation as the violent wildcard of the crew, it’s more an informed trait than something we actually see play out in the story. Duggan really isn’t giving Kate all that much to do as “team leader.”

I’d expect a team leader to be dealing with strategies and giving orders during battle, as well as dealing with conflicts and issues within the team itself. Except we see Kate do next to none of that. Most battles the group all seems to do their own thing. We see Kate jump in to rescue her people occasionally, especially in the fight with Donald Pierce and the racist anti-mutant group, where she pulls both Iceman and Pyro out of danger. But we don’t really see her stop and strategize mid-battle, like, “Okay, Pyro, you draw the Sentinel’s attention with fire creations, Bishop, cover him, while I phase the hostages free and Iceman freezes it’s feet.“ I think the King in Black Marauders is one of the few times where we really see Kate giving orders and making decisions during a battle. Most of the time, the battles just kinda happen, and either they’ve been strategized beforehand or someone else has the idea (Callisto in issue 19) or people just charge in and fight.

And to be fair, Kate certainly acts like a captain in terms of their general mission. She decides where they’ll go and what they’ll do, and she does give orders out at sea. But she doesn’t seem to make good use of her teams abilities during battles - mostly because Duggan doesn’t really want to write about anyone but Kate and Emma (and occasionally Callisto), so he lets the potential of the rest of the crew just sit there and rot. He’s too focused on Kate running around doing badass things to actually show her using her crew in an intelligent fashion and making proper use of everyone.

On the second matter - Kate doesn’t really have to deal with inter-team conflict because there isn’t any. At most, there’s some friction between Storm and Emma in the beginning, and they make up after Kate’s death. Kate’s crew just kind of automatically forms around her with no real effort on her part. Storm and Iceman are there specifically to protect her, Bishop has his own agenda, but he is willing to work with the Marauders to do so. Pyro is the only one who Kate would arguably have to win over as leader, and he’s been surprisingly well-behaved. He’s never challenged her leadership or even pushed back or argued that we’ve seen. I guess we can assume that Kate has earned his respect, or that he really enjoys the Marauders’ gig and is toeing the line so as not to get kicked off.

It makes a certain amount of sense, but the lack of friction also feels unrealistic. It’s hard to believe that former villain Pyro, even with his affably evil personality, will just settle right in with the crew and not clash with anyone beyond getting on Storm’s nerves. It’s hard to believe that Bishop, who has his own agenda to follow as a Captain of Krakoa, would never run into a situation where his mission and Kate’s mission clash and he has to walk away or disobey orders. (That was touched upon during King in Black, but then immediately fizzled out like so many other Duggan plotlines.) Hell, even Bobby and Storm, who are Kate’s friends and love her dearly, might disagree with a course of action at some point. But they never do. All is well aboard the Marauder, everyone is best friends or at least willing to tolerate each other, and they all follow Kate’s orders without question, and it feels very unearned.

But to my mind, the worst issue of Kate’s leadership is the lack of information passing down to certain members of the team. Marauders doesn’t feel like a tight-knit team, because most of the time, half the crew has no idea what the fuck is going on. So much of Duggan’s story is focused on Kate and Emma having adventures, making back-room deals and doing sneaky Hellfire stuff, and we’re expected to just accept that Bishop, Iceman and Pyro will be kept in the dark.

As far as I know, Iceman and Pyro have no idea that Sebastian murdered Kate. And BIshop only knows because he did his own investigation and figured it out, then had it confirmed by Storm. I understand the need for secrecy since Emma is trying to smack Sebastian down without making it a Council matter, but surely the rest of the crew should know about this? Bishop is a Captain of Krakoa working with the Marauders, he should absolutely know that Sebastian is playing power games. I can understand keeping some things from Pyro, he’s a new team-mate and former villain who joined under suspiciously convenient circumstances (fell asleep on the boat? Really?). But surely Pyro should at least be warned that Sebastian is not their friend. Otherwise, what’s to stop Sebastian from inviting Pyro up for a poker night at Blackstone Keep, plying him with whiskey and cigars, and getting him to spill the beans about all the Marauders latest missions? As far as Pyro knows, Sebastian is part of the Hellfire Co, AND a Council member, he’s got no good reason to distrust him. Because he doesn’t know that Sebastian betrayed them.

But Bobby is the worst, I think. He’s Kate’s good friend (they even dated briefly, although it didn’t work out for....obvious reasons). They are supposed to be close. And Bobby straight up mutilated a guy who he thought was part of the group responsible for Kate’s death. (To be fair, no one knew at the time that they raided that ship). Bobby was both devastated and furious at Kate’s death, and they’re still keeping him in the dark? Imagine how Bobby will feel knowing that the man he maimed was....not innocent, exactly, but not guilty of what Bobby believed. How is Bobby going to feel knowing that it was Sebastian, and Kate herself kept it from him? Bobby deserves better than to be treated like an underling like Pyro.

Probably the worst example, though, was this latest issue of Marauders (24), where we find out that Emma Frost conned the Mercury away from a shady alien, and that alien has it in for her. (I don’t remember the dude’s name, so I’m calling him Fake Greedo.) Fake Greedo tries to kill both Emma and Kate, they get saved by Sebastian (?!), which is a nice moment for him. Sebastian suggests they solved the problem with money, and Fake Greedo accepts. Then the whole group assembles in the Mercury for dinner, and Fake Greedo double-crosses them and sends the entire group, including Sebastian, Iceman, Bishop and Pyro, out the airlock into space.

The problem here, is that as far as I can tell, Bishop, Iceman and Pyro had NO idea about the deal or Fake Greedo’s grudge with Emma. Pyro literally has a line when he’s handing payment over to Fake Greedo: “I dunno who you are, or what you did to get paid, but you happy?” In other words, Pyro doesn’t know a damn thing about the deal or the Mercury. And I don’t think that’s just a joke about Pyro being clueless. He, Iceman and Bishop were off doing their own thing during most of the issue. (What were they doing? Who knows, Duggan couldn’t be bothered to show it.) It seems like Emma and Kate just....didn’t bother to tell half the crew about what happened. So they ride back to Earth with an alien who has a serious grudge against Emma, and the three of them have NO idea what’s going on, and they get sucked out of the airlock to possibly die, with without knowing what’s happening or why. They deserve better than that. If nothing else, Bishop is a security guy, he should know what’s going on.

If this book was written by someone better than Duggan, I would expect some repercussions from this. I’d expect Bobby, Pyro and Bishop to be angry that they were killed (or almost killed) because of one of Emma’s backroom schemes that they didn’t even know about. I’d expect Bobby to be especially angry that his friend Kate keeps not telling him things. I’d expect maybe some kind of splintering of the group or at least conflict that isn’t resolved immediately, because secrets have been kept that they deserve to know. But what will probably happen is that next issue Emma will do something cool, and any dead Marauders will get resurrected, and everyone will be totally fine with everything.

Anyways, like I said, this is not meant to drag Kate as a character, this is me discussing how Duggan is really doing her dirty by not giving her a chance to be an actual team leader. Because he wants her to be “in charge,” but he also doesn’t really want to write a team book, he wants to write her running around in pirate cosplay having swashbuckling adventures, so she winds up looking like a negligent, unnecessarily secretive leader. And I know she can be much better than that.

#marauders salt #up on my soapbox #or rather saltbox

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