Introducing a same-sex love interest for a beloved character is always a balancing act. Unless a show is set specifically within an LGBTQ social group, a lot of shows with queer characters, don’t typically start out with more than one in the main cast (although some start out a pair of queer characters who are already in an established relationship.) This means there’s not the usual opportunity for will-they-won’t-they stuff with the other regulars and any prospective love interest is a guest or recurring character brought on for that express purpose. If it works out, the character might get upgraded to a regular, and if it doesn’t, they’re written out, often never to be heard from again. From a meta standpoint, there’s an inevitable power differential, since we don’t know the newcomer like we know the beloved regular, and we’re instantly appraising them to decide if they’re “good enough” for the character we love.
In the case of Alex and Kelly, the situation is heightened. Alex wasn’t introduced to us as a gay character. That’s something she started to figure out for herself in season 2, and her coming-out storyline was intimately tied to her feelings for/relationship with Maggie, her first with a woman. In other words, it was a Willow Rosenberg scenario, and if Maggie was Alex’s Tara, Kelly is then positioned as her potential Kennedy: the “next girlfriend” after the foundational, emotionally-charged one whose love helped Alex come to understand herself and be proud of who she was. Alex/Maggie fans are fiercely devoted and Maggie’s exit from the show left a lot of dissatisfaction and outrage in its wake. Anyone new brought in for Alex was going to have an uphill battle in winning fans’ affections.
And when Kelly first appeared on the show, the anvils were falling left and right. She’s James Olson’s much-loved but heretofore-unspoken-of sister, so she’s immediately anchored to the show through him. She clashes with Alex early on, but it’s in a way that shows they’re both strong, passionate women who care about James and want to do what’s best for him in a crisis, and it’s not long before they come to an understanding of mutual respect. Before long, Kelly is helping Alex through an intense emotional situation and casually confirming her queerness through a reference to her deceased fiancée. It was inevitable that they were going to get together, and a chunk of their relationship storyline in season 5 feels at once oversauced and underwritten before settling into something more engaging.
But through all these ups and downs, I continued to like Kelly as a character, and I think she’s really coming into her own in season 6. A veteran who now works as a psychologist specializing in military trauma, Kelly isn’t initially a part of the world that Alex and the Super Friends know well. Her life has been touched by it – as James’s sister, she recalls the years he spent as Superman’s close friend, which placed James in the crosshairs of Lex Luthor multiple times – so it’s not like she’s a noob where these things are concerned, but her own combat experience was focused on nonpowered human threats, not aliens or metas. As such, accepting the invitation into Alex’s world puts Kelly in the path of a lot of things she’s never dealt with head on before.
I really like seeing how Kelly reacts to these threats, crises, and triggers. She knows that she doesn’t have the training or experience to deal with a lot of these baddies head-on, and she’s very aware that that puts her in a vulnerable position. As such, she doesn’t try to pull off badass moves she’s not equipped for, but she’s by no means a screaming damsel. Instead, she holds her own in the ways that she can, taking a defensive postion and keeping her head until she’s able to get the upper hand, get out, or find someone who’s better equipped to take on the threat. What’s more, being in a relationship with Alex and seeing the danger she regularly puts herself in can be triggering for Kelly, whose fiancée was killed in action, and she wrestles with how to let Alex be Alex while still honoring her own feelings of lingering trauma.
Even though, again, Kelly is a veteran who’s seen shit and is far from incapable in a fight, it’s nice to have a character in the mix who’s less combat-focused. She adds a different dynamic to the Super Friends, and with everything our heroes go through, goodness knows they can benefit from having a psychologist/trauma expert around. While Alex and the others kick ass and save the world, Kelly looks out for them: Alex especially, of course, but the others as well. I love her empathy, her emotional honesty, and the way she gives the heroes around her space to not be okay.
When we got the first handful of season 6 episodes earlier this year, it was so gratifying to see Kelly better integrated into the ensemble. She’s still Alex’s girlfriend, obviously, but she’s also just Kelly, compassionate friend and valuable team member whose insights should never be counted out. I’m looking forward to seeing where the rest of the final season will take her.
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Have I mentioned how psyched I am that Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s Hollywood debut is going to be in an MCU movie? There are the obvious reasons, the beautiful combination of an actor and a franchise that I really love, and how cool it is that a ton of people who don’t know who Leung is are going to see what he can do. But as Black Widow’s release draws ever closer, I'm reminded of all the trappings that can accompany a new MCU movie, and I’m excited to think about what that might entail for Leung. We’ve already got the action figure, but there are also gonna be featurettes on Disney+/the eventual DVD. A blooper reel? The press tour? At the moment, my mind can’t quite picture Leung doing a bunch of press in the U.S., and the fact that he lives on another continent and the pandemic isn’t over yet might give him an “out” from participating too much, but the thought of it is kind of wild. Like, is he gonna take part in the press junket? (Who would they pair him with? My first instinct would be Michelle Yeoh.) Make late-night appearances, in a group of his castmates if not on his own? Do those online-interview things like the Wired Autocomplete Interview videos? Is he gonna be on a Comic Con panel?!
I don’t want to get my hopes up too much for some of this stuff, since, again, the idea of Leung actually doing a lot of this doesn’t compute in my brain. But 1) never rule out the power of Marvel, 2) at least some of these things are for sure going to happen, and 3) even if Leung manages to avoid doing much press himself, I’m sure other Shang-Chi folks will, and some of them are bound to talk about how great he is, and that makes me happy.
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