Profile: Rogue

Rogue
First appearance: Avengers Annual #10, 1981

Real name: Unknown. If it has been revealed, I personally still don’t know it.

Current status: active in the X-Men.

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: Rogue is a most startling case. She was long done to death as a character, because for a long time, the writers, including even creator Chris Claremont, did not give her any serious or convincing development: she long remained stuck with her largely uncontrollable power of siphoning off and duplicating human energy, consciousness, superpowers, etc. And when Gambit came onto the scene, she was reduced to something like a junkie bound to a pimp’s leash.

What’s wrong with how this was done? It’s uncreative to just simply box a character into a corner, and the whole notion that she’d become less significant if she could gain the ability to control her powers properly was truly ridiculous, to say nothing short of insulting. It made feel sorry for the lady to be left absolutely trapped by her own powers, unable to make physical contact with other flesh and blood human beings. Yet, the writers and editors, for a long time, kept on depicting her that way, and left her at the mercy of Gambit too.

In recent years, Claremont and a few other writers slowly began to move away from this nonsense, giving Rogue better control over her powers, and Peter Milligan too may have made some repairs by getting her out of the Gambit trap. But why it had to take so long is an utter mystery.