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ship_manifestoSubject Line: Gambit/Rogue (X-Men--comicverse)
Title: I Love You, I Hate You, Don’t Touch Me.
Author: Elspethdixon
Spoilers: Some for X-Men and Uncanny X-Men, massive ones for the end of X-Treme X-Men, a few for bits of Ultimate X-Men.
Email: elowry@hollins.edu
For the sake of my and everyone else’s sanity, I’m going to stick to the main Marvel storyline involving Gambit and Rogue (X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, and X-Treme X-Men) and will mostly leave out canon AUs like the Age of Apocalypse and other versions of the X universe like movieverse, X-Men Evolution, the original X-Men cartoon, and Ultimate X-Men. The original X-Men storyline is complicated enough on its own.
Children of the Atom
First, the basics everyone should know before we start: X-Men is a comic book series created way back in the 1960s (1963, to be exact) by Stan Lee, the same writer responsible for Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, DareDevil, et al. In the forty-one years since its inception, the original comic book title has mutated into over a dozen different interconnected comic book titles, becoming incredibly complex and occasionally confusing in the process. The basic premise is that mutants with super powers (who are hated and feared by the general mass of humanity, much like any minority group you care to name) have begun to appear among the human population, and that some of them, led and inspired by visionary Professor Charles Xavier, have formed teams of superheroes to protect regular people from evil mutants—and to protect other mutants from people trying to use or destroy them. And then there are the aliens, and the time travel, and the canonical alternate universes, and… you see what I mean when I say it gets complicated?
Southern Accents=Sexy
Gambit and Rogue are comparative newcomers to the X-Men gang (Rogue was introduced in the eighties, Gambit in 1990), but I wasn’t around for the older issues back in the seventies, and they’ve been central members of the X-Books for as long as I’ve been following them. I was sucked into X-Men at approximately the age of eleven via the old X-Men cartoon, which used to be shown Saturday mornings on Fox back in the ‘90s. Unlike pretty much every other superhero cartoon then being show, it included female superheroes, as well as two Southern mutants. As an adolescent girl, as well as someone whose family hails from south of the Mason-Dixon line, I appreciated this. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it was Gambit and Rogue’s accents that did it for me—finally, I thought, superheroes who weren’t from New York! And the fact that both of them are decidedly easy on the eyes didn’t hurt either.
Watching the cartoon soon led to many covert readings of X-Men and Uncanny X-Men comics in book stores, and to my buying or checking out from the library every X-Men trade paperback I could find. To put it simply, I fell for Gambit, hard. The irreverent sarcasm, the often-overdone-but-still-sexy French/Southern Cajun accent, the acrobatic fighting style (merde, but that man is flexible), the hints of darkness in his past, the red-on-black eyes, and most of all, the way the guy never gave up, no matter how many times Rogue shot him down. Rogue herself, with her white-streaked hair and determinedly cheerful “spunky Southern tom girl” act, manages to be oddly endearing even when she’s sort of being a bitch, and as an adolescent I found her leather bomber jacket almost as cool as Gambit’s long trench-coat. It wasn’t until I was a good bit older that I admitted to myself that I liked her curvaceous figure almost as much as I did Gambit’s muscles. And when the two of them were together, the back-and-forth banter and painfully evident sexual tension lit up the page. Or screen. Or whatever. They wanted each other, bad, and, thanks to Rogue’s powers, they couldn’t have each other. But that never stopped Gambit from loving her, or me from rooting for the both of them.
Who Are These Masked Mutants, Anyway?
The Ragin’ Cajun:
“Gambit” is the code name/nickname of Remy LeBeau, an ex-thief (though exactly how “ex” he is is a topic for debate, since he seems to employ the skills and contacts gained in his previous profession pretty frequently) from New Orleans. He’s tall (around six feet), slender (supposedly about 175 pounds, though given how much muscle he’s got packed onto his frame it’s got to be a bit more than that), and has brown-to-reddish-brown hair that is often somewhat longish. He also has the most spectacular eyes in the entire realm of sci-fi/fantasy, solid black with glowing red irises. I think they’re his best feature, but he’d probably tell you otherwise; the unique colour marks him as a mutant and thus an object of contempt for many, and has occasionally even caused people to accuse him of being a demon. His nickname back in New Orleans was “Le Diablo Blanc,” the White Devil, and it’s implied in a couple of places that this was not meant as a compliment.
In addition to his eyes, Remy has an energy mutation, with a few psionic talents thrown in for kicks. The official, Marvel-science explanation is that he generates a bio-kinetic “charge” inside his body that can convert the potential energy in inanimate objects to kinetic energy, causing them to explode. Or, in other words, he touches things, and then they go boom—after glowing with a pretty pink light for a bit. He also has heightened agility, of near-Olympic-gymnast quality, and a semi-hypnotic “charm” power that he can use to manipulate people into believing him or agreeing with him. Possibly as a side affect of this charm ability, or possibly due to energy interference from his bio-kinetic powers, his mind is very difficult for even the most powerful telepaths to read.
Remy grew up on the streets as a pick pocket (a circumstance that has caused some fanfic writers to give him a past as a child or teen-age prostitute or victim of sexual abuse—there’s one in every fandom), and was adopted at the age of about ten (or maybe eleven or twelve—Marvel hasn’t always been consistent with dates) by organised crime boss Jean-Luc LeBeau, the leader of the New Orleans Thieves Guild, a secret society with a long and complicated history that I’m not going to go into here. The Guild took him in, trained him as one of their own, and didn’t even seem to mind when his mutant powers began to manifest. Or possibly, they found the idea of a member who could blow open vault doors without the need for explosives bloody useful.
Remy had a childhood romance with Belladonna Boudreaux, the daughter of the head of the Assassin’s Guild—the Thieves Guild’s ancient enemies. Once upon a time, their parents hoped to unite the two guilds by marrying them to each other, but all of that changed when Remy killed Belle’s brother Julien in a duel on their wedding day. Despite the fact that Julien was clearly asking for it, Remy was banished from the guild and from New Orleans. Then, he apparently proceeded to make his living as a professional thief, as well as by doing other, less savoury things. One of the least savoury was the period of time he spent working for the evil mutant scientist Dr. Essex (aka Mr. Sinister, since nobody in Marvelverse has only one name), doing a variety of illegal and semi-legal things in order to pay back a debt. This would come back to bite him in the ass later.
Eventually, Remy met and became friends with Storm, one of the leaders of the X-Men, and was invited to join the team. He did so, even though he didn’t believe Xavier’s dream of humans and mutants living in peace was attainable. Possibly, he was motivated by friendship for Storm, possibly he wanted to redeem himself for his actions under Sinister, possibly he was just tired of being alone.
As an X-Man, Gambit has always been something of a wild card—it’s not for nothing that his trademark playing cards are the joker and the ace of spades. He tends to drift in and out of the X-Men, dropping out of the team to attend to mysterious “personal” business and showing back up again whenever he feels like it. He can be charming—especially with women—but there’s often a hint of menace lurking under the surface. He doesn’t trust people easily, possibly because he himself is such a manipulator, but when he cares about someone, he cares deeply, and will go to any lengths to protect them. He keeps secrets, rarely volunteering important information about his past unless directly asked (he didn’t tell Rogue about his ex-wife Belle until she actually showed up and forced his hand), and like some of the team’s other more morally ambiguous members, has no problem using questionable tactics in order to accomplish his goals. Which isn’t to say that he’s out-and-out bloodthirsty like, say, Wolverine. Gambit is actually rather good at talking his way out of trouble, and has been known to cut a deal with a enemy rather than fight him—and if it comes to a fight, he’ll use subterfuge, dirty tricks, and anything else he can think of to tip the odds—including allowing himself to look weak or trapped so as to make an opponent underestimate him. Of course, he also seems to truly enjoy the adrenaline rush of a fight, or any other risky pursuit. How much of his adrenaline-junky qualities are due to sublimated self-destructiveness is up for interpretation, but given how conflicted Gambit often feels about his own past, it’s likely that there’s at least a bit of masochism there.
The Southern Spitfire:
Rogue, whose real name was unknown until very recently, has a past even more mysterious than Remy’s. A former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants who swapped sides to join the X-men, Rogue’s code name has essentially become her only name. Unlike Remy, she has no real family or contacts outside of the X-team. Rogue is supposedly about 5’8”, but usually is drawn somewhat shorter than that, not quite petite, but close to it. She also has a figure most swimsuit models would kill for, toned and athletic, but with Marilyn Monroe hips and breasts of truly awe-inspiring proportions. Trust me, this is one woman who looks damn good in spandex. Her hair has fluctuated through several styles, going from long-and-curly to long-and-straight to a shorter, (first chin-length and then not-quite-shoulder-length) bob cut, but has always been brown with at least one white streak in it, and her eyes are a bright, emerald green. When she absorbs another mutant’s powers, she sometimes temporarily acquires certain aspects of their appearance as well, such as Nightcrawler’s blue skin, or Carol Danver’s blue eyes.
Over time, Rogue’s powers have become a kind of cocktail of mutant abilities, but her original power, the only one that is truly hers, is the ability to absorb another person’s “essence” (energy, memories, mutant abilities, you name it, she can suck it out of you) via skin-to-skin contact. If she touches someone for too long, she can drain them to the point of death, and the stolen abilities will become permanent. Early on in her mutant “career,” while working for the Brotherhood of Mutants, Rogue permanently absorbed the personality and powers of mutant Carol Danvers, gaining super strength, near-invulnerability, and the ability to fly. She’s also temporarily absorbed the powers of most of the other X-Men and many of their enemies as well, and recently, these borrowed powers have started to resurface. And then her powers went away for a while after she was impaled with a sword and used to power an inter-dimensional gateway (see, what did I tell you? Complicated), but now they may be beginning to come back.
Rogue was born and raised in the (fictional) Caldecott County, Mississippi, and ran away from home at an early age, possibly because her family situation was abusive. She was taken in by the shape-changing mutant Mystique and her friend Irene (a blind mutant known as Destiny with precognitive powers) and essentially was raised to be a terrorist and Brotherhood member. At some point in her teen years—whether this was before or after she was adopted by Mystique is uncertain—she began a relationship with a boy named Cody, and put him in a permanent coma when her powers manifested for the first time during their first kiss. Needless to say, this proved somewhat traumatising.
After nearly killing another person with her powers a second time (the aforementioned Carol Danvers), Rogue left the Brotherhood and went to Professor Charles Xavier and the X-Men for help, hoping he could teach to control her powers. This never happened, forcing Rogue to go through life wearing gloves in order to avoid accidental physical contact, but she became a dedicated member of the X-Men anyway, and seems to truly believe in Xavier’s dream of peaceful co-existence between mutants and non-mutants.
Rogue is more of a team player than Gambit, and often comes across as a cheerful, spunky tomboy, with a drawling Southern accent and a habit of handing out endearments like “sugar” to her friends. Like Gambit, she occasionally leaves the X-Men for periods of time (she took off with Bobby after her first, disastrous kiss with Gambit, dropped out of the team for a while to try to lead a normal life, once left the team to try and have her powers removed by a less-than-reputable scientist), but she always comes back to fight next to her comrades, and always tries to be there to listen to their problems—that way, she doesn’t have to think about her own. Like Gambit’s easy, flirtatious charm, Rogue’s “Southern Spitfire” persona is as much mask as reality, albeit a mask she tries very hard to make real. Rogue can’t touch people, and although she longs for physical contact and a fulfilling romantic relationship, she believes she can never safely have one, and subtly—or not so subtly—pushes people away when they get too close. She is terrified of hurting the people she loves with her powers, and also has some serious issues with emotional intimacy as well, leading her to keep much of her past, including her real name, a secret. One side effect of her powers is that the memories and personalities of people she has absorbed occasionally re-emerge inside her psyche, and she has long feared that her own personality might disintegrate under the pressure. Recently, with her powers temporarily out-of-commission and a “normal” life with Remy looking like a possibility, she revealed to him that her name was Anna, but her team-mates still know nothing about her childhood or original family.
The Joker and the Queen of Hearts
Rogue and Remy are one of Marvel’s longest-running couples, up there in popularity with Scott and Jean Summers, but they are also the X-Men writers’ favourite couple to jerk around. You name it, it’s happened to them. Ex-wives and would-be lovers have come between them, they’ve kept secrets from each other, accidentally or intentionally betrayed each other, broken up repeated for fear of hurting each other (usually at Rogue’s instigation), temporarily lost their powers, been temporarily blinded in the line of duty (and relied upon the other to guide them afterwards), worked for villains, been nearly killed by villain, nearly killed each other… and yet, in the end, they always come back to one another. No matter what happen to them or between them, they simply can’t stay away. Remy has even come back from the brink of death simply because Rogue begged him not to leave her. And really, what’s a dark past and a few ex-lovers compared to devotion like that?
From the moment they first met, Remy and Rogue have flirted with each other, tossing banter back and forth like the hero and heroine of some romantic comedy. Their relationship has been as much about words as it has about physical chemistry, both the words they say and the ones they don’t say. Rogue says, “I love you,” but not “I trust you.” Remy says “I love you,” but is constantly keeping parts of his life a secret.
From the beginning, Remy hasn’t been afraid to treat Rogue like the woman she is, rather than the asexual person her powers force her to be, and their conversations, especially in the early days of their relationship, have a heavy amount of sexual innuendo, as if to compensate for the physical contact they can’t have.
“So, it's not the champagne and candlelight dinner I imagined when I asked you out, I suppose it'll have to do in a pinch.”
“I thought you'd appreciate me makin' you an' ol' fashion Cajun meal with muh own two hands.”
“ If I made a list of things to do "with your own two hands", stirrin' gumbo wouldn't be on it. “
“ Ya certainly know how ta get under a girl's skin.”
“ I'm trying.”
“ Gambit, please! Ya know even the slightest physical contacts means Ah'd absorb ya mind and powers!”
“ Worse fates spring t'mind, chere.”
“ That's all Ah'd need - thoughts o' you runnin' through muh head twenty-four hours a day.”
“How'd dat be any different than now?”
--X-Men #8
Eventually, their byplay takes on a pattern: Remy shamelessly hits on Rogue, she playfully insults him, and they both laugh. They keep this up even after they become a couple—and break up, and get together again, and break up, and get together again, and so on, and so forth. Both of them tend to use jokes and sarcasm to lighten serious subjects or avoid revealing the depth of their feelings about something, and their own relationship is no exception, though they make their share of heartfelt confessions as well. Both have declared their love for one another to friends and enemies alike (“Gambit's MINE!” Rogue declares hotly at one point, after a villain has captured him, “And ah don't take kindly t'folks who want to do him harm!”), though admittedly Rogue often seems to have an easier time of doing it when Remy isn’t around, and they’ve said it to each other’s faces as well. Sometimes it takes a near death experience in order for one of them to do it, but in a way the fact that many of their “I love you”s—and their first kiss—were exchanged at moments when they thought one or both of them was about to die makes them even more powerful. When they thought the world was about to be destroyed by the evil mutant Apocalypse in X-Men #41, they kissed each other despite the risk, not wanting to die without ever having done so. When Rogue thinks she is about to be destroyed by an alien virus in Uncanny X-Men #334, her last words are to tell Gambit that she loves him, has “always loved him.” When the two of them are trapped together in an cave in Antarctica in Uncanny X-Men #348, held prisoner by bad guys with their powers out of commission, they almost certainly sleep with one another, not wanting to miss what might be their only chance to be intimate with each other (their encounter takes place largely off-panel, but that they had sex is heavily implied). When Gambit is tricked into thinking that Rogue is dying in Uncanny X-Men #375, he cradles her in his arms, telling her that he loves her, that he has “always loved her.” If either of them really does eventually get taken down for good, their last thoughts will almost certainly be of the other.
For Rogue, Remy has always been the symbol of everything her powers have denied her; it’s not insignificant that every time she fantasises about being able to touch, the thought of kissing Remy shows up. He’s everything she wants, her “prince charming,” as she says at one point, but also everything she distrusts, both because she knows he’s manipulative and because the sexual chemistry between them occasionally frightens her. Rogue, denied any sexual or even casual contact for so long, simply isn’t comfortable with her own sexuality—not surprising, when you consider that her first kiss ended with her boyfriend in a coma.
For Remy, Rogue began as the ultimate challenge—the untouchable woman, the one no man was supposed to be able to have—and became the love of his life. To borrow a phrase, “He chased her until she caught him.” She also represents redemption of a sort, a source of love and support that he sometimes feels he does not really deserve, but nevertheless longs for desperately.
"Ah...love you."
"Don't say that, chere."
"But, I do..."
"You can't love me, Rogue...because you don't know me. You don't really know me."
"Ah know you have secrets, but ah know in time you'll share th-"
"Den what? What happens when you can't forgive me...any more than I can?" ~ Rogue and Gambit
--UXM#349
Their relationship has hit the rocks several times, most notably after Rogue and the other X-Men discover that Gambit unwillingly aided Sinister in the massacre of a group of mutants known as the Morlocks, and they decide to leave him behind in Antarctica. In the snow. Alone. Calling after Rogue that he loves her.
"Home? You ain't got no home, sugah. Not with me...not with the X-Men. Fend for yourself. You seem to have done a good job of that in the past."
"But...I love you."
"You're honest with the people you love, Gambit. Otherwise...it's a gamble."
--UXM 350
Afterwards, Rogue spirals into a depression under the weight of guilt, and leave the X-Men for a time in an unsuccessful attempt to get her powers removed (she comes back, of course). Remy, who manages to escape angstily symbolic icy death, rejoins the X-Men despite their abandonment of him, and forgives her almost immediately, though it takes them a long and awkward time to finally get back together. As mentioned before, Remy has just a bit of a masochistic streak, and is quite capable of making his own life miserable simply because he feels that he deserves to suffer, just as Rogue, who has a bit of a martyred streak, is capable of turning aside offers of love because “no one can ever be safe around her.”
But get back together they eventually did, and in the end of the recently ended X-Treme X-Men title they proved their devotion to one another in a typically melodramatic, brink-of-death-and-my-last-words-are-for-you way.
When Remy is captured by the oh-so-subtly-named villain Shaitan, who wants to use him to open a portal to another dimension, in order to let an invasion force through and take over earth, Rogue goes charging into the fray to get him back—and arrives too late. Remy, shackled in place while the portal siphons his life force away, has charged a pebble and is in the process of blowing the entire building to bits. Sure, he reasons, he’ll die, but at least the entire Earth won’t end up being destroyed. Rogue finds this outcome unacceptable, and flings herself on top of Remy, protecting his body from the falling debris. The portals energy beam then locks onto her as well, draining her along with Remy, and though he orders her to leave him before it traps her, she won’t (“I was trapped the moment they put your life in danger... While I live, you don’t die. It’s that simple.”). Which means that when Vargas, another villain who, despite his status as the X-men’s enemy, doesn’t want the world to be destroyed by invaders from another dimension, shuts the portal down by impaling Remy with his sword, Rogue is impaled along with him. There are several very dramatic full panel illustrations of the two of them lying atop one another with the sword pinning both of them to the ground. Rogue, using the strength and healing abilities she has absorbed from other mutants, pulls the sword out and heals herself, then tracks down Vargas. Whether she kills him or not is never revealed, but it’s heavily implied that she does. Possibly in a highly bloody and violent fashion.
Then she flies back, cradles Remy’s body in her arms, and begs him not to die. Using one of her stolen powers, she actually enters his mind and pills him back from the brink of death, saying, “Ah won't let you go! You don't run out on us so easy! You got no right to call us QUITS b'fore we've had a decent chance t'get STARTED!" And Remy, who really has no desire to come back to life for his own sake, wakes up again. For Rogue.
How can you not love this pairing? I ask you? It’s like angst crack.
After recovering from their sword wounds, both Rogue and Gambit were temporarily stripped of their mutant powers, and or the first time, Rogue faced the prospect of a life where she could touch freely. A life she wanted to spend with Gambit.
“Feels so dif'rent, TOUCHIN' without gloves. Without bein' AFRAID...I figure--since we've both LOST what makes us mutants----maybe this is our chance to start FRESH."
“No promises. Not yet, anyway. We take t'ings day by day, we see where it leads, fair?"
--X-Treme X-Men #19
The two of them take off on an extended road trip together, and give every appearance of being a happy, stable couple, proving that, once lies, secrets, inconvenient powers, and death wishes have been dealt with, they can indeed be happy together. Until they rejoin the X-Men, and Remy regains his powers and gets blinded when a charged playing card (one of his own weapons) blows up in his face during a fight. Then his sight comes back, Rogue's powers come back, Mystique attempts to seduce Remy in an attempt to break the two up (claiming her step-daughter deserves better), and Remy is temporarily brainwashed into becoming one of Apocalypse's Horsemen (Apocalypse=giant, evil X-Men villain who brainwashes people). Because to be an X-Man is to live in a constant state of angst, and Marvel just can’t let the two of them alone.
Currently, Remy is off in parts unknown recovering from being brainwashed, and Rogue is leading an X-Men team and keeping a candle burning in the window. She has faith that he'll be back (possibly the first time she's displayed faith in him), and so do I. [ETA] Gambit has now returned, having rejoined Sinister's Marauders. Time and Mike Carey will determine if he and Rogue will be reunited.
”So I should Ship These People… Why?”
Because they look damn good together isn’t an adequate answer, so I’ll offer up a better one. The two of them are alike in so many ways. Both were raised by foster parents, both have things in their pasts they regret deeply and would change if they could. Both of them are from the South, from background considerably less shiny and clean than many of their fellow X-men: Rogue was essentially white trash from Mississippi before she fell in with Mystique and became a terrorist in training, Remy was poor Cajun trash from southern Louisiana before he was adopted by Jean-Luc and became a career criminal. Both Remy and Rogue hide hurt or fear behind humour, hide their pasts in veils of secrecy, are afraid of trusting people too much, and consistently sabotage their own efforts at forming relationships with others because of it. And both of them find the same sort of enjoyment in the adrenaline rush of a fight, a fast motorcycle ride, a supersonic flight through the sky. Even their chosen code names “Gambit” and “Rogue” fit together as if they were designed to (a total coincidence, since both were supposed to be temporary villains when first introduced, not main characters).
Rogue and Gambit are the Beatrice and Benedick of the X-Men cast, at their best when they’re bouncing their quick verbal wit off each other, as well as the series’ Romeo and Juliet, with their relationship thwarted at every turn. When a couple faces down as many obstacles as they have, and still tries to keep going, you can’t help rooting for them.
Gambit: "We b'long T'GETHER"
Rogue: "Ah know."
Links:
Love Machine
Rogue & Remy site. Hasn’t been updated in ages, but has a very good image gallery.
The Joker and the Queen
Probably the best and most up-to-date R&R site out there, with timelines, boatloads of information, and a nice section of images.
http://www.gambitguild.com/
The best Gambit site on the web, with a fanfic archive, a discussion forum, comprehensive biographical information, downloadable wallpapers, and more.
Southern Comfort
The Guild’s sister site, focused on Rogue.
Down Home Charm
Another nice Rogue site with an attractive, clean design and some gorgeous fanart—but it also hasn’t been updated for a bit.
With ff.net’s search function currently down most of my favourite Rogue&Remy fics are impossible to find, but the fanfiction page at Down Home Charm has a decent selection of older Remy/Rogue stuff.
The LeBeau Library, in it's new home on the Gambit Guild site, has a nice selection of fic revolving around Gambit, some great, some not so great (but all with decent spelling and punctuation), and a significant part of it is Remy/Rogue. I especially recommend Lori McDonald’s Looking at a Woman and it’s sequel Thick as Thieves for any Remy/Rogue fans who happen to also have a soft spot for Iceman. And, oh hell, just read everything by her. And anything by Valerie Jones as well.
Fandom on LJ:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
romy_fic: A community for Rogue/Gambit fic from all X-Men continuities (comics, X-Men Evolution, movie-verse, etc.).
roguengambit: (active)
rogue_fan: (pseudo-active)
cajun_casanova: (not really active)
ragin_remy: (pseudo-active)
This manifesto focuses on 616 comics continuity, but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
luciademedici gives more information about movie-verse and X-Men Evolution Rogue here, as well as some useful Rogue/Gambit links.
She also offers a list of Rogue/Remy recs (high X-Men Evolution content, but some comicverse fic as well).
Title: I Love You, I Hate You, Don’t Touch Me.
Author: Elspethdixon
Spoilers: Some for X-Men and Uncanny X-Men, massive ones for the end of X-Treme X-Men, a few for bits of Ultimate X-Men.
Email: elowry@hollins.edu
For the sake of my and everyone else’s sanity, I’m going to stick to the main Marvel storyline involving Gambit and Rogue (X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, and X-Treme X-Men) and will mostly leave out canon AUs like the Age of Apocalypse and other versions of the X universe like movieverse, X-Men Evolution, the original X-Men cartoon, and Ultimate X-Men. The original X-Men storyline is complicated enough on its own.
Children of the Atom
First, the basics everyone should know before we start: X-Men is a comic book series created way back in the 1960s (1963, to be exact) by Stan Lee, the same writer responsible for Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, DareDevil, et al. In the forty-one years since its inception, the original comic book title has mutated into over a dozen different interconnected comic book titles, becoming incredibly complex and occasionally confusing in the process. The basic premise is that mutants with super powers (who are hated and feared by the general mass of humanity, much like any minority group you care to name) have begun to appear among the human population, and that some of them, led and inspired by visionary Professor Charles Xavier, have formed teams of superheroes to protect regular people from evil mutants—and to protect other mutants from people trying to use or destroy them. And then there are the aliens, and the time travel, and the canonical alternate universes, and… you see what I mean when I say it gets complicated?
Southern Accents=Sexy
Gambit and Rogue are comparative newcomers to the X-Men gang (Rogue was introduced in the eighties, Gambit in 1990), but I wasn’t around for the older issues back in the seventies, and they’ve been central members of the X-Books for as long as I’ve been following them. I was sucked into X-Men at approximately the age of eleven via the old X-Men cartoon, which used to be shown Saturday mornings on Fox back in the ‘90s. Unlike pretty much every other superhero cartoon then being show, it included female superheroes, as well as two Southern mutants. As an adolescent girl, as well as someone whose family hails from south of the Mason-Dixon line, I appreciated this. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it was Gambit and Rogue’s accents that did it for me—finally, I thought, superheroes who weren’t from New York! And the fact that both of them are decidedly easy on the eyes didn’t hurt either.
Watching the cartoon soon led to many covert readings of X-Men and Uncanny X-Men comics in book stores, and to my buying or checking out from the library every X-Men trade paperback I could find. To put it simply, I fell for Gambit, hard. The irreverent sarcasm, the often-overdone-but-still-sexy French/Southern Cajun accent, the acrobatic fighting style (merde, but that man is flexible), the hints of darkness in his past, the red-on-black eyes, and most of all, the way the guy never gave up, no matter how many times Rogue shot him down. Rogue herself, with her white-streaked hair and determinedly cheerful “spunky Southern tom girl” act, manages to be oddly endearing even when she’s sort of being a bitch, and as an adolescent I found her leather bomber jacket almost as cool as Gambit’s long trench-coat. It wasn’t until I was a good bit older that I admitted to myself that I liked her curvaceous figure almost as much as I did Gambit’s muscles. And when the two of them were together, the back-and-forth banter and painfully evident sexual tension lit up the page. Or screen. Or whatever. They wanted each other, bad, and, thanks to Rogue’s powers, they couldn’t have each other. But that never stopped Gambit from loving her, or me from rooting for the both of them.
Who Are These Masked Mutants, Anyway?
The Ragin’ Cajun:
“Gambit” is the code name/nickname of Remy LeBeau, an ex-thief (though exactly how “ex” he is is a topic for debate, since he seems to employ the skills and contacts gained in his previous profession pretty frequently) from New Orleans. He’s tall (around six feet), slender (supposedly about 175 pounds, though given how much muscle he’s got packed onto his frame it’s got to be a bit more than that), and has brown-to-reddish-brown hair that is often somewhat longish. He also has the most spectacular eyes in the entire realm of sci-fi/fantasy, solid black with glowing red irises. I think they’re his best feature, but he’d probably tell you otherwise; the unique colour marks him as a mutant and thus an object of contempt for many, and has occasionally even caused people to accuse him of being a demon. His nickname back in New Orleans was “Le Diablo Blanc,” the White Devil, and it’s implied in a couple of places that this was not meant as a compliment.
In addition to his eyes, Remy has an energy mutation, with a few psionic talents thrown in for kicks. The official, Marvel-science explanation is that he generates a bio-kinetic “charge” inside his body that can convert the potential energy in inanimate objects to kinetic energy, causing them to explode. Or, in other words, he touches things, and then they go boom—after glowing with a pretty pink light for a bit. He also has heightened agility, of near-Olympic-gymnast quality, and a semi-hypnotic “charm” power that he can use to manipulate people into believing him or agreeing with him. Possibly as a side affect of this charm ability, or possibly due to energy interference from his bio-kinetic powers, his mind is very difficult for even the most powerful telepaths to read.
Remy grew up on the streets as a pick pocket (a circumstance that has caused some fanfic writers to give him a past as a child or teen-age prostitute or victim of sexual abuse—there’s one in every fandom), and was adopted at the age of about ten (or maybe eleven or twelve—Marvel hasn’t always been consistent with dates) by organised crime boss Jean-Luc LeBeau, the leader of the New Orleans Thieves Guild, a secret society with a long and complicated history that I’m not going to go into here. The Guild took him in, trained him as one of their own, and didn’t even seem to mind when his mutant powers began to manifest. Or possibly, they found the idea of a member who could blow open vault doors without the need for explosives bloody useful.
Remy had a childhood romance with Belladonna Boudreaux, the daughter of the head of the Assassin’s Guild—the Thieves Guild’s ancient enemies. Once upon a time, their parents hoped to unite the two guilds by marrying them to each other, but all of that changed when Remy killed Belle’s brother Julien in a duel on their wedding day. Despite the fact that Julien was clearly asking for it, Remy was banished from the guild and from New Orleans. Then, he apparently proceeded to make his living as a professional thief, as well as by doing other, less savoury things. One of the least savoury was the period of time he spent working for the evil mutant scientist Dr. Essex (aka Mr. Sinister, since nobody in Marvelverse has only one name), doing a variety of illegal and semi-legal things in order to pay back a debt. This would come back to bite him in the ass later.
Eventually, Remy met and became friends with Storm, one of the leaders of the X-Men, and was invited to join the team. He did so, even though he didn’t believe Xavier’s dream of humans and mutants living in peace was attainable. Possibly, he was motivated by friendship for Storm, possibly he wanted to redeem himself for his actions under Sinister, possibly he was just tired of being alone.
As an X-Man, Gambit has always been something of a wild card—it’s not for nothing that his trademark playing cards are the joker and the ace of spades. He tends to drift in and out of the X-Men, dropping out of the team to attend to mysterious “personal” business and showing back up again whenever he feels like it. He can be charming—especially with women—but there’s often a hint of menace lurking under the surface. He doesn’t trust people easily, possibly because he himself is such a manipulator, but when he cares about someone, he cares deeply, and will go to any lengths to protect them. He keeps secrets, rarely volunteering important information about his past unless directly asked (he didn’t tell Rogue about his ex-wife Belle until she actually showed up and forced his hand), and like some of the team’s other more morally ambiguous members, has no problem using questionable tactics in order to accomplish his goals. Which isn’t to say that he’s out-and-out bloodthirsty like, say, Wolverine. Gambit is actually rather good at talking his way out of trouble, and has been known to cut a deal with a enemy rather than fight him—and if it comes to a fight, he’ll use subterfuge, dirty tricks, and anything else he can think of to tip the odds—including allowing himself to look weak or trapped so as to make an opponent underestimate him. Of course, he also seems to truly enjoy the adrenaline rush of a fight, or any other risky pursuit. How much of his adrenaline-junky qualities are due to sublimated self-destructiveness is up for interpretation, but given how conflicted Gambit often feels about his own past, it’s likely that there’s at least a bit of masochism there.
The Southern Spitfire:
Rogue, whose real name was unknown until very recently, has a past even more mysterious than Remy’s. A former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants who swapped sides to join the X-men, Rogue’s code name has essentially become her only name. Unlike Remy, she has no real family or contacts outside of the X-team. Rogue is supposedly about 5’8”, but usually is drawn somewhat shorter than that, not quite petite, but close to it. She also has a figure most swimsuit models would kill for, toned and athletic, but with Marilyn Monroe hips and breasts of truly awe-inspiring proportions. Trust me, this is one woman who looks damn good in spandex. Her hair has fluctuated through several styles, going from long-and-curly to long-and-straight to a shorter, (first chin-length and then not-quite-shoulder-length) bob cut, but has always been brown with at least one white streak in it, and her eyes are a bright, emerald green. When she absorbs another mutant’s powers, she sometimes temporarily acquires certain aspects of their appearance as well, such as Nightcrawler’s blue skin, or Carol Danver’s blue eyes.
Over time, Rogue’s powers have become a kind of cocktail of mutant abilities, but her original power, the only one that is truly hers, is the ability to absorb another person’s “essence” (energy, memories, mutant abilities, you name it, she can suck it out of you) via skin-to-skin contact. If she touches someone for too long, she can drain them to the point of death, and the stolen abilities will become permanent. Early on in her mutant “career,” while working for the Brotherhood of Mutants, Rogue permanently absorbed the personality and powers of mutant Carol Danvers, gaining super strength, near-invulnerability, and the ability to fly. She’s also temporarily absorbed the powers of most of the other X-Men and many of their enemies as well, and recently, these borrowed powers have started to resurface. And then her powers went away for a while after she was impaled with a sword and used to power an inter-dimensional gateway (see, what did I tell you? Complicated), but now they may be beginning to come back.
Rogue was born and raised in the (fictional) Caldecott County, Mississippi, and ran away from home at an early age, possibly because her family situation was abusive. She was taken in by the shape-changing mutant Mystique and her friend Irene (a blind mutant known as Destiny with precognitive powers) and essentially was raised to be a terrorist and Brotherhood member. At some point in her teen years—whether this was before or after she was adopted by Mystique is uncertain—she began a relationship with a boy named Cody, and put him in a permanent coma when her powers manifested for the first time during their first kiss. Needless to say, this proved somewhat traumatising.
After nearly killing another person with her powers a second time (the aforementioned Carol Danvers), Rogue left the Brotherhood and went to Professor Charles Xavier and the X-Men for help, hoping he could teach to control her powers. This never happened, forcing Rogue to go through life wearing gloves in order to avoid accidental physical contact, but she became a dedicated member of the X-Men anyway, and seems to truly believe in Xavier’s dream of peaceful co-existence between mutants and non-mutants.
Rogue is more of a team player than Gambit, and often comes across as a cheerful, spunky tomboy, with a drawling Southern accent and a habit of handing out endearments like “sugar” to her friends. Like Gambit, she occasionally leaves the X-Men for periods of time (she took off with Bobby after her first, disastrous kiss with Gambit, dropped out of the team for a while to try to lead a normal life, once left the team to try and have her powers removed by a less-than-reputable scientist), but she always comes back to fight next to her comrades, and always tries to be there to listen to their problems—that way, she doesn’t have to think about her own. Like Gambit’s easy, flirtatious charm, Rogue’s “Southern Spitfire” persona is as much mask as reality, albeit a mask she tries very hard to make real. Rogue can’t touch people, and although she longs for physical contact and a fulfilling romantic relationship, she believes she can never safely have one, and subtly—or not so subtly—pushes people away when they get too close. She is terrified of hurting the people she loves with her powers, and also has some serious issues with emotional intimacy as well, leading her to keep much of her past, including her real name, a secret. One side effect of her powers is that the memories and personalities of people she has absorbed occasionally re-emerge inside her psyche, and she has long feared that her own personality might disintegrate under the pressure. Recently, with her powers temporarily out-of-commission and a “normal” life with Remy looking like a possibility, she revealed to him that her name was Anna, but her team-mates still know nothing about her childhood or original family.
The Joker and the Queen of Hearts
Rogue and Remy are one of Marvel’s longest-running couples, up there in popularity with Scott and Jean Summers, but they are also the X-Men writers’ favourite couple to jerk around. You name it, it’s happened to them. Ex-wives and would-be lovers have come between them, they’ve kept secrets from each other, accidentally or intentionally betrayed each other, broken up repeated for fear of hurting each other (usually at Rogue’s instigation), temporarily lost their powers, been temporarily blinded in the line of duty (and relied upon the other to guide them afterwards), worked for villains, been nearly killed by villain, nearly killed each other… and yet, in the end, they always come back to one another. No matter what happen to them or between them, they simply can’t stay away. Remy has even come back from the brink of death simply because Rogue begged him not to leave her. And really, what’s a dark past and a few ex-lovers compared to devotion like that?
From the moment they first met, Remy and Rogue have flirted with each other, tossing banter back and forth like the hero and heroine of some romantic comedy. Their relationship has been as much about words as it has about physical chemistry, both the words they say and the ones they don’t say. Rogue says, “I love you,” but not “I trust you.” Remy says “I love you,” but is constantly keeping parts of his life a secret.
From the beginning, Remy hasn’t been afraid to treat Rogue like the woman she is, rather than the asexual person her powers force her to be, and their conversations, especially in the early days of their relationship, have a heavy amount of sexual innuendo, as if to compensate for the physical contact they can’t have.
“So, it's not the champagne and candlelight dinner I imagined when I asked you out, I suppose it'll have to do in a pinch.”
“I thought you'd appreciate me makin' you an' ol' fashion Cajun meal with muh own two hands.”
“ If I made a list of things to do "with your own two hands", stirrin' gumbo wouldn't be on it. “
“ Ya certainly know how ta get under a girl's skin.”
“ I'm trying.”
“ Gambit, please! Ya know even the slightest physical contacts means Ah'd absorb ya mind and powers!”
“ Worse fates spring t'mind, chere.”
“ That's all Ah'd need - thoughts o' you runnin' through muh head twenty-four hours a day.”
“How'd dat be any different than now?”
--X-Men #8
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Picnic The famous Rogue/Gambit "first date" scene. |
Eventually, their byplay takes on a pattern: Remy shamelessly hits on Rogue, she playfully insults him, and they both laugh. They keep this up even after they become a couple—and break up, and get together again, and break up, and get together again, and so on, and so forth. Both of them tend to use jokes and sarcasm to lighten serious subjects or avoid revealing the depth of their feelings about something, and their own relationship is no exception, though they make their share of heartfelt confessions as well. Both have declared their love for one another to friends and enemies alike (“Gambit's MINE!” Rogue declares hotly at one point, after a villain has captured him, “And ah don't take kindly t'folks who want to do him harm!”), though admittedly Rogue often seems to have an easier time of doing it when Remy isn’t around, and they’ve said it to each other’s faces as well. Sometimes it takes a near death experience in order for one of them to do it, but in a way the fact that many of their “I love you”s—and their first kiss—were exchanged at moments when they thought one or both of them was about to die makes them even more powerful. When they thought the world was about to be destroyed by the evil mutant Apocalypse in X-Men #41, they kissed each other despite the risk, not wanting to die without ever having done so. When Rogue thinks she is about to be destroyed by an alien virus in Uncanny X-Men #334, her last words are to tell Gambit that she loves him, has “always loved him.” When the two of them are trapped together in an cave in Antarctica in Uncanny X-Men #348, held prisoner by bad guys with their powers out of commission, they almost certainly sleep with one another, not wanting to miss what might be their only chance to be intimate with each other (their encounter takes place largely off-panel, but that they had sex is heavily implied). When Gambit is tricked into thinking that Rogue is dying in Uncanny X-Men #375, he cradles her in his arms, telling her that he loves her, that he has “always loved her.” If either of them really does eventually get taken down for good, their last thoughts will almost certainly be of the other.
For Rogue, Remy has always been the symbol of everything her powers have denied her; it’s not insignificant that every time she fantasises about being able to touch, the thought of kissing Remy shows up. He’s everything she wants, her “prince charming,” as she says at one point, but also everything she distrusts, both because she knows he’s manipulative and because the sexual chemistry between them occasionally frightens her. Rogue, denied any sexual or even casual contact for so long, simply isn’t comfortable with her own sexuality—not surprising, when you consider that her first kiss ended with her boyfriend in a coma.
For Remy, Rogue began as the ultimate challenge—the untouchable woman, the one no man was supposed to be able to have—and became the love of his life. To borrow a phrase, “He chased her until she caught him.” She also represents redemption of a sort, a source of love and support that he sometimes feels he does not really deserve, but nevertheless longs for desperately.
"Ah...love you."
"Don't say that, chere."
"But, I do..."
"You can't love me, Rogue...because you don't know me. You don't really know me."
"Ah know you have secrets, but ah know in time you'll share th-"
"Den what? What happens when you can't forgive me...any more than I can?" ~ Rogue and Gambit
--UXM#349
Their relationship has hit the rocks several times, most notably after Rogue and the other X-Men discover that Gambit unwillingly aided Sinister in the massacre of a group of mutants known as the Morlocks, and they decide to leave him behind in Antarctica. In the snow. Alone. Calling after Rogue that he loves her.
"Home? You ain't got no home, sugah. Not with me...not with the X-Men. Fend for yourself. You seem to have done a good job of that in the past."
"But...I love you."
"You're honest with the people you love, Gambit. Otherwise...it's a gamble."
--UXM 350
Afterwards, Rogue spirals into a depression under the weight of guilt, and leave the X-Men for a time in an unsuccessful attempt to get her powers removed (she comes back, of course). Remy, who manages to escape angstily symbolic icy death, rejoins the X-Men despite their abandonment of him, and forgives her almost immediately, though it takes them a long and awkward time to finally get back together. As mentioned before, Remy has just a bit of a masochistic streak, and is quite capable of making his own life miserable simply because he feels that he deserves to suffer, just as Rogue, who has a bit of a martyred streak, is capable of turning aside offers of love because “no one can ever be safe around her.”
But get back together they eventually did, and in the end of the recently ended X-Treme X-Men title they proved their devotion to one another in a typically melodramatic, brink-of-death-and-my-last-words-are-for-you way.
When Remy is captured by the oh-so-subtly-named villain Shaitan, who wants to use him to open a portal to another dimension, in order to let an invasion force through and take over earth, Rogue goes charging into the fray to get him back—and arrives too late. Remy, shackled in place while the portal siphons his life force away, has charged a pebble and is in the process of blowing the entire building to bits. Sure, he reasons, he’ll die, but at least the entire Earth won’t end up being destroyed. Rogue finds this outcome unacceptable, and flings herself on top of Remy, protecting his body from the falling debris. The portals energy beam then locks onto her as well, draining her along with Remy, and though he orders her to leave him before it traps her, she won’t (“I was trapped the moment they put your life in danger... While I live, you don’t die. It’s that simple.”). Which means that when Vargas, another villain who, despite his status as the X-men’s enemy, doesn’t want the world to be destroyed by invaders from another dimension, shuts the portal down by impaling Remy with his sword, Rogue is impaled along with him. There are several very dramatic full panel illustrations of the two of them lying atop one another with the sword pinning both of them to the ground. Rogue, using the strength and healing abilities she has absorbed from other mutants, pulls the sword out and heals herself, then tracks down Vargas. Whether she kills him or not is never revealed, but it’s heavily implied that she does. Possibly in a highly bloody and violent fashion.
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Melodrama Rogue throws herself atop a trapped Gambit in XXM. |
Then she flies back, cradles Remy’s body in her arms, and begs him not to die. Using one of her stolen powers, she actually enters his mind and pills him back from the brink of death, saying, “Ah won't let you go! You don't run out on us so easy! You got no right to call us QUITS b'fore we've had a decent chance t'get STARTED!" And Remy, who really has no desire to come back to life for his own sake, wakes up again. For Rogue.
How can you not love this pairing? I ask you? It’s like angst crack.
After recovering from their sword wounds, both Rogue and Gambit were temporarily stripped of their mutant powers, and or the first time, Rogue faced the prospect of a life where she could touch freely. A life she wanted to spend with Gambit.
“Feels so dif'rent, TOUCHIN' without gloves. Without bein' AFRAID...I figure--since we've both LOST what makes us mutants----maybe this is our chance to start FRESH."
“No promises. Not yet, anyway. We take t'ings day by day, we see where it leads, fair?"
--X-Treme X-Men #19
The two of them take off on an extended road trip together, and give every appearance of being a happy, stable couple, proving that, once lies, secrets, inconvenient powers, and death wishes have been dealt with, they can indeed be happy together. Until they rejoin the X-Men, and Remy regains his powers and gets blinded when a charged playing card (one of his own weapons) blows up in his face during a fight. Then his sight comes back, Rogue's powers come back, Mystique attempts to seduce Remy in an attempt to break the two up (claiming her step-daughter deserves better), and Remy is temporarily brainwashed into becoming one of Apocalypse's Horsemen (Apocalypse=giant, evil X-Men villain who brainwashes people). Because to be an X-Man is to live in a constant state of angst, and Marvel just can’t let the two of them alone.
Currently, Remy is off in parts unknown recovering from being brainwashed, and Rogue is leading an X-Men team and keeping a candle burning in the window. She has faith that he'll be back (possibly the first time she's displayed faith in him), and so do I. [ETA] Gambit has now returned, having rejoined Sinister's Marauders. Time and Mike Carey will determine if he and Rogue will be reunited.
”So I should Ship These People… Why?”
Because they look damn good together isn’t an adequate answer, so I’ll offer up a better one. The two of them are alike in so many ways. Both were raised by foster parents, both have things in their pasts they regret deeply and would change if they could. Both of them are from the South, from background considerably less shiny and clean than many of their fellow X-men: Rogue was essentially white trash from Mississippi before she fell in with Mystique and became a terrorist in training, Remy was poor Cajun trash from southern Louisiana before he was adopted by Jean-Luc and became a career criminal. Both Remy and Rogue hide hurt or fear behind humour, hide their pasts in veils of secrecy, are afraid of trusting people too much, and consistently sabotage their own efforts at forming relationships with others because of it. And both of them find the same sort of enjoyment in the adrenaline rush of a fight, a fast motorcycle ride, a supersonic flight through the sky. Even their chosen code names “Gambit” and “Rogue” fit together as if they were designed to (a total coincidence, since both were supposed to be temporary villains when first introduced, not main characters).
Rogue and Gambit are the Beatrice and Benedick of the X-Men cast, at their best when they’re bouncing their quick verbal wit off each other, as well as the series’ Romeo and Juliet, with their relationship thwarted at every turn. When a couple faces down as many obstacles as they have, and still tries to keep going, you can’t help rooting for them.
Gambit: "We b'long T'GETHER"
Rogue: "Ah know."
Links:
Love Machine
Rogue & Remy site. Hasn’t been updated in ages, but has a very good image gallery.
The Joker and the Queen
Probably the best and most up-to-date R&R site out there, with timelines, boatloads of information, and a nice section of images.
http://www.gambitguild.com/
The best Gambit site on the web, with a fanfic archive, a discussion forum, comprehensive biographical information, downloadable wallpapers, and more.
Southern Comfort
The Guild’s sister site, focused on Rogue.
Down Home Charm
Another nice Rogue site with an attractive, clean design and some gorgeous fanart—but it also hasn’t been updated for a bit.
With ff.net’s search function currently down most of my favourite Rogue&Remy fics are impossible to find, but the fanfiction page at Down Home Charm has a decent selection of older Remy/Rogue stuff.
The LeBeau Library, in it's new home on the Gambit Guild site, has a nice selection of fic revolving around Gambit, some great, some not so great (but all with decent spelling and punctuation), and a significant part of it is Remy/Rogue. I especially recommend Lori McDonald’s Looking at a Woman and it’s sequel Thick as Thieves for any Remy/Rogue fans who happen to also have a soft spot for Iceman. And, oh hell, just read everything by her. And anything by Valerie Jones as well.
Fandom on LJ:
romy_fic: A community for Rogue/Gambit fic from all X-Men continuities (comics, X-Men Evolution, movie-verse, etc.).roguengambit: (active)rogue_fan: (pseudo-active)cajun_casanova: (not really active)ragin_remy: (pseudo-active)This manifesto focuses on 616 comics continuity, but
luciademedici gives more information about movie-verse and X-Men Evolution Rogue here, as well as some useful Rogue/Gambit links.She also offers a list of Rogue/Remy recs (high X-Men Evolution content, but some comicverse fic as well).
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Date: 2004-12-06 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 08:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 10:37 pm (UTC)Pretty cool essay anyway, even if i know barely anything about this comic ^^
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Date: 2004-12-06 06:07 am (UTC)Really hadnt thought too much about them as a pairing before i must admit, i adore gambit, he is by far my favourite of the x-men. i like rogue too, but since i havent read heaps of the comics, the version of her in the movies kinda spoiled the greatness of her character for me.
Someone suggested a while ago that Sawyer from Lost might make a fantastic Gambit... whaddya reckon??
really really insightful and comprehensive look at that pairing, good work and thanks for showing me the gambit/rogue light :)
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Date: 2004-12-06 06:24 am (UTC)Two small corrections:
but has always been brown with one white streak in front
Well, no. Originally, Rogue had two white streaks on the sides of her head; this hairstyle was quickly changed to the more familiar one streak when artists began drawing her as somewhat older, as if that were gray hair.
Beatrice and Benedict
I believe it's Benedick, at least if you're talking about Much Ado About Nothing.
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Date: 2004-12-06 08:12 am (UTC)*headdesks* Oh, yeah. See, that's why I shouldn't try to write essays on three hours of sleep. Thanks, I've gone back and changed it.
As for Rogue once having two white streaks, I don't remeber the double-streaked style, but I'm sure you're right. I only picked up the x-books in the mid-90s, and certainly haven't read every single one out there.
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Date: 2004-12-06 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 08:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 11:18 am (UTC)Ditto here. Movieverse Rogue needs someone to bring out the fire in her, not to mention that every time she flirts with Bobby, it causes me pain. Plus, including Gambit would allow them to put in nifty Mission Impossible-type breaking and entering sequences. Of course, I shudder to think what they'd end up doing to his eyes and accent.
On the bright side, though, the movieverse incarnation of Kurt Wagner was fairly decent.
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Date: 2004-12-06 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-08 11:27 am (UTC)The first link you have there has some code wrong with it, but the rest of it is great :D Thankyou!
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Date: 2004-12-09 03:30 am (UTC)Good job!
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Date: 2004-12-12 09:11 am (UTC)But on the whole? Bravo. Expressed what this 'shipper feels (although I'll confess to being all about Wolverine/Rogue in the movieverse. Sue me).
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Date: 2004-12-12 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 04:01 am (UTC)Thank you! My orginal OTP!
Date: 2004-12-12 06:44 pm (UTC)No matter how far they are flung apart, they always end up back together. This was my true couple of the Marvelverse (back when I was a little girl in ja!) it was never Scott/Jean.
Their relationship is just so rich with the conflicts that they face, be it familial (wasn't he the leader of a band of thieves) emotional (Gambit can never forgive himself) and just GUH!
Long before Lupin/Black, it was Rogue and Remy for my OTP ( I think this is why I cant stand it when fan fic writers call Remus 'Remy' because there is only one Remy.
Re: Thank you! My orginal OTP!
Date: 2004-12-12 06:52 pm (UTC)Though you must admit, Sirius calling Remus "Remy" does create interesting mental images. Black/LeBeau would be one hot crossover pairing.
Oohh!
Date: 2004-12-12 08:16 pm (UTC)Can anyone write a fanfic? Anyone? Anyone...
That? Would be a hell of a cross over
Re: Oohh!
Date: 2004-12-13 11:40 pm (UTC)*chants to self* Will not make bad pun. Will not make bad pun.
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Date: 2004-12-14 08:19 am (UTC)How can you not love this pairing? I ask you? It’s like angst crack.
SO. FUCKING. TRUE.
In fact, it's so true that I want to make Remy/Rogue icons declaring the ship angst!crack.
My first OTP? Who am I kidding? I know I'll never really be over it. It'll probably be my last OTP, when I'm old and gray.
sigh
Lovely essay. Brought back soooo many good memories, even though I don't read comics as regularly or obsessively as I used to.
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Date: 2005-01-28 08:42 pm (UTC)Best... 'ship... ever.
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Date: 2005-01-29 12:02 am (UTC)You hit the nail on the head. Angst crack.
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Date: 2005-03-28 09:28 am (UTC)Well done. Seriously.
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Date: 2006-08-25 04:39 pm (UTC)Made me laugh outloud because it's exactly what I say!
Where did you get the last quote? The "Ah know"?
WONDERFUL job, although I know I'm reading this like 2 years later.... I've always been a R/R girl, and this made me way delighted
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 05:59 pm (UTC)http://www.gambitguild.com/library/
(Val's at it again, too. If you're interested. "Death Undone" being her latest.)
Also:
Upcoming is the Guild's arm here at LJ, still in development, but soon to be released as a new way of admission for the Lebeau Library:
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 06:00 pm (UTC)There's also
no subject
Date: 2007-07-02 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-02 03:27 pm (UTC)Small correction:
The Gambit Guild is still the Gambit Guild:
http://www.gambitguild.com
It's the old Lebeau Library (the one listed at geoshitties) that is presently housed at the Guild. It's still the Lebeau Library though:
http://www.gambitguild.com/library/
I shoulda made that clearer. :/
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-19 06:54 am (UTC)I'm reading X-Men and I started from the number 1 and I fell in love with Rogue when she entered the group. Then, I fell in love with Gambit and I loked how they started their relationship.
Now I'm reading the 370th issue and I discovered that I hated Rogue and Gambit together in all the issues written by Seagle (I hope I get the name right)... horrible scripts!
Now I prefer them separately... I'll see what the comics bring me and if I'll manage to love the pairing again!