I've only read one Whedon book ever, and I know nothing about him, really. But I know he killed Kitty, and I'm still really upset over that.

Apologies.

at first it did jar me out of the story and send me back there to the origianl issue..but then i thought why would joss do that...so that was what i came up with he was trying to be artsy...from what i hear writers do that..get all meta-physical with it and deep.
so when i took as ..kitty is the most dangerous one now..i was thinking ok thats cool.

Which is an opinion you're welcome to have, but not a very strong arguing point.

it was similar to the fast ball special..it just added a touch of cool to an allready cool scene....if kitty feel in a cavern and said ok emma im going in..it would have been cool..but it seems like since it was a homage its now not ok..i thought steranko and others (kirby...etc.)showed that what ever we "perceieve" to be as rules..arent..thats comics..we got no rules...other than make the story good....movies have rules...books do..txv shows....we shouldnt..we should alway challenge the rules and push them.guys like eisner and moore they push what we cant do..i see joss as doing that..he gave us a good cliff hanger and a homage all in one shot.and it did remind me of the old run..
i agree..
.it reminded me that kitty and emma have that history...last time she was the victim..the one the others went to save..this time..as a women..shes the last line of defense and now will go and save the others..showing that she has grown. its not just a "look kitty is tough" scene..its showing that when the hellfire last wooped butt this bad she was a victim now she has grown and will be the savior.it gave me a sence of kitty is an equal when back then she was just a lil kid..now she is the most dangerous member..when wolvierine use to be.

shes come full circle so to speak.

an sorry about the poor spelling an grammar

Here's the kicker. Just like I responded to Greg Hatcher's recent article, once again I don't think it's the fan's fault. Fans have shown that they'll respond positively to growth if you'll let them. Look at Wally West, the character was lucky enough to leave the pen of Wolfman early in the New Teen Titans run, so Wolfman didn't get a chance to get him thoroughly stigmatized as a total loser like he did with the other characters. In time, Wally West left his mentor's shadow for good, never mentioned inferiority again, and if anything his fanbase grew.

So I think it's a bad habit we're getting into to blame fans all the time. The problem is the writers. THEY want to write that pivotal moment in the character's life, so they choose to invalidate the previous story to make it happen. Chuck Austen wants to write Iceman's coming of age story and get credit for maturing the character so he invalidates the previous Iceman coming of age story. Devin Grayson wants to get credit as THE writer that brought Nightwing out of Batman's shadow so she invalidates the last story that brought him out of Batman's shadow.

Seriously, that was an awesome comment. Thanks.

So disturbing and yet so true.

I'm not really "falling" for any of it, the registration arc, Parker's unveiling, etc., I just take whatever entertainment value these things produce on their own until the next change obliterates them. I'm not too frustrated with that (trying to make sure that all changes are indeed permanent with long-lasting ramifications would put good writers at the mercy of bad ones as well as vice versa).

First, we fall for Marvel re-doing the superhero registration act, and now people think that Kitty Pryde will finally become her own adult character.

Never gonna happen. First of all, how can you possibly expect a series that is intentionally steeped in nostalgia to move characters forward. That's nonsensical. Second, there's the fact that Kitty Pryde has had dozens of thees moments and never makes that move forward. We've seen this before. Kitty Pryde gets cornered, we get to see how much of a badass she really is (aka hundreds of fans get new masturbation material), and in the end there's this notion that now Kitty Pryde will take care of herself and be an awesome confident person. Remember when Claremont cut her hair and gave her claws?

Except that never happens because Kitty Pryde's fans don't really want her to move on. They want her to keep being the Kitty Pryde they know and love. The one who's got a little purple dragon, looks up to Wolverine, loves the quiet guy, and is an underdog. The Kitty Pryde that these people love is thirteen years old, and now we've got this weird character who's supposed to be college-age, but keeps devolving and re-evolving, just so people can keep getting that moment over and over again.

And that's the real problem with doing a moment like the one from AXM. It pulls the character back to an old idea, and buries her in it. After all, if Kitty Pryde finally becomes the mature ass-kicker after this, it will mean that all the other times she supposedly did that already didn't count. It erases parts of the character's history.

You can't create a character's future by re-creating the past.

And I am saying that, if you are going to do that, it should only be done in scenes that do not have massive impacts upon the plot of the comic book, because you shouldn't be taking scenes that are important to YOUR work wholesale from OTHER creators.

It WOULD be worse, if the scene was important AND only readable if you had prior knowledge of the original scene. I certainly do agree that that is WORSE. And in that case, there are many nostalgic important scenes WORSE than the Astonishing X-Men scene in question.

But I think that's just varying degrees of bad.

I think it is bad to have your important scenes just be wholesale reproductions of previous creators' scenes. But yeah, there are a lot of scenes even WORSE out there.