PART 2 OF 4: BETRAYAL, MEMORY AND THE RIGHT TO BE ANGRY

PART 2 OF 4: BETRAYAL, MEMORY AND THE RIGHT TO BE ANGRY Content note: sexual coercion, forced pregnancy and assault. Avengers #200 needs to be described plainly. Marcus abducts Carol, manipulates her mind with Immortus' technology and uses her body to bring himself into the world through an accelerated pregnancy. His account admits technological interference in her feelings. The story nevertheless treats her departure with him as a romantic resolution, and her teammates allow it. The coercion is central. Calling this a strange romance would repeat the failure Carol later identifies. Avengers Annual #10 gives Carol the opportunity to confront that failure. Marcus dies after their return to Limbo because of his accelerated aging. Freed from his control, Carol learns enough to get herself home. She then tells the Avengers what their acceptance of his explanation meant. They heard evidence that her will had been interfered with and failed to protect her. Her anger has a specific object: the people she trusted did not ask the questions they should have asked. This is important to distinguish from someone else rescuing her from Marcus. Carol gets back. She speaks for herself. The annual lets her challenge the team's reassuring version of events instead of making their comfort the measure of her experience. The same annual introduces the aftermath of another attack. Rogue has taken Carol's powers and memories, and Jessica Drew saves her after she is thrown from the Golden Gate Bridge. Jessica gets her medical help and involves Xavier. Carol is alive, but the damage reaches into her sense of who she is. Xavier helps reconstruct her memories. Their emotional connection is a different matter. Knowing what happened in your life and feeling that life as your own are separate things in these stories. That distinction explains why a summary saying that Xavier simply restores Carol misses the continuing problem. Jessica's role also deserves to survive the summary. She is the person who finds Carol, acts and brings help. The recovery has relationships around it. Carol's story should not reduce every other woman in it to either the attacker or a background witness. With the X-Men, Carol can contribute even after losing the Ms. Marvel abilities. Uncanny X-Men #158 puts her professional experience to work in the Pentagon infiltration. She helps remove the government's files on the X-Men, confronts Mystique and also erases the records of her own former identities. Her enhanced reflexes and endurance have not entirely disappeared, but the mission is also about skills she already possessed. Her encounter with Rogue there is painful and angry. The story does not require her to be gracious about the person who did this to her. At the same time, she completes the mission. Carol has decisions to make and useful work to do, even while the loss remains unresolved. Logan is another important connection. Their intelligence-world history predates their association at Xavier's school, and the later conversation in Marvel Fanfare #24 places him in the position of an old friend listening to what she cannot recover. That friendship should not be expanded into an unsupported romantic history here. Across these stories, the question is how much of a life can be rebuilt after other people have interfered with its most private foundations. The books do not offer a quick repair. They let Carol keep acting while the damage is still there.