X-23 is no longer the character we know and love. She is now nothing more than a tokenized Wolverine.
@Bear Ribs, have you any thoughts on this?
I'm just kinda meh honestly. Comics tend to wreck their own characters from time to time, and X-23 has taken more of a wrecking than some.
Ultimately X-23 usually only has one character arc, she's pretty much murderous Pinocchio. She's a soulless killing machine that breaks away from her programming and gradually becomes a real girl. Then the next writer undoes all her development and she starts over. It's fairly rare that somebody does something new with her anymore.
Wolverine tends to be problematic* because he's so much more well-known and popular than the other heroes he tends to hang with. This has a bit of a warping effect, such as the common "Wolverine Publicity" stunt of putting Wolverine front and center even on other hero's comics where he barely appears. Similar he's the only one to be in all 11 X-men movies so far, even movies where he had no major role made sure there was a Wolverine cameo, and he's gotten multiple movies to himself where the others haven't. No other character comes close. As a result, unless there's a very strong editorial hand exercising discipline, Marvel will tend to put Wolverine everywhere they possibly can and cross him over as much as possible because he's a proven moneymaker compared to their large stable of also-rans that most non-comics fans won't even recognize. It becomes an issue when they do it so often and it warps everything else around Wolverine at times, to something similar to "Tragedy of the Commons" if an editor doesn't reign everybody else in and cut down on it
I think this change is a bad one but I don't really see this as sexism or a direct attack on X-23. I see it as somebody at Marvel seeing
another chance to throw up Wolverine and going for it even though it makes little sense and, in fact, is actively harmful to the character. It's stupid of course, but that's why I find Wolverine a bit problematic, his star moneymaker potential makes the writers do stupid things to get as much Wolverine as they can.
*I'm not using this term in the common internet discussion tactic of "X doesn't support my position but actually calling it bad will leave me open to counter-attack, so I'm going to imply it's bad without committing" but rather the actual meaning, it
causes problems.
