The Jubilee Push Isn't Propaganda, It's Growth

It's been a good month for Jubilation Lee.

X-Men '97 came back at the start of the month, kicking off with a trio of episodes that saw Jubilee—cut off from the majority of her fellow X-Men as they were flung across spacetime at the end of season one—come into her own as a member of X-Force. Just a week later, NetEase had a splashy debut for the ninth season of Marvel Rivals, which continued its mutant winning streak by adding Jubilee as the game's latest hero.

Of course, both of these big moments are punctuated by Jubilee getting to look extremely cool. The second of X-Men '97's returning episodes climaxes with Jubilee beating the snot out of reams of government black ops soldiers, diagetically skating around to "Volcano Girls" by Veruca Salt. In Rivals, Jubilee is a healing strategist, but a good amount of her kit is based around her being able to amp her offensive powers and increase her fire rate, letting her melt the beefiest tanks in the game like nothing and already has people calling for her to be permabanned from matches even before she's launched.

To many, this feels like what's come to be referred to in fandoms lately as a moment of propaganda. It's the payoff to years of jokes since Jubilee was really last in the public consciousness in the original X-Men cartoon—she was the bratty teen girl whose superpower was a fireworks show on a team with a weather goddess, a guy whose eyes shot laser beams from the punch dimension, and the world's greatest psychic (for the 5 seconds before she needed to take a lie down). Maybe it's fitting that the fourth of July weekend was framed by Jubilee getting to show off that her powers were more than just sparkles. But rooted in this idea that Jubilee is now cool because she's allowed to beat people up is an ignorance of one of X-Men '97's greatest strengths in particular.