#including characterization

“Raven is a bad parent”

And

“Raven loves their children”

Can and should co exist. I will never sit here and say Mystique is a good parent, but I think acting like they don’t love their children is just being willfully ignorant of their characterization since the 80s.

I see a lot of people try to claim Raven doesn’t care about their kids. I actually think they care a LOT, it just, doesn’t deter their actions. And they’re not a good parent, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love Kurt and Rogue and I think trying to claim they don’t actually does away with a lot of Raven’s character nuance.

A lot of the tragedy and depth of their relationships come from the fact that Raven DOES love their children, but it’s not enough. And Kurt and Anna Marie know that, and that’s part of the tragedy of it too.

I’m not a Mystique defender, but I am a Raven Darkhölme characterization realist. A lot of people flatten their character to add more sympathy to Kurt’s story especially, which feels kinda iffy to me. But that’s for another post.

From a storytelling perspective, it adds so much more depth and tragedy to all characters involved to not make the relationship so shallow and one sided as “Oh Mystique doesn’t love them”, and even to juxtapose Raven’s relationship to them with Irene’s is a whole other thing I may talk about one day. But like, you do the story injustice to flatten it down to just “Oh Mystique sucks”