Which X-Man Is Responsible For Ruining Kitty Pryde's Wedding?

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for X-Men Gold #30 by Marc Guggenheim, David Marquez, Matthew Wilson and Cory Petit, on sale now.

This summer in superhero comics has been somewhat defined by two monumental marriages; on DC’s side there’s the imminent nuptials between Batman and Catwoman. Marvel, on the other hand, has been touting the wedding of Kitty Pryde and Colossus in the pages of X-Men Gold.

As revealed by Marvel yesterday, however, the latter wedding didn’t end up going as planned. And while there was a happy ending for a certain mutant couple, it wasn’t Kitty and Piotr. So, why didn’t the wedding occur, and what caused Kitty Pryde to develop cold feet? It turns out, some advice from one of her closest friends led the leader of the X-Men to realize that this isn’t what she wanted after all.

Best Friends Forever

The night before the wedding, while the X-Men and friends party ahead of the big day, Kitty Pryde joins her best friend Illyana Rasputin on the roof for a private chat. Sensing something is wrong, Kitty pries it out of her bestie, with Illyana reluctantly telling her that she doesn’t think Kitty should marry her brother.

The romance between Shadowcat and Colossus has been on-and-off for over thirty years real-time and despite their affection for each other, it’s never quite worked out for them. Illyana tells Kitty that she thinks that if it was going to happen it would have happened by now, planting that seed of doubt in her mind.

When it comes to the big day, everything seems to be going fine and both Kitty and Piotr seem elated to be marrying each other, but when the time comes to put the ring on her finger, Colossus’ hand passes right through. While Kitty may have had every intention on marrying him up until that moment, she’s been known in times of extreme stress not to be able to control her phasing power. Here, it causes her to realize that she can’t go through with the wedding.

Later that night, Kitty and Colossus have a heart-to-heart where she tells him that though she loves him and she wanted to marry him, the words of the Rabbi forced her to confront the ups and downs of their courtship and she realised that it was a messy and unstable foundation to build a marriage on. It doesn’t necessarily seem as if Kitty and Piotr are breaking up and they seem to be in somewhat good spirits when they return to what would have been the reception to encourage Rogue and Gambit to take the plunge, but Kitty makes it clear that she might not ever be ready to get married.

The issue ends on a somewhat happy note as Rogue and Gambit are married and will go on to star in the upcoming Mr. and Mrs. X ongoing series by Kelly Thompson and Oscar Bazaldua. Where both Piotr and Kitty go from here is up in there air, but the cover of X-Men Gold #31 suggests that there may be more heartache and sadness before the series ends later this year.

So much of X-Men Gold as a series has been about Kitty Pryde returning to the X-Men from her time on the Guardians of the Galaxy and going from the youngest member of the team to its new leader. Her arc over the course of the series’ two years has provided a certain level of character growth for one of the few superhero characters who does grow and change as time goes by, but that does open up the question of what's next for her.

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Missed Opportunities

In the midst of all this is Illyana, who blames herself for planting the seed of doubt in Kitty’s head. Kitty and Illyana have been friends for decades, going back to when they both in the early-teens rooming together at the Xavier School. It was heavily implied that there were feelings of more than friendship that the two young girls couldn’t quite process and the perils of continuity would force them apart for decades, with subsequent writers following Chris Claremont either unwilling or unable to follow up on the chemistry between them.

While some may disagree with the interpretation, Chris Claremont was far from subtle when it came to the queer subtext in his work. Kitty was the only person with a strong enough connection to Illyana that she was able to wield the Soulsword, and they’d spend their nights having “tickle fights” that would get so intense they’d accidentally phase through the bed; years later, in the pages of Astonishing X-Men, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday would establish this as something that happens to Kitty when aroused.

Reading Illyana’s reluctant advice to Kitty on the rooftop, it seems as if she’s about to finally admit her feelings for her best friend, until the page turn takes the conversation in an entirely different direction.

The reveal of the events of X-Men Gold #30 in The New York Times saw Marc Guggenheim sounding not too enthused about the events of the comic he wrote, stating, “Part of writing other people’s characters in a shared universe are other ideas are going to end up supplanting yours. My job as a writer is to take those marching orders and write the best issue I can.” From the sound of things, X-Men Gold #30 goes in a different direction to that which its writer had intended, and it’s possible that Illyana’s feelings for Kitty were one of the changes dictated by Marvel editorial.

It still could turn out that Illyana had planned to tell Kitty of her true feelings for her, only for her to panic at the last moment and come up with a different excuse. In the aftermath of the cancelled wedding, she’s seen blaming herself for coming between her best friend and her brother, which is a difficult situation for anyone to find themselves in. X-Men Gold was announced as ending with September’s issues, so if Guggenheim does have plans to explore the queer subtext between Kitty and Illyana established by Chris Claremont, he only has a few more months left to do it.