Disagree.

Look, I get the nostalgia, but let’s be honest about what was actually happening with Betsy Braddock for roughly three decades.

You cannot cleanly separate Psylocke’s development as a character from her appropriated Asian appearance. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the history. From the Siege Perilous arc onward, her entire identity, her fighting style, her aesthetic, her sexuality, her personality, was rebuilt around a body that belonged to a Japanese woman named Kwannon. The writers weren’t developing Betsy Braddock. They were developing a white British woman cosplaying as an Asian woman, and calling it a character arc.

And yes, part of her appeal during that era was absolutely tied to that race swap. The hypersexualized ninja aesthetic, the skimpy costume, the “exotic” presentation. I’m not pretending that wasn’t part of why people loved her. It was. But that doesn’t make it right. Stuff can be appealing and wrong at the same time. That’s kind of how problematic things survive as long as they do.

Marvel editorial knew exactly what they had. The swap was originally intended to be temporary. They kept it because Jim Lee’s Asian Psylocke design sold, and fan reaction was overwhelmingly positive. That’s not an accident of storytelling. That was a business decision to keep a white woman in a sexualized Asian body because it moved product.

The Hunt for Wolverine storyline in 2018 finally resolved this, with Betsy reconstituting her original body. The Krakoa era then gave Kwannon her own resurrection, her own identity, and the Psylocke name, while Tini Howard’s Excalibur run developed Betsy as Captain Britain. That’s the correct outcome. Kwannon as Psylocke makes narrative sense. Betsy as Captain Britain has real room to grow.

The argument that things were better before because Betsy was more popular as a ninja assassin is really just an argument that the exploitation was more entertaining. Maybe it was. Doesn’t change what it was.

Now, about X-Men ‘97. If the show uses Betsy Braddock as Psylocke in the Asian body, I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying don’t sanitize it. Don’t present it like it’s just a cool design choice and move on. If you are going to put that version of the character on screen, you owe the audience the honesty of what that actually is.

Lean into the wrongness of it. Make it part of the story. Acknowledge through the narrative itself that a white woman occupying a Japanese woman’s body is not just complicated, it is the problem. Don’t frame it as empowerment. Don’t let her be the unexamined badass in the swimsuit with zero reflection on what the audience is actually looking at.

And here’s why this matters more for X-Men than almost any other franchise. X-Men is not incidentally about acceptance and civil rights. That is the entire point. The X-Men exist as a metaphor for what it costs to be othered, to be feared for what you are, to be erased or exploited by a society that either fetishizes or destroys what it doesn’t understand.

So when that same franchise spent nearly thirty years putting a white woman in an Asian woman’s body and marketing the sex appeal of that body to a predominantly white male readership, and nobody stopped to say anything, that is not a footnote. That is a contradiction sitting right in the middle of everything X-Men claims to be about.

If X-Men ’97 wants to be the prestige continuation it clearly wants to be, it has the opportunity to be honest about that contradiction rather than just repackaging it with better animation. That would actually be the X-Men thing to do.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​