Ranting To Rant: Superfluous Characters

This is an observation I'm just writing down to get out of my head. Don't feel you have to read it.

There are times when I have problems with new characters being created for a story, because it makes established characters redundant and put in the sideline, despite how much investment had been put into said characters by the previous writing team.

This happens a lot in comics.

And even in toys.

Many examples:

In Masters of the Universe, there is a hero character named Extendar, who is able to extend all of their body to make themselves longer and far reaching: neck, arms, legs, torso... all of their body extends.

This specifically sidelines the existing hero Meck-a-Neck, whose only power is his extending neck.

And lo, there comes a photo, as it to prove my point!

Gambit -- from the X-Men comics -- is incredibly guilty of this. He's a mutant who comes from a clan of thieves. Um... guess what? The X-Men have Storm! Ororo was trained as a thief on the streets of Cairo since she was 5 years old, following the death of her parents. She was only 11 or 12 when she was rescued from her street thief life from Ahmal Farouk at the hands (well, mind) of Charles Xavier. But she maintained those skills well into her adult life.

Gambit's introduction into the comic made Ororo's skills and background superfluous from that point on, because he was seen as being able to do everything Storm could do (when it came to thievery skills), but better!

Look, in the first appearance of Gambit, he's even on the cover carrying Storm, like she's fucking helpless!

Fuck you, Gambit, you fucking narcissist. I'm glad they killed you off in XMen97! I did not cry during that scene. Rogue is better off without your manipulating ass. And don't scream "SPOILERS!" at me for Gambit's death! Fuck Gambit and fuck all the enablers who like him!

I really like ribbons and streamers, okay?!

No... no it's not okay. Because artists have to draw that shitty cape every time he shows up in costume.

And then there is the villain that is Mister Sinister.

First of all, fuck you and your fucking name, Sinister! Okay, now that that's out of my system, lets get to why he's a tool.

Mister Sinister shows up as a new villain in XFactor, a geneticist who is obsessed with mutants and has used mutant DNA to support himself and make himself immortal since the 1800s!

Mister Sinister is a double-whammy of a character, as he knocks out TWO existing Marvel continuity villains who are supposed to have done it better:

Arnim Zola and Donald Pierce.

Arnim Zola is supposed to canonically be the inventor of superhuman genetic engineering during the days of WW2, when the first experiments into the science was being done. He is unscrupulous and uses his knowledge to make himself immortal by projecting his mind into a new template body each time he is "killed."

But we can't have that! Mister Sinister has been doing evil, unscrupulous genetic engineering for even longer!

Then we have another established villain: Donald Pierce, aka the White Bishop of the Hellfire Club Inner Circle. He is a cyborg who is distrustful of mutants, and realizes that mutants may even take over humanity with their superhuman powers. As such, he uses cybernetics as a means to even the playing field. He even augmented the hellfire Club soldiers as cyborgs after their original altercation with Wolverine in the sewers under the Hellfire Club Building.

But no! Again, Sinister has to do it better! When it comes time to eliminate the Morlocks, who gets the jobs? The Marauders created by Sinister! This is a team of cyborgs who hunt down mutants to cull their population. That sounds like something Donald Pierce would want to do and support. But no... the Marauders were created by and work for Mister Sinister. Since when does a geneticist know how to do advanced robotics, bionics, and cybernetics. Those fields are completely different from each other!