Noelle - Messy Theorizing

Hiya!

So I promised something messy this week, and messy I shall provide...Messy Marvel, that is.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s alright, don’t feel bad.  I know we just got a lot of new readers recently, so here is a quick description:  when I say Messy Marvel, I’m referring to a book series that I wrote, a.k.a. RMS.  (In case you were wondering, RMS just means Random Marvel-based Story)  That’s what I originally called it and it sorta just stuck)  I have a tendency to shamelessly advertise, so if you don’t want to read it, that’s cool, but if you do, I think you’re pretty dang cool and let me know in the comments.  If you haven’t decided, well, here’s a brief description:

A group of teenaged superheroes have a new and very different kind of hero added to their ranks.  Follow this mysterious girl from age fourteen onward as she faces challenges with her team - but who among them is really trustworthy?  And who is hiding deadly secrets?

(I wrote this blog post in a notebook at like, midnight, and now that I’m reading over this, that description was...incredibly cheesy.  I swear this isn’t a lame Y.A. novel)

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Marvel fan or not, because most characters are either original, or slightly bent to fit the story anyway, because, well, it is a fan fiction.  A reeeeally long fic, actually reaching three whole books, which leads me (finally) to the subject of today’s post!

(Also, from here on out is spoilers, so go away, people who haven’t read RMS.  But like, in a nice way.  You’re cool, just don’t mess up the books for yourself)

So as I’ve been writing book three ( which is not complete as of yet, though is definitely approaching done) some of my more attentive readers brought up a mystery...and since I’ve been watching lots of Game Theory recently, why not do a...Book Theory?

(yes, I’m going to rip of GT.  If you’re one of their nearly 8 million subscribers well...at least I’m crediting them?  I dunno.)

(Also note:  THIS IS NOT CANON TO THE MM UNIVERSE.  We’re pretending that I am not the author)

Okay so the mystery brought to my attention is this:  is Jess related to Clint Barton?

It’s definitely hinted at: in Warriors, Jess identifies him as her mentor, and in Survivors, not only does she go as Jessica Hart Barton, but she has an official I.D. card that says that she is, indeed, related to him.

This is pretty ignored, however, because Jess is already infamous for using multiple aliases, ranging from Katy Madorn to Jessie Stark.  Plus, in the big reveal in book two, we learn not one, but both of Jess’s parents, and we see family pictures with both parents and all six children.  That seems pretty straight forward, and glaringly obvious.

(I’m condensing a lot of info and trying to avoid spoiling everything at the same time.  It ain’t easy)

And then, in the last installment of the series, the Betrayers, we get confirmation of Jess’s parenthood when we literally meet Charles Lake - or did we?

You see, despite the fact that both Charles and Jess confirm their direct blood line, two things don’t match up:  Charles utter hatred of Jess, and the fact that BOTH Jess and Clea were memory wiped at age four.

Let’s start with the first part.  Yes, Charles hates people and is generally evil, we don’t really what cracked him.  All we know for certain is that his genetics experiments were banned and Maria died, and then he vanished, later emerging as Lake 2.0.  Wait, no, sorry, Izen (this will all be important later, I promised)

If you’re sitting there going ‘uuuuuh, I don’t remember anything about that’, well, here’s the screenshots.  There was a lot of death and feels going on about that time, so I could see why you probably missed these small details about the timeline:

Alright, back on subject.  True, Charles is generally evil, but he seems to be fairly nice to his children, even promising Clea an heir hood and putting Harmon in positions of power with the code name Inferno.  He never bothers Astra and Mirage throughout the entire series, only attacking Jess (and Mozart.  Heh heh.)

Jess, however, we see tortured, abused, abandoned, subjected to brutal experiments, and generally treated terribly.  Specifically her powers were stripped from her back and her memories of childhood, and her twin sister, totally erased.

But...

Why?

What makes Jess so different?  What makes Clea so special that she’s the one that accompanies Charles Lake when he vanishes?  What could be lurking in their past that needed to be erased from both Jess and Clea’s mind - Clea, mind you, who worked for years under the code name of Shadow and was always loyal to her father?  It doesn’t make sense...

Unless...

He’s NOT Clea and Jess’s father.

Yes, you heard me right.  Charles Lake is not Jess’s father.  So who is?

Aaaaaand enter Clint Barton.  Since Barton’s age in this book is indefinite, I had to check all possibilities, meaning...ugh.  Research.

Luckily for our theory, I’m a huge Marvel nerd and own not one, but two encyclopedias with lots of interesting pieces of information that’ll come in handy to support this theory.  I’ll be quoting this one throughout the rest of this post:

So first off, I wondered if Clint was possibly a (much) older brother, which was easy to answer - no.

I found out almost immediately that “Clint Barton lost his parents in a car crash at an early age.”  (emphasis added).  While we don’t know Hawkeye’s age in RMS, it’s pretty obvious that he’s significantly older than Jess.  Clearly, they’re not siblings.

The next option that came to mind was uncle, and I don’t really have proof against this.  Clint does have a “long-assumed-dead brother, Barney”, who could potentially be Jess’s father.  However, Barney is a redhead, reducing the genetic chance of him producing blonde twins, and he’s such an obscure character that its difficult to know anything for certain.  And since we’re trying to prove something as really true, we can safely say no, Clint is not Jess’s uncle.

Which leads to the only other direct blood line option: father.

Let’s do a quick run down for genetics.  The encyclopedia has Hawkeye listed as

• Blond
• Blue eyed
• 6 ft 3 in
• Totally human (no powers, not even a super human serum)

Jess, as described in the books and by the author (haha), is

• Blonde
• Blue eyed
• 5 ft 2 in
• Partially human (she was enhanced by Charles’ experiments)

Genetics are complicated, and would take up a ton of space on this blog post, so we’ll skip over it.  Let’s just say that genetically speaking, so far, so good.

(Side note: We can't list 'good at archery' as a genetic trait, in case you were wondering. Yes, both Jess and Hawkeye are excellent marksmen, but that's through years of practice, not through genes.)

Now, unless Barton suddenly becomes Zeus and spawns an Athena-Jess from his forehead, we’re still missing a rather important bit of info: a mother.  Fortunately, we have a wide variety of options - Hawkeye, apparently, has had a short string of lovers - Black Widow, Mockingbird, Spiderwoman, Scarlet Witch, and Wasp.  While in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), he’s married to a brunette with a couple kids, we’re going by the comics here. Because....reasons.

I’m going to focus on Mockingbird, a.k.a. Bobbi Morse, as the two were married for a short period of time.  An agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Morse is

• Blonde
• Blue-eyed
• 5 ft 9 in
• Partially human, with a limited amount of Steve Rogers-esque super human serum.

While according to the comics, she never had children and even died in battle, this is a fan fic we’re talking about, so eh.

(also, as I was researching, I found out that Bobbi Morse was once a Skrull imposter.  Now that would have been an interesting theory)

Alright, so we have a pairing that’s actually canon to the Marvel universe, that’d likely produce a blonde, blue-eyed child with mild superhuman strength.  So why doesn’t this child, or children, show up in the comics?

Because they were put up for adoption.

I can see you rolling your eyes, but we can actually put together a timeline from the bits of information we have now.

Two active crime fighters, having broken off a “whirlwind romance”, find out they’re pregnant with twins.  Not wanting the children to be put in danger, they’re put in an orphanage, leaving Hawkeye to keep a close eye on them...from a distance.  Now everybody’s favorite sociopath comes along, looking for a good test subject.  He already has a son and daughter, but his wife objects to any cruel experiments on them, so their powers were likely given later or in secret (and are much milder than any later experiments)  So now he’s on a search for new lab rats and comes across four year old twins, but only one has inherited superhuman traits from their parents.

Adopting them, he soon gives them powers - one through genetic manipulation, one by putting a serum creator in her lower spine.  These experiments are particularly horrible, but he doesn’t care - they aren’t his children, after all - and Maria, already pregnant with her third child is too weak to protest.

Soon, though, they start asking questions, and with his business already under criticism from the media, he wipes their memories, banking on their physical similarities to Maria and their adopted siblings to cover up the lie.  Maria starts objecting again, not liking the experiments being performed on her newborn child, Mirage.  She slowly weakens, and soon after Mozart’s birth, she dies, wasted away.

This allows Charles Lake to perform his last experiments and give Mozart his powers, before packing up shop.  While still keeping a close eye on his other children, he takes Harmon and his adopted, superhuman daughter Clea.

Jess and her adopted younger siblings are now stranded, and she has no memory of Clea or her time in the orphanage.  Hawkeye loses track of them until the Loki Invasion, where she reveals herself as the Stone Dragon.

He immediately takes her under his wing as her mentor, and convinces his close partner Black Widow to do the same.  He provides an alternate I.D. as his daughter - her true ID - but never reveals himself as his father.

‘But Noelle!  In book three-’ you start to complain.

I know, I know.  The parts in book three that started this whole mystery in the first place, and led the readers to believe that some Barton/Jess relationship was canon.  Here we see:

And then again:

But we can see here the key.  Jess calls him her Uncle Clint, and then again,

She considers him adopted family, just like the rest of the Avengers.  They are all Uncles and Aunts to her.  And we KNOW that Clint has never identified her as his daughter, because of a quote from earlier in the book, where Jess is having a dramatic internal monologue as an emo teenager, right from chapter one of book three:

The quotes that ‘started it all’ aren’t actually the quotes that point to Jess being related to Clint, though it did get readers asking the right questions.  So the answer to the question, “Are they related?”

Is yes.  But it’s more complicated than just a father-daughter relationship, and it explains so many mysteries about the timeline of the MM universe, including why Clea was the one taken, and why the experiments on Jess were so much more brutal and cruel than the ones on her siblings.  So...yeah.  Learn something today?  Probably not anything useful, but you certainly learned about the possible relationships between lots of random fictional characters.  Congrats.  Tell me what you think in the comments below, and I hope you have a wonderful week!  :)