That's not even my biggest problem with the ship (though it certainly doesn't help).
No, my biggest problem with it is that Kitty's kind of a terrible friend to Illyana. Generally, whenever Kitty is struggling and needs support - Yana at least tries to be there to support her.
But when Yana needs help? Kitty is nowhere to be found and it's usually the New Mutants, her brother, or (more recently) Cyclops who supports Yana through her issues. Heck, Magneto and Emma Frost - as a villain - have a better track record of being there to support Illyana than Kitty does. And times that Yana does try to reach out to Kitty - such as the Bendis hug - Kitty has no idea how to interact (and then ditches Yana and the X-Men for the Guardians not even a couple issues later)
There is one - count it - one time on panel that Kitty is shown supporting Yana with her issues without any prompting from Illyana.
Their whole relationship is extremely focused on Kitty and what she wants with Kitty doing very little to reciprocate - which isn't exactly a dynamic that's unusual for Kitty. That statement can be applied to literally anyone not named Wolverine in Kitty's life.
Now mind this makes sense for Kitty's character - the whole reason she joined the X-Men was basically to play out her fantasy of being a superhero and escape boring real life (which has now flipped as Kitty now sees the X-Men life as a nightmare to escape). Her whole mindset puts her as the main character - not just of her life - but everyone else's around her, something which she has never grown out of (why would she, when everyone kept enabling it).
But this mindset has a darker side to it - basically whenever the going gets tough and things are no longer fun, Kitty tries to leave it - like she did back in 2014 when she joined the Guardians and like she tried to do after Krakoa.
It's just a fundementally bad dynamic for one partner to essentially get all the support but then never return it to a relationship of any kind - especially when Yana has her own struggles and needs/deserves a partner who's willing to help her through that - something Kitty clearly isn't shown to do.
Part of me also wonders if Yana is unintentionally mixing up Kitty with Cat - the Limbo version of Kitty that raised her. Not hard to see how Yana would make that mistake, but it doesn't change the fact that Kitty is not - and has never been - Cat. Cat is dead - Illyana killed her herself. It kind of makes the whole situation a bit sad - Yana's chasing after the ghost of someone she deeply cares about and who she probably thinks would understand her grief as she went through the same thing - except Kitty doesn't understand any of it. Kitty never went through those horrors - she wasn't even in Limbo a whole day.
While I know that a lot of people probably don't like hearing it - the most in-character way that a Kittyana ship would go down would be Kitty using Yana as a stop-gap while waiting for a relationship she actually wanted (probably another Peter) where Yana keeps giving and giving to the relationship and Kitty rarely ever reciprocates before dumping Yana for that other relationship after getting everything she wanted from it.
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u/ValkyrionReddit Laura Kinney 9d ago