Emma Frost, known in the workplace as the White Queen, is coming to Marvel Rivals in season 2, entitled Hellfire Gala, which is set to begin on April 11. Initial reaction to the new character seems largely positive, not so much because of her abilities (which we don't know much about yet), but because an inordinate number of Marvel Rivals players seem very eager to be crushed between her thighs.
Frost is a Vanguard—a tank, basically—with powerful telepathic powers and the ability to turn things into diamonds, which I suppose could be useful in the defensive context. Her most tank-like feature, though—at least going by the Reddit reaction—appears to be, well, those thighs. As one put it poetically, "Thick thighs save lives."
It goes on like that—the thirst is very real:
- "I felt my neck crack when I first saw her. Damn"
- "I genuinely can’t tell if i wanna play as her or if I want the enemy frost to crush me"
- "She got thick"
- "Would"
- "I’m just waiting for the Cosplays cause Lord the Thighs are gunna Thigh"
- "I feel like she can simply use her thighs to get the win without diamond form"
- "She using 2 tanks just to walk"
You get the idea. There's a bit of debate over whether Emma is muscular or just thick, but that seems mostly like semantics because everyone on both sides of the point is clearly happy.
There is some consternation about the character to be seen here and there, though. Emma is a blonde, blue-eyed bombshell, and Marvel Rivals already has two of them: The Invisible Woman and Dagger. With the tremendous diversity of characters to choose from in the Marvel universe, does Rivals really need another one at this early point? Why not, I don't know, Beta Ray Bill, or Omega Red, or Puck, or Jayna—who admittedly might not be terribly useful without Zan, but you get what I'm saying.
Brickhouse over-representation aside, some have expressed a more practical consideration. It actually came up a few months ago, when Sue Storm debuted: A Reddit thread that was locked after 24,000 upvotes (via The Gamer) worried that it would be hard to tell the difference between her and Dagger in the heat of battle.
Other threads posted well before today's new character reveal express similar concerns about the addition of Frost. "Unless she is in her diamond form the entire match I really don't need a third slim thick blonde white woman running around the map confusing the hell out of me on which one she is," redditor Sico4u wrote in one of them. "Does this one jump away and turn invisible? Does this one drop a healing orb and can blind me? Oh sorry nope this one turns into a mineral deposit and is absolutely unkillable."
That worry has come up again today, here and there amidst the thigh thirst. "Both Sue and Dagger are wearing blue and white and now we have a 3rd lmao," redditor IsaiahXOXOSally wrote. "At least she's a Vanguard so she will be bigger and easier to tell apart from the other two."
"I'm betting it'll still be super hard to tell who is who if all three are on the same team," Done25v2 replied.
That matters because when the action is hot and things are flying, you don't have a lot of time to decide what you want to do when you spot an enemy causing trouble in a distant corner of the map. And you can see why it's a concern: If you told me all three of these characters—Sue Storm, Dagger, and Emma Frost—were actually the same person, I'd probably believe you if I didn't know better:
Xavier Coelho-Kostolny, currently a character artist at Hidden Path Entertainment, posted an interesting essay on "character readability" a few years ago, and while the whole thing is a lot more complex than just "characters shouldn't look too much alike," that's a fairly solid grounding point: If you have multiple characters with similar silhouettes and color schemes, at some point it's going to become a headache. And with NetEase looking to crank up the rate at which it releases new characters in future seasons, the possibility of indistinct character design being a problem is ever more likely.
For now, though, Marvel Rivals players have other priorities—and NetEase has no doubt about what they are.
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