New Warriors (2020 Reboot)

About

New Warriors refers to superhero comic series published by Marvel. In March 2020, a reboot of the series was announced by Marvel, with the introduction of modern culture-influenced characters named Snowflake, Safespace and Screentime being discussed and joked about on social media.

History

On March 17th, 2020, Marvel Entertainment^[1] announced the reboot of their New Warriors comic series co-created by writer Daniel Kibblesmith and artist Luciano Vecchio. The reboot introduces teenage superhero characters Trailblazer, Screentime, B-Negative and twins Safespace and Snowflake (shown below), who would be mentored by the original New Warriors team (Firestar, Rage, Speedball, Namorita and Silhouette). The new cast of characters has been heavily inspired by modern culture. For example, character Screentime is described as "A Meme-Obsessed super teen whose brain became connected to the internet after becoming exposed to his grandfather’s 'experimental internet gas.'" Psychic twin characters Snowflake and Safespace take their names from respective internet terms that are often used in a derogatory fashion.

A YouTube^[2] trailer for the series accumulated over 52,000 views in one day. A partial reupload of the video on Twitter^[3] received over 240,000 views in the same period.

Reception

Following the announcement, the new characters introduced in the series became a subject of discussions and jokes on Twitter. For example, on March 17th, 2020, Twitter^[3] user @LunarArchivist posted a clip from the trailer in which writer Daniel Kibblesmith presented twin duo Snowflake and Safespace received over 500 retweets and 2,300 likes, with the video accumulating over 240,000 views in one day (shown below).

Oh good lord, those crazy woke bastards at Marvel Comics actually went and did it. They've created an incarnation of #TheNewWarriors with two new characters whose names are LITERALLY Snowflake and Safespace (and one of whom is non-binary). 🤣 #ComicsGate #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/XnreP0NRlF

— Lunar Archivist (@LunarArchivist) March 17, 2020

In multiple posts, users expressed dissatisfaction with a non-binary character being given the name "Snowflake." For example, a March 17th, 2020, tweet^[4] by user @LilithLovett received over 1,000 retweets and 6,600 likes in one day (shown below, left). A March 18th tweet^[5] by user @PedanticRomantic garnered over 200 retweets and 1,000 likes in the same period (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References