Previous Post Quote: If memory serves she was there at the end when Thanos was subdued by the Guardians. So she's still around, I just think Bendis didn't want to use her in his new Guardians comic. Or Bendis was told specifically who to put in the comic due to the Guardians movie. I expect Bendis just didn't want to use Moondragon in GOTG. During AvX, the Avengers were at a tactical disadvantage due to the X-Men having lots of telepaths, and rather than having them call in Moondragon, Bendis retconned in a prior Moondragon/Hawkeye hookup and had Clint say he didn't want the team to use her due to awkwardness. That's going to a lot of trouble to not use Moondragon. I guess maybe he was contriving the situation for plot reasons. I only read a preview of that issue, which included the scene in question, so I don't know where the story went from there. If I were going to have an Avenger insist that Moondragon not be involved, it would be Thor.

You know, it's kind of irritating that the "we hooked up" retcon has become a default move to instantly create character connections without having to do something radical like actually show them interacting with each other; and in the case of Moondragon, it doesn't even make sense. Her shtick in the Avengers was that she imagines she's a god who has little in common with anyone short of other gods. Hawkeye's pretty much the last person she'd sleep with.

It's hard not to notice that this is almost always done in ways that play to male characters' reputations and shove aside female characters. It's not as if the hookup was used to tell a story about Moondragon, but rather to exclude her from a story. Similarly, we've gotten loads of scenes about superheroines talking about Tony Stark and Matt Murdock, which is great way to turn a conversation between a bunch of female characters into a conversation about how studly a male character is.

Really, it's almost always the opposite of good characterization to suddenly bring in an old hookup as a plot device. When She-Hulk slept with the Juggernaut, as "funny" as a lot of fans found that -- me included, for a while -- in retrospect most of its effect is that it makes Shulkie look like she's not even vaguely serious about her legal career what with "sleeping with a client" being a disbarment offense and all, which in turn kind of diminishes one of the character's more distinctive elements. (Compare Matt Murdock, whose ethical problems around his legal work is never used as a punchline but rather as a source of intense drama.)

The previous nadir was the retroactive reveal of the Sentry-Rogue relationship, which was creepy given that the writer apparently didn't realize a) that the Sentry had been established as in a committed relationship for pretty much all of his history by Bendis and b) that Rogue was extremely inexperienced with intimacy at all because of her powers and had huge hangups that a retconned sexual relationship sort of stomps all over to no good effect.

It's unfortunate that Bendis, one of the few writers who's made this work well, was involved in the clumsy Moondragon thing here (and the rape-y Scarlet Witch amnesia thing that Heinberg had to retcon later on.,..actually, what is it with Bendis making most of Hawkeye's plots about who he's sleeping with?). The whole thing works better if you read it as Hakweye making a creepy joke to get back at a character he never much liked rather than as a reference to an actual thing that happened.