Well, this is a new one. Marvel's VisionQuest has done something I hadn't seen since the Byrd Theatre changed hands: split the anti-woke commentariat clean down the middle, so they're arguing with each other instead of with the usual suspects. The fuss is over a scene in which Ultron, the genocidal tin can himself, kisses Jocasta. Fandom Pulse has the full rundown, and it's worth your time if only to watch people who agreed yesterday discover they can't stand each other today.

One camp says the kiss is degenerate nonsense, another wave of Marvel editorial sneaking romance where it doesn't belong. The other camp, and this is where I start squinting, keeps repeating the same four words like a rosary: "it's in the comics." Ultron and Jocasta, they remind us, have an actual history on the page going back decades. Ultron built Jocasta himself, as a bride, which is already the plot of a Tennessee Williams play performed entirely by appliances, but there it is, in print, canon.

And I'm sorry, but "it's in the comics" has never been a defense of anything. It's a citation, and a lazy one. Plenty of dreadful things are in the comics. The Clone Saga is in the comics. That stretch in the '90s when every costume grew shoulder pads and pouches is in the comics. Being faithful to source material is a virtue only when the source material deserved the faith, and the people hiding behind canon know it, because they've spent three years correctly mocking the studios for faithfully adapting bad ideas.

The honest question, the one neither camp wants to ask, is whether the scene is any good. Does it tell us something about these characters, or is it a marketing department's idea of a water-cooler moment, engineered to make you tweet? I haven't seen the episode, so I'll hold my verdict, but I'll say this much: a kiss between two robots is not automatically woke, and it doesn't get a pass just because somebody drew something adjacent in a comic decades ago. Both sides are reaching for shortcuts instead of watching the thing.

What I keep coming back to is this. For years we demanded that writers respect the source material, and the studios heard us and started using the source material as a shield. You can't complain, they say, it's canon. We built that wall for them, brick by brick, every time we graded a remake against the original. The lesson they took was "cite properly," never "write well."

A kiss between Ultron and Jocasta might be perfectly good television. I'll watch it and tell you. But if the best thing anyone can say about a scene is that it technically appeared in a comic book decades ago, that's not an argument. That's a footnote wearing a trench coat.