Carol Danvers has gone down a smash with the MCU fandom since she was introduced in last year’s Captain Marvel. Specifically, she’s become something of an LGBT icon, with it largely agreed that the heroine should come out as gay in Captain Marvel 2. Marvel filmmakers and execs have touched on this topic before, of course, but we’ve had no conclusive proof that it’ll actually happen yet.
A new rumor, however, claims that Carol will develop a same-sex relationship in the upcoming sequel, with a character who will no doubt be of key importance to the franchise going forward. But before we dive into this, we should point out that this info comes our way via 4Chan, whose leaked information is famously unreliable. Still, the site can sometimes turn up genuine intel and has done so many times in the past.
According to this recent leak, Carol will encounter a female version of Nova in CM2 – Beth Rider, an original character apparently created for the MCU and the daughter of comic book hero Richard Rider. The pair would start out as enemies, but they’d embark on a romance across the course of the film and on the superhero side of things, they’d have to team-up to defeat Beth’s evil uncle, Talonar.
There’s a lot to take in here, with the idea of Marvel gender-flipping Nova and then being so bold as to make Carol gay perhaps generating some suspicion. However, they did already make Mar-Vell, the original Captain Marvel, a woman in the first movie. And we’ll get a gay male lead in The Eternals in November, so the studio is clearly trying to push towards better representation in that area.
Besides, at this point, it would be pretty tone-deaf of Marvel to ignore the calls to give Carol a girlfriend in Captain Marvel 2, and sources close to WGTC have indicated in the past that this seems to be the plan, but whether this rumor speaks the truth or not, we’ll have to wait and see.