Details About Ironheart’s Drag Queen Character Emerge
Marvel is trying to ensure that nobody watches Ironheart, even beyond making an Ironheart series. We’ve known for about three years that there would be a drag queen character on the upcoming Disney+ series starring Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams (the successor to Iron Man, except she isn’t, except she is) and that this character would be played by Shea Couleé, a real-life drag queen based in Chicago who was a finalist on one of those RuPaul drag shows that keep popping up on my Roku home screen. But we didn’t know much about who this character would be; one guess at the time was Darkveil, a character from the comics inspired by Couleé and several other drag queens. Now, an article in Entertainment Weekly (who broke the original story in 2022) has more details from Couleé:
“I help a group of urban Robin Hoods to take away from the privileged and help give back to the community… I’m there to help out on all the missions that go down, trying to shift this power dynamic in this version of Chicago we see in the show… I’m more of the… I’ll drive the getaway car, hang out in the van on my cute little laptop with my fierce nails and help you hack these mainframes… From my understanding, this version of Slug they’re presenting is someone who’s being referred to as a code name… They’ve kind of left drag. They are a drag queen, but it’s kind of a past life… You see them in drag, but it’s kind of in the context of flashbacks before where they are now, because they’re trying to be on the low-low!”
The character, whose name is Slug, is a they/them; writing about this is going to be a lot of fun. So is watching it, of course, because it sounds like Slug is going to be around for multiple episodes. I’d ask what the hell Marvel and Disney were thinking, but it would be useless; we all know what they were thinking, and it wasn’t profits, or viewership, or giving the audience something they wanted to see. (Again, we can glean this from the fact that they made an Ironheart show to begin with.) This is a purely ideological move, an attempt to push the farthest reaches of adult sexuality into what should be a family show, at least to an extent – and easily to the extent of not featuring drag queens. It’s also another get-out-of-jail-free card for Marvel and Disney, an assurance that Ironheart will receive glowing reviews so its inevitable failure can be blamed on racism, dragophobia, review-bombing, and whatever other nonsense they concoct. But that’s almost beside the point; Ironheart was made in 2022, with reshoots happening in 2024, when Disney and the rest were under the impression they had a stranglehold on the culture and would permit no shifts. Since then, they were shocked to learn that this was never the case and have been scrambling to make people think they were no longer pushing this kind of thing in their entertainment. So, why start promoting Ironheart with the drag queen character? I understand they probably can’t cut the character, but I’d think they would want to keep a lid on this until the show airs. I’m glad more people will know what they (and, more importantly, their kids) will be getting into if they watch Ironheart, but from Disney’s perspective, it’s baffling.
‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ icon Shea Couleé reveals details about her secret ‘Ironheart’ character with a mysterious past: A ‘fierce hacker’ bringing drag looks to the MCU. https://t.co/wB8F57boq4
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) June 16, 2025
Anyway, for what it’s worth, what about the character? According to Couleé, Slug is a computer hacker, getaway driver, and thief who steals from “privileged” people and gives it to “the community” in another example of how despicably warped the MCU’s morality has become. This character, like the show itself, sounds excruciating, a lecture on race, class, and wealth disguised as a person, someone any normal viewer will want to see get rounded up by a superhero but who will be portrayed as a good guy. Marvel has done this almost uniformly in its recent movies and shows, from Monica Rambeau telling Scarlet Witch her victims were ungrateful for not thanking her for their eventual freedom to Daredevil agreeing that people should be allowed to rob stores if they want dessert to the TVA still, even in Deadpool & Wolverine, being portrayed as a force for good when they’re fascistic monsters. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that nobody wants this, and they won’t watch it, especially if Daredevil: Born Again couldn’t even get people to give it a chance. But, again, at least people know what they’re getting into; then again, just seeing the Marvel brand tells them that now.
Let us know what you think of Ironheart’s drag queen character in the comments!
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Comments (2)
Yeah, that’s exactly what Berlanti does: get people hooked, then drop the social justice hammer, and suddenly everything is about race and half the cast is gay. When Supergirl had her and Superman outright repeating Hilary Clinton campaign slogans, I got pissed — of course, after the election, I tuned back in and laughed my ass off. But you can see it in the MCU as well; the reason that held on as long as it did was because of Ike Perlmutter, but when he was forced out and Feige was handed complete control, there was no one to keep him in check anymore. It’s actually a lot like what happened in Hollywood as a whole, according to some people. In the old days, the studio heads were business-minded and conservative, or at least not completely whacked-out liberals, so they kept the wackier filmmakers in check and forced them to make art that had mass appeal rather than propaganda; there were still political themes in movies, but they were smarter, subtler, and often more subtextual, and always rooted in character. Then, the old guard died off or retired, the activists took over, and now, the lunatics are running the asylum, and you get, for example, drag queens in superhero shows.
They are the privileged though and always have been by expenditure. This is another CW situation. This is Berlanti all over again. I liked the Flash Arrowverse for a season or two, and then, everything was gay. People like Michelle Obama, Joy Reid, Van Jones, Rage Against the Machine, they all went to Ivy League schools. Did you? I did not. Also, the cities and urban areas spend more per capita, that is, more per avg student than in suburns or rural areas, so they already get the real privilege. This is the kind of thing that ruined the Big 2. In comics, I have no interest in Marvel anymore. Only Pepe Larraz I like, but the rest is bad art, and horrible writing and the gay stuff made me drop the company a long time ago.