Hey, let’s just reveal that Rocket Racer is asexual already. We have nothing to lose with this, and plenty to gain. Superhero comics are slowly getting better at representing people from all spectra of sexuality, but I’m not aware of any prominent Ace characters at Marvel. Let there be one, and let it be a character who has existed for nearly half a century.
Robert Farrell has been around since 1977, and even though he’s a smart handsome young man, no writer has ever thought it would be worth exploring a romantic storyline with him. There’s only even been one thing that came close:
There’s was one time when Bob was seen calling home to tell his Ma about a woman he’d just met. We’re obviously meant to assume he’s into his teammate, Nightshade. Except he wasn’t really calling his mother (who was in a coma at this point anyway), he was calling SHIELD to snitch on his fellow criminals, but pretending he was talking to his mother to obscure his motives. That fake conversation is the closest Bob has come to on-screen romance or sexual tension.
Obviously this is actually due to nobody caring much about Bob either way. My proposal here isn’t like when multiple creators tried to reveal that Iceman was gay and dropped hints about it before it was actually allowed to happen. No writer ever intended to make Bob asexual. I bet if he’d ever had a book in which to regularly appear, he’d have been given some love interest along the way. But that didn’t happen, and I say we ought to embrace it. We have here a character with decades of minor appearances who could be revealed to be asexual without it contradicting a damned thing and thus give an aspect to him that may make it easier to use him in appearances that are less minor, while giving representation to a group that could use it.
It seems like a good idea to me.