Marvel Comics' X-Men are famous for the impressive and creative offensive abilities of their members, and while the beloved hero Kate Pryde is more known for her defensive capabilities, her truly brutal offensive power is often overlooked by peers, enemies, and fans.
Kate Pryde, who went by the name Kitty Pryde prior to her Krakoan Age transformation into Captain Kate of the Marauders, has been a favorite member of the X-Men since her debut in 1980, serving as the youth's point-of-view character on the mutant team, creating a long-lasting legacy that has greatly influenced pop culture. Kate Pryde was also a major part of Fox's beloved X-Men franchise, played by Elliot Page in several films, where her powers were also shown to be mainly used for defense, espionage, and team support.
When Kate Pryde was first introduced she was a young mutant who had just manifested her ability, the power of intangibility which allowed her to phase through solid matter, and she quickly became a core part of Xavier's X-Men squad, utilizing her unique ability to help defend her comrades. Over the years - using many codenames such as Ariel, Sprite, and Shadowcat during her times on the X-Men and Excalibur - Kate's powers developed, with the powerful mutant realizing that her phasing causes all technological devices to malfunction which greatly increased her defensive capabilities, and discovering that her ability was so powerful that she was able to phase between the spaces of molecules which allowed her to walk on air or sink through solid ground. While Kate Pryde underwent intense martial arts training at the hands of Wolverine to take down the villain Ogun who had brainwashed her, her teammates and enemies still often viewed Pryde as a non-offensive player in a battle. However, the brutal events of the AXIS event caused this perspective to shift, after Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange accidentally unleashed a spell upon the world causing "World War Hate," which flipped the moral compass of many classic Marvel heroes and villains, in an attempted assault on Red Onslaught.
Kate Pryde Could Take Down All Your Favorites If She Wanted To
AXIS: Revolutions #3 depicted a side of Kate rarely seen before, with Pryde using her considerable phasing powers to go on the attack, proving that when she has the right mindset she could take down pretty much any enemy or obstacle thrown at her. Kate Pryde is shown robbing an incredibly secure bank with complete ease, efficiently using her phasing power to gain access to the bank's vault, and even combining her intangibility with her strategic mind to frame a civilian for murder by lining herself up with her intended target and allowing the civilian to shoot through her, killing a bank owner who had been funding anti-mutant legislation. The scene is incredibly effective at showing how terrifying Kate could be if she ever really let loose, making the reader easily imagine the kind of impact Pryde could have had on the mutant community if she had started as a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants instead of the X-Men. Of course, Kate Pryde has not always been a supporting member in battles, and especially since the dawn of Krakoa Captain Kate has upped her one-on-one brutality, showing how effective she is as a hand-to-hand fighter combined with her intangibility when she brutally took down Sebastian Shaw after he murdered her in cold blood.
One of the most famous moments in Kate Pryde's long history with the X-Men was when she used her intangibility to phase a massive bullet through the Earth saving the planet, perhaps the single greatest example of a defensive skill in Marvel history, but that does not take away from the fact that when utilized in the right way, Captain Kate Pryde's phasing can become a deadly, efficient, and secret offensive weapon against her many enemies.