#magneto serving gay

[september-skeleton]

they really just let magneto serve SO much cunt. every film. and expected me to be normal about it??? absolutely not this is the best thing ive ever seen. x-men would b nothing without that sassy gay bitch.

#x-men #magneto #x men #forgot what a slay this whole series is #magneto stan all the way

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Mcu Stan's are some of the most ignorant and annoying people especially tony, Wanda and Peggy Stan's. I never understood how you could get mad at Jewish or romani people for having a problem with the way the mcu handles its characters. Countless Jewish people have pointed ot why peggy is problematic and why Wanda is to but people get so up in arms about it like a billion dollar company dosen't have the resources to research the characters they're writing.

Peggy as a character fustraits me so much because I know her problematic orgions in the mcu and so do the writers but they keep pushing her and it's starting to effect things outside the mcu.

‘Nonny, I couldn't agree more! 

They've already retconned the comics-Peggy to match MCU-Peggy/HA, to cover up that they adapted Cynthia-the-Nazi by another name.

(Sorry folks, a turd by any other name still stinks!) 

under a cut cuz you know I had to go off:

They've given this new Buff Liz Truss her own run in the comics, where she performs sudden leftwingism by- omg, guys -discovering Colonialism is bad?? Oh wow, so impressive, give her a biscuit!

And they've had her attacking, somehow beating, and victim-blaming comics-Bucky, saying it's 'insane' of him to question her motives.

(Just like She-Hulk lusting over Steve's ass, you can tell it's a nasty dig by male Disney execs at female fans; in this case at those who point out how rotten Peggy is. 

Ironically, it's super authoritarian, radfem and totally in-character of Peggy to violently attack anyone who dares to question her majesty, since that's the very first thing she ever did on screen!) 

Right before pissing away 80+ years of comics history, showing absolute devotion between Steve and Bucky, to turn comics Bucky into a full blown villain who attacks Steve (y'know, like she did?)

Cutting off comics Bucky's nose to spite MCU Bucky's face, cuz all they really want to do is further de-gay MCU Steve in order to bring his stalker Agent Brexit into the main MCU movies again, (because that's her only value! As an accessory to a man!), while they’re supposed to be raising up a black Cap they transparently Did Not Want. 🤮

.

And just as it was absolutely unforgivable to take Jewish-penned Antifa Steve and pair him off with a Nazi, (I can't help feeling the Indiana Jones movies might have been an influence, there?) 

It was also unforgivable to take Romani Jewish Wanda and turn her into a Nazi. 

Her joint Jewishness and Romani heritage were important, too, because they showed the intersectionality of Fascism’s victims, since comics-Magneto (Jewish) met her Romani mother while imprisoned in Auschwitz. 

(You could also count MCU Bucky under this whitewashing heading, too, since MCU Bucky is partly based on Jewish comics character Arnie Roth. Another Jew made into a villain to serve Disney's Fascist 'don't say gay' values! 

There’s even speculation that they’re going to give WhatIf Bucky Peggy’s shitty corrupt backstory in the next season, and shift the blame off her by having Bucky co-found SHIELDra instead of her. I wouldn’t put it past these whitewashing bastards...)

.

I can't fault the mere existence of Wanda's villain arc, since that is in the comics... 

Except for two things: 

1) it was transparently done too soon, just because a male creative wanted to be the one to have Cool Scarlet Witch Stuff in his movie.

(If there had been, say, a second season of WV, detailing her slow post-bereavement descent down a dark-mother path? That would've been more interesting and made MoM more organic, IMO.) 

2) The real problem, as someone on twitter I think pointed out, is that if you know about Wanda’s Jewish background in the comics... 

Well, the whole film is about an evil red-headed Jewish witch trying to kidnap and hurt a child for magic ritual purposes. 😬  

Which, if you know about the history of antisemitism, and that Wanda was originally Jewish, makes MoM ‘Blood Libel: the Movie.’ 

And it’s not like Disney would give a shit about the antisemitic vibes, if they knew. 

They’re about to undo all the good of the Captain Marvel movie by doing Secret Invasion, where evil lizard people are secretly infiltrating the earth (IYKYK). 

I saw one Jewish person on twitter pointing out: “Someone was arguing that the skrulls don't deserve their own story because they're evil infiltrators and... this is not comforting to me as a Jewish person, you know? antisemitic conspiracy theorists literally describe Jews as evil lizard people who infiltrate and disguise themselves...” 

Captain Marvel repositioned the Skrulls as innocent maligned refugees, but I guess Disney doesn’t give a fuck about standing by that. 

Mask off antisemitism for the Rat. 🤢

.

In terms of Wanda’s show, while WV was a great, well-made show, which I enjoyed, while she was an interesting character in it, and Olsen gave a great performance, what I didn't like were the conservative values. 

It reminded me of the anti- second wave feminism films of the 1980s, where any woman who has a career (read: power, like Wanda has) is shown basically being driven insane by it and secretly just wanting to be a tradwife all along, even to the point of threatening her man if he interferes with it. 

In Wanda, we have a woman who never mentioned wanting the white-picket-fence life before, suddenly being desperate to give up an icky career to be a stay-at-home-mom in the suburbs, just because of the kind of 'golden age' sitcoms Disney would love to be associated with.

And it's presented as a terrible tragedy that she doesn't get to keep this sheltered 'dream' 1950s nuclear-family life and the slaves sorry, ‘prisoners with jobs’ necessary to maintain it. 

The spirit of Kevin Feige’s pathetic self-insert, aka Endgame Skrull Steve, is alive and well.

(As usual, a black woman receives the brunt of the violence, and is then made to comfort Wanda about the 'sacrifice' she has made by giving her hex-slaves sorry, ‘prisoners with jobs', their freedom at the cost of her own comfort. 😯 Holy? SHIT??)

Wanda becoming a villain coincides exactly with her turning from white tradwifism and embracing her (career-related) power. 

As usual with Disney tho, they dun fucked up and accidentally made something you can also read as kinda queer? 

Like: a couple who can't have biological children of their own together (like queer couples)? Who don't get to have that white-picket-fence life? Getting run out of town for trying to live that fantasy anyway?

And then Wanda breaks bad because she's annoyed about that??

Yeah it's no wonder she has been embraced by the gays as a diva!

And, NGL, seeing her deliver some karmic justice to MAGA Carter was SO SWEET. 😩 

(It should've been Bucky tho...)

Tony and Peggy have a lot in common because, no matter what they do, it’s never their fault.

The resemblance to Elon Musk grows stronger every day. 

TERF joke, rape joke, the mistreatment of women in the early IM movies, (ditto the slut-shaming he and Pepper engage in), industrial espionage (buying the rights or outright stealing other people’s inventions and passing them off as their own), eulogising a real Nazi (Wernher von Braun) for doing what Stark Industries did, arguing in favour of Ultron (who operated out of a Hydra base) and Hydra’s Project Insight in EG... and then in Spiderman he just re-makes Project Insight anyway (re-named EDITH)! 

I thought he was supposed to have stopped being the Merchant of Death?

He calls himself a “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.” 

But a) he just finishes off designs his daddy stole off other people, 

b) the value of which created his inherited generational wealth (not impressive sorry bro, what else did he get? an emerald mine?) 

c) he obviously mis-characterises his interactions with women (stripper-pole air hostesses under his employ? female journalists get a scoop after sleeping with him? pepper made CEO after dating him but mysteriously immediately dumps him once she’s been empowered? saying ‘I want one’ and being reminded of lawsuits when he ogles Natasha at work? this is giving Weinstein), 

and d) what billionaires call ‘philanthropy’ is actually just using charities for tax write-offs, donating to their old alma maters, etc. 

Daddy was a basic bitch thief, who dealt in stolen vibranium, knew about TWS, co-founded SHIELDra, had a villain business partner, and was BFFs with a Nazi torturer of POWs, and the woman who- gawd -she just can’t stop working with Nazis, bless 'er! 

Tony was blowing up people in the Middle East for decades, making a bundle and very obviously enjoying himself (sipping on champagne while the missiles fly) and only stopped doing that, when- gasp -it affected him personally? 

(The villains of IM movies are the ones just: doing what Tony did.)

Despite claiming otherwise, he hung around with black market arms traffickers often enough for Ulysses Klaue to recognise one of his catchphrases and claim “Stark used to say that to me.” 

He helped design Project Insight and saw nothing wrong with it (we know he didn’t, because he kept arguing in favour of it / recreating it.)

Even after this, he lied and sneaked around behind the Avengers’ backs to hubristically tamper with alien tech in order to create Ultron, leading directly to the endangerment of the world and further deaths in Sokovia (in another universe, this almost destroyed the entire multiverse).

He co-signed Accords which violated human rights, not affecting him since he’s rich, just to shift future blame and responsibility off himself and make him look dateable to Pepper. He admitted he knew Bucky was a brainwashed “Manchurian Candidate” but tried to murder him (to spite Steve) anyway. 

He refused to call Steve back when Thanos was coming, just out of piqued pride (if you wanted to calculate the potential consequences of that, maybe: half of all life in the multiverse?) And when asked to help undo the Snap his ego helped create, he says he “won’t, even” because, hey, it doesn’t affect him personally so who gives a shit, right?? 

But like a true billionaire none of this ever has any consequences for him!

He only sees the inside of a jail when he’s visiting!

So what with his messianic nuclear-family ending you can see why Disney haven’t felt the need to sabotage his comics incarnation. MCU Tony is right on-message!

#tw antisemitism #long post #mcu critical #antitony #antipeggy #antisteggy #p*ggy meta #mcu meta #comics meta #steggy is hydra trash party #cynthia glass #meta #mcu #stucky #steve meta #bucky meta #stucky meta #steve rogers #bucky barnes #yeah so tl;dr: fuck kevin feige and fuck bob chapek #MAGA carter and howard the milkshake duck #but not you wanda ur an angel and we're all THRILLED you're here

[philcollinsenjoyer]

it's very funny (haha) to me that magneto had to have a wife and kid here to stamp down the allegations wrt him and charles but also they had to die immediately so he could join the homoerotic battle with charles. no dedication no commitment to the bit those characters genuinely served no purpose except as a get out of gay jail free card

#don't come at me with magneto needed a reason to be mad at humans we have all seen magneto does not need any more reasons to be mad at #humans he's fine on his own. tell me ONE use these characters had besides being like he's NOT GAY. one.

[ohnostalgia]

8 4 14 9 :D

8. 🔪 to your throat, Rob Liefeld or Greg Land?

this is NOT hard. I, 100 times out of 10, will pick the Rob over Greg Land. I think I may have slightly deluded myself into thinking that it's better than it is but I do genuinely really like a lot of Liefeld's stuff especially the earliest X-Force issues I think are really good. Feral and Stryfe are some of my favorite character designs ever. On the contrary every time I reread Uncanny X-Men (2016) I want to kill myself. In conclusion: greg land morph

4. Character you have no time for, for no good reason at all?

HM this one is actually hard. I'm gonna say..... hmmm... OH i know. I hate Firestar. I have no reasons why I just dislike her vibes and her energies I have read zero comics with her in them. Maybe one day I will open my mind but that day is not for a long time

14. One-on-one fight you'd love to read?

this is extremely random but I really want Captain America to fight Spiral. absolutely no reason I just think it would be cool

9. Pick a character, then pick their best costume and explain why.

magneto has had better COSTUMES (shout out to the trial of magneto costume and the og) but overall i don't think he will ever beat the magenta 3 piece suit serve i MEAN just look at it. you look at him and go oh yeah that man runs a school of weird gay children. its just so perfect and I think about it constantly.

#sorry this took so long I went to walmart to buy cocoa powder

[keepsmagnetoaway]

X-Men 63 (December 1969)

Roy Thomas/Neal Adams

It's the very end of the 1960s! It's nearly the end of this run(spoiler)! It's hopefully the end of the Antarctica stuff! It's...the return of Magneto!

Ka-Zar man have you considered shutting the fuck up.

I won't detain you with any more of Ka-Zar's plotline, but this splash page, to be fair, fucks. I'm slightly running out of things to say about Adams' art which I haven't already said but this issue once again has all the unbelieavable Marvel Mannerism of his.

Also on the subject of the art, I love this shout-out to, I imagine, one of Adams' major influences, worked in as a Beast insult to Magneto's little henchfrog (who I assume is going to turn out to be Toad in disgusise, but that's just a guess).

Anyway, this is a pretty disappointing issue, to be honest. Magneto is using a machine to turn the Savage Landers into mutants who will serve him, and unleashes his latest, a siren named Lorelei who hypnotises all the dudes.

But not Marvel Girl! That would be too gay! So she is able to defeat Magneto and he once again "dies" all too soon after his reappearance.

Anyway, at least at the end of this issue they leave the Savage Land. I hope they never go back. This is also - jumping ahead a bit to preview what happens - basically the end of this book as a coherent story: there are three more issues to go but the creators are scrambled for each of them (Adams only draws one more issue, and it's not the next one) and the stories don't form any kind of arc, and then the book is cancelled until its revival 5 years later. So yeah, this is pretty much the last complex X-Men story for a loooooong time, and it was mostly about Ka-Zar. Shame.

[scarlet--wiccan]

open letter to Marvel's X-Men office

To whom it may concern,

I'm a longtime reader of Marvel comics and a weekly buyer with subscriptions and pull lists at my local comic store. I'm also an American of Romani descent who has spent years researching and writing about the function of pop culture in the systemic racism that my people endure. Much could be said about the record of Romani characters in superhero comics, particularly the Scarlet Witch, but I'm writing today to raise concerns about the character's throughline in the current X-Men era, which has come to a head with her apparent murder in X-Factor #10, written by Leah Williams. First, however, I would like to address the racial and sexual violence visited upon the character Prodigy, as depicted by Williams, who is a white author, and the history of racist microagressions and the objectification that many readers have observed in Williams' past work. In X-Factor #10, Prodigy, a Black bisexual, is shown to have been sexually assaulted and murdered by a predator who specifically targets Black bi and gay men. Prodigy's assault and death transpired while he was dressed in a drag-inspired look, an arbitrary decision which served only to further sensationalize the homophobic violence. This plotline was abrupt and underdeveloped, and leaped without warning into imagery that many Black and LGBT readers found traumatizing. This was not an authentic or meaningful exploration of Black and queer experiences-- rather it was an exploitation and objectification of the violence done to Black and queer bodies. Coming from a white writer, this is wholly inappropriate. Leah Williams being bisexual herself does not excuse that. I am particularly disturbed by the implementation of pro-police messaging, via white character Aurora, after we have all spent the last year protesting police violence against Black lives. At worst, this is tone deaf, but I, and many other readers of color, found it to be egregiously offensive. Readers of color, particularly East Asian readers, have long been wary of Williams and her treatment of non-white characters. The repeated and disturbing objectification of East Asian women in her series X-Tremists struck a serious nerve, particularly with Williams' original character, Nezumi, who seemed redolent of racist WWII-era propaganda conflating Japanese people with rats. Her over-sexed and racially tokenized treatment of Akihiro in X-Factor has also put readers on edge, although many bit their tongue and endeavored to support her new book on account of its numerous LGBT characters and plotlines. Unfortunately, it seems as though that tentative faith was misplaced, and we must reiterate that LGBT representation does not outweigh violent racism. The Scarlet Witch is a complex character with an ever-changing history. The most formative and consistent element of her origin, however, is that she was born to a Romani mother, and raised by a migrant, working class Romani family who faced racial discrimination and violent hate crimes. For context, the Romani people are a South Asian diaspora who are racialized in European society, and have endured systemic oppression ever since our arrival in the West, including an attempted genocide during the Nazi regime. Although Wanda is no stranger to taking a dark turn, the Decimation plot stands out as a uniquely damaging and harmful case of character asassination. You can imagine how the identity politics and acts of violence which were projected onto the character are offensive given her personal history, and the real-life history that she represents. For years, the vitriol and anger that were directed towards Wanda within this narrative, boosted by blatantly ableist tropes, shaped the way that readers and writers alike perceived her. That negative perception encouraged audiences to espouse hateful sentiments about Wanda without forming clear thoughts about their racist implications, or making any effort to better their understanding of Romani people and our needs regarding popular culture. The current era of X-Men comics has revisited the Decimation several times, but I fear that

they have done nothing to counteract the harmful messaging that was attached to Wanda during that time, and have only doubled down on her troubling political position in the mutant world. I shouldn't have to explain this, but characterizing a Romani woman as an interloper, and a bogeyman figure that Krakoans invoke to engender nationalism, directly parallels the racist propaganda that is used to subjugate real-life Romani people throughout Europe. Year after year, Roma communities face forced eviction, deportation, and property laws designed to weed out migrant travellers, while our lives are often endangered by violent hate. Earlier this month, on 19 June, 2021, a Romani man in Teplice, Czech Republic, was murdered in an act of police brutality, and the Czech state has refused to launch an investigation or deliver any sort of justice on behalf of his family. We have spent the last two weeks protesting for Roma lives. To be honest, witnessing Roma death on-page, particularly in the heartbreaking scene where Wanda's own son discovers her body, triggered a lot of the distress and emotional trauma that I've been carrying since the Teplice incident. Of course, the timing of it couldn't be helped, but I fear that Williams will continue to exploit our trauma and our pain in her upcoming series, Trial of Magneto, which promises to revolve around Wanda's death and Magneto's reaction. Given Williams' history, and her choices in this most recent issue, I simply have no faith, only grave misgivings. Leah Williams is a white woman who continues to profit from the exploitation racial trauma and stereotyping, and Marvel cannot claim to be inclusive while enabling her behavior. As readers, we feel we must demand her removal from upcoming and future Marvel projects. We cannot in good conscience support and continue to give money to the X-Men franchise with such creators at the fore. In general, Marvel needs to take a good hard look at how it employs. This won't be a solution to the company's ingrained problems, but removing Leah Williams would be a constructive place to start.

[certain cues have been taken from other readers who have posted and shared their messages to the X-Men office. Please feel free to borrow and modify any aspect of this letter, barring, of course, the passages regarding my own identity. This message has been sent to [email protected]]

#leah williams #x-factor #david alleyne #prodigy #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch

[themutantages]

X-Men: Evolution's characters need to get out of the closet -- or the wardrobe, as this title suggests.

"The Toad, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is all about Kurt and Toad, two self-conscious characters who want to look different. In Kurt's case, it's because he wants to impress Amanda's parents, even though she doesn't care he's blue and doesn't think they would either. In Toad's case, he's trying to impress Wanda (#ScarletWitch), who doesn't like him no matter what he looks like (because she is gay).

Meanwhile, Magneto teams up with Mastermind to kidnap Wanda and erase all of her trauma in a scene that serves as a more dramatic counterpart to the light-hearted slapstick scenes in the rest of this episode.

X-Men Spotlight: Margali, Amanda Sefton's mother

Listen to the episode here!

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E-mail us your feedback at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter at TheMutantAges, MIDImyers and RyanPagella.

If you like what you hear, please consider supporting us via patreon.com/themutantages. Thanks!

#the mutant ages #podcast #x-men podcsat #x-men #x-men evolution #scarlet witch #magneto #nightcrawler #nostalgia cartoons #cartoons #quicksilver #marvel #marvel comics #comic books #comics #lgbtq #queer #gay

[scottsumrners]

worst costumes:

- selene (ma’am this is not a bdsm club)

- polaris (girl i am SO sorry)

- northstar (there is a LOT going on. none of it is good)

- iceman (you should have just stayed closeted at this point)

- dazzler (simultaneously going to a funeral and also a discotheque?)

- karma (genuinely i dont know what the fuck is going on)

- rachel (girl. i WILL avenge you someday)

- magik (bad. just bad)

- captain britain (HAVENT YOU DONE ENOUGH)

- cyclops (i WILL avenge you as well my love)

costumes that are just “ugh” or couldve been better:

- mastermind,  mister sinister, exodus, banshee (isn’t that literally just how they dress?)

- maddox (okay hal jordan)

- synch (aimed for somewhere between a priest and a pimp? maybe?)

- daken (girl. what?)

- nightcrawler (also literally just what he wears as roleplay)

- pixie (also going to a funeral, but possibly as the mistress, or maybe as the woman who murdered her husband?)

- mercury (did she just roll naked in paint like she is a young gay actor on an european indie softcore coming of age story? possibly an adaptation of skam?)

- mirage (genuinely just a terrible color scheme)

- warpath (the shoulder thing ruins it)

- magneto (you’re gay, we get it. are you doing a tapdacing routine?)

- jubilee (just wearing a dress? not even a sparkly dress? just a dead pink dress?)

- wolverine, kid omega, beast, sage, domino (are you guys gonna play poker all night in a corner? try to sell stocks?)

- professor x (i literally just hate him. i hate how he’s trying to match up with magneto. just die you creepy old man)

outfits that FUCK:

- sunspot (berto got it right. this IS a dick’s out event!)

- sunfire (as usual, people of color are doing it right)

- prodigy (i dont know what the deal with the wings is?)

- aurora

- eyeboy

- pyro (yes girl! serve us some Orville Peck realness!)

- bishop (tits out. guns out)

- psylocke

- havok (somehow he makes it work. idk.)

- rogue (this is straight up just a kevin wada fanart)

- frenzy (she is giving us 70s! she is giving us princess of a foreign planet!)

- gambit (tits out as well. it’s probably just his bathrobe)

- rictor (a cross between damian wayne-as-robin and green arrow)

- angel (king of having his tits out)

- storm (self-explanatory)

- penance (somehow incorporates her past in her costume WITHOUT being offensive)

- jean grey

#hellfire gala #whoever designed these costumes... i just wanna talk. ignore the crossbow. come closer

[dswcp]

Happy Clone Wars Friday!

It’s Villain Appreciation Week! Every villain this week gets 4 panels to show off their tragic arc, dark goofs, and/or raging aesthetic! Today, bow down to...

...the master of reaction panels...

MAUL, NÉE DARTH!!!

Maul, of course, was made for The Phantom Menace, and he reaches peak characterization in Rebels, but he is above all a creature of The Clone Wars. It was only fitting that the show end with a confrontation between its chief creation (Ahsoka) and its chief adoption (Maul).

He has long been a special favorite of mine, my most frequent cosplay and a habitual muse when I’m writing and thinking about Star Wars. Friends pay me in Maul memes, and if you’re selling a Maul print at a con, I’ll probably buy it. (I think the most common question I ask artists is, “Do you have any Darth Mauls?”)

I’m not alone in singling out the guy. I have heard a lot of fans call him “the reason I fell back in love with Star Wars,” “the only good thing in the prequels,” “my gay demon dad,” and other assorted honors. We Maul fans get plenty of attention with fanservice, merch, and a frankly ludicrous serving of character development and narrative importance. We even have a playfully impossible goal to rally around: Solo 2: The Fall of Maul: A Star Wars Story.

He began as a demonic interpretation of Iain McCaig’s fear of clowns, emerged from death as a gimmicky spider cyborg, and somehow became a self-made, revolutionary intellectual in the vein of Jolee Bindo and Kreia. He sees beyond the binary of “Sith” and “Jedi” to what’s really important, and is only held back by a catalog of tragic character flaws and his really mean dad.

Maul gets to be Sith and not-Sith, whole and half, rich and poor, partnered and lonely, wrong and right. Ever is he smart, self-assured, damaged, and beautiful. Never is he happy or free, not until the very end.

By this point, he has as much range as Anakin -- if not morally, then socially and physically. Maul is like Anakin with more brains and less chances.

Though he is essentially flawless on screen, on paper he is often disappointing. Most comic and book depictions of Maul that I’ve read are kinda boring and repetitive. One exception is Cullen Bunn’s 5-issue 2017 series, blandly titled “Darth Maul.” It’s fun and cool and emotional, and Luke Ross’ art style kicks ass. A good Maul, like a good Loki or Magneto, will win you over with his charisma and sympathetic motives, then do something really horrible. A great trick is to pair him with a vulnerable foil, like Ezra or Ahsoka or, in this comic’s case, Eldra Kaitis. He’s at his best when he shows his heart.

“The Sith Hunters” from 2012 is another good Maul comic, mostly for filling in some plot holes in the cartoon with theatrical panache.

I’ve yet to find any comic set during Maul’s reign as the crime lord of Crimson Dawn. Hire me, Disney. Use my knowledge, I beg you.

***

"The Phantom Menace” storyboard by Benton Jew. Drawn sometime in the 90s (the book doesn’t say when!). I found it in “Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy,” published in 2013.

"Tales 24: Marked.” Dark Horse. July 13, 2005. (I found it in the collection “Tales Volume 6,” which you shouldn’t buy for “Marked” but you should for “Marooned,” “Nomad,” and the KotOR comics.) Writer: Rob Williams. Penciller: Cully Hamner. Letterer: Michael Heisler. Colorist: Will Glass.

"Darth Maul -- Death Sentence.” Dark Horse. July 25, 2012. Writer: Tom Taylor. Penciller: Bruno Redondo. Letterer: Michael Heisler. Colorist: Michael Atiyeh.

"Darth Maul,” Issue 5. Marvel. July 19, 2017. Writer: Cullen Bunn. Penciller: Luke Ross. Colorist: Nolan Woodard.

#darth maul #maul #the clone wars #star wars #sw prequels #star wars comics #storyboards #star wars storyboards #dark horse comics #marvel comics #savage opress #zabrak #binoculars #iain mccaig #benton jew #rob williams #cully hamner #tom taylor #bruno redondo #cullen bunn #luke ross #1990s #2005 #2012 #2017 #clone wars friday #hot sith content #not a sith #two panels #4 panels

[kurtty-drabbles]

Pirate au Redone

N/A: I´m thinking about certain arcs and ALL its bad implications and while I did make a Pirate au that involves SCPs and Lovecraftian shit, but, let´s try a different approach here. I want to make Ray the main antagonist here because frankly, she has every reason to be angry with Jean. Now, you´ll ask me "Oh you´ll make Ray be extra evil to Kurt since you hate this ship very much?" plot twist: NO. To me, Kurt is nothing to Ray, and it is not worth to think about it.  I´m taking some pieces of some arcs Marvel created and tossed around...every action has consequences.

@dannybagpipesarecalling @djinmer4 @bamfoftheundead @everykurt

In space, no one can hear your scream. In space, time is everlasting as is equally cold and Rachel Grey is cover by the Pheonix Force -eyes closed burning the last remnant of the Hound that Cassandra Cain tried, feverishly Rachel recalls, to implant on her mind again- and opens her eyes slowly as her fingers itch on her glove as she´s motilities her fingers till reach her temple.

Can you hear me now?

Her face frown as her lips remain in a thin line for long as her fingers shiver slightly along with her eyes who is shimmering with the fire is so associated with herself and, of course, with her mother.

Rachel Grey Summers. Can you hear me?

"I can hear you. I can feel you...Pheonix...who else would still bother to speak with me!" Rachel exclaims now shouting using her mind and own voice-it makes no difference when you´re an Omega telepath or a Summers- and her eyes continue to reflect her inferno.

There´s no more trace of Hound in your mind, Rachel...Cassandra´s machination is no more. You can feel your mind and memories intact.

Rachel tsk louder and shake her head as her breath heaven got heavy and her mind is miles away remembering her childhood-a time before the grimy tales her adulthood still clings and loathes so much- and recalls her mother, the real one, mention how her hair shines ''like fire, just like mine'' she recalls her father calling her kiddo (both Scott call her like that and is haywire the memories and feelings)

"Pheonix...did you curse me?" she asked with anger with her eyes twisted as her face is matching her inner turmoil- she stops breathing heavy as she recalls the few moments kid Rachel meet Kate and Frank in a nice and normal day- and asks again. "Are you using me to punish Jean Grey? Scott Summers? Humanity? Because...if so, your plan is failing...I´m not that special to make Jean suffer and ..." she stops speaking as her lips twists upside down and her fire is gone. "She´s not my mother as she let very clear"

Rachel...I´d not hate you...If I did...you wouldn´t be here.

"Fantastic...so, I´m just the punching bag...do you hate gay mutants?" Rachel jokes humorless as her chuckle is dry and she only stops when she tastes her tears.

No, child. I feel no hate for one´s sexuality. And I´m here to offer you a deal. A nice deal and one you deserve.

"Sure you don´t want to make deals With Nate Grey?" her tone is rugged and whatever she wanted to say-and she wants to say more. She knows and Pheonix knows- a version of Jean Grey appears to dry her tears in a fashion Ray´s mom used to do to a small Ray.

"Nate is not my host. Nate is not the one I´m close...I was your mother...yes" Pheonix states calmly before Rachel promptly mentions some of her mistakes. "I did some mistakes in the past and I know you and I love you. I´m your mother...notwithstanding of my mistakes and I want to make amends with you, Rachel Grey Summers" Pheonix clarifies gentle and such tone is almost similar to the Mother of Everything. Almost.

"What is happening on Earth?" Rachel looks down at the Earth below her feet without a smile or shines in her eyes. "Are they looking for me?" her tone is almost childlike. Almost.

"Nate Grey went insane and create a pocket dimension...uhum" Pheonix explains and rubs her chin-Pheonix likes to feel her bodies no matter the situation as she loves her original form - and speaks in an amused tone. "Zaorva did something much better...I could show you Earth 34. It is a real paradise and everyone respects each one culture" Rachel is not interested in this Earth and Pheonix is not offended. "Nate creates this world where he does minds controlled a large group of X-men where love and sex are forbidden and well...Kurt Wagner is a weapon to rape Meggan Puceanu" Pheonix explains bored.

"What? Can you explain this to me?" Rachel asked curious at this. "Can he do this?" as her eyes are solely focused on Pheonix.

"Yes, and with a group of other mutants who held a secret sex club and even create a fake daughter to Kurt. Apocalypse is resurrected by Nate as well and is now acting as buddies with Kitty and is about to kiss her...uhm" she humms amused again. "Her mind is a bit stronger as she´s questioning this fake reality a little...that´s impressive!" Pheonix concludes.

"No one is...talking about me?" She asked in watery eyes. "They speak about mutants rights and they completely forget about me...and my trauma again" she sniffs and a memory of little Ray hiding in a corner to cry until her father finds her and offers a doll to appease the lil Ray.

"If it serves consolation...no one will hear or care for Meggan´s trauma...oh, now they defeat Nate...and yes, no one will talk about this or what truly happens. The X-men will pretend this never exist!" Pheonix states calmly caress Ray´s short hair- is now flammable and similar to the Pheonix- as the woman is blocking the memories of a distant past.

"You´re not here to rub this on my face...So, what deal do you want to take with me?"

"Revenge, my dear. It is not something I usually seek, but, I´m more than happy to offer my help in this case...they offended you. They offended me" she states recalling ''no more Pheonix'' and Rachel is silent as Pheonix sweat the deal. "I can promise that Jean Grey, not your mother, will never ignore you"

Rachel´s eyes glow in the same fire as Pheonix and she raises her hand. "We humans when we make a deal we shake hands" and Pheonix offer her hand amused and impressed by the gesture. A sultry smile plays on Pheonix's face and is mirroring by Rachel.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

The aftermatch of Nate´s betray and timeless demise hits the news strongly- the news is slipt in two ways ''the X-mean are out heroes'' or ''the x-men are the worst'' - and the Avengers´s fans wonder why the Avengers weren´t there.

A strong hand stomp on the round table firmly enough and causing a loud sound that prompts the others to listen to the one who did cause the noise. "A mutant was that powerful?! How we had no idea...and once again, that mutant is linked to Scott Summers again..." and Tony Stark looks to Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver with penetrating eyes.

Pietro is ready to defend his sister, but, she gentle hold his arm and offers a political smile- Wanda is the one who knows how to play the game. Pietro, while looking like Magneto, has no patience to do any revolution or manipulation- and this holds him back for now.

"And what you want us to do, Tony?" Wanda asked feigning innocence as her eyes land on Cap Marvel for a moment who is looking away - is possible to see her lips trembling for a few moments- "the Avengers let clear they won´t help the X-men ever and I think...everyone recall when I went..." she pauses for a moment. "what´s the kind word you use against me? Oh right, I was crazy with power...so, should I just go and say no more...." she blinks at him ignorantly and Tony sighs.

"You have a point!" and adds. "Plus...Nate Grey is dead...I just wonder about those mutants who are too powerful...how can we trust him"

"Geez Tony, thank you, why you don´t say you don´t like Jews and Romani but say we´re special" Pietro states in a barked tone.

"You seem to forget we´re mutants...mutants that have a hate-hate relationship with Magneto, but, still mutants...and if you´re so anti-X-men and so anti-mutant...maybe we, the mutants" Wanda speaks rosing from the chair along with her brother. "should leave and form our group," she said that looking at her twin´s eyes who nods in agreement.

"Wait, I didn't mean..." too late as Quicksilver takes Wanda and both are gone in a blink of an eye.

Thor, who was watching cat videos and ignoring some of the tension of this meeting, put the cellphone down and speaks. "Nice Tony, now we lost our speedster and the most powerful Avenger ever. So...to top that off, I´ll be back to Asgard ...Enchantress and I have things to do there and Loki is behind this"

Cap Marvel didn´t leave but didn´t show any support to Tony Stark.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Kitty Pryde is on the beach watching the waves. Something is soothing in watching the formation of a wave, its wavelength, and how the salty water touches the sand. She hears someone teleport and offers a smile as she turns her head around to see Magik with booze in her hands.

"Yana, you´re a terrible influence!" Kitty jokes as she accepts the booze and drinks as Yana is looking at everything but Kitty.

"Wanna make jokes about how Kurt is a slut?" Yana suggests and the cut look she received proves this is not a great idea. "Sorry, it is just I´m not good at cheering people up. That was your thing...I just want to know how are you?" Yana asks now gazing into Kitty´s eyes. A bit puffy and Kitty´s not hiding her fear.

"I´m feeling so many things Yana. Fear, anger, regret, jealousy, pity, and love all laced in one confusing mess...when my life became like this? I almost marry Piotr" she makes a nasty face. "Sorry"

"I get it...you two are not compatible and I´m glad you didn´t marry him either"

"And after this whole mess...Excalibur is more than dead!"

"Yeah...I heard Psylocke mentioning this...Meggan is physically alright but uhm...I heard she´ll you know" Yana looks a bit uncomfortable and is looking for the right words. "let´s say she wants to close her fabric to prevent anything...after what Nate forced her to endure"

"That´s a big step and if she wants that...is in her right"

"And you?"

"And that´s what scares me, Yana...I have no idea"

#Pirate au redone au #Rachel Grey #Meggan deserves better #actions has consequences #Kitty Pryde #Illyana Rasputin #The Pheonix #revenge #Krakoa is shitty #let´s destroy this shitty place #Wanda and Pietro are bros #M incident mentioned

[boo-cool-robot]

sounding, i have a question. i love your posts about magneto but my familiarity with the x-men is like... only from the movies. do you have any comic recommendations? there are So Many Comics, im hesitant to just pick something

OH MY GOD I CANNOT BELIEVE MY MAGNETO SHITPOSTS MADE SOMEONE WANT TO READ COMICS

Okay, the first thing you need to know about mainstream comics is that most of them are bad. Like 90% of them suck, and the comics publishing model is awful to actively keep up with. Nonetheless….there’s a good number of elements I find extremely compelling…..like Magneto!

I have not actually read full runs of….most comics, so grain of salt with all my recs.

But anyway, my favorite comics Magneto characterization is probably Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants runs. Stan Lee created Mags, but Claremont was the one to come up with his backstory and make him a more nuanced character than the usual take-over-the-world supervillain. Uncanny X-Men 199 is about Magneto taking Kitty Pryde to a Holocaust memorial and submitting to arrest, and 200 is the story of the subsequent trial as Magneto contends with his crimes and Kitty contemplates growing up in a world with such bigotry. It’s extremely good and would be my number 1 choice for an X-Men story to be made into a movie, but it will never happen because it is contemplative and low on explosions (there’s an attack from psychic N*zi twins in there, but you know, comics.) New Mutants #35 picks up after the trial and has Mags serve as the headmaster of the Xavier Institute and mentor to the New Mutants team. You get to see him lecture teenagers about curfew and tell Rachel and Illyana that he gets the urge to just kill people, he really does, but THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO. It’s all very 80′s and has Claremont’s signature stiff-ass dialogue, but it’s fantastic. 

I also think that House of M and related comics are very important, even if I disagree significantly with a lot of its aspects. The core House of M story is a limited run where his daughter, Wanda Maximoff aka the Scarlet Witch has remade reality into one where Magneto is a semi-benevolent dictator who rules a world where mutants are in charge (see end notes for details on Maximoff-Lehnsherr family).  House of M: Civil War is a minseries that details his rise to power and his relationship with that universe’s Charles Xavier. Young Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, is a fix-it for the fallout of House of M that centers on Billy and Tommy, Magneto’s grandsons, and has Mags as a supporting character. The 2015 Secret Wars House of M miniseries is a non-canon story of Pietro trying to take over. House of M as a whole is kind of frustrating both in the way Magneto’s ideals are portrayed and with the stuff they do with Wanda, but it’s very compelling as a story about intergenerational trauma and you should read it if you’re interested in Magneto.

Other than those, I’ve read some of Cullen Bunn’s Magneto solo that follows Mags as vigilante. Very dark, and I don’t love all that characterization either, but it’s worth a read. The most recent X-Men Blue has Magneto in a mentorship role for the time-displaced original X-Men, though I’ve only read a little bit of that run too. 

Of stuff I haven’t read: I’ve been meaning to read the 2013 Uncanny X-Men run that follows Magneto, Cyclops, Emma Frost, and Magik as they recruit mutants to their radical cause because from what little I’ve seen that’s also a good Magneto, but idk. Chris Claremont did a limited run of Excalibur that features Charles and Magneto playing house together that’s supposed to be real gay. Age of Apocalypse allegedly has a long-haired Magneto leading mutants in the fight against their doom. Kieron Gillen wrote some stuff around 2012 about Magneto dealing with the wake of Cyclops’ bullshit? 

Comics during the 90s were generally big on making Magneto totally evil, so skip those. Same with the Ultimate universe version, which is frankly pretty offensive. 

Some important comics Magneto facts that are not canon in the movies that are useful to know:

Magneto was born Max Eisenhardt, in Poland. He has also used the names Erik Lehnsherr, Magnus, and a ton of others, though Magnus is probably the most common. 

Mags has naturally white/silver hair due to his mutation, though it was dark until his adolescence and full awakening of his powers. 

He is very smart and cultured and has a lot of formal education in science and physics. 

His powers vary wildly according to story, but he can do a lot more than move metal with his powers. 

He has been deaged and reaged and other bullshit a lot. It’s not stated how old he currently is, but it’s entirely likely he’s physiologically only about 40. 

In the main comics universe, Magneto has four children. With Magda Maximoff, he had Anya, who died in childhood, and Wanda and Pietro, aka Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. With Susanna Dane, he had Lorna, aka Polaris. He didn’t know that Wanda, Pietro, or Lorna were his children until he met them again in adulthood. Mags also has grandchildren: Luna Maximoff, Pietro’s daughter, and Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepard, aka Wiccan (?) and Speed, the soul reincarnations of Wanda’s children (it’s complicated). He has a very difficult and complicated history with all of them, but he cares about them a lot. 

He has had a long-running on-again-off-again thing with Rogue. Unlike in the movies, she’s an adult so it’s not as weird, but……I still hate it.

Also, I don’t know if you read fanfiction, but….if you want good Magneto content, you might consider it. Most of it is based on the movies, and most of that is specifically the First Class-Days of Future Past alternate timeline though. At the very least, most fic writers who create stories about him actively like him, which is more than some comics writers.

My favorite Magneto characterization in fic is in The Building of the House and Tehillim, which is canon to the movies. IMO XMCU!Magneto should be written as very traumatized and have significant problems with daily functioning, and these fics give a really fantastic portrait of that trauma. 

These are all AUs that in some cases hew pretty far from canon, but have characterization elements that I really like:

Limited Release, where Erik is a very intense and kind of crazy FBI agent 

I guess I should say thanks or some shit, which has a fantastically douchey young Erik

Lessons ‘Verse, which show Erik as an incredibly difficult and high-maintenance lover (these fics are mostly smut but I REALLY like the characterization)

Synthesis, which gives a really sharp portrait of Erik’s politics 

The end of the world (just not ours), which is kind of a college au that has a deliberately wildly diverging magneto characterization and is unfinished to boot, but…I’m really into it, idk

Anyway thanks for reading this giant-ass post, hit me up with more questions or if you wanna talk about Magneto

#long post #this is so long I'm sorry #I have so many magneto opinions #magneto was right #temporary x men tag #comics #xmen.txt #to the x men then! who do not die the old fashioned way

[whydidireadthis]

X-Treme X-Men (volume 1, 2001)

When you hear “extreme”, what springs to mind? Naturally, there’s the dictionary-correct definition of “exceptional” or “to the utmost extent”, but most of us who lived through the 90s (or who learned about them after the fact, I assume) can’t hear the word without hearing it as “EXTREEEEME!!”

We can’t divorce it from Mountain Dew, snowboarding, and ludicrous color schemes, of extremity not in reality, but in artifice -- a commandeering of the term in a vernacular sense to suit marketing and lazy youthful pseudo-rebellion, curated and served up ready for consumption by half-assed youth.

Appropriate then that X-Treme X-Men reads like Chris Claremont’s midlife crisis, but expressed through a small, awkward collection of characters seemingly hand-picked to be the least-favorite mutant superheroes we used to read about.

Note that I’m referring to the first series to bear this title, which started in 2001, in the wake of the then-new X-Men movie series...and the less said about that donkey mess, the better. This series is not the same one that came around a decade later, which aside from the last couple of issues was very good, featuring Dazzler and dimension-hopping. Just to clear that up. I’ll deal with that one another day.

The Genocide Slide

X-Treme X-Men slides in on the supremely awkward period where Marvel was desperate to confuse people into reading the comics by having them bear vague, superficial similarities to the movies. So of course, Magneto had to be their archfoe and doing Bad Guy Things, never mind that the justification for those things -- and quite a lot of the issues the X-Men are supposed to be dealing with -- come from a literal attempted genocide with massive casualties, both mutant and non-mutant alike.

And that’s really the first and most glaring problem with X-Treme X-Men and, indeed, every X-Men story and series from this point in time: a scope problem. After Genosha gets attacked in what absolutely has to be an attempt at genocide, an abhorrent evil in the eyes of every single civilization on the planet and several others as well, anti-mutant hysteria is not going to be acceptable anymore, I don’t care how you try to justify it. An entire race of people being targeted and countless numbers dying means you shut the fuck up about how boo hoo, you’re scared the mean nasty muties will take the jobs from hard-working Americunts.

It really shows, in a lot of the writing, that none of the writers even remotely understand the struggle of a mistreated minority. Like...at all. But especially Chris Claremont who, well past his prime as scribe of the X-people, tries to make his version of fetch happen with the X-Treme team.

And yes, one of them does snowboard. I’m not making this up.

But the biggest problem I had with Claremont’s writing is that, again and again, people who should know better (like Tessa and Charles Xavier himself) are either awkwardly forced into the “straight pride” question or presented with it as if it’s an airtight counterpoint.

I realize some of you might not know what this is, so allow me to digress slightly in order to explain.

“Gay pride event, ugh. Why don’t we get a straight pride event?”

I’ll even allow for you to have a moment to think this may be a reasonable question, before you realize how absolutely fucking stupid it is when anyone asks the best question that logically answers it:

“What, you mean like every other thing ever?”

I’ve long campaigned for a reboot for the X-Men, because Genosha even existing in the first place...was really going too far, but Genosha existing as an anti-mutant hell, then turned into a sovereign mutant nation, then getting wiped out by Sentinels...was way past too far. But in a post-Genosha setting as where this takes place, it really is remarkably stupid to hear Tessa (now called Sage for some reason, probably because it’s extreme!) repeatedly bitch and whine about the mutants they encountered not wanting to join them and Xavier being more concerned about mutant rights and advancing the cause of mutants...after an entire nation of them was brutally murdered. And she repeatedly asks the question, what about the non-mutants, are they just making time until their species comes to an end? Who champions their cause?

Oh, you mean like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Defenders, the Heroes for Hire, the Invaders, or any other superhero affiliation in the world?

This is yet another reason why the X-Men existing in the same universe as the rest of them makes anti-mutant insanity so nonsensical, but it makes it even worse when even one of the characters in a book centered around mutants -- and she is supposed to be a computerlike mind and one of the most intelligent people in existence -- cannot understand this very simple thing.

Could it be that Xavier is finally understanding that he really has to choose something to concentrate on, instead of trying to deal with every other problem on the planet and mutants too?

Well, that’s something that the other (terrible) titles at the time often ignored or failed to deal with but pretended they were addressing. We had Morrison’s absolutely embarrassing New X-Men, which I’m pained to remember. I can only imagine the pretentious college crowd who wanked to it constantly have either forgotten it by now or pretend they have. Of course, we also had Chuck Austen throwing in his mostly-terrible contributions there too, in both the other X-Men titles and, eventually, New X-Men as well.

Basically, the early 2000s were one of the worst times for the X-Men that have ever happened in the entire run of the whole franchise. And I mean that in both an in-character and a real-life sense; the X-Men series were utterly garbage, and the events happening in-world were wretched and miserable, and usually garbage too. It certainly didn’t help when you had people like Tessa actually lending credibility to blatantly asinine non-arguments.

It’s especially funny that when it’s hurled at Charles -- and by Ororo, no less -- he doesn’t even give it the dignity of a response, which I thought was nice. The school, he maintains, will give refuge to a mutant boy implicated in a murder investigation, rather than giving him over to a court that is obviously going to be biased against him because he’s a mutant. It raises a lot of questions which, of course, it never once addresses; it also points out, probably quite unintentionally, that mutants cannot any longer rely on human society to deliver any of the things that society is supposed to. They cannot rely on impartiality or justice. They cannot depend on fair treatment from government. They certainly cannot take for granted that anyone who isn’t a mutant and in much the same situation as they are would even understand or even could understand and fairly deal with such a problem.

I don’t think this is too complicated an issue to expect a writer of the most put-upon, targeted, and abused minority in an entire fictional universe to be able to understand and portray plausibly and in an engaging, accessible manner. But maybe I’m asking too much.

Regardless, I think it’s pretty easy to figure out why, even if it’s terrible writing, when Magneto decides he’s had it with humanity. After a near-genocide caused by an attack -- using giant robots whose development was sponsored by a government -- on a sovereign nation that made it their thing to be pro-mutant, it’s kind of the fault of every government that didn’t issue any sort of statement of support or protection for mutants, in the light of such a tragedy. It’s hard to feel like you can give over your agency and safety, much less the structure of your society, to people who apparently couldn’t care less whether you live or die. And the people who stayed quiet and didn’t voice their support, didn’t decry the horror of it, and didn’t insist on something being done...well, past a point, it’s kind of their faults too. But all this is way too complicated for superhero comics.

Which kind of makes you want to ask, why did they think it was a great idea to do this if they had no idea how to handle it and repeatedly refused to do so?

X-Cluded X-Men

X-Treme X-Men is, in some ways, better off for being separated from much of anything going on in the other titles, but it doesn’t make it a good series. It’s nice that they kept the same creative team for the entire forty-six-issue run, and Larroca and Liquid!’s art really is distinct and presents a unique vision of the world. Having Claremont write the whole run did at least give him the opportunity to introduce plots that he wanted to do and resolve them as he wanted to do. Consistency means a lot in comics, and in the superhero world, even the very specific X-circles, there is a large problem with that. See also Morrison’s abysmal New X-Men.

And before anyone says a thing about mentioning it twice, yes, I think Grant Morrison is horribly overrated, but the man is capable of decent writing and even good writing sometimes. He’s just never reined in and constantly celebrated as if he’s some sort of genius, whatever he shits out. New X-Men was different, and I won’t lie, the X-Men had needed something different because they were getting stale and uninteresting.

But you can’t just do something different and call it great because it’s different. Just because something has become so bad overall that people are losing interest does not mean that doing something different, whether or not it regains that interest, is an improvement. All it means is that you changed something and piqued people’s curiosity for a while. This is how Frank Miller built his career, on doing things that were different...but wholly inconsistent with anything that came before, and not very good to boot. You can’t just take a sharp left turn and expect IT’S DIFFERENT!! to handwave your lack of giving a fuck about what you were supposed to have learned before coming onto the creative team of a story that’s run decades before you came along.

Which brings me to some of the things that really failed X-Treme X-Men, and were indeed failed by Claremont. While turds like Fantomex and Doctor Douchebag or whoever his fucking name is, show up and never fuck off or die in New X-Men (and oh how I wish they of all people would), X-Treme X-Men is saddled with some newer-introduced mutants itself: a man from India named Neal Shaara who goes by Thunderbird for no reason at all, and Heather and Davis Cameron, Lifeguard and Slipstream, respectively. All three were created by Claremont, which makes it even more utterly bizarre that he just dropped them like hot potatoes during the run. They didn’t even get reasonable justifications for leaving or being utterly forgotten, they just fucked off and were gone, and nobody seemed to remember them afterwards.

The thing that really bothered me the most is that Davis actually started to develop some kind of relationship with Storm that she seemed to be very into, but in the space of a handful of issues, Davis just vanishes when his sister manifests a monstrous appearance. Which, considering everything Davis went through, including stimulating a potentially dangerous mutant power to save her and almost being killed in battle, seems like a whole lot of bullshit totally inconsistent with his character. So he left because he couldn’t deal with her having a weird appearance? There’s certainly no way that could’ve developed into an interesting, character-defining storyline examining the Camerons and propelling them into being well-rounded characters or anything.

At least we got some hilarious addressing of how poorly Nightcrawler had become written since his Excalibur days. Here was a character who had kept his faith in God, in good in the world, but it didn’t define him; he was no preacher or proselytizer, and the few times his faith was shown were dire times where he was in need of hope, like when the X-Men were sure they would die because of implanted Brood.

Not so, said the XTREEEEEME 90S!! This was a time when all of the X-Men were distilled down to cartoonish, shallow, barely two-dimensional caricatures of the more complex characters they once were! Kurt quickly became a bible-thumping jackass it was hard to sympathize with, which of course wasn’t helped by his embarrassing appearance in that cinematic cure for insomnia, X2. It wasn’t Alan Cumming’s fault, but that...was not Nightcrawler.

And neither was it Nightcrawler in the comics. So to have him come to Davis and give him the then-usual “God made me this way and I’m studying to be ordained" and Davis just deciding immediately after to leave and more or less never again showing up in any comic since 2002...is screamingly funny for me. It’s balm for my soul.

Compare and contrast with Kurt introducing himself to Kitty Pryde -- a young teenager -- some twenty years earlier, and her managing to deal with it and get past it, and see him as a person and not as a frightening demonic figure, because he’s charming and kind and shows through his actions that he’s worth knowing. The Kurt at the time of X-Treme X-Men is just an obnoxious loser who really gives any sort of spiritual path a bad name. What happened to the fun-loving swashbuckler who made Uncanny X-Men and the first issues of Excalibur so much fun? Oh well, it doesn’t matter since years of legal trouble with one of Kurt’s creators meant they couldn’t easily use the character. Not that they’ve particularly improved him since being able to use him again, but that’s a story for another day.

Honestly, the Camerons and Thunderneal weren’t bad ideas at heart, but it felt like Claremont just lost interest in trying to make them happen and dropped them. It’s sad to see, especially since Davis and Ororo made an interesting pair, and Heather had some intriguing powers. Thunderneal was basically a giant asshole (like many characters of the time, desperate to show how hard and extreme they were), but he had potential to become something and never did. It’s not like they were around for a long time and just stalled out, either; Thunderneal came from X-Men #100, which was just a year earlier, and the Camerons were introduced early on in X-Treme X-Men! And none of them really ever got to become characters.

There was also some guy called Red Lotus, but I kept forgetting he existed, as I just now forgot he existed while writing this. Apparently everyone else also forgot he existed, because even after the asinine debacle that was Scarlet Witch being a fucking menace to reality, nobody thought to check if he still had powers or not. Because that’s how genetics work.

You Can’t Go Homily Again

Really, characters made up a lot of the problems in X-Treme X-Men. Whether it’s the “straight people baby daddy problems” that pop up in place of actual character development, or whether it’s introducing too many new characters and just having people tell us how powerful and impressive we’re supposed to think they are, few of the cast actually get to do anything meaningful.

The ones that we know by this time also don’t really mesh up with how they’ve acted, ever, up to this point. We have weird Stepford Gambit, and I mean that as a reference to the film, not to the Cuckoos, and Rogue’s powers suddenly work completely differently than they ever have before, which is handled by pretending like that’s how they always worked. I could understand if it were lampshaded as a secondary mutation, like Emma’s, but it was only treated like that’s how we were supposed to believe they had always worked. But that was never how they worked, ever, at any point.

Of course, Gambit can’t have his powers most of the series, for some unknowable reason. He gets treated like absolute shit for his appearances in the whole run though, so you can probably understand why I was glad to see him and Rogue flit off in some hastily-excused jaunt, which seems to be the only idea Rogue ever has when things aren’t rainbows and sunshine in the X-Men. At least it means we get rid of Rogue for a while -- I find her utterly insufferable at this point, and her relationship with Gambit is incredibly toxic -- and as this isn’t the “main” X-title, we usually don’t have to deal with Wolverine either.

Thank god for that.

Storm is basically a bitch 24/7, with the occasional glimpse of the character we once loved. You’d think that, being Claremont, who wrote some of Ororo’s best moments and most characteristic stories that explored her strength as a person and as a human being and not as a goddess or a mutant warrior, he could write her strongly as a compelling leader for a team. Nope! She’s an asshole who is totally okay with people being put in mortal danger, sometimes by her, who has remarkably little in the way of authentic emotion.

The only thing that made her tolerable, for a very short time, was the blossoming thing she was developing with Davis. Good thing Nightcrawler took care of that little problem!

Bishop is boring at best and annoying at worst, and Tessa runs hot and cold at any given point in the series. One issue, she’s the only one that makes sense and nobody listens to her, for no reason. The next issue, she acts the same way but has inexplicably become an idiot and clearly isn’t thinking in any manner that a supposed computer mind should be. Cannonball shows up eventually and there’s something something X-Corps et cetera, which is presented with no context and never explained, but he’s another character who is very difficult to give two fucks about, especially with the dull way Claremont writes him...which is, yet again, nothing short of perplexing given that he had written the character much better before then.

Plodding Plotting

But the lack of context is something that struck me, reading through them; there’s no helpful editor’s note to refer readers to issues of the other series, as there had been. I don’t know if it’s unique to the format I was reading these in, but it seems like a stunt filled with the pretentious assurance that “comic books aren’t for kids anymore” and naturally, referring readers to other events in other series would somehow cheapen the whole experience. By giving them context they could seek out, or you know, any sense of what the hell is actually going on. There’s even a “God Loves, Man Kills 2″ that either needed a reference or the subtitle “Electric Boogaloo”.

The problem is that if you make the decision not to give readers any frame of reference, you have to make it abundantly clear in what you’re writing so that they don’t need that external context. As you might have guessed from what I’ve said up to now, this is another point that Claremont fails on, and almost nothing he writes gives readers that essential context. I had to sit and think back over years of comic knowledge I’d intended to forget, and even then I had to look on the internet to fill in the gaps!

Claremont’s plots are also needlessly protracted, beyond any reasonable measure. Things that could have, and really should have, taken an issue or two to resolve, instead are dragged out into issue after issue of nothing much happening. I could understand if anything happened we could care about, but so much nothing happens in X-Treme X-Men that you start to believe the extreme quality of it is that it dares to make a comic about wasting time. They’re superheroes, they have fabulous powers beyond human ability...and they busy themselves with things that have nothing to do with anything. At times, things happen expressly to stand in the way of the plot advancing, and at those times, it’s almost invariably when you as a reader will want the plot to advance most of all, if only just to get closer to the end of the story and move on to something else.

But most glaring and inexcusable of all is that, despite having the same creative team for the entire run, it feels like Claremont never really commits to any of the storylines he starts. He tosses something at the readers during a perfunctory conflict plot and then seemingly forgets about it, or handwaves a facile non-resolution that confirms he’s basically just wasted everyone’s time that gave a shit about seeing the story resolve in any meaningful way. This contributed to a feeling of being adrift in a sea without purpose, without destination or any means to get there. The X-Treme X-Men could ultimately be removed from the universe entirely and, aside from a very few limited circumstances during the run, not be missed.

Which would be fine, if all they were doing was very pinpoint-specific, niche work. But at times they do things like, say, single-handedly fighting off an alien invasion with about a half-dozen members, while groups like the Avengers are shown on-panel just sitting around doing nothing about it. And for the rest of the Xers to be to determined to help out their comrades in the last issue (with absolutely no real stakes and nothing on the line) they sure didn’t have a fuck to give when the tiny splinter group was all that stood between their home planet and a horrific genocidal alien force.

X-Treme X-Men is an oblique relic of a time when the X-Men very unfortunately hit a broader public eye and a wider range of consumers. And I’m not saying that because it’s always a bad thing when something in a niche goes for mainstream recognition (though it often is), but because Marvel could have maintained the comics as a consistent, if not spectacularly creative, home for the X-Men we knew and at least tolerated.

Unfortunately, Marvel went for the brass ring, knowing it was brass but thinking that because it was shiny, it would be just the thing. It wasn’t, of course, and they ended up with several very different writers’ very different concepts of a team that had enough problems before their publisher decided to mix things up a bit. There was a tremendous disconnection at the time, both between the teams and their titles, and between the readers and Marvel’s creative staff.

You could read X-Treme X-Men over and be bored and mildly frustrated by the uninteresting plots dredged up by a tired Chris Claremont, or you could read Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and witness a group of unrecognizable assholes having the opposite of adventures in a world you won’t give two shits about. Those are basically your major options to get a window on the time, not that I think it’s a particularly good idea either way.

At least with X-Treme X-Men, you aren’t reading the painfully horrible X-Men Forever, which would come about half a decade after the end of X-Treme X-Men and show, once and for all, that Chris Claremont was completely out of ideas and had forgotten, if he ever knew, how to write X-Men. X-Treme X-Men’s worst offense is that it’s boring and pointless, and while its writing isn’t great, it doesn’t quite reach the crushing lows that X-Men Forever would in 2009. Overall, you’re probably better off reading X-Treme X-Men than New X-Men, and at the very least, you’ll feel later like you just read the last tired issues of a failing series that went on too long and not the pretentious babbling of someone so far up his own ass that he’s somehow found Narnia.

But it’s still not a good read. It’s consistent, and that counts for something, but consistently boring is still boring.

#x-treme x-men #x-men #writing critique #comic review

[nomoremetaphors]

KNEECAPPING NICK SPENCER II:                                       ANTI-NAZI BOOGALOO

Last year, I made a post called ‘Kneecapping Nick Spencer’ as a response to an article by now-disgraced ‘journalist’ Devin Faraci.  It called out Faraci for taking an essentially passive stance toward art, and a ferociously hostile stance toward people criticizing sub-par media.  Faraci said we were all basically Annie Wilkes from Misery and I took issue with that.

Well, Faraci’s mostly off the chessboard now, but we’re still dealing with the title jerk from that post -- Nick Spencer, Marvel writer and the guy responsible for Secret Empire, a revamping of Marvel main-canon to match, presumably, the fantasies of an edgy teen who just started watching Agents of SHIELD, developed a crush on the Nazi sleeper agent, and went, “Well, what if everyone was a Nazi?”

I should probably preface this by saying I don’t actually advocate for perpetrating physical harm against Nick Spencer.  He’s, unfortunately, a fellow human being, and he isn’t presently physically attacking people in the street, or spouting racist propaganda on a street corner into a broadcast reporter’s camera, or what have you.

The thing is, though, that Nick Spencer is doing something violent, but it's not the kind of violence that I can meet with physical violence -- ethically, that would be dubious at best.

Spencer, in recreating the mainstream Marvel universe as one where the Nazis won, and all the characters we love are Nazis, has created what is essentially a safe space for neo-Nazis and alt-right trash by giving them the heroes that used to punch Nazis as a matter of course.

As the image above indicates, I support punching Nazis.  I support whoever that hero was who sucker-punched Richard Spencer (no relation, I know, it's a weird coincidence), because wow, Richard Spencer deserved it for the harm he continues to do by leading his Neo-Nazi movement.  

Maybe I'm a fundamentally violent person, I don't know, but I do know this: when your ideology supports the extermination of groups of people from the face of this planet because you don't like them, or their power threatens you, you've forfeited your right to be treated like a human being, because you've fundamentally rejected the humanity of others.

These are the people that Nick Spencer's Secret Empire serves.  These are the people who now get to look at Captain America -- a 75+ year old superhero whose first appearance was punching Adolf Hitler in the face, and has generally been Marvel's answer to Superman -- and see someone who believes what they believe and supports what they support.

The power in stories is in giving people symbols to rally around, in teaching people who they are, who they are capable of being, and, most importantly, who other people are, and what that means.  Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet includes the quote that '[cinema] taught straight people what to think of gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves.'  That's relevant here, because it's, essentially, the same for any group of people who don't see themselves represented in fiction or in real life.

Giving people stories gives them power.  It allows them to see themselves as more than before, and that's the first step to them reaching out and taking that power, and the world letting them.

As a queer disabled person, I know this concept intimately.  I have trouble seeing myself as a good person, as a non-monster, because for the majority of my life, mainstream depictions of people like me were monsters, jokes, or tragedies.  I had to reclaim stories and characters, jokes and tragedies and monsters, because I couldn't see myself anywhere else, and that has lead to me having trouble seeing myself as anything else.

What Nick Spencer has done is give neo-Nazis heroes.  He's given neo-Nazis the chance to see themselves as the heroes of the story.  

He's given them what I am still, in so many arenas, denied.

Considering people like me were among those targeted by the Holocaust -- though not to the extent that Jewish people were -- I have a very personal problem with Nazis getting to be represented by a character like Captain America.  I have a problem with them getting to take that symbol and make him theirs.

So yeah, I got a problem with Nick Spencer.  I've got a problem with his cowardice, his creative bankruptcy, and his inability to recognize his sins.

He seems to think that people who literally would rather I was dead deserve to be heard, rather than shunned; given heroes, rather than sucker-punches.  He's upset because people call him a Nazi for writing what he's written.  

He doesn't deserve the opportunity to write characters like Captain America and Magneto, because when given them, he writes a story that edgy white teenagers are supposed to outgrow between age thirteen and sixteen, and makes it mainstream canon.

For the record, I don't think Spencer is actively a Nazi.  I think, though, that the line between 'guy who gives away our heroes to Nazis' and 'Nazi' is irrelevant.  

There's no coming back from this.  I've stopped reading Marvel.  I won't be catching The Inhumans or Cloak and Dagger, TV shows I was looking forward to.  I'll be forced to do some introspection about whether I can keep enjoying X-Men content from Fox, or if I can read the upcoming Iceman, Generation X, and Jean Grey comics, but they're certainly coming off my pull list.

I encourage other fans to do the same.  Marvel needs to burn in order to understand what they've done, so let's kneecap Nick Spencer and the rest where it counts: in viewership, readership, and at the bottom line.

Hopefully, Marvel learns.  That said, given the last nine years, I don't really know if it can.

#marvel #nick spencer #secret empire #anti marvel #captain america #racism cw #anti semitism cw #nazis cw #featured

[thisiswhatwereupagainst]

Random Things You Should Know About the Brotherhood in the Comics

Fun fact, there’s been more than one Brotherhood of Mutants, and not all of them were led by Magneto. He wasn't even in all of them! There's a lengthy list of members, some more widely-known than others, these are just some fun facts about a few of the more well-known members.

- Toad has one of the worst backgrounds in the Brotherhood. He was abandoned as a baby by his parents, probably due to his appearance, and grew up in an orphanage where he was bullied and tormented by the other children for the same reason. Toad is actually very intelligent in the comics (he's an expert with machinery!) but due to his shyness and learning disabilities as a child, he was considered to be mentally disabled. I'm not sure what specific learning disabilities he's stated to have had though. I'd really like to know though, so tell me if you do! Between this and the bullying, he dropped out of school at an early age.

He was later recruited by Magneto, and they developed an abusive relationship. Not romantic, mind you, but besides that the dynamics were the same. Toad believed that Magneto cared for him and became dependent on him, while Magneto physically battered him and verbally belittled him. Read more about it HERE

I like Magneto, but people who think Magneto is a good man aside from his villainy need to take a good look at how he treats his followers. He abuses all of them, including Wanda and Pietro, but Toad got it the absolute worst and actually has a form of Battered Spousal Syndrome as a result.

- Pyro and Avalanche are super duper best bro-friends in the comics and I love it so much. Also, while they may or may not actually be lovers, depending on how you want to interpret it (I generally see them as friends), they were used to metaphorically represent gay lovers in THIS issue.

- Pyro is not an aggressive fire-obsessed nutjob like in Evolution or the movies. He's not angry, he's not insane, he's not a pyromaniac. He's a very nice, normal dude who just also happens to be a fire-controlling super-villain. Besides terrorism, he's also an author who writes Gothic romance novels. I'm not making this up, it's canon and it's terrific and I love it so much.

- Pyro's first name in the comics is St. John, not just John like the movies. It's pronounced Sinjin, I think. He's Australian, maybe it's a more normal name there? Also, speaking of him being Australian, his buddy Avalanche is an immigrant from the Greek island of Crete, and Toad is from England, specifically York.

- Pyro once saved a group of children from a T-rex

- Daredevil once tricked the Blob into getting jealous that Pyro always got the girls on their Freedom Force missions so that the two of them would fight with each other, suggesting Pyro is probably a ladies man ;D

- Once, when Pyro thought he was going to die, he held Mystique's hand and said "Worse ways to go, than with friends" ;A;

- But Pyro did NOT in fact die then. His death would come later. He contracted the Legacy Virus, and his last act alive was saving the life of Senator Kelly, a man he'd once tried to assassinate. The strain of this good deed was too much on Pyro's weakened body, and he passed away with a plea to Senator Kelly to change things for the better. Kelly promised that he would, and he kept his word, changing his anti-mutant stance and working towards improving mutant/human relations instead. Sadly, this led to Kelly being assassinated by a human who felt he'd turned traitor.

- Just as Pyro was made American in the movies, Avalanche and Toad were made American in the cartoons.

- Toad's real name is Mortimer Toynbee in the comics, and Avalanche is Dominikos Ioannis Petrakis. In X-Men: Evolution, they were re-named Todd Tolansky and Lance Alvers, probably to make them easier for children to pronounce. Alias that the comics Avalanche has used include Dominic Janos Petros, Jon Bloom, Dominic Szilard, and Nick.

- Avalanche enjoys gardening and establishes a bar under the name "Nick" to get away from his life of crime.

- One of the Red Skull's S-Men claims to be Avalanche's daughter. Her name is Dancing Water and she's basically a woman made of water who has squid tentacles for legs. She can reshape her body at all, spray blasts of water from her hands, control any nearby water, and teleport via water. As far as I know, it's unknown if her claims of being his daughter are true, who her mother is, what her history is, and why she wants to help the Red Skull destroy mutants.

- Fred "Blob" Dukes is fat because of his mutation, and the X-Men make fun of his weight ALL THE TIME. Making fun of someone for being fat is pretty bad, but there are some X-Men for whom I can still see it as in-character, they're not all the nicest people. But making fun of someone for how their physical mutation effects them? I'd think they'd ALL know better than that. If it's not okay to do to Nightcrawler, it's not ok to do to Blob!

- Blob eating a lot is frequently a gag too and haha I get it, fat people are gluttons, real nice Marvel. Besides that being a cruel stereotype in a series supposed to be a statement AGAINST bigotry, let's go back to the fact that THIS IS BLOB'S MUTATION. He is going to be this size no matter what. And a bigger person or animal needs MORE CALORIES. That's why a bear eats more than a chihuahua! He is eating a lot because guess what, he would probably DIE if he did not, it's basic biology, but it's made into a joke at his expense by the narrative itself. It's so messed up.

- Blob has a super duper best friendship with Unus the Untouchable, they are mega bros and it is so sweet and it is made even sweeter by the fact that Blob is frankly a HUGE JERK (no pun intended) to everyone else. But Unus is his BFF!! Read more about their Brotp HERE!

- Lesser known female Brotherhood members: Lorelei, Phantazia, Mastermind (Martinique Jason), and Astra. When Magneto abandoned his second Brotherhood and they became the Resistants instead, a woman named Mist Mistress joined them, and Spiral joined Mystique's Brotherhood when they became Freedom Force. The more well-known female Brotherhood members are, of course, Mystique, Destiny, Rogue, and the Scarlet Witch. See a post on Lorelei HERE and on Phantazia’s tag HERE for more about these ladies!

- While Mystique has consistently been portrayed as Magneto's subordinate in the movies, this has NEVER been the case in the comics. In fact, they have never even worked together until VERY recently. In the comics, they both led different Brotherhoods, and Mystique was the LEADER of hers, not anyone's second-in-command. In fact, up until recently, she and Magneto barely even crossed paths; the only time I'm aware of them even meeting was in the 1980s when she arrested him at a Holocaust memorial (this was when she and her Brotherhood were working for the government as "Freedom Force" in return for being pardoned for their crimes) So, needless to say, they do NOT have the same relationship depicted in the movies! Currently, they're both X-men and serving on the same team. Yeah, weird.

-Sabretooth is on the same X-Men team that Mystique and Magneto are, but contrary to the first X-Men film, I don't think he's ever been a Brotherhood member. I could be wrong though. But considering Sabes led the massacre of the Morlocks, I have a hunch not...by the way, Riptide was part of that too, he's sure as hell not a Brotherhood guy in the comics. Magneto HATES the Marauders!

- Ah, ok, I checked TV tropes on Sabes: "Something of an associate to Mystique's Brotherhood, as he was never affiliated with the team's present-day incarnation, but was shown in a flashback as joining up with an earlier iteration, even declaring himself their leader before being betrayed and handed over to the authorities by Mystique the next morning. He also worked for Exodus's Brotherhood, and is usually affiliated with the Brotherhood in adaptations."

-As mentioned, Mystique was NEVER  subordinate to Magneto, she led her own independent Brotherhood as LEADER...and at her side was Destiny, aka Irene Adler. Implied to be the woman who inspired the Sherlock Holmes character of the same name (with the equal implication Mystique inspired Sherlock himself...hey, she's Raven DarkHOLME) Destiny was a blind mutant who could see visions of the future. She was also Mystique's lover. Yup. They could not be explicitly referred to as such during the 1980s due to the Comics Code, but Claremont did everything he could to convey to the readers they were couple. They lived together, were affectionate with each other, and even raised a child together...none other than Rogue of the X-Men! In fact, his original plan was that Destiny would be Nightcrawler's mother and Mystique would be his FATHER, having impregnated Destiny in male form, but of course Marvel wouldn't let him get away with that. He also managed to sneakily slide in characters referring to Destiny as "Mystique's leman"---an antiquated word for "lover" obscure enough to slip by editors.

It used to be a common trope in media to use same-sex desires and relationships for villains as a way to emphasize their wickedness. For instance, a movie would never allow a hero to do such a thing, but it could be suggested with villains because it cast homosexuality in a negative light, as something bad people do to show how bad they are, like showing them kicking puppies. Claremont, however, went the opposite route. He used Mystique's tenderness with Destiny to humanize her instead, using their relationship to show a capacity for goodness in Mystique rather than play up how evil she was. They were depicted as loving and normal together, not depraved and decadent and bizarre. They were downright domestic.

While Claremont did have a notable fascination with lesbians, as shown by his use of sexy evil women who would pursue young heroines with a thinly-veiled subtext of sexual creepiness, he didn't fetishize Mystique and Destiny at all. He could have made Destiny a hot leather-clad young dominatrix like Selene or Emma Frost, but she's actually an elderly woman. Neither she nor her relationship with Mystique are ever sexualized. There are some f/f scenes in the X-Men series where you can imagine Claremont wrote it with one hand, but there's never anything like that between these two. Speaking of Destiny being old, she and Mystique were together FOR LIFE. They met during the 1800s when Destiny was much younger, and while they do seem to have had sexual relationships with men during their time together (as evident by both of them having children and grandchildren) their true loves were always each other. Destiny aged slower than an average person, but she did get old, and yet Mystique still stayed with her even though she remained young and I just love them so much. Destiny eventually met her end not by old age, but at the hands of Legion, Xavier's son.

Also, sorry to turn this into a personal soapbox but I have to here: Tumblr is all about "uwu LGBT representation uwuuu" but don't actually give a fuck about an actual canon woman/woman couple, even though tumblr's X-fandom collectively threw a fucking SHITFIT over Cherik not being made canon in DOFP and each of them having a girlfriend/wife and it being the worst most homophobic thing ever and the women in question getting bashed despite them being involved with these same women in canon...but Azazel gets to totally replace Destiny, who is nowhere to be seen in the movies, and fandom doesn't make a PEEP. Fandom is cool with that. In fact, they love Azazel and love drawing him in a happy heteronormative family with Mystique. Tumblr likes to be “uwu support LGBT representation uwuuu” but they give absolutely no fucks about Mystique's bisexuality and Destiny's very existence being erased. I've seen so much fucking Azazel/Mystique/Kurt fanart, but I don't even see much of Destiny even in COMICS fanart.

I get that it's an AU, it's not the comics, but it just leaves such a bad taste of hypocrisy in my mouth considering how tumblr X-fandom AS A WHOLE flipped out about Erik and Charles having relationships with Magda and Moira instead of each other in DOFP , even though they had relationships with those women in canon and, despite all subtext, have never been confirmed as a canon same-sex couple like Mystique and Destiny have. But people were ready to go to WAR for them. But two women who are a CONFIRMED CANON QUEER COUPLE? Who cares, right? Seriously, if it's not hot young cis white men, NO ONE CARES, even when it's a case of a REAL CONFIRMED CANON queer character (two, in fact!) being erased in the films. They had a lifelong relationship together, they raised a child together, they have all these affectionate moments...there is so much Mystique and Destiny stuff in canon, and Claremont WANTED to put in more and wasn't allowed.

And now that we're in a time period where that could be allowed, I think it's a fucking TRAVESTY that this wasn't put in the movies to make up for what wasn't let into the comics, to finally let them be “out” while Destiny was still alive. But it's even bigger travesty to me that tumblr not only ignores this, it endorses the heterosexual ship that replaces it, and then pats itself on the back for being “progressive” when it comes to shipping two DUDES (especially if they can shit on women in the process---there was a LOT of bashing Moira and Magda both in fandom when DOFP came out). Seriously, I swear the reason some people are into slash is just because there's not any EW GROSS GIRLS in it.

Sorry I had to get salty but this really bothers me. Mystique's bisexual and had a lifelong relationship with another woman in which they raised a child together and the movies not only erase that, movie fandom just accepts it while patting themselves on the back about being progressive because they have fanon m/m ships.

#xmen #x men #x-men #brotherhood of mutants #mutants