#alex summers is either a gay man or a transfemme and that is that on that

[summerstrash]

If Alex Summers comes out of Dark X-Men without some consequential alteration to his gender or sexuality I will eat my shorts.

Alex, currently:

Just insisted he and Maddie are "the same" and threw over his life as an X-Man to help her rule Limbo, which Maddie then characterized as a place that holds "the spirits no one wants to face. The parts of us we condemn to darkness. Nothing heals in darkness."

Most recently fucked a robot he perceived to be Maddie.

Spent the previous two years before Dark Web being manipulated by others for their nefarious or petty purposes in ways that left him physically & emotionally traumatized and isolated.

Was extremely sympathetic to robots and clones in an era when they were persona non grata.

Has a dissociative disorder that has not been explicitly resolved on panel yet.

Spent two years being paralleled with the most Wife Guy of genderweird WLWs , Mystique, during a period where Maddie's trans subtext feels its most intentional.

Alex, historically:

Is prone to fucking Scott & Bobby's exes (Lorna, Maddie, Annie)

Is prone to fucking people already in relationships when he meets them (Lorna, Maddie, Annie)

Tends to fuck MILFs (Maddie, Annie, Jan)

Feels deeply alone even when he doesn't have "good" reasons to be.

Once was the reason an energy vampire turned into a pterosaur man (Sauron).

And he's about to be on a team with:

Bobby's teen crush, but the version of Warren who experienced nonconsensual amputation and body modification and the isolation that creates.

A man married to a woman with a history of being unable to touch people. Remy's also extremely popular with X-Twitter Gays.

A robotic replica of Logan (y'know, the guy who is at minimum Scott's metamour, if not his boyfriend) named Albert, best known for hanging out with a robot little girl named Elsie Dee.

Kurt Wagner's demonic dad.

A guy who keeps fusing bodily with his sister and often walks around in a girl shaped body and who is an energy vampire (Emplate).

A guy who is part flesh and part machine and can sculpt his body any way he pleases and who can mind-control people by adding bits of his body to theirs (Zero).

Alex is absolutely surrounded by dudes who are exactly his type or who can be used for metaphors for transness as a result of Weird Body Stuff. There has never been a better time for him to be established as a closet case.

[summerstrash]

Lorna Dane in her "is it heterosexuality or gender euphoria?" era of her and Alex's relationship...

panels from X-Men #97 (Claremont/Cockrum/Grainger/Warfield/Kawecki)

[summerstrash]

I'm back on tiktok & back on my bullshit.

Video Description: a montage of comic panels of Alex and Maddie, focused on the times Maddie put Alex in the Goblin Gown in Hellions & Dark Web. Audio plays underneath of a person saying, "I am forcibly feminizing you, bitch. Sorry! I am, at gunpoint, forcibly feminizing you!"

[summerstrash]

Thinking about this panel from Hellions #12 again and I want to just point out that in this single panel, Alex is standing at the centerpoint between Lorna, Mystique, and Kate, which means he is:

Standing in the center of a Bermuda triangle of Bobby Drake's failed attempts at heterosexuality.

Standing between the other participant of his own failed wedding (hi Lorna) and the other iconic failed left-at-the-altar romance of the X-Men (Kate and Piotr).

And also standing between two WLWs, one of whom was a problem to resurrect and the other of whom is a queer woman with a past presenting as a man who has at this point been fighting like hell to resurrect her wife...

...While begging Erik to explain why they won't resurrect his dead, politically unpersoned ex-lover.

Alex, honey, you are never beating the trans WLW allegations at this rate.

[summerstrash]

Thinking about Alex Summers' arc in the Krakoan Era and it's genuinely impossible to read him as anything but queer and/or trans based on this era, for me.

Like, to make a very long argument (40 pages at last count, I'm working on it) very very short, Alex has, since 2020:

Had his autonomy repeatedly violated as people in power (Emma, Forge) use him to further their agendas (having a leg up on Sinister for Emma, upsetting Scott for Forge).

Spent more than a year paralleled with the highest profile WLW in X-comics (Mystique) as they both fought the system to get their dead, politically unpersoned lady-loves (Maddie & Destiny) resurrected.

Also spent that same time being repeatedly paralleled with Maddie both explicitly and through references to the original Inferno (1988), culminating in him explicitly saying that he and her are "the same" while he's wearing an outfit he later calls "[his] old Goblin Gown, or whatever."

Fit into an archetype that I call the "Nothing Girl" that applies otherwise very strictly to the main female characters of Hellions, in contrast to how the male Hellions' arcs are constructed.

Been repeatedly brought into parallel with people unpersoned by the Krakoan state (clones, robots) and connected to people the state, for the most part gave up on (the Hellions).

Got replaced on the X-Men, in essence, by a woman everyone thought was dead (Vault!Laura), who was, prior to being found, assumed to be a man (Darwin) instead, and who is in a longterm relationship with a man with a rainbow power signature (Synch).

Is now working with Maddie to make Limbo into a home for the kinds of lost and dispossessed people who are forgotten by systems of power, both human and mutant.

Like, for real, my blorbo has high-key been in his most babygirl era and I hope that means the next person to write him lets him out of the closet, or at least makes it clear to the audience that he's got a time share in Narnia, y'know?

[summerstrash]

in which alex is once again the one to understand maddie, explicitly because they're "the same," and all scott can respond with is alarm that alex is wearing maddie's clothes again

truly, the most cishet of scenes

panels from Dark Web: X-Men #1 (writer Zeb Wells, art by Rod Reis, letters by Cory Petit)

[summerstrash]

"red and yellow" // alex/maddie // id in alt text // inspired by how often yellow seems to symbolize innocence for maddie, as well as several orville peck songs including his cover of "fancy."

[summerstrash]

X-Men #16 (Gerry Duggan, Joshua Cassara, GURU-eFX, VC's Clayton Cowles)

The juxtaposition of Alex's search for "what he's looking for" not being "to be an X-Man" with Forge's search for Darwin (a man) leading him to a woman everyone thought was dead instead. // IDs in alt text.

[summerstrash]

Current Rankings As To What Dudes In Dark X-Men Might Fuck Alex Summers, In Order Of Likelihood:

Azazel - currently seems like he's horny for Maddie, also seems like a guy who would suggest a threesome specifically to mock and humiliate a "straight" boyfriend of a woman he wants to fuck.

Remy - Remy was nice to him in a mean way in their one (1) interaction so far, and "nice in a mean way" is catnip for Alex's weird issues. Also Remy is married. And, based on the unlettered pages we've seen from #2, Alex is about to have some kind of interaction with the kid who patterned her whole shtick after Remy, so like...step-dad energy could be imminent.

Albert - just very nearly killed him (Alex) to death, is a robotic duplicate of Scott's boyfriend, and currently is suffering from a traumatic separation from his Associated Robot Child, which, like, makes him the Most Alex's Type Anyone Could Ever Be Right Now.

Warren - Currently in a damsel in distress situation, in the clutches of another Maddie, and, like, I love a good foil-on-foil self-discovery arc, you know?

Emplate - He's a life-force vampire who hangs out with Azazel. I feel like, under the right circumstances, it could happen.

Zero - I feel like he thinks Alex is a boring normie stick-in-the-mud, and I don't think he's horny for that.

Maggott - Literally no interaction, and I can't think of any compelling thematic or character reasons for this to happen, tbh.

After #2 drops in two weeks I will update the rankings to reflect the events of that issue in a reblog, lmao.

[summerstrash]

....Alex transitions and Kyle is immediately like "so can you have babies. That would be hot" and they have sex about it and turns out some guy with a breeding kink talking about how he wants to knock you up is like. gender euphoria to Alex

Alex discovering her always going for moms in the past isn't because of her abandonment issues or wanting an authority figure to take control, but because she's projecting her desire to get bred onto them — that feels perfectly in character, honestly.

Alex has always wanted to be seen as normal and therefore worth something; this stems from childhood emotional neglect as well the trauma of having that normalcy ripped away upon her mutant reveal all the way back in X-Men #56-57. And she would consider gestating and birthing a man's children probably the most normal thing a woman can do, I think.

[summerstrash]

Cannot stop thinking about Alex claiming Inferno made him more deadly while dressed in a mirror of Maddie's outfit immediately after Malice!Lorna claims deadliness is a women's virtue. Louise. Louise. What does this mean.

X-Factor vol. 1 #39 written by Louise Simonson, pencils by Walt Simonson, inks by Allen Milgrom, colors by Gregory Wright, letters by Joe Rosen, edited by Bob Harras. Screencapped from the X-Men: Inferno trade/graphic novel collection.

[summerstrash]

Working on a manifesto to explain why Larry Trask would make an incredible third for Alex/Maddie, especially right now, and it basically boils down to:

Krakoa and Arakko have both had precogs on their ruling bodies; Larry Trask is the pre-existing precog who makes the most sense, if you want to give Limbo its own future-teller.

This is because Larry's entire story is focused around the forcible repression of his mutant identity, and Maddie and Alex are trying to make Limbo into a refuge for the lost and specifically "repressed."

Larry also has no mutant community, and all of his human relatives are dead or bigots, so he has nowhere on Earth, Krakoa, or Arakko to turn, but Alex Summers was a pivotal figure in Larry's period of self-discovery — why wouldn't a newly resurrected Larry Trask seek him out in Limbo?

Since 2020, Alex has been repeatedly shown to side with the people and beings that have been marginalized by the Krakoan state — clones like Maddie and robots like the Smileys most obviously — and was paralleled with Mystique while Mystique was trying to resurrect her own politically unpersoned, precognitive wife.

Maddie and Larry have extremely similar backstories of having their lives controlled and edited for the benefit of their villainous fathers, to the point where they have dramatic breakdowns during the realization of their true mutant identities, during storylines where Alex is central to how they express who they really are.

Maddie and Larry are also both huge tech nerds and I just think they would absolutely vibe over both that and their histories of putting Alex into Little Outfits™️.

Alex is kind of a lesbian and a gay guy at the same time, so I think him dating a girl and a guy at the same time just makes sense.

I don't know when the full manifesto will be done, because, like, to write it I need to explain the Larry Trask story, because he died in 1972 and was only in like, two stories totalling like six issues before that, but I hope to finish it soon because I love this ship and I need someone else to also love it so that me and my friend Andy aren't the only people thinking about it.

[summerstrash]

someday I'm going to write about alex summers and the ongoing motif of him as some kind of human sacrifice or metaphor for innocence, because alex regularly is faced with that situation (ahmet abdol, larry trask, maddie at least twice, the nexus of all possible realities iirc, emma's use of him in hellions)

and it's really interesting when juxtaposed with alex as an almost perpetual transgressor — coveting his brother's wife, leaving lorna at the altar, etc.

not fully sure what it all means yet but it means something

[summerstrash]

i just think that edie sedgwick & annie lennox make excellent dreamcasts for alex summers & maddie pryor, you know? // ID in alt text.

[summerstrash]

okay but what if Maddie got a crew cut like 80s Annie Lennox and Alex got an Edie Sedgwick pixie cut and a pretty dress and they were in lesbians with each other

[summerstrash]

alex summers got metaphorical bottom surgery in otherworld and i can prove it!!