#with magneto the character who was ACTUALLY in a concentration camp | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

caprica99 · 3 years

Text

Shadow and Bone rant, because I need it

Shadow and Bone has some incredible potential, both the books and the show, but neither actually lives up to it.

Alina could have been interesting. Cartographer is a rare profession for fictional characters, but in the books/show she's just a beginner (at 17/20 it's understandable). Make her at least 25 with 9 years of experience in the army, give her a promotion with subordinates she's responsible for and you would get a more interesting character who saw some serious shit in the army, acts like a soldier, and knows responsibility. (And maybe wants to stop the war at all cost, utilizing the Fold maybe.*wink, wink*)

It bothered me that we never saw her using cartography this profession that makes her unique for reaching her goals. In the show, she has dreams about the stag. It would have been interesting to see HER figuring out the whereabouts of the stag by using the stag's surroundings like mountains, specific types of trees, topography, etc. Work smarter, not harder.

Diana Bishop suffers from the same passiveness in the first book of the All Souls trilogy, but she actively uses her science historian background and those passages are the most interesting parts of her POV. Alina's interest in drawing and geography would give her a unique personality, and made her relatable to many (see ADoW and history nerds). Many YA heroines have a specific and useful skillset: Katniss-archery, Clary Fray-drawing, etc. Sadly, her entire personality is running away with Mal.

Mal's character feels pointless to me. The story depicts an oppressed minority group with special powers, and their struggles in the world, the heroine and the antagonist are both part of the said minority group, and he's constantly shown to be a bigot against the Grisha, so what makes him so important to the plot? His tracking skills? Give the job to a no-name tracker and I wouldn't miss him.

At least the show made him more likable, but Archie and Jessie still lack romantic chemistry. However his chemistry with his friends Mikhail and Dubrov was spot on, I really liked it. They showed life as a simple otkazat'sya soldier on the front, and their death was painful to watch. I thought that his friend's death would make a bigger impact on Mal, him wanting to get revenge on the fjerdans and end the war at all cost, and saying that maybe Kirigan's plan actually makes sense would make an interesting narrative. (They are at war dammit, there's no black and white only grey.)

Mal and Alina don't act like soldiers in a war-torn country, they act like American teenagers, and it's annoying. The General and Ivan are the only ones who act as soldiers in a 3 front war. When the villain shows the most responsibility in your story you should rewrite your heroes completely, or make the villain your hero.

The show is better than the books. It's a rare phenomenon but it is something everyone agrees upon. To me, the first book reads like a draft the author forgot to expand. The worldbuilding, the Grisha, and the characters were a perfect base to an original fantasy universe, but it all falls flat. The show made it richer by introducing multiple POVs and giving the actors more leeway (Ben Barnes ladies and gentlemen). But in the end, they had to stick to the books.

This is incredibly confusing to me because we have numerous fanfictions about Alina staying at the Little Palace, embracing her Grisha side, helping the Darkling because his plan makes sense, or changing his plan by coming up with a better one, or having dark!Alina etc... Clearly, this is what book fans wanted: giving Alina agency, make her realize that she had to work with the Darkling because she's Grisha too and they have the same goals but have different methods, let her be Professor X to Alexander's Magneto, ending the corrupt and incompetent Lantsov line, anything would have been better than taking Baghra's words at face value and running off.

Change I like: the whole West-Ravka storyline, it made the General decision understandable. Zlatan sold Grisha to the fjerdans, wanted to kill Alina and his actions could have led to a civil war, Kirigan only acted as a general of his time (not 21 century guys, we are talking about the unforgiving 19 century) and besides we only see the destruction of Zlatans army (BTW they were ready to kill everyone on the skiff) and not the whole city.

Change I don't like: making Alina half Shu. I'm not completely against it, but it was poorly executed. The racism Alina faces overshadows the Grisha-hate, rather than complementing it. Alina acts like being half Shu is somehow worse than being Grisha, eventough there are literal Holocausts going on against Grisha in two neighbouring countries, slavery in another, and the show never addresses it. This is the biggest problem with her character, she never embraces being Grisha, sides with the muggles, and makes her mission to kill the only person who stands between Grisha and persecution.

Would have been good: the show could have made little 5 minute scenes depicting the plight of Grisha in other countries. Either at the beginning or the end of every episode.

Episode 2: the Ice Court

Episode 3: the Shu concentration camps with the experimenting

Episode 4: slavery in Kerch

Episode 5: the Wandering Isle with consuming grisha blood

Episode 6: the Demon in the Woods storyline

Episode 7: Luda+Aleksander

And now... The Darkling/ Aleksander Morozov/ General Kirigan: the most interesting character in the entire series.

In the first half of SaB he was depicted as every soldier's dream general. Sitting and eating with his men, fighting side by side with them, constantly checking on his troops while other generals prefer to attend court. But in the second half, he transforms into a Mustache Twirling Villain TM and makes rather OOC decisions throughout the trilogy. He could have been a generic villain from the start, but why make him then a compelling character with understandable motivations?

In the books, I understood his motivations, but in the show, he was completely right. His backstory shows that he tried peaceful tactics but those never worked out. The only thing that worked against his enemies was power and violence. The price of hesitance was Luda's life (I'm willing to bet they were married). The Fold was actually a mistake born from desperation. He spent centuries in hiding, seeing his people persecuted. Even with the Little Palace and the Second Army Grisha are considered second-class citizens, they can't hold properties. He has to walk the fine line between usefulness and being a threat. He has to bow to incompetent Kings who don't give a shit about the state of the country. If Alina had to go through so much how would she end up? Because it's a miracle that Aleksander still has it in him to fight for the Grisha.

Many bring up Nikolai Lantsov as the Darklings foil ( or Diet Darkling as @ambitious-witch calls him) to show there is an alternative to Aleksander, but it's wrong. Because Nikolai was never part of an oppressed minority group, never had to fear centuries of persecution, he's an actual prince, it's easy to not be radicalized with his background.

Bonus: If Bardugo wanted to create a fictional world with tsarist Russia as a base, the least she could have done is to open a Wikipedia page or a dictionary for the correct names and terms. Starkov is a man's name: Alina Starkova is the correct form. Ilya Morozov, Aleksander Morozov, and Baghra Morozova would be the correct forms.

EDIT: They could have shown the building of the Little Palace and the start of the Second Army. I wanted to see the normal life at the Little Palace before Alina came along, little Grisha enjoying their powers, their reaction if the Darkling comes to see their training (I headcanon he visits the lessons at least once a year), the other teachers, and their reaction to Alina. Alina in canon is good with kids, maybe if she had spent time with little Grisha, she could have embraced her powers sooner. Having met with foreigners (Fjerdan, or Shu) and hearing their gruesome accounts of the foreign treatment of the Grisha would made her willing to fight for their future.

#shadow and bone #sab netflix #sab spoilers #grishaverse #anti leigh bardugo #the darkling #alexander kirigan #aleksander kirigan #aleksander morozova #alexander morozova #alina starkov #shadow and bone cast #shadow and bone netflix #darklina #alina x darkling #malyen oretsev

837 notes · View notes

bamfdaddio · 3 years

Text

X-Men Abridged: 1981

The X-Men, those back-to-the-future mutants that have sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are a cultural juggernaut with a long, tangled history. Want to unravel this tapestry? Then read the Abridged X-Men!

(Uncanny X-Men 141 - 152) - by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, Brent Anderson, Dave Cockrum, Jim Sherman, Bob McLeod and Josef Rubinstein

While I also committed various fashion atrocities at the age of 14 (tye-die and fauxhawks, oh my), even Liberace would find Kitty’s outfits too much. (Uncanny X-Men 149; Uncanny X-Men Annual ‘81)

We dial back from the v. epic scope of the last few arcs. Instead, 1981 is just a lot of fun! We get:

Storm and Emma doing a Freaky Friday!

the X-Men vs. Magneto (again!)

A surprisingly effective Alien rip-off

An dystopian future! (OoOoOoOo)

Last year was the year of the Dark Phoenix, this is the year of Kitty Pryde. That’s not to say Jean’s death is swept under the rug: all throughout, we see her friends mourning her loss or remembering her fondly. (Scott even gets to have a demonic adventure about it.) But in general, Claremont puts Kitty in the forefront, fleshing out his YA-addition to the team. And what would a YA heroine be without a grim dystopia? Roll out the iconic Days of Future Past!

To be fair, 2013 was a dark time for all of us: What Does the Fox Say somehow got to the top of the charts and I was still watching Glee. (Uncanny X-Men 141)

How cool would it have been to see a name like Jonothon Starsmore or Eva Bell on those tombstones?

Anyway, that’s Kate. Kate’s had it rough. Mutants are at the bottom of the foodchain, most X-Men are dead and only a small cadre of resistance fighters remain, Sentinels dominate, and while she is married to Piotr, her children have been murdered. Bleak. Luckily, the rebellion has concocted the plan to shunt Kate’s spirit back in time to prevent this awful future from happening. (You’ve seen Days of Future Past, the last passably good X-Men film, you know what’s up.)

Let’s do the time warp again! 1981!Kitty’s mind gets taken over by 2013!Kitty, who promptly tries to convince the X-Men that a new Brotherhood of v. Evil Mutants will try to kill Senator Kelly, a presidential candidate who tries to put the mutant menace on the agenda. (Mutants tend to blow stuff up when he’s around.) Since the X-Men recently took a literal trip to Dante’s Infero and also befriended a cosmic world-ending entity, they basically shrug and go: “Yeah, this checks out.”

Off to Washington they go (zoommm) and there, they happen upon the Baddest Bitches in Herstory:

“How dare you hate mutants, senator Kelly! We’ll fix that by killing you!” (Uncanny X-Men 141)

This All-New, All-Different Brotherhood consists out of:

Destiny, a blind woman who can see the future. Definitely the eeriest member of this group. Badass lesbian, though that won´t be canon for years.

Avalanche. Greek who makes things shake. Is a long-standing member of the X-Men Rogue’s gallery, but rarely features in the spotlight. I think he got more characterization in four years of X-Men Evolution than he ever did in the comics.

Mystique. Shapeshifter. Ruthless and unhinged, the Cersei Lannister of the X-Men universe. Absolute legend, secretly the wife of Destiny, currently not as unhinged as she’ll be later. Immediately implied to be related to Nightcrawler: it’s the yellow-eyes-blue-skin-combo.

Pyro. Can manipulate fire, not create it. Absolute pillock, in all the best ways of the word. Originally intended as gay, but they decided to make him Australian instead. (?!)

Blob. Big, strong, immovable. We’ve seen him before.

One of the details in this fight I enjoy is that Storm is still struggling with her leadership, although she has a better grip on things than Cyclops:

Wolverine then proceeds to use those iconic but deadly claws about twice per issue for the next, oh, forty years. (Uncanny X-Men 142)

While the X-Men fight the Brotherhood in the present, we cut back and forth to the future. There, the X-Men consist out of some familiar faces - Storm, Colossus, Wolverine - and some surprises: Magneto (in a wheelchair), Franklin Richards (son of) and an unfamiliar ginger girl called Rachel. (She’ll be important later.) We even learn (one of) Magneto’s names: this is the first time he’s canonically called Magnus.

One of the strengths of Days of Future Past lies in its brevity, the way it tantalizingly taunts us with a brutal but familiar future without giving away too much. It’s single-handedly responsible for all those dark future timelines the X-lines are so fond of which will eventually culminate in time-displaced grandsons from alternative dimensions and the impossibility of a succinct answer to the question: “Who’s Cable?” Too much of a good thing and all that.

Still, what Days of Future Past does so successfully is:

Put the idea of the mutant menace back at the forefront, hammering home the metaphor of mutants being a minority. Mutants being put in camps and being forbidden to breed should - regretfully - make us think of all too many real life equivalents. (Specifically, all of the imagery harkens back to the Holocaust.)

It starkly shows what happens should the X-Men lose, reminding everyone of the stakes. The X-Men are here for a reason: bridging the gap between mutants and humankind. If they fuck up, we end up with mutant concentration camps.

It helps that the X-Men in the future almost all die horribly: Franklin is incinerated, Storm is impaled… It's brutal stuff. The only one to survive is Rachel, who wonders if their plan actually changed the future or if they created an alternative timeline. (It did the latter, sorry ‘bout it, Rachel.)

In the present, Kate chases after Destiny, who trains a gun on senator Kelly. I always wondered how this works: if Destiny saw the future, she knew that killing Kelly would trigger a terrifying future. What in the current Marvel timeline made her decide that the Days of Future Past was better? Did she see her own death? Did she see the Onslaught-crossover coming? The Chuck Austen run? What was it?

In any case, time-anomalous Kate stops Destiny from killing Kelly and the future is safe! For now. Kate disappears, Kitty returns to her body and some of the Brotherhood are apprehended. All is well, for now.

After being a key figure in DoFP, Kitty is also the main character in the Christmas special, which is basically a straight up horror and a pastiche of the Alien-movie.

Seriously, John Byrne still isn’t sure why he wasn’t sued by Ridley Scott for this. (Uncanny X-Men 143)

If you love Kitty Pryde? Read this issue. If you’re not convinced you like 80’s Kitty? Read this issue. It’s not continuity relevant and it’s basically Kitty playing the part of a Final Girl in a horror where she’s being chased by a demon, but it’s so good. It showcases all her strengths and her foibles. Kitty’s intelligent, cute (sometimes preciously so) and brave, but she’s also young, self-conscious and hot-headed. And it's not as if the other X-Men automatically adore her: Storm berates her all the time, she’s afraid of Kurt because of the way he looks (though she grows out of that) and she fights with Professor Xavier a lot. Moreover, she has a clever power-set for a young superhero who faces menaces on a daily basis: a thirteen year old who can go intangible is far less likely to have reality ensue on her and be dramatically offed because she's better at protecting herself.

I’m sure there are people who thought Sprite was hogging the spotlight, but I, for one, say she brings more to the table than, say, Angel. She’s not the Dawn Summers of this franchise.

Scott also gets a side quest. Poor guy can’t catch a break: first the love of his life dies, so he quits the X-Men, then he realizes he can’t do much else than be a superhero. He becomes a sailor on the ship of spunky captain Lee Forrester, is drawn into the sadistic plans of a demon unironically named D’Spayre and then shipwrecks in Bermuda with Lee.

The X-Men, meanwhile, are tormented by a team-up of Doom (who’s currently Latverialess and working on a comeback) and Arcade, that annoying crony. Locke, Arcade’s dom, has kidnapped the loved ones of the X-Men (Moira MacTaggart, Jean Grey’s parents, Illyana Rasputin and Amanda Sefton) in order to blackmail them into getting Doom to free Arcade. Apparently, Arcade accidentally insulted Doom and DOOM DOES NOT FORGIVE THAT FOLLY.

While the B-Squad (Polaris, Havok, Banshee and Iceman) goes to save Arcade’s hostages, the X-Men sneak into Doom’s castle. Well, except for Storm, who doesn’t give a single fuck and simply flies up to Doom, demanding an audience. Doom likes the cut of her jib and invites her to have dinner. (This is pre-Tinder, so this is a legit way of scoring a date.)

If Storm has a flaw (I said if!), it’s got to be her atrocious taste in men. (Uncanny X-Men 145)

The X-Men find Arcade’s cell empty, while Arcade casually saunters up to Storm and says hi. Storm realizes too late that this is a trap: while the X-Men are all trapped in Saw-like traps, Storm is encased in ‘living chrome’.

If you remember she’s claustrophobic, you know why this is a bad move.

While the X-Men free themselves from their traps - Polaris hilariously has to deal with a murderous merry-go-round - Storm is slowly driven mad in her prison, triggering a worldwide tempest. (She causes Lee and Scott to shipwreck.) Under the threat of Wolverine’s claws, Doom releases Storm - or rather, unleashes her.

“Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!” (Uncanny X-Men 147)

The memory of Jean brings Ororo back to herself and she starts undoing the superstorm she created. (If only climate change were reversed that easily.) Their confrontation ends by Storm easily forgiving Doom, because she apparently trespassed on his grounds without adequate cause.

Mkay.

All of Arcade’s hostages return to their homesteads, except for Illyana Rasputin, Piotr’s sister: she’s staying at the mansion for a while. Angel, who’s sort of been a part of the team since the Phoenix thing, has had it with Wolverine and his ‘tude, and decides to quit the X-Men : he doesn’t want to be a part of an outfit that has a killer like Wolverine on it. (Or maybe he’s just mad Claremont didn’t give him any storylines: his presence has been mostly pointless.) It’s too bad he left before Kitty started experimenting with her outfits: I bet he would have loved her ugly-ass costumes.

Equally inconsequential is the introduction of a brand new character, who then proceeds to disappear from the narrative for the rest of the year:

Black Tom has tried to kill you at least twice, but him sending you a long-lost daughter doesn’t give you pause? Ugh, Sean, you deserve Moira. (Uncanny X-Men 148)

Intrigued by Theresa? TOO BAD, WON’T SEE HER AGAIN ANYTIME SOON.

Another new character is the lonely, decidedly mutant looking Caliban, who can sense “people like him” and is on the lookout for companions. Like many lonely people who try and grasp at friendship, he decides to overshoot his shot and ruin the night of Storm, Kitty and Jessica Drew at a Dazzler concert. Because he tries to kidnap Kitty, the girls react a trifle aggressively. When they realize their mistake - the eerily pale Caliban is a simpleton rather than a menace - he’s already fled. No mention is made of the Morlocks yet!

There’s also another dull annual where the X-Men team up with the Fantastic Four to save Arkon’s dimension from the Badoon and yaaaaawn. Far more interesting is the landmark issue #150. Slowly, through the adventures of Scott and Lee Forrester, Claremont has been setting things up for the return of a favorite villain. While the X-Men investigate Magneto’s old base in Antarctica on a hunch of Professor X and tangle with Garruk, Scott and Lee survive Storm’s tempest, only to wake up next to a strange island that seems to have been raised from the ocean.

It’s apparently some ancient citadel from a long forgotten civilization with a fondness for squid statues. (I don’t know man, I’ve never been to the Bermuda Triangle, maybe this is just super-accurate.)The tentacles make Lee Forrester feel very amorous, but before Scott can tell her he is way too repressed to just have sex with an attractive someone he’s known intimately for a month or two, Magneto saves his ass by revealing he, in fact, raised this island from the seafloor.

Oh, Magneto. So extra.

My ambitious little mutant demagogue then proceeds to take the entire world hostage, showing how much he’s grown from the pompous, raving madman from the sixties. (Sure, Magneto is still a bit of a madman, but increasingly, he starts being on the right side of history.)

“I’m trying to make Magneto more sympathetic.”

“Just put him on a page with some bigger villains who are less noble, like the Vanisher, Count Nefaria, or…”

“Reagan, Thatcher and Brezhnov?”

“Er.” (Uncanny X-Men 150)

It’s obvious Magneto is being pivoted as a more noble villain, codified into the well-intentioned extremist we know and love today. Not only do we get the first hints at his past, fleshing out his motivations, he’s also not wrong. Humans are historically not great at taking care of the planet or each other.

When the Russians call his bluff and launch nukes at Magneto’s new island, he quickly disarms them. His retribution is swift and ferocious: the entire citadel is a machine that massively amplifies his powers. He sinks the submarine that launched the missiles, condemning the entire crew to death, and he casually erects a vulcano in a Russian city in Siberia.

Damn. Not messing around this time.

Despite his good intentions, Magneto is still definitely in the wrong: not only because of his methods, but as Scott points out: if Magneto unifies the world under his kind of benevolent dictatorship, all of that will simply fall apart as soon as Magnus dies.

In a way, Magneto is just as big a dreamer as Charles is: Charles believes in peace and integration, whereas Magneto believes his iron fist will be enough to make a perfect world happen. Both of them ignore the reality that acceptance is difficult and messy, because you’re trying to change essential human nature: the fear of the other. Magneto believes in big, sweeping gestures that will fix the world in move, while changing the world is also boring, hard work. One step forward, two steps back. Magneto just wants to leapfrog to his ultimate goal.

The X-Men fly over the citadel, returning from Antarctica, and their plane crashes into the ocean. (Magneto does not brook planes over his territory, humans!) The Professor is also nearby, looking for Scott with Moira, Peter Corbeau and Carol Danvers. The X-Men sneak onto the island, but to their horror, their powers are nullified by some machine of Magneto. They reunite with Scott, who formulates a plan to thwart the would-be ruler of the world.

While the rest of the X-Men go to trash the machine, Storm, Kitty and Lee infiltrate the control chamber where Storm finds a sleeping, shirtless Magneto. Once again showing her terrible taste in men, she is not weak in the knees at the sight of a sleeping Magnus: instead, she contemplates killing him.

Storm knows how dangerous he is, but she also knows that he’s a great man who’s fighting for ideals, no matter how misguided. She hesitates too long: Magneto stirs, suspects an attack and tosses her out of the window, to her death.

Magneto quickly undoes the sabotage the other X-Men have wrought to his machine. A fight erupts. Storm, meanwhile, has managed to grab hold of a ledge. She crawls back up and smashes an important-looking computer, restoring everyone’s powers.

The battle turns grim, but Scott sends Kitty away to wreck Magneto’s machinery. She sneaks off, following Scott’s orders and destroying both Magneto's power-up device and all of his plans by phasing though the computer circuitry. Magneto senses this and furiously gives chase. Overcome by rage, he attacks Kitty and disrupts her phasing power with a magnetic bolt, seemingly killing her?

Everything about this story beat is great: mama bear!Ororo, mournful Magnus and even the fact that Kitty’s godawful outfit serves a narrative function: highlighting to us (and Magneto) just how young she is. The fact that Kitty’s Jewish is just icing on the cake. (Uncanny X-Men 150)

And thus, the softening of Magneto commences. 1981 might be a year with wildly varying narratives, but it has given us at least three enduring legacies to the X-Mythos: a new kind of Magneto, a fondness for dystopian futures and the character of Kitty Pryde, who's really come into her own this year.

Ugliest Costume: Kitty! Purposefully, but still. Best costume, by the way, goes to Destiny, with her creepy, creepy golden mask. Just imagine this lady casually strolling across a battlefield, eerily calm and collected, dodging everything you throw at her. Awesome design.

Best new character: I usually pick one character - what good is having a shared award when declaring the best of anything? - but this year, it’s going to one of my favorite couples: Mystique and Destiny. Can’t wait to see more of them.

Most audacious retcon: Blob somehow retroactively becomes a member of the original Brotherhood, which is not what happened. Ever weirder is Xavier pondering that he never met Magneto before his attack in X-Men #1, while their cordially adversarial relationship rooted in a youthful friendship would soon become a cornerstone of the X-Men.

What to read: Uncanny X-Men 141 - 143 and 150 - 152

88 notes · View notes

xmenvevo · 2 years

Text

something that bothers me a lot about post-80s rogue is that for most of that time, unless claremont is writing her she loses all her dirtrock punky alt girl energy and she’s just some variation of xmen tas yeehaw southern thottie which is like.... yes this is also rogue....but it’s not all of her and a HUGE part of her that people love to not get into in comics and adaptations (save evo my beloved) is that she’s a freak, she’s a weirdo. she’s ROGUE.

like it’s not just a edgy codename it’s very much a warning label. she is rogue, she’s a loose canon, she’s out there on the edge and she’s gonna do what she’d gonna fucking do so eat shit if that’s not what you wanted. she’s both an outsider because of her actions and because even within the xmen she’s on the “cannot pass” list. and also the shit list.

i really do not like a lot of 90s-00s rogue content. i don’t like a lotta modern rogue content. mainly because i think a lot of people forget that she was raised by MYSTIQUE AND DESTINY, STALKED AND ATTEMPTED TO MURDER DAZZLER and was just generally out here being an absolute raging psycho and like.... NEVER LOST THAT CAPACITY and how these things are a part of her and they effect her thinking and her character to this day.

like in axis they have her trying to sTOP??? MAGNETO???? FROM KILLING A NAZI???????? WHO JUST TRIED TO PUT THEM ALL IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP????? they literally have her condemn him for killing the red skull and i’m sitting here like “you can’t tell me that mystique’s daughter who’s already Killed People and one of those on tv is telling MAGNETO OF ALL PEOPLE he’s wrong for doing this” like shit lbr she’d’ve handed him the rock.

something that forever irks me is how in the comics there’s very little work to actually integrate her into the gang she just is pals with people. people like nightcrawler and storm who dead ass looked in her face when she was 17 and told her to fucking choke when she came begging them for help. some of that gets smoothed over when she tries to basically commit suicide by bad guy saving logan’s wife but then we lose all the progress between her and the aussie era xmen team at least when they brush off her sa in genosha and carol stealing her body and robbing her of her autonomy. she’s literally weeping and storm tells her she deserves to die then all the girls take carol on a shopping spree. and then in later 00s comics storm’s calling her anna marie!!!!! fuck you!!! that’s not earned!!!! we did not ever see storm apologize for treating a late teen/young woman she was in charge of like that. how can you expect me to accept this relationship when you do not show me them healing from this??? bc i’d really like!!!!! to not black out with rage over this!!!!! i wanna enjoy their interactions!!!!

there’s several other places like this where it’s just-- yall the work is not there... it’s not..... i don’t like how rogue gets handled sm.... she’s not a southern belle bombshell...... she’s the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. she listens to heavy metal and gets in bar fights. when she loses her powers, she gets a full fucking arm sleeve (which i’m STILL bitter is gone) and opens up a fucking motorcycle repair shop.......

okay this is getting too long and it’s GENUINELY incomprehensible because i actually have a LOT of thoughts about this shit and they all go all over. i’ll probably do some like.... actual posts with panels and issues and things so i can better explain my issues with how rogue gets handled bc i love her and i want her to be punk rock again so bad

#like let's be clear i LOVE rogue a LOT and i love xmen but i will also beat everyone with a tire iron over this shit #i'm really very very VERY firm about my thoughts on her characterization/aesthetic/etc and i will not move on these #bc i think they're very important and i'm really sick of characters getting watered down/mainstreamed/made more ad friendly #she's a neurodivergent child soldier who wears gimp suits so she doesn't kill people and go insane from her curse of being a soul prison #let her say fuck be messy wear huge ass goth boots and blare white snake or w/e #stop with the basicification of people it's killing me

8 notes · View notes

imperiuswrecked · 3 years

Note

Hi! I’ve seen a lot of posts calling the Maximoff twins Jewish. I haven’t yet seen that in the comics (me personally), and I’ve heard statistically irl many Romani are Muslim (Wikipedia, so take with grain of salt). It would be pretty cool to see Muslim representation, too, but I was wondering if the twins say anywhere that they have a religious leaning, or is that an assumption because of Erik’s faith? If anyone would know, I figured you might! Peace

Disclaimer: I will always reject the Maximoff Retcon until my dying day and as of writing this it has not been undone by Marvel yet, so I will continue under my firm belief that Erik and Magda are the Maximoff Twins father and mother.

Before I reply I would like to link you to this post that travels through the decades of Erik, Magda, Pietro & Wanda's shifting ethical backgrounds and current status. LINK

I would like to say this, not with the intent to disregard your thoughts which I think are very valid and interesting, but to say I really feel it would be wrong to have the Maximoff Twins as Muslims simply because we already have very few Jewish characters, and Jewish Romani too. So I would not wish to take that away and change the Twins religious leanings unless a writer actually spends time writing out why and showing the process of someone becoming a Muslim convert which is something that's never really seen in comics. Still I feel them being Romani was always more highlighted and focused than them being Jewish and I would rather a writer focus on them exploring their Jewish Heritage rather than change it to another religion. It would be great if Marvel or others show Romani Muslims in the comics but given the state of Anti-Arab and Islamophobic writing that has been evident in comics for a long time then it's very unlikely that would happen.

The Maximoff Twins (to the best of my knowledge) never explicitly say they are anything but Romani. they do not acknowledge any religion and I tend not to count the ones showing them around Christmas/General Holidays because let's face it, comics are very Christian religion dominated and it becomes the default for every character to just throw on a santa hat, get a tree, and give a gift, etc. Django and Marya Maximoff, the Twins adopted parents, are also Romani and we have never seen anything contradict that nor shown what type of Religion they may have.

Please take all my thoughts here with a grain of salt as well and know that I personally do not have a vast deep knowledge of Judaism/Jewish People except through my own personal readings and any Jewish fans who read this and want to put in their thoughts please do; As far as I know to be Jewish, one must be born to a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism.

In the comics there is no doubt that Erik (Max) is Jewish, however Magda's backstory has always been murky and undefined other than she is Romani and the Twins mother and was married to Erik. There is nothing to say that Magda never converted to or wasn't already Jewish Romani to begin with. So until comics come out and state that then it's best to assume that the Twins are Jewish Romani due to their parentage. The best place to see Erik and Magda's younger years is in Magneto: Testament, a graphic and emotional story of Erik back when he was Max, and as a child who lived through Nazi Germany/Concentration Camps, and how he first met Magda.

#magneto #erik lensherr #magda eisenhardt #pietro maximoff #wanda maximoff #quicksilver #scarlet witch #tw: holocaust #imp answers

40 notes · View notes

avionvadion · 4 years

Text

Magneto is a very interesting character/villain, and the takes on him being a parent is kinda hilarious because they all vary.

This is a dude who lost his parents during WW2 due to their religion, and barely survived himself due to his mutation and both Captain America and Wolverine coming to liberate the concentration camp he was trapped in. Then, years later, he proceeds to get persecuted AGAIN only this time for being a mutant.

So he decides to rally mutants together and try to defend themselves to avoid another Holocaust happening- only, by doing so and targeting humans, becoming the very thing he hated and was trying to avoid in the process. So after being stopped by the X-Men time and again (whether it’s by trying to wipe out humanity by straight up killing them or turning them all into mutants) he learns his lesson.

If we go by the movies- Magento decides to move to Poland(?) and take on a new name. There he meets a lady and he tells her the truth about himself, and she accepts him. They have an adorable little girl named Nina (I swear to god that name is cursed. If you’ve seen FMA/B you know what I mean so brace yourselves) who can talk to animals and even control them to an extent.

Meanwhile Magneto works in this factory under the name of Heinrich (Henryck?) instead of Erik, and he’s been a really good guy for a while. This is shown when a giant metal pot of boiling liquid falls and is about to crush his co-worker, but Magneto stops it to save the guy. Unfortunately, because he freaking SAVED A MAN all his coworkers decide to tattle to the police that he’s a metal using mutant, so the police then KIDNAP HIS DAUGHTER.

(Please note earlier Magento was singing a really sweet song to his daughter when she was being tucked into bed, and she was asking him where he learned the song and he was all “From my parents, and they from theirs. You’ll learn from me, and your children from you” and it was the softest freaking thing. And he promised to never leave her.)

But anyway he admits to being Magneto to the police and they trade his daughter for him, but the girl starts freaking out because her dad was being taken away and he promised he’d never leave so all the animals in the forest start attacking the police and the police freaking SHOOT THE GIRL AND HER MOTHER DEAD.

So, because clearly surviving the Holocaust and being persecuted for being a mutant wasn’t enough, the one time he tried to save someone and do the right thing it got his family (the one good thing in his life) killed. So Magento loses it again. Meanwhile Quicksilver (who is portrayed as a good boy in this) is still alive because Magento is his dad but Magneto never knew about him since he left his mother before Quicksilver was born.

NOW. Movies aside, let’s go to the cartoons.

Evolution! Magento keeps Quicksilver by his side (who is super bratty in this) but tosses Wanda into an institution because her powers were too much for him to control/handle. As such she grew up very unstable and her powers lash out with her emotions, so she has to remain calm to control them. After Wanda breaks out she makes it her mission to kill him, but stuff happens and Magento has Mastermind change her memories so she stops hating him.

Wolverine and the X-Men! Magento had built a mutant-island paradise known as Genosha. Quicksilver is still a brat and is kinda the family failure (ouch) but Magento’s two daughters Wanda and Polaris live with him. He is the most PROTECTIVE FATHER TO HIS GIRLS and that’s where it gets funny, because he’s so soft with them. This is actually the whole point of this post.

Like, Wanda meets Kurt and she’s flirting because he’s a gorgeous fuzzy blue elf of a gentlemen with a German accent and a prehensile tail, and Magneto literally CRINGES when she informs Kurt that Magneto is her dad because (being the enemy of the X-Men and Wanda’s dad) he feels like he just indirectly ruined her chance of getting a boyfriend. He didn’t, but like it was freaking hilarious.

Magneto, internally, as he turns off the screen he was using to observe them: “Oh gods he knows she’s my daughter. He won’t ever date her now. FUCK.”

And then with Polaris- she’s the family baby, I guess, so he keeps her inside Genosha at all times. He doesn’t want her to face the prejudice in the outside world for being a mutant. So when she meets Gambit, Wanda and Magneto are both like “HELL NO” and throw him in prison after they smooch.

Gambit: “So, uh... how long do you usually stay here?”

Fellow inmate: “Depends on the crime. What’d you do?”

Gambit: “...I may have been on the receiving end of a kiss from the “king’s” daughter.”

Fellow inmate: “...Wanda???”

Gambit: “Polaris.”

Fellow Inmate: “...”

Fellow Inmate: “You might wanna make yourself comfortable.”

And this entire post was to just sum up those last two scenes, but HOLY FRICK.

The varying ways of Magneto being a dad is ridiculous and hilarious. He’s either a total jerk-wad of a parent to all kids, completely disowns Quicksilver, Quicksilver is a good boy who doesn’t know his dad and his dad is a super soft father to his kids, Magento is incredibly soft and protective over his daughters while disowning Quicksilver (again), or Quicksilver and Wanda are just adopted for their powers while Polaris is the only one actually blood related.

#x men #magento #erik lensherr #wanda maximov #pietro maximov #Polaris #x men evolution #wolverine and the x men #x men movies #x men spoilers #kurt wagner #nightcrawler #remy lebeau

146 notes · View notes

81scorp · 2 years

Text

Constructive criticism: X-Men first class

Ah yes, X-Men first class. After X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned out to be a rushed, incompetent and excecutively meddled piece of meh, the studio folks at FOX panicked and hit the reset button. Since their cash cow franchise had been so utterly trainwrecked there was no idea in continuing on the track they were currently on. Better to go back to square one and go in a new direction. You gotta keep making those mutant movies or the rights will revert back to Marvel who might actually make a good X-Men movie, and we can`t let that happen. So... X-Men first class was a big step up from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, (That`s not very hard though.) and better than the X-Men 3 that we got. We got to see Charles Xavier really put his telepathic abilities to good use, some good character developing scenes with Magneto and some nice dialogue between the two of them. But it still had some questionable descisions. Like killing off the only black guy in the group. The guy who has the power to adapt to and survive pretty much anything. Not only that but the way he was killed off was pretty dissapointing. At first I was gonna do a CC were I just bring up a few points and suggest how they could be improved. But then I thought "What if this had been made in an alternate universe where X-Men 3 and XO: Wolverine were good?" Then they wouldn`t have to completely reboot it and distance themself from the first movies. They could have made it a prequel that could still work with the continuity of the previous movies. So... if I had a mutant buddy who could phase me back in time to my younger body, so that I could make some changes to this movie... What would I change?

Plot The 1940s, Poland: Erik Magnus Lehnsherr (Magneto), a young woman named Magda and a young man named Gregorij have escaped from a concentration camp, Nazi soldiers are chasing them. Gregorij is shot, Erik uses his powers in self defense to kill the two soldiers who chase them. Magda doesn`t see him use his powers. Back at the concentration camp a soldier has to break the news that the three prisoners have escaped to the camp`s head scientist: Dr Nathaniel Essex. (That`s right! In my version Mr Sinister is the bad guy! Makes more sense than Sebastian Shaw.) The 1960s, Brazil: Erik has found two former Nazi officers in a bar. He talks to them, interrogates them and then kills them. The 1970s, a trainstation: Erik is sitting at a table waiting for a train. A young Charles Xavier sits down next to him, they talk and Charles reveals that he`s a mutant, a telepath to be more precise. He says to Erik that he hasn`t read all of his thoughts, he only "skimmed the surface" and talks to him about how mutants and humans should help eachother. Erik disagrees with some of what Charles is saying but feels that he may have a point in some areas. Charles, noticing that Erik has a train to catch, gives him his card and hopes that they will meet some day in the future. Erik takes the train to meet a man in an office, (let`s call the man Fritz) who used to work with the nazis. Erik interrogates him, kills him and takes some documents from him. One of the documents is a blueprint of a helmet that protects your mind from telepaths. He also finds a knife with a swastika on it. The 1980s: Charles Xavier (who is not in a wheelchair yet) is now a professor, he lives in a mansion and is trying to get his invention Cerebro to work, he gets a little help from Dr Moira MacTaggert but it`s not going so well because, as Moira keeps reminding him, she`s "a geneticist, not a bloody engineer". She also mentions that his inside guy at the FBI has found something for him: an escaped orphan who can fire red energy beams from his eyes is believed to be hiding in the area. Since Cerebro isn`t fully functional yet Charles has to find him the old fashioned way. That same night: We see a boy in his early teens (Scott Summers) out walking, wearing a blindfold that he sometimes is forced to lift to see where he is going. He manages to get a good look at the area before he quickly shuts his eyes and puts the blindfold back on again. He`s been doing this for a while and gotten good at it. Charles finds him, unfortunately so does a hulking brute named Blockbuster. Scott defends himself against BB but BB is to strong. Charles arrives and is just about to knock BB with a telepathic punch... when some scrap metal comes flying and knocks BB. It`s Erik who showed up and saved Scott! Charles is happy to see Erik again and recruits him and Scott. BB wakes up a few 100 feet away from where Erik hit him, runs back to his boss and explains that another mutant showed up and overpowered him. The mutant had magnetic powers. That last part makes his boss react, his boss is Mr Sinister. Erik helps Charles build Cerebro. Charles uses it to find more mutants. At a boarding school he finds Warren Worthington III, a young teen with two wings on his back that allows him to fly. At a university he finds Dr Henry "Hank" McCoy, a muscular young man with a great intellect and superhuman strength. (He doesn`t have his blue fur yet.) And in a small town in Kenya he finds Ororo Munroe, a girl with long, white hair with the power to control weather. Erik builds a pair of sunglasses made out of ruby-quartz for Scott who is happy that he can finally see again and doesn`t have to worry about hurting anyone. In this scene Erik also mentions that he has studied metallurgy. At a bar in Canada, Charles tries to recruit Logan who tells him to go F himself. Charles takes the hint and leaves. (Yes, I`m keeping that scene in my version. It was fun.) One last student arrives at Charles` mansion: Jean Grey, a girl with the gift of telekinesis and telepathy. (She and Prof: Charles has already met a few years ago.) Xavier gives his students a speech where he welcomes them, tells them his dream about humans and mutants coexisting peacefully in the future and that the training starts tomorrow. What are their personalities? Scott is the very serious one and a bit of a square. Warren is the funny and, at times, immature one. Hank is the smart science guy and the witty one who sometimes competes with Warren for the title of the funny one. Ororo is the cool, confident one (but also secretly a little insecure) who sometimes competes with Hank and Warren over who gets to be funny one. Jean is a bit shy but works to overcome it and turns into the glue that holds the team together. That night: Ororo is going to use the bathroom but it is already occupied by Warren who suggests that she uses the smaller bathroom down the hall. Ororo doesn`t want that and decides to wait until Warren is finished. Warren thinks that she is spoiled. Scott bumps into Erik, sees his concentration camp tattoo, the two of them talk a little, Scott understands what a hard life Erik must have lived.

Act 2: First day of school begins. They have some ordinary classes, Moira teaches them about biology and McCoy (who has several diplomas) teaches them physics and literature. After this it`s time for physical training. They run in an obstacle course. They do well when it comes to the individual challenges but not so well when comes to the part where they have to work as a group. After the training they are all tired. It`s lunchtime. Erik does not eat his lunch at school but instead prefers to go to a cafè. There`s man at the table next to him (It`s Mr Sinister in human form.), they start to talk a little. Mr Sinister starts to talk about how hard it must be to be a mutant in todays society. It soon becomes clear that Mr Sinister is trying to recruit Erik to his side. Even if Mr Sinister`s views are similar to Erik`s he is not interested, he pays for his coffee and leaves. Xavier`s mansion: Scott walks in the hall, bumps into Jean, the two of them talk a little, she continues to Charles Xavier`s room where she tells him about nightmares that she`s been having and wants his help dealing with them. Outside the room Erik listens to their conversation. Scott continues to the recreational room to hangout with the others. In the recreational room Warren tells the group a little about himself, about how a fire broke out at his boarding school and how he saved his classmates. He encourages his classmates to share their stories, it might help them bond. No one is interested. Next day: They do the obstacle course again. This time they are slightly better at the teamwork and at the end of the obstacle course they get to fight Erik. He beats them. A little later Jean visits Prof Xavier again so that he can help her hold back her powers. Erik knows what they are doing and he doesn`t like it. Hank talks to Moira a little. He tells her that he has discovered that it is possible that mutants could develop a second mutation and that he has been toying with the idea of creating a serum that could trigger such a mutation. (I would like for Moira to have a little scene of dialogue with everyone of the students. Also, this little scene explains why Hank doesn`t look like he did in X-Men 3.) Lunchtime, a bench in a park: Erik is enjoying some alone time. He is soon joined by Mr Sinister. Sinister tells him some of his backstory (but of course he leaves out the part about working for the Nazis) He also reveals that he doesn`t age, is over 100 years old, has enchanced strength and has done some experiments on himself and added more powers, like firing energy-bolts from his hands. He wants Erik to join him and create a better world for mutants. Erik starts to consider Mr Sinister`s proposal. Later that night: Mr Sinister`s goons: Riptide, Vertigo, Arclight and Toad steal some lab-equipment from a building. The police shows up. The goons fight them and win. A beautiful day in a sunny park: Scott is out walking, bumps into Jean, they talk a little, Jean reveals that the park they are in now is not real, it`s a dream, her dream. She is still trying to control her powers and apologizes that her dream is "leaking over" into his. Scott doesn`t mind. Since this is a dream he takes of his glasses and is happy that he can do so without without hurting someone. They hang out and do some stuff you can only do in a dream, like fly, walk on water (there`s a lake nearby) and other fun stuff. It`s getting late, Scott has enjoyed their time together but thinks he should return to his own dream, they have to get up early tomorrow and fight Erik again. He leaves her head. Jean hears voices and decides to check out where they are coming from. They seem to come from someone elses dream. Erik`s dream, a forest, the night he, Magda and Gregorij escaped from the conentration camp and Gregorij was shot. Jean is there as a ghost, no one can see, hear or touch her, this is just a memory after all. She sees Erik and Magda mourning Gregorij and promising each other that they are gonna survive. A moment later Jean sees Erik and Magda serving customers at a tavern, after that she sees them getting married, after that she sees Magda giving birth to a daughter, Anya. Erik, Magda and Anya move to the city and Erik gets a job as a construction worker. One day his employer (Let`s call him Ivan.) only pays him half of what he deserves. Erik gets angry and causes a crowbar to fly and smash into the wall next to Ivan. Ivan pays him in full and Erik returns to the inn where his family is staying. We flash forward a day or two and Erik is now standing in front the inn wcich is now on fire and Anya is trapped on the second floor. Erik reaches out with his hand, maybe he can do something! Maybe he can... THUD! Two policemen strike him down. it was Ivan who led them to him. Ivan: "What a shame comrade. If you hadn`t threatened me this would never have happened." Helpless, Erik must watch how Anya dies in the fire. He is filled with rage and with his new powers he kills all the bystanders except Magda. Magda, afraid of Erik because of what he`s capable of doing, calls him a monster and runs away. Jean wakes up from Erik`s dream. Next day: The students are training on the obstacle course, Scott decides to take the role of a leader and this time they do even better than they did last time. They fight Erik and this time they get closer to defeating him. Erik is impressed, next time he might not hold back. Later, inside Jeans mind: she and Prof. Xavier put the last constraints on her powers. The two of them wake up, back in his room and Jeane leaves. A little later, a Museum: Erik watches an exhibition of the human evolution, from ape to homo sapien. He is joined by Sinister who talks to him some more. Sinister suspects that someone is eavesdropping on them and he is right. Jeane has been eavesdropping on them telepathically from a distance. She leaves and is followed by one of Sinister`s goons: Arclight. Arclight almost catches her but she uses her telekinetic powers in creative ways to escape her. Xavier`s mansion: Jean arrives, amost out of breath and explains to the others what she has seen and heard. What are they gonna do when Erik comes back, now that they know that he is involved with something evil? The phone rings. It`s Erik. He wants to talk to Charles. He tells Charles that he won`t be coming back to the mansion tonight, he`s working on something. He also tells Charles that he wants to meet him at a certain place at a certain time. Alone. Later that night: They decide to share their background stories. Hank tells them that his mutation made him a more than formidable footballplayer and earned him the nickname "the Beast". It also made the faculty suspicious, he was afraid to be outed as a mutant. He is grateful that Xavier showed up and recruited him before things turned really ugly. Warren says that he can relate to that. He had trouble hiding his wings, was afraid of being discovered, and sees Xavier as a lifesaver. Scott tells them that he used to have a brother, or maybe he still has, he doesn`t know. His father was a pilot. They were out flying, something happened with the engine, the plane was about to crash, his mom Katherine pushed Scott and his little brother Alex out the plane door with the only available parachute. Then he must have hit his head because the next thing he knew he woke up in a hospital with a head injury. His brother was nowhere to be seen. A few days later he ended up at an orphanage. His mutant power manifested a few weeks ago. Jean reveals that she once had a friend, Annie. One day when Jean and Annie were playing Annie was accidentally hit by a car. The stress awakened Grey's mutant telepathic powers which empathically linked her to her dying friend. The traumatic experience of Annie's death left Grey in a withdrawn and deeply depressed state. Moreover, not able to control her newly awakened telepathic abilities forced her to isolate herself from other people to hold on to her sanity. Her parents came into contact with Prof. Xavier who helped her out of her isolation. A year later Xavier opened up his school for the gifted. Ororo reveals that when she was little she lived in Cairo with her mom and dad. When she was just five years old, a plane crashed into their house. Ororo's parents were killed, but she survived, buried under rubble near her mother's body. This traumatizing effect left Ororo with the severe claustrophobia that still afflicts her today. (That`s why she didn`t want to go to the small bathroom earlier.) She managed to escape the rubble of her shattered home. Homeless and orphaned she was found by a streetgang of young boys who took her to see their leader and mentor who trained her to be a thief. But soon, it became too dangerous to be on the streets of Cairo so she left the city and wandered through the desert. Discovered that she could control the weather, ran into a tribe who believed her to be a goddess. They gave her food and she in return gave them rain so that their crops would survive through drought season. The students now understand each other better. Elsewhere: Erik is with Mr Sinister and the Marauders. He is using the equipment that the Marauders stole, his magnetic powers and his knowledge in metallurgy to create the telepathy-proof helmet that we saw in the documents that he took from Fritz.

Act 3: Prof. Xavier meets Erik at the trainstation were they first met years ago. It is early and there are no innocent bystanders. Erik reveals that he knows what about Charles putting mental blocks in in Jeans head and that`s why he left. The students should grow to their full potential at the school, not be constrained just because they are afraid of their powers. He also meets Mr Sinister who`s wearing the telepathy-proof helmet. Erik wants to leave Charles and join Sinister. He reveals Charles tries to convince him to stay. Sinister charges his fist with energy and threatens with violence. The students show up, ready to defend Charles. The Marauders show up, ready to fight. A fight breaks out. Angel takes Xavier somewhere safe so he won`t get hurt. But Xavier still wants be part of the fight and not see his students get hurt. During the fight the trainstation takes a heavy beating. Jean tries to reason with Erik but keeps getting interrupted. Finally she tells Erik that Sinister isn`t interested in the wellbeing of other mutants, he`s only interested in creating a superior mutant master-race, no matter the cost. And he worked for the Nazis during World war 2. Sinister attacks Charles and paralyzes him from the waist down. Erik uses his powers to steal Sinisters helmet, Sinister tries to fire energy at Erik but is paralyzed by Charles. Erik takes out the knife that he took from Fritz and sends it right into Sinister`s head. All the Marauders flee except Toad. Charles tries one last time to convince Erik to re-join them, Erik respectfully declines and wants to go his own way. He wants the students to join him but they respectfully decline, only Toad is willing to join him. Charles and his students return to the mansion. They turn on the TV and the news report about how a bunch of mutants demolished a trainstation. People don`t feel safe knowing what mutants are capable of. Charles is sad that they lost Erik but Scott and Jean tells him that they they will stay by his side, they even use the speech that he gave to them at the start of the school. What should they call themselves? The X-team? Fantastic Five? Warren suggests the Merry Mutants. Ororo hits him with a pillow. They`ll figure out a name. The students get their uniforms. Despite everything that has happened Charles and his students are optimistic about the future.

The End

Mid-Credit scene: A Morgue. It turns out that Sinister is not dead! Dun-dun dunn!

And that`s how I would do it. Not great but hopefully not bad.

Since the younger X-Men were not experienced adventurers in the beginning I decided to go for more personal stakes rather than big "we have to save the world" kind of stakes. Diving into the students individual backstories was mostly because I`m into keeping it close to the source material. But in hindsight I can justify it by pointing out that the members of the X-Men in the first movie never had any proper backstories. So in a story where you already know certain things, like if Magneto`s gonna join the badguy or not, you can always dive deeper into the things you don`t already know. (Unless doing so takes away ambiguous and mysterious things about the character/ story that made them interesting in the first place, of course.)

Constructive criticism of my constructive criticism is welcome.

------------------------ Written stuff: 42

Started writing this 2022-06-25

I was originally gonna do a CC of Watchmen but since I alreday had a finished draft of X-Men First class in my note book I decided to do that first.

Other movies on my Constructive Criticism list that you can look forward to

Watchmen (2009) Steel (The one with Shaq) Burton`s Batman Schumacher`s Batman Supergirl (1984) Jonah Hex (2010) Dragonball evolution The Spirit (2008) The Dark Knight trilogy

And as usual: English is not my first language, so if my writing doesn`t seem to flow naturally, you know why.

X-Men were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and belongs to Marvel.

#constructive criticism #Written Stuff #editorial #X-men #x-men movies #x-men first class #prequel #81scorp

4 notes · View notes

steveandbucky · 3 years

Text

from this article, which explains the two timelines, but even that was too confusing for me so; i have compiled what is The Canon Timeline of the X-Men Franchise because good lord i am a simple creature with a simple brain and i need it to be explained to me like im 5

3500 B.C.: X-Men: Apocalypse

In both the post-credits scene from Days of Future Pastand the prologue of Apocalypse, we learn about the world’s first mutant: Apocalypse. Basically, En Sabah Nur was the worst.

1845: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine attempts to explain Wolverine’s backstory. Starting in 1845 when a young James Howlett grows bone claws after witnessing the murder of the man who raised him. He runs off with half-brother/future Sabretooth Victor Creed.

1861-1865: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Logan and half-brother Victor Creed fight in the American Civil War.

1917-1918: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Logan and half-brother Victor Creed fight in World War I. (They really seem to like wars.)

1944: X-Men: First Class

In First Class,Charles Xavier/Professor X meets a young Raven/Mystique as children in Westchester. He offers her a home. Meanwhile, in a German concentration camp, Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto develops his powers under the abusive tutelage of Nazi Kevin Bacon. (His actual name is Klaus Schmidt.)

1944: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Logan and half-brother Victor Creed fight in World War II and are at the D-Day invasion of Normandy. (They love being soldiers so much.)

1945: The Wolverine

Logan jumps theaters of war and is now a POW in a Japanese internment camp when the atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. He saves an officer named Yashida from the blast. This act of heroism will end up backfiring…

1962: X-Men: First Class

Charles and Erik meet while they are both going after Nazi Kevin Bacon (aka Klaus Schmidt). After working together to build a team of mutants to fight for the CIA, they part ways at the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in part because Erik accidentally deflects a bullet into Charles’ spine, paralyzing him. It’s a messy divorce, and each has their own, conflicting view of the best way forward for mutant-kind.

1973: X-Men: Days of Future Past

Wolverine and young Professor X prevent Mystique’s assassination of Trask, but they can’t stop Magento from going all “mutant-kind first” on them and trying to assassinate President Richard Nixon. (Oh, Erik.) Magneto throws Logan into the Potomac where his is fished out by Mystique.

1983: X-Men: Apocalypse

Apocalypse/En Sabah Nur wakes up and sets off on a world domination plot with his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Magneto, Psylocke, Angel, and Storm. He convinces them to join his plot to destroy the world by giving them really cool makeovers.

Meanwhile, Charles’ mutant school is thriving, and includes teen students: Scott Summers, Jean Grey, and Jubilee. When Apocalypse and his horsemen begin to destroy the world, Charles, Mystique, Beast, and the kids (including Quicksilver and Nightcrawler) stop them.

In a random aside, Wolverine (now with an adamantium upgrade) is freed from his Weapon X imprisonment by Scott and Jean. At the end of the film, a man in a suit collects samples of Wolverine’s blood. (This will become very relevant in Logan.)(n.b. Logan not actually part of Canon Timeline)

1992: Dark Phoenix

We catch back up with the X crew in 1992, nine years after the events of Apocalypse. Charles Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters seems to be going strong, as do the X-Men who also call the school home. Things hit a snag when Jean Grey (who has aged very little since 1983), is hit by a cosmic force during an X-Men mission into space.

2016: Deadpool

Former Special Forces operative Wade Wilson undergoes an experiment that leaves him with powers. He adopts the Deadpool persona and hunts down Ajax, the man who destroyed his life.

Because Deadpool ignores the Wade Wilson character of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it seemingly takes place in the New X-Men Timeline. That being said, Wilson’s meta commentary about the multiple X-Men timelines implies its own meta-universe. But who has time for that?

(n.b. the events of Deadpool 2 (2018) are also part of this timeline)

2023: X-Men: Days of Future Past

At the end Days of Future Past,we see Logan return to a 2023 where there is no Sentinel threat and Xavier’s school is thriving with both Jean and Scott alive and well. Everyone lives happily ever after.

my conclusions:

the lesson here is "literally forget anything you saw in X-Men (2000), X2: X-Men United (2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) because none of it is canon anymore. this applies to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), except for the very beginning and the time-jump war-montage title cards." (which were the only good part of the movie anyway)

this sucks because i watched these movies back to back for the first time in the last few days. I guess I shouldn't have bothered 😔

Logan (2017) also not part of the timeline and honestly if it wasn't for Hugh Jackman and Wolverine i wouldn't bother to watch it but it's gonna have to wait bc i have the brain tired syndrome now

#emma.txt #this is for my own purposes tbh #xmen

19 notes · View notes

luci-cunt · 4 years

Note

Tell me about Magneto🤭

MAY YOU CAN’T SEE IT BUT IM KISSING YOU SO PASSIONATELY RIGHT NOW

Ok so listeeennnn tooooo meeeee, okokokok, so a while ago I went on this James McAvoy bender--don’t ask--and I saw he was in the X-Men movies, whic hi haven’t watched since the Wolverine movies/ Last Stand when I was like, actually a baby. So anyways I flipped them on thinking “yeah what could go wrong?” except I watched them in the wrong order

Anyways here’s an essay on why neither Erik or Prof X was right and the actual answer would be to compromise and these movies how how because they’re both too stubborn and couldn’t it destroyed their friendship and fucked everything up.

Also the fact that X-Men: First Class is the best Villain origin story to ever cross the screen.

Ok so spoilers ahead for X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: First Class

Now, it should be noted that I’m no an X-Men expert I just love these two movies.

So for some context: First Class and Days of Future Past are both kind of prequels, except DoFP is a prequel-sequel?? becuase of time travel?? I’ll explain don’t worry. The point is, they take place in the past where all the characters are younger. James McAvoy plays Professor X (who I’ll just be calling X for this whole thing), Michael Fassbender plays Magneto (aka Erik), oh and Jennifer Lawrence plays Mystic--who will be appearing in this essay XDD.

Alright so first of all have a plot summary: DoFP is about Wolverine getting sent back in time so he can convince a younger Prof X to stop Raven (aka Mystic) from getting caught by this guy Trask who then uses her DNA to create super weapons that irradiate all mutants. The current future Wolverine is in, he, prof X, Magneto, and a few other mutants are trying their best to survive but it’s a losing battle and their only hope is to literally change the past.

This one takes place after the events of First Class, which I will now explain.

So in First Class a younger Prof X and Magneto team up to find and recruit bb mutants to X’s school because the government wants to use Mutants to help fight the Russians (oh head this takes placee in the 1960′s right before the Cuban Missile Crisis). This is essentially a Magneto origin story and also--in my opinion--the best villain origin story to ever cross the screen.

OK so now some details on our main characters:

Magneto/ Erik Lehnsherr: a literal holocaust survivor who’s only goal in the begining of the story is hunting/ killing nazi’s, specifically one nazi who tortured him specifically and I will get into him later don’t worry.

Professor X: super smart rich white boy with a heart of gold but also enough naivete to make a lamb look like a Stephen King character.

Already you can see very stark differences between the two of them. Erik is set up as being a staunch pessimist while X is a vivid optimist, and that makes sense. X’s grown up sheltered and never wanting for anythign while Erik suffered a trainwreck of the greatest traumas in human existence hitting him over and over and over again from like age fucking 9.

Ok also tehre’s J-Law’s character Raven, who is a mutant that can change her skin to look like anythign she wants it to but her actual form is blue/ scaly/ “not pretty” (bullshit but ok). She met X when she broke into his house one night to steal some food and then they became friends, their relationship will become important later but for now that’s all u need to know.

ok so anyways, in the begining of First Class Erik is hunting + killing Nazi’s, specifically looking for this one called Schmidt because when Erik was little he and his family were carted away to a concentration camp where Schmidt witness Erik use his metal bending powers and decided to “train” him. aka physically/ mentally abuse him for years. The whole thing starts with Schmidt trying to get Erik to lift a metal coin with his mind, when he can’t (because he’s a child who didn’t even know he had his powers until literally hours ago) Schmidt puts his mother’s life on the line and when he still can’t Schmidt kills her. This sends Erik it’s a rage and he crushes some nazi heads but then Schmidt is still standing and mentions how “oh gotcha, so it’s rage and pain that’s the key to your powers huh?” anyways this tidbit and the coin will become important later trust me--

Meanwhile Prof X is graduating from Oxford/ generally being an idiot pretty boy. He’s a telepath who knows about his powers and has used them from an early age. He also wrote some big paper on mutants, which gets the attention of an FBI agent who witnesses the villains being mutants and wants his advice

However, the villains just so happen to be Schmidt, who’s going by “Shaw” now, so when X and the agents catch up to him Erik is already there and on a mission to murder his ass. Some bs happens, Erik tries to pull a submarine out of the water but can’t (T-T this will be important) and X jumps into the water to stop him because the mental stress is literally killing him.

That’s how they meet.

It’s important to note: up until this point, Erik didn’t know there were other mutants, so meeting X, who’s friends with Raven, is kind of a big deal for him. He and X become very fast friends and also have a very homoerotic montage where they become dads for a bunch of mutant teenagers, because they realize they can use X to track all these baby mutants, collect them, and train them so they don’t grow up fearing their powers.

youtube

Anyways, the other thing about this is that now that Erik has this newfound group of people that are just like him, he’s opening up, and X is helping him realize he’s actually so much more powerful when he taps into happy memories rather than fueling himself on pain and rage. This scene always makes me sob oh my god--

youtube

Also, fellas--is it gay to “access the brightest cortex” of your homies memories and remind him that hate and pain are not good motivators before reminding him that he has good memories he can draw on and showing him that his life has not been entirely painful?

YEs, the answer is yes are u shitting me??

ok so anyways--something to note about this is that X and Erik are both very protective of all their new kids, but Erik is especially so. I’m going to be getting into this more but just tab thsi thought for later :)

Now, the plot’s kicking up a bit, because it’s at this point that Erik and X capture one of Shaw’s (aka the nazi’s) main lackies and they question her until she gives them the info that Shaw’s planning on using the Cuban Missile Crisis tensions to start a nuclear war to wipe out all humans so that only mutants survive in the new world.

Obviously they want to stop him, but also, you can kind of tell that Erik is not totally against this plan, which only gets to be more later but that’s for later.

Right now I wanna take a quick break to talk about Raven--aka Mystic, aka J-Law. She and X were childhood friends and she kind of clung to him because she doesn’t have family/ anyone she can really be herself around besides him.

X insistently says throughout the movie he sees her as a sister, but it’s kinda obvious she’d be down to fuck. She has this big plotline where she keeps trying to get X to understand why it’s so frustrating for her to have to be using energy to look “human.” Because her natural form is the one with the blue skin. X doesn’t understand this because his power is easy to hide, it’s simple for him to just fake-human and have no one be any wiser, Raven, however, doesn’t have that luxury and when she tries to explain this to X it just flies over his head, insisting she hide her natural self to better fit in if that’s what she really wants.

Queue Erik, who comes in as a king of self love. He’s pretty blunt about it, but his point is basically “you’re wasting energy by constantly pretending you’re something you’re not--stop” and she responds essentially with “yeah but then no one will like me” to which he responds “then make them.”

Raven’s relationship with both the boys is used through both First Class and DoFP to really highlight their faults. X believes humans and mutants can coexist but he thinks we go about doign that by completely ignoring the pages of history of abuse mutants have suffered--and it’s mostly because he hasn’t experienced it.

Erik on the other hand will do everything and anything he possibly can to protect his new family/ people, and in his head that means exterminating any and all threats. By the end of the movie--humans become one of those threats.

The point of this whole ramble is that: they both represent utter opposites, BUT, X’s blind optimism and Erik’s blind pessimism are equally bad.

Ok so back to plot for a second to prove this.

Shaw is revealed to be a mutant himself and he also has a helmet that can block telepathy. (yes it’s the magneto helmetjasjd;fkjaskl;dfjasldkj jsut wait).

His plan’s complicated but basically: he’s going to poke America and Russia until they pop and incite a nuclear war. And it works. The whole pre-climax of the film sees X, Erik, Raven, and the other mutants all working double time to stop Shaw’s plan (AND IT INVOLVES ERIK SUCCESSFULLY PULING A SUBMARINE OUT OF THE WATER!!! BECAUSE NOW HE’S USING HAPPINESS INSTEAD OF ANGER/ PAIN!!!).

Anywho, they’re doing all this, but then some bullshit happens, the plane they’re on crashes oh and -- yeah there’s this part where Erik uses himself as a seatbelt for X it’s fantastic but anyways--

This is finally the climax of the film.

Also possibly the greatest scene in film history in my humble opinion.

Because listen--in order to stop Shaw they need the helmet off of him so that X can telepathically freeze his ass and they can arrest him or whatever. So they split up--Erik rushes into the wreckage to find Shaw and X stays behind ready to freeze the guy as soon as the helmet comes off but--

Well, vengence is just too tempting.

So when Erik gets Shaws helmet off, X freezes the guy, and he’s ecstatic, at least until he realizes Erik plans on killing Shaw.

He’s pleading with Erik because this is vengence and he can’t chose that but Erik just puts on the helmet and--taunts Shaw, pulling out the coin Shaw taunted him with all those years ago and in a mimickry of the game Shaw forced him to play as a child and killed his mother over--he slowly floats the coin at Shaws head, telling him “I’m going to count to ten, and all you have to do is move.”

But he can’t--because X is holding him--and that’s the point, Erik wants him as helpless as he was, and X can’t let his hold on Shaw go because that would mean putting Erik in danger but he’s also in Shaws head so he feels the coin go through his head as though Erik was doing it to him and the fucking cinematography in this scene is so fuaksdjf;laksjd;fjasd;lkfjadsl;asdjf;ljL:DKJFL:SDKJFL:D KFUCKKKKK

youtube

This scene is cinematic perfection don’t fucking lOOK at me unless you agree.

T-T and then, it only gets worse, because now Erik’s finally finished his original purpose--killing the man who killed his mother and ruined his life--and now he’s got a new one, aka protecting his new family aka the mutants.

AND HE’S ONLY PROVEN RIGHT THAT HUMANS ARE A THREAT BECAUSE THEY TURN AND TRY TO KILL ALL THE MUTANTS IN THE PLANE CRASH AND JSUT--

And so he stops all the missiles flying their way, and turns them around on the humans and X has to stop him but he’s not listening and the rawest fucking line in the whole movie comes when X says

“There’s hundreds of men on those ships--innocent men. They’re just following orders!”

And Erik simply replies, “I’ve been at the mercy of men ‘just following orders’--never again.”

And then he goes to blow up the shipsthen one of the other characters goes to shoot Erik and he deflects the bullet wtihout thinking right. into. X’s. back.

Paralysing him.

And just akjd;fjasdflkjasd;lfkj this scene speaks for itself

youtube

Listen just--akjdsf;ljasdlk jguys this movie has no right being this good.

And then the movie closes off with X and Erik literally begging one another to just see it their way--because they both want so badly to be on the same side but they’re too stubborn and they refuse to see compromise and just ajkdf;lja;sdkfja;sdljkfsadlkf

Ok I realize now that I barely talked about DoFP but this is already so long. The major things I was going to bring up was teh absolutely fantastic bitter exes energy that McAvoy and Fassbender bring to that movie it’s excellent but also the fact that X is literally the only person Erik goes out of his way not to kill despite standing directly in the way of Erik’s goal.

Like, you remember my whole deal with Raven??? yeah that’s x10 in DoFP (which takes place quickly after this movie) yeah so her and Erik are close, and shown to be close, but the second he thinks she endangers his fam he literally 180′s so quick and tries to straight up murder her.

BUT HE FUCKING BENDS THE BULLET AROUND X’s HEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! X!!!!!!!!!! WHO’S LITERALLY 100% AGAINST HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JUST

Ok, that’s all. By the way I don’t want to like, up your expecations too much because I actually kind of hate X-Men: First Class almost as much as I love it?? it’s very..... of it’s era, and cheesy, and dumb--but fucking magneto you guys holy SHIT

10 notes · View notes

moontours · 4 years

Note

in the xmcu magneto is canon jewish bc the holocaust was shown/mentioned in quite a few of the movies and it's a driving force for his character. what is kind of bad about it though is how a) like you mentioned neither of magneto's actors are jewish and b) some of the movies push that awful "magneto is just like his oppressors actually and xavier is right" narrative

#2. @thatgothamguy: Yeah, Ian McKellan’s Magneto is shown being in a concentration camp and repeatedly shows his tattoo he has from it through the first three films. It’s a legit thing. The Michael Fassdender version is also shown in a concentration camp as a sort of continuation of the opening moment from the first X Men film and to establish First Class villain Sebastian Shaw as a sort of immortal-esque mutant whom worked with the N*zis. Ian Mckellan lived through WW2 but isn’t Jewish. Neither is Fassbender

#3. Idk if Sir Ian McKellen is Jewish or not, probably not, but he is gay, so as a Jewish person I’m gonna say I’m okay with it even though one has nothing to do with the other and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I probably should be more upset about it! But I’m not. I like the guy! Fuck El*zabeth Ols*n though

#4. Except I’m pretty sure Judaism is passed down through the mother, so I don’t think his father being Jewish means anything, especially if Peter wasn’t raised Jewish

ohhh i see thank u all for telling me abt it!! i really didnt watch the xmcu movies jhrbjhbahjsda so i had no idea. its good that they had that as his driving force, i think that’s important but hmmm the narrative of magneto being like his oppressors and that xavier was right is very gross. it would’ve been nice if they casted jewish actors for this role just so theres more representation in media but also im not gna speak over u (ask #) if u say ur okay w it!! n absolutely fuck elizabeth olsen. as for the last point, yeah i rmbr reading smt abt that too—its a tricky topic i think and i do know that there are a lot of people who consider both wanda and pietro to be jewish as well even though its passed down through the mother

#im not jewish so jbjhasbj its not really my place to say n i dont wanna accidentally offend anyone #but this is all very interesting #im glad they established that part of magneto's backstory tho #anon #thatgothamguy #asks #i shouldve tagged this my bad omg #tw nazi mention #tw anti semitism

4 notes · View notes

erikfuckingsuggestion · 4 years

Text

the really insidious thing about playing panfandoms or greater mcu is the absolute number of microaggressions that occur that you are constantly butting heads against. in a panfandem its like "okay lets just accept that thor is real and a god, and lucifer is real, and god is real and jesus is real.” and on the flip you also have the x-men, and everyone proclaiming loudly that "we all love magneto and we stan magneto and magneto was right.” EXCEPT WHEN you actually play magneto as the jewish man he is. where he comes in and says, listen, i don’t believe any of you are gods, you’re just aliens or entities or whatever else. and then its like "hmmm i think you wont fit in here" “hmmm you cant just tell other characters they aren't gods" really? well THEY can say they ARE gods? its almost like.....everybody loves magneto... as long as he's trick or treating and eating turkey and celebrating christmas at the x mansion. and everybody loves watching magneto as long as the sum total of his visible jewishness is that he is being bullied for it, called slurs, thrown into a concentration camp and then angsting about it for the rest of the time, to make him “sympathetic.” kinda rude when these cottagecore “yoo im a pagan and i love thor hehehe” guys somehow get to express their religion through their characters (&telling that the first time they ever get any kind of pushback about that is from jewish & muslim characters played by jewish & muslim rpers who are interested in telling their own stories, too, and how they would intersect in a world where many canonically, observant jewish & muslim characters exist) but magneto is always and forever immediately shut down unless he is portrayed through a myopic lens of christianity centered bullshit.

:thinking_face:

#mcu #panfandom #magneto #x-men #erik lehnsherr #jumblr #judaism #monotheism #islam

18 notes · View notes

luanna801 · 4 years

Note

Would you be interested by a romance between a jewish and a romani character? Because I looked for it after a discussion about Magneto and inglorious basterds (ok I was initially ranting about the cringy "jewish/nazi romance" trope) and I wonder how you would feel about it. The jewish/romani romance stuff, I mean.

So I’m happy to answer this, but I want to clarify here that I think some people send me questions like these because I wrote a post about Jewish representation that ended up being pretty popular, but I am just one person who happens to be Jewish and have some opinions. Clearly those opinions resonated with other Jewish people, and non-Jews seem to have found them useful or enlightening as well, which is awesome! Hopefully that means I did something right.

But at the end of the day, nonetheless, I’m not some kind of ultimate authority on Jewish representation and the only person I can really speak for is myself. I guess what I’m worried about here is people coming to me and thinking my word constitutes The Jewish Stamp of Approval(TM) or The Jewish Opinion(TM), and it’s really not. (Insert obligatory joke about how Jews practically never agree on anything!) Especially when you’re talking about a really specific trope like this, and not something broader where there might be more of a consensus, my answer is going to be as much about my personal tastes and opinions as anything else.

Now, maybe my personal taste and opinion is all you were looking for, in which case I apologize for throwing this whole ramble at you! But I felt like it was important to clarify that, because I don’t want people coming to me and assuming my take on things is authoritative in a way that it isn’t and shouldn’t be.

To get to the question itself finally, I think to talk about Jewish/Romani romance, you have to talk about the larger connections between the Jewish and Romani communities, and also the limitations if you ignore their differences.

The most obvious connection between Jews and Romani people, in the modern era, is that we were the two groups most affected by the Holocaust, and arguably the only two intended for complete genocide. Beyond that, there’s certainly a shared history of persecution that goes back centuries. Both groups were ‘Othered’ throughout European history, at times forcibly expelled from several countries, and similarly stereotyped as shifty and untrustworthy.

There are also certain cultural similarities, though I’m not well-versed enough in Romani culture to talk about this at length. Both Jews and Romani people describe themselves as a diaspora, scattered across the globe. Both have a strong sense of ethnic identity and tradition that they’ve struggled to maintain while often being, as Judaism would put it, strangers in a strange land. Some of our traditions are similar, in particular from what I know some of our mourning customs, but again I’m not really knowledgeable enough to talk much more about that.

I think because of some of these similarities, there’s a certain solidarity between Jewish and Romani people, at least in some cases. Yet I also think it would be very dangerous to conflate the two and ignore our many differences. These are unique cultures, each with our own individual histories and traditions, and despite some similar patterns of persecution in our past, we honestly haven’t historically had much to do with each other, and don’t really to this day. I can certainly say that Jews have often kept to themselves, in segregated Jewish communities and sometimes forcibly confined to ghettos, and maintained a separateness of identity even when it wasn’t enforced by law. From what I know, that’s also the case with the Romani community.

It’s also worth noting that both groups have rules against intermarriage, although of course not every modern Jewish or Romani person cares to abide by those. That could theoretically be a hurdle for any Jewish/Romani romance, though there’s also no reason that someone couldn’t be both Jewish and Romani, either because they have both in their ancestry, or if they’re, for example, a Romani person who converted to Judaism. From my knowledge, that’s a pretty rare thing, but ‘rare’ and ‘nonexistent’ are definitely not the same thing.

I think a Jewish/Romani romance could absolutely be done well, but I’m wary that there’s an underlying logic here which assumes our groups are more similar and homogenous than they actually are. I also worry that overemphasizing our similarities risks defining who we are solely by that shared history of persecution and genocide, when of course being a Jewish or a Romani person is about so much more than that. If I saw a Jewish/Romani romance, I’d want to see the individuality and uniqueness of both groups respected, not have the two conflated as if going through the Holocaust somehow makes us interchangeable.

(Also, needless to say, there would be a HUGE difference between a Jewish and Romani person who, say, met in a concentration camp - which is how Magneto and Magda’s relationship was written, I believe - and a Jewish and Romani person meeting in the modern day. There’s that shared history, certainly, but above all we’re PEOPLE who generally talk about the same sorts of things anyone else does. I find it very unlikely that a Jewish and Romani person in the present day would just sit down like “Hey, the Holocaust sure was a thing our ancestors went through, huh?” out of nowhere.)

#replies #anons #representation #jews and judaism #romani #... I have a lot of thoughts about this oops #rambling

6 notes · View notes

obscureobsidianreblogs · 4 years

Text

X-Men Characters Ranking (I) The Worst

These characters aren’t what I would call the worst in the sense that I hate them and I don’t want to see them ever again, because I don’t dislike them as much as I hate how writers have treated them, many of them being basically anything other than plot devices and never having a chance to become better characters. I don’t think there’s no hope for them, only that I haven’t seen them getting chances to prove me there is.

Thunderbird/John Proudstar

This character is a joke in the worst sense of the word, basically being known as “Guy who died and unlike the rest didn’t come back”. It has reached a point Joanthan Hickman needed to create an explanation in-universe to why the hell this is the case!!! The fact all of this happens to the first native american member of the team is unfortunate. Thank God John’s own brother James, Forge and especially Danielle Moonstar came soon after to fix that.

Slipstream/Davis Cameron

I don’t want to sound mean, I really don’t want to, but I really, really, really don’t care about this character. How’s possible for a legend like Chris Claremont, who created so many memorable characters, create one so devoid of any interesting quality? If you want a X-Men male character who’s a surfer, just go with Havok in X-Men Evolution. Her sister Heather is a slightly better case, mostly thanks to the revelation that she’s actually part of Shi’ar royalty and we see her dealing with her body changing while she discovers her inheritance.

Joseph

Initially introduced as a possibly rejuvenated Magneto who decided to undo Magneto’s wrongdoings, what could have been the perfect opportunity to develop the character of Magneto was quickly wasted when writers at the time thought It would be more interesting to make him the third party in a love triangle involving Rogue and Remy. The revelation he was actually just Magneto’s clon and his death proved how much they regretted creating him.

Feral/Maria Callasantos

Maria’s backstory on paper could be a perfect way to create a compelling character: abused since her childhood, and killed her stepfather to protect her sister. Unfortunately Feral was created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld, who were more interested in action and fights than in writing compelling characters, and in Maria’s case it really shows. Her perpetual hostility towards her teammates quickly made her unlikeable, and soon after she was written out of the team. But while characters like Shatterstar have become fan favorites thanks to the works of writers like Peter David Feral has remained a character no writer has bothered to do anything with her, except depower her after the House of M event to later made Sabretooth kill her.

Maggott/Japheth

None of the characters that joined the X-Men after the events in Operation Zero Tolerance became universal fan-favorites, but while Marrow and Cecilia Reyes have managed to still pop-up here and there occasionally, Maggott quickly became the fandom’s punching bag, being an usual entry in the “worst mutants/powers” lists and soon after his debut became killed. In a concentration camp, just so his death could be anymore fucked-up. Yikes.

Omega Sentinel/Karima Shapandar

The idea of a biosentinel who still retains her humanity and which she uses to fight against her programming to team-up with mutants and become their friend instead of hunting them down is pretty compelling. Despite that Karima has become a punchline for her tendency to be a character who tends to get possessed or brainwashed too much in a franchise and a genre where character being possessed or brainwashed has become commonplace. It seemed like that cycle was finally going to finish after Brian Wood decided to published an all female team on his X-Men run and decided to make Karima turned back into a human but stay with her mutant friends, but all of that got thrown away when Jonathan Hickman took over, make her a biosentinel again and because he really wants to push the narrative of us vs them he made her team-up with the evil human organization who wants to wipe out mutants, because he says so. Thanks Johnny.

Lifeguard/Heather Cameron

Like I already said above Heather is a slightly more interesting character than her brother Davis, especially after the reveal of her Shi’ar ancestry and her transformation to a much more alien appearance. Although I must admit I initially dislike the character for completely petty reasons. More specifically, the fact she was introduced and paired up with Neal Shaara when Psylocke’s death was still recent, because Neal was sentimentally involved with her at the time. Shipping tends to do those things.

Stacy X/Miranda Leevald

The accusation of female characters being created just to eye-candy is one that I think gets thrown around in excess lately, but in the case of Stacy X it’s pretty much the perfect textbook example. She’s introduced as a prostitute, wears revealing clothing, her powers cause orgasms, flirts with a lot of her male teammates, and let’s not forget that infamous time Chuck Austen thought it would be a good idea to write her saying she was going to watch porn after getting in an argument. Classy. The worst part is that her example was so obvious that she never became really popular among fans, and the writers quickly got rid of her in the most unceremonious way possible, depowering her in the aftermath of House of M, without bothering to even give her the opportunity to be a better character. However, I think there’s still hope for her. In the recent Domino Annual Gail Simone gave her a heartbreaking moment in which Miranda had the opportunity to express how she dealt with her power’s loss and how it affected her.

Sunfire/Shiro Yoshida

I really want to like Shiro, I really do, the issue where he was introduced is still one of my favorites from the Neal Adams and Roy Thomas run. But it’s so obvious writers don’t know what else to do with him except remind people that he doesn’t like teamwork over and over again, feeling like an excuse to include him as little as possible. Also this is a much more shallow reason to dislike him, but I really think he needs an urgent redesign to get rid of that horrible mask.

Thunderbird/Neal Shaara

His backstory, about discovering a new secret biosentinel program that took advantage of India’s most disadvantaged population while looking for his missing brother, is actually one of my favorites on any X-Men character, being emotionally compelling with some social critic sprinkled over it. Unfortunately once he joined the team the most he did was get romantically involved with female teammates, first with Psylocke, a reason I’m sure a lot of fans at the time hated him because she was with Archangel, although tbh it never bothered me that much, and then with Lifeguard. The fact that after Karima Shapandar, the character that got turned into a biosentinel while helping him look for his brother, joined the X-Men no one single writer bothered to make him meet her again despite it was confirmed he retained his powers after House of M shows how little interest writers were in him. Ouch.

Revanche/Kwannon

Although it seems like now with Fallen Angels and Hellions they are trying to make her a much more interesting character, there’s still the fact the character was created an introduced just to have a revealing twist about Psylocke’s body swap, and after the writers realised they didn’t know what to do with her and neither they wanted to fix that, they took the easy way and got rid of her making her contract the Legacy Virus so she could die and they could keep Psylocke being a sexy purple-haired ninja.

Vulcan/Gabriel Summers

I don’t think X-Men: Deadly Genesis is the unholy abomination many fans think it is, but even I admit they make Gabriel a character really hard to like. To begin with he’s supposed to be the third Summers brother, a mystery in the franchise that was introduced back in the 90s but that never got a satisfactory resolution, only a bunch of clues that lead nowhere and red herrings, in the main timeline at least, Claremont wrote in X-Men: The End the twist the third Summers brother was Remy all along. Anyways, so Gabriel is not only supposed to be the answer to a question fans didn’t care anymore at the time, but he was also part of a retcon, one related to a part as iconic to the X-Men cannon as it is the Giant Size X-Men published in 1975 and whose main point in the story was to show a dark secret Xavier hided to the rest of the X-Men (Still handled better than the bs Bendis wrote during the Original Sin event). But Gabriel, instead of first acting as confused as the rest of the X-Men team after they discover his existence, to later discover the truth of what happened, with him too enraged to listen to reasons and start to attack everyone wether what happened to him was their fault or not, Remender wrote Gabriel as a douchebag from the beginning, kidnapping Scott and Rachel and just being plain awful, especially to the one who was actually his niece. And then there’s the whole becoming the new Shi’ar emperor storyline that I couldn’t care less… Let’s see what Hickman does with him, although my hopes are not exactly high.

#x-men #x-men comics #marvel #marvel comics #x-men characters #mutants

5 notes · View notes

sweetvixen1996 · 4 years

Text

FUN WAYS THE MCU CAN START INTRODUCING X-MEN ELEMENTS (NOT INCLUDING WANDA VISION):

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3

Mentions of the Starjammers- a team of space pirates led by Corsair AKA Christopher Summers who is the father of Scott Summers/Cyclops, Alex Summers/Havok, and Gabriel Summers/Vulcan.

Introducing the Shi’ar, a very importance alien race in the X-Men mythos. In fact, Professor Charles Xavier actually has a daughter (kind of), Xandra Nermani, with a member of the Shi-ar royal family, Lilandra. Lilandra’s sister, Deathbird, was is married Vulcan and pregnant with his child.

Black Panther 2

Ororo Munroe/Storm- An omega-level mutant once worshiped as goddess, Storm and T’Challa were once childhood sweet-hearts and were actually married for sometime -making Storm queen consort of Wakanda- in the comics before divorcing due to a number of factors including working long hours and the Avengers being dicks to the X-Men. Storm was the first major female character of African descent in comics and is regarded by many as being Marvel Comics' most important female superhero so even a mention or allusion to her would be awesome.

Namor- There have been a lot of talk about Namor showing up in, or even being a villain, in BP2 and that would be an excellent introduction of King of Atlantis into the MCU. Namor is half-mutant and half-atlantian so he tends to have an interesting relationship with the X-Men which can best be summed up as -he doesn’t hate them as much as he hates other surface dwellers. In fact, Namor even developed quite the endearing relationship with the Young X-Men member Loa, whose grandmother he was friends with. It was even hinted that Loa herself was actually Namor’s granddaughter.

Adamantium- Most famous as the unbreakable substance that coats the Wolverine’s bones, adamantium was created in a lab by Dr. Myron MacLain for the government in an attempt to reproduce the vibranium alloy he had made for Captain America's shield. It is stronger than vibranium but not nearly as versatile. Considering Shuri’s own genius, it would make sense for this metal to be metaled.

Gentle- Nezhno Abidemi was the son of a Wakandan woman and a Russian man. All his life Nezhno was persecuted and rejected, even by his own mother, because his father was an outsider, and it was from him whom Nezhno inherited his X-Gene. Nezhno was raised at the Royal Court of Wakanda. When his mutant powers manifested, Ororo Munroe, the new queen of Wakanda, advised her husband King T'Challa to send Nezhno to the Xavier Institute learn how to control his powers. It would be kind of neat for the one of the first mutants in the MCU to come from Wakanda.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Weapon Plus Program- Within the MCU, the Weapon Plus Program is an attempt by the US Government to recreate the super solider serum the created Captain America that eventually led to the creation of the Hulk and the Abomination. However, this program would go through several iterations with Weapon X is the tenth iteration of the Weapon Plus program. Weapon X’s most (in)famous creation would be the Wolverine.

Bucky’s Flashbacks- Logan AKA the Wolverine is an OLD man and fought in many wars, including WWII. On several occasions, Logan fought alongside Captain America and Bucky... sometimes they even rescued a young Magneto from the concentration camp he was trapped in.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

America Chavez- While not confirmed, it is suspected that America Chavez AKA Miss America will be in Doctor Strange 2. One of Chavez powers is the ability to open doorways to other dimensions so perhaps, with these powers we can see dimensions such as Limbo (a hell-like dimension ruled my New Mutant character Illyana Rasputin/Magik) or even the infamous ‘Punch Dimension,’ from which (according to some sources) Cyclops optic beams come from.

The Eternals

Origins- LOOOOOONG story short, the experimentation on primitive humans that created the Eternals also gave humans the capacity to become mutants, meaning that the two groups of characters are definitively linked by a shared creator. Specifically, the X-Gene was engineered by Oneg the Prober (whose name I really hope they change).

Black Knight- The Black Knight that will be appearing in the film, Dane Whitman, is the latest in a long line of warriors to wield the cursed Ebony Blade and one of the previous Black Knights was a man named Eobar Garrington who was various close friends with the omega-level mutant Bennet du Paris/Exodus, who would grow to become one of Apocalypse’s greatest servants. Perhaps a family story or two would make mention of this fearsome creature.

Apocalypse- Speaking of the Mutant Immortal, the Externals are likely some of the only beings old enough and strong enough to have met old En Sabah Nur and can still talk about it. Also, part of what makes the Big A such a threat is his access to Celestial technology, including a snazzy set of armor. Oh the stories they could tell...

32 notes · View notes

wandaposting · 5 years

Note

Can you talk about the whitewashing controversy? I think it's a shame, but some people are acting like the people looking forward to WandaVision killed their dog lol.

They were originally white from 1964 until 1978/1979 where the Magneto connection was retconned in. Then from the late 1970s to 2014 their boilerplate backstory was that they were children of Erik/Max/Magnus/Magneto of 12 names (obv German/Jewish) and Magda Eisenhardt (usually Polska Sinti), and raised by Balkan (specifically fictional country Transia) Roma Django and Marya Maximoff with no discernible Jewish influences.

In 2014, during the height of Disney-Fox corporate childishness, it was once more retconned that Django and Marya were their birth parents, thus making them full Romani still with no discernible Jewish influences which is their current status quo.

It’s a messy situation stemming from their whiteness being carried over from the era where they were, in fact, generically white Europeans. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that George Perez revamped her design to give her the ample curls and “Transian” superhero costume, perhaps inspired by the recent release of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Transian costume didn’t last, though the hoop earrings have been known to reappear ever so often. Notice, of course, how they were still colored as white people.

Some people frequently point to this era for proof that Wanda has historical pre-2010s instances of being drawn with darker skin after all — well, no, that’s just the palette they used for white characters at the time.

That one Avengers vs X-Men: Infinite issue definitely looked promising at a glance, until you realize it was the lighting all along and the colorist made no effort to make her palette distinct from Tony’s and Hope’s.

Same goes for Olivier Coipel art. Same even goes for the gorgeous Daniel Acuna panels where she’s famously known for not looking pasty white, in the context of lighting and how every other (definitely white, not counting fanon and headcanon) character gets drawn and colored.

It really wasn’t until the era of modern Representation Matters (specifically those All New All Different 2015/2016 halcyon days) and a couple of conscientious artists like Kevin Wada decided to take a serious look at that Romani backstory, and present her as how she should really look. And that redesign was amazing. You can go into my archives and see 2015/2016 me fangirling over how 🔥🔥🔥 it was.

Unfortunately, this too did not last. The outfit is still (mostly) in use from artist to artist, but the darker skin and the distinct Roma features- not so much.

*And, before you get on my case about colorism, which has been an issue for Sunspot and Storm, that argument is less compelling here when Wanda is literally white in her initial appearance.

The whiteness is still very much entrenched in the Scarlet Witch brand. You can see this in all of her merchandise and every pre-MCU adaptation she’s ever had. Unlike Mickey Rooney’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s role or Emma Stone pretending to look like her last name could be Ng, none of these adaptations are perceived as embarrassing or dated transgressions. They are all Wanda, for better or for worse. (Update: In an anonymous ask I recently received, someone likened the 70s Romani inclusion and the 90s Perez and Busiek interpretation of her “Romani roots” to a bad case of cultural appropriation. I’m inclined to agree. They really did just retrofit a white character into culturally appropriating a real group of people so that they could give her that exotique “g*psy witch” aesthetic.)

Some people will counter with: Well, just because she’s been whitewashed before doesn’t mean it’s okay for her to be whitewashed now. And that all of this is a result of systematic racism and is gross and everyone who supports it is part of the problem.

Well, sure, but all those versions are part of the tapestry that make up her character. You can take a revisionist’s paintbrush to try and make that tapestry align more with your ideals, but at that point she becomes more your own personalized creation than what she actually is. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with stubbornly supporting a personalized, idealized take on a character, but all of that other content isn’t suddenly going to lose its fan following and vanish from the mainstream.

And the specifics of how the Romani elements were included in her backstory kind of actually were shadowed by this blissfully ignorant 1970s American kind of racism. The “g*psy witch” trope most of all. And the kind of ignorance that permeates in presenting that sort of character as levitating criss-crossed over her bed while reading tarot cards surrounded by candles all mystic-like.

If you can recall any of this or perhaps the one George Perez era panel where she’s screaming to Pietro about how “my father was a kind g*psy man named Django,” or how she’s casually written into referring to herself and her family as that slur over and over again, you can recall that 99% of Marvel Writers’ other sparse attempts at reminding audiences that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are, indeed, Roma made them out to be blindly romanticized caricatures that I suppose creatives behind adaptations would prefer not to tackle.

I don’t have a solution for the people who are hurt by this, and for the people who expect and demand for Wanda to become a vehicle for authentic Roma storytelling— something she’s never really been before, aside from a few shaky glimpses in the Robinson run. It’s not my place to tell them what to do or think, and I definitely wouldn’t tell them to stop being upset.

Different people feel strongly about different things. I don’t expect I’ll be seeing Mulan in theaters due to its pandering to China’s very problematic government with their literal concentration camps, but I don’t expect everyone to have the same feelings as I do, or hold it against them if they don’t. It’s a movie. I’m personally not comfortable supporting it, but who made me the God of Consumer Morality?

That’s the thing with MCU Wanda and with WandaVision or every other verse or artwork where Wanda is Still White. A mass snub of it isn’t happening with or without my help. If you’re excited for it, stay excited for it (with an understanding of why some may be upset)! If the thought of it breaks you out into hives, I’m very sorry to hear that (and I’m also impressed you got this far), hope you can focus on the things you enjoy instead.

#answered #anonymous #scarlet witch #wanda maximoff #wandavision #this calls again for proper caps and punctuation y'all #yeah this one's from my drafts since i wasn't even sure if i should touch it again #but here i stand let's go

51 notes · View notes