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Long Distance

#XMen ScottAndJean CyclopsAndPhoenix LongDistance

Long distance relationships can be tough, especially while fighting for mutant equality.

Short Story.

-X-

Long Distance

Xavier Institute.

Jean has this thing she likes to tell people about me (usually when I’m failing miserably at some basic form of everyday human interaction).

“Scott is horrible at feelings; but he’s the absolute best at doing something about them”.

I never feel that assessment more acutely than when I’m staring at her through a computer screen. I know I can have the jet in the air in ten minutes. I can tell you down to the minute how long my flight time would be to get to her, anywhere in the world. But just sitting here, staring into her face as she tells me about everything she’s going through – everything she’s struggling with on behalf of us all, but out there all on her own, facing down hate and prejudice, making alliances and trying to outwit the politicians at their own games of political theater – at the end of the day, when she lets down her guard enough to let herself feel frustrated and exhausted by the political process and to wonder out loud if anything she’s doing in the outside world is half as effective as what she could be doing if she was here, home, at the school, with me.... I don’t know what to say, and I can’t even reach out to hold her damn hand in a show of comfort and reassurance. It’s excruciating.

#Xmen fanficBySlymInShades CyclopsAndPhoenix LongDistance

LongDistance

#XMen ScottAndJean CyclopsAndPhoenix LongDistance

Valentines’s Traditions

#Xmen ScottAndJean CyclopsAndPhoenix ValentineTraditions

Valentines’s Traditions

The first Valentine’s Day Jean and I were together was a big deal. Neither of us had been in a real relationship before. It had taken forever for us to admit what we felt for each other. And there was just something about flowers and hearts and candies that made it all seem very official for a couple of kids who had no idea what it meant to be in love.

We got all dressed up, I gave Jean a red rose, and off we went into the city for dinner and dancing. It was one of those moments in life where you wish time had a pause button. I never wanted that night to have to come to an end.... Now if somebody asked me to make a list of the best moments of our lives together, that one wouldn’t even make the top ten. I love that memory, but that’s all it is: a sweet memory of who we used to be when we first started out together. What we had then was puppy love. We hadn’t been tested. We were still figuring out life, still finding our place in the world. We thought we had forever, and a happy ending to look forward to.

“You and Jean were going to be heroes in a world where everyone loved you... perhaps as much as you loved each other....”

The world didn’t go the way we thought it would. We lived and died and suffered, and the world stubbornly refused to love us. It hated us and it feared us. No matter how many times we saved it, no matter how much we lost trying to do the right thing: trying to secure our place in the world as mutants, and trying to win the rights so many others deserve in this world. Trying to accomplish something as simple and as seemingly impossible as peaceful coexistence.

Through it all, the one constant we always had was each other. Together, we built a team, we built a school, we built a family. What we have now is a love to stand the test of time.

Valentine’s Day still comes around once every year to remind me of how innocently we started out. Sometimes we manage to sneak off into the city for a well-deserved night out on the town. Sometimes we even manage to make it back home without all hell breaking lose around us! But, for the most part, I stopped trying to outdo myself with grand gestures a long time ago. That was part of growing past puppy love. Realizing that no matter how grand the gesture, flowers and sweets and elaborate dates are all woefully inadequate ways to express how much I love Jean, or to show her how much she means to me. I hope that my thoughts, and my words, and my actions manage to do that every single day of my life... but for one day in February, Valentine’s Day is a nice reminder to pause and appreciate the moment.

I do still buy her flowers, and I add one extra rose each year because I’m glad we made it through another year together. I know better than to take that for granted. The local florist remembers me by now. I don’t even get strange looks anymore when I come in and ask for oddly numbered assortments of roses. I buy flowers. Jean buys chocolates. More often than not we stay in. She draws a bath. We smell the roses and feed each other chocolates.

I’ve learned it’s not about the grand gestures or the things we get in life. It's about the good we can accomplish together, the support and inspiration we can give one another when times are tough. And it's about precious moments that we’re lucky enough to share with the person we love the very most.

Those are the very best moments... the best memories.

#Xmen fanficBySlymInShades CyclopsAndPhoenix ValentineTraditions

Valentines’s Traditions

#Xmen ScottAndJean CyclopsAndPhoenix ValentineTraditions

Looking Back on Fifteen Years of X-Men in the Movies. by SlymInShades X-Men: 15 Years Future Past: Part 3: Every Few Millennia, Evolution Leaps Forward.

When it comes to X-Men, I generally try not to fanboy too much over things like costumes and backstories. I don’t need the movies to perfectly coincide to comic canon. I’m fine with movie reality being a different reality from the comics. I like that I’m getting something I recognize, but also something I can be pleasantly surprised by. To me, that’s the best of both worlds. Sure, I think it would be cool to see a live action retelling of my favorite comic stories, but I’ve already seen those stories, and I can go back and reread them anytime I want to revisit them again. So why not use the movies to make something new? X1 does that beautifully. I’ll say flat out: my most favorite change to any story canon EVER is the X1 addition of Dr. Jean Grey. That was an excellent surprise, and a perfect fit. Hank has previously been the resident doctor, scientist, and overall genius for the X-Men; I missed seeing him in X1, but I love that Jean got plugged into the Beast role. When our first introduction to the character is seeing Jean Grey testifying before Congress... that got my attention, big-time. Practically speaking, being the team doctor gives Jean something to do in the story beyond being a part of the love triangle; hell, it gives her a life beyond being Scott’s girl, and even beyond being an X-Man. All of that can only make her character more identifiable and more believable. But beyond plot function, it gives her a gravitas that the character doesn’t have otherwise. Jean Grey is clearly a force to be reckoned with before we even see her mutant powers displayed. I expected Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, Wolverine, Xavier, and Magneto to be impressive, and they didn’t disappoint. But the character that most impressed me after Dr. Jean Grey was Mystique. I really didn’t have any expectations for Mystique going into X1 other than to be impressed by the look of the character. I was soon impressed by her strength, attitude, and abilities as well. You easily get the impression that she’s second in command to Magneto, more than just a henchman or a romantic liaison. In X1 she goes toe-to toe in a fight with Wolverine. In X2 she proves herself as skilled in espionage as she is in combat. She can outsmart people as easily as she can outfight them.

DOFP Mystique infiltrating the offices at Trask Industries is very similar to X2 Mystique infiltrating Stryker’s offices. It was the Trask office scene that really sold me on Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Mystique after being horribly underwhelmed (and at times honestly pissed off by her characterization in X-Men: First Class). I love the DOFP musical ques that harken back to X2, plus Lawrence’s body language and mannerisms are spot-on here to match the nuanced elegance of Romijn’s Mystique. At this point the only thing missing is that little bit of electronic reverb that was added to Mystique's voice in X1-X2. I’m always amazed by how far Singer and Fox have pushed Mystique. This is a character that very easily could have been there only to stand in the background and look different. Instead she became a major driver of the story. Her fight scenes are spectacularly choreographed, shot, and cut, to make her look as strong and as intimidating as possible. Her DOFP fight scenes are nothing short of awesome. I love the combination of cuts between slow motion and full speed, close ups that focus on her facial expression, the use of aggressive (as opposed to flirty or frilly) music, and a martial arts style that makes it 100% believable that she’s mowing down everybody in her path. No just punching the guy once in the face here; the creative team refuses to let her be a lightweight, and Lawrence deserves a ton of credit for being willing to commit to Mystique. Mystique is such a powerful character she warrants respect even when she’s not in the room. In DOFP Eric and Charles have a whole conversation about Raven without stating the obvious, “how beautiful she is” or making a sexually charged joke at her expense. They speak exclusively about her character traits, two men speaking about a woman with genuine affection and respect. Sadly, that happens so infrequently in action films that it’s really striking when you do see it play out, and there’s a sigh of relief when you make it through the conversation and no one made a stupid joke. It’s a small detail - but respect matters. It means a lot to me that X-Men holds itself to a higher standard (again, one of the reasons I so disliked X3, and especially FC: they took a lot of dumb and unnecessary cheap shots). When you’re making a movie that anchors itself on themes of inclusion and tolerance, it seems contradictory (and extraordinarily stupid) to take cheap shots for the sake of low-brow humor. DOFP is, however, perfectly willing to laugh at itself. “You’re telling me these mutants are out in the world and our best defense is these giant metal robots?” Yes, Nixon’s reaction to sentinels is the “yellow spandex” moment of DOFP. You can be very funny without being mean, stupid, crass, disrespectful, or immature. Compare the Quicksilver sequence in DOFP to the Juggernaut sequence in X3. One is classic physical and verbal comedy, the other is more like kids throwing insults on a playground. Both got laughs from the audience. No contest on which one is funnier, classier, or smarter.

My second favorite change from comic cannon in X1 is the school. In comics the school was a school in name only, and it was the X-Men themselves who were the embodiment of Xavier’s dream. Their mission was his goal. They were his means to bring about peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants. The X-Men of the comics were purposed to combat dangerous mutants. That was the world they belonged to, they were adventurers not teachers. The Original 5 X-Men lived at a mansion that was called a school for youngsters (mainly because they were teenagers and their comic book was meant to appeal to an audience of young people) but the mansion was mostly just a cool place where the X-Men lived and trained. After the O5 “graduated” there were occasionally junior team members (most notably Kitty Pryde and Jubilation Lee), or even junior teams (New Mutants) but there were never underage, non-X-Men students studying at the school... until X1 launched that idea, and X-comics followed suit. X-Men comics have tried to embrace that new reality over the past 15 years and have never really gotten it right, imo. They tend to use the school as a wedge issue (most notably with the 2011 Schism storyline), spinning off different X-factions and philosophies to pit one group against another. In the movies it’s the school that holds everything and everyone together, it’s the school that creates balance because the X-Men are not just X-Men anymore, they’re also teachers. Even more than that, they’re surrogate parents. Xavier says in X1 that, like Rogue, most of the mutant kids at the school are runaways. These kids (like their X-Men teachers) are here not because they were recruited to be X-Men but because they were rescued. They were offered a means of bettering themselves, and then given a choice: “Rejoin the world... educated.... Or stay on to teach others, to become what the students have affectionately called, X-Men.” If they do later become X-Men, that’s a matter of individual choice, not a per-determined objective.

The fact that there is a sanctuary school for mutant kids creates a subtly different reality. I think this version of the X-Men are more whole and better-rounded individuals as a result. I love the idea that the movie X-Men have to stop Danger Room training to go teach a class full of teenagers math or science, history or philosophy, as opposed to their comic counterparts who bounce from one desperate fight to the next with barely time to take a breath in between. Comic X-Men are a band of brothers in arms; their relationships are largely forged through facing adversity together. Throughout the X-comics that I love best, they play up the Institute as a home, and the team as a family. There is a lighter side, with the occasional baseball game or date night. The movies get us to the same place, but via a different route. Movie X-Men are literal family. They work, they play, they take care of a school full of kids who have no other family... then they go out and save the world as necessary. But one of the things I love best about the movies as compared to comics is the way everything is centered around the school. “Anonymity is a mutant’s first defense against the world’s hostilities.” In the comics, the O5 and the teams that follow later didn’t have to worry so much about anonymity. Everybody already knew the X-Men; they were common knowledge to the general public. If there was a purpose to their costumes beyond simply looking like superheroes, comic X-Men needed a way to differentiate themselves from other costumed teams like the Fantastic Four or the Avengers more than they needed to keep a low profile from the general public. But for movie-X-Men the goal is to blend in and not draw attention to themselves, not to stand out as a costumed superhero team. Bright yellow costumes wouldn’t be a very good means of maintaining their anonymity. So, as much as it annoys X-Men fanboys and fangirls, there’s a practical reason why they would nix the yellow spandex: mutant anonymity. It all fits.

Of course, at the end of the day, X1 wasn’t X-Men: The Animated Series done in live action, which is the only thing I think a lot of old school fans wanted - and still want - to see. But I thought it perfectly captured the essential elements of what I loved about the XM:TAS and successfully put it in a real world setting. And I remain a big believer that Bryan Singer’s sense of storytelling and direction gives these movies a depth and an artfulness that is vital when dealing with such complex source material. His is a very visual-detail centered method of storytelling, combined with a snappy, jokey dialogue that keeps the plot moving along without ever being terribly corny. “You Homo Sapiens and your guns,” Magneto quips distastefully in X1. “Eric’s always had a way with guns,” Charles notes dryly in DOFP. The dry humor exchanged between Cyclops and Xavier in X1 establishes the ease of their mentorship just as thoroughly as the constant verbal jousting between Scott and Logan establishes their antagonism. “Maybe it’s his way with people,” Scott tells Charles, sarcastically speculating over Magneto’s interest in Logan. Singer lets humor establish the way these characters interact with each other instead of introducing excess aggression into the mix. In a Marvel Studios film, you know Cyclops and Wolverine would have fought each other at first sight (much like Thor, Cap, and Iron Man did in The Avengers), just because that's the more "exciting" option. I like Singer's way better. There's a constant edge to every interaction between Scott and Logan. You feel tension every time the two of them are in the same room, there's this constant jousting for respect, this constant expectation that they're only one push, one insult away from coming to blows... and the two of them enjoy pushing each other, testing those boundaries. “You don’t like him?” Xavier asks curiously. “How could you tell?” Scott responds with a smile. “Well, I am psychic, you know,” Xavier reminds Scott. It's all tongue-in-cheek dry humor. But the fact that Cyclops and Wolverine never throw a punch keeps that prickly dynamic alive, where an escalation would ultimately resolve it. Wolverine and Cyclops feed off each other; they are two wonderfully different characters who just happen to have very important things in common. The differences between them manage to accentuate the best qualities of each man. I like that Singer played that up without giving either man the clear advantage. Cyclops gets to be cool, in control, unintimidated: unshakable; Wolverine gets to be brash, bold, irreverent: indomitable. When that dynamic disappeared from X3 after Cyclops's "death", it left a huge hole in the film and it took Wolverine out of his element. No matter how much folks want to put Logan at the center of everything, make him the star of the movie, the leader of the X-Men, the head of the school... Wolverine is not the kind of character who's meant to be in charge of everything, responsible for holding everything and everyone together. Wolverine is the guy who rebels against authority; his sharp edge keeps everybody else on their game. Cyclops keeps Wolverine from going too far; he makes sure that everyone works together. Xavier keeps all of them focused on the bigger picture, the larger goal. Everybody has a function. No one character can do it all alone but, working together, they make each other better.

Have you ever noticed the way both Xavier and Magneto are revealed in shadow at the start of X1, then they have their first conversation set in a glass corridor where there are Xs covering the walls in the background? What about the close ups of the Xs in Xavier’s wheelchair when he first enters the room in X1 and again in X2? Singer's films are filled with these little reoccurring visual ques. Just Mystique’s yellow eyes giving her away is a reoccurring visual cue for her character. Twice, Mystique sabotages Cerebro (her younger self, in the DOFP Rogue Cut, does so in a way that doesn’t injure Charles). The look and sound of Cerebro is so familiar, so consistent, and so iconicly identified with X-Men and mutants, it’s practically a character in its own right. In all three of Singer’s X-Men films there’s a running theme with Magneto casually manipulating small, ordinary pieces of metal to use them as weapons. The moment where Magneto takes guns that are being used against him and points them at his attackers is repeated in X1 and in DOFP. DOFP also sees Magneto manhandle Logan to throw him into the river in almost exactly the same way he manhandles Logan on the train in X1; Jackman's posture, even his reaction and facial expression are similar. Wolverine doesn’t like flying and has issues with metal detectors, and of course throughout X1-X2 Wolverine keeps stealing Cyclops’s stuff. Background media is always somehow pertinent to the story in Singer’s films. In DOFP there’s the obvious Star Trek clip: “We're going backwards in time!” but there’s also the more obscure Sanford and Son reference: the video playing to distract the guards as Quicksilver goes to rescue Magneto, who is, of course, his father. Or the nature documentary playing in X2 just before the mansion is invaded, eerily describing the danger about to unfold. Running jokes and repetitive visual references help tell the story on a whole other level, they keep these stories and characters interconnected over multiple movies. You don't get that kind of interconnectedness when you're changing out directors and creative teams for every film. Even the familiar introduction montage and the musical cues in DOFP that called back to themes in X2... that felt like going home again after being away for far too long! Marvel Studios makes good, fun, enjoyable comic book movies, but Singer’s X-Men films are able to transcend the genre with heart, depth, thoughtfulness, humor, and a believability that requires a lot less suspension of disbelief than most of its contemporaries. Marvel Studios makes comic book realities come to life on the movie screen. But X-Men feels more real, like real but extraordinary people are living in our world, not just living in a comic book version of our world. Sure, they have mutant powers, but aside from that they have to deal with the same problems the rest of us have: first loves, attraction, jealousy, rivalry, loneliness, doubt, insecurity. They have strengths and weaknesses, faults and failings. We root for them to overcome their personal faults just as much as we root for them to save the day in the end. They are our heroes, but they also feel like our family, even the black sheep of our family, Magneto and Mystique.

X-Men does what great fantasy and sci-fi do best. It takes fictional situations - there are people out there with mutant powers - and it looks at that circumstance through a lens that can reflect real world issues which people otherwise find impossibly divisive. But great fantasy and sci-fi recasts controversial issues in ways that makes them more accessible for thoughtful debate by putting them in a different context, letting people see things from a different perspective. In the case of mutants, we look at a lot of consequences, both commonplace and extreme, that mutants face for being "different" from the rest of society. Ask people how they feel about perceived hate groups or social rights issues and you immediately tap into deeply entrenched, deeply personal, and deeply passionate beliefs. Ask people how they would feel about “mutants among us” and maybe they can see the other side of the debate more easily. Maybe they can imagine being a mutant afraid of persecution, or maybe they can imagine how a normal person might understandably feel afraid of mutants. We see this dynamic played out to exquisite effect in X1 with Senator Kelly in his final conversation with Ororo. It takes an extreme situation for the two of them to have an honest conversation with one another, but once they do they learn that each of them feels the same way about the other, for exactly the same reasons. It’s one of many human moments in X1 that leads us to a very adult moment of realization. The real monsters, the real dangers, aren’t evil mutants with powers, or robots, or aliens. The monsters are us, or people just like us. The real evil is in each of us. The hate and fear. The instinct to keep ourselves safe and protected by holding down those who might threaten us or jeopardize our place in the world, instead of accepting that we are all in this struggle for survival together. It’s that classic line from the X2 opening monologue: Sharing the world has never been humanity’s defining attribute. So what is humanity’s defining attribute? Perhaps aggression... but perhaps compassion as well. We are beings of extremes, but always searching for balance between our extremes. We will violently resist change, but we also hate being restricted. We are constantly changing, even as we fight change. We fight for our survival, but we can also choose to help each other survive.

How do we choose to deal with issues of chronic, systematic injustice? Do we resort to violent protest to force society into immediate change? Or do we rely on reasoned argument and peaceful protest to bring about gradual political and social change? This was a hot button issue when X-Men comics launched in the early 1960's - complete with imagery of angry anti-mutant protesters and lynch mobs chasing down mutants - and it's still a hot button issue today. Magneto is the villain, but he's not a maliciously evil villain. He's misguided but with compelling reason. Much like the Senator Kellys of the world, the Magnetos of the world make wrong actions sound justifiable, right, necessary - in order to protect the innocent and secure the future. The Magnetos of the world appeal to the disadvantaged and the alienated, the "other people" that the powerful and the comfortable in our society would rather forget exist. "No more hiding, no more suffering. You have lived in the shadows, in shame and fear, for too long. Come out. Join me. Fight together in a brotherhood of our kind." They make force, violence, and preemptive action sound like the best and only options. Magneto is the villain not because he wants mutants to take over the world, but because he takes the same inherently evil approach toward his enemies that they once took toward him. He doesn't believe that humanity is worth saving. He shows no mercy or empathy for their plight. "We are the future, Charles, not them. They no longer matter." Even if his cause and goals (securing a future for mutants) are just, he's lost the moral high ground by being willing to resort to terrorism and genocide in order to secure the future of the oppressed. "The war is still coming ... and I intend to fight it. By any means necessary." Change can be forced. Victory can be taken at the point of a sword, but what kind of a victory will violence win? Don't hearts and minds have to change of their own accord in order for there to be a lasting peace, or peaceful coexistence?

Always there is hate and there is fear. The take home message of X-Men is hope. The power of hope to overcome fear. The power of acceptance to overcome hatred. And the power of family, community, unity to overcome pain, isolation, division. People too often make the mistake of thinking that hope is simple or unrealistic. There are few things more complicated or requiring of greater strength than hope. Empathy is another greatly undervalued strength, as Charles Xavier learns in DOFP. “It’s not their pain you’re afraid of, it’s yours... and as frightening as it may be, their pain will make you stronger, if you allow yourself to feel it. Embrace it. It will make you more powerful than you ever imagined. It’s the greatest gift we have, to bear their pain without breaking, and it’s born from the most human power. Hope.” Hearing that line from DOFP always gives me a chill. It really drives home how powerful empathy and compassion are as tools for change. The struggle Xavier undergoes as he’s trying to master his fears enough to use Cerebro again illustrates how much courage and bravery are required simply to meet people where they are suffering, to try to help them, to try to make yourself a source of courage and bravery for others. When we do see it in practice, the power of hope is staggering. Hope has the ever-expanding ability to inspire greater hope, to include more people in the building of a better future. Violence - even as an expression of righteous anger - has only the ability to inspire greater anger and further violence. “Sometimes anger can help you survive,” Storm tells Nightcrawler in X2. She is right in that anger can be a great personal motivator. But anger will always need a target to rail against. It will always be divisive. It will give some a false sense of power while it will inspire fear in others. “There is no land of tolerance. There is no peace,” Magneto tells Rogue in X1. “Women and children, whole families destroyed, simply because they were born different from those in power.” Magneto is righteously angered over the slaughter of innocent people by those in power, but in his rush to take action against the world’s powerful he is willing to take the life of an innocent teenage girl, and potentially many more innocent people. Too often righteousness quickly gets lost in anger. Nightcrawler counters Storm’s statement by saying, “So can faith”. Faith, like hope, has the ability to unite people and to move them together toward change. Anger can only move a cause so far on its own, and when anger turns violent people are often pushed away from much-needed change instead of drawn toward it. Change is a choice. People need reason to change, and violence isn’t reason. Violence is action. Deciding if action is justified or not, if a particular course of action is wise or not, that is reason. No matter how just the cause, no matter how great the passion, no matter how intensely we want and need to make ourselves heard, no matter how appealing we find the idea of tearing down all the evil in the world, violent anger is self-limiting as an agent of change. It can make people pay attention, it can move people to action, but it can’t make people change. Violent anger is attractive because violence is action where people are tired of inaction. But violence will never provide a solution to underlying social problems. Only reason can do that. Reason, compassion, cooperation, justice, and hope. Hope is essential. Violence might manage to tear down the old power structures, but it is hope that tells us we can rebuild, we can make things right this time, we can be better than we were before.

Maybe we don't see it as often (certainly it doesn't hit us as hard as senseless acts of hatred and violence), but hope, love, and forgiveness also replicate themselves. There is moral value in having mercy, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness, for our enemies. Forgiveness is not justice. It is not what is earned or what is deserved. But it is right, morally, because the alternative is internalizing that which has wronged you. The alternative is seeking vengeance or giving up hope; either way means turning your back on society to live by your own rules. Ultimately, forgiveness means your life isn’t wasted on hatred and revenge, isn't lost in bitterness and despair. That energy can instead be focused on making some positive change in the world. I like to think that is why Xavier remains friends with Eric over so many years. And I like to think that is why Raven ultimately decides not to pull the trigger and kill Trask. "You can show them a better path," Charles reminds Raven at the end of DOFP. Killing is a dead end, the opposite of hope’s endless potential. It’s closing a door on redemption. It’s assigning a value to someone’s life based on what they are at this moment in time, and making the judgement that they are expendable. They have no future potential to be any better than they have been in the past, no potential to be more than what they are right now, in this moment, today. It’s the opposite of everything we know about the best of what human nature can be: Always capable of change. Evolution. Redemption. Second chances. Forgiveness. Hope. “Just because someone stumbles, loses their way, doesn’t mean they are lost forever. Sometimes we all need a little help.” One of the best things about X-Men is that it makes me think about these things, and it allows me to do so in a way that shifts the debate past the arguments I'm already familiar with, beyond the preconceptions I already hold. Looking through the world of the X-Men opens my eyes to see new possibilities. Sometimes we just need to be shown a better path.

To me, Star Wars encompasses the eternal hope of childhood. Good always wins in the end. Never stop believing in things you know to be good: follow the light, have faith in yourself, your friends, your family. No matter how bad Vader becomes, even the very incarnation of fear and evil redeems himself in the end. For love of his son, he rediscovers his humanity and sacrifices himself to overthrow the evil Emperor. He manages to set things right in the end. Love wins over hate, and it's never too late to turn away from evil. There are no such neat redemptions or clear paths to victory in X-Men. When the real enemy is society, the way the world has always worked, the worst of human nature itself, you don’t get that optimism that it will right itself in the end. Individual threats will be defeated. Some characters will have Vader-esque epiphanies. Some others will fall from grace, and the would will keep on turning. The real fight - the good fight - will always be there to be fought. And the real heroes will be expected to simultaneously pull their punches, turn the other cheek, and take the moral high ground, while their enemies will show no such mercy. "How does it look from there, Charles?" Magneto asks the captured Charles Xavier in X2. "Still fighting the good fight? From here, it doesn't look like they're playing by your rules." It's not a fair fight. It's a hard, exhausting, demoralizing fight. And it's a fight where one victory, one step forward, often means two steps back. To me, this is adulthood. Taking a hard look at the world around you and realizing how truly bleak the situation is - because the kind of lasting change we hunger for tends to take many generations, if not many centuries, to achieve - like mutation itself. "This process is slow, normally taking thousands of years." But there is power in simply choosing not to give up. There is inherent value in fighting for what is right, trusting that even if you lose today, the fight doesn’t end with your loss. Your fight and your message will have the power to inspire someone else to stand and take up the same fight tomorrow. Create “enough ripples and you change the tide”.

#Marvel XMen XMen15YearsFuturePast oped SlymInShades

15 Years Future Past: Fifteen Years of X-Men in the Movies. X-Men: Every Few Millennia, Evolution Leaps Forward.

#Marvel XMen XMen15YearsFuturePast oped SlymInShades

Looking Back on Fifteen Years of X-Men in the Movies. by SlymInShades X-Men: 15 Years Future Past: Part 2: Coming Of Age.

My first introduction to X-Men was the 90's animated series. Like many current fans, this is the version of the X-Men I first imprinted on, and it accounts for a big part of my expectations about who the X-Men are as individuals and what the X-Men as a franchise should be. My biggest memory of X-Men: The Animated Series is a first impression of being struck by how adult it was. This was an animated show aimed at kids, but it didn’t talk down to its audience. It made things accessible to kids but it didn’t pull its punches for them; it trusted them to be able to handle very grown up subject matter. What kids’ show almost casually tackles topics like racism, genocide, hate crimes, ethnic cleansing and ethnic enslavement, religious faith in the face of persecution, and religious fanaticism. And this wasn’t just a “special of the week” pause to talk about something serious for a moment before going back to lighter fare. This was the underpinning of the whole damn series. Holy crap! That got my attention, as did the complexity of the characters themselves: layer upon layer of motivation and depth was built into these characters, each one a distinct person with unique history and character traits that informed their actions. That depth was drawn directly from comics but executed very well (albeit it in wincingly or gloriously - depending on your point of view - over the top fashion) in animated form.

One of the defining moments of young adulthood is finding yourself in a larger world. You leave home for a new school or a new job, maybe you move to a new place, and you're surrounded by a lot of new folks who have different life experiences from your own. Suddenly you’re not in Kansas anymore. Your world is a lot larger than it used to be. Maybe everything you knew and were comfortable with feels very far away. It can be an exciting time, and it can be a scary time. Growing up means being faced with the reality that the world around you is bigger than you imagined, and you're not at the center of that world; you're just one small piece in the bigger puzzle. The centrality of your self, your way of life, your belief system - all of that decreases when you realize there are many people out there who don't live or think or believe the same way you do... and they also are happy, justified, and confident in their own ways as right. There are two choices: accept that the world is bigger than you, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing... or lash out, trying to repress and control the parts that don't fit with your view of the world. The latter is a childish reaction to fear, helplessness, and loss of self-importance. Close-mindedness is a defense mechanism for fear of the larger world and loss of status in it. Men like Trask and General Stryker believe there is a war to fight to protect their way of life. Senator Kelly also believes, “It’s a war. It’s the reason people like me exist.” And he’s ready to start taking prisoners. “If it were up to me, I’d lock ‘em all away.” To which Mystique replies (as she’s pummeling him unconscious), “People like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child.” Mystique and Magneto also believe a war is coming, and they arm themselves for it. Senator Kelly chooses to fight his war with words and laws. He can promote himself - his brand, his views, his agenda - while attempting to restrict the rights of mutants. But he can't turn back the clock to the way the world was before he knew that mutants existed, nor can he make mutants disappear - not without resorting to the extreme sort of actions that Magneto fears are inevitable. No matter how right or morally justified men like Senator Kelly (or his religiously motivated counterpart in the comics, Reverend Stryker) think they are, the world won't bend to anyone's personal philosophy. So what do you do? You can explore the larger world, learn to accept change, embrace common ground where you can find it, learn to accept differences where they occur... or you can draw battle lines and dig in to defend your way as the right and only way.

I imagine X-Men O5 readers had that “larger world” moment when they first read Giant-Sized X-Men #1 and saw the “All New All Different” X-Men lineup for the first time. Luckily, for X-Men fans everywhere, those comic readers embraced change! Comic readers who previously knew Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel, Iceman, Havok, and Polaris (heroes who were all more or less cut from the same cloth in background and appearance) now had Colossus, Storm, Nightcrawler, Sunfire, Thunderbird, Banshee, and Wolverine (heroes who were all drastically different, uniquely individual). Everybody on this new team had a distinct background that added something to their character. Canadian Wolverine. Russian Colossus. German Nightcrawler. Japanese Sunfire. Native American Thunderbird, Scottish Banshee (and Moira). And Kenyan Storm. They were later joined by junior team member, Kitty Pryde, who, like Magneto, was proudly Jewish. This line up was taking a huge swing at diversity. As a result, it really felt like what you were seeing unfold in the comics was part of a far bigger, far more interesting world. And that helped drive home the moral of the whole series. This was a window looking into how things could be if we really put aside our differences and accepted each other. That was a huge appeal to me when I started reading the comics (after seeing X1; X1 was my catalyst... I walked out of that theater wanting to know everything I possibly could about these characters!). It felt like a breath of fresh air, a lightening bolt moment - suddenly, “This makes sense!” People from different places, different backgrounds, with drastically different life experiences, all working together toward a common goal for a common good. The X-Men didn't just say that, they didn't just believe that. They actually lived it! The ANAD comic line up is probably the gold standard for diverse teambuilding, at a time where it was (and too often it still is) typical to have one female or one ethnic minority on a team - and somehow we've accepted that as being “enough” diversity, as if a single representative can somehow encompass all the various “different” people in the world - while all the rest of the world remains composed of "regular" white guys. It was unique that the X-Men were, and still are, a lot more diverse, typically splitting their line-ups, half male half female. Plus the X-ladies were never there mainly to be love interests or as damsels to be rescued; all of them were smart, strong, fully capable team members in their own rights. That has always been a huge distinction and a great drawing point for X-Men. We have immediate acceptance of the fact that everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses. There are no weak links, certainly not for gender, or skin color, not for language, nationality, or appearance, not for sexual preference, not for religious or political belief. But as cool as it is to see these “All New All Different” folks, it's not “just” diversity for “diversity’s sake”. Diversity means something essential to X-Men. It's their defining philosophy. It's a shining example of acceptance to the rest of the world. It's equality in action.

XM:TAS didn't take as big a swing at worldwide diversity as ANAD X-Men, though they did include a few more colorful characters who joined the X-Men comic lineup in the 80's and 90's: Cajun Gambit, Southern Rogue, and Asian-American Jubilee. X1 continued that diverse tradition with Storm, Jean, Rogue, and especially Mystique all featuring prominently. And of course, X1 relied heavily on Magneto's Jewish heritage and history to explain his motivations. What X-films may lack in worldwide diversity (and they appear to be quickly closing that worldwide diversity gap with additions like Bishop, Blink, Sunspot, and Warbird in DOFP, Jubilee, Nightcrawler, and Oscar Isaac taking on the title role of Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse) they make up for in continuing and expanding upon the theme of X-Men as home and family, a place where everyone is welcome and can be accepted regardless of differences, and especially of outward appearances. While XM:TAS didn't feature Nightcrawler as prominently as the ANAD X-Men lineup did, one of XM:TAS’s most memorable storylines focused on Kurt Wagner, his experience as a mutant, his struggle to be accepted by society, and how all of that was influenced by his Catholic faith. I was incredibly excited to see that plot thread make it into Nightcrawler’s characterization in X2. As much as I love the funny, suave, and swashbuckling early comic version of Kurt Wagner, the man of faith mutant - who just happens to look like a scary demon - is a character who resonates deeply for me, on many levels: visually, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Portraying a character’s religious faith is a tricky thing to do without the effort coming off as either “religion-light” or sounding overly preachy, but I thought Nightcrawler was handled perfectly in X2. Alan Cumming was amazing in the role, and that opening scene in X2 might still be the most impressive action sequence to establish a character’s powers in any superhero film to date. Mystique and Nightcrawler are some of the first mutants we see in the X-films who don’t physically look like everybody else (Sabertooth and Toad fall into that category as well, but those two seem to move even farther away from humanity by embracing their animal-like qualities over their human ones. They would rather use their appearances as a means to intimidate and inspire fear of mutants in humans.). Mystique and Nightcrawler are fascinating for their different perspectives on the same struggle, their different reactions to the way society views them. The conversation they have on the subject of appearance in X2 cuts to the heart of the struggle to fit in. Nightcrawler asks Mystique why she doesn’t use her powers to stay in disguise all the time. “Because we shouldn’t have to,” she replies. Where Nightcrawler pities humanity for not being able to see deeper than outward appearances, Mystique resents their blindness and refuses to compromise herself to appease their close-mindedness.

All throughout the X-movies we see this theme of control and acceptance. Will humanity ever be able to accept mutants, or will humanity keep trying, with increasing force (as Magneto predicts), to control mutants? “Let them pass that law,” Magneto taunts Xavier, “and they’ll have you in chains with a number burned into your forehead.” A big part of Xavier's character arc in DOFP is dealing with control. I lose track of how many times other characters expect him to use his mental powers to "shut down" people. For the first half of the movie he can't because fear and depression have led him to "shut down" his own powers. "The treatment gives him his legs but it's not enough," Hank says of Xavier, "he’s just lost too much." By the end of the movie Xavier comes to the conclusion that even with the full use of his powers he cannot simply "shut down" Raven. "I’ve been trying to control you since the day we met, and look where that's got us. Everything that happens now is in your hands," Charles tells her. "I have faith in you, Raven." Xavier has to learn to respect the free will and autonomy of others. He has to trust Raven to make her own decisions. He even trusts Raven and Eric enough to let them walk away instead of handing them over to the authorities. “You sure you should let them go?” Hank asks Charles. “Yes. I have hope for them. There’s going to be a time when we are all together.” X-Men is very much about control and autonomy, the struggle of mutants to control their powers and use them responsibly rather than allowing themselves to be controlled and manipulated by others. We can see that Xavier has come full circle on this issue in X2 with his insistence that Wolverine find his own answers to the mysteries in his past. “I put him on the path.... Sometimes the mind needs to discover things for itself.” That decision has even greater resonance post-DOFP, considering future Xavier knows more about Logan’s life than he should, thanks to their interaction in Logan’s future/Xavier’s past. Rogue’s mutation is a more extreme example because her power is uncontrollable and potentially deadly, but she's hardly an exception in those two regards. I would have loved to see Rogue and Cyclops have a sit down after Liberty Island, after the train station, and talk about what it means to live with knowing you can't control your own powers, and there's always going to be a danger of other people getting hurt as a result. Part of being a mutant is the constant struggle for acceptance, weighed against the constant potential for catastrophic harm, and the struggle to use power wisely. It's Jean Grey who embodies the latter struggle most iconicly as Phoenix and Dark Phoenix, living out the classic axiom of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But even Storm has the power to break a drought just as easily as she can cause a flood. It's all a matter of control. Hence the great need for the school.

In every incarnation of the X-Men, Charles Xavier is at the forefront with his dream. "There are mutants out there with incredible powers... and many who do not share my respect for mankind. If no one is equipped to oppose them, humanity's days could be over." Xavier is focused on human and mutant survival, believing that the end result of mutants protecting humans will be the mutual survival of both races, eventually bringing about peaceful coexistence. That’s always a curious inverse. Within the school, Xavier's mission is to take in, protect, and educate mutant kids. But out in the world, the X-Men have to protect humanity from dangerous mutants: the persecuted minority protecting the vulnerable majority. At Xaviers’ school for gifted students, young mutants learn control, and they learn to use their powers wisely, all while being protected from the world's hostility... and in the long term the ability to control their powers will protect others as well as themselves, allowing them to live lives of their own choosing, increasing the chances for future coexistence. In a lot of ways X1 picks up where XM:TAS leaves off. In XM:TAS Xavier was the patriarch of the group, almost the grandfather (or maybe more like the godfather). Much like his comic persona, Xavier is respected, but he's not a warm and fuzzy fatherly type. Scott and Jean were the acting adults, parenting this adult family of social misfits. That dynamic always appealed to me, as did the simple quest to be “normal”. In simplistic terms, their brood consisted of: the innocent kid, the prickly lone wolf, the reformed thief, the social outcast, the brain, and the fish-out-of-water goddess. Despite having mutations that make their own lives difficult and cause them to doubt their own fitness at times, Scott and Jean were mostly normal... even as the trappings of normal life (short term goals like actually completing a normal date night or -gasp- pulling off a wedding that didn’t end in unmitigated disaster) continuously eluded them. Movie-Xavier is a lot more of a fatherly figure, at least through X1-X2. Movie-Scott and Jean share the parenting duties with him, and with Ororo as well. But this time they're running an actual school for mutant kids. We really see in action this push and pull of the school vs. the real world. The weak in power protecting the strong in numbers. I like that dynamic. And I like this movieverse version of X-reality a whole lot.

One of my favorite movie moments ever is when Cyclops pauses to smile at the kid in the train station. I don’t know that comic-Cyke would have stopped in the middle of a mission to have a moment, for a variety of reasons both practical and personal. Comic-Cyke is not an emotionally balanced guy in the first place, and he's ultra tunnel-vision focused-in on the mission at hand. But movie-Cyke is comfortable dealing with kids because that is just as much, if not more, a part of his job, his life, his mission as an X-Man. I think it's telling that Xavier sends Scott and Ororo to the train station after Rogue in the first place, when he could just as easily have sent Jean and Ororo. Xavier's orders are, "Find her, talk to her". There are no admonitions about Magneto or the Brotherhood. I'd imagine Jean being far more capable of talking down a spooked kid gone AWOL from the school than Scott, but maybe not so for Movie-Cyke. He's part of a support system built to teach and mentor mutant kids. He and Ororo are helping Xavier and Jean work socially and politically toward mutant equality. Sure, he's also training X-Men to confront other mutants who would threaten the school or humanity (and in doing so, protecting the safety and anonymity of all mutants), but for movie-Cyke that's just one piece of his life; for comics-Cyke it's more like 99.9% of his life. This guy in the train station, while still the ultra-focused and wound-too-tight fearless leader we know and love from the comics, he has a pretty well-balanced life. Sure, Cyclops and Storm are prepared to fight the Brotherhood again if they do come after Rogue, but when they walk into that train station they're not necessarily expecting trouble. It's just as likely as not that they find Rogue, talk to her, remind her that she has better options available to her than running away, and bring her back to the school, no drama. This is a guy who knows it's not only okay but necessary to pause long enough to give this kid a moment of his time. That exchange makes him smile, and it makes me smile too, every time.

There's nothing cool or flashy about self-sacrifice. People will belittle you for it, tell you you're a fool and a weakling for caring so much about others and not simply looking out for yourself. "You're a mutant. The whole world out there is full of people who hate and fear you, and you're wasting your time trying to protect them," Logan scoffs at Ororo. "I've got better things to do!" I think that's the reason why I identify with heroes like Scott, Jean, Ororo, and Kurt instead of the flashier antiheroes like Wolverine or Gambit, or even the bad guys like Magneto. I think the "boring good guys" actually walk the much harder path in life. Hanging on to hope, day after day, is infinitely more difficult than giving into negativity and hiding behind cynicism. Trying to save the world is far harder than giving up on it. "Believing that humanity would never accept us, he grew angry and vengeful," Xavier says of Magneto. Simply making a choice to be kind to others, day after day - even when you're in a bad mood and really not feeling any kindness - that is infinitely more difficult than being an insulting, hurtful, smart-ass who lashes out at others. Having the power to kill and maim your enemies, but choosing to show mercy and spare them, even when they don't deserve that (even knowing your decision means you'll likely have to fight this fight all over again somewhere in the future, and possibly at even greater cost) - that is infinitely more difficult than landing a killing blow. That decision shows a self-awareness that realizes the real enemy is not the one you face in battle, but yourself. And if you don't keep striving to be even better than the outside world tells you have to be, eventually you'll end up compromising yourself into a position where you're way too close to becoming what you started off fighting against. To me, being a hero is choosing to take the more difficult way, again and again, because you understand that how you get there matters just as much as getting there.

#Marvel XMen XMen15YearsFuturePast oped SlymInShades

15 Years Future Past: Fifteen Years of X-Men in the Movies. X-Men: Coming Of Age.

#Marvel XMen XMen15YearsFuturePast oped SlymInShades

Looking Back on Fifteen Years of X-Men in the Movies. by SlymInShades X-Men: 15 Years Future Past: Part 1: Mutants Among Us.

A year ago, in the runup to Days of Future Past, I wrote at (typically excessive) length about the X-movie franchise, my experience of it, and everything it means to me. I’ll try not to rehash too much previously covered ground, but this month's fifteenth year anniversary of the first X-Men movie combined with the release of the Rogue Cut of Days of Future Past seems like a perfect time to take a look back. First off, I’m so glad director Bryan Singer decided to release this extended cut of DOFP. I loved the theater release version but you could tell they really had to streamline the future scenes in order to properly tell the past section of the story. Imagine if we could have had this story in two parts! One film concentrating on the future and how we got there, one concentrating on changing the past to create a different future. That would have been amazing. But anyway... we did get an extended cut, and we got Rogue back! Film left on the cutting room floor is always an irresistible mystery to me, but in this case the "lost scenes" were significant enough to warrant more than just a few clips buried away in the dvd special features section, which is pretty cool in and of itself. It’s especially fitting that the release is timed to hit now. The Rogue Cut brings us full circle. Our shared journey through the X-movieverse began in 2000 with Logan and Rogue introducing us to the X-Men of the “not so distant future”. Now 15 years later for us, even farther in the future for the X-Men, it’s the end of the line for mutants and their human supporters... and it comes down to Logan and Rogue to save the X-Men, thus restoring their own future and returning the audience to a more hopeful future that we feared we had lost forever.

Sure, in retrospect I can see there were a lot of things that could have been even better. Some X1 performances and characterizations fell short at times. Some characters didn’t get the screen time they rightly deserved. The all-black leather costumes were dull and understated in comparison to their comic counterparts. Budget limits ruled out settings like the Danger Room and characters like Beast and Angel, who would need a lot of CG help to be truly life-like. But the casting was almost universally inspired. From absolute legends like Stewart and McKellen, to fresh talents like Paquin, Berry, and Davison, to relative unknowns like Jackman, Janssen, Marsden, Romijn, Ashmore, and Park. I can’t say enough good things about these actors and the way they brought their characters to life. I only wish Fox could have beaten Marvel to the “shared universe” concept by launching Storm, Rogue, Cyclops, and Phoenix spin off films. Hell, what I really wish is that Fox could have managed to keep Singer on for X3 and X4, giving us a proper Phoenix-Dark Phoenix Saga... but that’s a whole different can of worms entirely. Almost all of my issues with the X-movie franchise are not “they did this wrong” but “they didn’t follow through on what Singer started in X1 and X2". After Singer left in 2004, Fox basically abandoned the X-Men “ensemble approach” that Singer had perfected with the first two films and reverted to the Batman-Superman single hero approach with a plan to start making solo films after X3... with the first of these solo films, of course, starring Wolverine. Without Singer there to keep the focus on the Phoenix storyline he had been carefully, subtly but steadily, building toward over the first two films, X-Men: The Last Stand was re-purposed to set up Wolverine as a tragic hero prior to his first solo film. Cyclops and Professor X were killed off. Nightcrawler disappeared without explanation, Rogue left the team. Both Rogue and, especially, Jean Grey had their character development abandoned. Jean was demoted from X-Man to heartless, mindless Phoenix-monster. Kelsey Grammar's Beast was a bright spot, as was Storm's taking on a leadership role. Getting to see the younger X-Men in action was nice. But you never got the feeling any of their stories were very important. Most of the "team" took on supporting roles to Wolvie’s story in X3. If Wolverine: Origins had worked, Fox would have continued with solo films for Magneto and Xavier, but Wolverine: Origins brought that plan to a screeching halt and the pre-production work that had been put into solo Magneto and Xavier projects got funneled into what would become X-Men: First Class (2011). I suspect it was the combination of near-catastrophic franchise failure set against the simultaneously increasing success of the Marvel Studios shared universe (and especially The Avengers’ record-breaking box office numbers) that brought Fox back to the table for making actual X-Men team films again (with Singer and DOFP) for the first time since 2003's X2.

Movie-Rogue gets a lot of grief for being too far removed from her comic book counterpart. I was fine with what we saw of Rogue in X1-X2 because it was Teen Rogue, and Teen Rogue starts out with only her absorption powers. That is her actual mutation. All the other super-powered attributes people usually associate with Rogue are things she acquires later on through her absorption powers. The super-powered Rogue that we first see in X-Men comics is an adult. X1 was only the start of her story. Yes! Absolutely, there should have been more to her story, but I don’t fault the first chapter for not telling the last chapter of the story. Also, the Rogue of X1 is a teenager who just found out she’s a mutant and ran away from home after her powers nearly killed the first boy she kissed. Rogue is not gonna be over-the-top flirty calling everybody she meets “suga” at this point in her life, no matter how much every X-fanboy and fangirl on the planet wants to see her that way. I’m not saying she can’t or shouldn’t be that character in the future. I even think Rogue was already progressing toward that “classic” characterization in X2. Look at the food court scene or the scenes between her and Bobby, and in X2 she goes from being afraid of using her powers to being willing to use them when she needs to stop Pyro's violent rampage. That’s a big step forward for Rogue. I absolutely think confident, flirty, southern bell-with-an-attitude is who Rogue grows up to be, but that is not who she is at this point in her life; in X1 she’s still an uncertain kid with a lot of growing up to do. And I’m good with that. Sure, you can argue that Singer should have introduced Rogue as an adult X-Man instead of as a teenager; I can completely understand Rogue fans’ disappointment from that perspective. But it better served the story to put the focus on a kid at the school, and Rogue’s absorption powers made her a perfect sympathetic protagonist to introduce the audience to the existence of mutants. Add in Rogue’s abilities for super-strength and flight too early in her character progression and she begins to move along more of a Superman or Spider-Man storyline; the focus shifts to personal responsibility. With Teen Rogue (and Teen Bobby too), we get to focus on what it’s like simply to be a teenage mutant instead of what it’s like to be a teenager with superpowers. Honestly, I miss having Teen Bobby play the class clown more than I miss Teen Rogue being super-powered.

Yes, Rogue was plugged into the role that Kitty or Jubilee play in the comics as Wolvie’s junior sidekick. Yes, she was there to help give him some character development, give him someone to care about unselfishly. That’s all fine by me. Rogue and Logan in the comics have always shared a connection: lone wolf friendship. I’m fine with that connection taking a different twist in the movies. The real problem is in the follow through. It’s in shuffling Rogue aside for the Cure plot in X3 instead of staying with the classic Phoenix-Dark Phoenix Saga. Imagine if Rogue had latched on to Jean trying to stop Dark Phoenix in the final act of X3. Boom. That provides a way to weaken the Dark Phoenix enough for Jean to regain control, and since we have established that Jean as Phoenix is capable of literally anything she can THINK... Boom. Rogue can fly and she can have super-strength if she THINKS it. Put that girl in a spin-off film! But, sadly X3 was utterly focused on the idea that Logan had to be the “hero”. Only Logan could save the day, and Dark Phoenix had to die by his hand in order for the day to be saved. That is a travesty that to this day makes me legitimately angry. I can’t blame the filmmakers entirely because they were drawing this idea from a current (at the time - 2005) comic storyline that resurrected the Phoenix and sent it on a similar path toward Logan’s claws. But, for me, it absolutely desecrates everything that is so great about the original Dark Phoenix Saga to take Jean’s fate out of her own hands and reduce her to begging for Logan to kill her. And, to this day, I’m mystified that people will defend Logan’s actions as “he had no other choice”. He “had to” murder the woman he claimed to love in cold blood. Seriously? Set aside for a moment the fact that I can think up a half dozen alternate plans off the top of my head - including the painfully obvious: stab her with a Cure dart instead of your claws. In what universe do we equate murder with an expression of true love?! And how in five blue hells does Logan manage to remain a sympathetic hero after this?! It boggles my mind that the audience is expected to feel sorry for him... for killing Jean. And make no mistake that it is Jean he is killing, not the Dark Phoenix. If Dark Phoenix was fully in control and wanted Logan dead his healing factor and adamantium skeleton would not be enough to save him. It is Jean who is fighting to suppress the Dark Phoenix, and it is Jean who gets stabbed to death in return for saving Logan’s life.

There's a world of difference between being unable to save someone and actually deciding to murder that person “for their own good”. The classic Dark Phoenix story was about the triumph of Jean Grey's humanity. She could have been a god, but she chose to be a human. The X-Men's actions in X3 are the polar opposite of a triumph of humanity. Deciding that Dark Phoenix is too dangerous to be allowed to live, and discounting Jean's potential to control her power or save herself... that thinking is far more in line with the “any means necessary” philosophies of Magneto, Trask, or Stryker. There should have been another choice. There should have been an infinite array of other choices, because when you love someone you move heaven and earth to find the best choice for that person. That’s my definition of love, as shown to me by the X-Men in the classic Phoenix-Dark Phoenix Saga. In that story Jean Grey also repeatedly asks her teammates to end her life when she realizes she can’t control the destructive powers of Dark Phoenix. They refuse, or they pull their punches at the last moment because they cannot bear to murder their friend. Plus, finding other, better, ways - especially when there are quicker, easier, but more morally questionable alternatives readily available to you - is kind of a hallmark of what the X-Men do. If we’re seriously gonna throw that concept out the window, then we might as well not bother with protecting people who hate and fear mutants; obviously, it’s easier and more efficient to just kill your enemies rather than trying to protect and ultimately redeem them! One of the things I love best about the X-Men is that they have to find solutions to problems that can’t be fixed by simply killing off one bad guy who "deserves" to die. Their problems are more complex than this, in large part because they choose to make them more complex. They choose to protect a world that hates and fears them. And they choose not to give up on an old friend or a teammate who has lost their way. For me, that was the most unforgivable sin of X3. The X-Men of X3 weren’t 110% invested in each other, to the point were they were family. X-Men should never give up on, or be willing to sacrifice, one of their own. That commitment is what makes them X-Men. It’s what makes them family. It’s also what separates Xavier’s road from Magneto’s road.

X1 stars Wolverine and Rogue, in so much as it’s primarily their story. They are duel protagonists, and we spend a good chunk of the movie not really knowing which one of them is the main protagonist (which one Magneto is after), but X1 is built around Xavier and Magneto. Most comic book movie villains are black and white. I love the shades of gray that define Magneto. He is clearly the villain. He does terrible things to Senator Kelly, and to Rogue, in order to achieve his own warped agenda. Can you imagine the worldwide anarchy that would have ensued if his plan had worked and he had essentially murdered hundreds of world leaders in one blow?! And he doesn’t much seem to care when Storm and Jean tell him his plan won’t work. These people are his enemies and he honestly doesn’t place value on their lives (because he believes they do not place value on his, and the lives of all mutants). Either he makes them mutants or he kills them. Either way, he cares more about the cause of mutant survival (through mutant superiority) than the cost in actual lives, be those lives human or mutant. Yet, in the final scene, Xavier visits Magneto in his plastic prison, not to lecture him or convert him, not to gloat or explain why, but simply to sit down like two old friends talking over the state of the world. These two are the original frenemies, and that portrayal keeps Magneto human. It keeps him redeemable, at least from Xavier’s point of view. You never get the impression Mags wants that redemption. He hasn’t changed. Only his circumstances have changed. Only his enemies change. “Humanity has always feared that which is different. You’re right to fear us. We are the future. We are the ones who will inherit this earth,” Magneto tells the world in DOFP. The same is true of him in X1. “Still unwilling to make sacrifices. That’s what makes you weak.” The same is true of him in X2. “You are a god among insects; never let anyone tell you any different.” Mags is consistent. He’s willing to make sacrifices: the president of the United States, a few hundred world leaders, or his closest friends.

X1 established Charles Xavier as the teacher, the wise mentor of the X-Men, the patient protector for all of mutant and humankind. And X1 starts with Xavier’s grown up X-Men acting as teachers, mentors, and protectors. In this reality the school has become an extension of Xavier. His mission, his dream, his philosophy - it’s all represented by a physical place, not just a team that he has assembled. This is his life’s mission. “You unlocked my mind,” Logan tells the Xavier of the past in DOFP. “You showed me what I was. You showed me what I could be.” Only in DOFP (Bryan Singer’s first return to directing the franchise since X2) do we finally get to see what drives Charles Xavier. One of my biggest disappointments of X-Men: First Class was that we didn’t get an impactful “why” for Xavier the way X1 gave us a “why” for Magneto. Young Magneto lived through the Holocaust. Young Xavier was an immature college kid who liked to pick up girls in bars... huge missed opportunity. At the very least, with a movie set in the 1960's, Xavier should have been part of the 60's Civil Rights movement, and influenced by the example of Martin Luther King Jr. X-Men: First Class kept the franchise alive at a time when a third subpar movie in a row probably would have sunk it, but FC disappointed me on many levels, basically because it kept everything it touched painfully simple when it had every opportunity to dig so much deeper. One of Xavier’s first lines in X1 is about hope. “Whatever are you looking for?” Magneto asks Charles. “I’m looking for hope,” Xavier replies. In DOFP we finally see that philosophy of hope cemented into place for Xavier, we begin to understand what shapes his deepest beliefs. At his core Xavier believes in hope, and his belief that there is always hope translates into not giving up on anyone who has gotten lost. “The professor I know would never turn his back on someone who’d lost their path, especially someone he loved,” Logan tells Xavier. Oh, the irony! Or maybe Logan learned something from the events of X3 after all.

Charles Xavier is ultimately defined by his willingness to hope and his unwillingness to abandon hope. During their visit at the end of X1, Magneto mocks Xavier: “Oh, yes,” he says with a touch of sarcastic surprise, “your continuing search for hope.” At the time, it was easy to assume Xavier’s hope was simply for the redemption of his long-lost friend. DOFP taught us that it goes far deeper than that alone. We know that Xavier's end goal is symbiosis through mutual respect, for mutual advantage: a common shared society. While Magneto's end goal is survival through strength and superiority: world domination by mutants. Mags believes we are fighting a war. Xavier believes we are pursuing change. When the goal is to be part of a common society, that drastically changes the way you play the game as opposed to believing that society, or all of humanity, is broken beyond repair. That is Xavier's ultimate reason for protecting humans. The alternative is allowing this war both sides are pushing for. Killing, or "making sacrifices" as Magneto likes to call it, means giving up hope. Once you determine that one person (or all of humanity) isn't worth saving, can't possibly change for the better, then the dream of peaceful coexistence slowly dies. Mutual respect and tolerance are necessary for an open society to exist and thrive. But those things can be easily derailed by forces pushing for change on each side, and not even evil forces, necessarily, but charismatic individuals driven by dangerous ideologies which distort reasoned argument to make hate, fear, exclusion, and persecution sound just a little too logical for comfort. Extreme preemptive actions begin to sound like rational, necessary steps forward. “It won’t be some border skirmish halfway around the would. This time the war will be for our streets, our cities, our homes. And by the time you see the need for my program, it will be too late.” Trask’s anti-mutant warmongering doesn’t sound so different from the warnings many politicians have used to build support for military offensives in our post-911 world. Trask's cold and detached scientific approach to mutant experimentation is repulsive, and his plan to develop weaponized sentinel robots which will protect humanity by hunting down mutants sounds beyond the extreme. But is it really that different from the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, or wide-reaching citizen surveillance programs, or drone attacks, all intended to prevent innocent and mass human causalities? Once we've seen firsthand the damage that can be done to us, it becomes easier to view every decision as part of a greater “us vs. them” conflict. Extreme counter-measures begin to become appealing. We have to decide if they are necessary, and if they are acceptable.

In an ideal world - say, if we were just starting the X-franchise now, given today’s pro-comic-movie, geek-friendly climate: where success would be expected and not the great unknown it was back in 2000 - I assume X1 would be bigger and bolder, perhaps more faithful to the look of the comics or the classic compositions of the teams. Instead we got more of a cherry-picked approach for X1, having to take into account budget restrictions, mindful of the fact that if this movie failed to immediately grab the audiences’ attention there wouldn’t be a second chance at X-Men for the foreseeable future. Singer truly had a daunting task in establishing a relatively unknown franchise. It's hard to wrap our heads around it today, but X-Men, and even Wolverine, were not household names back in 2000. X-Men had name recognition only for fans of the comics or the Animated Series. Before X1, the only superhero movie franchises of the past 25 years had starred either Superman or Batman. And X-Men was a very different kind of superhero movie! It came with an ensemble cast and a lot of heavy lifting. If the audience didn’t buy into this whole “hated and feared, but still saving the world” thing, or the dueling philosophies of Xavier and Magneto, then the movie wouldn’t work and the whole franchise would be dead in the water. And they didn’t have an “origin” movie to use to set all that up. All the set up had to be done simultaneously in real time with the story they were telling in X1. In my opinion that’s exactly why the movie works as brilliantly as it does! A story about a guy using superpowers to try to take over the world and another guy with superpowers trying to stop him - that’s pretty interesting. But why - what drives them? The fact that they’re mutants - now that’s compelling. That’s the real story. And that psychological, social-moral, political underpinning is what makes X-Men unique among big budget superhero blockbusters. I like Singer’s character-driven X-Men approach way better than I like Marvel Studios' more serialized approach, or the dark and gritty "reality-driven" approach Warner Brothers/DC Comics is going with in their latest reboots. And Sony (this time with the help of MS) is starting on its 3rd Spider-Man reboot in 13 years, telling the Peter Parker story almost from the very beginning... all over again. I honestly don't know how often they can tell the same story in a slightly different way (maybe change up the love interest and the villain, again) and have it still be “new and interesting”... and I love Spider-Man. I think MS should have let Sony keep Peter Parker where he was and gone with Miles Morales or Gwen Stacy for their Spidey crossover, and the Spider-Man origin movie that they insist is not going to be an origin movie... but that's just me.

It used to be hard for me to put my finger on what it was that was keeping me from loving the MS films when all the right pieces seem to be in place. On the surface these films have everything I love... but they don't make me love them. I appreciate them, I enjoy them - some of them I enjoy a whole lot - but I don't love them. It seems I always leave MS films thinking, "that was - almost - great". And that “almost” gnaws at me. For a while there I thought it was just a Phase I glitch. For the majority of the Phase I films (the first Avengers film and everything prior) the complaints I had were pretty minor. I really thought that after all the groundwork was laid, post-Avengers, then all the kinks would be worked out. MS would hit its stride, each new film would build seamlessly on the Phase I material, and they'd settle in to make some absolutely mind-blowing films. So far I haven't seen that. Just the opposite, most of MS Phase II has been lackluster or disappointing to me, and a few have just pissed me off because they felt like a waste of my time. At a time when I expected MS to raise the bar and become great, they have actually lowered the bar and become average - either that, or I've just gotten so used to the standard MS formula that it no longer impresses me the way it did initially. As far as I'm concerned, Singer’s X1-X2, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 1-2 are way better films (and not comic book films, just better films, period) than anything MS has done to date. Joss Whedon's first Avengers film comes close to that standard... but it has its own MS flaws holding it back from greatness. All in all, I don't drink the Marvel Studios fan-made Kool-Aid. I don't think everything MS does is perfect just because it's done by Marvel Studios. I'm not 110% convinced that MS can do Spider-Man movies better than Sony, I'm nowhere near convinced that MS could make good X-Men films based on the way they've handled the Avengers, and I honestly don’t want MS anywhere near Jean Grey, Storm, Rogue (or any of the other X-women who are favorite characters of mine) based on the way MS have handled - and failed to handle - their female leads.

I enjoyed this summer’s latest Marvel Studios blockbuster, Avengers: Age of Ultron. I thought Scarlet Witch was awesome, in particular. I credit that 110% to Joss Whedon, who made Scarlet Witch compelling here like he made Black Widow compelling in the first Avengers movie. But those two cases seem to be the exception to the rule when it comes to the way MS chooses to portray their female heroes. MS shows a persistent, systematic lack of interest in making its heroines proactive. The “woman punches a guy, then does next to nothing for the rest of the movie because she already proved she was a badass (so, what else does she need to do, right?!)” - that approach gets thinner and thinner each time around. Don’t insult my intelligence by expecting me to accept that crap. If Tony was so worried about keeping Pepper safe from his enemies, he should have put her in one of his gazillian Iron Man suits and taught her to use the suit to defend herself. There’s no reason Peggy shouldn’t have parachuted out of the plane with Cap to go rescue Bucky. Or Jane, being a brilliant scientist, could have figured out a way to open a wormhole for Thor to see what Loki was up to in Asgard. The deadly Gamora should have been every bit as intimidating (and as essential to the GotG) as Mystique is in X-Men. And I can only happily imagine the beat down Mystique would instantaneously put on anybody stupid enough to disparage her appearance and her sexuality in the same sentence. And shame on you, MS, for fridging Janet and using that as an excuse to make Hope sit on the bench. Hell, you even fridged Loki’s mom... his MOM. That’s cold, MS. Numerous character woes aside, there’s a huge audience out there that would love to see a Black Widow movie - they proved that by going in large numbers to see Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Lucy’. This is the point where MS should have broken from their rigorously planned production schedule and been flexible. When your audience is telling you you have a breakout character and a breakout star on your hands, it’s foolish to ignore that, foolish to place that character on the back burner and keep feeding audiences films that the studio decided several years ago an audience might like to see. Not only is the studio throwing away a great chance at success, they’re telling their audience, “Don’t get invested in any of the ‘minor’ characters because no matter how much you like them, they’ll never be that important to us.” Same “establish it, then shelve it,” attitude.

Marvel Studios seems to have made a conscious decision not to put heavy focus on villains the way DC does, but if you focus on your heroes over multiple films then you have to grow your heroes over multiple films. It’s not enough, imo, for them just to do cool stuff and look comic book accurate. It’s not enough to establish a good origin story and then be done with growing that character. It helps if you grow your villains and your supporting characters too, instead of using them up or letting them go stale (or worse, making a joke of them). And it continues to seriously annoy me when MS tries to substitute crass emotional manipulation for putting in the actual time and effort required to establish a character that the audience cares about. X-Men DOFP absolutely nailed the characterization of Quicksilver, to the point where he stole every scene he was in. Singer used him perfectly - the way Quicksilver used his powers, and his overall personality; it was all a perfect fit - and he undoubtedly got the biggest laughs of the movie. While the much-anticipated AOU Quicksilver characterization (the one all the MS fanboys insisted would be so much better than Fox’s) was so bland and boring, all he had going for him was a silly catch phrase. The most interesting thing about him was that he died... and then his death was treated as a lame punchline. Killing characters off has become a cheap MS shortcut to getting an emotional reaction from an audience. Quicksilver’s death in AOU was pretty bad, but it’s Nick Fury’s "death" in CA:TWS that I think remains the most egregious example of emotional manipulation in MS films to date. And it totally took me out of the movie - because I flat out didn't care. I knew he wasn't going to stay dead, and it felt like a waste of my time to suspend disbelief in order to morn him. Tell me why Cap and Black Widow were so broken up at Fury’s loss; what was Fury to them other than a very cool boss? At the end of X2 I'm completely torn up over Jean Grey's death because it means something! I know her story; I know she isn't going to stay dead. But what matters even more: I know how every other character in that scene feels about Jean's risking her life to save them. Their horror, and desperation, and grief feel real to me because Singer spent two movies building attachments between Xavier, Ororo, Scott, Logan, and Jean. We understand how close-knit everyone is at the school; they're family to each other. It hurts when she dies... and when you get that little hint at the end that she might still be alive in some other form - that moment is pure movie joy (and off-the-charts excitement for what was going to happen next in the series).

That’s something Marvel is starting to do too often, in my opinion. They’re telling the same (or very similar) basic origin stories over and over while using everything else at their disposal to build toward the next phase. Tony Stark is still an arrogant weapons builder, he just works for a good cause now instead of greed (or maybe he still works for his own ego, it's hard to be certain, especially after Ultron). He’s had no significant change to his core character since the end of Iron Man 1. Same with Thor: significant growth in Thor1, none since then. Same with Cap. In CA:TFA, I knew exactly what Cap was fighting for; that movie made me believe in him! Just as Iron Man’s and Thor's origin films made me believe in them. But I have no idea what Cap fights for now. What is modern-day SHIELD to Cap? (or whatever remains of SHIELD following the "deaths" of Coulson and Fury, and the rise of Hydra in CA:TWS). What are the Avengers to Cap other than a convenient means of continuing to fight Hydra? Hawkeye, Black Widow, The Hulk, even Fury. They’re static characters, they exist only to face the next threat that comes along. Surely the Avengers can't be that essential to his overall mission if Cap is willing to let them disband at will following each Avengers movie. I think a lot of the audience will be confused and disappointed to see the Avengers lineup apparently becoming interchangeable following the events of Ultron. Maybe if they stayed together, trained together, got to know each other personally beyond just occasionally saving the world together, there'd be a little more accountability when something like Ultron happens.... But that would probably make something like Civil War more unlikely, which is where Marvel plans to take this next. Establish a framework, then start dismantling it. Get the team together, then start breaking them apart.... Maybe that's the best option available when you don't invest in strong villains or strong supporting characters who can keep the team focused, and the audience engaged. But I think MS is missing the opportunity to give audiences what they actually expect from an Avengers film because MS is already focused on moving on to the next phase. MS is ready to start Civil War already. I think there's a huge audience out there who would have happily paid to see three or four films where the Avengers were actually a rock-solid team working together to defeat a common enemy. Reestablish SHIELD (for more than 5 minutes at the start of AOU). Something. The Avengers should have something in common other than the ability to save the world from the next big threat that comes along.

At a time when it seems like everybody is scrambling to reboot some successful movie from 30 years ago, I’m stunned at the lack of movement Fox has shown toward reuniting the X1-X2 cast in the wake of DOFP. It seems like such a waste to let these actors go their separate ways when almost all of them have expressed interest in reprising their X-Men roles, when they are still hugely popular with fans, and when there are more great X-Men stories to be told than any one cast of characters can possibly tell! I was really hopeful after DOFP that Fox would take advantage of the duel timelines (and so many X-Men storylines involving time and space travel or alternate realities) to do something really creative.... I think we'll end up getting a Fantastic Four-X-Men crossover film (assuming the new FF film doesn't bomb), but I think that will be the next step forward for the new cast members brought on board for X-Men: Apocalypse. If Fox has half a brain, they will keep Apocalypse as the villain for another movie and do a full-blown “Age of Apocalypse-style” alternate reality. But at this point, sadly, I'm not hopeful that there will be another film exclusively starring the original cast of X1-X2. Unfortunately, I think that ship sailed when Hugh Jackman decided to leave the X-franchise following Wolverine 3. But I’m honestly shocked that after two seasons of Agents of SHIELD, and one season of Daredevil on Netflix, we still haven’t gotten a competing X-Men tv or Netflix series from Fox. To me, a weekly or hourly format seems perfect for a coming of age-type mutant story set at the Xavier Institute, aimed at teens. Look at the popularity of the Flash tv show for WB. Personally, I’d love to get a socially-thoughtful, smart, mutant mystery/sci-fi tv show done in a Star Trek: TNG-style. And if it just happened to be produced by Bryan Singer and to be anchored with appearances by Stewart, Marsden, Janssen, Berry, Jackman... that would make me one very happy X-fan.

#Marvel XMen XMen15Years oped SlymInShades

15 Years Future Past: Fifteen Years of X-Men in the Movies. X-Men: Mutants Among Us.

#Marvel XMen XMen15YearsFuturePast oped SlymInShades

Do As Peggy Says by: SlymInShades

Agent Carter: Here To Rescue A World That’s Not Ready For Her

The Agent Carter two hour season premier episode was the best thing I’ve seen in a long time, Marvel or not, superhero genre or not. Those two hours (Now is Not the End/ Bridge and Tunnel) were a great 1940's era spy adventure mini-movie that is capable of standing on its own even if its audience knows nothing at all about Captain America or the rest of the Marvel Universe. It hit every note perfectly. Smart and funny. Completely immersive. It gave us a hero who is full of guts, and brains, and grit, and humor, and heart. It gave us a believable human being trying to find her place in a dangerous and rapidly changing world. It did all of that while playing up, but not pandering down to, the underlying premise that Peggy Carter is a woman in a man’s world.

Unfortunately I thought the show lost a little of its momentum and charm after the premier episode. The following episode (Time and Tide) felt like a hard step back to me. Gone was the lively 1940's music and that awesome Cap radio drama (which I had hoped was going to be a reoccurring plot device). And with those losses the show seemed to loose some of its fun and sense of adventure. No super spy Peggy in disguise this episode. Instead we learn a little more about Jarvis, which was welcome. But where the premier felt like Peggy repeatedly snatching victory from defeat, this episode felt like repeatedly snatching defeat away from victory. Peggy succeeds in protecting Jarvis from taking the fall for Stark (by exposing the underhanded tactics her boss and coworkers were using against him), but then we have to watch this terribly uncomfortable scene of her getting dressed down by her boss and made to apologize to Thompson. Thompson, known for his ability to beat suspects into confessions. But the issue with that scene should not be the way Peggy was treated. It should have been the fact that she knew she was going to get her butt handed to her for doing what she did to protect Jarvis, and she was still willing to take that dressing down because she knew she was on the right side and her boss was in the wrong. That sequence needed to be done in a way that better got that point across: showcase Peggy’s strength and her conviction. But instead of Peggy being empoweried in that instance for doing the right thing, even when doing the right thing hurt her professionally, that scene just felt like more of “poor Peggy, she’s being mistrusted and unappreciated by her coworkers again”. “Poor Peggy” is not the show I want to watch. I want to see “Agent Carter”. At the end of the show Peggy succeeds again, and recovering a cashe of Stark’s stolen gadgets is a pretty damn big victory, but again she’s not allowed to take credit for her success. That plot twist took a whole lot of suspending disbelief for me to buy into, and buying into it still felt rotten. So again, we’re snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Then to add insult to injury, we’re expected to mourn Krzeminski’s death as through he was the big hero. Hey, I’m sure the guy had some redeeming qualities. Maybe he even was good at his job, which in the end is the only nice thing Peg can say about him, but we sure didn’t get to see any of his better angels. So I honestly can’t say his loss impacted me at all. I was also disappointed by the side plot with Angie. She added so much fun and lighthearted support in the premier. How did she get relegated to the “girlfriend who doesn’t understand the hero has serious work stuff to deal with” in this episode?

The third week provided a bounce back for the series, regaining some of its previous momentum and light-heartedness. There was more drama and intrigue and humor here than in week two. But the best part of this show, hands down, was the couple of seconds that revealed Dottie at the end of the show. I enjoyed this episode (The Blitzkrieg Button) a lot, but the main draw of the episode was in reintroducing Howard Stark, and then relying on a Captain America tie in to keep viewers engaged in the plot. I’m wary of relying too heavily of Stark and Cap to carry Peggy’s show. I think they should stick with the “what happened at Finnau” storyline, which I assume is all related to Stark’s weapons, and the connection to Jarvis, and that General that Stark had a public falling out with. But this episode had a lot of filler. At the end we aren’t much closer to solving the mystery of what happened on that battlefield at Finnau, or who set up Howard Stark, or what weapons of Howard’s are still being pursued by Leviathan - remember Leviathan, I’m not sure they were even mentioned in this episode. The big “game changer” was Peggy’s learning that Howard had a vile of Steve’s blood among his inventions and had lied to her about that. That led Peggy to slug Howard in the face and kick him out of her life, but not before Howard explained himself by giving a bizarre speech about how he has to lie to get ahead in life, because the whole world is against him too, or something. It’s kinda hard to feel too bad for the playboy millionaire. And even if the cards are stacked against you, it is possible to get ahead and still retain your integrity. That’s what Peggy is trying to do. “Game changer” aside, I don’t see how turning the tables to pit Peggy against Howard and Jarvis at this point serves the story other than by momentarily increasing the drama. Honestly, that move reminded me a bit of season one, Agents of SHIELD. For a while there it seemed every week included a new, out of the blue, “game changing” plot twist, presumably designed to keep people on the edge of their seats. But all it really did was make things confusing in a hurry.

Back at the SSR, we continue to see how dishonorable Peg’s coworkers are. They can’t seem to have a “civilized interrogation” as Peggy lamented in the series premier. While her boss is manipulating a Nazi war criminal who is about to be hanged in order to learn more about the Battle at Finnau, Thompson is in charge and being Thompson: undermining Sousa, taking advantage of the homeless veteran Sousa brought in as a witness, relegating Peggy to taking lunch orders, and then having the nerve to ask her why she works there when all she “gets” to do is take lunch orders. Yeah. He might have some credibility here if he didn’t regularly resort to violence, lies, and bribery in order to do his job. “Natural order of the universe. No man will ever consider you an equal,” Thompson says confidently, without having a damn clue, apparently, that he can think for himself and choose to treat her with respect at any time he wants. But this is the same guy known for his ability to beat suspects into confessions, so, give me a break. Three weeks in, I’m already getting burnt out on wanting Thompson and the rest of Peggy’s coworkers to stop acting like big stupid jerks. And after a while it starts to take me out of the moment. I don’t know that a man of that time period would outright tell a woman that no man will ever consider her an equal, as Thompson did. A man in his position might try to tell Peg she’d be “happier” in a supporting role, or might hint at something that was more “her place”(which he kinda does), and he would probably be patronizingly certain that what he was doing was for her own good (even if he had to actively work to make her life difficult until she saw things his way). But I think the conscious issue of “winning respect” or “deserving equal treatment” is a more modern argument. At the time (mid 1940's) women had had the right to vote for 25 years, so this (women’s equality) is a societal change happening within most of these men’s lifetime. So it’s still very new. Certainly the women’s suffrage movement had been around for a lot longer, but I don’t imagine women’s rights issues were something a man of that time would necessarily be aware of (or overly concerned about), at least not in the very acute way today’s audience is aware of equality issues.

If I have issues with Agent Carter (and they are mild issues only; this show is easily my favorite Marvel Studios creation to date) they are the same issues that bug me with a lot of Marvel’s stuff. Marvel Studios tends to hit its audience over the head with a hammer to make sure they don’t miss the point when a subtle tap on the shoulder is all that’s really needed to get their point across. I had problems to that effect with Peg’s characterization in CA:TFA. Everything about her in the movie was over the top, from punching a guy in the face the first time we meet her to unloading live rounds at Steve - whom she deeply cares for. It worked, I guess, getting the audience’s attention by giving her shock value (I might argue that the blatant badassery was there to make up for her not having much plot function other than being Steve’s main squeeze - you know, but don’t tell her that, she’ll punch you in the face). But Peggy was a stand out character who was not to be messed with, and I liked her a lot in CA:TFA. I could even argue that she needed to be over the top in that situation. She was fighting a war. She had to be hard as nails and twice as tough. But she was still way over the top. This is a thing that occasionally annoys me with all Marvel movies. Sometimes the Marvel Studios stuff plays just a little too much like the comics. Why waste time gradually developing a character when you can just have them punch someone in the face? I thought Agent Carter was extremely successful at taking Peggy’s movie toughness and balancing it with heart in a way that added depth to Peggy’s character while in no way weakening or watering her down. Now they just have to work on not beating us to death with their plot points. We don’t have to have (multiple) conversations with Jarvis telling Peg the men she works with don’t respect her. We (any audience that has half a brain and is paying any attention at all to the show) already sees that dynamic perfectly clearly in the way Peggy is treated. Nor does Thompson have to come straight out and tell her directly... Marvel Studios: hammer time. We know what Peggy Carter is capable of, and it drives us crazy that her boss and coworkers refuse to see what we see. They’re already doing a great job of showing. Don’t overkill us with the telling.

As far as Peg’s boss and coworkers go, the writers really don’t have to go out of their way to vilify these guys. They condemn themselves with their own erroneous ideas and misguided behaviors. When her ops team openly reveres the 107th because they fought “side by side” with Cap, but everyone in her office collectively rolls their eyes anytime Peg mentions anything about Cap or her role in the war... that tells me everything I need to know. There’s a complete disconnect in that logic that just makes me go, Wait, huh what?! Thompson doesn’t have to freeze up in battle or have a questionable war record in order for Peg to stand out. Her superior skill and experience make her better at her job than he is, and the way she treats people - even while they belittle her efforts to help/support them - makes her a better person than they are. We already know Agent Thompson is a bully. We see it again at the start of this episode (The Iron Ceiling) with the codebreaker who can’t solve the evil typewriter’s message. Something not going your way? Threaten and intimidate people who are trying to help you. He also manages to be a major ass to both Carter and Sousa with the locker room scene, and nobody calls him out on that crap! Bullies usually have a secret. They’re usually afraid in addition to being mean, so it’s not so shocking to learn that Thompson is not who he appears to be. I really hope I’m not expected to believe he’s secretly a “good” person under layer after layer of rotten onion, and all he really needed was for Peggy to “understand” him. That’s usually not how it works. Abusive, opportunistic people are abusive and opportunistic because they benefit from that behavior. Disrespect is not a schoolboy “crush” as his boss tries to characterize it. Thompson may have been willing to throw both Sousa and Carter a good-will bone at the end of this episode, but once he’s had time to really think about it, I suspect Peggy’s knowing the truth about him will prove more of a threat to him than a comfort.

I’m reminded of that line from A League of Their Own: “The men are back, Rosie, turn in your rivets.”. That reality was addressed perfectly in the Agent Carter season premier when Peg’s roommate discussed being in that exact situation at her own job. Everyone is recovering from the war. I don’t think the men Peg works with are trying to suppress her because they see her as a threat or want to put her, specifically, back in her place; they’re just trying to go back to the way things were before the war (and dealing very poorly with change/progress/threats to their status quo). The problem being, things aren’t the same for women like Peg. Their worlds/opportunities greatly expanded during the war and it’s not fair to expect them to simply stand down: drop the lives they made for themselves, and go back to finding husbands and keeping house now that the war is over. The men of the time are blind to that pov and ignorant to the reality of working side by side with women as equals because, for most of them, it’s never been a circumstance they’ve had to deal with. In their world women were nurses, and teachers, and wives, and mothers. They haven’t acclimated to the post-war world where women were, in fact, doing their jobs while they were off fighting. That doesn’t excuse rotten treatment and disrespectful behavior by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just trying to frame it as something that is born more out of ignorance and insecurity than outright maliciousness. Peg’s boss makes an argument before sending her off to Russia. He doesn’t want to be responsible for her getting killed, or for a man on her team getting killed (because of her). It’s easy to dismiss this argument as dated until you realize that the same argument is alive and well today. It’s the reason why female US soldiers don’t fight on the front lines, not because of their own merit as soldiers but for (misplaced) fear of how everyone else would react to worst case scenarios involving a woman instead of a man.

I hope Agent Carter will continue to be smart and funny and exciting and relevant, but not too heavy handed. I’m afraid the heavy handed approach will backfire if it’s not used sparingly. I want to be made aware of Peggy’s situation, good or bad, fair or unfair. I like her story, both for Peggy personally and for seeing Peggy as a window into her times and her society. What I don’t want is to spend half of my time watching the show feeling sorry for Peg and being angry at her coworkers. Those are valid emotions and reactions, but they are not the ones I want to keep coming back to. I don’t want to get so caught up in the personal injustice Peg is facing that I start to forget that Peggy is the real hero here. She’s the also the underdog because most of the people around her don’t see her as the hero. The audience is in on that paradox, much like they are with Peter Parker or Clark Kent. Given, this is not quite the same because Peg is not purposefully keeping a low profile in order to protect a secret identity. She’s being unfairly dismissed, undermined, and denied the opportunity to do her job on a daily basis. But I don’t want to pity her for that. What I want is to see her succeed at her job in spite of everything going against her. I think this show would benefit greatly from treating Peggy’s coworkers with a little bit more of a wink and a nod, as if Peggy is actually protecting a secret identity - because if they don’t realize she can function as a real SSR Agent, she shouldn’t hesitate to use their stupidity to her own advantage. And to be brutally honest, I really don’t give a crap if her coworkers ever learn to respect her or not. I hope they do, for Peggy’s sake, because she deserves better from them, and I suspect the show will continue to inch forward in that direction. But as an audience member, her coworkers’ persistent ignorance and blindness is the least of my concerns. Peggy doesn’t need to change them. And she sure as hell doesn’t have to prove herself to them; she has already more than proven herself, and they choose not to see that. What Peggy Carter needs to do now is go save the world from Leviathan!

#Marvel oped SlymInShades

I want you!

#AgentCarter

Fearless Invitation The story behind: Letter to Jean

Scott Summers walked upstairs to the room he’d been assigned at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, emptied out his pockets, and tossed the motorcycle jacket he’d been wearing over the back of a chair. There on the desktop, among the small collection of things he’d borrowed from his future self, was the one thing of his own that Scott had been keeping on his person since he had left the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters a week ago... or decades ago, depending on your point of view. His gaze fell to the desktop, resting on the letter that he’d begun writing just before all hell had broken loose. He carefully unfolded the single page and read the first few lines.

Dear Jean, Please don’t be alarmed by this letter. I have been thinking of all the ways I wanted to tell you this and thinking of all the missed opportunities I’ve had....

I wish I could tell you how I feel.... How do you tell the girl you love that you’ve loved her since the moment you first saw her? How do you tell her that from the moment you first met, you knew she was the only girl in the world for you? How do you explain that, even when you couldn’t string together enough words and sentences to make simple conversation in her presence, you knew without a doubt in your mind that you were meant to spend the rest of your life with this woman? Sometimes I don’t know why this future surprises me so much. Sure, I never could have imagined anything like this. Yes, so much of it is horrifying and shocking, and nothing seems to have turned out the way we all thought it would. But when has anything in my life ever gone according to plan? Except for this. From the moment I held that scrap of paper in my hand, read the wedding invitation, saw that date in June like it had been set there in stone... I had proof that, finally, something in my life had gone right. The girl of my dreams had loved me. We had been happy. Enough to get married. Enough to want to spend the rest of our lives with each other. I don’t know what I was thinking when I handed you that invitation. A million things. I knew it wasn’t fair to spring it on you like that... but you had to already know about it from what was in Blue Hank’s head. I was hurt that you hadn’t wanted to talk to me, hurt that nobody here seemed willing to give me a chance, hurt that even my own teammates were starting to doubt me. Truthfully, I was starting to doubt myself too. And that scared me. This was the one bit of proof I had to show I hadn’t turned out all wrong. At some point you loved the man I had become. At some point in my life, Jean Grey had loved me for the man I was. But this wasn’t just some mind-bending future artifact. It was also, at least in my head, a way of saying all those things I couldn’t say to you. The way I’ve never in my life felt anything that compares to the way I feel when you’re standing right next to me. It’s the difference between the darkest night and the brightest day. It’s like, finally, I’m where I’m meant to be– and I–

#Xmen fanficBySlymInShades CyclopsAndPhoenix ScottAndJean

I've seen the man I become.

#Xmen CyclopsAndPhoenix ScottAndJean

My thoughts on Marvel Comics: All things must change... the iconic and the unique. by: SlymInShades

The more things change... the more things change.

I also have some issues with the blitz, itself. Too often it brings out the worst in a situation when all you have to go on is a media blurb. News media screams: "New Captain America is black" instead of "The Falcon, Sam Wilson, Cap’s longtime friend and trusted crime-fighting partner, heroically takes up the mantel of Captain America". I understand that Marvel doesn’t want to give too many plot details away at this point, but there’s a real danger of missing the actual story when facts get entirely buried in the blitz. When we don’t know anything about this change that’s coming, and the story we see in the media is: "Thor is now a woman." Well, eventually we figure out what they really mean is: "This woman is going to have the power of Thor". We still don’t know how, or why, or even who "this woman" is beyond that one fact. We have to wait to read the story. Hype. I get the hype. But it rubs me a little wrong when the hype is telling me that all I need to know about "this woman" is that she is, in fact, a woman and she is going to be... Thor. It bothers me when the media blurb doesn’t relay anything of substance, only race and gender. Sure, it might be shocking enough news to some folks that Cap is black and Thor is female... but is that really the way Marvel wants to play it? Pandering to folks who are going to be shocked that such things are possible instead of playing it up to the audience that is accepting of this news and sees it as "non-news"? Race and gender are important factors, but they shouldn’t be any person’s (or character’s) defining factors. That should be only the beginning of the story, so why market it as if it is going to be the most important part? It’s not. Diversity is done best when the reader can easily absorb the fact that Cap is black and Thor is female, and just enjoy the fact that they are Cap and Thor. I fully expect that the story will play out this way... once we can actually read it... a few months removed from the blitz. Marvel might pick up some extra sales from folks drawn in by shock appeal, but the audience that’s going to stick around and give these stories a go beyond the first issue are not the folks who are shocked, it’s the folks who accepted this announcement at face value and are curious to find out what happens next.

I’m not as big an Avengers fan as I am an X-Men fan, so I can take their drama with a grain of salt. But I’ll admit, the X-Men fan in me is really glad that nobody new is going to put on the visor and take over for Cyclops... as yet anyway. To me, Cyclops is a unique extension of Scott Summers. Cyclops is who he is because Scott is who he is (and that paradox goes both ways). I don’t think I’d like being told that Cyclops is an iconic role that anybody can fill. In my mind, he’s not. He’s his own guy. He can’t be changed out for any other guy or girl and still be the same thing. I like that individuality. I like the fact that recognizing individuality is an inherent part of the X-Men. It’s a building block and a strength of the team that they are a collection of unique individuals, drawn together across many different backgrounds and circumstances because they have one thing in common. Because they share this common experience of being different, being outcasts, being mutants, they become more than a collection of heroes fighting for a common cause. They become each others family. Maybe there’s an argument to be made that individuality is not so essential for Thor, Cap, Iron Man, or Spidey because they are meant to be larger-than-life superheros fighting evil in its more traditional sense. Meanwhile X-Men are more everyday heroes; they fight hatred and intolerance, as well as evil supervillains, robots, aliens, and all the rest of that fun comic craziness. In other words, maybe the Avengers can afford to be iconic. Maybe they can afford to let the hero be greater than any one person. While X-Men are forced to focus on their individuality, on the individuality of each and every mutant, until all of them can simply be accepted as individuals and no longer seen only as mutants. Avengers is kind of an ideal in itself: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. X-Men will always be a family of outsiders: mutants, fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them, fighting for their place in society, one person and one step forward at a time.

X-Men has a long history of incorporating diversity into its teams, and that’s one of the things I have always liked best about X-Men, its ability to bring together a unique cast of very different characters and treat everyone equally. The "All New All Different" X-Men team of the 70s opened the door of the X-Mansion to different races, different cultures, different traditions, different nationalities, and different religions. And throughout the 80s and 90 the X-Men roster continued to expand with men and women of different backgrounds, from all over the world. Current X-Men titles are doing a great job of carrying out this philosophy and tradition (with far less hype and fanfare than their friends over at the Avengers). I love that there is an ongoing X-Men title made up entirely of female X-Men. I love that Storm is getting her own solo title. And I love the incredible roster of new mutant characters that have been added to the current run of Uncanny X-Men: Tempus, Eva Bell from Gold Coast Australia, can control time. Triage, Christopher Muse from Michigan, is a healer. Benjamin Deeds, from Texas, is a mood-altering shapeshifter. Fabio Medina, from SanDiego, affectionately referred to as Goldballs, projects... well, goldballs. Hijack, David Bond from Atlanta, controls machines. They join the Stepford sisters, teenage Emma Frost clones - who, by the way, have decided that they don’t all want to look the same anymore and have changed their appearances recently to reflect their individuality. This is a wonderfully diverse and unique cast of characters. Four young women. Three young men of color. One young gay man. And yet none of those things are the most important things about the characters. They are individuals, each of them mutants with unique gifts, who bring their own unique personalities and perspectives to the team. It’s what they do once they get there that matters to them, and to me. When Ben came out as gay, the news of his outing was a media blurb that week. But in the actual comic it was just one of several nice character moments for him that week where we got to learn new things about Ben. His sexual preference was stated, accepted, and then he continued learning about his mutant powers and putting them into use. Because that, after all, is what he’s here to do. No hype. Just some fascinating young mutants training to be X-Men, fighting Sentinels, facing off with SHIELD, and confronting all manner of mutant-hating-scum. Working together. Trying to make the world a better place.

#Marvel oped SylmInShades

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