favorite 616 characters: alex summers, kwannon, john greycrow, quentin quire, maddie pryor, gabriel summers, larry trask
favorite XMCU characters: armando muñoz, alex summers, bobby drake, john allerdyce, romijn!mystique, mckellan!magneto, hank mccoy, angel salvadore
favorite comics ships: scoganjean, quevandie, crowhavlocke, alex/almost any man at all, crowlocke, alex/maddie (exclusively in an unhealthy way), gov. gen. howlett/hercules, hank/abigail (derogatory)
favorite XMCU ships: alex/darwin (otp), scogan(jean), allerdrake, alex/hank, first class polycule
characters against whom I am mildly to severely biased: charles in any incarnation (severe), 616!kurt wagner (mild to moderate), 616!hank mccoy (severe, except 60s/70s hank, who i love), abigail brand (severe)
stances on common wank/controversy topics: the marvel girl dress is fine; charles has no boundaries and has consistently been a creep since '63; wanda maximoff is a romani woman and lizzie should not have been cast as her; scott has no ass; jott and scemma are both great ships; madelyne can do whatever she wants to scott and especially jean, forever; the phoenix force is her own person
I'm also working on a project called Nothing Girls in Nowhere Places: The Case For A Transfeminine Havok in the Krakoan Era, but I've been working on it fairly steadily since 2021, so I have no idea when it'll be in post-worthy condition, but you'll find little thoughts I have about on this blog, and a poorly-kept journal of current efforts over at @nothinggirls, and scattered relevant screencaps at @queerhavok.
"what if they fucked" WRONG. what if they ruined each other's lives irreparably. what if there was nothing left but a smoldering heap. what if everything that brought them together twisted and corroded and ripped them apart. and then they fucked.
Steve Orlando & Stephen Segovia limited run series set during the X-Men's Outback Era?
Steve, my favorite male comic book writer currently working, and Segovia, the guy responsible for the Inferno Nightmare Sequences from Hellions (2020), are going to be working on new content where Alex and Maddie will be present?
"wahh i only like enemies to lovers if it's gay bc i don't want men to be mean to women" what about a woman doing heinous shit to a man and that man (who also sucks) being pathetically psychosexually obsessed with her. you people have no fucking vision. if you were willing to read & write women doing actual wrongs this wouldn't be a problem. let that female character commit atrocities with the sole goal of ruining one guy's life while they have weird sexual tension about it
Just read this week's Sinister's Six; my thoughts are as such:
Alex's physical transformation into living crystal seems to mirror his zombification in Dark X-Men, which I think is very curious.
Confirmation that Lady Fantomex is a redheaded plural system desperate for love and family is very nice.
Love that not knowing who's in there re: Venom is a plot point; looking forward to seeing what the reveal is next month.
Also, re: Alex & Chris Specifically —
The more we're given about Chris' backstory, the less I believe he's a real boy.
Like, I fully don't believe in a Lorna Dane, PhD, who would want to reproduce with Alex Summers. She, of all of his exes, feels the least likely to gestate, partly because she's made it 50+ years of stories without getting knocked up, and because she's the ex he wronged the most severely. She knows better, at this point.
The way Alex talks about her to Chris also feels like he's lying — but like he doesn't know he's lying.
The kid is conveniently trapped in a glass box, only attended to by a robot; a.k.a. the ideal enclosure for a little robot or hologram child to be housed and not discovered.
Alex is, largely, a character whose purpose in stories is to be manipulated and tricked by bad actors into working for lost causes and bad institutions, and to have sex with Wrong Women; being fooled by Sinister into believing he has a son with Lorna would being extremely on brand for him.
Domino's narration boxes explicitly establish that Alex's loyalty and buying into the mission is useful in getting other characters to obey Sinister's directives; Sinister only has Alex's loyalty due to Chris being present.
I don't believe this story can get away with fridging Lorna in this the year of our Lord 2025 without a huge dustup.
Lorna fans deserve better than that, firstly, and secondly, it's a flimsy fucking plot device to begin with, because:
Alex is equally easy to manipulate via endangering a woman as he is via endangering "his son."
Anyway, my instincts are saying that everything Alex remembers from Lorna's pregnancy & Chris's birth is a sham that Sinister put in his head because he wanted Alex to toy with.
I also don't think Alex has the X-Virus. I think the living crystal is also something Sinister did to him to sell the story. I think these things because:
Why would Alex transform into red crystal, when his powers are blue-white in color?
Meanwhile, Sinister has worked extensively with red crystal, from the ruby quartz glasses to the red crystal prisons he kept his clones in during the Krakoan Era.
Sinister also has genetically manipulated Alex before; I could see him body horroring him in this instance, too.
Basically, overall, I think whether or not this comic will be good or not will hinge on whether they fridged Lorna or it's more of the classic "Alex Summers gets gaslit so someone can use him as a weapon" type story.
charles xavier told me the brotherhood of evil mutants keep killing his xmen so i asked how many xmen he has and he said he just goes to the school for gifted youngsters and gets a new xman afterwards so i said it just sounds like hes feeding mutants to the leftist infighting war and then scott summers started crying
Sinister's Six #1 is delivering me things I didn't know I wanted and more directly clarifying Alex's position as a Nothing Girl, what with:
Alex's son Chris in this book paralleling Kwannon's daughter in Hellions and Maddie's Nathan Christopher in the original Inferno; all these children are under direct implicit threat from Sinister in order to control the actions of their parents.
The narration from Sinister about Alex having more to him than even Alex himself knows; this lack of self-knowledge is perpetually part of Alex's relationship to his body, from the Living Pharaoh outing his mutanthood in the Thomas/Adams run to Maddie abusing him in From the Ashes.
The ghost of some kind of illness in the form of the X-Virus; disease (and mutation-as-disorder) is frequently used as queer allegory in these comics; we don't know yet how exactly Alex has been impacted, though I suspect it has to do with the child.
Additionally, some other thoughts:
Re: The Kid:
Returning to Chris, nothing about him is conclusively indicative of another genetic parent, though his being a blue-eyed blonde does potentially indicate Maddie for his genetic mother, since Maddie and Scott produced a blonde child in Nathan Christopher, which indicates Maddie and Scott are both carriers of blonde genes, so any child Alex and Maddie have has significant chance of being blonde.
(Please note I specify "genetic" rather than "biological" mother; I do not see Maddie gestating another Summers son after her previous trauma, but I CAN see Sinister using Maddie's/Jean's genetics to create a test-tube kid to manipulate Alex with.)
Alternately, Chris could also be the genetic offspring of Alex and Janet Van Dyne, since his alt-timeline at-least-half-sister, Katie, long-lost in the whole timeline cluster fuck of 2015, is also a blue-eyed blonde, indicating similar recessive genes in Jan as well.
Until we see some kind of mutant gift from the kid, though, I'm hedging my bets and guessing Chris is probably test-tube Summers-Grey/Pryor offspring, because Sinister likes to dip his nasty fingies in that gene pool sososo frequently, and Maddie has lost control of Limbo in this future timeline, given that the Limbo lands are ruled by Darkchylde and Juggernaut, so I got absolutely see Alex seeing this child as the only thing he has left of Maddie, who he still loves, despite what she did to him the last time we saw them together.
There's also the interesting return of the Other Nanny, not the woman who was once Eleanor Murch but rather the robot who once worked with Magneto. This Nanny is also presented with red "hair," reflecting her Age of Apocalypse iteration rather than her 616 iteration, which I think is curious, because this Nanny is typically associated with Magneto, not Sinister, so why is she here, playing Nanny to Alex's son?
The X-Virus and Queer Womanhood:
The most prominently, visibly impacted members of Sinister's Six are women, one of whom is canonically a queer woman (Felicia Hardy, known bisexual). She's also been rendered feral by the virus, drawing a parallel between her and two separate important women - Hepzibah, Alex's stepmother, who she strongly resembles, and Rahne, subtextually religiously-self-hating queer woman (and transfem allegory in her death in 2019), who was once psychically linked to Alex on Genosha in the 90s.
The other queer woman on the team hides her face, is the female iteration of a character who is otherwise male (and she only exists due to a mad science accident) and she uses a traditionally masculine name (Charlie Cluster) when not referred to as Lady Fantomex. She's also the reason we know Betsy Braddock is bi, because Betsy has a fling with her during her time in Kwannon's body. It's not immediately clear how Cluster is impacted by the X-Virus, but her dialogue implies plurality, alongside her red hair being a motif among the women who are transfem metaphors (Maddie, Rahne) or, essentially, sci-fi trans women (Mystique, Cluster).
Cluster's potential plurality or madness also ties her into the idea of the Nothing Girl as a Mad, Mirrored Woman, as depicted by Hellions with Nanny, nightmare!Betsy, and Maddie, as well as directly with Maddie in Dark X-Men.
Domino isn't technically a queer character, but I feel that frequently, the subtext can be there; additionally, the X-Virus has turned her ash-white skin a dark, Mystique-adjacent blue.
Overall, the women of Sinister's Six immediately draw to mind queerness and transfemininity-coding in the text, whereas, aside from Alex, the one male teammate is Omega Red, who is actively dying from the way the X-Virus impacted him.
The key to the nature of the virus is also extracted from Venom, whose most definitive iteration is a queer relationship more or less expressed as a parasitic kind of plurality; while it's not clear which Venom is present in this book, the presumption of many readers, especially readers less familiar with current comics-Venom lore, is going to be that it's Eddie Brock in there, unless we're explicitly indicated otherwise.
So, total, Sinister's Six is made up of:
Felicia Hardy, a bisexual woman transformed and made feral by the X-Virus, bearing parallels to women associated with Alex.
Neena Thurman, one of Cable's exes who has been physically transformed by the X-Virus to look more like Mystique, a queer woman whose transfem subtext is more or less text and who has, in the last five years, been strongly in parallel with Alex.
Charlie Cluster, more or less a sci-fi trans bi woman exhibiting signs of plurality and carrying the redheaded transfem metaphor motif.
Venom, likely the gestalt entity of a queer interspecies relationship, whose body holds the key to understanding the situation surrounding the X-Virus.
Omega Red, a dying man.
Alex Summers, who does not carry any physical or behavioral indications of having been impacted personally by the X-Virus at all.
I suspect Alex may be a non-symptomatic carrier of the virus, because, while mutants are "unaffected" by the X-Virus, it seems to strongly impact people whose genes have been messed with — and we know Sinister did that when he tied Alex to the Pharaoh all those years ago.
There's also the question of Chris — is Chris potentially not a mutant, created specifically to give Sinister a vector of control over Alex by turning Alex's mutant body into a literal threat to his child?
Also, is Chris even "real"? Will he still be real when the story is over? Or will he go the way of Katie Summers before him, forgotten by the narrative?
Very interesting, very curious potentialities here.
