The Timeline Up Through First Class
My approach to Erik is to recover and synthesize as much of the canon approach as possible while trying to pay a little bit more respect to militant oppressed groups than I think the source material often does.
So, for everyone’s convenience, here is this roleplay blog’s sequence of events:
Auschwitz Period:
This will conform more or less perfectly to Magneto: Testament.
Post-Auschwitz
Erik’s powers came to fruition after he left the concentration camp and his health recovered. At that time, he struggled to conform to a pattern of “normalcy” for his family’s sake. The Nuremburg trials, with their stiff formality, could not slake his nightmares or his anger at what the world had allowed to happen. As he followed them, his blood roiled. But he always had wanted to provide for his loved ones, to settle into a comfortable life, and so Magda coaxed him to live one. The Soviets swooped down on Poland, with a reign as brutal as the Nazis’, albeit in different ways. Erik burned to join the resistance, but Magda was pregnant and persuaded him to move to Ukraine, where the Russians felt more secure. There, Erik fell into an easy pattern—work in the mines, then evenings at the bar or with his growing wife and daughter. It was a simple life, particularly for a man as gifted as Erik, but he was a simple man desperate for the same strength of belonging he’d known in his boyhood family. With time, he could smile over Magda’s softness, tenderly kiss their daughters’ feet, and chuckle at the fringes of the talk men made over their beer.
That peace didn’t last. Or—it was tenuous from the first. It terrified Erik how quickly others’ buried their dead. No one mentioned the war, or the Soviet yoke that followed. If Erik’s sharp tongue alluded to his past, brutal reality or the memories of the dead only silence or censure ensued. His neighbors and coworkers acted as though the victims, not the perpetrators of the crime, were untouchables, the diseased. At first, Erik bowed beneath Magda’s pleas not to torment people when they were finally finding happiness. At first he wondered if he was crazy. Yet somehow, as the memory of his family threatened to fade, as the world succeeded in making a fable of the concentration camps, rage inflamed him. Rage like he’d been too numb, too terrified, too young to feel in the camps.
With the rage, his powers grew. As they grew, strange things began to happen around him. And the more that metal sang to his touch in the mines—this dour, Jewish outsider—the more others came to fear him.
Then, one day, the village burned his house and his daughter to ash.
That same day, the man who would be Magneto raised the village to the ground.
His wife ran, and Erik couldn’t feel the betrayal of that, had no more room for bitterness. At the time, he thought he was the only one in the world. He thought he was cursed by the dead he’d left behind in Auschwitz, that he’d let the world forget. And he would not forget again. His family’s murderers were still out in the world. Justice had failed them, the guardians of the law had fled from its demands.
And Erik, Erik was going to see the law that his family had loved, trusted even as it led them to the slaughter, fulfilled. He would hunt the National Socialists down.
Every. Last. One.
Erik’s Mutant Discovery Phase:
This hunt ran aground quickly. At first, Erik made good time teaching himself all the skills he needed to stalk his quarry. Such things came easily to him. Erik had been educated early in languages. It was his family’s pride to be well-rounded, to wield the power of knowledge that their people had used to weave their accomplishments into the fabric of their nations’ culture when no one would accept their blood or their faith. And Erik was exceptionally talented. To his old repertoire of skills he added shooting, lock picking with his powers, and martial arts. He habituated himself to an itinerant lifestyle in every way save for his loneliness, having never been without family. (Perhaps it was this that drove him to start a relationship with Peter and Wanda’s mother, however short-lived and unsuspecting of what they would birth.)
But using his powers drew attention. By the time he was captured by a clandestine Soviet corps that had inherited Nazi experimental camps in Poland, Erik had assassinated five men. He was unprepared for the reality that other mutants existed, for the revelation that his curse was shared. The other mutants were very few—less than a dozen in number. They were kept separated as far as possible, isolated in their torments, but Erik had his first glimpse of mutants as a class of people transformed by chemical weapons, nuclear radiation, and experimentation.
Magneto soon escaped those conditions. Everyone that the researchers had encountered before had minor mutations, at best: Changes of appearance, enhanced metabolisms, or poison breath. They didn’t have the capacity to imprison a man who could turn all their weapons against them. The mutants scattered, none yet realizing they were a race, a class of their own. They feared him as much as the researchers did. Confused, Erik pressed on with the only certain thing in his life: the hunt.
He came upon Shaw’s trail, and the plot of X-men First Class ensued… with a few exceptions.
Charles gave Magneto the gift he longed for most in the world: A family to belong to. Certainly, Erik was gratified to meet someone who thought on as global a scale as he did, someone who possessed the talents to convince him he was not the only being in the world endowed with his power. But Charles had none of the harrowing experiences it took to relate to Erik, and given Erik’s growing, fundamental belief that mutants were the blessed offspring of human atrocities he couldn’t stand how sheltered Charles was. If not for the fact that they began to assemble the X-men immediately upon meeting, he would not likely have trusted Erik so deeply or grown so defensive of him and the friends that they had assembled. As it was, Erik found himself racked with anxiety over how little his companions responded at first to the experience he tried to share with them: We will be persecuted, we are a precious thing they will try to repress, the reminder of what they made us should hurt them.
Erik swiftly grew to love the group for struggling with the same existential fears and incredible gift he did. So when they finally caught up with Shaw, it wounded him that he had to shield his mind from Charles to do what was necessary. It wounded him that when he declared his victory over the man: You created me, but then, so did all the other humans who were there that day. And I am the testament against you all. You tortured my family. You killed my family—when he declared all that, Charles didn’t exult with him.
When he emerged, to a world turning missiles on them—their saviors—for their efforts, he’d barely thought about his response. It was natural: turn the weapons back on those trying to kill them. Turn the force back. As would happen so many times after, what ensued from his decisions was a maelstrom. He couldn’t make sense of it. He remembered nothing but hot white rage like possession. He didn’t know how he’d ended up cradling Charles in his arms, drawing a bullet from Charles’s back. He didn’t know how he’d ended up pleading: But I’m right. I’m right–. We’re brothers, what we want–.
No.
That word was a betrayal.
No. We do not.
Erik swallowed the aftermath. He watched Charles Xavier wipe minds and erase the Cuban Missile Crisis as it had happened from history, and he tried to swallow how that disturbed him, too. Erik watched as Raven—shyly, but with gradual conviction—took in the events that ensued alongside him and reassured him that there was one among them who agreed with him. They watched Charles begin building a school, building a persona, and they watched him forgive human leaders. And forgive them. And forgive them. Over and over and over. He forgave students, too, though in a different way. He forgave humans as though they had never done anything wrong and students as though they had. Erik felt that Charles was waiting for an apology from him, too, and he didn’t intend to give it.
When everything shattered, he’d known it was coming. He just hadn’t known how fast it would all move.
First Period of Resistance (The First Brotherhood):
This is where I’m going to be a lot more flexible. The basic plot from here, as I see it, is that the U.S. government begins small programs to monitor and control mutants. Charles doesn’t react much, while Erik and Mystique take immediate action in retaliation. To their surprise, Charles turns their own kin against them to stop them, and everyone’s relationship goes from bad to worse.
Magneto and mutants drawn to his first, dramatic entrance into politics form the Brotherhood. In its first incarnation, the group’s ethos is more or less the same as it will always be: Mutants were formed in the crucible of humanity’s worst, most horrific offenses, including nuclear holocaust and human experimentation. Rather than dying and becoming a dark spot to be met with silence and mourning they take violent action to make humans confront what they’ve made. They’re a liberation group, but in their first incarnation they don’t care much about collateral damage, feeling that those complacent enough not to fight the human leaders who have created them are complicit. They’ll take anyone, and they don’t really know how to lead a movement, so they quickly radicalize and grow more violent than I think either Erik or Mystique intend. This will all come to a head around the time that Magneto abducts Rogue, and afterward I imagine that he goes underground and leaves Toad to run the Brotherhood for a while.
After that I envision there being an:
Underground Period (The Brotherhood’s several iterations without Magneto)
Magneto’ s inevitably violent and bloody Resurgence
Second Period of Resistance: This is when Erik begins to form Genosha anew
And we can stick whatever madness you want from the First Period of Resistance on.
