You get my headcanons regarding the music tastes of the 97’ kids (somewhat accurate to the 90s i think)
Arlette: definitely Britney Spears, some Destiny’s Child, maybe a little bit of Alanis Morissette and specifically Just A Girl by No Doubt
Adrian: unironically listens to Weezer. Also really likes Bonnie Tyler but like, in secret. Jared can never know. But he has cried listening to Total Eclipse of the Heart and will do so again
Lilli: David Bowie and The Smiths, but also some older country music because she lived with her grandpa for a lot of her life and that’s what he liked.
Jared: Proud Nickelback enjoyer (derogatory). And anything metal or metal adjacent that he can play loudly and obnoxiously while doing air guitar solos. Specifically late at night to piss other people off
Notes: All depictions of Borderline Personality Disorder are based of research with the consultation of medical websites and videos in which medical professionals and people with the disorder discuss their experiences. All mistakes are the fault of the author.
I maintain that Northstar doesn't have Symptoms #5 (recurrent suicidal behavior) and #9 (transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms) of Borderline Personality Disorder. However I'd be lying if I said the way it's presented in volume 2 of Alpha Flight wasn't at least slightly intriguing to me.
The air is thinning as you storm through the skies. Clumps of ice freezing against your hair, snow sticking to your suit, your skin groaning as the frozen wind slaps against it.
But you don’t care.
In fact you don’t even notice.
Your body is made for these conditions. Freezing cold mountain tops, the burning hot atmosphere, able to go up and up and up until you ran out of sky.
Or oxygen.
Whichever comes first.
The air tosses you around in its clutches. Throwing you this way and that. Rocking you in the icy hurricane. You push against it, fighting for your life, tripping over air, as you land face first in the snow.
To any other being the belly flop onto the hard frozen ground would hurt (and it does hurt) but you don’t seem to notice.
As you brush the snow off your face, your eyes are focused on the light show projected against the dark screen hanging above your head. The beautiful kaleidoscope of teel, blue, and purple hypnotizes you and you feel your body warm up in excitement.
You made it.
You did it.
You found her.
Your name is Jean-Paul Beaubier and for the past several days you have been searching frantically for your sister Aurora.
Now you have finally found her.
It was a daunting search. Running around Canada, stumbling into that sleepy little school, in Laville. Finding the building burnt to ash and yet still ventured inside.
Braving missing floorboards, blackened air, and the tsks of a disapproving nun.
It was almost like you had a death wish or something.
You passed the corpses of classrooms, the bones of school desks, the melted figures of the Virgin Mary as you climbed higher and higher. Knowing that despite the danger she was there. She was waiting for you.
You don’t scream as your foot falls through the flimsy floor of a staircases. You sit there for a moment. Gripping onto the banister as you pull your left foot up and firmly place it onto the next solid step. Wondering if you were to let go of the bars, allow your self to fall, if you would actually make it to the concrete basement that glimmered below.
Or if your magnificent powers of flight would stop you before you reached the ground.
You quickly brush those thoughts out of your head, she’s waiting for you upstairs, you just have to get up there.
When you reach the top of the stairs you stumble inside. Exhausted even though you barely made it up three flights. However your attention is snapped away from your aching bones and tired eyelids, by a voice.
“Ah!”
Your eyes widen at the sight in front of you.
Aurora is sitting in the ashes of the classroom. Comfortably perched on the desk, her hair wild as if she had recently been hit by a bolt of lightning, she wears the dark uniform of a nun. The grey gown falling apart at the seams.
“Bon soir, Jean-Paul.” She greets. “Come in. Come in.”
“Aurora?” Your elation at finding her is quickly replaced by confusion and concern as you see the state she’s in.
“You are extremely late.” Aurora chastises.
‘Late for what?’ You want to ask, but you don’t say anything. Instead you take a seat at one of the sturdier desks. Your eyes cautiously drift from your sister to the chalk board. Trying to make sense of the strange writing.
On the parts of the board that have not been reduced to charcoal, Aurora has written Give Me the Sun Mother! In bright orange. Next to it a giant smiling sun has been drawn.
“Now where would you like to begin…?”
Aurora’s lecture makes little sense.
She begins to talk about the dinosaurs. Giant lizard birds, swept out of existence by an asteroid. She then switches to the Greeks. Something about a philosopher running naked through the streets of Athens. She somehow relates that to math. Before switching to Literature and making a comment about some play about spirits.
Try as you might, you can’t make heads or tails of your sisters mismatched sentences. As she drones on, your blue eyes roll into the back of your head, and you drift off. Heading lolling on the desk like your back in middle school. Falling asleep in the middle of a history lecture.
Your dreams are dark.
Not dark as in scary.
Dark as in dim.
Blank.
Meaningless.
Empty.
It’s so nice, just to be left alone, away from your thoughts.
For once.
Until a tap to your side comes to ruin it.
“Monsieur?”
“Hmm…”
You blink your eyes open.
Your lying on that same dusty floor covered in ash. The Sister you meet the day before stares down at you, lecturing you on how dangerous this is.
You ignore her.
Picking yourself off the floor your glance around the room.
Your sister is gone.
Again.
You ask the nun where your sister is.
The nun says she knows nothing about your sister. That you and her are the only ones standing in the former Madame DuPont’s School for Girls.
You argue this point, instead you gesture to the board. The picture of the sun, the bright orange scrawl in your sister’s familiar hand.
But when your eyes glance back at the writing your realize it’s gone.
Replaced with something entirely different.
Instead of Aurora’s thick orange penmanship, the phrase Help ME! is written in sickly pale skinny lettering.
The nun gives you a look. A look typically reserved for dealing with the profoundly delusional.
“I did not write that!” You insist. “It was my sister. She—”
“If you please sir,” The sister interrupts, pointing to his gloved fingers she adds. “The chalk is in your hands.”
Sure enough she’s right.
“My sister was here!”
You slam the chalk down on the floor. It breaks apart, rolling through the ashes, quickly becoming grey.
“She was here!”
This does nothing to persuade the nun. After your outburst she quickly excuses herself and steps outside. You decide to leave before anyone else shows up.
Now you are at the north pole. Staggering to your feet, as sheets of snow roll of your body.
Aurora’s dark silhouette is barely visible against the pounding snow. You have to squint to see it. it doesn’t matter though, because she’s there.
You’ve won.
You’ve found your sister.
And everything is going to be okay now.
“Jean-Paul? You have come all the way to the North Pole for me?”
Her voice sounds so faint. So unsure. As if she really didn’t believe this was all possible.
‘Of course.’ You want to say. ‘Of course I flew all the way to the North Pole for you. I’d do anything for you.’
They would hug, you would try to ignore the electric static of your body as your powers fizzed and frizzed at the contact. You and Aurora would leave this place. Go to your apartment. You’d talk, you’d laugh, you’d smile.
Slowly your conversation would turn serious. Aurora would reveal where she had been all this time. A small apartment on the other side of the country. Or perhaps in America. Or maybe she had taken a new suitor and had run off with him.
Then it would be your turn to talk. You’d tell her about how’d miserable you’d been. A groan mixed with an airy laugh, not divulging all the details, because those things didn’t matter.
The visit to Madame DuPont’s didn’t matter.
Your encounter in the classroom didn’t matter.
Your attempt to float past the stratosphere until air gave out…the thing that started this whole journey…that didn’t matter.
Aurora was back now.
She’d make you happy again.
Like she always did.
Except as you grow stagger closer. Your knees knocking together, the agony that punches through your nerves as loud as the wind, doubt begins to creep through your body.
You don’t feel like you usually do around Aurora. Like she’s the other half of a magnet drawing you closer to her. Like the clouds have parted and the sun is shining again casting all of his fears and doubts away. Like they’re the only two people in the world.
Rather you dread going near her.
“Aurora…” Your teeth chatter together. “My sister…Is that really you?”
“Yes, Jean-Paul.” Aurora turns away from him. “But not for long.”
Suddenly a bright light engulfs Aurora, she disappears from sight, replaced by the yellow beam.
“Aurora! Wait!” You pant, trying to run to her before she disappears. “My powers are—”
You don’t finish your sentence, because the light starts to dim, taking Aurora along with it.
Soon both are gone.
“Aurora!”
You slam into the snow. Grabbing fistfuls of frosty hair as you huff out long shaky breaths.
What do you think would've happened had Alpha Flight 1997 continued?
Plot points, character arcs, etc.
See it’s things like this that keep me up at night. That sounds like a joke but I’m genuinely writing this at gone 1 in the morning. But like, where would it have gone? What were the writers building up to, what did all that foreshadowing meannnnnn? And I’ll probably never know for sure, which means I can make up whatever I want.
I think there’s a certain point in the run where you can tell the writers knew their book was getting cancelled. Even before you get letters about the cancellation in the submission pages, you can tell. The weapon x story at the end feels especially rushed, like they were searching for any kind of conclusion to their obviously unfinished story, and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered
Off the top of my head (I cannot justify rereading 97 again this year yet) those questions include:
- Hull House- what are they doing there, what is the nature of the legacy program, what happened to the other recruits?
- Similarly, what was going on with those weird supernatural flashbacks Arlette and Adrian had?
- How did Heather’s new suit work? There’s no lava under Canada, so where were those geothermal powers coming from?
- Who were the kids’ parents really? Is that where they got their powers? How did they end up at Hull House (well Lilli wound up there after her grandfather died but what about the others?)
- Who was “The Director” of Department H and how was he connected to the Zodiac? It looked like the implication was he was the one who hired them, but why and for what? What was that thing they stole?
- What else were they doing on that secret floor? What the fuck was in the Curiosity file??? And what was up with Manbot, seriously what was going on there?
In the beautiful alternate universe in which Alpha Flight 1997 didn’t kind of suck and wasn’t cancelled (which I imagine is the same universe that the Gen X movie got picked up for a tv series), I’d like to get answers for all of these. I myself can’t really come up with good answers for all of them, but there are certainly some plot points I would’ve liked to see
The really oppressively sinister vibes of Department H are a really fun part of the run, like it’s always been kind of shady but here it’s genuinely evil-feeling. General Clarke’s death felt very abrupt, since up until that point he had arguably been the main antagonist, and the subsequent introduction of Mr Gentry felt a little too good to be true. He’s too nice and too much of a departure from what was previously established- I don’t trust him. I do think this is a result of the cancellation and attempts to tie things up, but wouldn’t it be interesting if it was revealed later that he was playing a similar game to General Clarke- he was just much better at it. He kept the Alphan’s happy, made them feel like he was trustworthy, even intervened on their behalf with other department officials, and all those little victories kept them distracted from how little power they actually had.
I also think there was some magic shit going on. Hear me out. Sunfire accuses Heather’s new suit of being ‘sorcery’. The flashbacks the kids have- Adrian of a wolf-like creature hovering in the air and speaking to him and Arlette of being trapped in what looked like a wooden box with bugs and the shadow of something with hands- definitely suggest something supernatural. What if the department made a deal with something?
There are mutant children at Hull House, more than seems statistically likely but no one questions it. If they tell Madam DeLaSalle they saw something at night she pats them on your head and sends them back to bed, smiling knowingly- not because she knows they were dreaming, but because she knows they weren’t. There’s something rotten in the walls, in the earth, that you never quite get used to. They needed children with powers. They take their blood and put things in, monitor them, measure what they eat, watch them as they sleep. They needed a suit with power, they get one that brings fire and magma boiling up from earth where it has no business being- no one questions it. There was a man called Bernie Lachenay, only he’s not a man anymore, he’s a machine, maybe he always was, and no one questions it. You don’t ask how things happen in Department H. You don’t ask where they get their ‘acquisitions’, or how it is they can change people’s memories, or what the Director keeps in the drawer under his desk. You just do your job and keep your head down.
Idk the weirdness and the creepiness are very fun and I think it would be interesting if they went in a more, I guess, lovecraftian direction with it? It would preserve the feeling of not knowing everything that’s happening while also giving us some answers as to what was going on. I especially think it would work in regards to Murmur. I love Arlette, I think she’s so fun, but her powers are weird. She needs to touch you to control you, but she can’t touch Jared and she manages to get him anyway, she sent one of the Zodiac across the planet via a teleporter she would have no reason to know they had and when they fought the X-Men, Maggott’s slugs went right past her as if she wasn’t there. I do have a feeling from some of the narration that she might’ve been supposed to betray the team in some capacity, but that didn’t end up happening and I don’t like that idea so.
Just- I enjoy the idea of something being fundamentally Not Right about the ‘97 kids, beyond their obviously poor socialisation. Like something’s been done to them- is being done to them- and they don’t know what, but it’s noticeable. You could also tie parts of the weapon x storyline back into this, but have it be demonic and/or magical instead of what, a sentient strain of bacteria? Is that what it was?
I think if the series had had more time they could’ve paced things a bit slower, given that sense of nothing being as it seems more time to fester, as it were. Maybe revealed information about Hull House and the kids’ parents gradually, like Basil Kilgrew was doing before he got unceremoniously murdered via elevator. They still could’ve reintroduced the previous members of Alpha Flight, but perhaps have them show up one by one, or have them encounter the weirdness on their own and investigate separately to the main team. Also we could keep the Prometheus Pit but make it more narratively relevant instead of having it be a microverse filled arc that sucked.
Every day I get closer and closer to rewriting this stupid run myself and I have a university degree to worry about I cannot be doing that. For now you all have to put up with my conspiracy theories
