The most hilarious thing in the world to me is watching all the right wing morons freaking out over X-Men 97 being “woke” and accidentally revealing that they have in fact never read an X-Men comic book and if they watched the old cartoon at all, it was only in passing and they never paid attention to it.
I’m not even talking about the fact that the X-Men have always met their definition of “woke”, even from the very beginning. No, I’m talking about the utterly baffling number of straight up factual errors I see them spouting. It’s absolutely embarrassing. They present themselves as fans, and are the exact type of guys who would gatekeep comics and assume any random woman in a comic store is a “fake fan”, but they have no clue about some of the most iconic elements from both the comics and the old cartoon!
I watched a video by a guy who had no idea Morph was a character in the old cartoon, and had never even heard of the Age of Apocalypse (one of the most famous X-Men stories in existence). I watched another by a guy freaking out over Storm’s Mohawk, not realizing it’s part of one of her most iconic looks from the 80’s. He showed a picture of her in her first costume from the comics (on a cover of X-Men Classic of all things) that looked way sexier than she was normally drawn when wearing that costume. Then said they “toned down” her look for the original cartoon, not knowing that her cartoon look was an exact replica of her look in the comics when the cartoon was made. They didn’t tone down anything. That was just what she looked like in the comics at the time.
The new cartoon is great. And I say this as a person who was totally obsessed with the old cartoon to the point that it worried my parents. To the point that I (a super calm and well behaved child) threw a massive tantrum when I realized the VCR had failed to record a new episode while I wasn’t home and cried on the couch for hours. To the point that my entire family still, to this day, knows every character’s name (and real name!) without ever watching the show because I talked about it so much.
I’ve never had a problem with “fake fans” of anything, because I figure if you fake something like that, odds are good that you’ll end up genuinely getting into whatever you’re pretending to like. And more fans of something is always a good thing in my book. But when those fake fans are actively trashing something I love just to grift to their narrow minded audiences, using completely false information, it’s ridiculous.
Honestly I wish I could just force these guys to read any storyline from Claremont’s 80’s run. It doesn’t even matter which one. They’re all solid gold. But maybe reading something so freaking great would open their tiny minds just a little bit.
