bro remember like ten years before joann decided she wanted to become a supervillain and harry potter fandom was the backbone of like basically all fandom infrastructure and they used to name the ships like they were literal ships. that was so fun and cute
thesis: the theme of “you gotta let go of ur trauma in order for it not to control you/for you to get better BUT we are all fundamentally the broken child inside our minds and we will never get past that so try not to let it ruin ur relationships and also just vibe and take advantage of good shit while u have it” is not only poorly developed to the point that it can barely be parsed because whedon constantly sacrifices opportunities to take his own story seriously to make jokes which are NOT EVEN VERY FUNNY but the ways in which it's developed are lowkey kinda evil. also like two things i liked tacked onto the end let's get into it
wrt emma's "one weakness" as exploited by cassandra nova:
and kitty's response to this argument:
(notable for a variety of reasons but i wanna pause for just one second to remark on what hank says here: "following scott's logic, what emma did was confront us with our worst fears. which we faced and here we stand" - it does not in fact follow logically from what scott was saying. whedon is just not very subtle wrt establishing theme)
the way emma breaks scott down is by destroying scott's ego:
(which i like as a continuation of morrison's themes of how identity is structured around trauma but. as a guy who is wholly unfamiliar with modern comics as of yet i do not feel like scott summers is a dude who calls women bitches even on his darkest of days but perhaps that's just me. or the fact that whedon clearly thinks having the characters say wildly offensive shit is edgy. either way!)
and by taking him back to the black bug room where he then gets to crawl inside the trauma vagina and. this happens:
which is. for a variety of reasons. i think one of the most evil directions we could have possibly chosen to take this.
i do not love this idea that our childhood trauma is "everything you are and everything you aren't" in general, but i PARTICULARLY dislike it in the context of comparison to morrison bc like -- i don't think whedon really got it? the ideas presented in morrison are not that you are always continuously defined by the worst thing that happened to you as a child, the idea is that your identity, which is fundamentally linked to your social standing and existence in relationship to other people, is constantly shifting in response to traumatic events many of which occur within the context of our relationship to others.
the other most clear example of this idea is in the convo bt emma & the danger room or whatever the fuck she's called (can you tell i didn't like this storyline?)
(also don't we love the extremely outdated cultural reference do the children even know what this means. it's not very funny even if u do.)
whedon also has this very weird preoccupation with "choosing" one's response to trauma:
this can also be seen in a lot of his coverage of kitty:
i'm not gonna go grab all the panels but she continuously struggles with the trauma of losing peter & her father, having emma running the x-men as a person she sees as the embodiment of evil, etc. and allows this to fundamentally injure her ability to trust others. in this context she's talking about a longform hallucination given to her by emma so she'd let cassandra nova outta the box and like. i need u to understand i'm being mean to the grown man that wrote this character but even i don't buy into this dialogue? like. the hallucination wherein everyone loves steals her newborn baby for having Too Much Power or whatever does not thematically have anything to do with being dumped or having ur bf die self-sacrificing? like is it meant to be about betrayal? i do not really get what the idea is here.
it's notable that kitty is also the only one of the characters who does not have a character beat about hurting others (scott cheated on his dead wife, hank "devolves" and eats a lil bit of logan's leg, peter hurts kitty by existing ig, logan has big claws for hands as per ushe, not even going to explain emma) which makes this whole thing feel ALMOST like idea is "yeah moving on from being hurt sucks but imagine to move on you have to forgive yourself for hurting someone else." which is a sentiment that makes me fucking violent lmfao BUT i think (hope) it is unintentional.
i would argue that whedon's intended take is that kitty allows herself to be Consumed by her trauma in that she is unable to move on from it (except she lowkey does and fucks peter again anyways but none of the thematic language seems to give a flying flip about that, so) which is like. better i think but still perhaps a little evil.
this brings us to the motifs of metal & the cage, or Why Kitty Gets The Bad End:
cages, prisons, boxes, oh my! this is the most consistent symbol whedon sets up! not pictured: the danger room. cassandra nova bug thing in a box in the basement. emma going into a coma. and finally:
not screenshotting it bc i am so fucking sick of whedon but kitty's end is that she melds with the missile heading towards earth so it phases through and doesn't hurt anyone but now she's lost in space and she has now Merged With The Cage. the cage is also Weird Metal which is uh:
not a well-developed symbol. in my onion.
anyways. all this to say that the idea that there is a right and wrong way to choose how we react to trauma (also paralleled in the arc of the alien attempting to throw peter into the fucking. sun idk in order to destroy the whole alien society bc it is has no sanctity for life and dictates that grief is shameful ((joss whedon does not understand fascism very well...)) and has traumatized said alien) is an idea that i do not like. we could get in a very complex discussion here but the way whedon presents these ideas is almost to the point of portraying any emotional response to a trauma as a weakness. in fact it is normal to be upset when bad things happen. who woulda thunk
i am sure there are people out there who find this idea empowering, like you gotta pick urself up by ur bootstraps to "be better" but i personally kind of hate it -- again, especially as a response to morrison. the way these ideas are developed makes minimal distinction between the idea of "being hurt" and "hurting others" and also really does not take the idea of guilt seriously -- despite the fact that it's explicitly addressed multiple times!
like, the idea of "survivor's guilt" is specifically brought up re:emma but we get literally zero exploration of how this might impact her outside of scott just saying "wow it sure has impacted her". which is why when i got to this part (presented again in sequence so that u may Understand):
my immediate reaction was "oh so we're saying scott SHOULDN'T feel bad for cheating on his wife got it okay"
like, i really dislike the way that emma's history is presented here. like. i'm not deeply familiar with the chronology of her personal history but there are definitely Some Things In It She Should Really Feel Guilty About, even if the circumstances which led her to these actions were understandable in some cases. but surviving a genocide is not one of those things. these things are not the same!
and full stop this is what happens right after and i just
genuinely cannot stand the take that "breaking" someone is 1) a sign of genuine care for another human being or 2) that this type of brutal honesty is necessary for people to "get better"
we saw this idea earlier as well
like jean never saw that scott "chose" to lose control because she respected him enough to not try to emotionally fucking break him lmfao. and we know this is a good thing because it gives scott "clarity" which lets him see that he is in love with emma. they don't really have any 1-1 conversations in between those two scenes either!! dear lord.
also see this wrt logan retraumatizing the fucking children in the danger room "for their own good" and a few other places as well lol. really weird shit and would love to hear another interpretation of this because genuinely it gives me about 85 million types of ick!
anyways to finish up the discussion of the Main Theme you may be saying to urself "but dude whedon's not saying that EVERYONE is always the worst thing that happened to them as a child bc at least some of the characters move on" WRONG
scott's whole thing is that emma breaks his brain and he has coma fun time control his laser eyes fun time and then at the end he fucking loses control again
not for any particular reason. just bc "clarity doesn't last"
which of course nothing ever does. all happiness is fleeting. u get to fuck ur gf twice and then she's entombed forever in a special metal space missile that was ur torture prison.
genuinely i feel like whedon read the new x-men and was like "oh yeah man hurt people hurt people." what a boring fucking take and executed in some really weird emotionally fucked-up ways. hated it! didn't like it!
i do feel bad ending this post on such a dour note tho so a couple of things i did like at least in part:
this depiction of jean/scott:
which is 1) a clear callback to the #132 kiss which is The Most Iconic jeanscott scene in my humble onion and 2) while clearly intended to be interpreted as a memory, it's unclear when/whether emma steps in to alter the scene - like is "oh, sweetie, are you really comparing...scott, love, you're just a man" a thing jean really said to him or is it a reflection of scott's fears. i personally more enjoy the latter interpretation bc it's pretty much exactly in line with the ideas presented in the new x-men AND it's way more creative than the ideas ab their relationship whedon brings up at the beginning of this run:
like. is scott summers' worst fear being a failure? yes, probably. is The Worst Thing the hallucinated ghost of his dead wife he cheated on with the woman who he is currently dating by roleplaying as himself and a younger less emotionally complex version of his wife could say to him fucking. "you're a failure" ?
probably not.
i do also really like some of the character beats for scott and emma:
like yes. keep having her say sex things to him in public and he just ignores her. extremely correct i want to see more of it keep doing it.
and a panel that makes me laugh no matter how many times i fucking see it
think my favorite scogean trope wherein jean is dead is where scott and logan are both in some type of relationship with her when she dies but perhaps not each other in the same way so they get to have weird gay grief sex w each other
