I would love to know your thoughts on the architecture of Quentin’s mind/his own mental library space for himself! Either in general or with respect to things he hides/obscures.
the way i was actually in the middle of a post that included this lol
mindscapes in the comics overall really fascinate me, in no small part bc telepath fave, but also bc it's such like. a big staple of a lot of x-stuff, considering the amount of prominent telepaths? we're going to see the inside of someone's mind, probably several times over in several different ways. even just flipping thru utopia & nation x, i saw at least namor, scott, diamond form emma, & the sentry, & the differences between people with tight control of their mind or experience, like namor or scott, compared to the wasteland of emma's mind when she's cut off from her emotions, to bob, having the most basic structures for his safety in a mind he can't fully control, just... gets me so good.
admittedly for quentin, i'm fond of the idea of the library & the view out the window really only being one part, & that the rest of the sprawl of that limitless mind is, at least in most respects, the school. xavier's as he knew it? the jgs? whatever they had going on in central park? yes. a little bit of all of them, stitched together in ways he can make appear utterly seamless. it gives him the space for the library as his focal point of more conscious thought, imo, the place where he's noting down observations & thoughts, keeping his records organized, as well as having the lawn to keep the eternally-burning brain damage on, but the rest of the school is... kind of a toss-up, whether stepping through a door gets you an actual, true-to-life recreation of whatever was there or something else. someone's classroom has been taken over to set up the relay for the psychic comms. opening certain dorm rooms slaps you in the face with vivid memories that have been twisted by quentin replaying the moment, again & again, & letting his feelings overshadow the reality of it. he's not exactly keen on letting anyone else read in the library, mind you, but that's the space people are first brought to bc they're the thoughts he's put, well, thought into - organization & cataloging & intent, usually, all wrapped up in neat leather bindings or stored on the jgs' nice computer systems in ways that are more presentable (ignore the brain damage out the window haha he'll just hide that).
things obscured... there's gotta be a jar in the basement, surely. a jar or a tank in hank's lab that glows a soft, eerie green from behind stacks of technical junk & half-finished constructs & chemistry sets. it being this sort of... nothingness, that he tries to keep pushed down. not just dissociation or zoning out but the straight up call of nonexistence that. hey we're not looking at! mccoy's lab is gross, nobody wants to see that, move along. don't look at the glowing green tub of suicidal ideation & fear of a loss of control. it's not spilling onto the floor.
there's also probably shit about his family, frankly - not necessarily the birth parent shit but. man he has repressed the fuck out of any & everything about his adopted parents. their names are smudged in the sparse record about them, things crossed out & edited & questioned with a vehemence you can feel in those psychic penstrokes, before there's long sections of empty pages only broken up by the occasional single line about them. that one even quentin can't really read, not emotionally but quite literally, it looks like it's been thru six ciphers even before quentin overlays it with the fun, familiar effect of "i literally cannot recognize letters or words right now even in my own hand" (shoutout migraine auras). it's collecting dust.
xavier is also probably a complicated one. he doesn't necessarily like admitting to himself, genuinely, he ever admired the man. doesn't want to think about the ways he's mirrored him or the teachings he took to heart. sure, it's a silly joke, the angel on his shoulder looks like charles, or a good thing to throw in chuck's face, i believed in you once - but actually letting himself think or feel like the man shaped his moral compass is far too damning to acknowledge. there's notes on the cover or the title page about revisions, new editions, but good luck getting his mind to procure the old ones to see the truth of anything. & the headmaster's office - charles' headmaster's office, specifically - is locked tight. the chair they tied him to still sits in the middle of the floor. the modified helmet rests on the seat. whether that's about pride or regret or both doesn't really matter if no one gets to see it.
there's stuff about his identity shoved between the mattress & the bedframe in his dorm room. replacing playboys with floppy, glossy pages about fucked up gender feelings & questioning his sexuality & psychosexual awakenings that start happening & have him immediately clamming the fuck up. hey why was my reaction to x-23 'sexy girl wolverine, this is the best day of my life'? not thinking about it. any thoughts there might be are printed in nice neat little snippets next to normal-looking images of laura & exaggerated mockups of what an actual sexy woman iteration of logan would look like & jesus christ he is not looking at it. & nobody else should be looking at how much of some of those articles got copied into his resurrection notes, either.
