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So, I saw X-Men this weekend
Ok, there were two major conceptual things that bothered me from a plot standpoint, and I was totally uninterested in the Xavier/Magneto dynamic for the first time ever in an X-Men film, and Michael Fassbender was awkwardly Aryan-looking for someone playing an Ashkenazi Jew.
But I would totally watch the Raven + Hank + Angel movie forever, and that was totally worth it. I want all the wacky mutant kids adventures. Which is ironic--I spent the first few X-Men movies wanting all the Xavier and Magneto, and now that there's a Xavier and Magneto movie I just wanted it to be about the kids.
The major issues I took with it were:
Issue one: Erik
I think making Shaw exist in the first place, let alone making him the big bad in this movie, was a terrible choice from a character-development-for-Magneto perspective. Nazi Germany was at its core a nation-wide system of dehumanization. It turned German citizens into murderers, and turned Jews, Gypsies, and others into animals. It took away people's names and turned people's into numbers. It was a factory for turning people into sausage. And, like, Erik says all these things, but he doesn't really seem to believe them, and they aren't really all that believable in his story.
Because the bottom line is, what Shaw did to him was personal, and what he wants to do to Shaw is personal. Erik's mother didn't die an anonymous number because of her heritage. Erik's mother was coldly executed as an educational tool for Erik so that Shaw could get under his skin and release his power. That is the opposite. And while Erik LECTURES the Argentinian Nazis about their warcrimes, he kills them only because of his personal anger at Shaw. The movie reduces Nazism's significance to basically a tool Shaw used to play out his agenda, and in doing so stripped away a whole lot of the things that I generally find interesting about Magneto as a character.
And they could have done Shaw right, too. But the character who would interest me in that circumstance isn't the Erik we see in the movie. The character who would interest me is the one who's aware of exactly how lucky he is that his mutation meant a supervillain took personal interest in him, who has survivor guilt over the fact that he never became a number, about the fact that his mother was shot in front of him for his skills, who almost certainly hates the way that this quirk of his DNA makes him something people want to use as a weapon. But that's not Magneto. That's Wolverine.
Magneto is about responding to race hatred with race hatred, not about responding to personal interest from a supervillain with agreeing with the basics of the supervillain's agenda but killing him for personal revenge.
Issue Two: Charles
So, as of the end of the movie, what the CIA knows about mutants is:
(a) They have intensely destructive powers and are totally willing to turn them on human beings.
(b) They are just about all convinced that they are innately superior to human beings and that their destiny is to take over the world when all humans die. Some of them are more patient for this to happen than others.
(c) At least some of them are totally willing to manipulate world governments to make humanity die out faster.
(d) Even the ones they think are their friends do things like vanishing CIA agents and then returning them without their memories. Logically speaking, there are really only two reasons why someone would do this. Either they tortured the agent in question and wanted to get rid of the evidence, or they are totally willing to mind-wipe their friends for marginal convenience. Neither of these is a feature that you would want in an ally.
Basically at the end of the movie, you're left with two teams of mutants. The ones lead by the guy who spends a lot of time talking about how the human race is inevitably going to become extinct in the wake of mutant evolution and is totally down for assaulting humans, and the ones lead by Magneto.
This means that all the Mutantphobia in the regular X-Men canon, both movie and comicverse, is TOTALLY JUSTIFIED. It's not a phobia, it's an entirely rational response to a bunch of people who mostly keep fighting each other and causing human collateral damage who they don't care about.
And it's ironic, because Marvel Comics generally is really good about being aware of this issue. It frustrates me that the group of people who were responsible for Marvels and the entire Civil War arc made a movie this blind to what was a central issue in both of those--the fact that a world that contains metahumans is really fucking dangerous to people who aren't metahumans, and that fear and misunderstanding is a rational response to living in that world. I would have *loved* to see a movie where the mutant split basically played out like the metahuman split in Civil War, with Magneto as the Captain America equivalent and Xavier as the Iron Man equivalent. I'd love to see both sides being right, but becoming bitter enemies because of their incompatible differences. Instead, both sides were wrong, and the only person who I thought had any moral compass by the end of the movie was Raven. (RAVEN WHY WAS THE ENTIRE MOVIE NOT ABOUT YOU?????)
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The trees that obscured the forest a few times, because of my ridiculous tendency to get distracted by details:
- Ok, I understand why *Erik*'s Spanish would have a Castillian accent, but those Nazis had been living in Argentina for over a decade. Why didn't they speak Argentinian Spanish, damnit? At least none of them had Mexican accents, I guess.
- I am so reproducing Moira's sweet seed-stitch beret from the Russian invasian scene. We will, however, pretend that I did not spend that entire sequence waiting for shots of her so I could memorize its construction.
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The fic I want:
The Erik growing up story that actually deals with all of his survivor guilt and the baggage of being a Jew whose entire Jewish community has been wiped out around him, and who has lost all faith in the religion part but still just... wants something from it.
All the Raven fic. Namely, I really want Raven/Erik, but I'm struggling with the fact that after years of Ian McKellen in the role, I am pretty much incapable of reading Erik as either straight or bisexual. I feel like she'd be in love with him, and he'd be in love with her, but just wouldn't really be interested in the sex involving girlparts, and it would SUCK, because he really wants to love her just the way she is and not demand that she change for him like Charles always did. But on the other hand she's totally capable of having the bodyparts he *wants* to have sex with if she feels like it. But then she'd probably have cascading gender problems, because while she can modify the body, she certainly has a strong cissexual bias, and anyway, is turning into a blue boy because that's what Erik wants any more accepting of herself than turning herself into a human-looking girl because that's what Charles wanted? And then they are both just failboats forever and have eternal awkwardness but are A++ BFFs. Um yeah, I want that story.
Um, also, I would pretty much like the story where everyone is all like "Oh, Professor X, we will totally take care of you and push your wheelchair everywhere and not ever let you move under your own power or have any agency" and all his students' ablism allows Charles to learn what it is like for everyone else in that movie to deal with his patronism. /o\ I realize that this is not a good impulse for me to have, but damn, that man needs to have his metaphorical napsack ripped off, unpacked, and thrown at his head until he finally notices that not everyone is a wealthy white dude with an invisible mutation that gives them secret power over everybody around them. Grrrrrr. HE CAN SEE INSIDE EVERYONE'S HEAD AND HE IS STILL NOT CAPABLE OF EMPATHY, WHAT EVEN. Except actually what would happen is he would be like "Man it sucks when people are patronizing. People shouldn't do that. Guess I will mindwhammy them to make them stop. There, I fixed it." And then he would never compare it in any way to his own behavior towards everyone else.
Also more kid shenanigans please. All of them. Haaaaannnnnnkkkkk. Learn to embrace being Beast. I would like the Beast/Havok where Havok is like "I used to call you Bozo, but now that you are all beastly you get me hot and bothered." And I would like more of Angel kicking ass. I would doubleplus like Angel and Mystique running around the world being badass and asskicking together.
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I very much like your view of Erik/Raven as well. And the need for Beast coming to terms with being Beast, because I thought his story was awesome until it was like "well they're just going to leave it at that. All right then!"
I'm not sure about Civil War as a model for an X-story I'd like to see, because I feel like that had its problems, too, but that's at least a model of a conflict where each side has a point. In practice, I think it is hard to pull off with X-Men because the whole mutant situation has borne the burden of being a metaphor for so many things over the years that whether you pick one of them or all of them, there's a level where it's not going to work. But, well, they probably could have tried harder than they did here.
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I want to see more of Beast. Where does he go from here? He was my favorite of the original team, and I was sulky about him not being in the movies for years (although the fact that he was Kelsey Grammer in X3 made me really happy even though I then never wound up watching X3). I just want his arc forever, thanks, moviemakers. And seriously, I want to ship Erik/Raven so bad, I just need to figure out how I can do it so it actually works in my head in a way that's validating for her *and* him.
I agree that there are problems with Civil War too (although in the name of full disclosure, I should mention that I didn't read all of Civil War. It happened when I was still in comics fandom, but when I was in my all-horror-all-the-time phase, so I only read the parts that
But one of the things that really struck me in the Abigail Nussbaum review of the movie is that the major flaw of the X-Men as a metaphor for everything under the sun is that they're genuinely dangerous to the people around them. They're not any *more* dangerous to the people around them than non-Mutant metahumans around them, which makes the prejudice really interesting in-universe, but if you pull them out of the Marvel-verse as the movies generally do, it's entirely reasonable for humankind to hate and fear them. And one of the things that I do like a lot about the way Civil War, if not how it played out, is that those kids genuinely screwed up, and it was their powers and their hubris that lead them to do it. So I guess what I want is not so much the entire Civil War arc done with only the X-Men as an X-Men story that comes to grips both with the fact wanting to keep track of who they are is a reasonable thing for the US government to want to do, and also that it has all kinds of dangerous potential consequences for them, which Magneto is totally correct about. I would watch that movie to pieces.
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Yes, THIS. It doesn't quite work as a metaphor for OMIGOD white people are so nasty to black people because they just don't understand them and are so intolerant because, y'know, black people (or gay/Jewish/other oppressed group) aren't inherently frightening or dangerous. Charles Xavier can TAKE AWAY YOUR FREE WILL. Havoc can shoot hugely powerful bolts out his chest and CAN'T CONTROL IT. The reasonable response to that is 'we must study these people but also defend against them'. Fear is a perfectly sensible response to someone who can kill you and can't control his power yet.
And I'm not sure if they were trying to do something with the Cold War analogy, but similarly, the Cold War was scary because both sides had nukes.
I also want ALL THE ANGST about Erik being gay and Jewish and a mutant, though, so I am also shallow.
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But yeah, it seems to be hard for any powers that be to do an X-Men story that feels honest in its viewpoint and isn't stacking the deck one way or other. The first film is my favorite version in a lot of ways, but even that pulls a weird kind of othering where non-mutants are inherently unreasonable, whereas you'd think there would actually be SOME humans on the mutant side. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, or if it's even possible to apply a fully-balanced viewpoint to the mutant metaphor.
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Anyway, yes. I would like to read/watch/see a version of this story in which both sides are right and legitimately unable to reconcile real ideological conflicts, rather than a version of this story in which both sides are wrong, and their major point of disagreement basically comes down to Charles being a righteous pacifist.
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All the Raven fic. Namely, I really want Raven/Erik, but I'm struggling with the fact that after years of Ian McKellen in the role, I am pretty much incapable of reading Erik as either straight or bisexual. I feel like she'd be in love with him, and he'd be in love with her, but just wouldn't really be interested in the sex involving girlparts, and it would SUCK, because he really wants to love her just the way she is and not demand that she change for him like Charles always did. But on the other hand she's totally capable of having the bodyparts he *wants* to have sex with if she feels like it. But then she'd probably have cascading gender problems, because while she can modify the body, she certainly has a strong cissexual bias, and anyway, is turning into a blue boy because that's what Erik wants any more accepting of herself than turning herself into a human-looking girl because that's what Charles wanted? And then they are both just failboats forever and have eternal awkwardness but are A++ BFFs. Um yeah, I want that story.
*chinhands* link me when you find it. *_* This hits my interpretations sweet spots so hard, sigh.