#I’ve seen people mention boomers and super young gen z

[jewishbarbies]

what is it with 50+ yr old people having no sense of spacial awareness when it comes to sound. playing random videos on their phones at full volume in a room full of people, turning the tv up as much as they want while other people are doing A Task, answering every phone call on speaker at full volume. when does it end.

[hellyeahheroes]

I goddamn hate the X-men

Any X-men writers or fans come at me for this. Fine. You can ignore my hate for this franchise because honestly, I will never be a fan of this series. Everytime this franchise is mentioned or even brought up in conversation around me, I will be the wet fucking blanket because honestly, it was a concept that never appealed to me or will never appeal to me.

Against my better judgement, I decided to pick up the New Uncanny X-men because I tried. I read and like the post Ultimatum X-men and I guess I am the only person in the world that did. I read and loved the New X-Men series that you just dropped off the face of the Earth for...nostalgia of everything I hate about this franchise.

So I figured that since my good online pal @majingojira loves the X-men and the admin of this blog @filipfatalattractionrblog constantly posts about what is going in comics in general and @newx-menfan has introduced me to the only X-men content that I actually respect is actually despondent about what is going on with you writers. I decided to pick it up and see what is the fuss about.

And my god, we are ten issues in and yeah, I now really hate your series, writers and fans.

I hate the concept of the X-men. I hate that they base themselves around the Civil Rights movement but most of the core characters are white. You want to know what really did it for me? When Wolverine lectured Luke Cage for not understanding the mutant plight.

I will never like the concept of allegorical racism in narrative form in a contemporary when most of the characters are non-people of color. And I sure as shit won’t like allegorical LGBTQI oppression and hatred in a narrative form when most of your characters are coded straight. This is why I tend to like the X-books that stray away from that mutantphobia bullshit or apply whole universe wide so it at least makes narrative sense why Firestar is hated while Johnny Storm is celebrated(and if you didn’t pick up on that reference, post-Ultimatum X-men or the Ultimate Universe in general, super powered people aren’t just not liked in general).

Because if you want to write about racism, maybe you should just use a character of color. If you want to write about LGBTQI issues, maybe you should write an LGBTQI character. The cognitive dissonance is so thick in this fandom that it is an actual commonality where there are X-men fans that are MAGA supporters. Build the wall the lowly tumblr jackass says with Cyclops leading a mutant resistance in his header while touting Magneto is right.

I’m a bi-black man and as of late, I don’t feel particularly empowered or represented in a series that uses the United States History of the Civil Rights movement as it’s core theme. That is depressing. If only Black People created a paramilitary peace keeping taskforce?

Whoops.

And it’s not like you fucking jackasses aren’t aware of the social commentary. The Champions make social justice their core theme and you fuckers do nothing but whine about it, but when the X-Men do it, it is high fucking literature because all of the characters are white. Could you imagine a super powered Black Panthers, Young Lords, Brown Berets, or Yellow Peril? I don’t hate the X-men because it is an outdated metaphor for racism. I hate them because it is a misplaced concept for racism or oppression in general.

So I pick up this series and honestly,  I have to ask this question. Who exactly is this book for? 

It is not for kids as you will literally send kid characters to the sewers and treat them as lesser X-men.

Okay, Jean, your super power and what you are pretty much known for other than dying is pretty much nuclear temper tantrum. You don’t get to call anyone out for being childish, especially since you do not treat any of these kids with respect yet you demand it out of them. Oh and look, here are the few panels where Ororo actually speaks and  says something and isn’t the token black person in the core X-men.

@filipfatalattractionrblog, the admin of the blog, had the right metaphor for this series as it is pretty much baby boomers rule and millennial and Gen Z drool the comic book version. Because outside of Laura who is doing her best Logan impersonation, there are no other young folks and X-23 really does not say anything of substance other than just be the distaff Logan. 

This entire comic book is nostalgia gate keeping. If you aren’t familiar with X-Men lore, then you are lost from the get-go. For example, the chief villain for this series is the alternate universe son of Jean Gray and Scott Summers.

...are you fucking serious?

First off, it shows a lack of commitment. You could have just made them have a kid and kept it in Universe but no, we have the added convoluted layer of alternate dimension for a villain that calls himself X-Man. That’s decades of obscurity and history that you just expect comic readers to grasp and accept as soon as you pick up a book.

And don’t get me started on using older characters that can’t possibly function as gateways for new reader. X-Men is probably the most narcissistic reading experience I’ve seen in comics. And no, not all comics are like this. Spider-Man, if recall correctly, has the highest number of issues in marvel but at any given point or at least at the beginning of an arc, you can pick up a Peter Parker Spider-Man book and don’t have to be familiar with past convoluted plot points especially in the fucking first issue of a new volume.

Your characters are overwritten like reading through the history of Jean Grey is like literary acid trip. Comic books get this reputation of being hard to get into but I don’t think there is a franchise that exemplifies this more than the fucking X-Men.

And it is a quick and easy fix. Use newer characters. I could have picked up the New X-Men comic and binge read all 40 issues without having to know the complicated history of the X-men. And it is not like the old guard weren’t around. It was more that the old guard weren’t crucial to the story. And that is important.

And finally, the nostalgia wankery just turns me off. How many times can you sit there and rerun the same plots from Claremont? You know what I like to do?

When there is a super team being made and I want to come up with a dream roster, I literally go TV Tropes X-Men page and just read up on 2000s and on X-characters. Why? Because they are rarely used and obscure enough to not be weighed down on X-bullshit. I actually get mad at X-Men fans who want to make Kamala a mutant. Say what you want about the Inhumans but at least they diversified and made newer characters and made them a staple. The X-Men’s greatest success since 2000 was X-23 and that was not even something the comic writers made but the cartoon show did. It’s 2019 and Magneto, a Holocaust survivor is still using that as his main motivation to why he hates bigotry?

Don’t listen to me. I hate this franchise and it fills me with glee that the misplaced nostalgia will be the death of you all. Every other Marvel property adapted but the fucking X-Men. I mean fuck, the Fantastic 4 are now the Fantastic 6 with 3 of the 4 married and Johnny Storm wanting to settle down and get married. Fucking Peter Parker had an entire series being married with child. And yet, it appears your characters are in a perpetual state of 80s. God.

@ubernegro