#all this evidence taken from uncanny xmen

[lunarblazes]

while i’m xmen posting i do have to mention that post-secret wars 2 arcs of xmen are absolutely insane. they’re really dark, with tons of character darkest hours and breakdowns, and specifically the way they explore kurt’s insecurities and character flaws are just so incredible?

like first he pushes amanda away because he’s having a crisis of faith in everything he believes and he can’t believe she would want to be with him for real, without manipulating him or any kind of ulterior motive. he nearly gets lost in murderworld trying to chase a heroic fantasy, because everything is so much simpler in a fairy tale, while amanda has to deal with the fallout of his callous words. when his team returns from san francisco, he’s forced to be serious again, and he immediately overcompensates, trying to be as daring and bold as he once was, to the point of recklessness—he tries to teleport nimrod, against storm’s advice and all the information they know about nimrod being able to learn from prior attacks, and loses his teleportation for a few days, is chased by a mob, and has to be tracked down and rescued by kitty and piotr.

then, while he’s still incredibly weak from that, to the point of fainting on logan when he teleports to say hi, he chooses to go on the x-men’s mission to rescue the morlocks from hunters that have been ravaging their tunnels. he intentionally overtaxes himself to get rid of one of the hunters, who has been incapacitating the rest of the team, and gets critically wounded by riptide due to his overtaxation and strain on already present wounds he sustained due to his recklessness.

kurt is unable to stop playing the hero. when he doubts his role in the x-men, he becomes reckless and self-destructive, falling back on his idealized vision of a heroic individual, the movies he watched as a child. because it’s so much easier to just get hurt making sure nobody else is—because then, you never have to think about all the hurt you’re causing others. he was raised as a performer, so it’s no wonder he immediately reverts to bravado when he’s cornered. none of the wounds he took were his teammates’ faults—in fact, ororo and logan explicitly told him to stop pushing himself so he could heal—and they didn’t need to do it (at least, not the first one, which would have made the second injury a nonissue). and he’s the x-men’s field medic with banshee in retirement. his self-sacrificing joyride actively puts the others in danger—nobody else thinks to check piotr for wounds after the morlock fight and it nearly kills him when he shifts from his metal form. i just think about him. like a lot. it’s really a wonderful execution of a common character flaw that gets overlooked—because selflessness is good, right?

not when people rely on you. not when it’s destructive.

this flaw is also partially why he’s not a good leader of the x-men—but i could write a whole different post on that so i’ll leave it here for now. i will explode. thanks