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moth-in-the-moon · 1 year ago

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I get what you mean. I might sound controversial here but Si Spurrier took Chuck Austen's spot in my list of bad Nightcrawler writers for awhile now.

After this tho ? This whole 6$ mess?? I actually prefer Austen to him. It's incredible.

Should have seen this coming, all the clues were there from the start : Nightcrawler's selective memory on everything he went through, none of his friends caring about him (100× worse than Austen on this one), that bit in Legion of X where we could see Nightcrawler's s3xual fantasies which included a woman that straight up looks like Rogue, the whole Mother Righteous deal, the Golden Child in Nightcrawlers (we went all later season Rick and Morty here) and of course the Margali fiasco, to which I'm still going "why just why" whenever I think about it especially after finding out Orchis actually has a magic user (new oc from Dark X-Men) who captured an alternative version of Nightcrawler + Madelyne Pryor before Fall of X went down (so like why tf couldn't they have another oc or just her be behind Legion of X's horn plot instead of the only good parent Kurt has??)

Just get Si Spurrier away from Nightcrawler forever. I'm begging here

Who are you and how did you find me

Outside of getting an ask that isnt from people I talk to on the daily, i assume, uh. Yeah what's been happening to Kurt has all kinda a big mess.

People can like the retcon and more power to them if they do, but I just. personally dont like how it messes with everything (a la Maximoffs arent Magnetos kids anymore, but somehow worse?) Full on explaination of my thoughts under the read more, be warned though, it might be a bit messy just based on it being me trying to collect my thoughts in a written form

Spurrier has made some very weird choices in the comics, definitly, though not all of them suck IMO.

(I'm probably the one person who thought about how Azazel has basically soul magic and how Kurt could thusly have magic aswell, meaning that Hope Sword being a magic weapon that kurt made in his soul (one which he should not have, but apperantly grew back) satisfied me and me specifically beccause AHA magical kurt!)

BUT YEAH NO, they messed up Margali ALOT, which, read the headline she is my girl, I liked seeing her again but WOW did they not understand her and what she does and the way they characterized her could be considered a form of character-assasination and possibly even. downright horrible considering the fact that she is a roma woman (though lets be real there are many issues with how writers treat the romani characters and as someone who is not romani, I wont speak on it in detail now, cause it's not really my place. but like man); Mr Sinisters rule 63 self was a whole thing, again as my headline says, do not like her., i think her character was handled horribly. Plus they made her like. the reason why margali does magic and as the number one margali fan in the world, thats bullshit. Margali has been sorcerer supreme twice, possibly even trice depending on how you read her being guardian of limbo so having her get to that point cause some fuckin Nathaniel Essex clone was like "teehee i actually gave you magic" and then making her take margalis magic and kill her?? It's bad. (also i dont like the way she looks, why would she look so different from other essex clones, its just. aesthetically weird to me); On the note of the nightcrawlers, I actually quite liked them as a concept, though I think they couldve gotten more creative with their designs. Please make them look like more than just character but hit with a blue coat of paint, theyre a mix of two genetic samples, not a full clone of one character. They are in a sense of biology, children of those two characters, dont make them look boring also dont like how two of them had a baby. they both have 50 percent kurt DNA. thats. thats not gonna be a healthy baby. Do like the baby tough, shout out to the god baby, her concept is way too funny to dislike.

NOW, I will say, reading over the stuff again, i feel like its implying that Raven used a bit of the dna from the baron and azazel for the whole, having a baby thing???

WHICH, if I'm reading that right, might actually mean that they just actually did the most insane move of basically going "actually every bio-parent we've ever given Kurt is Kurts Bio-Parent" and I would actually respect that and it would change my opinion on this comic INSTANTLY because this kind of shark jumpery would be amazing.

But either way, I feel like retconning everything is really bad for everyones characterization, especially Destiny and Mystiques, part of it being the "oh we had to leave you cause future vision said so" feels very much like them trying to find an excuse for why they wouldnt raise their child

Idk it feels weird to have him be raven and irenes beloved darling child that they were forced to give up when you have mystique and destiny not really giving a shit about kurt, like ever previously in the comics.

To me it feels empty and almost like a cheap reference. It isnt something easily inserted in todays canon, years ago, when we didnt have all the baggage of years of interactions, you couldve easily added that fact and explained why they left him, but now, its a mess

Plus they JUST brought Az back in the comics in the dark x-men thing, which. feels like really bad timing, if they just let azazel fade from memory and then do the retcon like "yeah kurt just dreamt all of that demon stuff teehee", it'd be annoying but.

He's in comics.

Recent comics.

Why would you remind everyone of his existence, yknow, the man literally made and designed to be kurts bio-dad down to basically being a red Kurt with straight hair and without ectrodactyly. and then. retcon him being the father.

It feels so weirdly timed, did they not talk to eachother when planning these series??

Also I get that not everyone likes Azazel and his deal, which is fair, he's a kinda one note weirdo guy, but idk man. I like him. I think he's funny, I like villains like him being just annoying pests.

ALSO!! Spider-Kurt is actually one of my favourite things recent comics has done, because FUNFACT there's a character who we only ever see the tombstone off on battle world, from a different universe, called Amanda Wagner-Parker aka Spider-Crawler and. I am kinda obsessed with her?? Like. They actually just gave us a hinted at Kurt/Peter kid a tonne of years ago??? possibly??? like that??? and no one ever talks about her So them making Kurt be buds with Peter and hang out was actually catering to me specifically. That was a good idea. Kurt as spiderman with magic powers was written for my tastes and no one elses ever actually

Also uh, all comic characters are technically ocs so being like "ooo new oc from this" feels a bit dismissive to me, just say character

#also pretty sure you dont have to censor yourself on this platform #at least like not in asks #idk man I like azazel and I think just this weirdo dude being kurts dad is funny and a fine choice #big sidenote also I love Golden Child #I think she should come back and become some sort of god-child shes so funny as a concept #let the god toddler be a powerful force brought back into this reality by her own god powers or something #and now they have to raise a god toddler who also glows and floats and has wolverine genes so she probably also has claws #anyway back in my 'one day I'll write character analysis' hole #the dagur and kurt analysees that I keep wanting to write will maybe one day exist #moth answers #moth fuckin. writes a novel more like it

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inbabylontheywept · 24 days ago

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The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss.

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town.

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse?

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed.

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now.

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it.

---

My job has glue traps.

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life.

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you.

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out.

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me.

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps.

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me.

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was:

Do NOT mess with animals in the building.

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences.

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop.

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve.

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover.

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell.

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair.

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right?

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes.

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil?

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question.

Who grabbed the snake? I asked.

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right.

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No.

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago.

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again.

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think.

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be.

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

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