#the way that Scott basically the Batman of the x men

[fantasticgothicpeachsludge]

In a perfect dc x marvel crossover au Scott Summers would have been adopted by Bruce Wayne

[newx-menfan]

Laura Kinney isn’t the “Goodie Two Shoes” fans make her out to be…and other thoughts… 

Part 1: “The CRINGE”

Let’s be honest- we all KNEW I would eventually get here…after doing write-ups on Surge, Hellion, AND Prodigy…since X-23 is one of my all time favorite characters…

If there is one thing that drives me totally NUTS about X-23 fandom though (and fandoms, in general)… it is this weird fan attitude that Laura Kinney…aka “X-23”…aka “Wolverine”… can essentially “Do No Wrong”….

She’s the “BETTER” Wolverine. The less “TOXIC” version. The PERFECT Wolverine.

You see it in comic clickbait articles ALL the time- Laura is, essentially, the PERFECT answer to all the problems of the original character….

If you happen to mention ANY sort of criticism against X-23, textually or just about the character ingeneral - “She’s a bad friend”… “She can be kind of selfish”… “she is objectively a derivative character that is based off of a more popular X-Men”…people will look at you like you just kicked their puppy or said something really cruel…

And what’s interesting to me about all of this is… X-Men is KIND OF a book essentially about very flawed people, all trying to survive. That was, after all, Marvel’s WHOLE sell for years- they had the “relatable”, “real” characters…. where DC comics had “Gods”.

You would think, with characters EATING another planet, living out problematic “antebellum” Dark Phoenix fantasies, having psychic affairs, saying the “N-word” repeatedly, starting out as villains… it’s kind of accepted that ALL OF THE OTHER X-MEN have made terrible choices at some point or have been written BADLY….

Yet if you go on X-Men twitter… you will regularly see fans yelling that Jean Grey “is the most powerful X-Men” ever, Gambit or Logan are just these perfect “girl-dad’s”, or Storm can essentially NEVER be wrong…

And the PROBLEM with this is…it’s made writing these characters ALMOST LOGISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE…

When Jean, for example, is at GOD LEVELS and ALWAYS morally right… what can you feasibly DO with her character anymore? If you create a villain to match her insane power levels… fans will be upset and complain that the fight wasn’t “fair” and inevitably pull up some vague comic panel to argue just why Jean really should have won …If a writer decides to de-power her OR makes her go evil, fans often will inevitably view it as sexist… so how can you write Jean Grey as still relatable? 

New relationships or Scott Summers dying?- Fans often get upset when writers break up the iconic Scott/Jean or Logan/Jean ships…or accuse writers of romanticizing toxic relationships…

Put her in a teaching/mentor/Headmaster role?- we saw what happened when writers tried it with Kitty, Storm, and Logan…they just became pretty boring….

Often writers solution seems to be… just killing Jean off…

This isn’t to shoot down criticisms like “Women in the Refrigerator Syndrome”, “plot armor”, ect…but I do think it’s important to talk about how… possibly… fandom has gone too far the other way… that fandom is basically guaranteeing characters will inevitably become obsolete or unusable… or cause writers to inevitably just repeat the same five stories for nostalgia sake, because they can’t do anything “new”…

This isn’t JUST female characters either- I would say characters like Gambit, Wolverine, Cyclops, Batman, and several others have pretty much the same logistical problem…they’ve been hyped up SO MUCH…that you can’t really DO ANYTHING with them anymore, for fear of angering their large fanbases….

Laura has relatively quickly developed this problem, and it seems like the shelf life of comic book characters is burning out quicker and quicker…

What is it about Laura, that makes her immune to any real criticism within her fan base, in a comic book series where it’s kind of accepted that every character is in some way…horribly flawed?

I am going to go through in these posts talking about why Laura really isn’t the perfect character readers constantly make her out to be… that she actually IS pretty similar TO Logan and a lot of the complaints against him CAN be tied to her as well… and that the biggest problem currently facing Laura AND COMICS in general right now, I would argue, is that writers are not able to admit that Laura or any of the other characters ARE sometimes wrong…or to quote Kitty Pryde…sometimes kind of a “jerk”…

———————————————————————

Part of the reason no one criticizes Laura, is because of her tremendously tragic backstory.

Essentially a modern version of “Frankenstein”; Laura is created to be a replication of the “Weapon X” experiment in miniseries “Innocence Lost”. (I know people tend to focus more on the “Pinocchio” allusions from the book, but I find the  “Frankenstein” allusions more relevant…)

Sarah Kinney opts into this program, because, like Victor Frankenstein: she desires scientific exploration without ethical scrutiny. 

Focused more on pushing the realms of scientific discovery instead of considering the consequences, Sarah manages to create a viable clone, with the caveat that it is female, because the “Y” gene from the sample is too damaged. It’s only when Rice, another scientist with a Wolverine-vendetta, forces Sarah to be a surrogate to Laura as punishment for her insubordination, that the ethical considerations truly start to come into play for Sarah…

Laura experiences extreme torture, radiation poisoning to activate her mutant powers, coating her claws without anesthetic, creation of the trigger scent (a pavlovian odor that causes her to black out and go berserk), forcing her to kill her Sensei and other targets (and her puppy, according to Liu…), and many other horrors while there.

Sarah, after seeing Laura’s potential for good after Laura spares Rice’s illegitimate kid from being murdered and Laura helping  track down Sarah’s kidnapped niece; tries to free Laura and destroy the facility…

Which leads to Rice coating Sarah with the trigger scent and having Laura murder her.

While Laura DOES manage to escape…she now has to live with the fact that she killed her own mother for the rest of her life…

This is pretty much the bare bones summary (I ignored Sarah’s own history of childhood trauma and abuse and the Rice subplots)….

Laura then goes to track down Sarah’s relatives in “Target X”, bonding with Megan, the angsty traumatized niece that had been kidnapped previously and develops her first real human connection.

It’s hard NOT to like Kyle’s adorable version of Laura; watching her riding on roller coasters with Megan, peeping in on people in windows, accidentally getting Megan into trouble by mimicking teachers, hanging out at the boardwalks in San Fran…. Laura is socially inept…but in a relatable way…

Things go to hell however, when it’s discovered that Debbie’s boyfriend is actually a facility agent and spying on them…

Laura fights the Sabertooth-like Kimura, saves Debbie and Megan, helps them go into hiding, and then attacks Logan with the plan to kill them both…only to get captured by Shield….and then is freed by Captain America…

Again a bare bones summary and nothing to really criticize, since Laura has little engagement with people in these situations and is the victim, despite doing some really horrible things. It’s a pretty reasonable storyline and it is, again, a modern comic retelling of “Frankenstein”…similar to “the Incredible Hulk”….

Laura is the monster of modern science, desperately seeking the answers of what it means to be human…

Sure…she kind of/sort of tries to kill Logan…but it’s understandable considering the situation…(and it’s not like Logan doesn’t have a history of trying to kill his own family members in comics…)

“NYX”…good and bad…is kind of the story that PUSHES the TRAUMA NARRATIVE to a ridiculous degree…

I get why on multiple levels…people, including Craig Kyle himself (writer of “Innocence Lost” AND ”Target X”) …HATE NYX.

And truthfully… I personally remember rolling my eyes, the first time I heard about it when it came out…

“NYX”, written by Editor Joe Quesada, was the first introduction of Laura, and technically came out BEFORE “Innocence Lost”/“Target X” but after Laura’s appearance on the tv show “X-Men Evolution”. Canonically…it’s a little more challenging but most fans AGREE NYX comes AFTER “Target X”….

Laura is in NYC and being trafficked by Zebra Daddy (yes…that IS HIS NAME IN THE BOOK…); becoming mute and withdrawn. 

When a john kills himself she meets another mutant, Kiden Nixon, and joins a ragtag group of homeless mutants…there’s a whole subplot about Kiden’s dead dad…Zebra Daddy comes after Laura and she kills him to save her friends…

In the end, Laura abandons her friends (because Laura has to be a “lone wolf”); but bumps into them years later after joining the X-Men…

While I will fully admit there are parts of Laura’s story that ARE handled pretty well…there’s also A LOT of voyeuristic panty shots in the art….a ridiculous amount of hand waving…and constant over-theatrics…

———————————————————————

Laura really is that character that teeters on an edge of cringe….

“Female Clone of Wolverine”- admittedly sounds cringeworthy to a non-comic book reader… (and people who remember HOW BAD “the Clone Saga” was…)

“Dating and obsessed with a ‘Draco Malfoy-esque’ sorta toxic copy of Jean Grey”- soundscringeworthy…right?

“Tortured weapon who is forced to become a teenage sex worker out on the streets of NYC and is goth and self harms…”- 100% sounds like an over the top show on CW….

I DO OBJECTIVELY GET why, when Laura first popped up into comics, a lot of male Wolverine fans saw her as just this “edgy CW-like attempt at new readership”… (technically she was CREATED on Warner Brothers “X-Men Evo”…so that’s not totally an inaccurate summary either…)

A teenage Wolverine…with boobs…

Hell…the director of “Logan”, James Mangold, didn’t want to feature her as a teenager…because he thought it sounded like a “CW show”….

“NYX” did feel like something out of a Frank Miller, “Batman: Year One” hallucination. That’s not to say it’s a BAD comic…but it definitely reflects the era of the 2000’s where everything had to be “gritty”….female characters were all heavily sexualized…it was at a time where “Skins”, “Misfits”, and “Gossip Girl” hyped up underage teenagers doing drugs, partying, and having risky sex….

One of the covers of “NYX” literally features Kiden with a pacifier…heavily hinting at “rave culture” and “ecstasy” usage…

I know a lot of modern readers take offense to this book and Quesada…but I do see the other side of it. A big part of Millennial early counter culture WAS indie sleeze….it WAS very hedonistic…it did fit the time period it was created….

“NYX” is a as much of a product of Millennial culture as “Academy X”, “the Ultimate verse”, or Grant Morrison’s “New X-Men” was… it was the same as how “Generation X” or “Jim Lee’s X-Men” was for the 90’s…how all of Claremont’s “Uncanny” and the spinoff books were products of the 80’s culture…and how Kirby’s “X-Men” was for the 60’s…ectera, ecetera…

And the common trend with all of them? They all have some PRETTY CRINGY MOMENTS.

I’m 100% sure, in ten or twenty years, we will look back and criticize how this era of comics incorporated embarrassing parts of youth culture…or writing styles…or counter culture…

But at the same time…her backstory… DOES start to feel a bit ridiculous. It does start to feel like this manufactured, over the top modern “Oliver Twist” or “Great Expectations” to get fans to essentially accept and sympathize with this fairly new character…Like someone just took a bunch of random origin stories and dumped them together in blender, to make the ultimate “SAD” character…

Is Laura really ALL that different from ridiculous characters like Adam the X-treme? Or Birdbrain? the lost Summer brother…Vulcan?

Yet we don’t take any of those characters overly seriously…

It’s moments like watching fans debate whether it’s right or wrong to use the Codename “X-23” for example, screaming at fans who are fine with it because they realize she’s ultimately a fictional character and Marvel on some level needs “brand recognition”…that even if her backstory does deal with real topics and issues…. do you remember that Laura’s backstory is pretty comicbook-y and absurd. 

As “cringy” as Laura SOUNDS on PAPER…she works because the writing ultimately did what it was supposed to do. Laura has objectively some of the BEST MODERN COMICS and even books like NYX, are pretty decently written, even if the subject matter and handling and culture are outdated from it.

Laura IS a great character…but she’s also kind of on edge of “cringy”…

And where we can kind of ACCEPT that cringe with Logan and his weird nose-less era…or Gambit referring to himself in third person… or pretty much EVERYTHING about Kitty (ninja…pirate…teenage prodigy…weird waifu for literally every male writer); Laura is this one character that you can’t criticize…or if you DO, it has to be solely around the sexualization of the character…and not the character itself…

I do understand fans getting attached to certain characters…in seeing their OWN trauma represented IN the character and reflected back…but at some point…I do think you have to see the humor of it all too…

That Laura isn’t ALL that DIFFERENT from other products of their time- like clone Superboy…FantomeX…Quentin Quire….Bloodstorm…Maggott…Adam the X-treme…

She just had better writing.

[gh0stlyb34r]

Welcome to my blog !

About me ! ; the basics

name ; saint , logan , johnny

big age ; 19 ('05)

little age ; 2 - 5

pronouns ; he / they / star / it (+more!)

gender / sexuality ect. ; gay , trans , ace , poly(?)

links at end of post!!

pronouns page | strawpage

About me ! ; my interests

games ; call of duty , overwatch , valorant , hogwarts legacy , jedi fallen order , jedi survivor , red dead redemption 2 , roblox (royale high , dress to impress + more!) , fnaf , poppy playtime , indigo park , forza horizon , resident evil 4 , good pizza great pizza , animal crossing new horizons , mario kart 8 , mario kart wii , just dance , the last of us , detroit become human , spiderman , little nightmares , buckshot roulette

movies / shows / musicals ; star wars , harry potter , marvel , x-men , deadpool & wolverine , the greatest showman , grease , hairspray , moulin rouge , phantom of the opera , annie , hamilton , les miserables , arcane , criminal minds , swat , titains , the batman , high school musical , heartstopper , heathers , young royals , ghostbusters , beetlejuice , into the woods , mean girls , the umbrella academy , nimona , descendants , lemonade mouth , stranger things

youtubers ; pezzy , grizzy , bigpuffer , elasticdroid , gtlive , game theory , warn , aspen , frogger , flats , dawko , ethan nestor , smii7y , blarg , thedooo , beaplays , coleydoesthings , filmcooper , dechart games , hthaze , james marriott , willne

musicians / bands ; taylor swift , hozier , noah kahan , james marriott , mcr , twenty one pilots , p!atd , billie eilish , sleeping at last , the smiths , fleetwood mac , the cranberries , laufey , mitski clairo , paramore , bruno major , depeche mode , chappell roan , novo amor , taylor austen dye , maya hawke , frank sinatra , 1d , 5sos , feels like july , florance the machine , djo , sleep token , lily allen , ghost , lady gaga , gerard way , daughter

misc ; books , lego , monster high , collecting , cds , dvds , posters , flowers , pins , halloween , fall/autumn , deco pacis , colouring

DISCLAIMER ; I do not support the actions of my faves! I hold them all accountable! I do not support JKR , noah schnapp ect!!!

About me ! ; My faves

celebrities / authors ; pedro pascal , oscar isaac , hugh jackman , ryan reynolds , erik j brown , ali hazelwood , tom holland , gerard way , aiden gallagher , kit connor , andrew garfield , ewan mcgregor , hayden christensen , carrie fisher , eddie remain , tom hiddelston , josh hutcherson , david harbour , wynona rider , aaron tveit , matthew gray gubler , maya hawke , natalia dyer , thomas gibson , padget brewster , aj cook

characters ; viktor , jinx , vi , ekko , simon 'ghost' riley , john 'soap' mactavish , kyle 'gaz' garrick , captain john price , keegan p russ , robin buckley , spencer reid , steve harrington , emily prentiss , aaron hotchner , penelope garcia , james potter , remus lupin , sirius black , loki , logan howlett , scott summers , rogue , marc spector , steven grant , obi-wan kenobi , anakin skywalker , luke skywalker , han solo , leia organa , ben hargreeves , luther hargreeves , five hargreeves , newt scamander , theseus scamander , din djarin , wade wilson , danny zuko , ben florian , flynn rider , aziraphale , crowley , nick nelson

My rules ! ; do not interact

nsfw , abdl/ddlg (and variants) , racist, homophobic , transphobic , ableist , zionist , edsh , n@zi , trump supporters , anti agere , anti petre , dsmp/qsmp fans (mainly dream team & wilbur fans)

My rules ; boundaries

when using pet names or gendered terms, keep them masc or gn NO FEM TERMS

DO NOT flirt with me , whether that is as a joke or platonicaly

keep all asks SAFE FOR WORK

more...

Links ; other blogs

writing blog ; @b4bywr1t3s

caregiver blog ; @royaldaycare

Links ; requests and master list

request info / master list / whitelist

Links ; credits

dni banners ; one , two , three

consent banner and dividers ; @kodaswrld

My tags ;

ghostlyblog ; normal posts + asks

ghostlyboards ; moodboards + stimboards

ghostlymedia ; agere media + other photos/videos

🐾 . lo's fictional cgs ; fictional characters that I see as cgs/my cgs

🐾 . lo's fictional faves ; my favourite fictional characters

[blorbobutworse]

Character Interpretation: Wolverine

More info under the cut! I did this because, at least on my phone, it looks like I wrote....a lot.

I actually have two ideas for him!! Because he contains Multitudes and also I don't want him being horny for highschoolers.

First is what characteristics they share, and then what makes them separate versions.

Born : 1875 ~1900

Comic sized!!! 280 lbs and 5’3"

Amnesiac, has flashbacks/nightmares, does not remember anything up to 20 years before Joining the X-Men.

He forgets recent memories when his head has been severely damaged. The more damage, the longer the amnesia

Animalistic, almost feral communication methods, on high stress situations and when he first joined the x-men.

Secretly cuddly but refuses to admit it. (Touch starved)

Like a real wolverine: a scavenger, does have bite to back up his bark but would prefer not to use it, at least when he has some of his memories.

Loves playfighting but refuses to ask

Canon alchohol/cigar/addiction issues.

Parental towards Kitty Pryde and Jubilee

Have Something going on with Kurt (I prefer Kurt Older, though I might decide to do a teenager a la X-men Evolution eventually…but even then I want fun gay uncle Kurt not baby. personally.)

Good trio with colossus + Kurt

Has persistant guilt and was/is forced to kill people the X-men aren't willing to take out

Essentially, everything already written in my page!!!!

Wolverine #1: Teacher/Dad/Big Brother

X-Men Evolution (No attraction to Minors <3)/Wolverine (1982) Comic/ Uncanny x-men

Brave, Protective, sassy old man

Parental towards all the kids, gentle with them and even reads them stories sometimes,it's a running joke with the toddlers that He Can't Read (he does it to make them feel smart and learn)

More into talking/fighting about his feelings/crying

Leans on Charles/Kurt to hold him back because he doesn't want to put that responsibility on Scott, because although he's team leader he's still A Child

Often argues with Xavier about having Child Soldiers, consistent point of conflict

Wolverine #2: Dilf Whore

Was NOT a teacher to the original X-men Xaviour raised: Storm, Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Iceman, just joined up with the X men when they were already adults, sort of similar to X-Men 1 (movie) or the original X-men comic run.

Slut <3

I rotate him between Jean, Cyclopes, Kurt, and a lovely enemies with Benefits with Sabretooth(NOT SIBLINGS IN ANY OF MY UNIVERSES!!!), but he’s essentially free use within the team :)

Oh! And hes in like a FWB thing with Gamit and Rougue <33333

More Touch Starved

Emotional Issues !!

Basically a horny hot mess trying to deal with his issues in the worst way possible. Just the PE and art teacher bc if he was given anymore responsibility he would Traumatize the Children.

Different fanfics will just have like. A little note telling you because, again,I don’t enjoy Logan flirting with underage girls while also being a girl dad, that feels….gross.

Batman' analysis will hopefully be out sometime tommorow my friends 💕

[crimswnred]

these hc are so cute ! maybe what halloween costume the Li would wear individually and in a couples costume 💓💓💓

HI YES YES YES I LOVE THIS QUESTION

I'm so excited!! ok, ok, without any further ado:

what the season 2 lis would wear for halloween (individually and in a couple)

bobby.

individually: look me in the eye right now and tell me he wouldn't dress up as spider-man. especially now with the spider-verse movies.

couple: he's a silly guy so I'm thinking he could wear literally anything after a little convincing, but ultimately, I'm saying:

beast boy & raven or robin & starfire (teen titans)

scott pilgrim and ramona flowers (scott pilgrim vs the world)

shark boy and lava girl

this has gotten way too long!! pls check out more under the cut 👇

gary.

individually: most likely a star war reference. or something funny. definitely something tight

couple: again, another silly guy who would wear anything you ask him, but here are my picks:

han solo and princess leia (and he absolutely loves it)

bowser and peach, not mario tho because that's too basic

bob and helen parr (the incredibles)

ibrahim.

individually: violet man. ok, let's say violet man isn't a real thing (like, well, it isn't). he's DEFINITELY dressing as another superhero. my guess? either superman or batman.

couple: he's gonna rock the best geek couple costumes ever and he'll show off. together, you guys will either serve cunt or die trying. here are some ideas:

batman and catwoman (the batman)

wanda maximoff and vision (wandavison)

jean gray and scott summers (the x-men)

noah.

individually: he would probably wear something that's more halloween than costume party, if you get what i mean? he prolly loves the holiday 'cause of his siblings and REALLY commits to the bit. fred krueger, jason, chuck, ghost face...

couple: like I said, he commits to the bit and goes all the way but he's sticking to the horror pattern because that's how it should go. some ideas include:

emily and victor (corpse bride)

other mother and other father (coraline)

beetlejuice and lydia (yes, the red wedding dress)

lucas.

individually: something sexy but that he doesn't need to put much effort in, like a vampire or something. i can't see him going all out for halloween, i'm sorry 😭

couple: now, when in a couple, it's a tad different... he's making sure you look good together and when i say good, i mean GOOD. you guys would probably be the hottest couple at any halloween party, here are some ideas:

gomez and morticia addams (let's put that stache to use, shall we?)

mr and mrs smith

tony montana and elvira hancock (scarface)

henrik.

individually: TARZAN. and he loves wearing nothing but a thong the whole night.

couple: I bet on something fun and easy, but also cute! he just wanna have fun with you and party for a bit, so I don't think he would propose something super complex. some ideas:

johnny and mavis (hotel transylvania)

daphne and fred (scooby-doo)

lola and bugs bunny (space jam)

kassam.

individually: I'm thinking classic and boring. doesn't care much when he's on his own. classic halloween stuff.

couple: HEAR ME OUT — iconic moments from pop culture. what do I mean by that? well, I mean:

britney spears and justin timberlake in matching jeans outfits

xtina and eminem (at the ICONIC vmas)

sony and cher (like halsey did!)

carl.

individually: spock! a little on the nose for him but COME ON. he's always dressing up as a star trek character, switching up every year. I can see him wearing something marvel related too.

couple: yeah, some star trek reference for sure but since that's not my breed of nerd (sorry not sorry), I'm saying:

jessie and james (pokemon)

loki and sylvie (loki series)

link and zelda (the legend of zelda)

ahh!! this was so much fun to do!! thanks for asking, anon 💝 I had a blast with your question!!

(!) I don't know enough about the missing LIs to add them to this list. if you'd like to ask for a specific islander that didn't make the list, don't be afraid to drop your request in my inbox.

more headcanons.

[stormyelliotwritez]

okie dokie so here's the fandom list and the characters i'll write for. i will update this at times so yeah, here we go.

supernatural (dean winchester, Castiel, balthazar, bobby)

911 and 911 lone star (tk strand, carlos reyes, evan buckley, eddie diaz, paul strickland, owen strand)

stranger things (eddie munson, steve harrington, robin buckley (platonic only), nancy wheeler, jonathan byers)

house md (gregory house, james wilson, lisa cuddy and i can write foreman, chase and cameron but i can't promise it will be good.)

doctor who (any new who doctors and companions and friends tho coz im writing male reader bill, jenny and vastra will be platonic only coz otherwise that just feels weird also probably platonic for yaz and 13. also any masters because i love them and am obsessed with them)

hannibal (just hannibal and will coz im only on like the first season so it'll be based on vibes mostly)

star wars (like anyone basically just not palpatine and the creepy bad guys like the blue one or moff gideon. i am obsessed with clones and bounty hunters so yeah!)

batfam and dc (anyone basically coz ive got a pretty good grasp of most of their characters. if anyone requests the joker, i will probs mean like lego batman or the animated tv shows joker so the one who isn't an ass and is a bit gay. if they're lesbians (even if its just that i hc them as lesbians), it will be platonic though.)

marvel (anyone like please just give me ideas of marvel stuff to write. i will need like a really good idea to be convinced to write for tony because he pisses me off sometimes. also team red and loki tv show are like my favs so i will write actual masterpieces for those)

criminal minds (the bau gang)

good omens (aziraphale and crowley also like any of the other characters besides metatron because i wanna murder him in his sleep (: so yep)

sherlock bbc (sherlock, john, jim)

star trek (the one with chris pine) (bones, kirk, spock, scotty)

the addams family (im talking like the live action movies and the animated because i watched one episode of wednesday and it sucked ngl so yeah. ill write for the whole family so yeppity yep)

gravity falls (anyone basically except for gideon and his dad)

hades the video game (anyone tho i don't think anyone would request this)

the x-files (mulder, scully, skinner, the lone gunmen)

spiderverse (hobie, miles, gwen, noir, pav, peter b parker, miles universe peter, miguel (only if you wanna get into a fight with him))

x-men universe (gambit, charles, erik, peter maximoff, hank, victor creed, scott)

deadpool and wolverine (well… deadpool and wolverine, ig. i think cable and colossus both count in this one so them. also platonic negasonic teenage warhead and yukio)

also i will write for miguel in a not fighting way if you really want him and poolverine together coz that ship infected my mind

i think thats it so yeah! :)

please send in requests!!!

[crashhole]

My 2024 Comic Reading List

Listed alphabetically, this is every title I read this year. I’ve either read the entirety of each series and/or am currently up to date with the overwhelming majority of these, though a few of them I did drop, and some were rereads. I also didn’t double down on series with the same names (such as Wolverine, Iron Man, X-Men, and other titles that have ended and relaunched this year) but I did include one shots. Almost all of these were read physically and are part of my boyfriend and I’s collection, but a couple of them were read digitally- mostly but not all of the manga. Ultimately, I can say I’ve read at least one issue of every title on this list.

I read 1030 issues from 284 titles this year.

———————————————

Absolute Batman

Absolute Superman

Absolute Wonder Woman

Absolute Power

Action Comics

The Addiction

Age of Bronze: The Story of the Trojan War

Ain’t No Grave

Alan Scott, Green Lantern

Alien

Alien: Black, White & Blood

Alien: Paradiso

Alien: Romulus

Aliens Vs. Avengers

All-New Venom

All The Things We Didn’t Do Last Night

The Amazing Spider-Man

Animal Pound

Astro Baby

The Autumn Kingdom

The Avengers

Avengers Inc.

Avengers Twilight

Barfly

Basic Instinct

Batman

Batman: Dark Age

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees

Beware of the Planet of the Apes

Beyond Real

Beyond the Planet of the Apes

Birthright

Black Widow: Venomous

Blitmap

Blood Hunt

Bloodrik

Blow Away

Boruto: Two Blue Vortex

The Brood

The Boy Wonder

The Cabinet

Cable

Carnage

Catwoman

Cemetery Kids Don’t Die

Chainsawman

Chasm: Curse of Kaine

Claymore

Cobra Commander

Coda

Convert

The Creeping Below

Creepshow

Creepshow Holiday Special

Crocodile Black

Cruel Universe

Cult of the Lamb

Darkstalkers: Jedah

The Darques

Dawnrunner

Dazzler

DC All In Special

Dead Eyes: The Empty Frames

Dead X-Men

Deathstalker

Deer Editor

Deprog

Destro

The Deviant

Devour

The Displaced

Doctor Strange

Doll Parts: A Lovesick Tale

Doom

Duke

Edge of Spider-Verse

Epitaphs from the Abyss

Exceptional X-Men

Eye Lie Popeye

Falling in Love on the Path to Hell

Fall of the House of X

Fantastic Four

The Flash

Flavor Girls: Return to the Mothership

The Fog

Gannibal

Gatchaman

Gatchaman: Galactor

Gatchaman: Ken Deathmatch

Geiger

Generation Hope

Get Fury

Ghost Rider: Final Vengeance

Giant-Size X-Men: Magneto

Giant-Size Spider-Man

G.I. Joe

G.O.D.S.

Godzilla 70th Anniversary

Godzilla: Best of Destoroyah

Godzilla: Best of Spacegodzilla

Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons II: Sons of Giants

Godzilla Library Collection

Godzilla: Mechagodzilla 50th Anniversary Special

Godzilla Rivals: King Ghidorah vs Space Godzilla

Godzilla Rivals: Versus Manda

Godzilla Rivals: Mechagodzilla vs King Ghidorah

Godzilla Rivals: Mothra vs. Moguera

Godzilla: Skate or Die!

Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theater

Godzilla: War for Humanity

Godzilla vs. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers 2

Golgotha: Motor Mountain

Gun Honey: Collision Course

Helen of Wyndhorn

Hellhunters

Hello Darkness

Hellverine

Huge Detective

Hyde Street

I Heart Skull-Crusher!

Itchy & Scratchy Comics

The Immortal Thor

The Incredible Hulk

Interdimensional

Into the Unbeing

The Invincible Iron Man

Jackpot

Jackpot & Black Cat

The Jaguar

John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dead In America

Jujustu Kaisen

Justice League Unlimited

Kid Venom

Kill All Immortals

Laura Kinney, Wolverine

Life

Lucky Cap Scouts

Man’s Best

Marvel 85th Anniversary Special

Masterpiece

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Return

Minor Threats: The Fastest Way Down

Monsteress

The Moon is Following Us

Morning Star

Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace

Mugshots

The Multiversity

The Multiversity: Mastermen

Mystique

Naruto

Nightmare Country: The Glass House

Nights

NYX

The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos

The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos Halloween Special

The One Hand

One Piece

Our Bones Dust

Paranoid Gardens

PeePeePooPoo

Phoenix

Planetary Expansion

Poison Ivy

The Power Fantasy

The Powerpuff Girls

Power Rangers Unlimited: The Morphin Masters

Precious Metal

Predator: The Last Hunt

Predator Versus Black Panther

Promethea

Psylocke

Ranma 1/2

Resurrection of Magneto

Rise of the Powers of X

Rogues

Roxxon Presents: Thor

Sabretooth: The Dead Don’t Talk

The Sacrificers

Sainted Love

The Sandman

Santos Sisters

Scarlett

Scarlet Witch

Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver

Sentinels

Seven Years In Darkness

Seven Years in Darkness: Year Two

Shaman King

Sheena Queen of the Jungle: Fatal Exam

Shiver Suspenstories

The Sickness

The Six Fingers

Skin Police

Something Epic

Space Ghost

Space Usagi

The Spectacular Spider-Men

Spectregraph

Spectrum

Spider-Man: Black Suit & Blood

Spider-Man Reign 2

Spider-Woman

Spirits of Vengeance

Star Wars Visions: The Ronin and the Droid

Storm

Street Fighter Masters: Akuma vs Ryu

Summer Shadows

Superman

Superman: House of Brainiac Special

Superman: Lost

Superwoman Special

S.W.O.R.D.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles X Naruto

Tenement

The Terminator

Thanos

ThunderCats

ThunderCats: Cheetara

Tom Strong

Toxic Summer

Transformers

Uncanny Valley

Uncanny X-Men

Unnatural Order

Universal Monsters: The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives!

Universal Monsters: Dracula

Universal Monsters: Frankenstein

Ultimate Black Panther

The Ultimates

Ultimate Spider-Man

Ultimate Universe: One Year In

Ultimate X-Men

Ultraman X Avengers

Vampirella

Vampirella: Dark Reflections

Vampirella/Dracula: Rage

Venom

Venomverse Reborn

Venom War

Venom War: Carnage

Venom War: Daredevil

Venom War: Deadpool

Venom War: Fantastic Four

Venom War: It’s Jeff

Venom War: Lethal Protectors

Venom War: Spider-Man

Venom War: Venomous

Venom War: Wolverine

Venom War: Zombiotes!

Vicarious

Violent Flowers

Void Rivals

W0rldtr33

Washed in Blood

Weapon X-Men

The Weatherman

Wesley Dodds, Sandman

What if…? Aliens

What If…? Donald Duck Became Wolverine

The Whisper Queen: A Blacksand Tale

Witchblade

The White Trees: A Blacksand Tale

The Wicked + The Divine

Wolverine

Wolverine: Blood Hunt

Wolverine: Revenge

Wonder Woman

World’s Finest

X-Factor

X-Force

X-Men

X-Men: Blood Hunt - Psylocke

X-Men Forever

X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse

X-Men Unlimited

Yakub the Father of the White Devil Race

Yu-Gi-Oh!

Yu-Gi-Oh! R

Zatanna: Bring Down the House

Zatch Bell 2

Zawa + the Belly of the Beast

Zenescope Presents Horror & Fantasy Illustrated

———————————————

Any questions? Looking for any recommendations? Hit me up! And have an incredible 2025!

[scorpionyx9621]

Do you think Jason Todd fandom is kinda toxic? Because it seems like NO MATTER what DC do, there'll always be complains. Forget the bad adaptation like Titans. Even Judd Winick cannot escape the criticism with how he potrayed Robin!Jason. They just never satisfied.

SORRY, IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO RESPOND TO THIS. I just moved from Washington D.C. to Seattle, which, for my non-American friends, that's 4442km away. And I DROVE THERE ALL BY MYSELF. And now I'm trying to find new work in a new city and trying to stay mentally healthy and positive. Life is exciting but hard and scary.

*sighs*

As someone who was a fandom elder with V*ltr*n. I've seen some of the worst when it comes to fandom behavior. I'm talking people baking food with shaving razors and trying to give them to the showrunners. I'm talking leaking major plot details and refusing to take it down unless they make their ship canon (I am looking at you, Kl*nce stans) For the most part, DC Comics has had a decades-long reputation of treating their fans like trash and not caring what they think so from what I've seen, we all just grumble and complain in our corners of the internet about how we don't like how X comic portrays Jason Todd.

The challenge with Jason Todd is that he's your clinical anti-hero, the batfamily's Draco in Leather Pants, he's a jerkass woobie, and on top of all of that, he's a Tumblr sexyman. It's a perfect storm for a very fun but frustrating character to be a fan of. It doesn't help that every writer decides to re-invent the wheel every time Jason comes up so his canon lore is confusing at best and inconsistent as a standard.

I guess starting with a general brief on who Jason is and what is uniform about him with every instance he's appeared in comics/media.

Grew up in a poor family in Gotham with a dad who was a petty-mid-level criminal, and a mother who dies of a drug overdose.

Survives on the street on his own by committing petty crimes and potentially even engaging in sexual acts to keep himself alive.

Is cornered by Batman and taken in after Dick Grayson quits/is fired

Becomes the second Robin, but is known for being the harsher, more brutal Robin.

Is killed by Joker after being tortured, but somehow comes back to life and regains senses through the Lazarus Pit

Resolves himself to be better than Batman by basically being Batman but kills people.

Where there has been a lot of conflict in the fandom is the fact that Jason Todd is not a character that is written consistently. DC Comics loves to go with the narrative that Jason was "bad from the start" and was the "bad robin" when, yes, he has trouble controlling his anger, but he also still is just as invested in seeing the best of Gotham City and trying to be a positive change for the world as any other DC Comics hero.

Where I get frustrated with the fandom is its ability to knit-pick every detail of a comic they don't like while completely disregarding everything that makes the comics great and worth it to read. My example being Urban Legends. To which most people had pretty mixed reactions to. I was critical of the comic at first but as it went along I ended up really liking it. I have a feeling DC Comics went to Chip Zdarsky and told him he had 6 issues to bring Jason back into the Bat Family, and honestly he didn't do a bad job. Did it feel rushed? Absolutely. I wish there was more development of Jason and Bruce's characters and their dynamic as a whole. However, where I see a lot of people being angry and upset with Urban Legends is that they feel Zdarsky needlessly wrote Jason as an incompetent fool who needs Bruce to save him.

Whether or not that was the intention of Zdarsky is up to debate. However, and this may be controversial, but I don't think he wrote Jason Todd out of character at all. For as fearsome, intimidating, and awesome as Red Hood is. Jason is a character who is absolutely driven by his emotions. Why do you think he donned the role of Red Hood? As a response to his anger towards The Joker for killing him, and towards Bruce for not taking action against The Joker and for seemingly replacing him so quickly after he died. Jason didn't care about being the murderous Robin Hood or for being the bloody hammer of justice against N*zi's and P*d*ph*les. He only cared originally about making The Joker and Bruce pay. It wasn't until he trained under the best assassins in the world and realized most of them were horrific criminals who trafficked children and were p*dos that Talia began to realize that the teachers that she sent Jason to train under started dying horrific and painful deaths.

The entire story of the Cheer story in Batman Urban Legends was started because it finally forced some consequences upon Jason. Tyler, aka Blue Hood's father was a drug dealer who gave his supply to his wife and kids. And when Tyler's father admitted he gave the drugs to Tyler, it immediately made him fall within the self-imposed philosophical kill-list of Jason Todd. And Jason, well, he proceeds to kill Tyler's father. When this happens, Jason is in shock. Tyler's dad fit the bill to easily and justifiably be killed by Jason. We've never seen Jason having to deal with the consequences of being a murderous vigilante on a micro-level. When Jason realizes what he's done in that he's murdered Tyler's dad, he's shocked. He tells Babs the truth. He does a rational thing because he's in shock. He doesn't know what to do, he never has had to face the consequences of his actions as Red Hood and now the gravity of befriending a child as a vigilante hero who kills people just set in when he killed the father of the same child he was just introduced to.

(Oh here's a little aside because it had to be said, Jason would not have been a good father or a good mentor to Tyler and absolutely should not have been his new Robin. Jason is a man who is in his early 20's (not saying men in their early 20's can't be good fathers at all) who is a brutal serial killer using the guise of a vigilante anti-hero to let him escape most of the law. the complications of having the man who murdered your father adopt you and make you his sidekick are way too numerous for me to explain in a long-winded already heavy Tumblr essay post. There's a reason why we don't advocate for a story where Joe Chill adopted Bruce Wayne or one where Tony Zucco took in Dick Grayson.)

The next biggest argument is that they feel that Jason is giving up his guns as a means to just be invited back into the Bat-Family. To which I will tell anyone who has that argument to go actually read Urban Legends. Already have and still have that argument? Please re-read it. Don't want to? That's okay, I will paste the images from the comic where Jason specifically says that he doesn't want to give up his weapons for Bruce and his real reasoning down below since the comic isn't exactly readily accessible.

Jason gave up the guns because he felt the gravity of what he had done and knows how it'll effect Tyler. Thankfully his mom is alive and in recovery. But Tyler doesn't have a father anymore. And Jason killed Tyler's father. It may have been in accordance to Jason's philosophy, but it was a case where it blurred the lines. Jason Todd isn't a black and white character, just very dark gray. He doesn't kill aimlessly like the Joker. If you are on Jason's list you probably have done something pretty horrific, and also just in general, being in his way or being a threat to him. Mind you, in early days of Red Hood and the Outlaws (Image below) Jason almost killed 10 innocent civilians in a town in Colorado all because they saw him kill a monster. That being said, Jason isn't aimless in his kills.

(Also can we just take a moment to appreciate Kenneth Rocafort's art? DC Comics said we need to rehabilitate Jason Todd's image and Kenneth Rocafort said hold my beer: It's so SO GOOD)

That being said, the key emphasis in the story of Cheer asides from trying to introduce Jason Todd back into the Bat Family and give an actual purpose for him being there, other than him just kind of being there ala Bowser every time he shows up for Go Kart racing, Tennis, Golf, Soccer, and the Olympic games when Mario invites him, is that Jason and Bruce ultimately both want the same thing. Jason wants to be welcomed back into the family and to be loved and appreciated. Bruce want's Jason back as his son and wants to love and protect Jason. Both of these visions are shown in the last chapter of Cheer while under the effect of the Cheer Gas. It's ultimately this love and appreciation they both have for each other that helps them overcome their challenge and win.

Jason Todd is a character who, just like Bruce, has been through so much pain and so much hate in his life. The two are meant to parallel each other. While Bruce chose to see the best in everyone, giving every rogue in his gallery the option to be helped and give them a second chance, hence why he never kills, Jason has a similar view on wanting to protect the public, but he understands that some crimes are so heinous they cannot be forgiven, or that some habitual criminals are due to stay habitual criminals, and need to be put down. But at the end of the day, the two of them both try to protect people in their own ways.

I am aware that through the writings of various DC Comics authors such as Scott Lobdell and Judd Winick, the two have had a very tumultuous relationship. And rightfully so, I am by no means saying that Scott Lobdell writing an arc where Bruce literally beats Jason to within an inch of his life in Red Hood and the Outlaws, nor Judd Winick's interpretation of Under the Red Hood where Bruce throws the Batarang at Jason's neck, slicing his throat and leaving him ambiguously for dead at the end of the comic is appropriate considering DC Comics seems to be trying everything they can to integrate Jason back into the family. That being said, a lot of these writings have shaped the narrative of Jason and Bruce's relationship and have an integral effect on the way the fandom views the two. It doesn't help that Zdarsky acknowledged Lobdell's life-beating of Jason by Bruce at the very end of Cheer by having Bruce give Jason his old outfit back as a means of mending the fence between the two of them. That does complicate a lot of things in terms of how they are viewed by the fandom and helps to cause an even greater divide between the two.

Regardless, I want to emphasize the fact that Jason Todd is a part of the family of his own accord. Yes, he's quite snarky and deadpan in almost every encounter. However, Jason is absolutely a part of the family and has been for a while of his own will. There's a great moment in Detective Comics that emphasizes this. Jason cares about his family because it is his found family. Yes, they may be warry about him and use him as a punching back and/or heckle him. At the end of the day, we're debating the family dynamics of a fictional playboy billionaire vigilante whose kleptomania took the form of adopting troubled children and turning them into vigilante heroes. Jason Todd wants a family that will love and support him. This is a key definition of his character at its most basic. This was proven during the events of Cheer and is being reenforced by DC Comics every time they get the opportunity to do so.

Now, none of this is to say that I hate Judd Winick. I do not, I don't like the fact that in all of his writings of Jason, he just writes him as a dangerous psychopath, and Winick himself admits to seeing Jason as nothing much more than a psychopath. Yet Winick is the one who the majority of the fandom clings to as the one true good writer of Jason Todd because 'Jason was competent, dangerous, smart' Listen, friends, Jason is all of that and I will never deny it. However, what I love about Jason isn't that he's dangerously smart of that writers either write him as angsty angry Tumblr sexyman bait or that they write him as an infantile man child with a gun. There's a large contention of this fandom that has an obsession with Jason Todd being this vigilante gunman who is hot and sexy and while I definitely get the appeal. It is very creepy and downright disturbing that all of you hyperfixate on his use of guns and ability to be a murderer. It is creepy and I'm not necessarily here for it.

What I love about Jason Todd is that despite all of the pain, all of the heartache, all of the betrayal, and bullying, and death, and anguish. Jason Todd is one of the most loving and supportive characters in all of DC Comics. Jason has been through so much in his life, but he still chooses to love. He still chooses to see the bright side in people. Yes, he takes a utilitarian approach and chooses to kill certain villains, but at the end of the day he wants to see a better world, and he wants to be loved. It takes so much courage and so much heart to learn to love again after one has been abused or traumatized. I would not blame Jason at all if he said fuck it and just went full solo and vigilante evil. He has every right to, but he still chooses to be with the Bat Family of his own accord. That's something that I see a lot of in myself. I have been through a lot of trauma and yet I try to be a better person myself in any way that I can. It is extremely admirable of Jason to allow love back into his heart when he really doesn't need to. He kills and he protects because he has this love of society. It may have been shaped by anger and hatred, but Jason has found his place amongst people who love him and value him. I think Ducra, from Red Hood and the Outlaws put it best in the image given below.

To end this tangent, I love Jason Todd and all of his sexy dangerousness, but it's far more than that. As much as Jason may be dangerous and snarky, he loves his family without a shadow of a doubt. I look up to Jason Todd because despite all of his pain and all of his trauma, he still choses to love. Jason Todd is a character who is someone I love because despite all of his flaws and having a very toxic fandom, he still serves as a character filled with so much heart and so much passion. I wish more writers would understand that. But for now I will live with what I have. Even though the fandom may be vocal about it's hatred for his characterization, I choose to love Jason regardless because he is a character who chooses love and acceptance regardless of his pain. Jason Todd is by no means a good person in any sense of the word. He has easily killed upwards of 100 people by now. He is a character who is flawed and complex but ultimately is one who powers forwards and finds love and heart in a place from so much pain and anguish. That is what I love about Jason Todd. After all, to quote a famous undead robot superhero, "What is grief, if not love persevering?" Jason Todd chooses to love despite all of the trauma and pain and grief. Yes, he is hardened in his exterior, but inside there is a man with a lot of love to give and someone who deserves the world in my eyes.

[thevindicativevordan]

Hey, can you give an expansion on the X-Men's "Lost Decade" and how terrible it was?

Don't know if I'm the best choice to go in-depth. Other more fanatical fans might be able to shed more light on the subject. Still I can easily offer my outsider's opinion and I do love talking about stuff I'm not qualified to talk about.

Hickman places the "Lost Decade" as starting from Avengers vs. X-Men and lasting until the start of his run essentially. Arrogant as hell but accurate as well by my assessment. I'd even stretch it further, as a non-hardcore X-Men fan there's really nothing worthwhile that happens within the time period stretching from the end of Whedon's Astounding up until House of X/Powers of X. That entire time only gave a few worthwhile ideas, Gillen's campy Sinister, Cyclops becoming more militant, Magneto basically joining with the X-Men, etc. But there's nothing in that time period that really endured and fueled the franchise the way that Claremont, Morrison, and Whedon did, at least not that I can see. Hope's storyline of being the first post-M-Day mutant, being fought over by mutants and humans and struggling to deal with everyone viewing her as a Messiah figure, ended anticlimactically on account of it being undercut by Marvel. Their wanting to establish the Avengers as superior to the X-Men ruined her storyline. Instead of being about her and the mutants AvX really became about the Avengers and the Phoenix Five. After that story Hope and the other new mutants basically disappeared entirely until Hickman bought her back and made her important again.

What's hilarious about these hero vs. hero stories Marvel does is the writers ALWAYS fucking rebel against what the editors want, and so do the readers! You're supposed to see the Avengers as the designated good guys of the conflict, but Bendis of all writers has Cyclops basically call them out on never being around when the Sentinels show up to kill the mutants. Not a fair criticism, that's like Batman complaining that Flash doesn't just clean up crime in Gotham for him, it would ruin the status quo people want to read, but it sure as hell made readers feel like the Avengers were bullies. Plus the P5 basically make a paradise on Earth, didn't start losing control until the Avengers kept attacking them, wouldn't have even EXISTED in the first place if the Avengers hadn't mucked things up, and there's really no good reason to fight against them other than a need to go back to status quo (and also I suppose how unsettling it is to have a world get Miracleman'd). Hence why "Cyclops was right!" became a meme, readers rejected the stance Marvel pushed of Cyke being a villain for stuff he did under the influence of the Phoenix, something Bendis ended up running with as well. If Jean can get off for killing a world than Cyke can get off for killing Xavier while Dark Phoenixed.

After AvX is when shit really hit the fan however. That's when the mandate changed from Quesada's "make this like the comics I read when I was a kid" to Perlmutter's "fucking Fox won't give us the rights back, make the Inhumans our new top franchise". Mutants just spin their wheels doing NOTHING under Bendis who starts strong with a really great premise. Sincerely believe the basic idea of the O5 is brilliant. What if the young, uncorrupted original X-Men come to the present and to them, THIS is a bad future like Days of Futures Past or Age of Apocalypse? Cyclops killed Professor X, Jean is dead, Beast is a hypocritical asshole blue furry, Angel is whatever, and Iceman is still irrelevant! Shit is insane and completely not what they thought their futures would be like. So they stick around and try to unfuck the future before going back.

There was a ton of potential there and Bendis wasted all of it on boring storylines that went nowhere. We never got Scott's Mutant Revolution, it was all just empty hype. O5 did nothing meaningful at all except Bobby came out as gay, yay for him. Still funny to me that Bendis went out of the way to establish that the O5 couldn't just wipe their minds and time travel home anymore because of temporal shenanigans, but Marvel basically said fuck that and sent them home that exact way regardless. Really annoyed we never got the story of how Cyke got a Phoenix Egg by Time Runs Out in Hickvengers, but I doubt Bendis could've told that story well anyway.

Meanwhile you've got the Inhumans getting pushed but in their usual hilariously incompetent way, Marvel editorial completely botches their handling of that franchise as well. Instead of leaning into what makes them unique, they chose to make them diet mutants and copy the whole "hated and feared" part. Also they have the brilliant idea of making it so the Terrigen Clouds that create nuHumans also kill mutants, thus making the Inhumans a threat to mutants in-universe and out. So of course the X-Fandom hates these new guys for killing mutants and stealing their spotlight, nobody cares about diet mutants when you've got the real thing, their handling of the one Inhuman people liked in Black Bolt sucked, and the Inhumans show was dogshit and basically killed the franchise. Was a total failure that's more or less ended with the Inhumans banished, but it really was a terrible time for both franchises. By the end Cyclops and Wolverine were both dead which feels symbolic of the state of the franchise. Two of the biggest male mutants were killed off and nobody cared, everyone was just praying things would get better soon.

Oh Christ that quote on the cover has me rolling. Benefit of hindsight is that Rosenberg came in and did exactly what he needed to: burn the franchise to the ground so Hickman could come in and rebuild. He brought Cyclops and Wolverine back to life after Jean had been revived as well, setting up the return of the OG Mutant Trinity for the first time since Morrison killed Jean off. Emma came back and revealed herself to have always been working for the benefit of mutants still, due to Marvel abandoning their idiotic plan to make her evil again. But he killed a bunch of mutants off apparently, and in ways that made Twitter pissed.

There's plenty of stories I left out because I didn't read them or don't remember them, but the point of this is that the "Lost Decade" is called that because it's a decade in which nothing meaningful happened. Mutants died but nobody cared because there was no sense of direction. Events occurred that people didn't like and were pure cash grabs such as Age of X-Men or Battle of the Atom. Fans lost faith in the writers ability to chart a course, the entire franchise lost momentum in part because of editorial, and in part because not even Claremont nostalgia bait could entice people anymore. X-Men needed new ideas, needed to stop naval-gazing, and needed to establish a new jump on point. Hickman delivered all three in spades but unfortunately it looks like his run has become a victim of it's own success. Nothing about the post-Hickman lineup entices me and I think after Inferno I'll be dropping the franchise again.

[wayneprincess]

Okay but I feel a compulsion to write some more about my X-Men: Evo/Justice League fanfic Unlimited I used to write when I was a kid/teenager, don't feel obliged to read it.

So basically it was about X-Men and Justice League joining forces to stop A.M.A.Z.O from destroying the Earth and the ony way to do that is Jean becoming Phoenix, annihilating A.M.A.Z.O and then killing herself and here are the best tidbits

- Wolverine had a crush on Black Canary and tried to impress her with his fighting skills and general toughness, thinking she's unhappy with Green Arrow. Ollie tried to be friendly and joval at first but then got to the point of trying to get the Founders' permission to kill him

- J'onn had a mindreading prank war with Xavier

- also J'onn cured Rouge from her deadly touch and she got knocked up by Gambit, then I retconned it into Rouge getting knocked up by Scott because of drama

- basically JL treated X-Men like rookies all the time (except for Wolverine, Storm, Forge and Angel) and the mutants wanted to prove that they were skilled in combat too, but Leaguers just shushed them until Scott turned out to have stronger laser beam in his eyes as Superman

- there was also a subplot with Orion deciding that Jean is incarnation of the Universal Goddesses or something and wanted to worship her but then I ditched it halfway because I got older and realized how creepy it is

- as a major Storm fan I turned her into femme fatale (she had, you know, forbidden romance with enemy-turned-friend Magneto) and gave her a bit of a MarySue vibe

- I also was a Magneto fan so he was always the smartest man in the room and fought with Green Lantern because he hated soldiers

- Bruce and Diana still had that 'will they/won't they' energy and were dancing around each other, one of the best thing I've written back then was a piece when Batman took a literal bullet for Wonder and they had a lot of existential talk about her immortality and heavy stuff like that

- I also think that I killed Kitty so there was more angst and tears and emotional growth from the younger teenager but I'm not sure if she was ressurected at some point or if I just forgot and went on with the story

[botslayer]

Heroes Reborn: Opinion piece.

So Marvel recently announced an interesting event, time, as it tends to in comics, has broken down on the side of the road and been rebooted. There are no Avengers in this new timeline. Instead, the world is generally protected by the “Squadron Supreme.” 

For those who don’t know, the SS is a team of “Superheroes” (rant incoming) from... Honestly, it depends. Sometimes they’re from another reality, at least in part, other times they’re just regular humans (Save for Hyperion, the man with the atom on his chest) who all get powers later or what have you. Their primary five members are Hyperion, Nighthawk, Zarda the Power Princess, Whizzer(Or “Speed demon”), and Dr. Spectrum. These are, of course, parody characters based on the Justice League from DC. Problem though: These are supposedly “Heroes” but they just about always turn stupid evil or at best into the Justice Lords, and while the latter was the plot of the original book they came from, I want them to actually BE heroes.  Even when they are heroes they still discuss taking over the world for whatever insane reason and it makes it hard to believe they ever wanted to be heroes sometimes, let alone were... And sadly this event seems to at least partly continue this trend. What am I referring to?  “Heroes Reborn,” The event I explained above Is still showing Hyperion And from my research: The rest of the squadron, being monsters to an extent considering they killed at least some of what the prime continuity calls the X-Men and most likely many more in “The Mutant Massacre.”

Already a point off. But this combination of characters working under Magneto is at least interesting enough that I want to read this. The established lore of this universe has my attention, what else is there? How about... exactly what I asked for? 

Hyperion and the Imperial guard Is about our buddy Hyperion and the Shi’ar deciding to go on a quest through the Negative zone... Aight. I’m down. Maybe this will deepen his character. and justify him being an authoritarian idiot.  If the Avengers never assembled though, what about some other Marvel heroes? Peter Parker, the original Spider-Man is basically Jimmy Olsen. 

He exists in a state of Hyperion Hyper fanboying and actually pals around with him a bit. There wasn’t much else to what I read of it but I’m curious how that premise might go south. Up next: A Villain book that looks neat if nothing else. 

Various heroes and villains in the prime universe are now a cabal of villainous anti-heroes and the like opposing Nighthawk’s branch of the Squadron in Europe. Saber Tooth, Hawk eye, Scott Lang, and others all working together like this is a fascinating sight to behold, I must say and I’m curious about their team dynamic. Finally we have the one I’m the most interested in, “Young Squadron.”

This comic examines newer faces of prominence in the Marvel comic universe, namely Miles Morales, Kamala Kahn, and Samuel Alexander in this universe as the sidekicks of three particular SS members... And I wanna talk about their personas.

Samuel Alexander: As a member of the Nova corps, of course becomes Dr. Spectrum’s apprentice. Who else? But I will say... And I know you’re all thinking it: Google Chrome. Despite the weird color scheme I like the patterns and I’m curious how, if he doesn’t have the prism, he actually has these powers even though I don’t know much about Alexander as a character. Up next: Kamala. 

Cringy name aside (I know it’s a silver age-grade silly name and that’s the point but it’s still goofy in kinda the wrong way) I also have to wonder what her powers are in this universe. I doubt Zarda would just pick up some random kid and not at least give her a power-up via gear or a spell or something. And this outfit... Hm... Okay, look: I understand there might be touch of a cultural thing to the overall look that I’m not seeing but to me it just looks kinda lop-sided and... Under-armored? Like Kid Spectrum has a helmet and knee pads at least and you can make up a material for his suit but Kamala’s looks like the torso should be armor even though it’s more obviously made of cloth except for the metal sash thing? If they can trim the skirt a little and give her some gold/black shoulder pads, I would say that would look good because it might also help balance the colors. As it stands the black gold and blue, while they can be striking, all look more like they’re trying to fight for what the main color is. But what do I know? Finally, Miles Morales:

I’m just gonna come out and say it: The fact that he’s Falcon in this time line feels like slightly racially inclined type-casting. But it also makes sense given Falcon’s original color scheme and the fact that Night Hawk is supposed to be Batman. But I feel like making his own thing like the other two might have better move... Off the top of my head: “Hawk wasp” Which would still lend itself very well to crazy colored costume and the Squadron Supreme’s penchant for being intimidating and evil. But again, what do I know. Still very interested in this series and I hpe to read it when it comes out in friggin’ May.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael in the Mainstream: The Dark Knight Trilogy & Its Negative Impact on the Superhero Genre

Superhero movies have come a very long way in the past couple of decades, cementing themselves as a genre unto themselves rather than the odd action movie here or there. Almost every year a few new ones of varying quality pop up that incite equal parts excitement and derision. It’s definitely a genre people feel very strongly about, but even people who tend to not love superhero films will admit that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is fantastic.

From 2005 until 2012, Nolan reinvisioned Batman in a way that grounded the character in reality. There’s no fantastical elements, there’s no insane science, there’s no superpowers… Everything in these films could happen in the real world. In a post-Batman & Robin world, this was seen as a breath of fresh air, and the critics loved it. In particular, The Dark Knight helped to usher in the modern age of superhero films, releasing the same year the MCU kicked off and widely being hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. That’s right, not even superhero films, films period. These films were impressive, groundbreaking, and… they fundamentally ruined superhero movies for quite a while.

Look, I don’t particularly hate these films. I think all of them are pretty good, in their own ways. But they have a lot of glaring issues that really hamper them a fair bit and yet, somehow, they became the blueprint that studios decided to look at for what they thought a successful superhero movie should be. Nolan’s films are serious, brooding, dark, and lack the whimsy and creative insanity that makes comics such a fun and engaging medium, and I think this right here is what has hurt comic book movies the most over the past decade. These are films that feel absolutely ashamed to be comic book movies, and they desperately want to seem like they’re “mature” and for “adults.” And, unfortunately for the rest of us, this shame translated over into a lot of other films, something we’re only just now recovering from.

Looking at the greatest strength of the trilogy shows this issue pretty well, that being the villains. Nolan’s films gave us truly iconic portrayals of characters like Bane, Joker, and Scarecrow, and you’re not gonna hear me say much bad about them. Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Aaron Eckhart, and Heath Ledger all do fantastic jobs as the insidious rogues of Batman. But the issue I have is that by grounding these characters in a realistic setting like this, it kind of misses the point. Joker isn’t using exploding cakes and laughing gas, Ra’s al Ghul isn’t an immortal warrior, Bane isn’t a drugged-up super soldier… They’re all just Guys. They’re Guys With Gimmicks, yes, but at the end of the day they aren’t what should be looked at as the be-all, end-all of the character’s portrayals.

And yet everyone acts like no one should ever play Joker again, because Heath Ledger’s Joker was just so good, guys! And he was good, but I don’t think Ledger’s Joker should be the absolute final Joker ever. Quite frankly, I prefer Phoenix’s Joker, because even if that version is also in a rather grounded film missing the overt weirdness of comics for the most part, he still dresses in a colorful costume, acts weird, tells jokes, and is in general more Jokery. Out of all of these villains, I think Bane and Scarecrow at least come within the ballpark of being close to how they should be, but Scarecrow is horribly underutilized and Bane is given a rather undignified sendoff.

Then there are the bigger issues. Batman himself is really downplayed throughout the trilogy, getting fairly little screentime compared to villains and side characters. This was a huge point of contention when The Dark Knight Rises came out, with most of the film featuring Bruce Wayne, and in hindsight it highlights how unwilling Nolan was to engage with the comic book trappings of what he was adapting. I like Christian Bale a lot, he’s a great actor, but I don’t think he really carries any of the films; in fact, it’s usually the villains carrying the movies. Bale is certainly not as bad as Val Kilmer in the role of Wayne/Batman, but he’s no Keaton, he’s no Clooney, he’s not even an Affleck. A lot of the time, he also just feels like… a Guy. And Batman should not ever, ever just be a Guy.

But perhaps the most egregious fault of the films is what it did to Gotham City itself. In Burton’s films, you really get a feel for the Gothic atmosphere of the city with how it’s designed, and this goes for Batman: The Animated Series too. And even the more cartoonish, colorful Gotham of Schumacher’s films pops and leaves an impact. But Nolan’s Gotham? It’s very much just a City. There is nothing distinct about Nolan’s Gotham, it’s literally just a generic city, and if you even have the faintest knowledge of Batman you will know that Gotham is not just a city. Gotham is pretty much a character itself, a dark, imposing landscape in which Batman does battle with his costumed foes. Every other adaptation I can think of knows to make Gotham feel unique and distinct, but this one just absolutely drops the ball. You might as well just have the city be New York if you’re going to put no effort into giving it personality.

And that all brings me to this: every reviled superhero movie of the past decade, from F4ntastic to The Amazing Spider-Man to Dawn of Justice, all have their genesis in Nolan’s trilogy. He laid the groundwork for these films to exist, and a large majority of the blame needs to be put on Nolan for sapping the fun out of comic book movies. Now, to be totally fair to Nolan, he’s not entirely responsible for what happened to the comic book film landscape; prior to him, the X-Men film series was giving all of the heroes dark costumes and being a bit more serious. But despite those films playing a bit of a part, there’s one major reason I don’t fault them nearly as much: The X-Men films never once felt ashamed to be comic book movies.

You have to understand, people loved grit and edginess in the 90s and had just violently rejected Batman & Robin a few years prior to the original X-Men film, so it’s hard to really fault it for wanting to avoid being too campy. But much like Blade, the films never tried to act like they weren’t still crazy comic book films. Scott still has eye lasers, Mystique is still blue, Nightcrawler looks like a demon, there are Sentinels and Apocalypse and even Dazzler shows up at one point! The X-Men franchise wasn’t always good, but it managed to balance between being silly and taking itself seriously pretty well for the most part. Magneto is still a Holocaust survivor, his relationship with Xavier still has impact, there are still emotional moments here and there, but then you also have Deadpool movies and the multiple comic book style retcons to the timeline that leave the continuity a mess, and something about that just feels right. And all that makes Logan less egregious despite being the sort of brooding, angsty superhero drama Nolan would make, because even if it is those things, it still centers around a dude with metal claws coming out of his hands trying to stop his best friend from wiping out everyone with psychic seizures. Nolan could never make this superhero film.

Nolan’s films, on the other hand, did. These films did not feel like they wanted to be comic book movies, they felt like they wanted to be serious crime films but Nolan was stuck with Batman so he just mashed the two together. And honestly, I’d probably be more forgiving if it weren’t for the hugely negative impact these films and their critical success had on the superhero genre even until this day. The first decade of superhero films as a major contender in cinema were colored by these films. People outright balked at silliness in superhero movies for quite some time, with a lot of criticism levied at the early phases of the MCU for being too goofy; in fact, at times it seemed as if the MCU was going a bit too far in the goofy direction without striking the proper balance, with films like Age of Ultron having most of its tension defused by constant wisecracks. And on the DC side, Nolan’s grounded approach lead to Zack Snyder’s flaccid filmmaking with dark coloration, moody atmosphere, and not a shred of joy to be found. Nolan is essentially the peak of dark, grounded superhero films, and Snyder is the nadir, but Snyder’s awful DC films wouldn’t exist if not for Nolan.

It was a slow crawl getting to what superhero movies should be. Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man were films tossed out only when Marvel was certain they could take risks, because absurd concepts like those would just not have been able to survive if not for years of good will beforehand. That’s not even getting into some of the more bonkers elements of later films, such as Ego the Living Planet and basically everything about Doctor Strange. In fact, Doctor Strange, for all its issues, is still a massive step forward for a genre that outright rejected magic for a long time, instead for a time turning Thor and his costars into a cast of hyper-advanced aliens, with later films having to clarify that there is magic and zombies and so on. The recent WandaVision was able to further clarify this by making Wanda unambiguously magic and not an evil Nazi science experiment.

Superhero animation didn’t suffer quite so much, but that’s mostly because, much like comics, animation is still seen as “kid’s stuff” by way too many people. And even then, they didn’t escape the shadow of Nolan totally unscathed; one need only look into the infamous Bat Embargo, which limited Batman villains so there could only be one given incarnation of said character in media. For instance, the Scarecrow being in Batman Begins meant he could not appear in the animated series The Batman. This lead to such things as no Batman characters appearing in Justice League Unlimited. It was truly a stupidly frustrating time to be a Batman fan when some of his most iconic foes were relegated to only certain appearances because it “might confuse kids.”

Let me again clarify this: I mostly like the Nolan films. I usually like Nolan, though he has become unbearably, obnoxiously pretentious these days. I think a lot of elements of them are great, I feel like they mostly have strong villains, and I don’t disagree that The Dark Knight is a fantastic film. But the thing is these are only good as AU stories, as their own thing; they should not be the template every superhero movie should follow, or any superhero movie for that matter, because they lack the ability to engage with the things that make people love comics in the first place. People love wacky, off-the-wall concepts, superpowered aliens, magic, talking animals, evil living planets, alcoholic ducks, and all that fun stuff.

People desperately want the fun, camp, and wacky stuff back in comic book films, as the success of the goofier DC films like Aquaman, Shazam, and Birds of Prey as well as the success of shows like Doom Patrol in comparison to the critical and audience revulsion of Snyder’s films, with Shazam in particular giving us such bonkers concepts as an entire family of superpowered children and Mr. Mind, the evil alien caterpillar. Thor: Ragnarok and the Guardians of the Galaxy films have become some of the most beloved MCU movies despite being weird, wacky, and wholly embracing the joy of comics to the point the latter films feature Howard the Duck and the aforementioned Ego alongside bizarre characters like Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and Taserface. And the thing with all of these films is that they’re able to balance the weirdness and wackiness of comics without losing sight of human emotion, moving storytelling, and drama. They’re both fun and deep, goofy and yet meaningful. This is what comics are, and what they should be, and anyone who thinks comics should be grim and gritty really needs to think about why they think an entire genre needs to be colored in with only the dullest colors.

I think what I’m trying to say here is this: Make a Detective Chimp movie, you cowards.

[outside-the-mailstrom]

GENERAL BACKGROUND

I've always been a fan of Marvel comics (or, Marvel Comics' properties, at least) I've fragmentary early memories of Batman The Animated Series, and some associated Batman and Superman comics (aimed at younger readers, in a 'Timmverse' style of the TV shows then airing - gorgeous, simple, iconic Art Deco inspired designs), but for the most part my early conception of superheroes came from what was called "Marvel Hour", a Saturday morning television timeslot ft. back-to-back episodes of cartoons from between the 60s and 90s, starring basically the big names you'd expect. I was quite wee, and don't rightly remember who did and didn't have their own show; obviously the big titles are easy enough for you to guess but I also feel (nebulously) that Iron Man, Hulk, Daredevil, and even the Silver Surfer had their own programs; the line-up jostled, there wasn't an Avengers or Defenders team-up show as there would be these days. There was always Spiderman, of course, and there were generally The X-Men.

X-Men The Animated Series, which was written and produced around the same era as Batman The Animated Series, does not (it has been noted) hold up near so well as its famed compatriot; it has its charms, and is a fascinating window into history, but it's not... strong on revisits. It's a little hard to say how much all this galvanized my interest in the subject matter, and how much it merely looks like it as an artefact of looking back through years of other things layering up (notably the early 00's onward movies, the X-Men Evolution tie-in cartoon [of which I was still, as a viewer, at quite a formative young age], a steadily developing interest in the concept of transition and transformation in all things, and ways that my own self-reinforcing creative projects drew from my standing experience of X-Men as a source material in ways that deepened my interest in, and sympathy for, it as a set of signifiers). Substantial engagement with actual X-Comics, however, comes later; primarily as a fan of the podcast Jay & Miles X-Plane The X-Men (which is pretty much as it sounds; a two-hander deep-dive through X-History & continuity, which settles early in its own run into a charisma and humour driven analytical recap of the major story arcs of the history of the franchise, starting at the Bronze Age [70s onward] and working forward practically issue by issue), aboard which bandwagon I found myself early in its days as a snowballing project (less than a dozen episodes as I recall? Certainly some time before it began to resemble a leading voice in intersectional leftist queer focal fandom, although it was always stridently those things, as well as advocating for a pro-soap opera, pro-minor characters, pro-Cyclops revision to popular understanding of what makes X-Men great).

Of course, if you sit two X-Fans down to talk comics for an hour a week for any length of time, really, under no x-ternal supervision or hard guideline parameters for what subjects are, and are not, on topic (amongst many other things more broad ranging and personal) they're going to get to discussing contemporary releases as well as ancient history. So, at the same time as learning, by glitzy guided tour, the history of The Hellfire Club, how the Phoenix Force actually works, why Scott Summers is autistic and Kitty Pryde is queer, I also got the nod-here-reference-there back ally tour of the contemporary X-Line, as it was shaping up; the early days of the Brian Michael Bendis run, the stuff that came out of Schism and Battle Of The Atom.

Consequently this particular period has always seemed, to me, beguiling.

I spent a period intrigued by it (not least because it’s intriguing, and this is a creative, perhaps even visionary author with strong, distinctive, and original ideas for stories that could be done with this premise and set of characters, and [by the accounts that I was receiving] was executing said ideas, if not flawlessly, at least with panaché). The podcast soon became somewhat of a bonding point between myself and my sister, who (being close in age to me) has always been very immediate in my life, but in such a way as can mean a lot of treading on one another's toes (less risk of that now). Like me she was a long time X-Fan, like me mostly from growing up on related media and finding them abstractly cool (we both had tween crushes on Evolution Nightcrawler - I remember printing out pictures of him from the school library, she now has a tattoo). My sister's completionist tendencies led her to track alongside the podcast, reading originally trade paperbacks and eventually Marvel Unlimited (with a cursory reading of revisionist takes on the Silver Age [60s] - X-Men Season One by Dennis Hopeless and Jamie Mckelvie, then hard-in with the real Bronze Age [70s onward], starting at All New Giant Size X-Men #1, and just working forward). I don't know quite where she's up to now.

I gave this a go, I certainly appreciated things about it, but in general it didn't grab me as my starting point - and while there are many other jumping on points between 1975 and 2013 (already three years in the rear-view by the time I decided to get around to this) the more-or-less present day just seemed the more-or-less obvious point to jump on, so I jumped.

Actually I read the first volume of G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, up to the 2015/2016 Secret Wars event, then I backed up and read Bendis' entire runs on Uncanny and All New X-Men (which notably, themselves, conclude at the start of Secret Wars), I also read, to my knowledge, all accompanying X-Titles coming out concurrently with the Bendis run, comprising what I'll generally refer to as the wider Bendis Era; Storm by Greg Pak, Cyclops by Greg Rucka, Magneto by Cullen Bunn, X-Force by Si Spurrier (all of which were really quite good, to my mind), and All New X-Factor by Peter David (which wasn't really for me - by which I seem to imply that it's probably for someone... in practice I think perhaps it is simply not really that good). I then read all of the X-Related crossover material that tied in to the aforementioned Secret Wars event (as well as a few non-X-related Secret Wars titles on general recommendation from Jay & Miles' Patreon stretch-goal video reviews of contemporary [primarily X] comic publications). My general process was to read an issue or two at a time then cross-reference with video reviews, as a lot of my engagement with media involves parsing it through the lens of critical voices who represent known quantities relative to my tastes (although it would be erroneous to suggest that by this point I'm not in some way attached to somewhat of a cult of personality around the public personas of the hosts, albeit what seems quite a calm and good natured one).

After finishing the Secret Wars titles I faced a relaunch of the line, and, eager as I was to find out what this experience (and the itemized content within) was like, I'd been a diehard Bendis fan through the process so far and wanted to let my recent reading mellow somewhat; to ruminate, and take a beat to work on other projects - breathe, mourn, let my first formative era of fandom settle before steam-rolling on with a new age.

It’s been… a few years, and while I really do have plenty else I ought be on with I've decided to throw myself back in and read some damn X-Men.

As follows are broadly my thoughts on what I will, somewhat snarkily be calling the 'Ordinary Era' (that is, post Secret Wars, through to the end of Jeff Lemire's Extraordinary X-Men, concluding with the Inhumans vs X-Men event), and beyond.

[thecorteztwins]

I love how you care so much about obscure characters. Who is your favorite underrated female X-men character

Awww thank you! I love bringing them love, so it makes me really happy for you to say that! My absolute fave is Haven, but I read “faves” as plural so I wrote down a bunch...my faves can bounce around a bit but here’s a list of some of them! It’s under a cut because it’s long, I really like to explain who these gals are and why I like them so much! Warning, there is some description of pretty horrendous sexism and racism for some of these, since nothing makes me latch on to a woman harder than wanting to defend her from the SHITTY THINGS WRITERS DID TO HER! I kinda wrote novels for Haven and Madelyne, then I did links to previous things I’ve written about others. This is a LOT, I’m so sorry, I just love sharing!! Thank you for asking!!

THE BIG ONES Basically my consistent mega-faves I’m always ready to talk about! RADHA “HAVEN” DASTOOR - This lady has been at the top of my list for over five years and counting! She just really resonated with me on a deep level. She’s this mysterious woman who turns up in X-Factor for seven issues, and though she’s very benevolent towards them (even when they attack her) she is technically a villain, as she’s trying to destroy 3/4 of the world to bring about the Mahapralaya, a sort of Hindu apocalypse that will bring about an age of peace and end to suffering. So, her motives are very compassionate, and as it turns out, the horrible things she’s trying to do aren’t actually her fault. She’s being posessed by the Adversary, a demon of the highest order and an entity of cosmic evil. Or more specifically, her unborn child is. See, Haven was a really, really good woman. She was not a mutant, but she was sensitive to the pain and suffering of others from an early age, and she devoted her life to helping the poor and needy. She’s incredibly rich, so she could have helped just from afar, but instead she not only used her wealth to help others, she herself went out in the streets to attend to the poor and sick with her own hands. She bathed lepers, cradled dying babies, everything. She actually GOT the name “Haven” from a children’s hospital that she renovated, the kids started calling HER that instead. What a villain, huh? It all goes super wrong when she fell in love with a guy. After he took her virginity, he took off, leaving her pregnant. This was in 1970s India, and she was a very a religious woman, she felt INTENSE shame and horrible guilt and sunk into a deep depression, now living on the streets herself she was so broken. And then...then her fetus started talking to her. Yeah, see, technically she wasn’t posessed by the Adversary, her unborn child was. It incubated in her for twenty years, corrupting her mind, making her its pawn, all basically for its own amusement til it could be reborn into the world, killing her. And the guy who knocked her up? Got off scott-free. Basically she had sex ONE time and she had to be punished for it by being stripped of her agency, forced to betray everything she loved and believed, and then finally killed in the mud while a Marvel deity stood over and told her how she brought this on herself. It’s a slut-shaming Victorian morality tale of how no matter how good a person you are, you’re tainted forever if you violate purity culture just once, and we’re expected to AGREE with this narrative as readers. It’s sick. It gets even worse in how X-Factor treats her. She first appears RESCUING Polaris from government agents who are trying to kill her, because despite WORKING for the government at this time (X-Factor was a government team during this period) Polaris’s energy signature matched Magneto’s. Haven is the one who saved Polaris by teleporting her away. Polaris was distrustful and threatened Haven. Haven tried to talk her down, but also opened her arms and said that if Polaris truly did not believe her, then she would not resist. Polaris decided to “give trust a try” but I also truly believe that if Lorna had attacked her, Haven indeed would have let her. Haven is a human but the Adversary gave her INCREDIBLE power, she could WIPE PEOPLE FROM EXISTENCE by THINKING ABOUT IT, but she was a pacifist every step of the way, even as a villain. X-Factor would REPEATEDLY attack her later...she NEVER retaliated. The worst thing she did was, once they kept on attacking her, she just kinda put them in her pocket dimension as a time-out, but didn’t hurt them any. I really don’t think she COULD, possessed or not. Anyway, after meeting Lorna, she ‘ports Lorna back to safety and leaves her be. She is interested in recruiting Lorna and the rest of X-Factor to her cause, but she’s very moral about it, and never uses situations like these as leverage; for instance, when she heals Rahne of the Genoshan bonding process and gives her back her free will and her ability to resume her fully human form, Rahne is ECSTATIC and ready to do ANYTHING for her. And rather than exploit this, Haven just hugs her and tells her that her joy is thanks enough. Again, what a villain! Anyway, it turns out this Haven lady is also an activist! She’s big on promoting peace between warring groups (which I think makes it very significant that she’s an Indian character from Mumbai, then Bombay, who was created in 1992, the same year when Hindu/Muslim tensions in India resulted in the Bombay Bombings and subsequent riots, and she indeed mentions Hindu/Muslim tensions in her pro-peace speeches) and she emphasizes accepting MUTANTS in particular. It is very rare we see humans who are pro-mutant, though they had happened before, but this is the first time we see a human who is pro-mutant WITHOUT any affiliation or friendship with the X-men, and who is a public figure who seems to have some real social power---she’s a best-selling author, lecturer, and apparently her being a very wealthy woman has made some very wealthy people listen to her. She is basically the perfect ally for mutants if you take out the demon-possessed part, and I always found this super interesting and wish more had been done with it. So, she’s speaking at Brahma Hall (Brahma, notably, is the Hindu creator god) and...THIS happens. It’s...it’s really distressing. I’m sure it’s bad enough in its own time, but reading it NOW, in a post-9/11 world, a world where POC are routinely slaughtered by law enforcement (they always were but social media has made us more aware) it’s chilling. And we, the reader, are supposed to see X-Factor as JUSTIFIED in how they treat this unarmed, non-threatening, apparently-human-for-all-they-know woman who is promoting peace. Because no matter how nice she is, the US government says she’s an evil terrorist, and the US government turns out to be right! Yay, America! This might be a good time to mention Haven was the first Hindu character in X-Men comics, and the philosophy that the Adversary is manipulating her with comes directly from Hindu cosmology, and that is WAY IFFY to say THE LEAST. Holy xenophobia, Batman! And in an X-MEN comic of ALL PLACES! Oh yeah, and our good guys also describe her beliefs as “New Age psychobabble” and make fun of her temple decor as "very 60s" when BOTH ARE FROM HINDUISM, WHITE USA HIPPIES DID NOT INVENT IT, YOU IGNORANT SHITS So anyway, Haven’s very interesting to me as someone who is so deeply pacifistic and compassionate, that even when she’s being steered by a literal demon that has been talking in her womb for 20 years, she’s still someone who is perpetually polite, who won’t hurt the HEROES even when they want to hurt her, who SURRENDERS during a FIGHT in order to HEAL ONE OF THEM, and...who ends up with an abruptly aborted arc where she’s killed by her own “child” and victim-blamed in her last moments by Roma, the Omniversal Guardian Goddess and foe/counterpart of the Adversary. It’s made all the more tragic by the fact that Haven’s last pleas to Roma weren’t for herself, but for Roma to stop the Adversary, as she had realized now what her “child” really was. Even in her final moments, Haven was thinking of others, of the world. It’s just....awful to me that a character as interesting and unique as she was was thrown away like that, and that she was treated in such a sexist, racist, xenophobic way by both the HEROES and the story itself. I stan Haven 4 life. MADELYNE PRYOR- She’s maybe not “obscure” per se, I think most X-Men readers have a basic understanding of who she is, but the problem is that “basic” is not enough. What most people know is ”she’s Jean Grey’s evil clone” and some might know that “she was married to Scott Summers and went evil when he ditched her for Jean”. But that’s so far from the whole story, and it really does Madelyne a disservice, and canon has done her ENOUGH disservice already. Madelyne was originally created by Chris Claremont to truly be just a human woman who looked just like the dead Jean, with whom Scott would settle down and have a kid, and leave the X-Men. It’s a pretty nonsensical notion, the idea that this woman just happens to look exactly like Jean and meet Scott and fall in love, but this was his plan, he has confirmed it. And like...that’s pretty sexist from the start, in that she’s very literally created as a replacement for Jean on a narrative level, there’s NO REASON that she should have to look exactly like Scott’s dead ex besides as a way for Scott to still “get” Jean in a way. But Maddie rises above that swiftly by being a super strong, super cool character in her own right. She’s a pilot, she’s fearless, she’s adventurous, she’s got a mean right hook, and she’s got a tragic backstory when she crashed her plane and cost the lives of over three hundred passengers. She gets involved with Scott and by extension the X-Men, and she holds her own despite having no powers. Weird fact, this means that some of the X-Men, like Rogue, met Madelyne before they ever met Jean. She also gets a cool story where she gained healing powers, and the reason her powers specifically took the form of healing is because they were what she wanted them to be. She’s a good person, and also a total badass. Then, Jean came back, and the Powers That Be wanted her back together with Scott. But Scott was married to Madelyne. Rather than have them get a divorce or something, it was decided Madelyne had to be very literally demonized and then murdered, because we can’t just have two women co-exist, no, they must be divided into a “good” woman and a “bad” woman and fight over a man. Actual quote from Chris Claremont: “ Then, unfortunately, Jean was resurrected, Scott dumps his wife and kid and goes back to the old girlfriend. So it not only destroys Scott's character as a hero and as a decent human being it creates an untenable structural situation: what do we do with Madelyne and the kid? ... So ultimately the resolution was: turn her into the Goblin Queen and kill her off.” So, after something like EIGHT YEARS of being a character unto herself, Madelyne gets retconned as actually having been Jean’s clone all along! Which, okay, does make sense, certainly more sense than ‘this woman just happens to look EXACTLY like Jean and hook up with Jean’s ex” but then the REASON that Sinister cloned her...is nothing to do with Maddie or Jean themselves. Madelyne’s creation isn’t ABOUT her the way so many other clone/created-in-a-lab type stories are, like Laura Kinney. She wasn’t important. She was made literally just to have a baby with Scott, the BABY is what’s important. She is REPEATEDLY called a “brood mare” in fact (a female horse used specifically for breeding) So basically, her only value, her only REASON for existing, is her reproductive capacity. A lot of people think that Madelyne either found out she was a clone and went crazy-evil, or she went crazy-evil when Scott went back to Jean. That’s not what happened. Madelyne goes through a long, long series of arduous tragedies that piece by piece dehumanize and violate and traumatize her, and even then she doesn’t become evil until she’s TRICKED into being infected with demonic energy. Being “evil” was NEVER her choice, and everyone forgets that. See, first Scott walked out on her and the baby. Then, the Marauders attacked her, nearly killed her, and stole her baby and left her for dead in a coma for months. When she woke up, her baby was still missing, and she rejoined the X-Men to help them while they also helped search for her son. She sacrificed her LIFE alongside them to defeat the Adversary (yes, the same one Haven was pregnant with!) and then was resurrected with them too by Roma (yes, same Roma). She continued to work with the X-Men, despite the fact Scott had left her, and used her tech expertise to be the X-Men’s computer gal in Australia. When she saw X-Factor on one of the news monitors, including Scott with Jean, she realized why he’d abandoned her. She punched the screen and the explosion knocked her unconscious. While she was knocked out and dreaming, the demon Sym invaded her mind showed her a few different reflections of things she could be, one of which was a demonic reflection of herself. She chose that one, saying “What the heck, it’s only a dream.” And then Sym infected her with demonic energy. So she literally JUST found out her husband left her and their now-missing son for another woman, and she thinks she’s dreaming so yeah she picks the idea of being a demon IN THE CONTEXT OF A DREAM, A FUCKING FANTASY, WHEN SHE’S GOT EVERY RIGHT TO BE PISSED and oh well now you’re gonna be evil for real honey you don’t get a choice. Serves you right for being angry even for a moment, woman! But even then, she didn’t instantly turn evil. Horrible shit had already happened to her, but she still held out…so of course, more shit happened to her. While she and the X-Men were trying to help an escapee from Genosha (which was still enslaving mutants at that point) she ended up captured herself, and since their readings indicated she was not quite human (though what exactly she was, they didn’t know) they tried to put her through the “mutate bonding process” that would enslave her too. As a result, her latent psychic powers finally manifest, and she telekinetically explodes the place. From there, we start seeing big hints that something is going really wrong with Maddie, she seduces Havok and she’s entered into a secret bargain with the demon N’astrih, who promised to help her find her still-missing son (whom she still wanted to find and save at that point because she was still mostly herself) and of course, that bargain transformed her into the Goblyn Queen. After this transformation, though, she STILL had not gone past the point of no return. That didn’t happen until she met Sinister and she found out the truth of her origins—-not only was she a clone of Jean Grey physically, the few memories that she had also came from Jean, and her emotions from Scott had been PROGRAMMED into her (meaning she never had a choice at all in the man she loved) and it was all to be a brood mare, to produce a child with him. Only then did she go off the deep end completely, and agreed to N’astrih’s plan to sacrifice her own son (who he now found and gave to her, as this was his plan all along) because it was the absolute BIGGEST fuck you she could give to Sinister and to Cyclops. And like, yes, that’s evil, but given at that point she was not only magically infected/corrupted with demon energy AND insane with trauma that had been building up for months if not YEARS of development…she basically had a better excuse than ANYONE in all this who was also corrupted by Inferno. Yet she’s the one who doesn’t get a break. The unfairness is just…staggering, really. Even her death isn’t without indignity, violation, and depersonalization---she tries to commit a murder suicide, linking her mind with Jean’s and killing herself so that Jean will be dragged down into death with her. Jean, who really is the kindest to Maddie, urges Maddie to live instead, but Maddie’s last words are “not in the same world as you”. Jean survives. Maddie does not. And then...Jean takes Maddie’s memories and psyche into herself. It’s meant as beautiful, but to me it’s a heinous violation. Maddie wanted nothing more than be APART from Jean, so much so she KILLED HERSELF, and now Jean has made her a part of her forever, and we’re meant to applaud this? It’s DISGUSTING. Madelyne gets resurrected in the 1990s by Nate Grey, but it turns out that was an accident on his part, his mind was subconsciously seeking...Jean Grey, of course. And we he finds out he’s the one who brought her back to life, HE TRIES TO KILL HER. Jean stops him, but it’s no wonder to me that poor Maddie runs to the arms of Sebastian Shaw...who, of all people, actually treats her as an individual from the get-go and ends up being a pretty good boyfriend to her. Never even tries to use her in any evil schemes, it’s crazy. Madelyne has come back and died again and come back a few times since then, but she’s never really been “Maddie” again, whether it was brave adventurous Badass Normal pilot Maddie who just wanted to help people, or the bitter, conflicted, morally grey Maddie of the 90s. No, she’s just....she’s not even Goblyn Queen anymore, she lacks the pathos, she’s just this sexy evil misogynist caricature of herself and I hate it. I really love Madelyne Pryor. She came into this crazy world as a normal human, and when she got pulled into superhero shenanigans she held her own. She was a badass, she was a spitfire, she had a huge heart. She deserves a lot better than just being a gross Sexy Evil Lady with no personality, especially since she no longer has the whole “demonically possessed” issue going on. It’s just stupid and sexist at this point. I personally love original 80s Maddie, and also 90s Maddie where like...this shit has happened to her and she’s darker for it now, and understandably so, but she’s also still HER. Like, she leaves Sebastian Shaw not because he ever treated her badly, which he did not, but because he was doing things that could hurt OTHER PEOPLE, and that was where she drew the line. She was an enemy to the X-Men now or at least really hated them, she killed Threnody for bringing up her past as being “bred to breed”, but she also wasn’t about to be with a man who would risk the lives of millions of innocent people with his schemes, no matter how well he treated her, no matter if he was the one man who ever saw her for HER. Real Maddie is INTERESTING and Real Maddie is GOOD and I want Real Maddie back so she can call everyone on their shit and then go off and live her best life instead of being eternally dragged back into pointless villainy by authors who can’t think of anything better! MEGGAN PUCEANU - As with Madelyne, she’s maybe not UNKNOWN per se, I mean she’s one of the lead characters of Excalibur, but I also don’t think she’s an A-lister at all either. I’ve written about her HERE and HERE and her relationship dynamics with Brian Braddock/Captain Britain HERE so I feel like those links will probably be better than another novel like I did for Haven and Maddie! CATSEYE AKA SHARON SMITH - The deaths of all the Hellions were a tragedy, but Catseye is the one I found most interesting and with the most potential! I’ve written about her HERE and the Hellions in general HERE with a segment on her. She’s just so cute and innocent and INTERESTING, I want to know so much more about how she behaves, how she perceives the world and interact with others, how she gets on with her teammates, how she reacts this and that, I just love her! MINDMELD - Appears for only one issue, is arguably the first transgender mutant in Marvel, and also a total badass who I think is really sexy. I write more about her HERE and HERE. HONORABLE MENTIONS I’m not freaking out over these girls AS MUCH or AS CONSISTENTLY but they all have a place in my heart!! Really all it takes is someone MENTIONING them to get me revved up all over again!

THRENODY AKA MELODY JACOBS- Another Marvel gal who can’t catch a break, when she’s remembered by anyone at all. I wrote about her HERE prior to her most recent return in Deadpool, then HERE about said return. I just really, really want Threnody to be happy. She’s suffered enough. Admittedly, that could be said for most women on this list, maybe all of them. GOSAMYR- Wrote about her HERE! Most people who know of her at all typically hate her but I find her extremely interesting. She’s like everything people HATE about women, every stereotype of “toxic femininity”, but then this is explained as part of her culture and biology, and this is, to her, what is normal, and how is she to KNOW that everyone acts nuts around her when she has no basis for knowing how they act when she’s NOT around? She interests me in the questions and dilemmas she raises, and I just kinda have a thing for women we’re supposed to hate because of their feminine traits. KWANNON- The Japanese woman whose body Betsy Braddock had for years. I was very excited when she was brought back to life and given her own series, I wanted for her at last to be a CHARACTER with her own PERSONALITY and LIFE that wasn’t just an excuse to give a white woman a ninja makeover, and then I got...Fallen Angels. And she’s just...she’s literally just 90s Psylocke. I was very disappointed. But I still like Kwannon HERSELF in terms of potential, and now that she’s back maybe she’ll become a real person sooner or later. SATURNYNE AND SAT-YR-9: Wrote about them HERE! I really like Sat-Yr-9 as a villain (I especially enjoyed her short stint in the Hellfire Club as White Queen with Viper as her lieutenant and not-so-subtle girlfriend) and I like Saturnyne as a sort of celestial bureaucrat, someone who isn’t a force of good or evil but a force of ORDER, like the opposite of “embodiment of chaos” type characters. MURMUR AKA ARLETTE TRUFFEAU: I have not written about her before but HERE IS HER WIKI ARTICLE. As with Gossamyr, she seems like the “sexy shallow slut we’re supposed to dislike” type, so of course I like her. BIANCA LANEIGE- A Generation X villain who bore a grudge against Emma Frost from her days in the Hellfire Club, I wrote about her HERE. She’s pretty comedic as a bad guy, but that’s not a bad thing! I’d like to see her around again one day, either as silly as ever or made more serious. LIFEGUARD: Wrote about here HERE. She was in the first X-Men graphic novel that I bought and I’ve always had a soft spot for her since. I really liked that she didn’t give a shit when she found out who her bio-father was, it’s such a refreshing reaction compared to the usual “what if I’m just like my father/I can’t believe I’m adopted/etc” angst. Comparatively, she’s super upset about her Shi’ar lineage, because that actually altered her INTERNAL self when it manifested, she started seeing everyone around her as PREY and I reckon that’s pretty distressing for someone like her. Always wanted to see her come back; she’s in the background at a Krakoa party! SILHOUETTE CHORD: Wrote about her HERE and HERE. I just like her I guess! She’s maybe not obscure per se since she’s a main cast member of The New Warriors, but I’ve never really seen her get any attention. BLACK MAMBA AKA TANYA SEALY: Wrote about her HERE! THE ASP AKA CLEOPATRA NEFERTITI: Wrote about her HERE! SKEIN AKA SYBIL DVORAK: Wrote about her HERE and HERE! She was on the “Woman Warriors” team with Black Mamba and Asp, and I like the idea they just hang out as friends a lot!! ANACONDA AKA BLANCHE “BLONDIE” SITZINSKI: Wrote about her HERE! I just want her to hug me...really, really hard :) SHARADA DARTHRI: A minor villain that shows up during the “all female X-Men” team era in...2013, I think? Wrote about her HERE. DRAGONFLY AKA VERONICA DULTRY: Wrote about her HERE MANTIS : Despite the fact that she’s very well-known for her film version in Guardians of the Galaxy, most people don’t seem to know much at all about her comics version even though she’s been an Avengers member since the 70s. Wrote about her HERE and HERE and HERE, someone else writes about her HERE PENDING These are characters that I have not had the chance to personally read up on myself yet, but I want to! Their names link to their Marvel wiki articles! TOPAZ FIREBIRD SNOWBIRD SILVERCLAW There are honestly countless others I’m probably not remembering but this is a good handful I think! Oh, yeah, and also...COOTER. Because her name is COOTER oh my god.

[davidmann95]

Hey David. What in your opinion are the best comic writers from each decade? Starting with the 60s since it’s your area of expertise.

Going by superhero stuff:

30s have gotta be Jerry Siegel, right?

40s and 50s I both give to Otto Binder.

60s I suppose it simply has to be Stan the Man Lee.

70s I’ll go ahead and say that while there were plenty of superb talents, it was an era caught between the naturalism of later eras and the operatic/cartoonish bluntness of what came before it, rendering a lot of even the better stuff awkward. So if we’re essentially talking about what’s aged the most gracefully, Jack Kirby’s work retains the most power and entertainment value in my opinion, even if I still have to read most of Fourth World. If we’re talking in terms of defining the era though, Denny O’Neil.

80s is the other easy one, Alan Moore.

90s is easily the toughest - Moore’s still in the mix on the fringes, Grant Morrison’s on JLA and Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo, James Robinson’s got Starman, Mark Waid all over the place and easily winning the ‘definitive’ category for doing more than anyone here outside the Image founders in shaping the era, Garth Ennis is doing Hitman and that kinda counts, ditto Neil Gaiman with Sandman, Kurt Busiek’s throwing Marvels and Astro City out there, Warren Ellis kicking off his reign with Stormwatch. I’m gonna go way, WAY off the beaten path though and say Scott McCloud nets the honor for his work on Zot! as basically a perfect superhero comic; since it’s pretty much all he did he by default has the best average output.

The 00s in principle should be the toughest. Ellis on The Authority, Planetary, and for good measure Iron Man: Extremis, (either he or Mark Millar would be this era’s winner as the ‘definitive’ creator), Waid with more good stuff, Matt Fraction and Jonathan Hickman and Jason Aaron, Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka, Brian Bendis and Geoff Johns striding across Marvel and DC respectively as unto colossi, Moore penning Americas Best Comics, some would throw Joe Casey’s name into the mix, Robert Kirkman’s astonishingly high batting average on Invincible, Darwyn Cooke with Batman: Ego and DC: New Frontier, Ennis gets another ‘depending on how you look at it’ with Punisher, and Busiek with more Astro City and Superman: Secret Identity and JLA/Avengers. In practice however, this is the decade where Morrison did All-Star Superman AND New X-Men AND Final Crisis AND Marvel Boy AND the first major chunk of his Batman epic, so it’s actually pretty clear-cut.

I suppose it’s possible for the 10s that another name could blow in and seize the crown. As is, in spite of tapering off hard we have Mark Waid dropping the mic every issue for 5 straight years with Daredevil (on that ALONE I would give him the title of ‘definitive’ again without hesitation for the ripple effects - without that we don’t get Hawkeye, and therefore the creative thesis behind Marvel NOW!, and therefore basically everything good to come out of Marvel this decade), Hickman emerging into his full power, Ellis hitting and running with a few all-killer-no-filler stints, Tom King being Tom King, Morrison still putting out Action Comics and the rest of Batman and Multiversity, Steve Orlando sailing under the radar with consistently great stuff, Tom Taylor rapidly emerging as a fan-favorite whose voice is I think just going to become more influential over time as the encapsulation of what this website specifically wants to see in its superhero comics, Fraction with the aforementioned Hawkeye alongside wrapping up Iron Man and soon doing the Lord’s work with resurrecting Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, Aaron frequently killing it, Scott Snyder as this generation’s supreme purveyor of popcorn entertainment, and dang, at this rate of progression Chip Zdarsky will probably be able throw his hat the ring if he can’t already. But for consistent high-quality execution I just don’t think anyone else this decade can top Al Ewing.

[grveyardshift-blog]

ok it me tay with intro number one here! i'm still garbage at writing intros but i'm hype to write the best single dad edgar! i'll have his stats up soon but his pinterest board and playlist are here!

for starters edgar is lowkey one of the most irresponsible people possible, or at least was? he's a great dad and is surprisingly fantastic at being a single dad because like wow he loves his kids so much. as far as he is concerned they are the best kids ever and total nerds and he'd do anything for them. 

his kids are named malerie and althea i love them with my whole fucking heart, so does edgar. mal is five and thea is two, their mom is out of the picture and honestly he isn't even bothered bc he got the best part of the deal.

he's just a giant softie okay?

wears too many flannels and those god awful hawaiian shirts bc he's that meme where the guy is like gesturing to a butterfly but imagine the dude is edgar and the butterfly is his god awful wardrobe just. is this fashion? NO IT ISN'T EDGAR

messiest hair ever, does he own a brush? yeah i'm sure he does but he's usually more focused on braiding his daughters hair than giving a fuck about his own.

oof he loves rock music, specifically 70s rock and just has the playlist of a dad i'm so proud TM

definitely a dog person i feel like he's got two and an owl

lives in a kind of small but nice three bedroom house with his kids, two dogs and the owl. still undecided where he lives but i feel like when he has order meetings, the weasley's probably end up watching his kids. 

could be super loveable if he'd open up enough to let someone love him. he's pretty big on hook ups and doesn't want to get his heart broken again bc the way things were left with his baby mama just weren't great i imagine. they don't talk, she never sees the kids, etc it just sucks a lot

this fucking nerd honestly makes my whole life. loves x-men, star wars, batman and pretty much everything in between. also has an indiana jones hat he got in america and loves it more than anything. 

i feel like he's super close with his siblings like he looks up to amelia a lot and she's practically his best friend. she's also like basically in charge if something happened to him, like he trusts her so much without a doubt he'd want his kids to be raised by her. sadly they all fuckin die and it hurts me because he's just in the order to make the world a better place for his kids and everyone else. 

the idea of his kids growing up in a world run by the dark lord, so hateful and just terrible is not something he'd ever want. he wants his girls to grow up loving and accepting, not caring about things as silly as blood status. 

did i mention that he was lowkey a slut while in hogwarts because he was! also he's super bisexual so like! give him a boyfriend or a girlfriend! however i'd die 4 him to get a boyfriend i'm happy with whatever my dudes

drinks too much coffee bc this boy is not a tea person what so ever

fascinated by muggle shit to be completely honest 

malerie got him a best dad mug for his birthday and he definitely cried bc how fucking cute is that

has lots of tattoos and makes a lot of awful jokes, ends up regretting that too just aasjfas his constant mood is YIKES

is trying to quit smoking but it's not going so hot he's a progress

i don't know if this would help at all establish his character but i considered chris evans as a fc for him just bc i love that dumb bitch and he lowkey radiates the energy i'm playing for edgar but so does matt daddario in all his god awfUL SHIRTS 

character insp: chandler bing, isaac lahey, roy harper, jim halpert, scott mccall, sometimes he’s a peter parker, simon lewis, marcos diaz

aesthetics: dad shirts, burnt out cigarettes, comic books, rings in tables bc of coffee mugs, dogs barking, colorful hair ties, rock music, complaining about being old, dirt caked sneakers