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The much more interesting story is how the X-Men deal w/ their mentor entire worldview collapsing & how do they pick up pieces to actually progress forward & arguably w/ realization that one of the major obstacles in their being removed.

Bc he's always been a character who priotized control over everything else & would rationalize whatever actions he took to maintain that control & that debt should always become due.

Now where Marvel predictably dropped the ball is when it was revealed a portion of Magneto's psyche had corrupted Xavier & an entirely new being was created in Onslaught, thus perserving Xavier but the idea of Onslaught being Xavier was/is such a more interesting to idea (to me anyway).

The big moment was wiping Magneto's mind, a line crossed in which he couldn't rationalize his way out of & eventually his ego collapsed, thus Onslaught was created.

Kind of unintentionally, they had already been seeding the idea that Xavier=Onslaught, as the scaffolding of Xavier's image had been crumbling around him, the world was turning into something he couldn't control anymore & every moral he'd created was starting evaporate.

This is true w/ a lot of X-Men comics in the '90s, is that they'd introduce a character/concept but have zero idea where it was going, it was just something to fill the pages each month, which is how the X-Men got Onslaught, they needed a huge villain but no idea where to go from there.

When I was 12/13 reading X-Men, one of things I was pulling for after the Age of Apocalypse & the story started to unfold, was that they were going to pull the trigger w/ making Xavier an actual villain in the form of Onslaught. They didn't of course, but it's idea that's always been in my head.

Every time Xavier gets reasserted into the narrative, it resets the progression which is both frustrating from a storytelling perspective but also how -- again -- it mirrors real world obstacles to actual progress.

It's why mutants as a "metaphor" has always been clumsy bc all the bigotries that exist in our world presently still exist in the Marvel Universe, but inserting an sci-fi concept like mutants into the mix creates much different point of inflection w/ regards to shifting power dynamics.

It's funny how even when I don't think all that highly of the execution, X-Men can't help but stumble into relevance w/ our current situation, bc what do you mean Xavier's current position mirrors the tightrope so many liberals are trying to walk while various while not helping the marginalized.

Bc the X-Men are always going to inevitably be "outlaws" by virtue of being mutants, the system as it's currently constructed is going to inherently going to view them as "illegal" & creating workarounds to not openly challenge said system is going to wind up making you look like a chump (at best).

He forms X-Corp as a legal way around the X-Men being "outlaws," so he never truly comes in conflict w/ the system & continues working w/ Val Cooper regardless how tenuous that relationship might be, all the while she extrajudiciously keeps mutants in cages.

Apocalypse is really a perfect foil for Xavier and not in any way that's particularly positive. Apoc gives him something to rage against that doesn't really effect the status quo, it's threat that existence in the future while he ignores present conditions

Can you have a cult of people exclusively online bc people literally can’t stand you in person?

Actually, as I just wrote something ab Onslaught...include one Charles Xavier to that.

13 year old me is hoping they don't cop out on Onslaught this time around.

I'm generally not a hater of fictional characters but I make an exception for Kate Pryde.

He turned down everyone’s fave [heavy side-eye] 40 years ago & they’ve been making him pay for it ever since.

Unrelated to anything else today: Tracy McGrady’s 2003 season is not discussed enough.

Having people discuss some of the worst film criticism over the last 18 hours or so is kind of a nightmare of mine.