Being MUTANT: an X-Men discussion

[Sundowhn]

They're all nice, your interpretations. I personally think that Storm, Nightcrawler, Mystique and Wolverine are specifically right, while what comes to my mind when thinking of Colossus is not Siberian wasteland but Soviet futurist agitprop art like this:



I'm not so sure about Shadowcat and Cyclops, I think their powers were probably chosen just because they were 'cool'. Anyway, your readings are very interesting.

I see what you mean with the poster from Russia!

[BroHomo]

I think the X-Men shelter him like the circus and his family did. They're safe circles of acceptance in a hard world sort of thing.

I remember an old flashback issue with Nightcrawler, from his childhood. (I'm guessing Rita might have scans) where he makes an outside friend but the boy's father chases him off and he goes creeping home to his mother covered in mud from where he ran. She lectures him about accepting who he is and so forth.

Aww yeah I remember that. But then lil boys Dad had beaten the boy Up : ( for playing with lil Kurt, forcing him to end the friendship, and I thiiiiink yelling at lil Kurt like it was his fault, asking him whyd he have to be blue (tooootallly caught serious feels when i read it as a lil kid.) Adult NC later met up the now adult boy who had a son of his own and he made up for it. I loved those scenes but haaaaated the villain mostly because of the way his name was spelled D'Spayre ugghh

But then in the extra pages there was this gem like a Ray of hope...
Awww
2789855-nightcrawler_excalibur_77_young.jpg

[Sundowhn]

Aww yeah I remember that. But then lil boys Dad had beaten the boy Up : ( for playing with lil Kurt, forcing him to end the friendship, and I thiiiiink yelling at lil Kurt like it was his fault, asking him whyd he have to be blue (tooootallly caught serious feels when i read it as a lil kid.) Adult NC later met up the now adult boy who had a son of his own and he made up for it. I loved those scenes but haaaaated the villain mostly because of the way his name was spelled D'Spayre ugghh

But then in the extra pages there was this gem like a Ray of hope...
Awww
2789855-nightcrawler_excalibur_77_young.jpg

Yep, that's the one! ��

Back on the topic though, I think Kurt learned what it was to be a mutant from birth, whereas most of the others were hit by surprise in puberty and had pretty normal life experiences before.

[sungila]

Wow! Such brilliant imaginative minds, so steeped in cannon and what's most amazing to me from each of you is that in your reading and relationship with X-Books you have all read further, reached beyond, challenged, expanded and incorporated these characters and their stories - you've continuously translated, enacted and performed these parts into something other, something relatable and real outside the panels and perhaps, outside the walls and limits of the world of self and perception of life in time itself.

Thinking and seeing and reading in symbols, deconstructing (distilling) down to essences of utterances and origins! Sundowhn, I'm not sure I necessarily feel as though the creators intended for each of the mutant powers to symbolize precisely what you've associated them with but your interpretations are exciting and plausible as you've made them. This is exactly what I'm more or less attempting to do and or say with this thread. That mutations are...they happen as a means...they come from a defiance of acceptance (either through revolution and revolt or curiosity and misfit intelligence).

Kurt being born mutant. Being a foundling taken by a women bound to the winding way. Being a prayer cast bitterly into the hope of uncertainty by a desperate shape changing mother who doesn't trust that world of man, doesn't trust anything or anybody lest it be blind Destiny. Nightcrawler performing high above the round top, bar to bar and then BAMF, dimension to dimension, space to space, here to there - was he truly born Mutant...or was he simply born vulnerable as any baby? His vulnerability, the way he looks...sometimes I think this vulnerability and singularity that is so powerfully manifested at birth, or in times of rebirth is not really a matter of transformation in the exterior sense of gaining armor, tougher skin or greater being - but in a polishing off and healing of self. As if the 'new' being is parent and child. Time was and time to come, a sort of intuitive forward backward journey through the many pathways of inheritance that no matter how zany or crazy or tragic they may seem and feel to be simply end at this place here now. Kurt isn't born teleporting. Or is he...in a way...his first jaunt being into this life...or could it be...that 'birth' wasn't his first jaunt at all...perhaps it was one of the eternal last leaps Kurt makes out of so many paradises...back into the sway and fray where he's always him...a pathway himself...that no acrobatics (not even literally defying death) can escape.

Rita, I love thinking of Colossus (who is an artist himself) as art coming from avant garde agit prop poster art. I mean, he is so often silent and there - statuesque and cooly objectified by others. As if, he is in body, the perfect steel forged from that industry - and yet, held there within...and he himself, given to this impulse to express something inexpressible with a brush, a palate, a model, a landscape and that silence...that steely silence! Often there is something going on behind those steel curtains and straight lines, a three penny opera perhaps. See, now I'm going to end up thinking about Bowie again and those Berlin albums. Lol.

People can't become Martians can they?
People can't become Mutants either can they?

Somebody once told me something like people may not be able to change where they come from, how they got here or the fundimental medium of their composition but they can change how all that is expressed, and perhaps through that expression somehow adapt to the needs of that making that expression requires. Hmmm...perhaps a mutation and a mutant power is something like walking out of a shipwreck...and salvaging that wreck in order make the most of this strange land that is any shore...

I'll have to adapt just to fully understand what I've just posted here. Or maybe I already did and that's why I'm feeling somewhat confused and embarrassed but oddly sure.



What's this got to do with X-Men?

Well, what if telepathy is a given? Not mind control. Not the opposite.
What if being Mutant is being 'the maker'? Mutating is making? What if X is simply a place, any place, to mark the map in order make the map and to make the map is not need it at all...unless it's to remember where it will be...for yourself or some other secret somebody someday perhaps...

X is when we changed. Puberty maybe? That time...this time, perhaps...that age of X...that special day on the calendar, that appointment, that engagement, that day...that moment...or a tally mark on the stone. A lion in a cave.

What if making fire, making anything is walking through walls?
What if making is jaunting from here to there through a journey so immediate and intimate you don't even 'go' there as you go?