Cyclops Appreciation

[FluffyCyclopsRLZ]

That pic really captures archetypal Cyke: Stoic. Badass. Unflinching. Sex Object.

The clenched fists totally sell it, don't they?

[steve2275]

i still feel like his strength shoulda stayed a 3 and intellect a 6

[Mr. Mastermind]

Well, they sort of wrecked poor Emma's characterization in XMFC and then bumped her off in DoFP, so unless they're going to bring in the Emma who was on the Island with teenage Scott in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I'm not sure we even have an Emma Frost left in the cinematic X-Men verse to have a relationship with Scott. Which is a pity because she's a terrific character, but absolutely no one seemed to 'get' her in XMFC. They wrote her very badly and then they cast someone who did not work in the role.

It's true that they butchered Emma in First Class, but my guess is that she'll be apart of the Four Horsemen in Apocalypse.

I doubt they'll do Scemma because of the age differences, but I can handle that as long as they do Scott right this time. Didn't Singer say that his biggest regret of the first two films was his handling of Cyclops? Given how Wolverine isn't really that important in DoFP I have hope Singer will try and give Scott a good role.

[Anis]

I really can't work out if the people writing it didn't realize that they turned the Avengers and Wolverine into the world's worst bullying thuggish hypocrites or they just assumed we wouldn't notice because, hey, it's the Avengers, and everyone knows they're good guys.

Well done, Hope. You just beat up your grandfather when he was letting go of the Phoenix thanks to Jean, whose mantle you are not fit to touch, tried to destroy the one thing that would bring back the mutant gene, and now you're hugging the woman who nearly wiped out your species. Cable would be so proud.

Don't worry about the blood on your hands, Cyke, as you're not the one who put it there. You're actually the only person, apart from Reed Richards and Hank McCoy who didn't behave like a complete jerk. You just tried to feed the world and stop wars even after you were possessed by a cosmic entity and held it together longer than anyone else would have done. The Avengers are just going to punish you now for being consistently so much more awesome than they are by throwing your hot ass in mutant kill-kill jail.

Ugh, if I just don't read the acts of blatant hypocrisy this book contains I can get myself into a mindset where I can try to like the Avengers again and want them to make friends with Cyke but then I see what arrogant bullies they are throughout this thing and how pervasive is their smug self-satisfaction and overwhelming ability to duck all responsibility for every action they take and I'm back to Oh My God Just DIE Already. Just keep those people away from Cyke, Bendis. Seriously, I don't want Stark rescuing him. I don't want Stark NEAR him. I don't want Cyke catching asshat cooties from him. Please let the Uncanny kids save him while Stark is still strapping on the suit.

The Stark, Cap, Hawkeye and Wolverine of AvX really are just irredeemable. Please let them retcon it that the polar bear serial killer who wanted to murder the sixteen year old girl his supposedly best friend died to save was actually a Wolvie from a different dimension because that guy really is unrecognizable. Don't care about the other three. They can just self-immolate on their own gassy smugness and prove that spontaneous combustion is a thing. That final scene with Cap, invader of Utopia, and Wolvie, wannabe killer of a teenage girl and past master at getting possessed and killing people, sitting there in their little fug of self-righteousness judging Cyke and bloviating about Xavier is Uncanny Avengers #1 levels of WTFery. Cap you can take your damned shirt off all day long you will always be dead to me until you have a moment of clarity about how frickin guilty you are and as that's never gonna happen just stay the hell out of the x-books.

Now I need to shower because I have AvX on me.

Honestly... the book wasn't that bad if you're an Avengers fan while reading it.

I was. The Avengers movie was the reason why I started reading comics. I read AvX because I followed the Avengers and had so much fun reading it. Prior to AvX I only read DPS and DOFP so I had almost no attachment to any X-characters. I assumed The Avengers were supposed to be the good guys.

However, I found myself siding with the 'villain' more and more and in the last few chapters I was no longer the Avengers fan. After all, You see me HERE.

I've NEVER picked up another Avengers related comics ever since, not even Uncanny Avengers. Marvel picked them to win the war but they lost me. My new book shelf that was meant to be filled with the Avengers books now has the X-books taking up the place.

I don't think I'll reread AvX anytime soon. I know I'd hate it as much as you do this time around and I don't want to hate it because thank to that book I've become a Cyclops fan and enjoyed so many X-men stories and even have single issue of ANXM & UXM to look forwards to every month.

[steve2275]

[elgrey]

Anis, it's so interesting that AvX made you an X-Men fan - and a Scott fan. Did you sort of react against a feeling of being manipulated into an anti P5 place or did the efforts some of the writers of AvX made to safeguard Scott's integrity work? And did it turn you against the Avengers or just make you like Scott more than you liked them?

I'm always frustrated by AvX as a text. I'm not anti Barthes, but I do like to at least know what the writers' intentions are before I go all death of the author on them and with AvX I honestly don't know, and it causing you to defect from the Avengers side to the pro-Scott X-Men side seems like even more proof that either they genuinely wanted to write an open-ended narrative where all interpretations were equally valid, or...something else. Except the post AvX responses clearly suggest to me that we were supposed to walk away from AvX thinking Avengers and Logan Good, Scott Bad, as that is the only viewpoint we have seen in every comic since that isn't Uncanny X-Men.

But before the ugly AvX aftermath, when only one viewpoint was allowed to prevail, I felt the narrative did both reasonably oppose and reasonably support Scott at various times. I definitely felt there were people fighting Scott's corner in the writing room throughout, even the way he began to unravel was character-driven rather than just random.

Scott has always been an idealist. He still is. He's not just taken off for the Savage Land for a vacation with people who would hide him. He's still trying to save a world that hates and fears him despite being more vulnerable than ever because his beams don't work properly and he's now got all the government forces in the world trying to arrest him or kill him who would have left him alone before. But it never even occurs to him to not try to get out there and do the right thing.

He's also a guy who came under the sway of Xavier's philosophy at an extremely vulnerable and impressionable age, and found it very difficult to really question Xavier's belief system. I actually think he still hasn't questioned Xavier's belief system, however much he thinks he has, because he's still doing what Xavier wanted him to do when he was sixteen. And he does have daddy issues and he and Xavier have had an intense and chequered father-and-son relationship. And Xavier hasn't really ever given Scott what Scott has tried several times now to give Cable, which is the 'I believe in you whatever you do because you're my son and I love you' thing, which Scott clearly craves. I actually really like Scott's relationship with Xavier in all its ups and downs and wish that relationship hadn't ended. I think Xavier has always been more flawed and more human and yet also more sympathetic when dealing with Scott that at any other time when he isn't with Magneto. (I found him sympathetic in Deadly Genesis and in the Legacy run, where Xavier's faults were probably examined the most rigorously but with compassion and understanding.) So, it's not as if the writers had Scott just commit a random act of violence because he's Evil Now. While possessed by something that is canonically psychotically over-protective of him, he lashed out at a man with whom he has long standing issues about Xavier bullying him, manipulating him, lying to him, not loving him whatever he does and Scott resenting it, and still loving Xavier and - I truly think - Xavier genuinely loving him.



I found Scott's interactions with Xavier very teenage throughout AvX. He basically wants to show Xavier that he's all grown up now, but he also wants Xavier to tell him that he's done well. I thought scenes like that were really good.

What did disappoint me was how unnuanced the aftermath of AvX was. We had X-Sanction, which made it very clear that if the Avengers were allowed to take Hope away and prevent her bonding with the Phoenix that the world got turned into a disaster area. We have Tony 'testing is for suckers' Stark being the cause of the problem:



And we have Henry refusing to support the Avengers because he thinks that what they're doing is every bit as wrong - if not more so - than what the Phoenix 5 are doing:



And yet when the dust cleared at the end of the event, every 'hero' in the shared universe was allowed to indulge him or herself in an orgy of unbridled Scott hate without a single opposing voice. Given that there has been not a word from the Avengers since that casts any doubt on their own behaviour or suggests any shared culpability in the way things turned out, I'm left assuming that we were supposed to think they didn't do anything wrong. Despite AvX being riddled with the Avengers doing a lot of terrible things.

As a reader it makes me want to tear my hair out because I really would like to know what the narrative was meant to be before I accept or reject it and I still have no clue.

Rogers pontificates at Scott in the final issue as if the Avengers had ever had just cause for invading Utopia - which they didn't as was made crystal clear by a story in which they end up doing exactly what they twice brutally beat the crap out of a human-and-vulnerable Scott for trying to do - permitting Hope to bond with the Phoenix. There is also no word from Rogers that it was entirely the fault of the Avengers meddling with forces they didn't understand when they caused the creation of the Phoenix 5 in the first place - and no acknowledgment of that in any of the books that followed AvX except for Emma mentioning it once in Uncanny. No one, obviously, mentions the Avengers viciously beating Scott up when they had no right - or as it turned out cause - to do so, because even Scott probably just thinks that's normal, but it is a little odd that none of them feel bad about concussing and clawing him half to death when he was, you know...right. Even with all the Scott-hating since no one has actually suggested in canon that Hope bonding with the Phoenix did put the world at any more risk than it showing up and finding no one left to host it or that Scott wasn't right all along about Hope being the means to restart the mutant gene.

And I get that the Avengers don't give a stuff whether there or mutants in the world or not, but why has it never been addressed by Henry and Logan, people who did care rather a lot about the mutant gene being restarted at one point? Yet, during AvX, Logan was apparently fine with his species going extinct. Even though he had run two X-Forces and got a lot more blood on his hands trying to keep his species from going extinct. Except now he's all for it going extinct apparently as he was fine with murdering the one person who might be able to bond with the phoenix and bring it back and equally fine with Wanda and Hope obliterating the phoenix. I'm still waiting to have any insight from Logan on how he feels about that because it's been completely sidestepped. In fact, in fairness to the writers, Scott's AvX character arc is about the only one that doesn't wildly contradict past canon.

In contrast, poor Logan's hypocrisy got cranked up to the max, which, given how much a driving force of who he is has, for years, been his awareness of how many people he's killed, is just bizarre. In fact everyone's hypocrisy over Xavier's death has been perfectly ridiculous, given that they witnessed what happened and have to know how culpable they are and how not in control of himself Scott was. It's weird that they managed to use the 'Jean went nuts while possessed by it, therefore the Phoenix is evil (but Jean's not) and Scott should know that' argument and the 'Scott went nuts while possessed by the Phoenix we dropped on him, therefore Scott is the worst person ever' argument in the same narrative, apparently with no problem.

I actually think that if there had been more intelligent debate in the comics that followed AvX rather than just the simplistic 'Scott is so awful and evil now that it makes me sick' reaction by former friends who have been just fine about accepting back Logan after he killed Northstar, and Jean after she wiped out the D'Bari and every other shade of possessed and crazy they've all lived through, that AvX might not be as hated in some quarters as it is. It did feel a little like in an attempt to make sense of a narrative that had a lot of shades of grey, editorial decided that it needed to be repeated - everywhere - in case we somehow missed it that Scott is an evil murdering murderer and everyone is right to hate him now. I think if they had been less keen to trash Scott in so many different titles, and had the characters who logically would offer up arguments in his defence actually doing so, everyone would have ended up looking better and AvX might not be as disliked as it is.

It would still be a narrative where the Avengers hijacked an X-Men story and pissed about annoyingly for twelve issues in a story that would have turned out more or less the same but with a much lower body count if they had never showed up, but I think they would just have been perceived as well-meaning bunglers who were trying to do the right thing, not as hypocrites and bullies.

[elgrey]

That body though...

That pic really captures archetypal Cyke: Stoic. Badass. Unflinching. Sex Object.

It so does! He's so battered but unbowed and ready to take anything else the bad guys throw at him and throw it right back at them. (Although not quite sure why they're looking at his exposed nipples like that.)

[steve2275]

[ArcGospell]

It's true that they butchered Emma in First Class, but my guess is that she'll be apart of the Four Horsemen in Apocalypse.

Maybe they can make it that the Emma that was with Scott in Origins was one of the Cuckoos and they were renamed to Emma, Adrienne and Cordelia. The only way I can see a proper Emma appearing.

[steve2275]

another 2 hit special combo

[elgrey]

The conversation between Moira and Charles from Deadly Genesis about the ethics of using mutant children to fight for mutant rights. I wish Scott and Logan had ever had a grown-up talk about the issue instead of all that yelling and name-calling.

[JeffimusPrime]

I wonder if that Xavier speech was used now, how would it be portrayed, as a positive theory or a negative one. It seems to me to be pretty close to Cyclops's current view that mutants need to be trained because of the dangers they face, dangers they face just because they are mutants. Its an unfortunate truth but that is the world they live in.

I think if this was said now, Logan and most of the school would be strongly against it and would perhaps even call Cyke a monster or traitor for thinking in such ways. It seems like despite people labelling him a traitor or someone who has given up the dream. He is perhaps far closer to Xavier's mentality than perhaps even the people running the school in Xavier's name are.

[Kid A]

Maybe they can make it that the Emma that was with Scott in Origins was one of the Cuckoos and they were renamed to Emma, Adrienne and Cordelia. The only way I can see a proper Emma appearing.

Hadn't thought about the Cuckoos, but yeah I've been hoping for Emma Frost Jr. myself.

[maxi_miceli]

Hadn't thought about the Cuckoos, but yeah I've been hoping for Emma Frost Jr. myself.

I don't like Scemma, but I think that either having Scott and Emma together at the start of the movie and end up with Jean and Scott at the end of it, or directly establish Emma as Scott's ex would play quite nicely.
On an unrelated topic, at last in UA it can be said that it's a X-men and Avenger comic, Scott was awesome and did exactly what I wanted him to do, I wonder if that future is still going to play a part in UA

[OpticDreams]