Cyclops Appreciation

[DakenGirl]

Haven't picked up today's issue of ANXM yet, have you? CuBeast admits he enjoyed punching a shape-shifter who looked and sounded like TYKE. Not even the older version. Prof K then proceeds to totally enable him, lol.

It has begun.

I interpreted that as Hank enjoying punching Raze. (I mean, who wouldn't?) I don't think Young Hank has yet been infected by the Everyone Must Hate Cyke virus, and Kitty, as we know, would be fiercely guarding his virtue if his dad hadn't whisked him away out of her protective reach.

[elgrey]

Anis, have you read the Brian K. Vaughan Cyclops solo from 2001? It's only available as four issues of a comic, not a trade paperback (at least in the UK). The art isn't wonderful but the writing truly is. There isn't a panel where Scott isn't being intelligent, compassionate, trying not to kill people, dealing with terrible odds with gritty determination, or just doing impossibly difficult things in a very efficient and completely unwhiny way. Great work by the writer all the way through. It's all from Scott's POV and Brian K. Vaughan does such a great job of giving Scott a voice.







The only thing in it that is just heartbreaking with hindsight is that all Scott thinks about is the team, and how they're his family, and how much they mean to him and how he would do anything for them and he doesn't want to endanger them by bringing them in to help him - as he deals with overwhelming odds. (Presumably, given recent events, while they all sat around in the school going: 'Didn't there used to be another staff member somewhere around this place? I'm sure whathisname used to sit there...' Apart from Xavier, who sends him away on holiday and won't take no for an answer, and Logan, who does at least seem to miss him, given that he is waiting by the front door when Scott comes home, presumably having been counting the hours....)

[FluffyCyclopsRLZ]

I interpreted that as Hank enjoying punching Raze. (I mean, who wouldn't?) ]I don't think Young Hank has yet been infected by the Everyone Must Hate Cyke virus

Beast's rage-on for Scott started with casual Dudebro Jealousy. These things escalate.

Kitty, as we know, would be fiercely guarding his virtue if his dad hadn't whisked him away out of her protective reach.

"I can't believe the brat chose his absentee dad over me! ME!!! How the heck I supposed to be the best surrogate mom ever if my charges bail on me because of some stupidly awesome space road trip???!!! Scott Summers is a jerk!"

The only thing in it that is just heartbreaking with hindsight is that all Scott thinks about is the team, and how they're his family, and how much they mean to him and how he would do anything for them and he doesn't want to endanger them by bringing them in to help him - as he deals with overwhelming odds.

Such is the tragedy of Scott Summers. That guy will not give up on his bros and his sisters. And he shall pay dearly for it.

Apart from Xavier, who sends him away on holiday and won't take no for an answer, and Logan, who does at least seem to miss him, given that he is waiting by the front door when Scott comes home, presumably having been counting the hours....)

Somehow I knew that last bit wouldn't be lost on you.

[cwatz]

I interpreted that as Hank enjoying punching Raze. (I mean, who wouldn't?) I don't think Young Hank has yet been infected by the Everyone Must Hate Cyke virus, and Kitty, as we know, would be fiercely guarding his virtue if his dad hadn't whisked him away out of her protective reach.

There are a lot of ways to look at that scene probably.
A) Enjoying hitting Raze.
B) Tyke. "That is for leaving us" or something like that. Not hatred, but more of a "good to get that off my chest".
C) Cyke. Not drawing a line between him and Tyke.
D) Some combination.

[Ztopia]

Idk if anyone pointed this out. But nice of NuXavier to have a Cyclops was right poster variant in his room lol

[Dosas]

Surely the most interesting character in the MU.

*fires optic blasts !

[elgrey]

There are a lot of ways to look at that scene probably.
A) Enjoying hitting Raze.
B) Tyke. "That is for leaving us" or something like that. Not hatred, but more of a "good to get that off my chest".
C) Cyke. Not drawing a line between him and Tyke.
D) Some combination.

Those all work for me. None of the rest of the O5 are orphans so they probably don't fully understand how much it means to Young Scott to spend time with his father (not knowing about his daddy issues as yet!), so from their perspective, they're marooned in the wrong time and all they have is each other and he goes space-adventuring. They probably are feeling a little tetchy with him, and somewhat hurt that he would leave them when their lives are so confusing and difficult.

(And I still like to think that Henry's annoyance with Adult Scott is coming from a place of love it's just at this point there is nothing really in canon to back that up. I'm just choosing to believe it in the way little kids believe in fairies at the bottom of their garden.)

[cwatz]

Those all work for me. None of the rest of the O5 are orphans so they probably don't fully understand how much it means to Young Scott to spend time with his father (not knowing about his daddy issues as yet!), so from their perspective, they're marooned in the wrong time and all they have is each other and he goes space-adventuring. They probably are feeling a little tetchy with him, and somewhat hurt that he would leave them when their lives are so confusing and difficult.

It goes deeper than the orphan thing. Tyke has had a pretty rough go since coming to the future.
He finds out he may or may not be a douche. Peoples hatred of Cyke has been getting thrown onto him by proxy. Awful for a 16 year old to fear what he becomes, and have all that hatred thrown at him. Pretty damn lonely.

What about his safety net or person he can be close with? Jeans going through some nightmares of her own, and due to her own future (and theirs), starts giving Scott the cold shoulder. Thus hes in a position where he has nothing. Its how the whole Laura thing started. Two people who felt alone in the world found comfort in one another.
Insert Daddy. Something he never had. Perhaps a beacon of hope. At the very least a vacation from all the BS hes dealing with. So he took it and ran.

The rest of the O5 views it as "Scotts leaving US, what a dick". As if this was about them at all. Never thinking about the nightmare he was going through. Thus, feels good to give him a slug.

[OpticDreams]

Beast just jelly every incarnation of Jean chooses Cyke.

[FluffyCyclopsRLZ]

The rest of the O5 views it as "Scotts leaving US, what a dick". As if this was about them at all. Never thinking about the nightmare he was going through. Thus, feels good to give him a slug.

Privileged kids vs Brain-Damaged Orphans Who Do Something For Themselves Once Every 10 Years or So

Gotta love it.

[Mr. Brightside]

That second text box. If I thought I loved Cyke before, now I am struck dead.

[elgrey]

Surely the most interesting character in the MU.

*fires optic blasts !

I think he is, and it's not as if it isn't a world stuffed with interesting characters, too, but even amongst such amazingly rich and complex people, I think Scott takes the biscuit. He was such a mix of interesting contradictions even before M-Day. The fact that he had the childhood of a serial killer and yet had such a rigid moral code. The fact that he broke that code when he felt his people needed him to do it and has lived with the cost of it, ever since, which one knows, in his case, must be incredible painful. He's unstintingly brave in the face of pain, torture, injury, and death, but ran away from a failing marriage without really admitting to himself that was in part what he had done, and then failed to tell Jean about Madelyne, while simultaneously hurling himself between danger and any innocent it might threaten.

His lacerating self-doubt and cycle of 'It's all my fault!'-ing when younger that needed a strong woman working full time just to convince him otherwise was so deeply embedded it's very difficult to believe that it's actually no longer a part of him, and isn't just something he's got better at repressing. At the same time, he clearly did develop some genuine quiet confidence in a battle situation where he couldn't afford not to trust his own strategy or lives would be lost. The fact that he absolutely loves the other X-Men and is devastated by them being injured or killed but in battle situations will deploy them like chess pieces if he has to is fascinating and admirable and chilling at the same time. (I find those aspects of Scott so reminiscent of young WWI Captains having to make terrible decisions in terrible situations and developing a steely calm over the surface of inevitable deferred pain.) Him letting Logan get turned into a vampire to win a battle was at once a brilliant multiple life-saving piece of strategy and a crappy thing to do to a friend. The X-Men and mutants in general needed Scott to become the guy who could unhesitatingly do that, but we've only really seen glimpses of what it's done to Scott to become him.

I think it's another fascinating contradiction that he is compassionate and kind-hearted and yet, through repressions and hang-ups and an almost neurotic inability to express his feelings in any meaningful fashion, has made the lives of most of the women who have loved him fairly unhappy and given all of them in turn reason to think that he loves someone else more than them. Even Jean, who is arguably the love of his life, when she didn't have her telepathy working, immediately felt emotionally shut out by him and became convinced that it was the Phoenix he loved, not her, and when it was working, still felt shut out by him after she saved him from Apocalypse. Madelyne spent most of her time with him being given reason to feel that he would always put the X-Men before her and had never stopped loving Jean or hoping that she was the Phoenix. Even Emma always had the ghost of Jean Grey tagging along in their relationship without Scott ever finding a way of telling her that he needed and loved her every bit as much as he had Jean.

He's clearly, going by the telepaths who have read his mind and revealed what they saw there, potentially quite masochistic in bed, not to mention potentially quite kinky, and seems to like the idea of women in black leather with whips, but he seems to be utterly vanilla in all his romantic interactions with women, annoyingly prudish, constantly has to be coaxed to put out by frustrated partners, and left to his own devices seems like he would rather read a good book on battle strategy than have sex with the passionate, beautiful women whom he claims to love. Presumably he represses his libido in case it inhibits his efficiency, but for a guy who can learn brilliantly from each new situation he encounters and put it to tactical use, not grasping that never ever making the first move might make women feel unattractive or unloved and drive them away never seems to occur to him.

When even telepaths feel emotionally shut out by a guy, you know he's never going to win boyfriend/husband of the year. And yet, it's very obvious that he truly does love all of them. He's just too damaged not to damage other people even when he is trying not to. And yet he also is capable of going on loving people even when they give him no cause to do so, or even actively act as if they hate him, so he doesn't seem to need his affections to be reciprocated or even recognized to flourish, possibly because of his low self-esteem issues and the long, formative period in his life, when he was so utterly unloved by anyone. (Creepy little room-mates obsessed with him not withstanding.) He doesn't seem to bear grudges and he will take humiliation unflinchingly and just pick himself up and keep going even though he used to be the guy who felt utterly exposed by every misstep and was so afraid of making a fool of himself that he could barely function. He doesn't seem to have much of a masculine ego, and seems able to turn it down like a low gas flame when dealing with people with higher testosterone output than himself, like Logan or Namor, and yet he is arrogant enough to stare down space gods when the need arises.

I think the pattern of never having a father who he believed truly loved him and replicating that with his own kids by forgetting to tell them how much they matter to him, is fairly standard, but I do think he manages to take it to new levels sometimes. I'm sure none of them doubt that he would die for them as he already did so for Nate Grey, but actually telling them how much they mean to him seems to be completely beyond him, and he never really found a workable relationship with Hope, who he never managed to communicate with effectively throughout their relationship, despite, I think, having a lot of sympathy for her grief over Cable and the responsibility she was going to be bearing, but, his way of showing support was to make her do endless rigorous training. Presumably, Xavier giving him endless rigorous training made him feel better able to cope with the world, but it never seems to occur to him that some people might do better with a tub of ice cream or a trip to the circus.

I think he's probably one of the most damaged people in the MU who hasn't become a bad guy and still manages to function very much the way he always has. He's still trying to save mutants from humans and humans from mutants and train mutant kids to control their powers and be able to defend themselves from oppressors, which was pretty much what he was doing when he was sixteen, even though he's a walking bomb crater of issues and complexes and repressions and what appears to be at times a barely controlled death wish. He seems to have no idea how to function except as part of the machinery of a higher cause. He always puts duty before pleasure. He seems incapable of taking a day off, or having fun. He's uptight, stoic, uncommunicative, often humourless, and has experienced more pain and misery in his relatively few years than most people do in a lifetime and yet is still painfully vulnerable and idealistic, given that he is still fighting for a better world and has not ever resigned himself to just accepting that this might be as good as it gets.

And that's not even scratching the surface of the guy because he's so layered and complex you could write a hundred essays about him and there would still be huge areas for debate and discussion.

I do think his current isolation from so many of the people that he loves must be taking a toll on him, added as it is to his grief and guilt over killing Xavier, but it's impossible to imagine him ever taking a minute to admit to himself that he is guilt-racked or isolated or lonely or just plain miserable, because he would probably regard that as self-indulgence, these days, and irrelevant to the task in hand.

I must admit, too, that I am more than ready to see someone showing him a little basic human kindness that isn't about wanting to get into his pants. He's been cold-shouldered by so many of the people he still seems to love for so many years (our time) now. I would really like to see him just catch a break and win a small victory that isn't soured by bitterness or cavilling from Logan and the others.

Apologies for the tl:dr. Scott is just such a maddening and fascinating combination of odd contradictions and noble virtues and really interesting flaws.

[FluffyCyclopsRLZ]

Apologies for the tl:dr. Scott is just such a maddening and fascinating combination of odd contradictions and noble virtues and really interesting flaws.

Dang. And to think I love to sum up Scott as the Energizer Bunny of Soul-Crushing Hardships, lol.

[Mr. Brightside]

Apologies for the tl:dr. Scott is just such a maddening and fascinating combination of odd contradictions and noble virtues and really interesting flaws.

And an insanely gross amount of haters. I understand not liking him, but what spews from peoples mouth -_-
Funniest thing is, chances are that he kept their favorite characters alive from certain doom at least once XD

[elgrey]

The rest of the O5 views it as "Scotts leaving US, what a dick". As if this was about them at all. Never thinking about the nightmare he was going through. Thus, feels good to give him a slug.

Well, they're teenagers. Everything is inevitably going to be all about them, but horrible as Teen Scott's time has been, they've all had things to deal with as well, and they probably do feel pretty lost without him, as he was pretty good at leading from the front even when he was an insecure kid.

Ironically, after they all got dragged into the future because Adult Scott was the guy Teen Scott was told was going to cause mutant genocide, it's all the others who have had to deal with awful versions of themselves. Teen Scott clearly has issues with his adult self, and doesn't want to grow up to trash a marriage to Jean Grey, kill Charles Xavier, be estranged from all his friends, or be a miserable, isolated guy who's had a fairly rotten life, but Adult Scott is nothing like as freaky a future prospect as Evil Brotherhood Beast, Evil Brotherhood Iceman, Crazycakes NuWarren or terrifying Xorna Jean. They're probably all secretly thinking that Teen Scott has less reason to freak out than any of them as at least the guy he grew up to be hasn't mutated into an obvious monster.

I'm so torn on Teen Scott not being in ANXM. I miss him horribly and I hate him being away from his friends, but I love him being with Corsair and want him to spend lots of time having fun space adventures with his dad, and preferably Hepzibah. I'm hoping that maybe the wonderful Rucka solo book takes place over a very compressed time frame so Teen Scott can fit in a lot of happy adventures in a very short time so the rest of the O5 don't have to be without him for too long.

Really enjoyed the way this latest issue of All New was so well integrated with Uncanny. I hadn't expected that and it was a real treat.