Originally Posted by
BobbysWorld
Really hoping this year that SOMEBODY does something to examine the disconnect between the two 'generations' now of Academy X kids. What little we've seen/heard of them shows that they're all allegedly living in the same house in the Akademos habitat, but like, there's got to be so much in the way of growing pains to that now, because of the inherent divide between the experiences of the kids who died and were brought back and the ones who lived through the events of Messiah Complex, Utopia, and all of that.
Like, the last the kids on the bus remember, after a couple years of relative peace and happiness in a thriving school for mutants, they lost their powers in a blink of an eye and were sent home....and then woke up on Krakoa, and even WITH the sliding time scale, at least a couple of YEARS have passed. Classmates who were the same age as them, and even younger than them, have literally lapped them not just in age but in experiences they simply just have no frame of reference for. What a mindfuck it's gotta be for someone like Tag and Wallflower to come back to a much older and more jaded Hellion, Elixir, Surge, Anole, etc.....with the latter having basically become full on warriors who have fought an actual war for survival, been to Limbo, LIVED in Limbo, had to relocate from one 'last refuge' to the next between the mansion and then San Francisco and Utopia and X-Haven and more, who came of age beneath the watchful eye of Sentinel 'bodyguards,' who have been thrown in prison for fighting for their rights under Osborn's regime and captured and turned into weapons by the Leper Queen, served on teams like X-Force, have memories of divergent realities like Age of X and Age of X-Man, some like Hellion have lost limbs, others like Elixir have killed, they've fought their own in the form of Wither and resurrected mutants on Necrosha...
All of this must sound like some kinda weird fucked up nightmare story to the kids whose last memory is just around M-Day, and they're probably constantly wondering what ELSE did we miss that they just don't wanna tell us about because I can't imagine the survivors having been all that eager to TALK about all of this with their resurrected friends.
So to me it seems inevitable it should create a very real sense of disconnect that they should all have to work to navigate past and find a way to relate to each other again, because even if they're all happy now on Krakoa, the very IDEA of it must mean very, VERY different things to them. And for the ones who were around for the last few years and constantly fighting, we're talking inevitable PTSD and the kind of ingrained hyper-vigilance that never totally goes away, or at least not for a long time......meaning even 'in paradise' they're probably still occasionally on edge and looking over their shoulder for the next threat in ways that baffle a lot of their now younger classmates. And I'd love to see them focused on if and when the X-Offices follow up on Bishop's War College idea, because I can easily picture the resurrected mutants like DJ goofing off and not taking it too seriously, only for this to create conflict with the older classmates who come down on them for fooling around and not getting how important this is, and not totally able to explain WHY because like.....they weren't there.
For anyone who's read SWORD lately, a few issues back one of the many Arakkii to challenge Storm over her leadership and seat on the Council was saying he was doing it because 'why should we listen to you? You weren't there [for our war with Amenth], you don't know what it was like, you CAN'T know!'
Which is something I feel the now older classmates might feel towards the ones who died. BUT this is complicated because at the same time, the ones that died could just as likely resent the ones that didn't, to some degree, thinking well at least you GOT to live! At least you're not missing whole years where the world moved on without you, where you blinked and everything was different, at least you had chances to DO things, chances we didn't have because we were DEAD!
I would like to see the X-books to explore that kind of issue between the kids who died and came back and the ones who were around the whole time. They WANT to all just be happy that everyone's alive and well and they're all together and safe again, but there's this GAP in their lived experiences that none of them totally know how to get past.