January Meme: Hopes and fears re: the X-Men getting integrated into the MCU

[selenak]

To be frank, I’m not keen on them being integrated all. For a variety of reasons.

Now, if the X-Men hadn’t been split from the MCU from the get go due to earlier deals, this would be different for. I like some of the cross connections in the comics, i.e. Jean Grey having been instrumental in Jessica Jones‘ recovery from Killgrave, for example, and the lengths both movies and tv shows had to go through in order to avoid the word „mutant“ along as there was no Disney/Fox deal was ridiculous.

Then again: sometimes it worked out well thematically. Since the MCU Maximoff twins could not be Magneto’s kids, the MCU had to provide another explanation for their powers, and Steve identifying with them, making that connection about volunteering for being experimented on by German scientists, was one of my favourite scenes of his in Age of Ultron. (It’s also what made me believe he’d recruit Wanda later. Now, the fact the MCU thereafter treated Wanda as a blameless waif with no blood on her hands until the not intended by her deaths from the opening of Civil War, instead of someone who had been a voluntary Hydra experiment/member and who had at the very least the responsibility for any deaths and injuries caused by her releasing the Hulk in Johannesburg, which hadn’t been Ultron’s orders but her choice – that’s another matter.) (This is why I’m into fanfiction in which Wanda talks with either Tony or Natasha about the blood in both their ledgers respectively.) (Otoh I avoid stories which go into the other extreme of making Wanda an evil madwoman, usually in order to woobify Tony. Do not want, and I’m speaking as a fan.)

Back to the Maximoffs: X-Men movies have the superior Quicksilver, imo as always. In fact, this take on Pietro/Peter might be my overall favourite in any medium, and if in an intended integration of the movieverse X-Men with the MCU, he were to be for the axe, I’d hate that. And yet I cannot see how MCU Wanda Maximoff and her dead brother can co-exist with X-Men Movieverse Peter Maximoff who may or may not have a female twin in addition to the younger sister we see him with in the same ´verse. One of them would have to go, and this makes me fear for the one who wasn’t until recently owned by the Mouse.

Another issue, which andraste recently mentioned in a comment: the Maximoffs aren’t the only characters which in the comics go back and forth between X-Men and Avengers comics (and teams), and the way this happens always brings up a premise problem. When Hank McCoy/Beast in the comics is a part of the Avengers, he’s a popular member in a popular team. When he’s an X-Men, he’s part of a team which, to quote the famous tagline „defends a world which hates and fears them“. Now, mutants being treated as tolerated outsiders at best and far more often persecuted and discriminated against is so much part of the central X-Men premise that I don’t see how they’ll ever give it up, in any depiction. And you can fanwank that superheroes who weren’t born with special abilities but aquired them artificially are easier for the general population to accept. But since any line up of the Avengers usually includes a mutant or two, that doesn’t really work.

So, if, like the comics, the MCU and the X-Men movies take place in the same universe again, you’re not just left with the usual problems even within the MCU logic – aka a Watsonian explanation for „why doesn’t superhero X faced with problem Y ask superhero Z for assistance? - , but with additional ones like: why would the public see a difference between Spider-man (identity unknown, and thus also whether or not he’s a mutant), Thor (alien with superpowers, extremely popular on earth, all the more so for not having been involved in Civil War), and whichever X-Men will be around in future movies? Yes, prejudice is irrational, and the popularity of the Avengers in general took a dive post-Ultron and even more of one through and after Civil War, but Homecoming is set post Civil War and there the Avengers and superheroes in general are still treated as pop culture heroes by most of the characters. How that should square with a society where two thirds are wary or all „ew, mutants!“ is beyond me, even if the movies unlike the comics avoid letting characters like Beast swap teams now and then.

In conclusion: my hope is the X-Men movieverse continues to be treated as separate from the MCU, though the MCU is welcome to call mutants mutants now instead of „people with enhanced abilities“. My fear is that this won’t happen, and the result will be a mess.

…then again: what do I know? I also thought we really didn’t need another version of Spider-man (Peter Parker edition), and certainly not in the MCU, and changed my mind about this as soon as Tom Holland! Peter had his first scene in Civil War, loving him like no screen Spidey before him. So maybe TPTB will pleasantly surprise me again.

The other days

Comments

[rheasilvia]

All very good points! I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, I'm afraid, since my main problem with all superhero media at the moment is that I'm interested in a very few specific people, and the movies (especially) just keep cramming more and more people into them. To me, this is an active turn-off, because it means the people I actually want to see, and to see having meanigful character development and interactions, get about 2 minutes of screentime, in which they do nothing but swap banter with some other person I don't care about.

So, yeah, this development seems like an invitation to cram even more people into a single movie, which would be bad - but otoh, at this point it hardly makes a difference anymore. Sigh.

[kore]

+100 This has been my problem ever since MCU's Civil War. I'm just not there for Kevin Feige re-enacting fight scenes he dreamed of from boyhood with actual people as his action figures.

[rheasilvia]

Same here! Unfortunately, I tend to be bored by extended fight sequences* at the best of times... which - especially with the growing number of characters involved and the rising special effects budget - basically appears to mean I am just not the right audience for the type of superhero movie being made today. I do regret that, but, yeah.

* (So far, the only exception has been Winter Soldier, and that was probably at least in part because I knew who the Winter Soldier was and was already interested in the character. I do also think the fight scenes were very well done, though.)

[kore]

Yeah, The Winter Soldier is about the epitome of the MCU for me, and I loved the fight scenes because they were beautifully choreographed (the elevator one!) and meant something, and they weren't completely dependent on super fake CGI. I tried rewatching Age of Ultron the other day and it just looked like a bad video game.

[jesuswasbatman]

Yes, I think the "why do people hate mutants so much as opposed to other superheroes" issue would be very hard to deal with in a unified Marvel film universe, quite apart from the continuity issues related to specific characters.

[jesuswasbatman]

(Plus my general doubts about whether "superpowered people as metaphor for real-world persecuted groups" works at all or whether it's an outdated and essentially misguided parallel that should be quietly forgotten, which I won't go into here.)

[oracne]

I agree on all points.

I am wondering if maybe X-Men would have to be a total reboot, maybe retrofitting by saying they existed before, but hidden from the general public, so some backstory could exist before crossover with the current MCU. Or perhaps they were there and just not mentioned, which seems unlikely, but...I am very curious how this would work.

[sholio]

Yeah, as the above commenter said, my assumption would be a total reboot/recast in the same way that they didn't take the existing Spider-Man or Hulk movies as canon, but invented their own version as well. This is kind of the best-case scenario, I guess, because it gives them scope to introduce the X-Men characters (and the whole concept of mutants) organically into the MCU. It still means that some of the major characters and storylines from the comics will have to be very different, but the MCU has already reinvented a number of characters while keeping them plausible as characters, and it doesn't raise the same set of monstrous logistical issues as trying to have both versions existing in the same continuity, with multiple versions of the same characters and things like Apocalypse's near-destruction of Earth happening in the same universe where Loki's attack on New York was a big enough deal to be worldshaking.

The other plausible option I could see would be to have the existing X-Men movies take place in a separate universe that's still in the same multiverse. This is the way the DC TV universe has gone with Supergirl vs. their other shows, which gives them the possibility for canonical crossovers while being able to get away with Supergirl having aliens living openly on Earth and periodically attacking from outer space, while Flash is dealing with more down-to-earth threats on an Earth where aliens are unknown.

I just can't see the existing movies being integrated into the same continuity. It would be a mess. It also doesn't really fit with the way the MCU has operated so far, with new characters and concepts from the comics being gradually added in a way that fits with what went before. Not that they've always been successful at this, and it is getting increasingly messy as they throw more comics canon into it, but trying to hammer together the MCU and existing X-Men continuities doesn't really seem like it fits with the MCU's development paradigm up to now.

[selenak]

Yes, a complete reboot and gradual reintroduction would work best in terms, though that still leaves the problem of whather or not they also ditch the "most people hate mutants" premise.


Not unrelated, in case of a reboot: to Magneto or not to Magneto? He is one of the most memorable and iconic X-verse characters. He's also one of the few with a backstory which is fiendishly difficult to update. If you keep him as a Holocaust Survivor and want to use him in the present day, he's in his 90s. If you change his central backstory trauma, then not only will you have two thirds of the fandom yelling in protest and hating this new Magneto from the get go. (The "in his 90s" part is probably why aside from parts of Days of Future Past the newer movies are all period pieces. Logan excepted, which did confront and use the state Xavier logically would be in head-on, but was a special case.)


I mean, whether Tony Stark gets his heart shrapnelled in Vietnam or Afghanistan or some future US war isn't really all that important. Steve Rogers is also stuck with a WWII origin but due to the "decades in ice" factor can awake in the 60s or 2010s or whenever. But Magneto? Short of also giving him several decades frozen in ice, I don't see how they can keep him a Holocaust survivor and use him in the ongoing present day.

(Related: Charles Xavier can theoretically be born whenever, but if you use a frozen/kidnapped by aliens and returned decades later/*insert plot device of choice* explanation for Magneto keeping both his backstory and his present day appearance while presenting a contemporary Charles, their status as contemporaries and equals that way is gone.)


Now, Neil Gaiman in his 1602 canon AU did something which I thought was clever to solve that problem, but as I recall reaction to his solution was mixed. His historical Magneto hasn't experienced the Holocaust as a child, he has experienced a trauma typical for the 16th century instead: child Enrico leaves the Ghetto in Venice, gets kidnapped by Christians who baptize him and keep him, with his parents in vain trying to get him back while the Pope decides that of course the soul of this Jewish child must be saved. This results in older Enrique posing as an Inquisitor while secretly building his power base. The thing is, his cover identity is all too real in that he actually does torture and kill other mutants in his role as Inquisitor (until he's busted as a mutant and has to flee), only saving some of them (which get smuggled out of the country to his secret power base). Cue fannish indignation of "Magneto would never!" Leaving aside that the 20th century version does kill (some) other mutants, too, I think this misses the point that the 1602 version is someone with a different set of issues and trauma. He despises the church for what was done for him, but he uses it, and being raised there, spending his entire existence within the system, has absolutely shaped him and his methods.

(Btw, I do love the way he exits the tale, telling his frenemy Carlos Javier whom he's battled through most of the story that oh, btw, Sister Wanda and young Petro actually are my kids but they don't know, look after them while I'm off to my secret brotherhood, Carlos, would you?)

What I'm trying to get at: you can have a Magneto character shaped by different historical circumstances, but he will, if the writing is any good, inevitably be somewhat different as a result, and again: cue angry fanbase.

An obvious solution would be to avoid Magneto (and Xavier) completely for a while - there are plenty of intriguing mutant characters who either weren't used yet or only got cameos in the movies until now. But, see Spider-man: there's the lure of the well known name to producers....

[kore]

....ahhh man, I hadn't even thought about the Magneto aging problem. Aren't the comics all knotted up with so-called Marvel Time already? I don't think a general movie audience would be quite as accepting of the kind of soap operatic stretched-out storylines.

[sgac]

Well you can have immortal/slow-aging Magneto. Or you can have a magical/mutant de-aging accident - say he and Xavier were both caught in it when they were working together, and it's a tie binding them together (metaphorically, not in a soulbond sense, we have to specify these things).

[selenak]

With Magneto and Xavier, absolutely, we have to specify. :) Also: I like that idea! Would be a satisfying-in-universe explanation that allows Mags to keep his backstory and Charles as a contemporary.

[kore]

The other plausible option I could see would be to have the existing X-Men movies take place in a separate universe that's still in the same multiverse

Some of the stuff Feige has said about "everything will be different" is VERY intriguing if Endgame really is going to involve the multiverses and that's where people from the Snap went and so on. There's a lot of wrangling over whether some supposed scenes are VR or multiverse or time travel, but I'm thinking multiverse if Scott and the van are there per the Endgame trailer.

[selenak]

Reintroduction via complete reboot strikes me as the most plausible solution, too, though see below in my reply to sholio, I don't know how they'll be able to continue using Magneto in the present without changing his entire backstory.

[kore]

Isn't MCU also going to be bringing in the Skrulls? If the Skrulls were hidden all this time, or at least for a while, maybe mutants could have been hidden too. I think them being there all along but somehow never mentioned won't work, either.

[moon_custafer]

And you can fanwank that superheroes who weren’t born with special abilities but acquired them artificially are easier for the general population to accept. But since any line up of the Avengers usually includes a mutant or two, that doesn’t really work.
I know prejudices don’t follow logic, etc, but it’s always seemed to me that a more realistic breakdown would be along the following lines: people suspicious of superpowers would hate anyone who has them, regardless of whether they were acquired or inborn, while those inclined to accept superbeings would be unlikely to draw a division between artificial and natural-born powers. Otherwise, it’d be as though the general public loved basketball but hated tall people and wanted them kept out of the NBA. I mean, racial segregation of sports happened, and gender segregation of most sports still does, so I guess it’s possible for public opinion to be that skewed, but I still think you’d be more likely to get “It’s not how you got your powers, it’s how you use them” vs. “SHIELD faked Steve Rogers’ history and *really* he’s an icky mutant.”

[selenak]

Yep, same here. BTW, I now dimly remember that in the comics "House of M" storyline (aka the Wanda-created alt-verse where mutants ruled), Peter Parker faked being a mutant successfully for years, since really, "gained power through radioactive spider" is a less likely story than "I was just born this way".

(The other thing I remember from the Spider-Man section in "House of M" was that Gwen Stacy was alive (and Peter was married to her instead of MJ), her father was alive, and even Uncle Ben. And at one point, they found the diary of Peter from the real timeline, assumed this was him somehow creatively venting and were very very disturbed that he'd killed them off in this fictional version of his life. Though Aunt May was a bit smug when she noticed that despite getting kidnapped and threatened all the time, she never dies.)

[kore]

(I'm usually OK with most of the comics-to-movie changes, but I'm SO ticked we didn't get elderly badass comics Aunt May.)

[selenak]

On the one hand, yes, on the other, elderly Aunt May is a reflection of how the perception of age, especially for women, shifted. (See also the Kents and how old/Young they get depicted through the decades.) I mean, Marisa Tomei is of the same age as RDJ. If you look at the only known photograph of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, one of my favourite poets, she looks like she's 70 when she's all of 49. And never mind movie stars who usually look younger than they are, take 90% of women today around 50, and they really don't look anything like the grey/white haired May from the comics who was created in the 60s.

[moon_custafer]

I saw a tumblr thread once (is there a term for this, where it’s not a formal fanfic but a bunch of people swapping ideas for a fanfic?) in which various people speculated that Peter is a mutant *in addition* to having accident-created powers – and that his mutation is to be a magnet for bad luck. As soon as Professor Xavier discovers this, Peter hightails it out of there before anyone can remove the mutation-suppression collar that led to him discovering this issue. Later he tinkers with the collar, comes up with an improved bracelet version that doesn’t have side effects, and gives it to Rogue as a gift for her wedding to Remi.

[selenak]

LOL. You know, sounds plausible enough to me. :)

[sienamystic]

Hah! I like it.

[kangeiko]

These are all v good points. I'd also say that adding mutants in at this points makes a bit of a hash of the whole MCU storyline. They have a situation where Tony's logic is significantly stronger than Steve's re: accountability, but that only works if you don't have mutants being registered. If they add them back in now, they'd either have to do it as "suddenly, mutants appeared, and the world was VERY surprised" or they'd have to explain how a registration / accountability act aimed at super-powered individuals didn't include mutants.

Also, haven't they covered this ground already with the Inhumans, and it didn't exactly set everyone's imaginations alight? I honestly think their best option on this is to have it be a parallel world / portal scenario where SOME X-men end up in the MCU (a bit like the Star Trek AOS premise) which keeps the previous films as canon, and yet allows the injection of characters previously outside of that. That could allow, in theory, for a Quicksilver to show up who is Wanda's twin, thereby creating complexity and conflic. If they try to retcon mutants in instead, it will become an unholy mess. (Too many characters, too quickly! Add ingredients slowly, tasting as you go along to ensure you don't over-season.)

[oracne]

I like this idea, too.

[selenak]

Quite. I mean, I suspect that after A4, everyone will go their separate ways into their own movies for several years anyway, but still, either a complete reboot or the multiverse option several other commenters have suggested sounds like the best case Scenario.

[kangeiko]

Do we have a timeline for when they're planning to do that, or is this still all up in the air?

[kore]

Now, the fact the MCU thereafter treated Wanda as a blameless waif with no blood on her hands until the not intended by her deaths from the opening of Civil War, instead of someone who had been a voluntary Hydra experiment/member and who had at the very least the responsibility for any deaths and injuries caused by her releasing the Hulk in Johannesburg, which hadn’t been Ultron’s orders but her choice – that’s another matter

YEAH
THAT

//will be salty about that FOREVER, as well as the writers saying that Bucky didn't deserve to be on an island eating fruit salad as a "reward" for being innocent or whatever (fruit salad? what?) (cue fandom writing Bucky eating fruit salad in a lot of fics. Fandom ILLU)

-- I think people here are right and what we'll have is not exactly a soft reboot but a kind of retooling so the characters fit into the MCU verse. Feige said something like "there will be two eras, before Endgame and after Endgame," and while that could be just more bullshit hype, I think mutants could be a part of that. Maybe we'll get multiverses, or something like the end of Secret Wars with realities crashing together but nobody remembers what happened. Inhumans the movie was cancelled, the Inhumans show flopped, and the Netflix shows, with the "enhanced" vocabulary, are also gone. I think AoS got about as close as they could come with the "mu -- CARHORN" restriction, didn't they do some of the terrigen plot? But I think that's wrapping up too. So maybe a switch from an Avengers world to the X-Men?

Which is a big difference thematically, since a conflict in the Avengers world has been between people who want to be 'enhanced' and people who've been enhanced largely against their will. But from the start the X-men have been genetically different, unable to be "cured," Born This Way. That can be a really problematic approach but I'm also not sure who the mutants are without it.

[lokifan]

I also thought we really didn’t need another version of Spider-man (Peter Parker edition), and certainly not in the MCU, and changed my mind about this

SAME.

[ffutures]

They've sort of edged round it a bit in the Deadpool films, and it really wasn't a total disaster - keeping it down to two or three characters and most of the main MCU stuff happening in the background helped considerably, of course. The trouble is that the X-men do not play well with others in their cinematic universe, but given an extinction-level threat I can see them making more of an effort.

[4thofeleven]

There's also the weirdness in the 'integrated' Marvel universes that non-mutant heroes never seem to do much about threats to mutants. Obviously from a writing point of view that's because you don't want them overshadowing the X-Men in their own stories, but when it's meant to be the same setting, it gets weird that, say, Captain America isn't smashing Sentinels full-time and fighting anti-mutant bigots.

(Aside: Have Captain America and Magneto ever teamed up to take down Nazis? Because that's a story I'd love to see...)

[selenak]

Ages ago when I was at Theatrical_Muse and we did rp, I remember that likeadeuce and some others did a storyline where - this was when the comic book Civil War storyline was still going on - there was a big superhero conference at a neutral location which also included some Cap and Magneto interaction. But no Nazi take downs.


As far as actual comics canon is concerned, I have no idea, but I'd assume one problem is that Steve's reentering the modern age got pushed further and further, while Magneto's pre-supervillain Nazi hunting days remain firmly in the 1950s and early 60s at most. As to whether there's a Magneto versus Hydra storyline, you know better than me. I avoid Hydra storylines if I can. *insert here my usual "Hydra makes no sense" rant*

...now, if instead of Hydra members, you wanted to do an actual storyline involving Cap, Magneto and Nazis, and it's not "Steve doesn't go into the ice and encounters post-Auschwitz child Erik instead" (please oh please not "Steve liberates Auschwitz" as a further example of US-ifications of actions done by other people, in this case the Russians), I would suggest something far more complicated. The closest thing the MCU got to confronting Steve with Operation Paperclip was finding AI!Zola in The Winter Soldier, but the fact of the matter is, Operation Paperclip was far from the exception. The CIA and the US government wasn't just fine and dandy with a certified Nazi like Reinhard Gehlen building up the first post war (West)German intelligence service, they actively pushed for it, because hey, Nazi meant anti-Communist to them. (That's how John Le Carré who served in Bonn as a member of British Intelligence in the relevant time summed it up more recently in his memoirs.) So, if Steve doesn't go into the ice, and remains at the government's service post WWII, what would he do if ordered to work with actual Nazis in order to hunt down "terrorist" Magneto? (Resign at once, I'd imagine, but that still leaves him with the bitter awareness that for every Eichmann who is on the run and can be brought to justice, there are five Gehlens who get active US support instead.)

[schneefink]

Many great points in the comments here.

About adding the X-Men to the MCU or not I immediately worried that adding even more characters, no matter which ones but especially if there are many at once, will make it even more difficult to deal with the question of "why aren't the others helping?" in single-character-focused movies. So far you either had a smaller cast of characters and/or the threat was local/during a very short time period and/or in a place where the others couldn't easily get to (and even then sometimes it was odd), but as soon as you add mutants that will be way harder to explain. Also because while the MCU so far has been pretty US-focused when it comes to origin stories (with exceptions like space, Wakanda etc), as soon as you add mutants you have to think more about what's happening with people with superpowers in other parts of the world.

I like the idea of having the X-Men in a neighbouring multiverse dimension that can be crossed but not easily. But I too really hope to see more of X-Men Quicksilver, he was my favorite.

[selenak]

To expand on the "not easily": It occurs to me that what they did with Thor early on could be a model - Asgardians needed the rainbow bridge to get to our world, and it was broken at the end of the first Thor movie. Maybe whatever MacGuffin allows dimension-crossing either gets broken for a while or can be used only every five years or so, thus explaining why hero(ine) X can't help with the latest menace.

And yep, please bring back the Evan Peters Edition of Quicksilver, TPTB!