Chloe’s adventures through wikipedia

[grassangel]

So, as I have been reading far too much X-men fanfiction recently and I don’t follow X-men at all outside of the movies (of which I’ve only seen three, First Class included) and the second animated series I decided to look at Wikipedia to inform me. Also, I wanted to check whether the fact Nightcrawler’s hair is grounds for a Sandman crossover. (X-men is Marvel, Sandman is DC so er… in-universe is out, BUT IT’S SO CURLY and exactly like Desire’s hair and now I want to read something that involves the two of them.)
Which lead to me looking at Magneto’s timeline and… holy crap. I don’t think I’ve got enough suspension of belief for the comic canon. I’ll just stick to movie/cartoon canon and fanon. It’s er… kind of more believable. Though the House of M storyline does seem kind of cool. Also, Magneto has a case of twins in the family tree. Both his kids and his grandkids have pairs of twins in them. His grandkids seem the coolest out of the lot though, with a fan favourite – Wiccan – and the cutie Luna (whose mother is called Polaris and eee, geeky celestial name love!) being two of them. It almost makes me sad that in my headcanon (which is pretty much hybrid genetics) that they wouldn’t have children. Although… yeah, if there are great-grandkids in a storyline the story’s been going on far too long. Especially if the great-grandparents are still alive. And er… comics shouldn’t HAVE complex family trees.

Magneto’s character design, which was probably thought up way before this, reminds me pretty strongly of the Red Hat Society. You know, the one that is based on the lines of a poem that goes “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple //With a red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me.” Red! Purple! Hat! Er… helmet. Senior Citizen!
At least in comic art, which is another reason why I think I’ll stick with movie!verse. At least in the movies Magneto had a nice shade of red…
Vaguely unrelated – Ian McKellen has said somewhere he was disappointed that Magneto didn’t get his romance with Professor X. Which is just as hilarious as James McAvoy’s but this time more sweet and less face-palm inducing simply because he’s SIR IAN M^cKELLEN. And a BAMF. And a prominent LGBT campaigner. (He did a production of Waiting for Godot in Australia/New Zealand. I will probably regret not seeing that for THE REST OF MY LIFE.)¹
So yeah. There is a complete pair of actors for Professor X. and Magneto who think they should’ve gotten together. Which is, as always, amusing but also makes me want to facepalm and carefully peek between my fingers to see what the result would be. (Two out of four actors agree that Professor X. is Magento’s one true love!)

I also came across the fact that a character named Destiny/Irene Adler *glares at Marvel* (Stop appropriating things, will you?) was meant to be Mystique’s love interest but wasn’t because of some stupid comic rule. Which is pretty much one of the saddest things I read on this journey. (Also, humans are flexible enough without mutations to have fluid sexuality. *blows raspberries at the genetically disposed to monogamy/heterosexuality yaysayers*²)

Apparently Moira McTaggart is an important character in the comics. I didn’t particularly read her page, except she keeps popping up in other character’s pages and apparently owns an island off Scotland and is a scientist. Which is a bit better than a CIA agent. From the way she was written in the movie, I kind of don’t care what happens to her because it seems she’s kidnapped/coerced/killed/taken hostage by every other bad guy in the comics and may have been a beard for Professor X. She was written rather beardy in the movie. Which made me rather glad that she had her memories wiped at the end, and this is the only time I have so far supported putting a female character on the short bus, even though that is mind-rape and that is wrong. (But now I want kid!fic of Charles not knowing that changing what people think is wrong and never quite learns that messing with people’s brains alters them in a way that just isn’t right.)
The CIA agent role she filled in the movie does kind of make me wish Canton III was there instead. Except the space race happened after the Cold war, right? And the space race was followed by the Middle Eastern oil crisis of the 70s which was then followed by Vietnam, right? (American history, not my strong point. Mid to late 20th century history? Not my strongest point either. Except for that oil crisis. Which has NOT MUCH AT ALL written about it. Despite being within living memory. Ugh, come on, history is being made every day and people are only kind of getting that now but I would kind of like things like this to get their own historical record now before everyone forgets about it.) But yeah, I want Doctor Who crossover because yay! Canton is cool.
Talking about points of history though, why is there no Beatles related things in the movie or in fic?⁵ Are the 60s not Beatlemania in States tiem? *checks* Well, it was for the UK. Which would at least make it plausible for movie!Charles and Raven to be fans. Also, lol, ‘Imagine’ is pretty much Charles’ song, even though it’s the wrong period for the movie.
Also also, the colouring the colourist did for the movie! FITS PERFECTLY for the era. As in… photos taken during the 60s did have a warm hue to them. I am also sick of dark/blue hued movies so I was quite happy that there was no point I was mentally grumbling about lack of contrast and being unable to see details.⁶ Even if it did mean I spotted that their shoes were wrong.

Back to Raven, Mystique is another character I like far better in movie!verse than comic!verse from reading her article. Aside from the fact she has this habit of abandoning her kids. She did that twice. And then fostered Rogue with Destiny, but still she’s a sucky mother in the comics. (And the movies, I will admit. But she at least seems to have fond feelings toward them, rather than a ‘Oh, it’s you.” attitude?)
She is also really old. She was around for the start of the 20th century. Actually all the first-gen mutants seem really old⁷ but she just kind of stands out from the crowd for being particularly old. And a bitch. Which er… is pretty much the same as the movies, but at least she’s kind of cool and understandable in the movies. Rather than just coming across as bitter and confused and with a massive chip on her shoulder.
… in an alternate universe she looks far too much like Destruction for me. And still gets together with Destiny. *cue brain breakage*
And why is there an umlaut/dieresis in her name? I can see no reason why ‘Darkhölme” needs a change of sound mark.

Illyana’s kind of cool. I only mention her because she’s the first Magik. The second one is Nightcrawler’s foster sister/love interest, Amanda Sefton/Jimaine Szardos Which just… ick. Westermarck effect, where are you?⁸   
And so I come to the character I came initially to check, Nightcrawler. Who is apparently at least as old as Magneto. And that just freaks me out far too much as I only know him as the dorky kid from the cartoon. The cartoon is also why I’m kind of going ‘what?!’ over the fact he apparently has a German accent and is Catholic. And even attempted to become a priest. What. (No, I have not watched X2.)
Not so surprised over the fact that he’s Mystique’s kid because uh… that’s kind of obvious. Like blindingly so.
He also has a daughter from another universe, Nocturne, which also gets a what from me, but mostly another “Oh god, comics shouldn’t have complicated family trees”. Look at that list of family members! It’s almost as complicated as the Summers family! Whose patriarch is called Corsair and have I mentioned I REALLY want a Doctor Who crossover?
(Errol Flynn was an Australian? Also, there’s a Star Trek/X-men crossover BOOK? I just… comics are batshit crazy. These are all things I learned from link hopping from his entry.)

Of course, then after looking him up I had to check up on his father Azazael. Who is a demon from the Dungeon Dimensions and damn if that doesn’t make me want yet more Sandman crossovers AS WELL as a Good Omens crossover with Crowley. Because, you know, all demons know each other and it’d be REALLY amusing to see an anti-human demon and a pro-human demon.
He’s got a crapload of kids too, because he uses them to teleport to earth somehow. So he has Nightcrawler, some other guy and Kiwi Black. (Stop appropriating things Marvel!) The last of which is OBVIOUSLY Maori and a New Zealander. And it’s kind of weird seeing an American property use New Zealand as that far away place. Usually, people just go to Alaska or Hawaii or maybe Brazil if they need to disappear. Unlike the UK which will send people to the other side of the world to either Australia or New Zealand in order to have them elsewhere. Maybe it’s because we’re Commonwealth countries and it’s actually easier for Brits to get here… Even though we both (as countries) kind of like Americans? (Unless, in the case of New Zealand, if they’re on nuclear ships, in which case, no.)
There isn’t that much to his page though, aside from links to other pages which have equally short entries, so I kind of idly clicked on the actor who played him in the movie.
Only to discover he was a ‘Hey! It’s that guy!’ except I couldn’t tell because of that red Ben Nye makeup. He was one of the numbered brothers in Stardust. And was in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Primeval, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and this new one called Hanna which looks cool if you’re into brain-washed teenaged assassins as played by that girl who played Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones.
Amusingly, he was also in the Spice Girls movie, in which the guy who played Nightcrawler in one of the other X-men movies was also in. Which just proves that all British actors have worked with each other at least once.

Perhaps the most AMAZING thing ever though is that he was in this thing called The Quatermass Experiment. Which is the live action remake of a 1953 similarly live action BBC program that apparently influenced Doctor Who (it’s mentioned in the memo for Doctor Who’s production in the BBC archives!) and Sapphire and Steel, the former of which I already watched but now makes me want to watch the latter. It has a New Avengers era Joanna Lumley and it’s about TIME & SPACE COPS.
But anyway, I now want to watch this series. Just look at the TVTropes page for it! I vaguely want to watch them all sometime, like I want to do with all the better quality Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass movies and adaptations, except this series is probably shorter, even though it does have a couple of movies and several (short) seasons. But mostly I just want to watch the remake.
Because the remake has this Jason Flemyng as the titular role and has BOTH David Tennant (before he was the Doctor) AND Mark Gatiss in it.

Who is now a person I will flail over. Aside from writing and STARRING in Doctor Who and Sherlock, he has a dog named ‘Bunsen’ and built a Victorian laboratory in his basement and if that doesn’t shout awesomeness, I don’t know what does. (And dammit, now I expect him to write some delightfully pulled off steampunk series for the BBC.) He also wrote The Vesuvius Club and is gay.
The latter of which vaguely surprised me, even though I have reader the former. But that may be because TVC is shelved right next to Neil Gaiman’s Murder Mysteries and contains about as much (gay) sex as that does, which is to say a page or two, and so I just sorted him into the ‘liberal British person (who may be slightly higher up the Kinsey scale than one⁹)’ pile.
But now I should reread TVC graphic novel because well, now I can recall who Mark Gatiss is and with a bit more knowledge of Victorian history (and being a fervent Echo Bazaar player, which is relevant as it is a similar shade of disturbing) might be able to make more sense of it/appreciate the pretty pictures more.
Interestingly, I went to double check Murder Mysteries, and went via Doctor Who and the Doctor Who list of episodes pages. Whereupon I found the most interesting thing concerning the production codes for season 6. (And season 4)

They’re out of order. It says in the footnote that both instances of this were done for a ‘greater variety of stories’ and to make the series more cohesive.
However I can’t help but think ‘Haruhi Suzumiya’ and that it would be MOST excellent if they were shown out of chronological order, from an outsider’s perspective rather than from the Doctor’s. There’d be references to adventures that you think you haven’t seen but then BAM a couple of episodes later there’s the context!
Except that would probably go just as swimmingly as Haruhi did – the long time fans would get a kick out of it, while the casual fans would moan that it’s all too confusing and why did the BBC decide to do such a thing? And then when they released it on DVD all the long time fans would complain that the episodes were ‘out of order’ and the people who only watch things on DVD will have to scour the internet to see what order the episodes were screened in and the BBC will have generally caused everyone a huge headache.
So that’s one reason why showing episodes PURPOSELY out of order would be bad. But only one.

And that pretty much sums up my exciting adventure through Wikipedia. If you find such things as interesting. I know I found it interesting, even though I went on tangents galore and isn’t it such a pretty thing to see how my mind works.
//shutting up now

1 – Unrelatedly, Patrick Stewart is famous for many roles, mostly either Professor X. or Jean-Luc Picard and my headspace of him is currently set to ‘Shakespearean actor’ but I REALLY want to see him as the Doctor. Because as much as I love 10 and 11, I want a serious but not a depressed homicidal Doctor and… Patrick Stewart would just be AWESOME.
2 – It is kind of because I’ve been dipping my toes into the X-men fandom (and I read some blogs by an atheist) recently that I want to proclaim my religion/faith as ‘Scientist’ (because particularly militant Atheism seems to believe in Atheism itself, as tautological as that seems, and ‘Doctorist’, after the Doctor of course, just doesn’t sound as fun), my sexual orientation as ‘homosexual’ because I’m attracted to homo sapiens (sapiens)³ and ‘puny’ because I like puns like these.
3 – I suppose it should be sapiensexual, but humans are pretty much the only arm of the homo genus existent. And if for some reason another species/subspecies did pop up I’m pretty sure that in my lifetime at least we’d be genetically compatible. Also, I can make a pun! Even though etymologically speaking I do prefer ‘peoplesexual’ because it doesn’t have any roots to the (sometimes gendered) “‘man’ as in ‘human’”. But! I can amuse myself with wordplay⁴ and hopefully-kind-of-in-a-nonharmful-way support LGBTQA because everyone should just love people.
4 – Wordplay kind of seems as if it should be a kink. Like bloodplay, except not as icky. *is a loquacious and sesquipedalian little word slut*
5 – I am a child of Beatles fans, I am sure there were other popular bands especially in the United States, but the Beatles are so iconic of the era I’m not sure why there hasn’t been anything done with them yet.
6 – I am quite certain that the ‘trend’ for colouring movies so darkly is a result of lazy film making. Dark/low contrast colouring means that mistakes in the set and costume design, continuity and even bad acting can be hidden that would normally show up in high contrast/bright colouring. Yeah, colouring adds an depth of feeling, but you can do that without making it hard for me to see where the fuck a character is and what the hell they’re emoting.
7 – I don’t get why she’s one of ‘the children’ in First Class fic. She’s maybe three years younger than Charles. That’s about three years older than the other ‘children’ except maybe for Hank.    
8 – Which interestingly enough does not apply to movie!Charles and Raven. Charles has absolutely no reason at all to not get why Raven’s attracted to him. Well, aside from the whole genetic attraction thing. But they’re both mutants and maybe mutants fall for other mutants so much easier because of genetic attraction. Or a much closer common ancestor or something.
9 – Yeah, Neil Gaiman to me is somewhat more than a Kinsey 1 but not quite a 2. And that is all mostly because he sometimes writes stuff that is so understanding of people who are not white, straight, etc., that I do wonder. It makes it slightly hard not to RPS him sometimes. (But then I get amused by whatever’s being discussed and then just wish there was more interaction between whoever it is he’s talking to.)

Comments

[amelia-seyroon.livejournal.com]

Ian McKellen has said somewhere he was disappointed that Magneto didn’t get his romance with Professor X.

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

Ian McKellen is a sweetie like that. I am a little bit in awe of him whenever he does something awesome. Which is pretty much all the time.

Also, you don't know who Stephen Fry is? BFFs with Hugh Laurie and appeared in Black Adder, Bones and a whole lot of other things I can't name off the top of my head.