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In which Banshee is chronically hapless; the team gets new costumes (again); Chamber is a self-fulfilling prophecy; toddlers will sell you out in a hot minute; Moira MacTaggert is definitively not in; we are frustrated by excessive ambiguity; and it’s not Rashômon, but it’ll do.
X-PLAINED:
- Banshee post-Generation X
- Generation X #71-74
- Interior decorating
- New costumes (again)
- Chamber, but a housecat
- A meet-cute
- Teen angst
- Fashion
- An extremely awkward conversation
- A brief history of boba in the United States
- A fracas
- Fun things to do with extra skin
- Evolving teacher-student relationships
- Poor interrogation technique
- Husk vs. international terrorism, in general
- Ghosts of the Massachusetts Academy
- Villains and heroes we think would be neat as the reverse
- A world in which Peridot of Steven Universe imprinted on X-Men
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I wonder if explaining why Chamber’s psionic speech could be less noticeable because of how people hear their own voices and how that differs from what other people hear.
So when you talk in someone’s head it sounds like how you hear it, but because people won’t hear Jono’s natural voice theres no comparison.
I assume Emma stole the fainting couch from the Hellfire Club. That seems like something they would have.
This series coming to an end (or almost) made me realize how little change there was in the main characters of this book. Chamber, Husk, Jubilee, and Skin are members for the entire run and there really aren’t any major new additions to the cast (I am purposefully ignoring whatever was going on with M). Do you think this was a positive or a negative for the series as a whole?
That’s an interesting observation and one I don’t think I’d actually thought of. Plus the only reason two members left the team were because they were killed off: Blink back in their formation, and Synch near the end, rather than dropping out or graduating. The closest they got to a new member was possibly Gaia, and no one seemed to know what to do with her so she just left without a ripple
Unlike New Mutants, which did add new members as it went along, Generation X always seemed to be more about these particular kids, who simply happened to be in the same class and just… stuck there.
So I think it’s a mixture. We got to know these kids better because they were consistent, but they never seemed to be particularly deep characters in the first place (interesting, but not deep), so no one actually told us anything particularly interesting about them, beyond some minor soap-opera bits like Skin’s background and whatever Monet and the twin’s situation was THIS month.
Fairly sure the multiple issues of multiple viewpoints throughout the same day would be largely influenced by the 1999 movie “Go”. The obvious comparison is Rashamon but that’s the same events from different viewpoints. The inciting incident here leads to several stories all happening at the same time, which is far more reminiscent of Go, a relatively cult movie from just a couple of years previous.
I see that Chamber not only collects vinyl records, he also obsessive enough to collect the Japanese remasters too. I couldn’t see any bootleg tapes, but I bet they’re somewhere in there.
Alas I cannot call myself a fan of the new uniforms which, from the descriptions we hear of them from Chamber and Skin, make them seem more like they’re psychically imprinted to keep the wearer calm or something.
Jono and his interaction with the deaf girl are interesting and raise fascinating questions about how someone who deaf from birth, and so with no real concept of how verbal words work, would react to someone who transmits verbal words direct into her brain.
I’m not sure it would automatically be as easy as it seems to here as “Just think the words” shouldn’t necessarily mean anything to someone who doesn’t think in words, but signs instead. But I make no claims to be a speech scientist so may be way off base there.
Rana enjoying music reminds of noted deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who plays barefoot, so she can feel the vibrations through the floor.
Yes, the Massachussett’s Academy is fairly old and well established, as Janet Van Dyne mentions she nearly went there as a kid, so ghosts seems viable.
Paige seeming to drift into a support role (in this case it seems to be a take on DC’s Oracle) is an interesting one and one I wish we’d see more often. Doesn’t this come a little out of the blue though?
Sorry Miles, the marks on the Hannah’s back do look like scratch marks to me, but not from a beast, but from a human (they’re too widely spaced to be animal marks IMHO) which, along with the also visible bruising in that panels, made me think of some utterly unpleasant notions we will not dwell on here, but it seems there might be a third take for her past.
It seems odd to have a ghost story which implies so many ghosts in the school, but Paige doesn’t even look to see if Everett is there too, as ANOTHER recently murdered student.
Oh, and best piece of advice I’ve heard about cutting out the AI responses to search engine queries is to include an obscenity to the query or word strong.
The designers of LLM’s want to NOT teach them swearwords so they tell them to ignore anything which includes one.
How obscene or blasphemous you want to get, I leave to your discretion, experience and any workplace rules you might have.
Re: heroes become villains and Storm:
I think the biggest issue is Storm as street level villain would get overwhelmed by Storm as vengeful goddess. Unless she lost her powers, the temptation to go big is too big.
How about Rogue and Gambit as criminals and Storm trying to stop them? You could play up Storm’s thief skills that way. The reverse would be interesting too as long as Storm doesn’t use her powers too much.
If you’re worried about permanent damage, it could even be a long con to stop the true villain and they were good all along.
Are we okay with Brian Wood now?