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starrology101 · 14 hours

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NEW X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES - SEASON 1, EPISODE 1

Our series opens on Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Archangel, Beast, Wolverine, Nightcralwer, Storm, Colossus, Gambit, and Rogue battling sentinels on the Brooklyn bridge. They exchange banter as they fight, with it clear they’ve been together for a long, long time. After winning the battle, Professor Xavier contacts them and congratulates them on a job well done. Jubilee comes running up to them, really sorry she missed out on the big fight. Least she can do is take a picture though!

We zoom out, as the picture she took is now framed in Headmaster Scott Summers’ office. It’s one year later. Scott takes a deep breath as he sets the picture down. Jean playfully knocks on the door as she enters. As Scott vents his stress, the premise of the series is explained: With most of the old X-Men team having become disillusioned with the idea they could make any more of a difference than they already had, or, alternatively, simply having other opportunities call to them, they disbanded, while Professor Xavier left Earth entirely to be with the love of his life, Lilandra, in space. Recently, however, the Mutant population has boomed into the tens of millions, many of whom are children, so Scott and Jean are re-opening the school, and making it an actual school, to teach and protect the Mutants of tomorrow. But while the kids are set to start arriving in a couple hours, they’re still missing a crucial piece to this new stage of life: they have plenty of veterans signed up to be teachers, but as things stand, there are no X-Men.

Scott is worried he doesn’t have what it takes to run everything and protect everyone. He’s not Xavier. Jean tells him that, no, he isn’t it. He’s her amazing husband who she knows will do a better job than the professor ever did. And he isn’t alone in this. He has her.

EMMA: “And more importantly, Darling, you both have me.”

Emma Frost stands in the doorframe, posing overly dramatically, before strutting in and sitting down on Scott’s desk.

As Emma snipes at both Scott’s insecurities and Jean’s “mothering” of him, her deal is quickly gone over. Former major villain who turned over a new leaf, and who, more importantly, actually does have experience running Mutant schools, so Scott brought her in to help get things set up, and is keeping her around just until they have everything running smoothly. Jean cannot wait for her to be gone, while Emma insists she has no intention of leaving anytime soon. As the two continue to bicker, Scott buries his face in his hands, sighing.

SCOTT: “Wish us luck, Professor.”

Later, the school grounds are packed as parents drop off their Mutant children. Here, we’re quickly introduced to the seven main kids we’ll be following.

First, we meet Sofia Mantega, who’s being dropped off by her father’s assistant. While obviously coming from a wealthy home based on the car she shows up in and her preppy style, she’s also shown to be an awkward sweetheart, as she acts like best friends with her dad’s employee, and nervously says sorry to everyone as she makes her way through the crowd, the wind carrying all their words right into her ears as she uses it to carry her bags.

Next, Julian Keller is introduced as a clear foil to her. Floating in the air with his telekinesis, he’s shoving kids and parents out of the way so his family’s employees, who have his bags, have a clear path, Julian barking at all the losers to move and get out of the way as he does so.

Noriko Ashida is thanking one of the teachers, Danielle Moonstar, for getting her off the street and hooking her up with gauntlets to control her powers. We then see those powers in action, as she sees Julian pulling his crap and super speeds over to him, telling him to quit being such a jerk. The two begin their first of many, many, many squabbles.

Cessily Kincaid arrives all alone, on a bus. She takes a deep breath and puts on a big smile as she enters the school, being nice and saying hi to everyone, but no one pays her any attention, apart from some freaked out looks from parents at her metal body, depressing her.

Brian Cruz, also alone, and getting pushed around in the crowd, tags himself, making everyone else move out of his way.

Sooraya Qadir is too nervous to even enter the crowd, but she’s greeted and welcomed by the youngest teacher at the school, Kitty Pryde, who, with a friendly smile, volunteers to phase her through everyone.

In the trees adjacent to the school, we meet our final main kid, Laura Kinney, staring down at everyone alongside her mentor, Wolverine. Logan promises this will be a good place for her. She’ll be safe, she can make friends, she can be a normal kid. Laura maintains she’ll never be or do any of those things. She can act like she’s one of these kids, she was trained to do so, but she’ll never be like them. Logan makes her promise to at least try. She asks why he can’t stay with her, and he tells her this just isn’t the place for him anymore.

LOGAN: “Besides, if I stuck around, you wouldn’t need to talk to anyone else.”

Laura asks about the man in charge. She’s never heard Logan do anything but complain about Cyclops. Does he really trust him?

LOGAN: “Never tell him I said this, but there’s no one I trust more. Besides, he’s got Jeannie watching his back. You’ve got nothing to worry about here, kid. I promise.”

The two awkwardly stand up, neither really good at goodbyes, so Laura just pounces off onto the schoolgrounds.

In the school’s auditorium, Scott is giving a speech to all the new students about what it means to be a Mutant, while also clarifying what they’re here to learn, and that they aren’t here to train to be X-Men, but to attain the skills they need to survive in the world. While Scott is talking, Julian sets his sights on Sofia, instantly smitten by her beauty. He nudges the stranger sitting next to him, asking if he agrees she’s the hottest girl here. Brian, shocked ANYONE would talk to him, nods his head and agrees.

As Scott nears the end of his speech, he does know most of the kids probably have questions about the lack of a current X-Men team. He assures them that they’re working on solving this issue, but until then, enough heroes are gathered here that he promises no one will be able to hurt them.

Cut to an underground base where, paralleling Scott, William Stryker is giving a speech to his small army of Purifiers. The man is genocidal, intent on killing all Mutants, but only because he genuinely believes that Mutants have all been corrupted by Satan and that God has tasked him with his mission, the pain on his face genuine as he recalls killing his Mutant wife and child.

His speech concludes with declaring they’ll be launching an attack on the heart of Mutantkind in America: Xavier’s.

Sofia and Noriko are getting moved into their room. Sofia is being friendly and trying to make conversation while she takes a bunch of pictures for social media, her following quite large, but Nori is disinterested and mostly ignoring her, thinking she just seems like another vain, preppy rich girl, putting on her headphones and some J-Pop to tune her out.

Julian and Brian show up at their door, and Julian starts hitting on Sofia. She “politely” rejects him, saying she unfortunately doesn’t date bullies and jerks. This instantly gets her Nori’s approval as she slams the door in the boys’ faces. Brian pats a bummed out Julian on the back.

Cessily and Sooraya are rooming together. Cessily thinks she’ll judge her like everyone else, like her parents, for her metal skin, but now that she’s away from the crowd, and all the boys in it, Sooraya is much more relaxed and easily hits it off with Cessily, the two bonding as Soo encourages Cess to show off some of what she can do, the girl of mercury having some fun as she does a cheer, implementing her stretching and wiggling. Sooraya applauds her. She explains that she’s actually had her powers for a while, unlike the more recently developed Cessily, and she learned quickly not to judge. She does think Cessily could stand to cover up more though.

Scott, Jean, and Emma are walking through the halls. Jean was finally able to get in touch with Storm, in her mind, “the obvious choice”, and she’s agreed to come back to America and join the New X-Men. Other ideas are tossed out, but none of them work for one reason or another, be it Warren being busy running his company, Gambit and Rogue traveling the world, or Colossus still being in mourning “all this time later”.

Laura stumbles across the three as she’s familiarizing herself with the building’s layout. Scott welcomes her, asking if she needs help finding her room. Laura puts on her “Normal Girl” act, saying how she was just exploring this school she’s so excited to attend, but Jean and Emma tell it’s okay to just be herself. Laura’s face falls as she tells Scott Logan was right; he does smell trustworthy. So does Jean. Emma doesn’t. Scott lets her know they’re fully aware of her unique situation, and wish to help her anyway they can, but Laura tells him not to bother; she won’t be here long.

That night, Scott is working late in his office, as Jean tries to get him to come to bed. The two are very cute and sweet, but just as Jean is getting him up, they hear a noise from outside. Looking out the window, they see the school being stormed by the Purifiers under the cover of darkness.

Jean wakes up all the teachers and orders them to focus on protecting the students, and orders the students to stay in their rooms no matter what they hear, while the two of them and Emma deal with the attackers, Emma intentionally being a pain to pull away from her beauty sleep.

Meeting The Purifiers face to face, the headmasters, still in their pajamas, demand to know what’s going on here. The soldier in charge explains who they are and their holy mission.

SCOTT: “Different name.”

JEAN: “Different look.”

EMMA: “Same bigots.”

The three proceed to show why they’re the ones in charge, as they easily fight through the immense and heavily armed paramilitary group, forcing them to retreat.

As they flee, Laura jumps out her window and attempts to pursue them, but Jean halts her. Scott questions what she was doing, and she asks in turn why they let their enemies who wanted to kill everyone here live? Scott and Jean make it clear that isn’t how X-Men do things.

LAURA: “You said it yourself, Mr. Summers. You’re training us to survive. Not to be X-Men.”

Laura stomps back inside, Scott in for another rough relationship with a Snikt.

EMMA: “She does have a point.”

The other headmasters just glare at her.

The next morning, the kids all begin their classes, and we get a glimpse at some of them. Chemistry with Beast, Drama with Nightcrawler, Chorus with Dazzler, Creative Writing with Karma, and Powers for Self-Defense with Danielle Moonstar (the only class everyone’s excited about).

Looking at all of these kids’ happy faces, and coming off last night’s win, Scott thinks he may just be able to pull this off after all.

SCOTT: “Failing them can’t be an option.”

Elsewhere, in a church, Stryker apologizes to God for failing and says he won’t underestimate the X-Men again. God speaks back to him, promising that he’ll ensure that next time, he’ll be as ready as he needs to be.

#new x-men #academy x #x-men

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starrology101 · 14 hours

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In the Hellions mini, Tag said that if he didn't have his friends, he'd have no one. I was wondering what the deal is, regarding his home life? What was life like for him before coming to Xavier's?

We hadn't plotted it in detail, but we were planning to explore Brian's backstory. He was a kid who never got attention even before his mutation manifested. We weren't sure if he came from a broken home, or was just neglected in his home, but either way, he always felt like he didn't know who he was even before he realized he was a mutant. As a kid from Puerto Rico, he was treated like an immigrant even though he was a citizen, and he felt somewhere in between.

Ultimately, the way we saw it, he had no real sense of a family, and in our initial proposal for the Hellions mini, we also stated that he had "no real sense of identity" beyond his friends and his role as a student at Xavier's.

One of the reasons we had Brian be with Cessily in the aftermath scenes of the final issue of the Hellions mini was to subtly set up that his situation and hers were similar.

We did know we were going to have Julian dig into this after the Hellions mini - that story was going to alert Julian to the fact that Brian had locked his sense of self into this group of friends, and Julian was gonna want to do something about it. This would have led to a story where Brian reconnected with his parents and we would discover that he hadn't been home since coming to Xavier's.

Our memory of those plans are pretty vague, but we think we wanted his mother to actually have missed him, and that Julian would push Brian to reconnect in ways that would help Brian forge a sense of self that would help him take the next steps in figuring himself and his powers out.

The trick with Brian is that some of our memory of these plans have blurred with the storyline for a supporting character for a novel we're writing. We wrote the novel years ago and are rewriting it now, and we realize we folded unused Brian plans into a character in that book and now don't remember how much of what we remember is unused Brian plans and how much is stuff we filled out when we morphed those plans into this new character.

The novel, which we've decided to brush off and rewrite, has a lot of our unused ideas for Academy X rebuilt into something new, so we always struggle to separate the old plans from the novel ideas they morphed into.

#new x-men #new x-men academy x #hellions #brian cruz #tag #julian keller #hellion #cessily kincaid #mercury

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starrology101 · 14 hours

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Tag/Brian Cruz Appreciation Post

Brian is the only Academy X character from the main two squads who never got any real character work in the main title, he remains pretty strictly a background character in Weir/DeFilippis and is quickly killed off in Kyle/Yost. But it's clear that before they were kicked off the book, Weir/DeFilippis were going places with him, and we can see it in the New X-Men: Hellions mini and in House of M.

(more under the cut)

In this miniseries, the Hellions squad are all granted wishes by a villain named the Kingmaker. Julian's wish was for fame and glory, and pretty quickly his wish was granted when he stops the assassination of a governor, and the press is immediately all over him. It's later revealed that the journalist who spoke to him also works for the Kingmaker, and Brian was in on this and helped him out by directing the questions to her so that Julian could look good to the public.

Later on, Brian is acting as an agent for Rockslide, who's wish was to become a pro wrestler. He reveals that his wish was simply to help his friends with their own wishes, and doesn't seem to have any problem with this at all. We know that his original wish the Kingmaker thought was dumb, so he changed it to this, which Julian is a bit bewildered by.

Brian is clearly a very selfless person, he is committed to getting his friends what they want and doesn't seem to care that much about what he wants for himself. I'm very curious what his original wish was, presumably it was something that he actually wanted for himself, but was okay with giving it up.

Weir/DeFilippis have talked about the direction they were taking Brian on their blog, where they stated that he had no sense of self outside of his friends. (x) This is definitely what I have analyzed from this mini as well.

We can also think about the fact hat Brian's powers are really specific and not exactly the most helpful in a combat situation. Pretty much every time he uses them it's shown to have a really short term effect. Compared to the rest of his teammates, with Julian and Sooraya being ridiculously powerful, Santo being very strong, Cessily's powers being very combat effective and Kevin's deadly touch, he probably feels very outclassed and useless. If having a sense of self is something he already struggles with, this must be a huge insecurity for him. In fact, part of the reason he might want to help his friends out so much with their wishes could be that he wants to feel useful for once.

In House of M, Brian is in a very different place as a character. Instead of being Julian's best friend and part of the Hellions, he's actually part of the "New Mutants Academy" along with Prodigy, Wallflower, The Stepford Cuckoos, and Quentin Quire.

Quentin was not a part of the Academy X class at all since he was a Morrison character and was comatose throughout the history of the book. However, since House of M was an alternate universe where a lot of dead people were shown to be alive, and a lot of wrongs were righted and "greatest wishes" came true, Quentin is here and appears as he did before the riot at Xavier's - his hair still brown and still looking like a nerd.

And case in point, everyone at this school seems to hate him, except for Brian.

Brian consistently sticks up for Quentin when other students are being rude to him, though Quentin dismisses Brian each time he does. This is very in character for Quentin, but it's interesting that Brian doesn't have any (negative) reaction to the way that Quentin treats him.

Later, at the end of this issue, Quentin is forced to commit suicide by Laurie because he finds out via his telepathy that she and her dad are working for S.H.I.E.L.D.

Brian eventually finds Quentin's body, and refuses to believe that he would have committed suicide. He also says that he was planning on hanging out with Quentin that night. Laurie's father, who is a therapist then comes in and lies that Quentin had been seeing him and was struggling with suicidal ideation, to cover up his and Laurie's tracks. Brian refuses to believe this as well, claiming that he would have known and that Quentin was his friend.

Heartbreaking as this scene is, despite the fact that Quentin was shown to be rude to Brian in front of others, it appears they were actually close friends. We can assume that Quentin either was much nicer to Brian when they were by themselves, or simply doesn't know how to be kind to his friends. My money's on the latter, and that Brian knew this and was alright with it. Brian is shown to be a very emotionally intelligent person, and Quentin struggles in relationships with others most of all.

Brian later is confronted by the Cuckoos, they offer their condolences and he lashes out, angry at them for being rude to him. They agree with Brian that they don't think he was the type to commit suicide, and Brian thinks more on this and begins to suspect Garrison's hand in Quentin's death because of his pheromone powers.

It's clear that Brian feels bad for Quentin, that all the other students hated him and didn't care to understand him. He was all Quentin had, and now Quentin is gone.

Later on, Karma catches Brian going through files to try to find evidence against Dr. Garrison, she doesn't believe him at first, but it still sets a bit of doubt in her that leads her to getting help from Doug Ramsey, using his powers to go through Dr. Garrison's computer and finding out that he's a deeply undercover agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Garrison then comes in and is about to kill them with his powers the same way his daughter killed Quentin, when Brian in turn uses his powers to save the teachers.

Brian accidentally ends up making Garrison kill himself by jumping out the window of the building trying to "get away" from himself. Brian feels awful about this, he didn't want to kill someone. But he saved Doug and Xuan's lives.

In this alternate universe, Quentin almost replaces Julian as Brian's best friend- the friend that he attaches himself too. Unlike his situation with the Hellions though, Brian doesn't have any friends outside of Quentin. It appears that the fact that he's Quentin's one true ally has made him an outsider at the New Mutant's Academy. Yet instead of feeling lonely and sorry for himself after Quentin's death, he is still thinking of Quentin and trying to prove that Quentin didn't kill himself. He cares deeply about Quentin, just like he cares deeply about Julian and the Hellions in the regular universe.

One thing I think is also very interesting about Brian is how in both examples, with both Julian and Quentin as his best friends, he joins in on them being rude, or even straight up bullying others, but when he is alone with either of them he's just a very sweet kid. This goes hand in hand with the fact that he's tied his sense of self to his friends.

I mentioned earlier that often times in House of M certain character's situations in the alternate universe are based on their "greatest desires." I have a theory about how this could apply to Brian. Weir and DeFilippis have stated that though they weren't planning on it, they did have an idea in their heads for a future arc where Brian falls in love with Julian. (x) This wouldn't have worked out for him, since Julian is in love with Sofia and presumably straight. However, Quentin Quire is a character who has always had a queer aesthetic and has had queer subtext as well. In House of M, it's possible that Brian's wish was being able to date his best friend and this has come true, with Quentin instead of Julian. This is just a wild theory though.

So yeah, though Brian didn't get any character work prior to House of M and the Hellions mini, just these two stories set him up for what could have been a really interesting arc, and hint at who this kid is on the inside. It makes it all the more devastating that Kyle and Yost killed him off, and he is very unlikely to get a story ever again. But, I can dream. I love this kid, and I wish there was more appreciation for him out there in general.

#brian cruz #tag #x-men #new x-men

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