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100 days of enemy recs: 66. Xavier/Magneto
I went and looked up the old ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ship_manifesto for this pairing and it said something about how there were FOUR WHOLE CONTINUITIES to keep track of, and they knew it was confusing. Ah, we were such sweet summer children back then.
(,,,meanwhile, xmfc was ten years ago? please join me in feeling old for a moment.)
The main - but definitely not the only - continuities that really matter fannishly for these two are the original comics, the various cartoons, the Stewart/McKellan movieverse, and the XMFC movieverse. Since Disney are probably going to screw with it again now that they own the rights, it's probably a good time to go through this.
I can't really summarize the comics for you. Partly because for huge swaths of X-Men comics, I just can't parse the art even when the art isn't objectively bad. I'm still listening along to the Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast in an attempt to figure it out, and while it has helped a lot to figure out Summerses and Apocalypse and Wolverine and many other things, I still haven't really come up with a Unified Theory of Xavier and Magneto. Probably because there isn't one. Just remember that Xavier and Magneto have definitely been lovers, and have also spent a lot of time as enemies, and as allies, and also a lot of time when one or the other of them was evil and/or dead and/or pretending to be dead, and have probably at least once been retconned into never having met and then retconned back? It is even more of a mess than most comics continuities because basically a generation grows up with Magneto as an evil villain, and then a writer goes "but wouldn't it be cool if he reforms!" and then that lasts until the next generation takes over and makes him a cardboard villain again like when they were kids, and then the *next* generation comes in and makes him a good guy like when they were kids, and then... well, you get the idea.
There are several cartoon verses, several of which had their own thriving fic fandoms in the early days of online fandom, but they are scarce and hard to find these days. X-Men Evolution was basically a high school AU where Xavier was the principle, and ends with Magneto implied to be redeemed. The earlier X-Men cartoon basically followed the comics storylines, only a tiny bit more cohesively.
Then there's the movies. The first X-Men movie with Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan was just. Really good. It's basically the movie that convinced the world that superhero movies could actually be legitimately good movies and worth making, so I guess we kind of have it to blame for what has happened to Hollywood since. But one of the main things it got right was focusing in on the Xavier/Magneto history as the foundation of the whole story. Another thing they got right was being willing to start in the middle of the story and let people catch up. Magneto starts the movie already in jail, having been previously captured by the X-men, being visited by his old friend/foe/lover Charles Xavier, and it just keeps that relationship tuned perfectly the whole way through. They agree on ends and disagree on means and you get the distinct impression is that all they want is to be able to sit together and keep their philosophical argument going for the rest of their lives, but both of them are too much men of action to be able to do it. It's so great.
Later there were more movie in the series and unfortunately they kind of went off the rails, but the first one is still very good. I should re-watch it.
Then they rebooted with X-Men First Class, which tries to do what the original movie realized it didn't need to do, and fill in the Xavier/Magneto backstory. It, too, understood that their love story was the key to the whole thing, so understandably, the vast majority of the Xavier/Magneto you will find on the web these days is XMFC continuity.
I never really bonded with XMFC, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that everything *other* than the Xavier/Magneto in that movie was just a mess. One is that the vast majority of the fic in that fandom AUs out Xavier's disability, and I'm interested in a character who has basically always canonically used a wheelchair. And the last one is that, look, if you have the option of a Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan version of anything, why would you ever look anywhere else????
"We'll meet in secret to play chess in the park when we're old" is still my ideal of a love story.
So here is some classic original XMMV Xavier/Magneto fic for you.
ship_manifesto for this pairing and it said something about how there were FOUR WHOLE CONTINUITIES to keep track of, and they knew it was confusing. Ah, we were such sweet summer children back then.(,,,meanwhile, xmfc was ten years ago? please join me in feeling old for a moment.)
The main - but definitely not the only - continuities that really matter fannishly for these two are the original comics, the various cartoons, the Stewart/McKellan movieverse, and the XMFC movieverse. Since Disney are probably going to screw with it again now that they own the rights, it's probably a good time to go through this.
I can't really summarize the comics for you. Partly because for huge swaths of X-Men comics, I just can't parse the art even when the art isn't objectively bad. I'm still listening along to the Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast in an attempt to figure it out, and while it has helped a lot to figure out Summerses and Apocalypse and Wolverine and many other things, I still haven't really come up with a Unified Theory of Xavier and Magneto. Probably because there isn't one. Just remember that Xavier and Magneto have definitely been lovers, and have also spent a lot of time as enemies, and as allies, and also a lot of time when one or the other of them was evil and/or dead and/or pretending to be dead, and have probably at least once been retconned into never having met and then retconned back? It is even more of a mess than most comics continuities because basically a generation grows up with Magneto as an evil villain, and then a writer goes "but wouldn't it be cool if he reforms!" and then that lasts until the next generation takes over and makes him a cardboard villain again like when they were kids, and then the *next* generation comes in and makes him a good guy like when they were kids, and then... well, you get the idea.
There are several cartoon verses, several of which had their own thriving fic fandoms in the early days of online fandom, but they are scarce and hard to find these days. X-Men Evolution was basically a high school AU where Xavier was the principle, and ends with Magneto implied to be redeemed. The earlier X-Men cartoon basically followed the comics storylines, only a tiny bit more cohesively.
Then there's the movies. The first X-Men movie with Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan was just. Really good. It's basically the movie that convinced the world that superhero movies could actually be legitimately good movies and worth making, so I guess we kind of have it to blame for what has happened to Hollywood since. But one of the main things it got right was focusing in on the Xavier/Magneto history as the foundation of the whole story. Another thing they got right was being willing to start in the middle of the story and let people catch up. Magneto starts the movie already in jail, having been previously captured by the X-men, being visited by his old friend/foe/lover Charles Xavier, and it just keeps that relationship tuned perfectly the whole way through. They agree on ends and disagree on means and you get the distinct impression is that all they want is to be able to sit together and keep their philosophical argument going for the rest of their lives, but both of them are too much men of action to be able to do it. It's so great.
Later there were more movie in the series and unfortunately they kind of went off the rails, but the first one is still very good. I should re-watch it.
Then they rebooted with X-Men First Class, which tries to do what the original movie realized it didn't need to do, and fill in the Xavier/Magneto backstory. It, too, understood that their love story was the key to the whole thing, so understandably, the vast majority of the Xavier/Magneto you will find on the web these days is XMFC continuity.
I never really bonded with XMFC, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that everything *other* than the Xavier/Magneto in that movie was just a mess. One is that the vast majority of the fic in that fandom AUs out Xavier's disability, and I'm interested in a character who has basically always canonically used a wheelchair. And the last one is that, look, if you have the option of a Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan version of anything, why would you ever look anywhere else????
"We'll meet in secret to play chess in the park when we're old" is still my ideal of a love story.
So here is some classic original XMMV Xavier/Magneto fic for you.
- Travel Advisory (3497 words) by Penknife
Fandom: X-Men (Movieverse)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Erik Lehnsherr, Charles Xavier
Additional Tags: Cliche, Hotel, Airplanes
Xavier and Magneto, coincidentally cancelled flights, and only one bed. - In Dreams Begin Responsibility (2957 words) by Kass
Fandom: X-Men (Movieverse)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Charles/Erik
Additional Tags: Telepathy, Dreams, First Time
Xavier dreams. - Smoking on the Bus / Burn All The Letters / The Last of the Jedi by
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
artaxastra
X-Men (Movieverse),
Charles/Erik
Long
Rating: Mature
Charles and Erik and time and youth.
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YES to all that, and it bugs me both characters get really softened, especially Magneto, in terms of what they're willing to do for their cause(s).
(Especially re Jean and X-Men 3. OMFG what a horrible, terrible, no good movie.)
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And also, some of the fics do try to address at least some of the political and other stuff, but part of what makes the Mutant Metaphor(tm) evergreen is that it's always (metaphorically) about whatever our big issue is right now, for us.
By making XMFC a period piece, the metaphor becomes about the issues that were big for them, then. (And canon didn't do a great job with the back then issues, either.) So even the fics that try to address the other political/identity stuff often seem to not quite work, it's pushing it through both the Mutant Metaphor filter and the Historical Fiction filter and ends up a bit too mushy.
Pocky_slash (and a few of the others that use XMFC backstory) make it work because Picard/McKellan's Xavier/Magneto was always in large part about how the problems of the past keep haunting us in the present, and that is always one of the problems of us, now.
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