347 – Onslaught Begins

I think I’d have liked the Onslaught reveal a bit more if we’d seen a more gradual accretion of power and definition. So a wispy psionic form became stronger and more defined over time, and finally get’s totally monstrously large and ripped when the Ruby of Cyttorak is added to the mix. That of course would have required pre-planning and co-ordination, but what the heck, let’s shoot for the moon.

I agree with Jay that the Magneto design influence works better as it being Xavier associating his darker thoughts with the person he’s spent so long opposing/obsessing over. I’ve also heard the story about Magneto being inside Xavier’s mind since Charles shut his brain down, as being an “out” for Onslaught’s more dangerous actions too, but agree that it works a lot bettter if it’s ALL Chuck.

I think the Crimson Gem works a bit like Moonstone’s moonstone, it’s a physical object that triggers a transformation, and the user can then carry it, or phase into their body, and can make it reappear when required.

Cain threw the Crimson Gem into space one time, and stayed transformed because he hadn’t ceded the power back to the Gem first. I think he then started leaving it phased into himself, which Onslaught managed to reverse.

Or maybe they just forgot… 🙂

Hmm. I have a definite feeling that when the podcast gets to New X-Men, I will be writing passionate defenses of the Xorn twist against Miles Stokes’s savage attacks on it. I mean, of *course* Xorn was ruthlessly written to be a character to whom the reader would become attached. That’s why the twist works.

This is also why the subsequent retcon was a bad idea, as seen in how uninteresting everything done with Xorn since then has been. He’s a character whose main value was to make the reader feel the pain of being betrayed, and once he’s served that purpose, it’s painfully obvious that he’s otherwise just a set of striking but (deliberately) superficial trappings.

And I’d also stick up for Onslaught’s conceit of the X-traitor being an actual traitor, but the one person who in a sense “can’t” betray the X-Men, because in the Harras/Lobdell era he’s more-or-less *been* the X-Men, treated as the defining essential figure without whom you can’t have the X-Men. Some of this is probably because I’ve found the Xavier-as-Christ-allegory so over-the-top in these ‘90s comics and, yes, if you’re going to go there, why not go the whole way and have him be Judas, too? And indeed the Antichrist. (I am genuinely curious to see if we get any explicit Revelations echoes.)

Can’t say that I disagree with our hosts about the inadvisability of the Magneto retcon-or-is-it. Although I should obviously wait and see how that reads to me when I get to it.

But having Onslaught be Xavier’s completely natural and understandable frustrations with everything, all bursting out at once, and especially his difficulties with having to be, 24/7, this perfect visionary that he’s been made out to be in the last few X-years, even as he feels that he is a failure? That seems clearly better, because it’s a superhero-story version of a real experience that people have — I was struck, listening to our host’s performance of Onslaught’s “villain” speech, how much it didn’t sound to me like a villain speech at all.

(And not only better. It’s also just simply more elegant as a premise than mucking this up with “But he’s also part of *Magneto’s* mind.”)

Which is why I am so dismayed at hearing from our hosts that the reason for injecting Magneto into this was a worry that this would somehow ruin Xavier as a character. Apart from anything else, it suggests that Harras and Lobdell had really not grasped how the superhero comics market was changing, that the X-books were going to be primarily for adults going forward. Because who other than a child, and a comparatively young child at that, would be invested in making sure that Xavier remained a “good guy”?