X-Men '97's Take on Morph Is Already Making Bigots Mad
X-Men '97's Take on Morph Is Already Making Bigots Mad
Marvel's animated revival of the beloved X-Men cartoon is bringing back a very special mutant—with a few changes worthy of the mutant metaphor.
So in the latest installment of what won't make MAGA throw a tantrum.
That article took way too long to get to the fucking point that the character is nonbinary.
And I doubt most bigots even know about this cartoon existing. They didn't even give an example.
Making one character not-straight means you'll get tens of millions worth of advertising from the maga crowd and everyone laughing at them
For example, I didn't know this show existed until I saw a post laughing at someone whining about it.
Thanks for summary. I got bored in first paragraph and came to comments. Thx
Maybe stick your head outside of the bubble for a second and you'd see conservative on social media complain about the trailer and Disney being woke again.
Wait until they find out that an entire subtheme of the show is mutants discovering how to coexist with those who would have them subjugated for being different...
So a character that can literally change genders at will considers themselves to be nonbinary?
That's... Completely logical.
Assigned non-binary at birth
Resident Comic Book Guy here...
Morph was originally introduced in X-Men #35 in 1967 under the name "Changeling":
https://gocollect.com/comic/x-men-35
He took the appearance of Professor X and remained in the book until #42 (1968) where he was killed off as Xavier.
https://gocollect.com/comic/x-men-42
After bringing him back for the 1992 Animated series under the name Morph ("Changeling" was taken by DC comics for their human/animal shapeshifter), and the comic book adaptation of that series (where he is also killed off), the current version was introduced in 1995 as part of the "Age of Apocalypse" alternate timeline.
https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/12386/x-men_alpha_1995_1
Morph is a mimic who can change his appearance to match anyone, male or female, similar to Mystique, who for years was assumed to have been Nightcrawler's mother, but was recently revealed to have been his father (X-Men Blue: Origins #1)
https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/111680/x-men_blue_origins_1_2023_1
Following 60 years of comics is pretty much a soap opera.
I'm thinking of the mechanics of a shape-shifter being pregnant... like, if they switched genders would the fetus just get stuck inside between organs and die, or would it cease to exist? Would the shape-shifter be able to take on a male outward appearance while maintaining a uterus? Or would they just not shift for 9 months?
Much simpler, I suppose, for the shape-shifter to father a child.
Questions we've been asking for thousands of years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir
Mystique, who for years was assumed to have been Nightcrawler’s mother, but was recently revealed to have been his father (X-Men Blue: Origins #1)This is literally what South Park revealed in season two about Cartman’s father. The person we know as Eric’s mother was actually his father.
The whole premise of the show was the government persecuting those it didn't like. They are only proving the point of the show.
For real though, why do bigots even like X-Men? It's not even remotely subtle.
Getting mad at X-Men for being "woke" is just very, very very stupid and I don't even want to throw justification as to why because it should be so obvious if you've even take one look at the media source that they're effectively outing themselves as morons.
If you get mad at other franchises for revisionist inclusivity, whatever, but c'mon it's X-Men, there's no limits here.
They said the same for Star Trek. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. It's almost as if these fuckwads don't read/watch the original source material and just need an excuse to hate on fictional characters that are depicted a certain way they don't likd.
XY-men? XXY-men?
He can change his gender on a whim - of course he (or rather they?) would be non-binary.
Also, Mystique is Nightcrawler's father, so it's not exactly a new idea for mutant shapeshifters.
97X BAM...The Future of Rock and Roll
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After yesterday brought with it the first look at X-Men ‘97 in action we also got to learn a bit more about one of its more fascination inclusions on the X-Team: the full-time return to the animated fold for shapeshifting mutant Morph.
He was introduced as a minor character in the comics as Kevin Syndey, aka Changeling—with that codename tweaked to Morph for TV due to an alleged copyright concern with DC Comics, which used the Changeling codename for Teen Titan’s Beast Boy—and was brought into the world of animated X-Men, where he skyrocketed to popularity by, well, immediately dying.
Morph has undergone some pretty radical changes in the decades between The Animated Series and ‘97, adopting the pale, hairless, and blankly-featured visage that the character was given when an alternate version of the character inspired by the cartoon series was integrated into comics continuity with the Age of Apocalypse storyline, and then through another alternate riff in the multiversal teambook Exiles.
The mutant allegory has been a stand-in for a large variety of minority causes since the inception of the X-Men, from political thought, to racial discrimination to, yes, issues of gender identity and queerness.
Some of these allegories work better than others—race has always been a fraught lens for the mutant metaphor in particular, especially as more and more non-white mutants have stepped into the spotlight, perhaps best emphasized in the infamous moment in the 1982 storyline “God Loves, Man Kills,” where Kitty Pryde uses a racial slur to draw equivalence to being called a “mutie.” But the connection between mutantkind and queerness has always been particularly potent, and a topic the franchise has engaged with for generations and generations of storytelling in ways big and small.
Star Wars faced a similar dilemma in introducing the first trans-identifying Jedi in the alien bond-pair Terec and Ceret in its High Republic comics.
The original article contains 767 words, the summary contains 312 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Bigot brains run on fear, insecurities, and anger. Makes them very easy to control if you have no ethics.
I like that they leaned into AoA/Exiles Morph's look.