“There’s a cure?!” asked the girl that kills everything she touches.
“Hey shut up we’re perf” replied the girl that makes clouds.For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. “Makes clouds my ass” she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and that’s how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.
I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY
“Finally, a cure for my chainsaw hands!” decreed Chainsaw-Hands Joe.
“There is no cure,” said Johnny Five-Dicks. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”
*puts on devoted X-Men nerd hat* Y’all make a solid point here about Rogue’s situation versus Storm’s situation. There’s a reason that Storm gets capital-R Respect from everyone up to and including actual literal gods (Thor et al. call her Windrider, and at least one planetary king tries to make her his queen in the comics), and yeah, it’s because she fucking won the genetic PowerBall. Yeah, Storm’s abilities have some downsides (her powers depend on perfect mental control, because once things get out of hand they get REALLY out of hand, and the physical toll can be extremely dangerous to her, and they’re hard to disguise because they leave a physical mark in her hair), but ultimately they’re just fucking awesome. Rogue’s abilities, on the other hand? Not fun for anyone involved. (Yes, in the comics she eventually manages to get them under control, but the point still stands that the mental block preventing her having control existed because the initial manifestation of her powers was So Fucking Traumatic.) And herein is where this arc (in the comics moreso than the movie, but the movie too) actually gets really interesting.
It’s completely understandable that Rogue wants to be able to touch people. Humans are social creatures (mutants too, as demonstrated by the Morlocks) and we NEED touch. It’s a theory bandied about more than once in-universe in the comics that part of Rogue’s depression and issues controlling her powers is because she’s cripplingly touch-starved with no solution in sight. Hell yeah, I’d take news of a cure as my goddamn salvation. That being said, it’s also completely understandable that she’s conflicted about it–her entire life is gone, particularly in the comics, where she’s basically been chased out of her home and taken in by the Brotherhood until she ended up with the X-Men. Beyond the issue of “Well, I’m a mutant and that’s part of my identity and I have a whole society to support and how will it reflect on us if one of the X-Men gets the cure”, there’s also the issue of where the fuck she’s going to go if she gets this cure. She has permission to stay at the Institute (I will fight you on behalf of Prof. Xavier, but even his worst critics can’t deny that he wouldn’t kick her out), but what would the other residents think of her? How would they treat her? Regardless of their logical understanding of her reasons, she would likely still be viewed, subjectively, as a traitor to their cause, because who needs to integrate two races together when you can just make the minority match the majority.
And furthermore, it’s already canonically true that humans have tried to forcibly make mutants ‘right’ again. I get where Storm’s coming from, is what I’m trying to say with that one. She probably understands Rogue’s angle too (I just…she’s such a great character in the comics and I feel like her particular mix of compassion and ruthlessness could have been brought out more in the movies), but she’s also trying to see the bigger picture. Once you’ve tacitly admitted that your species as a collective is in need of curing, where does that stop? I mean, historically, the answer to that question is “nowhere, until someone pulls out the big guns.” Like, look around, guys, this sort of thing isn’t exactly strictly fictional (like, um, sexuality therapy, if we’re going to adhere to the standard heavy-handed X-Men metaphor–I know that some tiny number of LGBT+ kids/adults go to therapy for their voluntarily, but way more don’t).
And Storm’s probably also wondering the ‘how’ question, which, yeah, is clearly THE important question to be asking. Especially once it’s revealed that this cure is being taken from a child against his will, where does that stop? (Side tangent: it actually makes pretty good sense to me that the cure ‘wears off,’ because the serum from Leech is probably a temporary thing that binds to the cells until the cells die, and since you have a whole new body about every seven years from a cellular standpoint, it would naturally lose its effect unless there was a way to force the body to generate more of it…and since the serum is an effect of a mutation and the serum is preventing the body from manifesting mutations, then obviously it’s a limited-term thing.) A similar thing comes up with the Legacy virus arc, in which situation it’s eventually revealed that Colossus is being used to source the cure (in a terrible, terrible, non-Geneva-Convention-compliant manner), and the decision of the X-Men to rescue him from basically being tortured cuts off the source for the cure. Kind of a grisly ‘good of many vs. good of few/one’ question, if you’ll forgive the Star Trek reference. (I’ve got a few complaints about how many things this movie tried to do, because I think either the Dark Phoenix arc would have made a phenomenal movie or the Cure arc would have made a phenomenal movie and the movie just tried to do a lot and ended up decent rather than exceptional.)
Anyway. Not really making any groundbreaking points here, I’m sure, but occasionally I lose my grip on my constant desire to scream about X-Men until I go hoarse. So sorry, to those of you who read all this in the hopes of a groundbreaking point. I have some things to say about the differences between offering a cure for a disease and offering an option to manage untenable conditions, and some other things to say about free will, and still more things to say about the impulse to be ‘normal’ versus the impulse to stay in the group of ‘freaks’ who took you in, and about infinite things to say about humanity re: the X-Men. If you really, truly wanna know, I guess you can…ask?
TL;DR: Moran’s godmother got her some comics when she was eight and she was instantly and cripplingly addicted, and ten years later she has ALL of the thoughts and feelings about literally any aspect. Do you know how ridiculously unscientific that aside about the serum is? So unscientific. The most unscientific. And yet I’ve spent God-only-knows-how-much time trying to figure out how it would work in a semi-scientific manner. That should tell you something about me.
(via yea-lets-do-this-shit)
