telophase | So. The Sabretooth rant.

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So. The Sabretooth rant.

octopedingenue took me up on my offer to rant about the character of Sabretooth and how what Marvel did with him pushed me over the edge.

First off, I'm going to mention that it's been years, on the order of fifteen or so, practically decades since I read the books I'm talking about, so I'm hazy on the details, and I'll probably get some wrong or out of order. That's OK. We can all live with that. It's the larger narrative that's important, for the most part.

And it's really less of a rant than a history, with a couple of ranty bits in it. But one of them's really ranty.

OK. I'm a character person. I get really into fandoms and properties when there's a character I can really get into. In the case of the X-books, it turned out to be Wolverine.

I got into the X-books when an iteration of the cartoon started up, and two friends of mine taped it on their VCR (yes! I feel old!), sat me down in front of the first episode, and every time a new character came on they stopped the tape and explained who the person was and what their relation was to everyone else on the team. It took the better part of an afternoon to watch.* It seemed sort of interesting, so the next time I was near a comic store, I swung in and grabbed an issue of X-Men off the shelf.

It was probably the best issue ever for me to grab at the time. It was the last issue of a story arc and was entirely devoted to denouement, with all the characters hanging out around the X-Mansion reflecting on their experiences and trying to deal with the personal consequences. No action whatsoever. It was unlike anything I'd expected from a superhero book, and it made me want to know more. (If anyone remembers enough about it to identify it, it was an arc where Professor X had somehow gained the power to walk again, but the ability was slowly leaving him and he was dealing with the emotions that brought up. And Jubilee was in it, but I don't remember what her particular issues were.)

I'm not sure how I got into Wolverine in particular, but about this time in the story arcs, his old comrades/enemies/random people from the Weapon X program contacted him, and he was drawn back to that, to deal with the consequences of Weapon X playing out in his current life. There was the most marvelous bit of plot thrown in to deal with the mad retconning that was happening: memory implants, as part of the program. That meant you couldn't be sure if ANYTHING was true, or if it was implanted in an attempt to reprogram Wolverine and the others for Nefarious Ends. So dead people could suddenly show up alive again, people could unexpectedly turn out to be related to each other, or traitors could be allies after all, and vice versa.

Which brings in Sabretooth. Now, if you've seen the movies, I think they did a really good thing to separate the Origins: Wolverine Sabretooth from the idiot killing machine in the first X-Men movie, which was not actually call him Sabretooth. Victor Creed, code name Sabretooth, is basically what Wolverine could be if he let himself indulge his rage, fear, and animalistic side. Sabretooth first showed up in the X-verse, IIRC, rocking a mullet and serving as a hired killer massacring an innocent tribe of mutants called Morlocks who lived in the sewers of New York City. He was pulled out as a heavy every so often, mostly to give Wolverine someone equally badass to beat up on and to show us what Wolverine was scared of letting himself turn into. He was a simple, straightforward bad guy, the equivalent of Nazis in Indiana Jones movies.

He was also sometimes portrayed as reasonably sophisticated - in a particular short series, you see his mansion, him in a suit (with cigar, natch), his personal psychic assistant Birdy, and his DeLorean sportscar. And sometimes he's just a mindless killing machine. It pretty much depends on the writer.

Enter the Weapon X story arc, where I first met Sabretooth. He was part of Weapon X. He has some sort of connection to Wolverine beyond Weapon X, but because of the memory implants, nobody's really sure what. He may be Wolverine's father. He may have killed Wolverines' lover, the Native American Silver Fox. (Yeah, I know. Sensitive to cultural differences, Marvel ain't.) Except that Silver Fox shows up again. I think. Maybe. It was fifteen years ago and as she's female she's not really important to the story except as she forces the men to act. Silly girls, wanting to read about women as actors in their own right, tee-hee.

After the big mess that was the Weapon X storyline, pretty much none of which I remember, Wolverine went back to the X-books (well, he continued in his own book at the same time, too), and Sabretooth sort of did whatever he does. Then, I think, the Age of Apocalypse storyline occurred, which took over all the X-books for a period of months in Marvel's periodic attempt to get people to spend more money on comics - you HAVE to buy all the X-books to follow the overall story arc. Sheer, annoying, marketing genius! The AoA story arc took everyone into an alternate reality where they had different relationships and different stories.

At some point, perhaps concurrently, perhaps after the AOA - I really don't remember - Sabretooth had two miniseries, Sabretooth, and Sabretooth: Death Hunt, which might have taken place after the events I'm about to narrate. I have NO IDEA what happened in which miniseries, because it's been so long, but we get to learn about Victor Creed's past - he was a spy during the Cold War with Mystique - and a bit about his childhood - in the 1800s, when he was born and grew up (a healing factor like his and Wolverine's makes you practically immortal), his dad locked him in the basement and pulled his teeth and claws out with pliers every time they grew back in, because everyone was scared of his mutant abilities. Hey! Actual character depth and a small amount of sympathy! Wow! We also learn OMG SPOILER that Mystique and he had a son that he doesn't know about (he thought the spy he knew in the Cold War was dead, but she left him, faking her death, after she got pregnant), the evil financier Graydon Creed, who's been doing some engineering of various plots in the X-books, I think. Victor Creed also, at some point, deals with enemies of his own. Not that I remember much of that.

By the end of the two miniseries, because of the fallout of the Weapon X storyline, IIRC, he's slowly falling apart psychologically himself. Well, even more than usual. Unstable memory implants will do that to you. He knows he can't put himself back together. But he knows that that Professor Xavier *can* put him back together. So Creed engineers his own capture. I don't remember how. I don't think he just surrendered himself, but he may have placed himself in a situation where the X-team would capture him.

Professor X, of course, isn't willing to put Creed down like the rabid dog he is, and imprisons him down in the basement of the X-mansion and applies talk therapy for six months.

Boom Boom, a young X-person, is strangely drawn to Creed, and goes down to talk to him a lot.

meganbmoore points out that this development is kind of stupid, because he is a known terrorist and mass murderer who's killed, or attempted to kill, many of her friends. But that whole MASS MURDER thing aside, there's a little bit of interesting stuff there, as he seems to develop a sort of grudging friendship with her and we don't know if he means it or if he's playing her. He also shows signs of rehabilitation. The X-team members are all thoroughly convinced he's playing her and faking the rehab and stage an intervention with her. That doesn't work too well, and shortly after that ... he escapes.

I don't remember the details of the escape except that, after engineering his own capture and therapy, he suddenly decides (well, a new writer suddenly decides) that he's not interested in that after all, and escapes, taking Boom Boom as a hostage. Er, I think he takes her as a hostage. I may be getting that part from a fanfic I read about that time.

The X-team give chase. Professor X laments that he couldn't affect Sabretooth at all during his time there. To which I reply: dude! Sabes took close on TWO HUNDRED YEARS to get that fucked up and you are unhappy that a mere six months doesn't work to un-fuck him? HUBRIS INDEED.

The X-team head out after him, hunting him down over an issue or two, through his network of safe houses. They eventually corner him and beat on him a lot. And then comes the point at which I lost all faith in the X-books, although it took me a few more months to finally stop buying comics. Sabretooth is beaten. He's on the ground, exhausted, unable to move. Jean Grey hover above him, angry. She telekinetically BREAKS HIS LEGS. For NO REASON other than she's angry and has lost it. Fair enough. But then...

...NOBODY CALLS HER ON IT. EVERYONE ACCEPTS THAT THIS IS REASONABLE BEHAVIOR. NOBODY SAYS AT ANY POINT THEN OR AFTEWARD, "HEY. MAYBE TORTURING YOUR ENEMIES WHEN THEY'RE UNABLE TO ESCAPE IS SOMETHING THAT, SAY, BAD GUYS DO. MAYBE WE SHOULD HOLD OURSELVES TO A HIGHER STANDARD THAN THAT."

That ... was a huge piss-me-off moment there. A great chance to do something good, to have nominally good characters confront their bad sides, to have them try to work out what it means to be a good guy, to figure out where the line between Them and Us is, the nature of control and how to handle it, and ... NOBODY FUCKING CALLED HER ON IT. I mean, isn't that the whole MISSION behind Professor X's school and superhero team?! To define the good guys and to be them?

Apparently torture is OK if it's a good guy doing it! She was really angry! And he was a bad guy, after all!

If anyone wants to FIX IT WITH FANFIC, here is a REALLY GOOD POINT TO DO THAT. ~~Plz to be including gratuitous Wolverine, only not in that stupid yellow and brown spandex.~~

...

Sabes doesn't die, of course. He's too popular a bad guy for that. The next story arc picks up with Sabes as part of a good team, only controlled by an electronic collar that will ~~blow and decapitate him~~ give him excruciating pain to the point where he falls unconscious if he makes one wrong move. Come to think of it, I think maybe one of his miniseries took place at this point - he manages to hunt down two old enemies of his and gets the means to get rid of the collar. But I'd lost interest in the X-books by that point, and when Magneto pulled the adamantium out of Wolverine's bones, I said the hell with it and stopped reading all comics except Hellblazer.

And now it is WAY TOO LATE and I need to GO THE HELL TO BED. Will deal with comments in the morning.

--
* If you are unaware, do not, under any circumstances, ask an obsessive comic book geek to explain the Summers family tree to you.

myrialux did so once, years ago, and recalls a restaurant table being ENTIRELY COVERED with napkins on which various branches of the tree had been sketched.

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Though I've not read these comics (I saw the cartoons first and was utterly unaware that comics for them existed), I agree utterly with your rantiest moment.

I have a similar problem with the Harry Potter books in which Hermione first sends Umbridge to her death and then casts a memory spell on her own parents and sends them to Australia. Engineering possible deaths and forcibly removing someone else's ability to decide their own life are not the actions of a hero imo. And no one calls her on it.

On a side note, if you want a book series that deals wonderfully with what it means to be good or evil, check out the Lemony Snicket books. The first few follow a pattern, but keep reading. Later on the characters are forced into situations in which they do or feel they need to do things that they'd earlier condemned in the bad people and they actually try to figure out what that means. Basically, the first few books set up very clear lines of what is good and what is not, and then the rest of the books screw that up entirely until the characters have to decide for themselves.

And no one calls her on it.

Exactly. I mean, if the plot needs that to happen to progress, then you have to follow through with the consequences. If it threatens to take over the book, then you have the character deal with the consequences in a quiet manner. But you deal with them.

I think trying to explain the Summers family tree is like trying to explain the relationship network in Marmalade Boy...to a power of ten.

Or the plot of X: 1999.

And I suspect that the explanation:

1) Did not include the not-quite-confirmed-in-comics-but-stated-elsewhere Son of D'Ken and Katherine (sometimes Anne) Summers, who was an oft-brainwashed amnesiac assassin?

2) Did this before they decided that there was a missing team of X-Men between the originals and the Claremont relaunch, one of whom was the younger brother of Cyclops and Havoc. Katherine (sometimes Anne) was pregnant when Ma and Pa Summers were abducted by aliens and D'Ken took the fetus out aged it, and turned it into a slave until he escaped and fled to Earth (much like his possible-but-probably-written-out-of-continuity-now half-brother) conveniently aged to being almost his older brothers' age. He went evil and I think he's running the Shi'at empire these days.

OMG I AM SO SORRY BUT IT'S LIKE A DISEASE AND I DON'T EVEN REALLY READ THE X-BOOKS ANYMORE BUT IT'S ALMOST AN OSMOSIS THING!!!

This is why Maddie went insane. And Jean played dead for years. And Domino never married Cable. And Lorna only wanted to marry Havoc when she was insane.

1) Isn't Wolverine's oft-brainwashed amnesiac assassin son named Daken? That is NOT CONFUSING AT ALL.

2) Wait wait is that the guy Stryfe or whatever who is like the evil!AU!clone of Cable? Because he and Deadpool are basically MAKING OUT in current(?!) future AU continuity and it is the best fanfic place ever.

P.S. OH MAN is

telophase gonna like Deadpool, and/or want to punch him in the face a lot. Because yeah, often it's like, fuck you Wade Wilson, you are a loathsome excuse for a human being, but you don't claim moral superiority when you're breaking people's legs.

Edited 2009-05-08 11:18 (UTC)

Re: your P.S. GOOD.

1) Wait, Daken is brainwashed? I did not know that. I have mild interest in him and MOST of Wolverine: Origins waiting to be read because of my curiosity. But this guy is Adam X/X-Treme from the 90s. (Who, I confess, was EXACTLY MY TYPE when I was a teenager, and so, like Shatterstar, I REMAIN VERY FOND OF AND I REFUSED TO BE JUDGED FOR THAT!!)

2) NO! That is an accurate description of Stryfe, but this is someone else! I...uhm...totally forget his name, but he's an Ed Brubaker creation who first appeared in X-Men: Genesis. I kind of like him which, combined with Daken, apparently means that I have a very unfortunate tendency to like evil X-Relatives. Also, is it Stryfe, or Nate Grey, Scott and Jean's AU cloned son who was knocking boots with Maddie, who is Jean's clone.

re: P.S.: Maybe the total insanity will help?

1. I think Daken is brainwashed but A-OK about being brainwashed? or maybe he is just a big zealot? I forget. All I know about him comes from random "As you know, Bob" infodumps and recent-ish stuff in Wolverine Origins, and I promptly quit reading that after it finished the Deadpool guest stint. (Which was beautiful, despite how much the hallucinations-and-MPD!Deadpool writing annoys me. "You want revenge! How much revenge, Logan? All of the revenge? You ****ing baby.")

2. TOO MANY SUMMERSPAWN. Seriously, their genetic material is not that valuable! I don't know who you're talking about still but I probably shouldn't think about it anymore for my brain's safety. And I completely forgot about Nate Grey except that he was even more Jesus than Cable or something. Anyway, it is definitely Stryfe who Deadpool is/was (was in the AU future's past, but is no longer in the AU future's present) shacking up with.

The insanity and general mental instability does help! Though there are still times when I'm all, "So you are crazy, this is not a license to be a jerk, FYI."

The explanation was made during the mid-90s, probably about 1995/1996. Make of it what you will.

POSSIBLY included the amnesiac oft-brainwashed alien assassin, then.

And probably Nate Grey.

Apropos of almost nothing, Age of Apocalypse is pretty much one of the awesomest things in the history of time.

It is. Oh, how it is. Though I think I'm the only person ever to like Gambit and the X-Ternals best, even if it did leave my teen self shipping Jubilee/Sunspot for a while, which is extremely inappropriate given what was going on with him in the MU proper at the time. (Even though rereads have informed me that my adult self only gets a small possibility of that reading, which may just be a leftover of the teen reading.)

YES GAMBIT OMG.

*cough*

I always thought that (aside from Rogue) Gambit had the best 'OMG MUST NOT BECOME THAT EVIL EVEN THOUGH I WILL FUCK WITH YOU FOR NO REASON ANYWAY' character.

You are not the only one.

Equally, never ask Eb the relatively question "So who is this Green Lantern dude anyway?"

The answer will swallow your soul.

The proper response is "Which Green Lantern?" If that's not enough of a warning that you're in for a long ride, then you deserve what you get. Likewise with the Flash, Green Arrow, Blue Beetle, Robin, and in recent years, Wonder Woman and Superman.

I'm sorry, I wasn't going to respond at all, but I felt this comment required the gratuitous use of a Ted Kord userpic.

Also, I picked up Blackest Night from Free Comic Book Day and all I can say to the 'rainbow Corps' is bzuh? o.O

All due love&respect to Ted, yet I am going to miss my adorkable Latino Ted-fanboy Jaime like I miss grade-school recess. Stop screwin' with the Beetles, DC!

You remind me of my deep and desperate desire for an icon of Diana, Hippolyta and Artemis.

*is the only comic book fan ever who just kinda ignores the GLs except for Guy Gardner*

I was an innocent! I didn't know the full ramifications of what I was asking until it was too late. :P

...the Summers family tree...

Initial thought: Buffy Summers? Whut?
Second thought: "Aha! *Scott* Summers!

Third and Awesome thought: What if it's the same Summers family?

Edited 2009-05-08 08:23 (UTC)

In another dimension-timestream IT IS. Seriously, there are so many now-impossible branches of the Summers family tree...

*geek brain explodes*

Me being me and having Jubilee/Generation X blinders when it comes to X-stuff, the moment I remember most about Sabretooth's captivity is the issue where Jubilee works up the nerve to to him his dinner (which doesn't sound like much until you consider it's a 14-year-old taking dinner to a mass murderer who'd love to terrorize/hurt/kill/use her entrails to decorate the Christmas tree just to stick it to her then-absentee father figure, something that was confirmed to still be an interest of his while he was reforming) and the Phalanx Covenant where he, Banshee, Emma Frost and Jubilee were trying to save Generation X from the phalanx. (ANYONE READING THIS COMMENT CANNOT ASK ABOUT THE PHALANX OR I'LL DERAIL AGAIN!!)

I remember that the part that interested me most was how X-People would put on the control band so they could use the collar to make him be a good boy (though my favorite bit there is when he's trying to intimidate Kitty Pryde and she sticks her arm through her head and tells him that if she soldifies it, she'll lose an arm, but he'll be dead) but I don't think that was ever really fully explored in terms of morality and consequences. (Though Fabian Nicieza took the basic idea and ran with it-granted, a bit too far-in Thunderbolts a couple years later.)

I remember being really annoyed by the Jean thing too, though that's (it's ok if the GOOD GUY does it) is something I've seen a lot in comics, even to the point of Captain America in the Ultimate Universe punching out a beaten man because he was in a bad mood. (Come to think of it, Joss Whedon, a comic book geek, had a tendency to do this too, especially with Willow and Xander, though it was more often behavior than physical.)

Regarding the comic book you mentioned: That was also one of my first comics (Uncanny X-Men #297, thank you very much) and the big event is the event that made the Summer Family Tree explode with "Either the mercenary who made your bright young things(the New Mutants) Angry And Violent is your son, or the evil scion of Apocalypse who shot your mentor is your so, and the other is a clone. Oh, and they're both twice your age." Jubilee's issue was that Xavier had the chance to walk again for a little while and was too busy angsting to enjoy it.

I think overall I ended up losing patience with Marvel* superhero comics because this was typical of what they did: they'd start to flirt with questions of morality and consequences, but then suddenly pull away, saying "We can't answer that! WE NEED MOAR BOOM!" It's probably why I loved Hellblazer and The Maxx so much: John Constantine was never allowed not to deal with the consequences of his actions, even down to his chain-smoking, and the things he did to get out of whatever current scrape he was in would come back to haunt him later and he damn well knew it but did them anyway because there was no other option. And The Maxx's short run was all about consequences and morality and whose job it really was to take care of someone else's problems.

By all rights I should be a total Watchmen fan because of this tendency, but I started reading comics in a post-Watchmen world, and thus the particular ways Watchmen deconstructed superheroes had already been incorporated (albeit shallowly) into comics of the time - it was only 5 or so years after Watchmen had been released, IIRC - so the themes weren't new to me at the time in quite the same way that they were in Hellblazer and The Maxx. (ETA: Plus, plz to be remembering that I am a character person first and foremost, and none of the Watchmen characters were people I could get into. Obviously, it's part of the way the story is told that none of them can be characters I can get into, barring Rorschach in a minor way, but it still functions to keep me from fully becoming a fan, even in the more academic sense of the term.)

* Never read many DC superhero comics.

Edited 2009-05-08 15:16 (UTC)

I could never really get into The Maxx because there was too much squick factor, but yeah, that makes sense. And total word on Hellblazer (and another reason the Constantine movie was about some other supernatural guy named John Constantine).

One of the (many) ways Marvel irritates me is encompassed in your rant, but only as a side part.

Ooh goody! We get to seriously injure/punish someone, to the point where a normal person would be permanently disabled and there would be serious long-term consequences, but let's only do that to the person who has a "healing factor" so it won't really have any consequences whatsoever! It'll be fun!

Combined with people telling me "Look, Professor X is disabled! He has a wheelchair!" Yeah. It flies. Gosh, well, that tells the reality of trying to find a place to live when half the apartment buildings in the city are walk-ups, right? I totally feel that represents the number of businesses we simply can't get into. Yup! PWD are totally represented in comics!

But Anna! (they say) They're not supposed to be realistic! They're comics!

Fuck that noise. Seriously. PWD are so routinely ignored or dismissed that having Professor X (with the bonus implication that his disability is all in his head since he apparently can walk just fine when his psychic powers are suppressed) wander around without any serious consequences to his disability is just damned insulting.

At best, if I really squint, I can maybe talk about how, everywhere Scott Summers goes, he's got the damned red-eyed glasses, but that doesn't given him the fraction of the problems that being blind would.

So, they do all this horribly physically-altering stuff to people like Sabertooth and Wolverine, and then magically wipe it all away. No consequences that are truly life-altering.

But hey, it's comics. I guess me and mine don't deserve our own heroic-fantasy, right?

he apparently can walk just fine when his psychic powers are suppressed

Wait, what?

Isn't that cannon?

Oh, please tell me that's cannon, because otherwise I've been ranting about that for years and embarrassing myself. It's in the cartoon, at least - when they get to that weird place where everyone's powers are suppressed.

Oh, it easily could be. My brain is just threatening to explode here. Which, to be fair, comes up often when discussing Marvel canon, which regularly makes my brain hurt.

A quick trawl through parts of his Wikipedia entry doesn't say one way or the other, although apparently the original injury was physical.

But even if it's only in the cartoon, you have every right to your rants. Marvel approves the cartoon after all, as far as I know. :)

I think it's canon that comes and goes, and a relatively recent development.

Not so recent, actually - he's been in and out of that chair every few years for decades now. The canon version I think

troubleinchina was referring to is the one where he got a new cloned body thanks to the Shi'ar (this was back when he was boning their Empress) and because his paralysis was so integral to his self-concept of some such nonsense, his powers actually blocked him from being able to walk.

Or it could be the fight he had with the Shadow King back when Gambit was just being introduced where the Shadow King broke Xavier's spine (on the astral plane IIRC) and that became a permanent injury.

Technically, I tend to think of anything in the X-books since the late 90s (when I started drifting away) as being relatively recent. But I think Lilandra putting him in a cloned body is what I was thinking of, and that I was didsplacing it by about 10 years. (I think that's also a "totally didn't happen" thing most of the time or something. Not that that makes it any better.)

At least I didn't make it up in my head. Although I kinda wish I had. *sigh*
Thanks for clarifying!

I can't comment on most of this since I had stopped following the comics before the point where you started, but speaking of Children of Mystique, at some point Nightcrawler was Mystique's son. (He didn't know that because he was raised by circus acrobats.)

What's most interesting about this was that Mystique was his father. I forget who his mother was.

I remembered that Nightcrawler was her son, but didn't remember the father bit. XD

Like Cartman on South Park!

Destiny was supposed to be his mother at that point.

Yeah, they tried to do something interesting there but then decided he had to be the Big Baddy after all. I think he also tore Psylocke apart on his way out.

But what really got me frothing was The Trial of Gambit, where we find out that Gambit was part of some bad things involving the Marauders in that he recruited them but had no idea they were being hired for the Morlock Massacre. Like he was the first X-Man tricked into helping evil by a supervillain. In punishment for this crime (and I guess for not confessing all this himself), Rogue saves him from being crushed by a giant building but leaves him to die, half-naked, in Antarctica. Because the building would have killed him too quickly? Even better, the X-Men--Angel, Psylocke, Beast, Joseph, Maggott, and Trish Tilby--let her. We don't get to see what she had to say when she caught back up to them alone, but whatever because they leave him to die. When they get home and meet up with the others, nobody forms a search party or asks them if they lost their damned minds.

And the Marvel writers were astounded that fans were upset not just because some of us liked Gambit but also because heroes don't do that. It's a mean, sadistic, and cowardly form of murder. If the series had stared this hard in the face, it might have been one thing, but instead the audience is supposed to see all this as perfectly fine.

A long time after we saw that Gambit saved himself after a lot of suffering, and Rogue is given the excuse that she gave him that diatribe and left him to die because she was working off his own death wish. Lame, Marvel.

Sheesh. Let's not worry about good writing! All the fanboys want is the next big fight!

Whyyyyyyy does that strike me as behavior so typical of the X-Men in general and Miss American Universe Jean in particular. Sigh.

I run across too much of the Old School POV of "heroic = any action performed by a (super)hero" (see re: superdickery.com) mooshed with the New-er School '80s-'90s POV of "grim and hardcore = more realistic = MORE BETTER," leading to this incomprehensible values dissonance. I can maybe see some handwaving of personal blame for superhero/villain mass destruction (like that committed by, oh, JEAN/PHOENIX, for instance)--even though it's still a questionable and easily screwed up handwaving to do--because that's not a morality issue that's at all common or even able to be atoned for on a personal level. You're a metahuman and you blow up a planet? Hey, I don't know, maybe you had your reasons! Maybe you are Inigo Montoya and that planet killed your father. But you break someone's legs or leave them to die because you're having a bad day, and you're supposed to be a sane and morally sound person? Okay!

I think I missed this whole bout with Sabretooth in one of my boycotts of the X-books. Probably the one inspired by the time Gambit got abandoned to die in Antarctica, as mentioned elsewhere in this post, because he accidentally did something particularly evil a long time ago, and no one else on the X-Men has done anything bad ever and if they had they'd surely gotten properly punished for it. Oh, superhero comics! But I have liked Sabretooth in the occasional spurts of him I see, largely because he is one of the few villains allowed to go LOLOL CRY MOAR at Wolverine's Angst without the narrative having to always whip him good for it because how dare he. And one of the random Exiles trades I read had AU!Sabretooth as a kindly orphan-raising AU Iruka with love and asskicking for all.

One thing I did appreciate about movie!Victor Creed is that it was presented as perfectly understandable that Creed could be a misanthropic psycho who enjoys killing AND someone with affection for and protectiveness toward his little brother Jimmy.

There should be a word meaning "good" or "enjoyable," mostly applicable to superhero comic books and fandom TV, that really means "good/enjoyable with the built-in understanding that this expectation of quality only covers a limited time/situation and the right is fully reserved to hate the good/enjoyable thing later until it becomes good/enjoyable again if it ever does."

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So. The Sabretooth rant.

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