Ineffable!

It’s Fic Back Friday! And in this occasion I’d like to go back to another fandom I haven’t been active with in a while (not a fan of what they’re doing with the franchise recently, I’m afraid) let’s go for an X-Men fic! :D

The welfare of a child by oddegg (2116 words)

Chapters: 1/1

Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Characters: Sean Cassidy, Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Raven, Hank McCoy, Alex Summers

Additional Tags: Angst, Childhood, Neglect

Summary:

Written for the 1stclass-kink meme prompt: Charles gets turned into a kid/baby. While the team scrabble to work out how to put him right they try to look after him. Turns out, Charles doesn't need much looking after. If he's a baby, he never cries. If he's a little kid, he's really self-sufficient.

Everyone's charmed/amused by this except one person (Sean) who is really unnerved by this. All babies cry. Kids that age are not that independent - they're just not. Unless they're used to nothing happening when they cry/used to fending for themselves.

Reccer’s note:

I liked this fic when I first read it, not just because it was sort of exploring the loneliness of Charles’ life despite his (many) privilege(s) but also because it gave Sean a lot of depth that the movie didn’t. sure, I liked his goofy character in First Class, but even the most ridiculous person has something else going on behind that, and it was nice to see a fic try t take a dig at it at a time when we still thought the new X-Men franchise would try and do something with its new-to-the-big-screen mutants.

This is an archive of said liveblog, with all my tumblr posts put into one (long) DW instance. All times are set on Bangkok time, because that’s what I’m using at the time of crossposting and I don’t want to go through the effort of converting the time, even though I liveblogged this thing while in France, probably around midnight ish.

3:43am (Bangkok Time)

Aaaaand we’re on for DOFP!

Let’s hope I don’t take 3+ hours to watch this one :P

There’s the Hanukka flashback I was talking about earlier. It’s still sad that Erik’s entire powers, ideals and being are shaped by his judaism yet the franchise doesn’t acknowledge it unless it feels forced to do it.

Also on a different note, I’m only now noticing that in this scene, Charles is functionally Erik’s love interest. Like, shipping goggles aside, what he’s doing there is exactl the kind of emotional labor and validation that female characters often end up providing to their love interests in movies (I reblogged a post recently about how Natasha did this for Bruce in Age of Ultron) and in some tengential ways, he continues to do that through the franchise.

(I don’t know about the comics, really, but in both movie trilogies, Charles is Erik’s main redeeming element, used even above the discussion and understanding of the trauma he went through)

“Honestly Charles, I don’t know how you survived living in such hardship”

“Well it was a hardship suffered by me”

I remember when the movie first came out, there were interpretations of this saying that maybe this was a way to hint at a more difficult past for Charles, and while I did kind of adhere to that for a long time (and you can make a case for telepathy being an inherently isolating experience no matter the wealth or company you have) right now I’m thinking it’s more a case of Raven feeling like she has to be thankful for what she found in Westchester.

Like, despite all of Charles’ flaws (and he has a lot of them), he did still find a thief in his kitchen and welcomed her as a sister when he had zero obligation to (presumably, there was mental manipulation involved, which probably explains why the movie didn’t want to dwell on that too much) and no matter his attitude about that later on, if we assume that Raven’s pre-Charles backstory is the same as RoMystique’s (ie. her parents tried to drown her and she ran) she would have been extremely aware of how much of a godsend that was, and I doubt it’s gone away with time.

Listen, I know there were countless gifs of Erik’s face in proto-cerebro with the caption “Perfection” but honestly this must be such an ambivalent moment for him–on the one hand it’s the first time he’s connecting with mutants and that’s such an important thing: he’s not alone! He has a people again!

But on the other hand he has been a lab rat before and he is, once again, in a military facility doing things he didn’t intend to do because (tengentially) of Schmidt, and that can’t possibly be a good association.