cammeh | Wherein Cam Talks Too Much About X-Men: First Class

So. My obsession with X-Men: First Class is reaching critical levels. I thought that the giddy infatuation would fade after a week or so (as so often happens for me with shiny new (sort of) fandoms), but it's been two weeks now and it's only getting worse. D:

I honestly expected next to nothing from this movie. While I liked X1 and X2 a lot, I was never in love with them, and Last Stand and Wolverine were just—I don't even want to remember them, okay, and then the trailers and clips for First Class were horrendous, and out of everyone in the X-franchise I've never even been all that interested in Professor X and Magneto. So I basically just saw this because I randomly had time to kill and I was already by the movie theater.

AND THEN IT WAS LIKE GETTING HIT IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD BY A TWO-BY-FOUR, AND I HAVE YET TO SHAKE THE LITTLE STARS AND TWEETY-BIRDS OUT OF MY EYES. ♥_♥ I CAN'T EVEN REGRET IT, GAWD.

It's a wonderful comic book movie.

I mean, it's not like there aren't plenty of flaws, I'm not saying that. There are race and gender issues, some of which are on purpose because it's set in the 60's, and others which could have been avoided. There are some pacing issues, the woman playing Emma Frost is...not good, I found it hard at times to see Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw instead of, y'know, Kevin Bacon, the supporting characters could have used more development though on the whole they were well done, there were some huge continuity breaks (both in diverging from the comics and also diverging from the other movies, none of which I minded because whatev, whatev, I conceptualize it as a reboot and anything that retcons X3 gets my okay), and they try to cram a lot of events into a pretty short time frame. As much as I loved the ending, as effective as it was for ripping out my heart and stomping it into tiny bitty pieces, as painfully, horribly perfect a way it was to (SPOILERS:) [paralyze Charles], the development of Charles and Erik's friendship and their conflicts and clashes and eventual break (along with Raven's shift) is something that probably should have spanned years in canon time, and thus would have been better handled over multiple movies.

ALL THAT BEING SAID, now that I'm through with my objective-viewer caveats, lol—I loved this movie pretty damn unreservedly. Like. I came out of the theater already making grabby-hands for FIC and FANDOM and META and SQUEE and HEART-EYES, cackled madly when I discovered there was already a kinkmeme and people writing amazing fills, and I've barely surfaced for air since. I have about 40 different tabs open at the moment, and almost all of them are First Class related. ...Yup. 8|a

Why the obsession, you ask? What is the draw? Well, like I said, it's a great comic book movie. The scale is epic, the musical score is epic, the effects—though somewhat rushed in places by the production schedule—worked great for me (with a few exceptions), the plot was pretty interesting and neither convoluted nor particularly dumbed-down, the Holocaust scenes were chilling and fairly accurate, the mix of BADASS and humor and drama and angst was well-balanced, the way powers were downplayed so that they became a natural part of the characters and the world allowed for the EPIC moments to pop even more than in some of the other movies where every single instance of power-usage was played up for the 'ooooo! aaaaa!' factor, the way it paralleled minority issues and echoed the Civil Rights movement and toyed with self-acceptance and pride versus hiding and assimilating, and with discrimination and hate and fear, and basically addressed a whole host of ideological issues that actually had roots and believable depth and thus allowed you to get invested and understand both sides—all that was wonderful.

….

And.

More.

Importantly.

CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK CHARLES AND ERIK AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@_@

Like.

I can't even.

They were amazing. The movie is about them, make no mistake, the whole thing hinges on their chemistry and connection and the development of their friendship and the believability of their importance to each other, and it. Is. Beautiful. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender knocked it out of the fucking park—in all honesty they, as actors, are way too good for this kind of herpaderp comic-book-blockbuster genre, but that's wonderful, because just as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan elevated the other X movies through their quality, McAvoy and Fassbender elevated First Class through the goddamn roof. Like. In interviews they clearly knew it was a la-dee-da blockbuster and that a great deal of why they took the parts was because they wanted to work with each other, they wanted to work with this specific director, and hey, they were prepared to have a great deal of fun making the movies...But they played it beautifully straight, owned the roles, gave them so much heart and life and sat around reworking the script for days because adding a bonding scene here would make the progression of the relationship more real, and oh, oh, it worked.

I don't even usually ship things on first view; unless it's an explicitly romantic, well-done relationship my shipping goggles don't come into play until I've engaged the canon more closely and wandered around through the fandom twanging my fingernail against other people's opinions and seeing which ones resonate for me. For example, with two of my strongest ships, Zoro/Sanji from One Piece and Tim/Kon from DCU, I didn't come out of reading their comics shipping it, much less actually seeing it in the canon. The love for them together came out of an exploration of dynamics that appealed to me.

With Charles and Erik? I was sitting in the theater with my heart in my throat going OH GOD, KISS HIM YOU FOOL! KISS! HIM! and for a moment actually thinking he would.

THAT NEVER HAPPENS TO ME.

And I'm not the only one! I keep running across endless accounts from fans about their friends/parents/brothers/boyfriends who never see slash in anything coming out of that movie either, like, 'oh yeah, those two were in love', or even shipping it and vigorously defending the pairing's validity. And one of the reasons it appeals to me, when, for example, the recent Sherlock Holmes movie didn't particularly make me ship Holmes/Watson despite being slashy as hell, was that it wasn't something that was played for laughs. It wasn't this sly, overplayed, nudge-nudge-wink-wink nod to fangirls or whatever that the actors and directors and everyone can have a field day with but never actual intend to go anywhere with it. It was just this. Amazingly obvious, intense, well-acted and believable connection and mutual fascination and draw between two characters almost before they even properly meet, what with Charles's telepathy and how he sensed Erik like a bolt out of the blue. I reacted to it as if it were an actualfax canonic romantic tragedy playing out on the screen, and it could have been.

When the actor who plays Charles Xavier says things like: “It's kind of a love story, like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which, really, was a love story between two men. This is the first time in their lives they’ve met someone who is an equal of sorts, someone who understands them and can connect and push them too. Especially Charles, he’s fascinated with Erik and his potential. For Erik, Charles is the first person he’s trusted to really tell about his past and the first person to understand the horrible things he’s been through.” I can't even. I have no defense jesus christ, I'm done. That kind of dynamic, of strong equals who push each other in the midst of mutual fascination and admiration and conflict, that is my Kryptonite, my absolute Achilles heel when it comes to shipping, and these two hit it harder than anything. I can ship other dynamics, but this one utterly slays me.

And as much as I can rhapsodize about these two and their dynamic as a pair, they're equally fascinating as individuals. I love how sympathetic Erik is even as he's misguided, I love his intensity, his hypocrisy and lack of apology, his experience and his pain and his conviction, his determination and lack of hesitation or doubt and his protectiveness and his vision for the world and his ruthlessness in pursuing it and how he's so much more than he believes himself to be and the way it's like he cracks open and spills over his own edges when Charles gets him to laugh. I love Charles's unrelenting optimism and the way he empathizes hopelessly and sees the good in everyone and wants to help them and better the world, I love that at the same time as all that he's also clearly so much younger and more imperfect than the Professor Xavier that we usually see, a little fast and loose with the ethics of mindreading, a dork and an absolutely rubbish flirt, kind of harmfully, sometimes willfully blind towards people and ideas in some cases, which is so ironic with a telepath; I love his enthusiasm and his generosity and his loneliness and his hair. :D I love how they interact with the kids and with outsiders and with each other. I love the chess.

It's just ridiculous, okay. I want to write them all the words ever, but then I get impossibly sidetracked reading the thousands and thousands of beautiful words that other people are already writing for them. (OH GOD I CAN'T DO THEM JUSTICE.) There are so many ideas, so many fics I would love to write, but all my musings inevitably turn prompts toward epic length, and pssshhhh I have no idea how to sustain something like that.

I am crushed by the unbelievable amount of gorgeous, heartrending angst being written—it's hard to escape angst with these two, really—and I love it, but fffffff I'm a happy-ending girl at heart, really. D: MOAR AUs and FIX-IT FIC, PLZ. Although there are a healthy number of those as well, some of them amazingly good. I want to see Scott and Jean and Storm incorporated into the 'verse, I want to see Erik and Charles found Genosha, I want them to conquer the world, I want to see Erik stay at the school and help Charles teach and oversee the advent of a new species, I want so many things. And I already have so many epic WIPs tracked on the kinkmemes, it's idiotic. *__*

While I've been waffling about wishing I could just sit down and write endless fic for them and instead despairing at my own inadequacy, I've also been poking about dear_mun. Because trying to get a handle on the characters via RP is easier than just jumping in off the deep end, maybe. Except not, and wow there are some really good people floating about already, SO INTIMIDATING, and unlike in fic where you can orchestrate things yourself, with RP you have to get the dynamic down with another person, and that's hard to do when there's so much room for personal interpretation in the canon, and endless assumptions to be made about what kinds of things went on off-screen, during downtime, etc. And also with a telepath in the mix. 8|a

I also feel like I need to set down an entire headcanon to get a firm grasp on how to play people who really have so little screentime, so it's hard to play without doing so, even if just derping about is easy enough to do. Like. How long did Shaw have Erik, really? When and how did he escape? What did he do in the intervening years, was it all Nazi hunting? Was he a soldier? Where did he go, who are the people he met? And with Charles, did his stepfather and Cain exist in this 'verse? How did Raven fit in as they were growing up? What was the development of his powers like, how did he get such good control? There are so many gaps to fill, and even though they have decades of comics canon, I'm not really comfortable pulling from it wholesale.

Not to mention I'm not looking to jump into any actual multifandom games with a new character. Too much to deal with, I think. (Although *sob*, why is

luceti

….This~ entry~ is~ too~ long~~~ This is why I update so rarely, I always ramble for hours. 8|a And I have like five other things I wanted to ramble about, like the new Young Justice episode, and the DCU reboot, and Zoro and Reepicheep and dropping from Luceti, and my ridiculous crush on James McAvoy (WHYYY IS HE SO CHARMING, his features shouldn't even go together particularly well in theory, but then he walks around all smiling and saying words and breathing air and I am like hnnnnng and then go watch three of his movies in 24 hours), and etc. etc. etc.

...S-some other time for all that, I guess. orz

PS - Hi everybody from the

erik_charles Friending Meme! *waves frantically* Welcome!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Limited Release
Summary: Epic modern AU loosely based on White Collar; Erik is a metallurge FBI agent with a grudge, Charles is kind of a stalker but still awesome and oh also btw an omega level telepath and the most famous and well-regarded advocate for mutant rights in the world, Raven is part of Erik's team, Hank is a fanboy, and Alex is a criminal consultant. Extremely plotty, lots of great world-building, hilariously silly bits mixed with heart-breaking bits, characterization and writing exploding with virve all over the place; one of my favorites. 45/? parts, very epic length, still very much WIP

and these, from atoms
Prompt: “Essentially, there's a severe lack of wheelchair for some reason or another, and someone has to carry Charles somewhere. Theoretically, Erik/Charles would be great, but it's kind of hard to manage that, what with how they've split apart.”

I don't even fucking know how the author turned this little prompt into this amazing, extremely plotty and original, tense, incredibly well-characterized, brilliant fic that takes place numerous years post-movie, but they did, AND I LOVE THEM FOR IT. \o/ 23/? parts, epic-length WIP, one of the ones I wait on with baited breath *_*

make your wars
Summary: The one where they’re perfectly normal men in the twenty-first century. Except for where they aren’t. Gennish, pre-Charles/Erik. Warnings: Mentions of war, child abuse, homosexuality, murder and hints of PTSD. ~3,000 words

and the sequel to the above: and quietly keep walking
Summary: Erik abhors silence and Charles is nothing if not noise. Modern day AU, no powers. ~4,800 words; I'm really hoping the author writes more in this series, I think it might be my favorite modern!AU because it captures who they would be and who they would be with each other so well. *_*

world enough and time
Summary: Charles Xavier in the days, weeks, months after the beach. ~2,100 words

all the fears you left behind
Summary: "Erik has had one goal. He’s spent his life in relentless pursuit of it and has given almost no thought to what would come after he achieves it." ie The one with the really awesome play on the gun scene. ~2,200 words

...I'm done again. 8Da

IT ONLY TOOK YOU TWO HOURS AND TWENTY MINUTES TO READ ALL THAT?!

What are you, some kind of--of--reading machine? /o/ \o\ /o/

SOMETHING LIKE THAT. I EVEN WENT TO THE SHOP HALFWAY THROUGH!

Also, I am hooked on both of those WIPs. B| Hurry up and make them update faster, Cam. (You can totally do that, right.)

Cam how did you do that

My god, woman! DO YOU HAVE SUPERSPEED.

...Apparently my mutant power is causing updates to appear! \8D/ Or maybe they appear when other people call on me, since it's never worked before. 8|a ...OH WELL /pounces on updates yaaaaaaaay /rolls in updates whoooooo

/will be back with more recs momentarily >_>a

Snakes and Ladders Are Banned In Here
Summary: Set post movie. They never meet in public; not for fear of getting caught, but because they’re too aware of innocent bystanders. ~4,000 words

What The Knife Wants
Summary: Erik and Charles each keep one thing secret from the other. ~1,300 words of ouch. ;;

i guess i should say thanks or some shit
Summary: believe it or not, charles has a well-thought-out moral philosophy. he doesn’t follow it. but he has thought it out.
alternatively: charles and erik douche it up in amsterdam. Contains very dubious morality. ~18,000 words

Synthesis (Scenes from an AU)
Summary: Synthesis is a dynamic process. Or, scenes from the AU where Charles and Erik have sex, get married, become best friends, and run the school together.
Notes: Warnings for the Holocaust, implicit references to torture and child abuse, institutional misogyny, and potential dub-con situations, depending on how you interpret Erik/Charles. This is not "fix-it" fic; this is another possible road. Contains various other pairings in the background. ~15,200 words

your head caught in a waking dream
Prompt: “Soon after Charles meets Raven, his parents/guardians/whatever find out he is hearing voices and have him taken to a mental institution. Charles is fine when he goes in, but being surrounded by people with mental illness is rough for a telepath. By the time Raven manages to breaks him out, Charles is far from fine. I want telepathic Charles in complete denial of his powers because he is so certain it's all in his head, and Raven trying to help him with varying degrees of success. bonuses for: Raven shifting to visit Charles in the hospital (especially if it confuses Charles even more and makes things worse); Erik somehow helping break Charles out; RAVEN BEING AWESOME
Currently ~17,500 words, 11 parts, and still WIP. Warnings for...I don't know what to call it. What happens when you stick a sane telepathic child in an insane asylum and don't believe him when he says he's sane, and by the time you break him out he's genuinely lost it (it being his mind and any control over his powers), and Erik is still attracted to him against his will. I love this fic a lot, it's a really amazing take on the prompt, fantastic writing and characterization. /wants mooooar *_*

And now LJ is working and I am finished with this wonderful list ;A;

Wherein Cam Talks Too Much About X-Men: First Class

TAKE THIS! B|||

/TOOK IT ALL

@_@ /wakes up to this

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,...and then there were new releases 10 minutes later

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dkljsfdsf HERE

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