Thank God for Chris Claremont, bringing all of that back down to Earth

I can completely accept that Kurt would feel some obligation to hear out Irene and Raven. The revelation that Irene is his birth mother and that he's not related to Azazel after all should be hugely significant to him. The discovery of Irene's memories, and Raven's memories, being tampered with should give him pause. And most importantly, the fact that it clearly matters to Rogue is something that really should go a long way towards Kurt giving this a chance.

But no, he should not trust either of them. That previous issues tried to portray Kurt as excited to have a happy family in Irene and Raven, after everything they've done (to him, to his friends) was just patent lunacy from the authors.

He does not like them, but he is willing to give them a fair chance to slowly begin to earn his trust. That is a far more reasonable, emotionally honest, take on where recent events have left Kurt with regards to his evil mothers

RAVEN - "So we made a baby. Just her and me."

KURT - "But… but, you're both w--"

RAVEN - "Don't be pathetic."

[…]

KURT - "Ja… ja, I g-get that part, I'm sorry--I didn't mean to… I-it's just.. the science. The genetics. I don't--

RAVEN - "Pft. You think all I do is shift skin like a clever blue squid?"

[…]

KURT - "Raven… that's close to playing go--"

RAVEN - "Don't you dare. These creatures will pierce their ears, laser their retinas, and fit metronomes to their heart[.] But adjust a thread of RNA? Retool one molecule into another? Suddenly you're tampering with the divine. There's no magic in us, Spider-devil. There's only the machinery of monkeys."

--X-Men Blue: Origins #1 (Si Spurrier, 2023)

First off, Kurt sounds unimaginably stupid in the face of what is possibly the least shocking revelation of all time ("Kurt's parents were his real parents all along.") Raven spent centuries living as Irene's husband, and they were still together when he was born. And Raven can turn into a dolphin, so it's hardly surprising that her shape changing isn't just surface level. The only reason to ever doubt that Raven and Irene were his biological parents in the first place is that he was already told that wasn't true, by Raven. As for Raven, I presume she's meant to sound eloquently condescending, but she just comes off as stoned throughout this whole scene. No one talks like that.

More importantly, I'm sorry, but Si Spurrier just does not understand how Kurt's faith informs his character. He does not understand why the arguments that he has Kurt make are not arguments that Kurt would ever make. Kurt Wager is an educated man. He is a college graduate, he's been to seminary. He was a teacher and a resident at a STEM school. He is a citizen of the post-scarcity anarcho communist utopia island where dead people are cloned inside giant mangos and returned to life. He knows how babies are made. He would not argue against his own birth like a Christian fundamentalist trying to have an IVF clinic shut down.

I don't get how this keeps happening whenever he writes Kurt. They have Catholicism in England. They have Germans in England. But whenever it's time to invoke Kurt's religion, he writes him like, honestly, a really classist rendition of what people think small town Americans are like. Which is the wrong background entirely for this character.

Yeah, it's just not credible at all for Kurt to have not investigated the Hellfire Gala. A million people are missing or dead, Sentinels control the Earth, and mutants are being hunted in the streets. Ten weeks have gone by within the story. Is he not slightly curious about this? In all that time, he never drops in at the Limbo Embassy or the Hellfire Club to demand an explanation? He doesn't pop over to Logan or Ororo, his best friends (who are not keeping anything resembling a low profile), to see if they're okay? He doesn't even go to Krakoa and bop Xavier on the head for trying to mind control him? It's just not his problem anymore?

I get that Spurrier needs him isolated from his friends, but this is not a plausible timeline of events for it to happen

So Uncanny Spider-Man is to feature Kurt Wagner as a new Spider-Man.

That's a strikingly weird decision, but IMO it's not meritless on its own. My own reservation is that I just don't trust Si Spurrier to write Nightcrawler at this point, in any exigency. Maybe he'll do fine once he's no longer writing a philosophical treatise starring Legion, and is just writing a more traditional X-Men/Spider-Man story; but between Way of X and Legion of X, I really don't think he's shown that he has anything to say about Kurt Wagner as a particular character.

To the actual Kurt-as-Spider-Man concept, I think we really need to see how this comes about in story, to judge whether there's anything worthwhile there. I don't think Kurt has ever been part of the NYC superhero union before, but those characters do fill in for each other all the time, so it's not something totally unprecedented, asside from Nightcrawler's involvement.

We seem to be headed into a splintering arc where the core cast are all off on their own. Is Kurt perhaps on the run, and in need of a disguise? He doesn't know Spider-Man as well as Bobby or Logan, but they were at least colleagues for a while at JGS, so going to him for help could be written to work. I could see Parker being absolutely unhinged enough to suggest "i'm out of town next week, just come to New York and be me, no one will notice"

I can accept that Storm is meant to be very busy on Mars, and that events have been really hectic, so maybe it does just take this long for her to notice that Nightcrawler has been replaced by an imposter. Five years seems an excessively long time to not have a conversation with him, but that could be a rough era and not a precise timeline, and we don't know where the switch happened. So that could just be something we're asked to let slide to make the story work, and I think that's not unfair, as long as there aren't too many oddities like that.

But after she finally figures it out, confronts the brainwashed X-Men, and flattens the entire island singlehandedly, she just flies away? The entire reason she returned to Earth was to find out what happened to Kurt, and having found him, she doesn't even get to try and rescue her friend? He's been mysteriously transformed into a weird looking monster, but that happens to X-Men all the time, it shouldnt give her pause.

It's also kind of incredible that she can't just try and capture Charles right there, and take him back to Mars to try and find a way to undo all of this.

I've liked Immortal X-Men. Reading Sinister and Destiny trying to scheme against one another in all of these alternate timeliness has been fun, and I think details of what's really going on have been trickled out at a very effective pace. But as the months drag on it's developed too much of an overreliance on using Sinister acting zany to cover over the way our entire cast has been denied any level of individual agency, to service the needs of a plot that they're getting in the way of.

To an extent much of that could be excused by the framing of the story itself. Destiny can behold all futures at once and chart all possibilities leading to them, and Sinister has manufactured a series of nested timeloops to trial-and-error his way to victory. With Sinister having already charted all of his own failure points, and with Destiny covering for him as part of her own agenda, there exists a natural scenario where the X-Men lack initiative because their enemies have already removed all meaningful choices from them.

But this story itself has already drawn attention to the fact that he's too overconfident, and the people around him aren't good at behaving according to his plan. Recall that in last month's issue, he died nine times trying to assassinate Hope Summers, and when it finally worked, Kurt was just kind of standing there passively watching it all happen. If he remembers that he can teleport, the entire story ends right there.

And then in this month's issue, having successfully implemented his plan to replace Charles/Emma/Hope/Bennet, his escape requires Destiny to play along by leading the X-Men thousands of kilometers in the wrong direction, and successfully lie to Jean Grey. Why would that work? After Judgment Day, why would Jean ever trust anything Irene had to say, instead of finding her own answers? [1]

So instead of having the X-Men trapped in Sinister's carefully constructed maze, doomed puppets that can only play their scripted parts, key moments in the story are reduced down to different shades of the Idiot Plot. And I think, so far at least (with a lot of time left to go, to be fair), it all relies much to heavily on the villain's charisma. It needs the audacity of his actions to enthrall the audience, as a substitute for really setting up a plausible path into this next phase of the story.

[1] All that being said! If that turns out to be what Fall of X is about--Jean figuring out Charles has been taken over, once the timeline resets again--I'd get over a lot of reservations. She could tip off Ororo and form a resistance together to overthrow him before it's too late. A lot of mistakes are forgivable if the destination is worthwhile. Could be anything, though, really. I'm not picky

It began with a very rough start, but I think Judgment Day was on balance very good to Nightcrawler in particular. It has easily the best Kurt material to see print in a very long time.

Importantly, Kieron Gillen seems to have recognized early on that it’s Kurt--and not Jean or Colossus--who is the actual moral anchor of the X-Men and structured their part of the crossover accordingly, instead of treating his faith in humanity as an object of naivite or (worse) as an expression of zealotry.

When he’s throwing himself against Orchis over and over again, demanding that his enemies stop and listen to him, and it works, that was the first time since his solo was cancelled that I felt like we were reading about the same character as from Excalibur.

Haven’t talked as much about comics as usual because of being dead irl (lol), but I’ve been reading along with all of Judgement Day, and more than anything else I’ve just been thinking I feel so horrible for Kurt Wagner fandom.

Here was Kieron Gillen, trying his absolute hardest to make Bennet du Paris look like an utter madman, rendered totally deranged and out of touch with reality by zeal and religious fervor. We’ve got him ranting about how his very blood bears the image of the holy stigmata, and he’s laying out his belief that Erik was the anti-pope, and that he thinks Hope Summers is an incarnation of his religion’s messiah, and then he has that entire sequence of being judged by the Celestial with all of that with the devil and hellfire and his centuries dead boyfriend.

But after all of that, who still looks like the real religious zealot? Poor Nightcrawler.

I don’t like that Kurt actually became a priest at one point, but I like that he went to seminary. I knew a lot of Catholic boys who went to seminary, or who planned to do it after college, not because they were particularly religious, but because they were Catholic boys, and that was just the next step of growing up for them. 

When I was reading Kurt for the first time, that always felt real to me. It was something that made his character feel more lived.

I don’t like that he actually went on to become a priest though, as I’ve said. I feel like that level of commitment to the Church misreads his character. When he couches philosophical arguments in Catholic theology, I think it should be read as a reflection of culture and of his education, and not as dogma. 

I liked Claremont’s Legends issue. I thought it was very cute. It’s not an era we’ve really dug into before, particularly with Kurt, and it’s not without merit to have him struggling to come to terms with his new physical limitations whilst trying to prove to himself that he’s still capable of acting as Nightcrawler. This is a much stronger take on his tendency towards introspection than what a lot of modern Kurt stories accomplish.

(Also as a Shadowcat fan I’m always happy for any mention of her weird secondary mutations. Other writers, please remember that you’re not writing the Evolution character)

I would have made it a stand-alone one shot though, or maybe an anniversary issue. The reason being I think writing a canon compliant interlude strays too far from the intended purpose of the X-Men Legends brand. These stories are supposed to represent a second chance for authors, whose creative runs were cut short, to illuminate where they would have taken things had they operated under different editorial constraints.

Claremont has already had the opportunity to do that, with his X-Men Forever. We already know what he would have done if he hadn’t resigned in 1991, and it wasn’t Legends.

Unlike the previous stories in this series, this issue already fits perfectly into the existing X-Men canon as we know it. That’s not Claremont’s fault--he pitched a story to Marvel and they picked it up. But if they want the Legends project to continue indefinitely, they should avoid doing too many stories like this.

I've had a fraught relationship with a parent, and I can understand how the internal justification behind this decision might go. Some shade of “maybe it'll go differently this time” even when already sure that it wont. And Kurt is a superhero who has dedicated his life to helping others improve theirs, so the feeling that it costs nothing to be compassionate, and that it's the right thing to do besides, is likely to be a potent one in his position.

My issue is consequently not with the abstraction of him doing something nice for Raven, while knowing she probably doesn't deserve the consideration, but with the actual circumstance of the vote. Namely, it makes him look deeply foolish.

Kurt is quite aware of who Irene Adler is. He knows that whatever is about to happen, it's more than likely going to be exactly what she wants. He should be aware that his vote is therefore one with the potential to be decisive, both to the motion and to the future of his society, and not something to be thrown away just because it suits him in the moment.

I've seen some fans float the idea that maybe Kurt just wanted Destiny there, for some reason. Well, maybe, but there's not really any sign of it in this story. Hickman has set things up for other authors before in his books, so possibly he just did this for Si Spurrier without being fully informed as to why, but I think it reads more like Kurt just made a big mistake.

As to how significant that is, while Kurt has recurred fairly regularly in Hickman's run, he is not one of the main characters within it. So to that extent I don't think an isolated character glitch here is that big of a deal—compared to say, in Way of X, where he's the co-lead alongside Legion—but it's such a monumentally consequential error, connected to both Destiny's ascension and Moira's exile, in the highest profile book of the year, that it's the kind of thing that could easily define his character in the near term if they're not careful about it.