God if everybody would just let me do it.

[sabinetzin]

Okay, Marvel fans of the flist (all three of you), I am having a problem. As usual, I am having a timeline problem, because it is one of those things that, as a fangirl, I am far more worried about than the people who made the movie are. I am trying to work out some kind of functional timeline of the nebulous period between Raven and Charles in the kitchen and Raven and Charles in England (which is quite a long time, actually, now that I look at it).

But this is the problem I keep running up against on the various Marvel wikis:

A natural genius, Charles completed high school at sixteen. He attended Oxford University accompanied by Raven. He earned Ph.D.s in Genetics, Biophysics, and Psychology. After completing his thesis on genetic mutation, he was approached by Agent Moira MacTaggert [etc.]

Is any of this canon? Because I don't remember it. There are several Marvel wikis, but this particular article is copied verbatim on all of them. It seems like imported canon at best and an ass-pull at the worst.

I'm not crazy, right? Like, I'm pretty sure that's something I wouldn't have missed.

(I'm not going to all this semi-frantic effort to write D/s AU, why would you even think I was?)

ETA: I should note what we've been hashing out here is XMFC canon, not comics canon. Because MOTHER OF GOD who even knows what's going on in comics canon.

Comments

[calliopes_pen]

No, I think you're correct. That doesn't look like something that was ever in comic canon.

[helens78]

I don't think that's canon. More to the point, I bet it comes from the movie website. So it's probably movie extra-canon, and can be taken and run with or ignored as you please!

[sabinetzin]

IDK where it comes from, actually. It's not from the official Marvel wiki, and the official XMFC page goes to some facebook game.

MY MIND, SHE BOGGLES

[helens78]

Whaaaaaat, argh! It had a pretty good website with lots of little dossiers on all the mutants (my favorite was that it mentioned Darwin had a genius-level intellect and could learn languages instantly; that's gone into fics as canon). Which is why I thought of it when you said it was posted everywhere! But now we can't even check ;_; because even if it were on the Wayback Machine, the whole fucking thing was Flash, so it wouldn't have been saved.

[sabinetzin]

Nooooo! Then I suspect that is where it came from. Even though all that stuff about Charles and Raven makes no sense at all.

[cesare]

I think you can explain stuff however you want. The film basically skipped Charles's teenage years and I don't think it made any reference to anything in between, apart from Raven saying she was studying waitressing. Most comics canon have Charles graduating high school early, breezing through undergrad at Harvard and getting his graduate degree(s) at Oxford. Which incidentally, Charles is so ridiculously overpowered in every possible respect. According to Marvel.wikia.com he has "Ph.D.s in Genetics, Biophysics, Psychology, Anthropology, and Psychiatry at Oxford University and Columbia University. Undergraduate studies were conducted at Harvard University, where he graduated with honors at the age of 16." AND he's super extra double rich AND he's the most powerful telepath AND he was in the Army in Korea...

Reminds me of David Cross joking about how God comes off to him like someone's dream D&D character: "No, let's give him MORE powers! Roll d12!"

[sabinetzin]

God, Charles. Honestly, the only person more ridiculously overpowered is Scarlet Witch, and that was only for a little while, and only because she could rewrite reality itself.

Only in comic books would anyone who was even vaguely socially well-adjusted ever, ever want more than one PhD. I know it sounds great, but getting one is a fucking horror show- you don't just show up, give them a real long essay, and get some paper to put on your wall. Same goes for graduating college at 16. You end up as Rodney McKay (if you're lucky) and not Charles Xavier.

So I've been, like, cutting things out, and moving them around, and I'm sending Raven to college because by the time she says that she would have already done been graduated from undergrad for like two or three years. And everybody can more or less suck it- but then, that is my attitude towards everything in this fandom.

(None of this is helped by the fact that Harvard is ENORMOUSLY overrated and produces crappy archaeologists, or that I lived at Cambridge, not Oxford. But what can one do.)

[cesare]

Only in comic books would anyone who was even vaguely socially well-adjusted ever, ever want more than one PhD. I know it sounds great, but getting one is a fucking horror show- you don't just show up, give them a real long essay, and get some paper to put on your wall. Same goes for graduating college at 16. You end up as Rodney McKay (if you're lucky) and not Charles Xavier.

I guess allowances are made for Charles's powers-- in the comics afaik he's closeted as a mutant until relatively late in life, so if he was using his powers to get through all his classes and various dissertation defenses, who could complain? No, really, who could complain, even if someone had a problem with it, even if they knew about his mutation, he could just make them forget about it. Come to think of it, Charles is the one person who actually could just show up and give them a real long essay or, idek, a stack of blank paper, and come out of it with a paper to put on his wall.

I've been assuming Raven was Jennifer Lawrence's age at the time of filming, so 19-20, for lack of a better guidepost (since in comics canon, she would've been, what, seventy, by then? Oh god, there's a story in itself: Raven was 70 when she met tiny Charles, and took a child form in order to relate better to him. Adds to why she's so irritated that he treats her like a li'l sis as they get older...)

[sabinetzin]

Come to think of it, Charles is the one person who actually could just show up and give them a real long essay or, idek, a stack of blank paper, and come out of it with a paper to put on his wall.

Man, your brain really is stuck on creeper!Charles. :D But, still and yet, I don't really buy Charles doing that. I mean, he's not exactly Good Guy Greg, right, but the one thing he does seem to be serious about, if he can be said to be serious about anything, is his academics and general mutation studies. Plus it wouldn't get him anywhere. I mean, it wouldn't earn him any respect, and it wouldn't be challenging enough to be fun.


I've been assuming Raven was Jennifer Lawrence's age at the time of filming, so 19-20, for lack of a better guidepost

She's got to be in her mid-twenties, because (I did not do the math on this today, and then I was like wut) eighteen years pass between the kitchen and Charles graduating. So, there's a BIG chunk of time gone. But oh god, old!Mystique and young!Charles, there is a hell of a story to be told there.

(It is my personal headcanon that nobody knows how old she is but Hank. He hasn't told her, because he doesn't know if that's polite or not.)

[cesare]

:D I don't necessarily always go to the creeper!Charles place with it. I just like thinking of the implications of "Want to see another magic trick?" :D :D He doesn't have to be an out and out creep to cut some corners here and there.

I do think Charles is serious about his genetics studies, and would do the necessary work to achieve the knowledge equivalent to a doctorate in his various fields. But for him, how long would it take to learn and internalize that much information? He could go find the leading minds of the day, sit next to them at a cafe and 'study'. How much patience would he have for jumping through all the various hoops that baseline humans require of each other to get those pieces of paper?

But personally I'm happy granting Charles a couple of Masters degrees and one Ph.D. by 28 and calling that good enough, because otherwise, wtf, five doctorates? Seems like even a supernaturally gifted genius would've been at university for a dozen years at a minimum to pack all that in, and I have to think that would've brought him under some serious scrutiny, which First Class Charles probably would've preferred to avoid, if only to protect Raven.

Eighteen years pass! Okay then. I knew the timeline was wonky in the film so I admit, I didn't pay a lot of mind to the dates. But I like your headcanon about Hank. Sounds right to me!

[sabinetzin]

He could be quite the knowledge sponge. I mean, it takes him a couple of seconds to pull all that out of Moira, in a couple hours he could be, frankly, the shit in whatever he wanted. And oh man, if you wanted to do genetics research, Harvard and Oxbridge were the places to be at that time. I mean, Watson and Crick got their Nobel Prize in 1962.

Though it occurs to me that all the really good genetics stuff in the UK was done at Cambridge and King's College. suck on that, Oxford

As a doctoral student, it's really interesting to me- there are hoops he wouldn't have to jump through being in the British system and not the American one, but damn. Where is the point where it would have to stop? Smart is one thing, but smart doesn't get you real far in academia if you don't have everything else.

The question becomes, to get through it any faster than anyone else, how many balls would he have to juggle? Because to get through your PhD you've got to keep your whole committee satisfied, and if he had a lab he'd have to run that too.

Very little fighting in academia is intellectual squabbling, mind, so it doesn't matter how smart he is if he can't keep everyone happy. So how many people could he keep happy at once? Because some people hate a charmer, and some people are just so ornery that if they liked him, that would be suspicious.

And even after all that, you can get five PhDs and not get a job because someone doesn't like your tie.

(Can you tell I'm at the stage of my PhD where I often look around and go "I COULD BE DOING ANYTHING ELSE RIGHT NOW"?)

But yeah. Eighteen years, because they meet in 1944 (I went back and checked, because I was like, that doesn't seem right at all). It was mindboggling. My mind was thorougly boggled. Because I've had a hell of a time trying to figure out how old Raven is (because, let's be very honest, I think about Raven a lot).

[cesare]

Raven's worth thinking about a lot!

(Can you tell I'm at the stage of my PhD where I often look around and go "I COULD BE DOING ANYTHING ELSE RIGHT NOW"?)

XD

I mean, :-( sympathy and stuff.

I may pick your brain about the wild world of grad studies sometime, because I'm still simmering on a modern AU where they're grad students, which is kind of dumb of me, considering I know fuck all about grad school. But I got this notion about the two of them picking up part-time work as superheroes, and I can't shake it. I really love the idea that sometimes they're like, "Can't someone else go save downtown from that lightning bolt supervillain? Because I've got a shitload of papers to grade."

[sabinetzin]

That's pretty excellent. :D

"For the last time, Erik, your advising meeting is not the sort of calamity to which we need to respond."

[cesare]

:D That's about the vibe, yy.


Normally it might be hard to choose between filling in to TA for Dr. Richards versus picking up a quick H4H job that Armando had to ditch, but considering Erik's been awake less than ten minutes and he already feels like tying all the flatware into knots... H4H, definitely.

Except wait, no, he realizes once he's made the mistake of calling in and talking to Moira: in fact that's the worst idea ever. He doesn't know what pisses him off more, the picture she sends of the target, who looks like Santa Claus in a yellow rain slicker, or the "offer"-- Heroes 4 Hire doesn't use vulgar words like "bounty."

"Four hundred dollars? Are you kidding me with this shit?" Erik asks. "Charles is basically the most powerful known telepath in the world and I can lift a tank, and you want us to split four hundred bucks to bring down the Gordon's fisherman."

"Supply and demand," says Moira. "If you guys were full time, I could get you in on the big jobs. If you can only give me a couple of hours here and there, then sorry, you're getting the crumbs."

[sabinetzin]

:D :D :D

[dema69]

In the mid 80's they went into this abit when they showed Erik first meeting Charles. He has two PHD in Psychology and in Genetics. he stated that he graduated when most are just starting. After that he was in the Korean War with the Army. After that he was in the border lands of Palistine where he met Erik. And thus began the epic never really fully ended romance of C&E.