*****SPOILER ALERT*****
If you have not seen this movie yet and are planning on it, please stop reading right now. I may give some things away that you don't want to know, but admittedly most of what I'm angry about has nothing to do with the actual plot line.... This is your last chance to turn back....
First of all, I'm a huge fan of X-Men. I have seen almost everything there is to see and own a good portion of said movies/TV shows. I never read the comics, but have read a lot of information about the comics so I do know a lot about them..... I also went as far as writing a fanfic involving the X-Men which I'm now reworking into an original story that I hope to someday get published. Such is my love for the X-Men.
So, when I heard that they were going to be including two characters from the X-Men in the new Avengers movie, I was super excited. Wanda and Pietro aren't my favorite characters, but they're ones that I do know and are fairly well-known. This is particularly true of Pietro (aka Quicksilver) who recently appeared in the latest X-Men movie.
The first time I cringed was when they were introduced as twins. They are not twins. Pietro is the older brother.... They might even be half-siblings, for that matter, come to think of it.... The second cringe came when their back-story included the fact that they were orphans. They are not orphans. Their father is Magneto. Then my cringing and barely-accepting of facts turned to full-blown anger when they were fully revealed to be some type of "human genetic experiments" that were done in Germany.
No.
Just no.
They are not human experiments. They are mutants. They were born with those powers and abilities. They did not volunteer for some type of experiment and then gain powers as a result as of the experimentation process.
Basically, they stripped these two characters completely of their back-stories but kept their names and abilities to force them to fit into their story line. You just can't do that! I'm almost certain that there are plenty of characters between Thor, Black Widow, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, and Hawkeye that they could have pulled to be the bad-guys-turned-good-guys. So why did they even need to grab a couple characters from the X-Men world if they were just going to remake them?
Some may argue that the had to do that because the universes don't fit together or whatever, but they do. Both Wolverine and the Beast have spent time on the Avengers team. And the X-Men have worked for (and sometimes against) S.H.I.E.L.D. So it would not be a stretch to include actual mutants in the Avengers. The whole mutant issue wouldn't have to be a major plot point. It would even have to be mentioned other than "there's this new thing that's starting to happen where people are mutated." That's it. That's all I was asking for. But, no! They had to strip the characters of nearly everything that made them them to make them fit into a story that they're not in.
Anyway.... There's no Amazon link because it just came out in theaters, so here's a picture of the "Maximoff Twins."
And here's them in their original form.....
Random thought after watching this movie: Honestly, I was too angry about this whole Maximoff twin thing to fully get into the rest of the movie. And I already did all my ranting above, so I've got nothing else to put here.
****UPDATE****
After doing some further research and talking with cousins who have more knowledge than I do about these characters, I discovered that I had erred in my thinking, so I am now making corrections.
Pietro and Wanda are, in fact, twins. I honestly did not know that, and am not sure why I was so sure that Pietro was older. So, I was just completely wrong in that area.
My second problem was that they were presented as orphans. I also did not know, but that is how they were first presented in the comics. It was only later that it was revealed that Magneto was their father, and I guess that story was also retracted later, so they may or may not actually be orphans. So, I was again just completely wrong in that area.
My biggest issue was the fact that they called them genetic experiments. I still have a slight issue with that, but there are copyright issues at play here. Fox owns the rights to the X-Men series, which includes the term "mutant" when it refers to the race of people. So, they were not able to use that term, and they had to stay away from using their mutant names, which is why they were primarily referred to by their first names only. The only reason they were able to be shown on the Avengers at all is that they were both a part of the Avengers team which means the rights to those characters went with them and did not exclusively belong to Fox.
I still have some issues with that, because there were a bunch of the X-Men that were on the Avengers at some point, including Wolverine, Beast, Firestar, Storm, Havok, Cannonball, Sunspot, Rogue, Sabretooth, and X-23.... So do all of them also have duel-citizenship as far as rights are concerned? And what about all the other comic book crossovers? Wolverine first appeared in an issue of The Incredible Hulk, so can he appear in the Hulk movies?
I also feel like Fox missed a HUGE opportunity to promote their X-Men franchise. I mean, Avengers 2 is one of THE biggest blockbusters of the year (and probably ever, let's be honest), so they would have had free advertising with two mutants running around alongside the Avengers....
Anyway, I was wrong about a few things, and I'm sort of glad since now that I know my frustrations were unfounded. So now I feel like I need to go see it again when I'm not going to be angry about their backgrounds getting changed too much so I can enjoy it more.... But I'll probably wait until after the challenge because I have a lot of other movies to watch this year.
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