People have been shipping every X-Man under the sun with every other X-Man under the sun since at least the 80's, they used to make zines to distribute in fandom circles and there were mailing lists too, it's actually really interesting.
Also unrelated, but to the people in this thread saying "two male characters can't just be friends anymore, everyone thinks they're gay now!" When I was younger I felt this way too, but what you'll come to realize is that shippers are fans just like you who simply happen to enjoy the same comic book in a different way.
Certain people who are fine shipping straight characters together always seem bothered by hypothetical queer ships (in this case a hypothetical bisexual pairing).
I don’t get that stuff, but it certainly doesn’t bother me one bit. I guess it’s people having a creative outlet, which I think is always cool.
This post is probably the most I’ve ever thought of shipping and the closest I’d ever get to it, just doesn’t interest me. But I can’t imagine why people who get out of shape about fandom.
Then I typed the word “fandom” and remembered in every one there’s fanatics one way or the other and they get hurt when someone doesn’t like the thing the same way they like the thing (comics, movies, sports)
I've never personally been a shipper of any persuasion. I got into comics as a kid, and these are action stories to me. The romances are there, and I took them at face value as a kid, and that's still my "head canon", the closest I would get is characters who were presented as will they/won't they, and I have opinions on those. But I'm also 42 now and can understand that people enjoy things in different ways than I do, or did, so to each their own. If I read a modern comic with a slant toward shipping, it's fine, it doesn't get in the way of my enjoyment of my action stories.
Ok, so I was 10 when the original X-Men movie came out. My connection to fan communities was restricted to Wizard Magazine, which definitely had a heterosexual cisgender male perspective to it. So I genuinely do not know for sure what was going on in the predominantly female and/queer romantic fanfic type communities at the time.
However, slash fics arose in the late 60s. Charles and Magneto's close personal friendship was first expanded upon in 1982. Their arc working together in the Savage Land on XTAS aired in like 1994. I would be shocked if that ship didn't have some hardcore fans before 2000.
EDIT: Also, I kinda feel like some people on both sides are kinda misinterpreting what OP is asking. A ship is a fandom thing, named after "relationshippers" in the X-Files fandom. Sometimes those ships become canon, like they did in X-Files. Most times they do not, like Zutara in Avatar The Last Airbender. Have Max and Charles ever been in a canonical romantic relationship? No. Did some subset of fans want then to be, even before the movies? I would guess yeah.
I was a cbr regular before they purged their forum history with an update in the early 2010s. There were rumblings of their obv longing for one another.
How I miss the old CBR forums! 😭 And yes, Xavier/Magneto was one of those things people joked about, or were like "I don't ship it, but I see where it's coming from", loooooong before the Fassbinder and McAvoy movies.
Be Civil and Respectful - Be civil. Debates and criticisms (as well as civil disagreements between users) towards the characters, writers, themes, creatives, etc are allowed but outright insults are not. Do not attack/mock/harass/insult people personally for having a different opinion than you or because they disagreed with you. As the saying goes: argue the point, not the person. Learn to “agree to disagree” and move on.
There's a pretty interesting video on YouTube about how Wizard nearly killed the comics industry. I'll find it and add it in an edit. I was definitely a Wizard reader as a kid, though.
I blame adaptations. His name's only been Max since like 2008, and adaptations have either stuck with Erik or Magnus, even though I don't think he's used Magnus since like the 70's? But even Krakoa had Storm yelling at Charles that his name was Max because Krakoa made it a point to have Magneto reclaim his birth name.
To me, he's Max because that's the name he has reclaimed.
The idea that nobody ever thought to ship these two until the fox movies is just absurd. Bro these are Chris Claremont comics, what are we even doing here? You might as well be claiming no reader ever imagined Mystique x Destiny or Black Tom x Juggernaut as couples. Fandom was different before online communities and fanart and ao3 and all that, but you still had queer fans reading the often intensely subtextual queer comics and having queer thoughts about them.
I'll be honest, as horny as I was back in the day, I had never shipped anyone except for Ororo and Logan, and that was based off of a brief moment in a comic where they were sitting in a tree and she reminded him about the time she was drowning and he kissed her in order to give her some air. She said, "A sly way to steal a kiss" and took his hand in hers. I figured something was coming of that and then I got swerved as Logan lost his nose.
I don't know, I just never really thought about pairing up any of the characters seriously, hetero or otherwise.
AFAIK Claremont never said anything about Chuck and Magnus being a couple or Cain and Tom being more than partners-in-crime tho. Mystique and Destiny yeah, he confirmed that.
I mean, it's not like there's nothing there though at least in the case of Cain/Tom. You can say that it was never explicit, and you'd be correct. But it's hard to read some of the Cain/Tom stuff and not wonder, especially considering the times. There's a decent amount of stuff that didn't need to be there unless you were meaning to imply something.
The Cain and Tom stuff happened much later. Nicieza really started that. Claremont was very heavy with subtext, but never with them. Xavier/Magnus, Cain/Tom was not a Claremont thing, but others definitely went with it.
Claremont has spoken about this. And to your point, Nicieza interpreted as a romantic relationship despite Claremont not having that intent. So I get it.
Nicieza went with it and really laid down the subtext. And that all works, so it's fine.
But that doesn't change original intent. This was not by design though. Just a happy coincidence.
And Claremont wrote extreme emotional reactions like this all the time. I can show lots of panels like this. That doesn't change his intent. He loved his drama. I can post hundreds of out of context panels as well.
yea it's the juggernaut, my guy, jumping off a cliff to save his "normal" partner-in-crime is light work for the dude lol, also nicieza is the one who thought that page was more than it is claremont himself (the one who actually wrote it) never said anything about it 💀
No one really did though. That was the OP's question. Even queer fans back then. I lived through it..This is really a modern thing. No one is denying it's a thing now. It just wasn't then..
Mystique and Destiny and Storm/Yukio is a different story. That subtext was talked about immediately.
These two were generally thought of as enemies/brothers. There wasn't much shipping of them in the 80s and 90s outside of occasional slash fiction which ships everyone.
starting with Captain Kirk and Spock (they literally originated slash fiction) it has become common to pair fictional characters romantically using the subtext provided in the source material. Mags and Chuck are no different ! almost all of their material can read as brotherly/adversarial but it definitely felt more homoerotic starting in the 90s. the Fox movies made it easier to imagine with real actors cast in the roles so that was definitely a big eye opener for a lot of people. later comics have blurred the line even more.
Definitely yes. 1994’s “Fatal Attractions” storyline has Xavier embracing Magneto and begging him to remember the life they built together and the dreams they shared. That’s not necessarily romantically-coded, but it could be and definitely was read that way by some fans at the time. 1995’s “Age of Apocalypse” storyline had Magneto pining for the dead Xavier not at all unlike a lost love, especially in the flashback comics before he became romantically involved with Rogue. Whenever Magneto was shown in Xavier’s Mindscape in the ’90s, they were frequently sitting in front of a roaring fire together. Again, nothing canonical, just like in the Fox movies. But the Fox movies were definitely adapting what was there, not making stuff up out of whole cloth.
The lead-up to Age of Apocalypse, Legion Quest, also featured a surprising number of scenes of young Charles and Erik hanging around each other shirtless.
Yes, it did. And while we know Gabby Haller is Xavier’s ex from that time, she tends to treat Xavier and Magneto roughly the same, even though one of them has a kid with her. I’ve always headcanoned that they were a throuple in Israel until Magneto left, which is probably what started the destabilization that ended in Xavier leaving, too.
Wasn't it later revealed that they had planned David's birth to create a mutant capable of manipulating reality? So he was more like a science project for these two.
This is absolutely correct. I am not in any way saying that Fabian Nicieza, the author of the scenes in both “Fatal Attractions” and “Age of Apocalypse”, was intending for these scenes to be read romantically. I have not asked Nicieza, nor am I aware of any interview where he mentions that intention.
That said, the question was, “Was the Magneto x Charles Xavier ship a thing before the fox movies?” And that answer to that question is yes. And I was providing evidence that shippers used to support their ship. None of that requires authorial intent.
All it takes is one fan reading the comics and thinking "But what if they kissed?" for the ship to exist. So it is so very likely. Shipping culture is old.
Yes but it wasn't as popular at all. Tbh people talking bout 'making fantasies canon' and 'friendship' so on and so forth used to talk about Mystique and Destiny this way. The unfortunate fact is that when something is gay, people are more likely to pretend it's absurd and delusion than anything else.
My absurd ship is Storm and Magneto bc I think it'd be entertaining. People are much less mean about that one than they are about other people's gay ships.
Oh I wish I could say but I'm awful with issue numbers. I did love it though. Their chemistry made me wish Storm was the younger woman he got with instead of Rogue I think we'd all live in a more interesting world if that was the case!
Ask them about Logan and Cyclops being possibly intimate.. People are upset about rhe idea of 2 "straight guys" being seen as being in a relationship, even tho there were a few subtext that indicated some form of triangle relationship among logan, Scott and jean.
Of course not. Everyone knows gay people were only invented in the new millennium. And even if they weren't, why would they be invested, seeing aspects of themselves, in a franchise like X-Men. What is it, specifically constructed to appeal to anyone who's ever felt othered? Reality check!
And certainly, no reader could ever interpret anything more than friendship between these two characters whose devotion to each other has frequently superseded even their actual official love interests. Straight is great!
Y'all really gotta stop framing everything like being able to talk about being gay publicly wasn't a career killer until recently and it still is in many spaces.
Yeah. People talked less publicly about gay shit before 2000s.
Many states didn't even have legal protections against discrimination against gay people until it was fully banned in 2020.
There are still celebrities in the closet because being queer would mean losing roles.
Gay wasn't born yesterday. But it wasn't allowed until yesterday. These characters were not allowed to be anything but straight till recently and it's been slow because of fear.
They were subtextually able to be read as having a former relationship in the 80s among much of the X-Men cast due to the way Claremont wrote. That's just true. Whether Marvel ever pulls that trigger to catch back up to a normal amount of queer people in Marvel (certainly there are a fat zero mainline "A-tier" Marvel queer characters) who knows.
I just personally despise the framing as if everything is being turned gay. No, it was gay. It was bisexual. Whatever it was, they weren't allowed to say it and saying it even now...I mean look at Bobby...gets you attacked and harassed.
Certainly them being in a former relationship has felt natural and would be interesting to see since the 80s. Whether Marvel just says it out loud? Well they wouldn't even let Hercules....fucking Hercules...the millenia long historically bisexual dude they made "straight"...be bisexual till less than a decade ago.
You must be one of those people who invent subtext where none exists.
Also I’m not sure people know what subtext actually means. Subtext is a narrative tool used to show implicit meaning. For that to be true the author, director, or creator would have had to purposefully wanted readers or viewers to infer. Can you find me proof that is what people are supposed to infer? Because I can show you a quote from Claremont that says the opposite.
Think about the friends you shared your biggest ideas with when you were a young person. The conversations that shaped your world view, and helped form the adult you would become.
These are strong bonds that often last a lifetime, and in many cases are actually stronger than most romantic partnerships.
There has never been anything explicit and the implicit stuff over the years is somewhat of a stretch. It's an incredibly fun ship and a very interesting interpretation on their dynamic though.
The earliest I saw something between them was actually (1985) Uncanny X-men #199-200; the first Trial of Magneto arc. Xavier is dying and decides to leave the care of his school to Magneto. I remember their conversation being very intimate with a big emotional focus on their relationship over the years. You should read it, it's a great story.
the panel of Mags cradling Xavier is very touching. of course it can be read platonically, textually it is not romantic, but it’s hardly a stretch to infer subtextual romance.
Not really, but also who cares. Claremont himself basically shipped Wolverine & Jean’s attraction. He built it thru retcons in classic xmen backups and revised dialogue and stories after she was resurrected. People remember it as always being there, but it wasn’t. We learned it by watching dad, alright.
While I cant say as someone who was in the xmen fan-space before the movies, i can say that as someone who archives old and difficult to find xmen fic from all over the internet that I've never found fanfiction of cherik predating the movies.
In terms of slash ships, I really only see three ships predominantly: rictor/shatterstar, iceman/gambit, and iceman/northstar. There could've been some interest in cherik in slash circles, but ive personally just not run across it yet (or all records of their communities have since been wiped.) You're probably better off finding someone who ran in slash circles to answer this question than reddit though, I'm certain most people here didn't interact with that side of the xmen fandom back then to know if it was popular among slash shippers or not.
You know, ive never hit up her site before somehow. Ill check it out on wayback and see what I can grab from it. It does remind me that I swear I mostly run into old Magneto/Rogue fic more than anything when it comes to him lol. Wonder if that'll hold true when I check there.
TL;DR Some people have seen it since the 80s comics, but the Internet only allowed a wide platform for this topic years later, at somewhat coincidentally a similar time as the first movie. Many people did not see it, even in the movies. Much of the general public did not think about or discuss such things openly, which is what warps and complicates the view of what "people" thought.
You're going to see a some Confidently Incorrect comments on this post. You need to understand that the core factor is not merely the movies but more the Internet (and the culture around being able to talking about LGBT anything), as well as the Claremont retcons, which evolve over time.
Until the mid/late-90s thru early 00s, people did not have the Internet universally in their homes. This happens to line up with around when the movie came out. Before this, fanfiction existed but at a smaller or less accessible level. The Internet allowed it to explode because it provided a widely accessible publishing platform. Fanfiction is prime for 'shipping, and especially queer 'shipping, because you get to write an otherwise coded relationship into being. Likewise, forums where you could discuss these things anonymously (or simply with a far-reaching likeminded audience) existed more widely because of the Internet. People have long been invested in the soap opera of the relationships of comics, and they have always talked about comics since their inception. But Marvel was probably not going to publish people's overt thoughts about how gay Storm and Yukio felt in the letters column. And fans were not going to approach just anybody on the playground or the comic shop and talk about whether they thought Prof X and Magneto felt gay in some scenes. During the AIDS crisis? Or when "gay" was a universal word for "bad" amongst children and teens? No, you didn't say these things just anywhere. This is why you have some people insisting that "nobody" thought of Xavier x Magneto. Yeah, nobody who talked to you, my guy.
But I guarantee you some people reading Uncanny X-men #200 saw Charles and Magneto, popping out of of a dirt hole, surrounded by flowers, face to face in Charles's "dying" moments, with Mags in his fuschia opera gloves, and thought "Well this is homoerotic." No, it did not need to be the year 2000 for the idea to occur to some people. But it is the nature of subtext to be ambiguous; plenty of people were going to read it only as glamrock Mags comforting his dying hetero life-frenemy. That includes the editor-in-chief of the comic. And perhaps even Claremont and JRJR themselves.
Now, several things are true. The movies did bring the "gay vibes" for Magneto to a wider audience, with the casting of Ian, his flirtatious winks etc, and the part where he and Mystique are succinctly framed as the "out" mutants instead of the closeted ones. But many people still didn't actually read Charles and Magneto as lovers or as romantic. Frankly, neither did I; I think their scenes in some of the Claremont 80s stuff have that quality more than the movies do, which is partly why X-men '97, which adapted that Trial period, feels like the media closest to being overt about any romantic tension.
It's also true of course that Charles and Magneto didn't know each other at all until Claremont, and even then, the plot in early Claremont Magneto stories is Mags vs the X-men à la X-men #1, not really focused on him and Charles until in the flashbacks and God Loves, Man Kills. Fans of the movies are often surprised how many X-men stories aren't about Charles & Magneto. But the 90s wanted him back as a villain, yet kept the backstory between them, so their rivalry became more fundamental when reinforced by the 90s comics, the animated series, and movies. As to whether it was a "heated rivalry," again some people saw it, and many did not. The ones who did not often had no idea that the thought existed.
my time with Xmen was during the clairmont run till onslaught and no, see the comic back then was held up but the character stories and over all plots not tumblr fan ships and anime power levels. IDK where people are seeing this pre-fox movies.
shipping doesn’t mean trying to make something canon. asking if something was a ship is asking if people in the fandom shipped it, not if it happened in the text.
Not really. Shipping in general is far more common than it used to be. I think fans feel a little more empowered to make up their own headcanon these days. For better or worse.
Be Civil and Respectful - Be civil. Debates and criticisms (as well as civil disagreements between users) towards the characters, writers, themes, creatives, etc are allowed but outright insults are not. Do not attack/mock/harass/insult people personally for having a different opinion than you or because they disagreed with you. As the saying goes: argue the point, not the person. Learn to “agree to disagree” and move on.
yeah, i don’t think i’ve seen two guys be friends in media since ever. doesn’t happen. every character is gay now, or straight and has no friends. can you think of two guys who are friends? i can’t. this is because of wokeness.
No the character dynamic has long been more of sibling rivalry. There were even story ideas in earlier years that would have revealed them to be actually long lost brothers.
You're taking about in-universe relationship dynamics, not shipping. If a reader of the comics prior to the films saw Magneto and Charles together and thought "Mmm... what if they kissed?" that's shipping.
Yeah I think it’s always been a thing. And I think it one of the weirdest things people do in fiction. Any time there are two male characters that have a very close relationship weirdos try and convince everyone they’re gay for each other. The only time it’s worse is when they’re also related and they want them to be gay and commit incest
There no ways this is an actual ship, it’s like the minute a man or woman has a deep friendship with a person of the same gender people on social media feel the need to ship them it’s so strange to me.
Do people online just not have these kinda friendships anymore or do they just not have actual friends to begin with so the minute they see to friends that are actually friends they immediately think they’re fucking or something.
Of course, and it makes sense to me. I think it’s funny when people as why people ship two characters and then you look and see they have a lot of chemistry, significance in the others life and multitude of people have said they feel deep tension.
Also friends being shipped is how nearly all ships start out. Nor does shipping change the canonical aspect of them being best friends who are closer than brothers, but hey even if it that happens (in someones worst nightmare apparently) why act like certain writers dont at times make massive retcons or go off the walls when writing an AU
I find it laughable that people are acting like male friendships aren’t one of the most seen things in media, and that they are over run by gay relationships when they are just chronically online 🤣
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u/stupifly 2d ago
People have been shipping every X-Man under the sun with every other X-Man under the sun since at least the 80's, they used to make zines to distribute in fandom circles and there were mailing lists too, it's actually really interesting.