The Four Color Media Monitor

Entertainment Weekly tells that the fishy TV and film scriptwriter Beau deMayo broke his silence after being fired from X-Men 97, to tell why he wrote an episode that gets rid of Gambit, a direction which I decidedly am not pleased with, based on how it reeks of the illogical dislike for a fictional character that was common at the time Chris Claremont created him, and the thinking is doubtless still prevalent today:

“Lotta questions and so I'll momentarily break silence to answer,” he said. “Episode 5 was the centerpiece of my pitch to Marvel in November 2020. The idea being to have the X-Men mirror the journey that any of us who grew up on the original show have experienced since being kids in the 90s. The world was a seemingly safer place for us, where a character like Storm would comment on how skin-based racism was ‘quaint’ in One Man's Worth [the season 4 opener for the original X-Men animated series] . For the most part, to our young minds, the world was a simple place of right and wrong, where questions about identity and social justice had relatively clear cut answers.”

However, DeMayo noted that his worldview shifted after the September 11th attacks. “Things weren't so safe anymore," he explained. "Grassroots populist movements began to rise around the world as a whole nation struggled to deal with collective trauma and fracture at the seams of every diverse demographic. The effects we still feel today, and have only been exacerbated by more collective traumas like COVID or several recessions."

DeMayo said that he wanted the episode, which ends with a harrowing attack on mutant haven Genosha that kills Gambit and Magneto, to reflect the pain of real-life attacks on safe spaces. “Yes, it looked like Gambit's story was going a specific direction,” he said. “The crop top was chosen to make you love him. Him pulling off his shirt was intentional. There's a reason he told Rogue any fool would suffer her hand in a dance, even if it ended up not being him suffering. But if events like 9/11, Tulsa, Charlottesville, or Pulse Nightclub teach us anything, it's that too many stories are often cut far too short. I partied at Pulse. It was my club. I have so many great memories of its awesome white lounge. It was, like Genosha, a safe space for me and everyone like me to dance and laugh and be free. I thought about this a lot when crafting this season and this episode, and how the gay community in Orlando rose to heal from that event.”

“Like many of us who grew up on the OG cartoon, the X-Men have now been hit hard by the realities of an adult and unsafe world,” DeMayo continued. “Life's happened to them. And they, like we did, will have to decide which parts of themselves they will cling to and which parts they'll let go of in order to do what they've been telling humanity to do: face an uncertain future they never saw coming. As Trask told Cyclops in the premiere: ‘you have no idea what it's like to be left behind by the future.’ Now the X-Men do, and like each of us, they'll have to weigh whether this is a time for social justice — or as Magneto preached at his trial — is it a time for social healing.”

It sounds on the one hand, like deMayo exploited Gambit to serve as a gay metaphor, and on the other, that he'd off Gambit is quite off-putting. The character was one of various victims of the illogic of attacking fictional characters instead of how they're scripted in past decades, and this direction is not improving upon that kind of embarrassment that's long infected fandom. Sure, Remy leBeau may be resurrected in this cartoon so long as it's still on the air, but even so, this direction is not something I can approve of, period. It's long become so cheap. One can wonder which is worse - killing Gambit or turning him into a gay metaphor. And look at that - the mention of "social justice". That's pretty telling.

Now as for the comparisons to the Pulse nightclub: curious Mr. deMayo doesn't have the courage to mention the perpetrator was a Muslim jihadist named Omar Mateen. Why, deMayo's superficial reference of 9-11 is also defeating, because there's no mention of the Religion of Peace's role, nor al Qaeda. And did deMayo ever consider the former nightclub attendants like this one, who turned to Christianity and left the practice of homosexuality? Why don't their experiences count?

Even the citation of "grassroots movements" is fishy, and hints Mr. deMayo wrote all this from far too much a leftist viewpoint. What Gambit tells Rogue is also potentially insulting. So I think it's better not to tune in to what already reeks of far-left influence that makes even the most questionable moments from past X-Men stories look tame by comparison. If deMayo was let go by producers, it's just as well, but the saddest part is, leftist scripters will still influence the cartoon going forward, so long as it continues broadcast.

Labels: animation, golden calf of death, golden calf of LGBT, history, islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, terrorism, violence, women of marvel, X-Men