#nscu

**technically he shows up in civil war: xmen (2006) and I think 1 issue of cable and deadpool (?) but its really not relevant to the plot.

so the way I see it is here’s what happened: rictor and shatterstar left xforce in xforce #70 and went to mexico to take down the richter family arms dealing operation. they also wanted to get some space from xforce to figure their shit out. which, I have to say, going on a crusade against a whole bunch of arms dealers is not the ideal setting for working out your relationship but hey, what do I know. this goes on for a bit, and things actually go pretty well which can be seen by the fact that they shared a bed in xforce annual 1999 :)

I actually think a fairly significant amount of time passes and its not just nonstop fight guys destroy guns like they have some really nice, almost normal time together, and this is the time where their relationship develops the most!

until eventually the thing goes down in oaxaca where rictor gets captured and arcade takes shatterstar to madripoor to fight against domino (this is in xforce #76). after this they carry on for a bit but it starts to get hard because A) rictor feels like a liability (Classic. I love him so much you know I just wish he loved himself some more) and B) ric is worried ‘star is only still with him because it’s all he (’star) knows and it makes ric doubt whether their relationship is real or just a product of being stuck together through so much shit.

eventually ric is basically like “you gotta leave me and figure out who you are beyond me” but (ric doesn’t realize this) shatterstar kind of already did after that the first time ric left in xforce #45 (and this is something I’ve actually given A LOT of thought to). like he kind of had to because of the whole ben russell stuff, doubting his identity gave him the space to think about what it means to have an identity in the first place. like after the initial “what the fuck” of it all its like coming to accept that whether his life on mojoworld was real or not, he is still a whole person with possibly a whole future and he gets to decide how it goes.

unfortunately 'star doesn’t really have the skills to communicate this in a way rictor will understand. like he can’t explain how he really HAS become his own person because he still kind of doesn’t understand the whole benjamin deal and also lacks the proper words to explain how it is for him to be who he is, so they have this whole argument and rictor is like “you don’t care about me you've just learned what it looks like to care about someone and you’re imitating it with me because I am the only thing that’s familiar to you” and long story short they go their separate ways. Pain.

shatterstar ends up drifting for awhile and then going back to madripoor voluntarily because xforce is all people he doesnt know (this is at the end of v1 when the team gets completely different) and hes like well I guess I can fight. and a LOT happens here I haven’t expanded much but he spends a while just doing fights and stuff and the only sort of concrete event I have is that He eventually loses in a hair match (like in wrestling) and they shave his head. which is why he has short hair in xfi because I REFUSE to believe he would do that voluntarily.

also at some point here the whole shit goes down with the fuckin uhhh blade of whatever in the xforce shatterstar miniseries and also he goes to the alternate universe where spiral has taken over. this is xforce volume 2 which is genuinely a garbage comic. even by rob liefeld standards, it fucking sucks. the xforce shatterstar mini has some redeeming qualities like the “light pierces my eyes and I’ve returned to the coliseum” bit as well as “i force my body to yield, to ignore every impulse, demanding that I bury my sword within this mans chest. ending his life in the most violent way possible” which is a really good illustration of A) how far he’s come and B) how much he’s going through it right now.

I also do want to bring up one thing about xforce volume 2. there’s a bit where he says “if I am to be such a failure as a man, then let me succeed as a weapon of mass destruction” and later he says “...as much of a posturing fool as I am” and I have read every shatterstar comic multiple times and this is literally the only example I know of where he talks about himself in such a self-deprecating way. this is why I think things were seriously fucked for him between annual 1999 and xfi 43. I think he and rictor definitely had some kind of falling out or breakup and it’s largely because the way he is in the 2005 mini and xforce v2 are soooooooo .... it’s like he regresses back to the way he was in very early xforce but with added edgelord moments. like he talks about failing to learn to be human and failing to be more than a weapon and yes this can be explained easily by the fact that these are liefeld books but. I choose to interpret meaning where there likely is none. that post about skateboarding up a flight of stairs, you know?

anyways, some more time passes, he ends up with domino somehow and they do some shit in the civil war: xmen mini and then after that I haven’t really figured it out but eventually he gets cortex’d and then you have xfactor #43. I do think that since cortex is a madrox dupe and madrox knew about rictor and shatterstar’s relationship it is likely that cortex sought ‘star out specifically to Get rictor in that storyline. but idk.