#nscu

first we have to get something out of the way: I hate the “shatterstar’s his own grandpa” paradox. I am sorry if this angers people but it makes me mad so I ignore it. the reason it bothers me is because it means alison blaire essentially married her grandson, which is A) weird and B) bad from a genetics perspective.

in my version of canon ‘star IS the biological child of longshot and dazzler but longshot wasn’t cloned using ‘star’s DNA because..... oh god... another whole separate post can be made about this but... in my head, on mojoworld the way genetic engineering works is not really the same as it is here. here genetic engineering generally means taking an existing genome and inserting or deleting genes. this is how they make, for example, animals that glow, or confer pesticide resistance to plants.

but on mojoworld I think the way they genetically engineer is more like... the way we mechanically engineer. like the entire organism is built from the ground up. there’s a master genetic blueprint which is essentially the “minimal genome” required for a functioning humanoid. this was created by study of Earth humans by arize and the other genetic engineers. they can then go in and customize by adding elements to the genome that code for the signals/building blocks that control things like height, strength, hair color, eye color, having hollow bones etc. so in my head longshot was sort of... designed with ‘star as the inspiration, but not directly cloned. that wouldn’t even make sense anyways because A) different hair color and B) LONGSHOT HAS 3 FINGERS ON EACH HAND and shatterstar has 4!! thats NOT HOW CLONES WOULD WORK!!!!

(side note, the concept of a minimal functional genome is a real thing in biology! some scientists have taken a bacterium that already has a small genome and reduced it to the minimum size required for viability. here is a wikipedia article on it and here is the original paper (DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5447.2165) which I can explain in more detail because I took a class on synthetic biology which this technically falls under and I had to read this paper very closely).

fuck I’ve written 4 paragraphs and not even talked about his childhood yet. I am so sorry. anyways. so the way I think they raise the gladiators on mojoworld is they create them in batches of 5 to 10 identical copies of a certain “model”, place each copy in a different “class” with a set of 2-3 mentors/teachers, and train them to fight until they are 13 or 14. until this time the only names they have are the names that identify the “model”--like for shatterstar that would be gaveedra-seven where the model identifier is “gaveedra” and he is (in the lore that I have come up with) the 7th of 8 total.

the reason they create multiples and put them in different classes is each mentor is going to have a slightly different style of teaching which is going to work better for some and worse for others, so it allows them to have more mass production while increasing the chances of creating a truly great champion. it’s classic nature versus nurture--the genetic engineers create your nature, but you don’t end up exactly the same as others of your model. maybe you get an edge, maybe you don’t.

another thing that happens is different mentors believe in different ways of raising the kids in their care. shatterstar specifically was raised in a class where there was absolutely zero emotional development at all and no attachments allowed beyond fighting alliances. that’s not the case in all classes, and it also had the effect of making him somewhat of an outsider even within the other gladiators as he got older.

at 13 or 14--and yes I realize this is very fucked up but dude its fucking mojoworld idk what you expected--they start participating in fights. the first ones aren’t to the death and they’re as teams and they’re not usually televised they’re more like high school sports games that are attended by scouts (here, they’re “sponsors”--I think that’s a canonical term but I honestly can’t remember) and if you get sponsored you leave your class and join a new “team” that’s really just a bunch of people who all have the same sponsorship. this is where things can get interesting because they’ve all been raised with slightly different fighting styles but more importantly, slightly different degrees of Personhood.

also at this point I should mention that by this time, there are usually only 2, maybe 3 of each model left. either they died or were recognized as not having talent so they were sent to eventually fulfill other roles in the network. in ‘star’s case there was just him and gaveedra-five. once you get to the stage where you’re sponsored and you’re actually fighting to the death one of the first people you’ll fight is any remaining members of your model group.

by the time you’re the only one left of your group, you’re also eligible to earn a stage name. this usually happens if you have a particularly epic fight with a lot of viewers, you win and the commentators will typically say something like “Let’s give this crowd a real name to cheer!” and they’ll have a few candidate names and they’ll kind of just pick one. AUGH I actually have this scene written out in story form but its too long so I think I’ll save it.... :) 

after you get a name you also get a cool outfit and usually some kind of mark or tattoo that serves as a brand. this brings me to another important point--shatterstar inherited the X-gene from alison and therefore he IS a mutant. his mutation is the swords vibration thing and the glowing eye. the star mark is a tattoo and teleportation is benjamin russell’s mutation (how he fits into all this is... for another post). basically after he got his name the costuming department guys were like “hey your eye glows, you look like the Legendary Warrior of Old, Longshot, we’re gonna pattern your look after him” so they gave him the star tattoo and the outfit that’s literally inverse colors of longshot’s.

also this brings me to another aside: you’re probably wondering “if he’s the biological kid of longshot and alison how are there 8 gaveedras?” when the genetic engineers got a hold on him as a baby they were like Sick! free baby! free genetic material! thats our job done for us! so they cloned him (in the traditional sense) and made 7 copies. this was also to kind of conceal his identity as technically being from outside mojoworld, which would make him stick out and thus be a target. they DID edit out the x-gene in the other gaveedra models though. this wasn’t a problem for ‘star because his mutation didn’t manifest until he was already sponsored.

I think that’s .... pretty much it for macroscopic lore on what it was like to be a kid gladiator on mojoworld. now let me give you some Tidbits of his life specifically:

like I said he was raised in a particularly cold and ruthless class. the mentors that raised him are like well-known by everyone to produce some of the best warriors but also there’s discourse on mojoworld because some people say perfectly emotionless killing machines aren’t as fun to watch. when he was sponsored there were 4-5 others in the same sponsorship and they were like Theres Something Wrong With You LOL

they speak earth languages on mojoworld because they’re imitating the broadcasts they (the spineless ones) used to hear from earth. however, most of the lower-class as well as almost all arena fighters and other television personalities speak cadre or other languages which are native to the planet. the stage names are all vaguely in english, but the gladiators don’t really understand them at first.

shatterstar got his name before he got the glowing eye, and when he learned what stars are, and saw his eye as a little star, he was like wow :) this is Me :) which is why that name is so important to him. it’s also one of the first things that wholly belonged to him.

(you can’t see stars on mojoworld because of light pollution and also because it’s a pocket dimension and there just aren’t that many stars to see)

I hate to bring up the s**ley miniseries but I do think it would be interesting to have him have a sort of ... mentor/first friend, similar to the concept of gringrave but they were NOT in a relationship. it was more like... another kid who was a year or so older than him got a soft spot for him and helped him not be so clueless. she didn’t make as much progress as xforce did, obviously. but they were.... something like friends.

unfortunately she was used by spiral to get shatterstar to murder the first rebel guy who tried to get him out of there. then she got switched sponsors (this can happen) and he had to kill her, and he was like well I will simply never develop any kind of attachment to anyone ever again.

he almost didn’t make it out of the first training session with his sponsorship group (this is semi-canon--there’s a reference when he’s teaching terry to swordfight to almost not surviving the first time he was in a gladiator class or whatever it was).

the closest he ever came to losing was the day he got the name. that’s why the crowds loved it so much.

the double-bladed sword was a gimmick weapon but when he got his mutation they realized it works way better if there’s resonance between two parallel blades so they redesigned it as an actual weapon.

(forgot this but I feel like I should include it) at 17 he escaped the arenas and joined the cadre alliance. two years later he came to earth and joined xforce.

**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.