ADayInTheLife

Let’s talk about Cyclops.

Cyclops is an easy character to get wrong. You can’t see his eyes, so it can be difficult for actors to emote realistically when playing him. He’s one of Professor Xavier’s premier students, so it’s easy to depict him as a brown-nosing know-it-all. He’s repressed, so it’s easy to depict him as a stick in the mud, especially compared to perennial fan-favorite and classical tall, dark, and handsome bad boy Wolverine. He’s the clean-cut, All-American, Wonder Bread white guy of a crew with a blue demon, a Russian Superman, a literal African goddess, whatever character we decide Beast can be today, a Holocaust survivor with all of the Byronic charisma that every Shakespearean character of all time can muster, a beautiful woman whose tragic destiny is to literally end the world or commit the most heroic self-sacrifice of all time, and the aforementioned Wolverine. That’s a cast of characters where it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle, and Cyclops does.

And that’s downright tragic, because Cyclops is absolutely fascinating when you get in the weeds. Don’t take my word for it; it’s canon. Every telepath that has ever interacted with Cyclops has decided that he is far and away the most interesting person in the room. Sure, his complete inability to express himself well means that you need to be able to literally read minds to know that quickly, but most of the X-Men (and a great many of their creators) agree with that assessment eventually. And that inability to express himself well? Cyclops is one hair shy of canonically confirmed to be neurodivergent (likely Autism Spectrum Disorder). That level of representation is something the MCU is only starting to experiment with now, and a positive and accurate portrayal of ASD (and one that, unlike Drax, is actually confirmed on-screen) is something that could be a real benefit.

But the trademark of the MCU is snark-filled irreverence, and I feel a great amount of trepidation that Cyclops isn’t going to be done right. And he can be! You just need to understand who he is at the most basic level and then build up from there. (You know. How all characters should be written, so that they’re internally consistent and allowed to grow in believable and fulfilling ways. But I digress.) And because the MCU has such strong (if snarky) character archetypes already on hand, and because Cyclops will naturally need to interact with many of them, let’s look at two that have helped define the current public notion of Marvel super-heroes: Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.

The first thing to understand about Steve and Tony is that they fit into the popular literary archetypes of the Hero and his Lancer, respectively. The Hero and the Lancer are foils to each other, and in an ensemble cast of strong personalities, these are fantastic archetypes into which to slot, respectively, the leader of the team and the most popular member of the team. Super-hero teams are particularly fond of doing this, and popular Hero/Lancer pairings in super-hero comics include Steve and Tony, Superman and Batman, Batman and Nightwing, Leonardo and Raphael, and Cyclops and Wolverine. It’s important to understand that the Lancer is, in many ways, everything that the hero is not, and this means that, while they may share the same goals, they each represent something the other could never be and they each have something the other will never be able to possess. This allows the two of them to be better than the sum of their parts, but it also naturally lends itself to creating strong character conflict, which is how we avoid plot-driven stories. Notably, Captain America: Civil War is literally all about a Hero and Lancer’s buried or repressed resentments coming to a head because their worldviews have diverged past the point of maintaining the initial mutual respect that characterized their early relationship.

Steve and Tony are wildly popular MCU characters. So, it benefits us for the point of this discussion that Cyclops, at his most basic, is essentially a fusion of these two into a brand-new character that combines some of the best aspects of both. Like Tony, Cyclops is a sarcastic iconoclast with no respect for traditional structures of authority.

Like Steve, Cyclops is a born leader with an innate ability to inspire those who work him to be their best selves, and everyone who has ever worked with the guy for any amount of time has willingly and wholeheartedly followed his lead without question.

This combination of character traits makes Cyclops a potentially fascinating character — especially in an MCU which no longer has either Tony or Steve to rely on.

Of course, understanding a Hero means understanding their Lancer, as well, since that relationship is symbiotic. And one way that Cyclops has traditionally suffered outside of the original comics is that he is chronically overshadowed by Wolverine. This is understandable, as, on paper, Wolverine is a far more fascinating character in his own right than Cyclops is. He’s gruff-but-honorable, he has a dark and mysterious past (which makes for a good breeding ground of random encounters), he’s seen more of the world and had more life experience than almost anyone else, he has a surprisingly sensitive and romantic side that’s normally hidden under layers of tragedy and pathos, and he’s a useful window into several parts of the Marvel Universe that we normally don’t get to see: Japan, Alpha Flight, Madripoor, and the Weapon Plus Program (the seedier underbelly of Project: Rebirth, from Captain America’s origin).

But just as Heroes need Lancers to embody everything the hero isn’t, so too do Lancers need Heroes to give them direction and focus and point them in the direction that the story needs them to go. On his own, Wolverine is Rambo: a war vet whose past trauma prevents him from living a meaningful and fulfilling life and manifests itself as cinematic aggression, hopefully against targets that we have successfully convinced the audience deserve this rage even though they had nothing to do with its origin. If we want literally anything else from Wolverine, we need to pair him up with someone who can give him focus and direction and whose orders Wolverine will be willing to take, in spite Wolverine’s checkered past with trusting in authority figures not to, oh I don’t know, brainwash him into a mindless killing machine and erase all knowledge of his past. (Just for example.)

Being that kind of authority figure takes a very specific type of character. And luckily, we have exactly who we need: Cyclops. Cyclops’s utter disregard for traditional power structures neatly dovetails with Wolverine’s lived experience, his ability to command respect through personal loyalty speaks to the hidden romantic in Wolverine, his ability to command obedience through demonstrated competency and earned trust quiet the cynic on Wolverine’s shoulder, and his ability to do all of this without resorting to violence or punishments keeps Wolverine from reacting badly to Cyclops’s authority just on general principle. There’s literally nothing for Wolverine to hang his anti-authoritarian hat on. But that only works if you don’t butcher Cyclops’s character so that Wolverine can shine. If Cyclops is a nerd and a tattletale, then it doesn’t make sense for Wolverine to hang around with the X-Men long enough to form any other bonds. Your only option at that point is to make Wolverine less combative and more of a straight man, which takes away all of the fun parts that make Wolverine so appealing in the first place.

Wolverine needs Cyclops for Wolverine to work as a character. A symbiotic relationship. Like all Lancers have with their respective heroes. Without Luke Skywalker, Han Solo is just a drug-dealing scumbag criminal. Without Superman, Batman is just the Punisher in a funny hat. The Hero brings the Lancer up as a character by speaking to a part of the character that the world has quieted. Wolverine needs that in order to be the character we want to see on screen, and Cyclops is the perfect character to bring that out in him.

And lest this begin to sound too formulaic and like we’re treading over ground already covered in the MCU, I should point out that all Hero/Lancer relationship do not look the same. Tony Stark was a snarky rebel because Steve Rogers was an earnest traditionalist (at least before each grew through their relationship and took on aspects of the other — again, writing character-driven stories naturally leads to character growth and fulfilling, completed personal character arcs). But Cyclops doesn’t need a Lancer like Tony, because they would be too similar in too many ways as characters. Like Tony, Cyclops possesses the cinematically-useful character trait of being able to absorb, internalize, process, and intuit large amounts of new information quickly, and then make complex plans of action that are totally reliant on this information that, until just a few moments ago, he did not possess. But Cyclops also shares an important character trait with Steve Rogers: the ability to explain his plan to others in a way that makes it clear to them what their role is, why that particular role is both vitally important and something only they could accomplish, and that he is trusting them to complete their role without direct supervision because he knows that they can do this, even if they doubt themselves.

With that particular set of character traits, it makes sense that Cyclops’s Lancer is someone who has a vast amount of knowledge and practical experience which Cyclops has not had time to acquire himself, but who lacks the ability to communicate that experience to others in a way that immediately inspires trust and obedience. Enter: Wolverine, a man whose practically-limitless skills, knowledge, and experience have been acquired through such a great amount of tragedy and pain that he cannot see how to move forward into a more positive direction without outside help.

And Wolverine isn’t the only character whose fits this mold. Characters with a vast amount of skills and life-experience who nevertheless find themselves subordinate to Cyclops include: Wolverine, Cable, Storm, Dr. Nemesis, Nightcrawler, Mister Fantastic, Emma Frost, Bishop, Namor, and even f*#@$&n’ Magneto.

That’s right. Magneto. The man so arrogant, he named himself Magnus. The man with such an absolutely inflated sense of his own importance that he made his helmet crest the national flag of all mutants anywhere.

Yes, believe it or not, there was an extended period in the comics where that Magneto willingly placed himself as Cyclops’s second-in-command.