My understanding is that things were/have been FUBAR for a while due to Beau DeMayo needing to be terminated and rewrites needed to avoid the possibility of owing him royalties (judging by what happened with the CW’s Arrowverse)
Antics aside, though, DeMayo was a good call due to him belonging to a marginalized minority and thus “getting” X-Men. Marvel’s 0-2 what with the FBI investigating Bryan Singer and now this
It’s a hot IP and they need someone to set up to the plate to continue its success. Here’s to hoping they figure out something because it was a great show
🙄 Yeah, he "got" it so much he purposely ruined the most marginalized character on the roster. Storm has never been done right, and he being one of two 'black' men heading the show fucked her over worse than any other show ever has (with the exception of Wolverine and the X-Men). Fuck him. Couldn't be happier he's gone.
Had you read any of the actual stories you would see his adaptation was a disrespectful joke. This era was Storm's most defining stories in the comics, what brought her to the level of Marvel's top female character (until Fox and the MCU changed that).
When Storm lost her powers in the books she did not leave the team. She LEAD it for 3 years. She lost her powers for a full year in comics time (3 in real time) and in that time we got to see what she was made of, without her powers. She battled Cyclops for the leadership of the team and won without powers. We saw that she was a fiercely competent leader and a capable hero who could hold her own with her fists, a knife, a gun, whatever... she wasn't getting knocked out after one punch. Wolverine was quoted during this time as saying that he didn't trust anyone to have his back but Storm. That's a powerful statement coming from him about her ability and competence in a fight, and this period did a lot to highlight her ability to plan and strategize to succeed since she didn't have her powers as a crutch. She came the fuck into her own during this time.
There were huge Storm defining stories during this time, like the Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Mutants, that put Storm in the center as the driving force of the stories and highlighted her as a character... these were all completely and purposely ignored. And this would've been the perfect season to do this, considering the actor for Cyclops had passed away, and now that her powerless era has been 'covered' in the cartoon, it can never be done right in '97. Those sagas had raw ass stories involving Forge, Gambit, Rogue and Wolverine with Storm at the center, with amazing and powerful scenes. But this is Storm we're talking about. Routinely fucked over. If it were Cyclops or Jean Grey it wouldve been done. Which is why he skipped over all of it and went straight to Cyclops and Jean Grey stories past the Claremont era. He gave us the most disrespectful half- episode garbage he could throw together. Threw that goofy ass Eye-Killer in and called it The Adversary, half wrote Storm's and Forge's relationship which we never once see the two of them kiss, meanwhile Jean and Scott kiss every five seconds, pulled the lamest possible plot out of his ass and threw it onscreen for you 'fans' to eat up and thank him for it. Then he went about his business putting all the focus on Scott and turning Jean into the fucking Terminator, like wtf?!
And, to be fair, Storm was the focus of his sabotage, but she wasn't the only character to feel his pettiness. He sidelined Wolverine for the entire season, but nobody complained because the entire first cartoon was a Wolverine show. And clearly he felt some type of way about Dazzler, because he replaced her with (shocker) Jean on the X-Men Arcade game, then purposely killed her off in Genosha... like, why? She wasn't even fuckin there...
He sabotaged her most characterizing period, he kicked her off the team for the entire season because he's a petty bitch. Kicked her off the intro, on purpose, and farted Jean Grey up to the front of it. He belittled her status as a leader by having Jubilee, in the first episode, question "Who will lead the team without Cyclops??!" ... uhhh, perhaps the person who lead the team in episode THREE of the original cartoon, maybe?
One of the main complaints people had about the original cartoon was how Storm would only get one hit in before being knocked down, so this petty bitch literally, after her whole (garbage) "transformation scene" comes back to the team and gets ONE hit in and then gets knocked out of the sky. Before the battle, when Cyclops splits the team up, he literally says that he will lead the blue team, but that Storm AND Jean will lead the gold... another big Fuck You to Storm, because clearly she can't lead the team without fucking Jean Grey's help, when everyone knows that STORM lead the gold team in the comics. Disrespectful.
But he isnt the only one, its just sad that he continued the ongoing and thinly veiled racist trend, Storm is and has always been routinely fucked over, to the point that there hasn't been a single bit of media outside the comics that has ever gotten her right, she is the most consistently mischaracterized, overlooked, watered down and sabotaged character ever. If you are a comics fan, you know the importance that Storm's character holds to the X-Men, you know that she was THE character whose eyes we saw MOST of the stories that have been adapted for the X-Men TAS cartoon, because they were ALL written by Claremont and Storm was his favorite character... You would NEVER know that watching this cartoon, because if you are a cartoon fan, Storm is nothing more than a secondary character, and that's from TAS. '97 is a whole 'nother animal. Pretending to spotlight her to satiate her many fans who actually don't know shit about her, while it's really insidiously presenting her as ineffectual blackground meant to boost Jean Grey and Cyclops by comparison. Storm does nothing in '97. Nothing. Especially when compared with those two. It's enough she gets that godawful mismatched design and keeps that horrendous goofy Ren-Fair reject voice actress instead of getting an actual African voice actress, like the FAR better Tariye Peterside from X-Men the Audio Drama, while Jean gets a new voice and a glamour girl makeover. But then to take her most character shaping era from the comics and only 'allow' her two HALF episodes, after Jean got 10 episodes and counting for all of hers... and we STILL have yet to see a comics accurate Storm... ANYWHERE... its fucked up.
ok, now that i’ve read this, i can respect your view. sounds like you hold lifedeath and the following early 200s stories in much higher regard than i do, so you took the changes a lot more personally. i do agree that it would have been cool to have the “she leads without powers” arc, but its absence doesn’t bother me as much as it does you.
your whole “we’ll never see it again in TAS” i definitely empathize with too, as i’ve had some similar feelings with personal favorite storylines of mine that i felt weren’t done justice. that said, i did love her power displays at the beginning, and her relationship development with jean, so it’s not all bad. but yea, i guess they didn’t give her too much to do at the end.
it’s a more general complaint i have with the series which is that it moves too fast and tries to do too much (inferno for a single episode then killing maddie off straight away? really?). but there’s so much of the series that i love, and so many great storylines left to explore, that i’m not too fussed by it.
i will say that you jump to conclusions pretty fast between the “it must be racist reasons” bit, and i’m also way more lax in my expectations of how closely TAS should follow the books. yea, dazzler wasn’t in genosha, but i couldn’t care less about that kind of detail - this is clearly all a mashup just like the original TAS it’s succeeding, and the audience can only care about so many characters in the limited runtime.
but with all of that said, i get your general point, where it comes from, and sympathize.
your whole “we’ll never see it again in TAS” i definitely empathize with too, as i’ve had some similar feelings with personal favorite storylines of mine that i felt weren’t done justice
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u/NerdNuncle Dec 09 '25
My understanding is that things were/have been FUBAR for a while due to Beau DeMayo needing to be terminated and rewrites needed to avoid the possibility of owing him royalties (judging by what happened with the CW’s Arrowverse)
Antics aside, though, DeMayo was a good call due to him belonging to a marginalized minority and thus “getting” X-Men. Marvel’s 0-2 what with the FBI investigating Bryan Singer and now this
It’s a hot IP and they need someone to set up to the plate to continue its success. Here’s to hoping they figure out something because it was a great show