In March, Amanda and I were driving to WonderCon in Anaheim, the kid sister of San Diego Comic-Con. WonderCon is like SDCC, but less. Less crowded, less expensive, and less amazing. If you’re in SoCal, it’s easy to make a day out of it, and the out-of-towners can spend a day in Disneyland and call it a proper vacation. WonderCon: It’s Just Fine!
Amanda was invited to be a guest on a panel about how to prevent comics industry burnout. I was there to support her and see if anyone would sell me a used Action Max, the worst game console of all-time. Why do I want one? The console works with VHS tapes, and I’m obsessed with VHS toys. And in tough economic times, I’m willing to do my part to support the irony market.
The 45 minute drive from LA to Anaheim for a comic-con seemed like the perfect time engage Amanda in that most beloved American parlor game: “Which X-Man do you most want to bone?”
Amanda and I are designing an X-Men inspired dating sim for Dorian, because it’s fun to make action figures kiss. As a narrative designer, my work begins by considering the story as it relates to the game’s core mechanics. As per the dating sim genre, the player will be introduced to a number of potential dates, who they will get to know over the course of the game through conversation. By the end, they will have paired off with one of them. So figuring out who the dates will be is core to the player experience.
While designing the cast, we talked about diversity. It’s important for us to have a diverse cast, in terms of cultural backgrounds and personality types, for many reasons. The story of X-Men is a metaphor for marginalized people in society, namely Black, brown and queer folks, and how they’re treated in the world today. It would be disingenuous to offer, say, an all-white cast and tell the player, “These are the outcasts of the world!” On a design level, if you offer the player a selection of dates who feel too same-y, that’s a less compelling player choice, in my opinion, than if each date represents a whole world of unique romantic possibility, and the character’s personality is a gateway to fantasy.
We want to capture the tone of X-Men: The Animated Series, which is rooted in character conflict. These are heroes with wildly different personalities and worldviews who must work together, because the world hates and fears them. The mutants clash, take sarcastic swipes at each other, undermine each other’s authority, and yet still manage to save the world. They’re underdog misfits. That’s so much of the fun, and we want the player to have fun! (A bold design choice, wanting the player to have fun!) So we ruled out a cast of only the kindest and most huggable X-Men, like Colossus and Beast. (Though hugging the former would be uncomfortable and hugging the latter might give you fleas?) We need messy characters, too. Kissable instigators.
However, a limitation we have is cast size. Let’s say we decided to design a big cast of 10 or 11 heroes, like in X-Men. We were told Dorian was going to fund an “art exploration” for our game, but there was no official deal in place. If Dorian came back to us and said, “Actually, you’re funding this entirely,” we’d be totally screwed. (Pun intended?) You see, every character or “sprite” in a dating sim adds to the budget, because an artist has to draw the sprite with a number of different poses and facial expressions, so the conversation appears more realistic. If all a sprite can do is smile kindly, it’s hard to give them a line like, “I hate you and I hope you die in a fire!!!” (Actually, that’d be pretty funny. *Makes Note*) So if we went ahead and developed a cast of ten heroes, and found out Dorian only had the budget for five, that could lead to a painful edit. We decided to develop a cast of four dates. If we continued the series, a logical way to expand would be to add more potential dates to the cast.
Jessica at Dorian also encouraged us to have an all-male cast. This made sense to us, knowing the marketplace. Dating sims, like manga, are marketed by gender. Their player base is largely looking to date dudes, and X-Men has plenty of “men” to base characters on. Again, if our players want to have dateable female heroes, we can always expand the cast later.
So, with all this in mind, we talked about which X-Men we wanted to bone. It was no surprise that the conversation found its way to Gambit and Rogue, arguably the hottest couple in Marvel Comics. (In second place is, obviously, Warbird and Doop.) Amanda said Gambit was very attractive, even though he’s untrustworthy. She also mentioned young Magneto, and I get it. A young Jewish man with a perfect physique, a genius mind, flowing hair, and the power to bend the world to his whim? She was describing yours truly!!! 🧲 😜 🧲
I tend to go for nerdy girls, which the X-Men doesn’t have a lot of. Physically, I’m most attracted to Storm – I’d meet her at the monorail! – but she’s very serious. I wasn’t sure if there’d be chemistry there. I thought Rogue would be a more fun date. Like, she’d carry me through the night sky and put me down at a remote truck stop for some peach pie. That’d be romantic! That said, unlike Gambit, I wouldn’t kiss her and go comatose, not even for a really, really good peach pie.
Over the course of the day at Wonder-Con, we synthesized our requirements and preferences into a cast of four. In our game, we’d have analogues to the following characters…
• Cyclops / Storm – A strong, tough leader whose authority would be questioned by his team, leading to delicious power struggles.
• Gambit – A smooth-talking lothario who’ll make passes at everyone, including the player and…
• Nightcrawler / Rogue – A friendly, physically unique outcast whose powers create social conflict.
• Wolverine – A beast of a man with temper issues who pushes buttons. Snikt!
There would also need to be a Professor X mentor type, and a villain whose scheme needed to be foiled, of course. But that would come next. When we arrived at WonderCon, we decided to turn our attention to the show and having fun. Amanda had a panel to crush, which she totally did. Lighting up a comic-con panel is one of her superpowers.
🎲 Your Turn: Who do you think is the hottest superhero couple? Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn? Black Panther and Storm? Howard the Duck and Lea Thompson?! Email your reply or use the “Comment” button below to tell the whole world.
🔌 Plugs: There’s a new game out on Android called Mercy. It’s a high school apocalypse simulator from the very talented author, and friend of mine, Lily Sparks. I was a playtester and adviser on the project. Mercy is free and full of great writing!
📨 Next Week: I’ll spill one of gaming’s best kept secrets! Technically, it’s not a secret at all, but it’s really cool and no one seems to know about it.
9 responses to “Who Are the Sexiest X-Men?”
Im not big into superheroes, so my couple pick is Goliath and Elisa from Gargoyles. Not traditionally thought of as a superhero universe, maybe—but at one time, that was exactly the plan. Michael Eisner was looking to develop Disney’s own homegrown original, sprawling superhero property to compete with Marvel, and the Gargoyles universe was going to be the seed. An interesting counterfactual possibility—what if we ended up with a trio of major superhero universes, Marvel, DC, and Gargoyles? Disney just got Marvel in the end, though!
Great pick. Gargoyles was a terrific show! I love that Michael Eisner was willing to swing for the fences on original ideas. Today, TV executives are more inclined to be like, “I know, let’s reboot Gargoyles,” instead of trying to make something unique. Even the way the Disney Afternoon repurposed library characters like Chip & Dale and Baloo was pretty creative.
Among the big Marvel and DC rosters, about the only place I’ve ever done shipping was the Teen Titans. And there I’m a big fan of Robin/Starfire and Beast Boy with Raven and/or Terra… and to a lesser extent, Cyborg/Bumblebee… Or if I’m in the mood for Yuri, any two or more of Starfire, Blackfire, Raven, and Terra or Raven/Jinx.
Going beyond the two companies that practically made the superhero genre and American comics synonymous, I really enjoyed the Grue/Skitter and Foil/Parian relationships in Worm, and in it’s sequel, Ward, I found it adorable how Look-See got shiptease with nearly every member of the team that was the focal point of Ward. Ward also has the couple of Weld, a man made of metal and Tress, a disembodied with razor wire like tendrils for hair who wears a prosthetic humanoid body to help deal with the dysmorphia from the transformation that came with her powers and to keep said tendrils from shredding anyone who isn’t invulnerable
And speaking of ward, it had a pair of characters whose powers made relationships particularly thorny… or rather, a side affect of their powers triggering at the same time while touching… The characters are twin brothers, and because they got powers at the same time and were touching when it happened, one of them exists in the real world while the other is out of phase with reality. The twin that is out of phase remains fully cognoscent of the outside world and whatever the in-control twin is doing, but has no agency, is incapable of losing consciousness, and no way to communicate, but the twin who is in-phase with reality has complete control over their swap… And to make things more awkward, one twin is straight and the other is gay
So pretty much every combination of Teen Titans? ^_^
I’ve never read Worm or Ward, but I really like when powers affect interpersonal relationship dynamics outside of fighting. The twin brothers sound fascinating!
I’d recommend both Worm and Ward, as well as the rest of Wildbo’s works, though for fair warning, they aren’t for the faint of heart. There’s lots of messy relationship stuff, both personally and socially, romantically and platonically plus lots of tension between powered individuals(called Para-Humans in setting) and non-powered individuals, plus the way people gain powers in setting, called trigger events, are usually the result of a latent para-human surviving the kind of trauma that goes down in their memories as the worst day of their lives(Things like being tortured by a tinker(the in-verse term for a para-human whose powers revolve around advanced technology(Think Iron Man or Reed Richards without the stretching) who specializes in augmenting living things, being forced at gun point to be a living landmine detector, surviving a Kaiju trying to level your home town, a cap stone incident of a prolonged bullying campaign that puts the victim in the hospital, to name a few), so even among the heroic para-humans, there’s a lot of mental scars, and many of the “villains” are broken individuals who fell through the cracks… and sometimes, the powers are related to the trauma). I’d argue at times, it makes Dark Knight Trilogy Batman look like Adam West Batman… Also, to give fair warning, Worm is about 1.7 million words, and while I’m not sure on its length Ward isn’t a short read either, possibly longer… fewer “arcs” but I’m pretty sure the average number of chapters per arc and average word count per chapter are higher for Ward… Aside from Worm and Ward, Wildbo has also written Pact(supernatural in a modern setting), Pale(same verse as Pact, but whereas Ward is a direct sequel to Worm, Pale is a completely separate story) Twig(Set in an alternate history America wherethe kind of science Victor Frankenstein did dominates the Academic landscape and is used in the service of a globe spaning Empire that conquered America at some point before the story starts, focus is on a group of augmented childrenwho serve as covert agents of the Academies and the Crown, largely deployed against rebels and independant scientists doing research the powers that be don’t like people meddling with)… And currently Claw, currently on-going(and which I need to catch up on, a crime procedural set in what appears to be a near future America following a partial collapse of the federal government(I’m only like 18 chapters in, WildBo works tend to run for hundreds of chapters, details of the greater setting are often filled in only when they become relevant to a viewpoint character’s story)
*If you get a fifth slot* – like, if Dorian exceeds expectations… might I suggest:
– Angel/Sunspot: rich himbo with objectively desirable powers whose insecurities lead to conflict
I’ve always thought the characters in X-Men who had “passing privilege” as well as enough money and/or social capital to make most of their problems go away added an interesting dynamic.
Like, they don’t *have* to participate in the fight. But the fact that they don’t is bound to cause friction with the team members who didn’t luck out in that way. They’re sort of the shadow or mirror to the Rogue/Nightcrawlers. I think Psylocke (the Betsy Braddock version, anyway) would also fall under this umbrella.
Kat, this is an excellent suggestion, you’re totally right – and I think you’ll be pleased to know we’re already heading in this direction for one of the cast.
WRONG. It’s DOOP!
He’s a sexy pickle!