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Pound the Table | An X-Men Self-Insert

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I have a question for @October Daye:

- What are Noa's greatest desires? And how do you imagine her 'House of M' version, both as personal story/background and family life (that is, is she married? Does she have kids? Ect...)
 
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Trunko said:
now I want Nora and She-Hulk do a Marvel version of 'Law and Order' together, maybe with Matthew "Matt" Murdock as a regular character and cameos of all main Marvel characters.
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Here's something about that: She-Hulk would talk to us, the audience, in the middle of it.

Jen: "Okay. I'm gonna poll the readers of this fic: should I ask Noa out?"
Noa: "What are you talking about? Who are you talking to?"
Jen: "Don't worry. It's the end of the chapter so we'll just be hanging here in limbo until October Daye collects the poll info and writes us a saucy romance."
Daye: I'm not actually going to write that. This is a courtroom drama, not a slashfic.
Jen: "Let's see what the poll says. You know fanfic readers. This is happening if they vote for it! Democracy! And remember, dear readers: vote yes on Jen/Noa and then head to Ao3 to get a preview. But not THAT part of Ao3. The vanilla part. Don't make this weird, okay?"
Daye: I refuse. I'm taking a six month break to do real world law.
Noa: "I'm still here."
Jen: *winks*
 
Ganurath said:
I'm entirely certain that Noa's magic has a different theme.
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Noa's magic isn't holy. She just uses religious iconography to focus it, because the ritual is the point, and it's comfortable for her.

Trunko said:
I have a question for @October Daye:

- What are Noah's greatest desires? And how do you imagine her 'House of M' version, both as personal story/background and family life (that is, is she married? Does she have kids? Ect...)
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Who's Noah? That's a boy's name.

kaosisreality said:
Here's something about that: She-Hulk would talk to us, the audience, in the middle of it.

Jen: "Okay. I'm gonna poll the readers of this fic: should I ask Noa out?"
Noa: "What are you talking about? Who are you talking to?"
Jen: "Don't worry. It's the end of the chapter so we'll just be hanging here in limbo until October Daye collects the poll info and writes us a saucy romance."
Daye: I'm not actually going to write that. This is a courtroom drama, not a slashfic.
Jen: "Let's see what the poll says. You know fanfic readers. This is happening if they vote for it! Democracy! And remember, dear readers: vote yes on Jen/Noa and then head to Ao3 to get a preview. But not THAT part of Ao3. The vanilla part. Don't make this weird, okay?"
Daye: I refuse. I'm taking a six month break to do real world law.
Noa: "I'm still here."
Jen: *winks*
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I mean, Jen is due to show up in… three or four chapters? One or the other.

I'm still debating how hard I want her to be leaning on the fourth wall.
 
Anaja said:
I had to retrain my autocorrect on those two while posting here. Convince it that I wasn't just leaving off a letter that I obviously intended.
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I didn't, but my autocorrupt is already trained not to ping on Yiddish, so Noa, being a Hebrew name, just gets a "you spelled me wrong" as opposed to an "oh, you must've meant Noah or Nora, here, let me fix that for you".

No, damn it. N O A. Three letters only. Not four!
 
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AU Reader Omake — '97-verse: Giving a Timeout
  • Apocrypha
    • Hello, everyone and here's the second non-canon omake chapter of '97 Verse.

    Enjoy.


    Giving a Timeout​

    Can this day get any worse?, Noa Schaefer sarcastically thought with annoyance after learning that the protestors started to riot and storm their way into the United Nations Headquarters. All thanks to the Friends of Humanity and their leader, Carl Denti, who had fashioned himself as the so-called X-Cutioner.

    And this whole stupid tantrum was simply because her old friend, Erik Lehnsherr a.k.a. Magneto, was given a fair trial by a panel of UN Judges for his actions as the ex-leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. He was willing to submit to them under their custody as a show of good faith, and even allowed the power-suppressing collar to be placed around his neck, even if it felt discomforting for him to not access his power of magnetism.

    Noa had stepped up in her role as his defense attorney to defend him before the courtroom of the UN HQ (albeit in an apparently human form, courtesy of her mutant power).

    Despite Magneto's previous attempts at encouraging her to be more comfortable with her true appearance, rather than continue to hide what she was*, even he understood that her esteemed career as a lawyer would have been in jeopardy should she appear before the UN HQ as a mutant.

    Which would also have given the Friends of Humanity more ammunition for their anti-mutant rhetoric.

    The difference between Noa and the X-Men, in her eyes, was that she'd managed to live her whole life in disguise as a human, while they were publicly mutants, fighting to protect the world that feared and hated them. Prior to Erik reaching out to her, and her subsequent agreement to help him in continuing Charles' will and legacy he had left behind, she would never have considered that.

    Even if Charles had to be incredibly extra in getting all of the pages of his last will and testament bound to a hardcover book binding!, she cracked a lighthearted jab at Professor X.

    On the other hand however, there were several advantages for Noa to appear as another important human ally of the mutants in public, and she intended to make good use of them while they lasted. At least Moira McTaggert* wouldn't be the only one, and currently, she was a tad occupied as a member of the Interim Council of Genosha.

    Even with the intervention of Cyclops and his fellow X-Men taking over the UN Forces, who withdrew to protect the courtroom inside, to de-escalate the situation, her draconic hearing could tell that they were steadily losing ground, and with the rioting protestors hiding the Friends of Humanity were close to breaking through. It wouldn't be long until they entered the courtroom and started shooting at everyone inside.

    Actually, no. You know what? They're all getting a time out!, Noa made a decision, clenching her fists in tranquil fury.

    "Counsel, where are you going!? It's too dangerous out there!" Valerie Cooper called out once she noticed the defense attorney for Magneto starting to leave the UN courtroom, and assumed that the blonde woman was attempting to bail out.

    "I'll be going for a walk, Dr. Val. Don't worry, I won't be long," the short woman reassured with a calm look of determination, ignoring her fellow blonde who narrowed her eyes in suspicion towards her.

    Magneto simply smiled, knowing what she was going to do.

    Briefly stopping, Noa turned to the Goddess of the Weather who was floating in the air. "Miss Storm, keep everyone safe and make sure no harm comes to them here. Especially my client."

    "Of course. Be careful," Storm complied, as she was curious of the blonde lawyer's capabilities aside from her expertise with the law.

    After leaving the courtroom's doors, locked and guarded as they were by the UN Forces, Noa stumbled her way to see the X-Cutioner pummeling a silent Cyclops whilst petulantly whining about 'humans having more dignity than filthy mutants when dealing with their problems' while the other X-Men were keeping the angry mob at bay, with little success.

    Yeah, no, they're all definitely getting a timeout, she thought, preparing to end it quickly without further violence.

    Taking out the small, two-fingered mystical ring she'd secreted out of her briefcase, the mutant attorney put it on her left hand and made an anticlockwise circular pattern with her right hand, focusing her magical power into it. It formed a large glowing orange magic circle in front of Noa.

    Suddenly, hundreds of orange magical portals appeared below the feet of X-Cutioner, the Friends of Humanity and their fellow anti-mutant protestors. Their eyes widened with shock and fear, before they all fell into the portals together.*

    The violent rioting had been successfully subdued.

    "What happened?", Cyclops asked after he recovered his visor to contain his optic blast power and see properly. He saw the lack of angry humans in the ruined entrance of the UN HQ, leaving only himself, his fellow X-Men and Ms. Schaefer.

    "Mon ami, our attorney is a magician!" Gambit remarked with widened eyes after witnessing her use of magic.

    "Fascinating, is that your Gift, Ms. Schaefer?", Beast inquired with a look of curiosity.

    Putting away the Sling Ring, Noa shook her head. "I'm afraid not, Dr. McCoy. I learned this simple magic trick from the Sorcerer Supreme himself*. It came in handy to travel anywhere I want without paying the tickets."

    "I see, that would explain how you and Magneto managed to bypass the mansion's security systems and entered The Professor's office," the blue furred doctor realized.

    Morph wondered out loud, "So where did you send everyone with those portals?..."

    Turning around to go back to the UN HQ's courtroom, the blonde lawyer simply answered. "Don't worry, they will be fine. I'll let them out after we properly settle the trial of Magneto. Now if you will excuse me, gentlemen."


    *Shout-out to Michael Fassbender's Magneto who encouraged Mystique to be herself than hiding her true form in "X-Men: First Class".

    *In the comics, Moira McTaggert is a mutant whose power of reincarnation allows her to live multiple lives to shape the destiny of mutantkind. In X-Men '97 Episode 5, she is human (unless eventually revealed otherwise in the show) and the only Token Human member of the Interim Council of Genosha.

    *The X-Cutioner alongside the Friends of Humanity and the rowdy protestors have been falling… for 30 minutes.

    *AUTHOR ADDITION: Hi, @October Daye here!~ Thanks to Warmachine375 for this one, but unfortunately, Noa isn't strong enough to do what he wanted her to. But she can do a single portal, and use it to set off a pre-arranged signal for someone else, waiting in the wings to make even more...
     
  • Apocrypha
    • owlmessenger said:
    Not to defend the assholes, but don't you start to asphyxiate after falling at terminal velocity for a while? Isn't that a step further than Noa usually goes?
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    Falling for 30 minutes is another Marvel movie reference, this time to Thor: Ragnarok and the initial meeting therein between Loki and Doctor Strange. It may not be intended to be taken as literally as the main text.
     
    They got sent somewhere with much less gravity, so terminal velocity was low enough they could still breathe.
     
    owlmessenger said:
    Not to defend the assholes, but don't you start to asphyxiate after falling at terminal velocity for a while? Isn't that a step further than Noa usually goes?
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    Normally, yes. However, if you were falling into an infinite void (or, more achievably, falling through 2 paired portals) then that means that the air can fall with you. This will make it far easier for you to breathe for far longer — partly due to you now either lacking or having a far higher terminal velocity. The 'relative air-speed' is much lower.
     
    Spector29 said:
    W...what? That's a very strong opinion whne, near as I can tell, Logan's never talked about it in comics. (Or else this would be easier to google)
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    I've been trying to write up a post on how the X-Men came to be associated with the LGBTQ+ community and how the AIDS epidemic specifically played a role in the Friends of Humanity being invented as villains for the X-Men which solidified their cultural connection to the LGBT community in the 90s after the soft reboot of the X-Men in 1975 started shifting the cultural subtext of the comic towards being positive about other minorities.

    It's a complicated mess that I don't know if I'll able to ever disentangle properly before this thread/story runs its course, but in Wolverine's case basically:

    - He shows up 1974 as an enemy of the Hulk, then resurfaces in 1975 as a member of the X-Men and then slowly builds up his now famous/infamous popularity/publicity that exploded in 80s when he starred in his first independent series which was basically catnip for the then young punk culture.

    - In 1970 the first proper intersectional organizations for the GLBT community have become politically active with the first Gay Liberation Marches happening in New York and Chicago while the first Gay Freedom Marches happened in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

    - The first HIV case we can confirm is is an adult Bantu male known only by his tissue sample designation of LEO70 in 1959 in what was at the time the Belgian Congo. From there it spread around the world until the AIDS Epidemic was declared in 1981. Now the part relevant here for Wolverine's Biness is that HIV is a selective virus:

    Article:
    HIV is sexist.


    A woman is twice as likely to catch the virus from an infected partner in a heterosexual relationship than a man is.


    And homosexual men are at even greater risk. They're more than 20 times as likely to get infected from an HIV-positive partner than partners in a heterosexual relationship.


    Now scientists at Microsoft Research and the Zambia-Emory HIV Project have a clue about why these disparities exist.


    Only the strongest, most evolutionary "fit" versions of the virus tend to infect a man when he has sex with an HIV-positive woman, scientist report Thursday in the journal Science.

    In other words, particular versions of the virus, with particular DNA sequences, are most likely to pass from a woman to a man. This reduces the chance an infection occurs during sex.


    The restriction is less when women have sex with an HIV-positive man. And, most likely, reduced even further when men have sex with men. So the chance of an infection increases in both situations.


    HIV infects Homosexual Men at a rate that is 20 times higher than heterosexual couples. Heterosexual women are twice as likely to catch the HIV virus from an infected partner than men are. And lesbians have only had confirmed partner to partner transmission of the virus since 2014 and were considered to be infected before that usually trough dirty needles or heterosexual encouters of all types.

    So take the 1980s when AIDS was not a well known thing. Add the fact that Gay Men are being shadow exterminated by Reagan who is doing what he can to sabotage the response to the disease because it is believed to be limited to Gay Men as they are its only victims. Then there is the whole Bisexual Men are perceived as a Bridge Population for HIV to enter Heterosexual society:

    Article:
    While bisexuals who are exposed during sexual relations with other men are one bridge on which the AIDS virus can cross from the high-risk homosexual population to infect heterosexual women, the greatest threat comes from intravenous drug users. Only about 4 percent of diagnosed AIDS cases are thought to have been transmitted through heterosexual intercourse, and fewer than one in 10 of those appear to involve bisexual men, according to a New York study.

    But numbers offer little consolation to the individual woman who fears that one miscalculation could be fatal, especially a middle-class woman who thinks the chance of contact with a drug addict using contaminated needles is remote. For this kind of woman, experts say, the figure of the male bisexual, cloaked in myth and his own secretiveness, has become the bogyman of the late 1980's, casting a chill on past sexual encounters and prospective ones.

    She might also be distressed to learn that bisexuals are often secretive and complex men who, experts say, probably would not acknowledge homosexual activity even if questioned about it. Indeed, some cannot even admit such behavior to themselves.

    ''Homosexuals have been out of the closet a long time but bisexuals have not,'' said Dr. Theresa Crenshaw, president of the 5,000-member American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. ''Straight women are going to discover some very unpleasant news about some men they have known.''

    It is a particularly acute worry for women in such areas as New York, Miami and San Francisco, which have high numbers of AIDS cases. In New York, for example, it is estimated that as many as 500,000 people, mostly men, may already be infected with the AIDS virus but as yet free from symptoms of the disease. This contrasts with the 33,000 confirmed AIDS cases in the nation, still overwhelmingly confined to homosexual men and drug abusers. Some Think They Can Tell
    Some experts feel the threat is exaggerated and doubt that male bisexuals will be a vector of widespread infection among women.

    Those relatively few bisexuals willing to discuss their private lives now fear they ''will become scapegoated as carriers of the plague,'' according to David Lourea, executive director of Bisexual Counseling Services of San Francisco, a support group. ''The danger is in telling women to avoid bisexual men and give them the impression they are safe with straight guys who may be just as risky now because they are secret IV drug users.''

    Still, the fear about bisexuals persists, and women are left to their own resources to ferret out a man's sexual history.

    ''If the guy won't tell me I could only guess,'' said the Miami office worker. Her solution: no sex with any man until she is confident of her safety. But ''even then the guy could be a good liar,'' she noted.

    Some women believe they can recognize bisexual men. ''I don't care how much they want to cover it up, their little effeminate ways tip you off,'' said another Miami woman, Isis Gradaille. This view is disputed, however, and many bisexuals may seem very masculine to women they attract.


    That article came out in 1987. It is as old as I am. Now there is more in it than what I've quoted here, but this is the relevant chunk to understanding how Wolverine got to being considered Bi instead of Pan.

    Basically on both the heterosexual and homosexual side of the culture one of the consequences of the AIDS epidemic was that the Bisexuals definition of Kinsley from 1948 was used to demonize a sexual minority among them that was not to blame for the spread of the disease. It's just a lot harder to find an article from the Gay side outright doing that.

    - In the late 80s and especially in the 90s here was the rise of the 90s anti-hero who as a usually male character was a response to both the more public knowledge of there being Homosexuals and the AIDS epidemic shaking people's belief in their freedom to have sex freely. So such anti-heroes were hyper-masculine power fantasies living on the edge of their lives while taking girls and names without a care for tomorrow as long as they did right today.

    While Wolverine as a character is woven into the DNA of such characters, he himself was not one because of his Wolverine Publicity. See Marvel was not very financially sound until it was bought by Disney, and even then you could argue they are threading water only tolerated for their adaptation potential, so Wolverine being a reliable source of income meant that they couldn't change him much without losing what made him interesting as a character.

    They tried all the same which is where the original X-Men: The Animated Series comes in: In that show Wolverine got codified as the gruff sensitive male of the cast. He was Jubilee's older brother, everyone's wiseass pain in the ass, Jean Gray's "Nice Guy" ect. Some of the writers of the original show really did not like Wolverine while others on that same team loved him.

    So he got to be insecure about his power being able to heal others trough a transfusion, displayed symptoms and struggled with PTSD, was the one who left his violent past behind while Sabretooth couldn't, ect. This resulted in an entire generation of kids growing up seeing Wolverine as someone opposite the 90s anti-hero as ironic as that is for a character that was one of the main inspirations for the trope.

    - In the early 2000s X-23 got created for X-Men: Evolution and then got added into the Comic Marvel Universe trough NYX which implied a romantic interest between her and Kiden Nixon. And this is the point where Wolverine collides with the LGBTQ+ community to result in Wolverine being Bi.

    See in the 2000s as the LGBTQ+ community was becoming mainstream and was adding the Q and the + while at the same time going more and more mainstream until we get to the 2010s where you get representations in regular children's cartoons. Which is an interesting story in itself and I am already skipping over a lot of complexities in there including the disagreement over what to call the community right now.

    What matters for Wolverine being Bi is that in the 1990s Pansexuality, a term that originated in 1914 among the opponents of Sigmund as Pansexualism in order to denote the idea that "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical" which then mutated into Pansexuality in the 1970s and was used along the terms Omnisexuality and more rarely Bisexuality, was making a mainstream debut as a replacement for the term Bisexual that intensified in the 2000s.

    So in the LGBTQ+ community what is happening is that parts of the Lesbians and Gays that are Biphobic are transfering their irrational hatred for Bis from the 80s and 90s that existed basically as scapegoating to avoid the actual causes of the AIDS Pandemic onto a Bi stereotype that was a mismash of everything they could majorly agree they hated about the world outside the community.

    So at a time where non-Heterosexual relationships are getting mainstream representation and those whose sexual orientation has them being between Heterosexual and non-Heterosexual and looking to terms like Bisexual, Pansexual, Omnisexual and other more obscure terms a bunch of assholes in the community use the old Biphobia to define Bisexuals as "not Queer enough". As an Other:

    - A man who is still too masculine to be a Beta, but to open with his feelings to count as an Alpha.

    - A woman who is quiet and submissive in her relationships, yet when it comes time to fight she steps into the first lines willing to draw blood for what she fights for.

    If these two definitions look really vague it is because they are. What they also are is just one part of an entire rainbows worth of punching down done in certain parts of the community by homosexuals for an insane number of reasons. Except these two definitions stuck around into the 10s and the 20s while others faded into obscurity or into specific sub-cultures.

    Because there really were people stuck between Heterosexuality and non-Heterosexuality who found Heterosexual culture too limiting/stifling while also never feeling fully welcome in non-Heterosexual circles, even the genuinely good and welcoming parts because of cultural differences, who identified with those definitions and who also identified with both Wolverine and X-23 if they read Marvel comics.

    This subculture identifies with the Bi label. They are a minority even in the parts of the community that are between Heterosexual and non-Heterosexual, but they consider themselves exclusively Bi.

    And they identify with the above definitions because those are the only definitions that fit in any way. And they identify with both Wolverines because they are loners in a crowd in which they never fuly belong in any situation and those are the charcters that fit the most.

    So yeah Wolverine is Bi. Both of them. Hope this makes sense @Spector29 because this is just a chunk of text I could pull out of the insanity that is the X-Men and the LGBTQ+ community intersecting. Like there is so much stuff there and for the most part I can't tell what is relevant to point to and what is just a thing that happened and then didn't matter.
     
    TheFourthman said:
    I know this is a comic thing but. God this name is so dumb. You hate them and you're using their naming scheme.
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    In fairness, the Friends of Humanity aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. They use salvaged Sentinel technology that they could barely understand other than repurpose them as MegaMan Cannons and the depowering weapon used by The X-Cutioner had only one shot, which Storm was hit by it, taking the blast for Magneto, in '97 show.

    Had they been smarter, they could have the weapon that depowers mutants mass produced and distributed among their ranks.
     
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