u/BatmanFan317

Okay, so there's been a lot of discussion about Emma's absence from a season adapting New X-Men, a lot of it not so calm, so I wanted to throw my hat in the ring about some of the common criticisms I've heard:

1. Emma needs to be there for New X-Men

While she does play a large role in the original story, not only is the show clearly taking a different approach to the comic's story (Genosha being before anything to do with X-Corp, characters like Rogue and Nightcrawler sticking around, Bastion as the mastermind behind Genosha, etc.), but this show has been fast and loose with the stories it adapts since S1 of the original show. Kitty Pryde is still not a character even after all this time, but they adapted Days of Future Past with Bishop in her place in Season 1 of 92. Rogue and Gambit didn't even exist when the original Dark Phoenix and DoFP stories came out, and were given major roles in 92's versions of the stories. This show has always been about adapting stories with the cast they have, not 1-to-1 recreations. Hell, Kitty is absent from what they've adapted of Astonishing too, but I've heard no noise about that in comparison to the upset over Emma.

2. They keep stealing Emma scenes and giving them to other characters

See above, but I also want to dive into this a bit more. Charles gets Emma's Danger Room fakeout scene, and the reason for this is because not only is his new mindset being established (a very important thing to establish if we are indeed on the road to Onslaught), but also because his misuse of the Danger Room in this very episode is the main plot. So him getting this scene ties to that. I've seen people say he also got the "humans will hate and fear us, so we need to be non-violent" speech and that they made it a joke, but I don't think I recall seeing that anywhere in Danger.exe?

3. They gave her mentorship of Generation X to Polaris

I don't think this is the case from what we've seen of Polaris in the show so far, she temporarily mentors them in the Danger Room (and even then, Synch and a mute Chamber are the only Gen X members there), nothing like what Emma and Banshee were doing with them.

4. Beau DeMayo hates Emma Frost as a character

I've heard that he made very strange Tweets about her (note: heard about, not seen myself, but I'm gonna take their word for it), and those Tweets do sound bad, but honestly, if Emma in 97 was purely down to DeMayo and he does hate her, he's definitely not going anywhere near as bad with it as "hating her" would suggest. Like, the dude could have taken things way further than just Emma being mildly villainous as she was in the original show, he could have dug up and adapted the pony being set on fire thing, or even just made her even worse. I've seen characters being written terribly by people who hate them (e.g. Wolverine when written by Garth Ennis), and Emma is nowhere close to the worst it could be. Do not take this as a defence of DeMayo himself, the dude is a weird fucking creep, I am specifically talking about his writing and how people attribute Emma's writing to him.

Ultimately, I can relate to wanting to see more of a character, but I don't think the entire show is against Emma or whatever. I've seen people say that maybe we'll get more Emma in later seasons as a response to the above criticisms, but honestly, I think Emma's redemption is just a story the show isn't interested in tackling, and I cannot blame them with how massive the cast already is. They actively shunted Cable, Jubilee and Sunspot, major Season 1 characters, off to a single episode so far, and in spite of their absence, we've still got a cast that people are saying is too big in spite of that. I just hope we can all get along, I've seen Emma stans who are massively upset, but I've also seen people stirring the pot. We're X-Men fans, we love this show, let's all calm down.

Blofeld and Spectre. We never get explicitly told who Isola's client is, but like, c'mon, it's obvious. Achievement for catching her being named after the Bond song for the movie literally called Spectre and MI6 knowing nothing about them, and the only time that kind of setup wasn't Spectre was Quantum, which only existed as a stand-in for Spectre and even then, ended up being retconned as part of it when the rights BS was resolved.

But yeah, if IOI gets to do their trilogy, I'm willing to bet Blofeld is the endgame, the big final boss of Game 3. Game 2 will likely have more blatant Spectre build-up, maybe even pulling a FRWL/Thunderball style debut for Blofeld, unseen face with only the cat on his lap visible. They might have Isola fill the "dead love interest that hardens Bond's heart" role Tracy and Vesper did, since they're setting her up as a reoccurring character with conflicted loyalties between Bond and Spectre, and they've already shown how willing they are to leave her out to dry with the failure to secure HYPERION in Wave of the Future.

But what do y'all think? Because I am very excited to see IOI reimagine Bond's nemesis the way they've reimagined him.