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Every superhero and superteam have tropes that highlight their strengths. However, there gets to be a point where these tropes become a huge problem. Some X-Men tropes that fans once loved have become overused, and these ten are the ones that we really need to be consigned to the dust bin of history.
10. Magneto Was Right
Magneto is one of the X-Men’s most complicated characters. Magneto’s belief in mutant superiority, combined with his own past as a victim of the Holocaust, has made him into a character that most fans love. Over the years, the view of Magneto has changed; he’s no longer looked at as a villain and many see him as sympathetic. In fact, there are many people out there who like to think that Magneto was right, including the characters in the comics. This has led to the “Magneto was right” trope. Characters like to hand wave Magneto’s excesses away because of his past and his fighting for the oppressed people of the world. However, Magneto is still a racist mass murderer, and it’s about time everyone remembered that. Magneto is a great character, but more because how fascinating he is, not because he’s right.
9. Unending Plot Lines
Chris Claremont made the X-Men popular, and he did so by introducing multiple long term plotlines. These plotlines would bubble in the background of stories, building and building, and would eventually become the main plot. This kept readers hooked to the X-Men books, as they would want to see how the whole thing would turn out. After Claremont left, writers have done the same thing, but it’s often a bust. The ’90s are a huge example of this; there were plotlines introduced in 1991 that didn’t get their pay off until 1999. It’s honestly pretty ridiculous, and it still goes on to this day.
8. Evil Xavier
Xavier has been made into a villain over the years, and it’s kind of gotten pretty annoying. Xavier was always shown to be pretty shady, but it became a huge plotline in the ’00s X-Men comics. It was revealed that the Danger Room had become sentient and that Xavier had enslaved and that he had created a team of X-Men to free the originals from Krakoa that was killed, everyone’s memories of them taken by Xavier. It just kept going from there. This sort of thing became the rule with Xavier; he was always doing something bad with his mental powers or had terrible secrets of some kind. This is completely different from the Xavier that most fans got to know over the years, especially if they’re coming from movies of TV. It’s time for this trope to go away, because it’s made Xavier into a very predictable character.
7. “Age of” Stories
“The Age of Apocalypse” is an X-Men classic, but it’s brought with it a very bad trope. “The Age of Apocalypse” was the first time that X-Men fans got sucked into an alternate universe, but it wouldn’t be the last. First, there was “Age of X” in the mid to late ’00s, then we’d get “Age of X-Man” in 2019, as well as several sequels to “The Age of Apocalypse”. “Age of Revelation” is the latest “Age of” story. These stories have their strengths, and a good Age of Apocalypse story is a glory to behold, but the fact that the X-Men books have gone back to this well so many times has done a lot of damage. None of them can match the greatness of the original, and have become cases of diminishing returns.
6. Dark Dystopian Futures
“Days of Future Past” was the first major dystopian future, and it birthed a host of imitators after its end. Futures where superheroes lose are pretty common nowadays because it’s interesting to see how out heroes react when things are at their worst. It’s cool to see them actually lose and die. However, we’ve seen so many of these in the X-Men comics that it’s gotten really tired. Every X-fan has their favorite dystopian future, but that’s as much a part of the problem as anything else. We don’t need these dark futures anymore.
