x-men canon question

[kaydeefalls]

For those of you who know more about X-Men than I do -- how long has Xavier been in that wheelchair? Was he already crippled when Jean was his student, or did it happen later? And was Magneto responsible, or am I just making that up?

It's for my xmmficathon fic, so while I'm cool with just making up a backstory that fits my fic, I'd rather go with canon if I can...

Comments

[penknife.livejournal.com]

There's no movie canon on this at all, so you've pretty much got a free hand. In both comics canons, this happened before he met Jean or the other original X-Men. In 616 comicsverse canon, Magneto wasn't responsible; Xavier was injured while stopping an alien invasion in Tibet, which may be more ... colorful ... than you want to deal with in movieverse. In Ultimateverse canon, Magneto was responsible; their final argument before their split ended with Magneto throwing a steel beam at Xavier and breaking his back.

[kaydeefalls.livejournal.com]

So Erik was never a teacher at Xavier's school? I'm pretty sure I've read fics like that. Or was there a brief truce post-wheelchair?

Or maybe I should just make up whatever I want, because yeah, lack of movie canon.

[penknife.livejournal.com]

In 616 canon (the mainstream Marvel universe) Magneto was never a teacher at the school when the original X-Men were young, because he was busy being a maniacal supervillain at the time. He and Xavier had met in Israel and become friends, but had been estranged for years by the point Xavier started assembling the X-Men. Later, though, Magneto became headmaster of Xavier's school for a while because Xavier was near death and had to leave the planet with his alien girlfriend (it's a long story). Magneto wasn't particularly good at dealing with teenagers, although he tried.

In Ultimate X-Men canon (which is its own separate timeline), Charles and Erik founded a school together in San Francisco after they left their respective wives to be together (yes, it is as slashy as it sounds.) After facing prejudice from the locals, they went to the Savage Land with their students and some other mutants to build a utopian society there. It went bad pretty quickly, and Erik and Charles had a horrible fight in which Erik left Charles paralyzed. All of that was probably before any of the current X-Men became students, although I don't think we know for sure.

In movie canon, we have no idea. It's a popular fanon thing to make Erik have been a teacher at Charles's school, but there's no canon either way. All we know is that Charles met Erik when they were both young and that Erik helped him build Cerebro.

All of which is an extremely long-winded way of saying I think you should make up whatever you want -- that's pretty much what everyone else does.