After 20 years of Fox’s X-Men franchise, the MCU has its work cut out in rebooting mutantkind from the ground-up. Which, to be honest, is probably why Marvel has so far been happy to repeat Fox’s greatest hits.
But, at some point, once Marvel runs out of Fox legacy actors to bring back, the studio will have to introduce its own version of the team. And when it does, it would be a smart move to adapt a major new retcon that’s just unfolded in the pages of Marvel Comics. Not only would this storyline help fix a glaring wasted storyline in the First Class series, it would also start out the MCU’s X-Men on a path to vastly superior LGBTQ representation than Fox’s films.
Nightcrawler’s origins just received a massive retcon
X-Men fans may be aware that Nightcrawler is the son of Mystique, and traditionally his father has been the villainous mutant Azazel. However, in X-Men Blue: Origins by writer Si Spurrier and artist Wilton Santos, the story of Nightcrawler’s parentage is completely rewritten, making his mother, Mystique, an even more tragic character than she was before.
In short, Origins reveals that Azazel isn’t Kurt Wagner’s father at all, but Mystique is. And his mother is Destiny, Raven Darkholme’s long-term on/off-again wife. The comic explains that Destiny, with her precognitive powers, receives a vision of Azazel taking over the world, and this can only be prevented if a mutant child with similar powers rises up to stop him.
In order to avert this dystopian future, Mystique and Destiny agree to give life to this child, with Mystique using her shapeshifting abilities to take on a male form to conceive the boy who will become Nightcrawler. Tragically, though, there is another part to Destiny’s prophecy; the child must suffer in order to become strong enough to oppose Azazel.
Mystique and Destiny then give up their son, and Kurt’s life continues as we know it — left on the side of a road in the Black Forest and raised in a German circus. Tormented by the knowledge she had abandoned her son, Raven pleads with Professor X to wipe her memories. This explains her coldness and detached demeanor towards Kurt in previous stories.
How Mystique and Destiny’s romance could break the mold in the MCU
Needless to say, Fox massively dropped the ball on exploring Nightcrawler and Mystique’s familial relationship, as the only time we got to hear Jennifer Lawrence tell Kodi Smit-McPhee she was his mother was in the X-Men: Apocalypse gag reel. It’s especially frustrating as Mystique and Azazel’s time together as teammates in X-Men: First Class set up this plotline so neatly.
So, if both of these characters do end up in the MCU’s X-Men team, any reference to their mother/son dynamic would be a plus. Adapting the X-Men Blue version of Nightcrawler’s origins would be especially compelling, however, as it would ensure that the franchise has an integral LGBTQ+ relationship from the off. In contrast, Fox’s franchise took until its final entry, 2020’s The New Mutants, to give us a key same-sex couple.
There’s much that Marvel can pluck from current X-Men comics to make its own version of the lore different from Fox’s — the team’s island home of Krakoa, the Hellfire Gala ETC — but exploring the bond between Mystique and Destiny and their son Nightcrawler is particularly necessary.
