The X-Men are one of the most complicated teams in the Marvel Universe. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four can get a tad bit convoluted, but they don’t have anything on the men and women of X. Sure, wild things happen to those other superhero teams, but they don’t have anything on the wild status quo changes of the X-Men. The team is Marvel’s civil rights metaphor, a group meant to fight for the rights of an entire race of people. In a lot of ways, they’re the ultimate leftist superheroes: they battle against the the racist power structure of the world. That’s their whole thing and they’ve gotten really good at it over the years.
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The adventures of the X-Men have gone in numerous directions, some of which serve the main metaphor of the team and others which don’t. There’s always been one part of the X-Men’s lore that never really made sense, though, and it’s something that the current slate of X-Men comics are heading towards: the X-Mansion. The X-Men’s most well-known base is a mansion, the home of the wealthy Xavier family that had been “turned into a school” (although, not really, it was still just a big house). It’s one of the most popular superhero bases ever, but it’s always been a huge problem when you look at what the X-Men should be.
The X-Mansion Doesn’t Fit the X-Men at All
The X-Men began their superhero career in the X-Mansion. Professor Charles Xavier decided to use his familial home to help his dream come true, working to train mutants so they could control their powers and fight for peaceful co-existence between mutants and humans. Now, I’ll be honest — for a while, the X-Mansion fit the team. Those early days were more about the superhero adventures than the civil rights, and superheroes and mansions went together. The team stayed in the mansion until the ’80s, and it served as the perfect place for the mutant soap opera that fans loved so much.
The Outback Era was a huge change for the team, and it gave readers a look at the way they would work away from the mansion. There was something about the X-Men away from the lap of luxury; their fights were dirtier, more important to mutants, and it gave things an excitement mansion stories didn’t have. This era saw the team get down and dirty with their fellow mutants, trying to break the apartheid power structure of Genosha. The team would go back to the mansion in the ’90s, staying there until 2007 when they moved to San Francisco after it was destroyed, having a lot of the same adventures they always had there. Since then, they’ve returned to the property, but instead of using the mansion, they made it into a school (so, technically, they haven’t been back to the mansion since 2007).
As far as it goes, the mansion has always served to move the X-Men away from the struggle. It gave the team a safe haven, a place where they didn’t have to worry about the judgment of humanity. They didn’t have to worry about the good fight of mutant rights; they could take a break. However, this is actually a terrible thing for the team. The X-Men are a team that exists in the modern day to help mutants, and helping them from a mansion never felt right, like the ultimate in limousine liberalism, or when socialist streamers stream from their multi-million dollar homes paid for by their listeners.
I think the mansion works best as a school, where it’s no longer really a mansion. It’s best when it’s a place of work for the team, but the problem is that even during these times it feels like a reservation. It feels like a place that the world has allowed mutants to be safe, instead of a place they’ve taken and made their own. The mansion is weird like that. In some ways, you feel like it’s the right place for the team but the more you look at it, and the way that fans see mutants now, it’s a terrible place for the,. It’s a lie in a lot of ways; even its status as a “safe haven” is a lie because the mansion has been destroyed numerous times. The X-Men have outgrown the mansion, and it doesn’t serve a positive purpose anymore.
Returning to the Mansion Is Inevitable but It’s a Mistake
The mutants are coming to the MCU, and that means things are about to get really basic for the X-Men. When most people think of the team, they think of the mansion because of X-Men: The Animated Series, the Fox X-Men movies, and X-Men ’97. The MCU version of the team is almost certainly going to be in the mansion, and that means that the comics are going to go back to the mansion. This is a huge mistake.
The X-Men have changed a lot since the last time the team was in the actual mansion (and not the Jean Grey School, which, again, wasn’t actually the mansion). The safe haven doesn’t really fit the team anymore. They’ve spent almost twenty years out in the thick of the fight without it. The mansion just doesn’t work with the X-Men anymore; we’re just going to go back to stories that were already old when the team started doing them again in the ’90s. We’re going to get the mansion, but we don’t need it.
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