In which Alison Blaire is sadly human

[razsolo]

Hi all,
This is my first post on s_d, so apologies if I did anything wrong...I originally was gonna post this to my livejournal, but figured this place would be more receptive than a bunch of people who aren't comic fans to begin with.  ;p

This is from Uncanny X-Men Annual #11, published 1987.

The story is basically that the X-Men need to face their own personal greatest desires individually, and spoiler alert: most of them fail. The one scene from this story which has stuck with me through all these years though is the following (this isn't actually my scan, but I can't find whose tumblr it was now, sorry!):



The reason I find this so memorable is that it's a really human moment.  Dazzler gets to choose whether she wants to be a lawyer, a singer, or a homeless woman with no responsibilities beyond herself.  

Chris Claremont's Alison Blaire was a really human woman who was intelligent, brave and had amazing powers, but at the end of the day was just a normal person.  This era's Dazzler was one of my favourite X-Men precisely because of this.

When I first read this I was quite young, and I don't think I really fully understood the gravity of Ali choosing the path she did.  As I have grown older though, I more understand the appeal of choosing the path where you're least likely to fail.  I think it is really mature writing which unfortunately was much more common in the 80's than it is now.

Anyway, that's really it.  Oh, and also the Alan Davis art is LUSH (as usual).  Thanks for indulging my trip down memory lane.  ^_^   

Comments

[icon_uk]

Welcome to the wonderful world of posting, and starting with Alan Davis is a fine choice! :)

Interesting that none of the choices was her being a hero.

I always found this a powerful moment, but it ultimately harmed the character for me. She has the opportunity to become whatever she desires, but CHOOSES not to because she lacks the courage to and prefers to live in squalor because it's safer.

It sort of coloured my perceptions of her from that point one, courage should be one of the core underlying traits of anyone who is in the X-Men, and when push came to shove, she didn't show it. She didn't fail because she faced heroic odds and lost, that I could accept, but she failed because she never even tried and though human, it's not a trait I particularly want to see my heroes exemplify.

That's probably not a terribly fair perception of it, I grant you, but it's how it hit me reading this as a teenager.

I don't even recall seeing her address this, and maybe work on her self esteem issues, afterwards.

[razsolo]

Thanks for the welcome! :)

I fully get where you're coming from with how you say it colored your perceptions of her, and I agree that this scene isn't in any way heroic...that's kind of what I love so much about it though. Alison showed her courageous side with the X-Men on several other occasions (eg: fighting Juggernaut, her Fall of the Mutants sacrifice in Dallas, saving Rogue from drowning in a fight with the Marauders), but personally I like the idea that Claremont's X-Men are not all cut from the same cloth and they're not all archetypically heroic; some of them are there by circumstance, and while they have heroic qualities are also really flawed in other ways.

This Dazzler to me is so much more interesting than the current ditzy celebrity Dazzler we see pop up every now and then in the X-Men...ditto with Havok who never really wanted to be there, and Psylocke who really DID want to be there and to be a fierce warrior, but felt that she never measured up to that ideal. A lot of these characters have become a lot more generic in the following decades which I think is kind of a shame...

[shadowpsykie]

I've never seen the current Dazzler as a ditzy celebrity. This current Dazzler is a woman who had been through HELL and had come back still loving life AN with a drive she either didn't have before, or regained..

[razsolo]

Fair call...I haven't read lots to be able to make a fair comparison to be honest, and admittedly a lot of what I have read of Ali in the past few years has been illustrated by Land, who is kind of the anthithesis of character depth... ;)

[greenmask]

This is a good comment!

[halloweenjack]

My interpretation of that story was that it was the magic crystal that was at the heart of the alien fortress that was manipulating them into choosing failure as a sort of automated defense mechanism. Alison could have chosen to live on the streets and dumpster-dive, if that's what she really wanted, long before meeting the X-Men.

[arilou_skiff]

There's an old saying somewhere that courage isn't lack of fear: Courage is being deathly afraid and wanting to be somewhere else but doing what you have to do anyway.

[icon_uk]

Indeed, and I'm a firm believer in it, along with the Emerson quote "A hero is no braver than an ordinary person, but they are brave five minutes longer".

[alexanderlucard]

I love this annual. So many great things. Plus it introduced America to the Braddocks!

[icon_uk]

Well, Meggan at least, New Mutants Annual #2 introduced Betsy and Brian a week or two earlier.

[salinea]

Welcome to the community! Perfect first post. :D

[philippos42]

Dazzler? Sadly human? Oh, Claremont/Davis? I knew what it was before the page loaded.

This annual is amazing. I read it as a kid, and I was marked for life. Let's see if I remember the outcomes:
Havok letting go, even if everyone dies.
Rogue getting to be the belle of the ball.
Brian and Meggan's desire for a regular upper-class existence, contrasted with Betsy ripping away her skin to be inhuman steel underneath.
Storm getting to be a thief on the streets again--and Storm having the will to resist.
Wolverine's irreconcilable duality.
Dazzler reconciling her dualities by taking a third option: nothing.
And of course, poor pure Longshot not knowing what's going on.

For the record, Storm's and Dazzler's are the ones that spoke to me, in ways I still don't understand, for better or (probably mostly) worse.

[greenmask]

I really, really want to see more of this.

[icon_uk]

I think it's one that the one third rule would cripple, since there are a LOT of character moments in it which would need to fall by the wayside.

I'll have a dig and see what I can find in my longboxes (I know I DO have a copy) but if someone else does it first, more power to them.

[razsolo]

It would be sweet if someone could post some more! I do love this annual! I don't physically have it in my possession anymore, I only found this page by trawling tumblr for an hour, lol :)

[philippos42]

Like icon_uk said, it would be hard to do justice to it here. It hits a lot of notes very very fast in about 40 pages. Not a lot of wasted space.

It's also deeply surreal, as you can see here.

[runespoor]

Seconding the wish to see more.

[jlbarnett]

I find it interesting there was no remaining an X-men option

[razsolo]

To me, it says that she never really desired being an X-Man (or a superhero at all for that matter), it was something circumstances pushed her into.

She only started hanging with the X-Men after they helped her with Malice from memory, and after Fall of the Mutants it was a particularly dangerous time to be a mutant so it makes sense that she would stay with them rather than go it alone; unlike say Betsy who really wanted to be seen as a warrior or Storm who is quite driven to serve as a protector, Dazzler was just making do with her circumstances a lot of the time though I think.

After they wrote Madelyne Prior out and just before the Siege Perilous reset everything, I actually kind of thought Claremont was heading towards pushing Havok and Dazzler together as a couple...they were both very similar in that they didn't really want to be heroes, but did it because they had to.

It's a shame the Australian X-Men team fell apart so quickly once they started being depleted because it would have been really interesting seeing how Psylocke, Havok, Dazzler and Colossus fared as a team for a bit...

[jlbarnett]

And she wanted to be a bag lady? Remaining an X-man would have been submitting herself to another's lead, following orders, rarely if ever breaking off to just do what she wanted. She wouldn't have to pick a desire because someone else could tell her what to do.

[icon_uk]

The trap set up various scenarios designed to make the victim no longer desire to fight their way to the centre of the Citadel. Any of the three options would work in that regard, it didn't care which she chose.

[razsolo]

I don't think it's so much that she thought being a bag lady would be totally awesome, more that she desired not having to take responsibility for her lifepath and it's the culmination of that desire; the fact that she's so upset about choosing it shows that she's not proud of herself for choosing it, but looking at her life up until that point I can see it as well within her character.

She could have been a great lawyer, she could have been a great singer, but she has always been her own worst enemy when it comes to achieving this stuff (this also brings to mind an issue of her own solo series where she met She-Hulk, and from admittedly hazy memory, I seem to recall she was a bit taken aback by how happy and well-adjusted Shulkie was with her own choices). Actually, now that I think about it, I would love to see Shulkie and Dazzler become pals...maybe with the X-Men being forced to mingle with non-mutants more this could be a thing! :)

Being an X-Man is still putting herself in a position where she could fail badly by making the wrong choice, and in this case could get people killed if she fails. She is at heart a good person, so she will be a superhero if she has to, but I really think this is why she didn't chase that lifestyle for so long, because she actively didn't want the responsibility to have to fall on her (disclaimer: I am not up to date on Ali's character these days and it has been pointed out to me she's not like this anymore, so I am only talking about her in the context of where she was around this era).

[skemono]

(this also brings to mind an issue of her own solo series where she met She-Hulk, and from admittedly hazy memory, I seem to recall she was a bit taken aback by how happy and well-adjusted Shulkie was with her own choices

You mean this scene?

[icon_uk]

The trap works by making the heroes no longer desire to fight, if they are still X-Men then they will still be fighting or at least ready to fight, almost by definition.

[jlbarnett]

but didn't it leave Psylocke still able to fight?

[lilacsigil]

I really liked this because it said something about why Dazzler was with the X-Men, too - she likes the spotlight, she likes action and she's not scared of failing in the moment, but she's scared that it all means nothing. A life as a singer or a lawyer is a lot of sustained effort that might lead only to failure, but with the X-Men she can make a difference right now. And she's not alone. All three of these choices had her alone and isolated, so no wonder she took the "easiest" of the three.

[icon_uk]

Well, I never knew THIS about Dazzler (Go to Number 4 on the countdown), apparently she was intended to be the fifth member of X-Factor (along with Cyclops, Beast, Angel and Iceman) before they opted to revive Jean Grey from the dead instead