There’s nothing quite like being around my fellow students discussing X2 to make me feel totally out of place.
I mean, I realize that I’m a bit older than most of my fellow students because of the time off I took between Antioch and UT, but when the X-Men start getting discussed, I’m just totally out of it. I mean, it’s so freaky when the people I hang out with start talking about the syndicated cartoon show as their “golden age”. By the time the cartoon came out, I had stopped collecting the comic books because the writing had gotten so shoddy. Hell, I remember the one-time appearance the X-Men had on the Saturday morning cartoons I watched when I was growing up; not only was Wolverine only played for comedic relief, but they actually gave him a freaking Australian accent. And Americans wonder why people around the world have such a low opinion of them.
I mean, people can be talking X-Men, and even though I used to follow them a lot, it’s like I have no common language to communicate with them. I can’t even tell them how my favourite X-Men character was Dazzler, because they’ll just be like, “Who’s that?”
I guess this also brings up some other issues, because my comic book collection was one of the few things I lost in the fire a couple of years ago. Honestly, I had just been keeping the X-Men comics around for their monetary value, but I also lost my Popples comics, and that’s still a hard pill for me to swallow. Thankfully I had my copies of the original Marvel Super Heroes pen-and-paper RPGs stored away somewhere else, so those are still safe — if I ever get around to digging them out from the hideyhole where they’re currently residing.
I don’t know, it’s like, I understand that I’m a bit older than the people I hang out with on campus, but I’m not that much older. Yet there still seems to be such a huge gap between us that there isn’t that much that we can relate with. Even when a common thread comes up, like the X-Men, it’s such a struggle to find common ground. It’s frustrating and disappointing.