Babies and Daddies and Baddies, Oh My!
As promised in a previous entry, now that we know what's going on, it's time for me to maintain my Number One Siryn Fanatic On the Internet title with that fine old fandom tradition: making crazy predictions. What kind of fan would I be, however, if I relied solely on the published comics for my theories? The writer of the new X-Factor, and Terry's current handler, Peter David, offers his thoughts on X-Factor and yaoi at the following links--
Soliciting readers' comments on X-Factor #28
Offering his X-Position on the same issue
X-Position on issue 25
X-Position on issue 24
Ergo, with the comics and the author's direct quotes in mind, I have some prognosticating to do on our resident sharp-tongued seductress.
Withour further ado, then, see my "ideas" for the future of Siryn in X-Factor. These will include both what I think will happen and what I want to happen, though I'll do my best to keep a clear demarcation between the two. Going in order from the relatively simplest and sanest ideas to the...not so much:
- After reading 28, it appears that my estimate of Terry's gestational stage was incorrect. She's now only 6 weeks along, which means that Mr. David has been pacing X-Factor at a rate of 12 months of real time to 1 month of canon time. If the series continues at that pace, then, no, she won't be pregnant until 2010, she'll finally pop that kid out in 2015. If he doesn't expect her to take as long as 2010 to complete her pregnancy, then X-Factor is about to pick up the pace, is all I'm sayin'.
- Signs point toward Jamie Madrox eventually getting married to Layla Miller. Why would we get that many references to their eventual marriage if no such storyline was on the way? Layla will come back, sooner or later, they will pull a Magik with her and have her come back much older than her previous age (I suspect she'll be about 19 or 20), and Jamie will romance and marry her. What does this have to do with Siryn, you may ask? Well, Siryn is having Jamie's kid, for one thing, and I don't think she continues to entertain any further notions of True Love between herself and Jamie, but if Layla comes back and Jamie starts falling for her while Terry is pregnant or caring for a newborn, there's going to be some tension. I'm not saying she'll get in the way, just that Terry will be mildly disgruntled. But, because Terry is a grown-ass woman, she will also deal with it and eventually get over it.
- And I'm really hoping Layla comes back before Terry delivers the Sproglet, because I still want to see Layla be the midwife! "I'm Layla Miller. I do know something about birthin' babies."
- Mr. David confirms that Theresa has not made any progress in accepting her father's death. Something will have to be done about this. This can't just be left hanging forever, and I don't think it will be, either. Terry is in an unsustainable position regarding Banshee's death, and something will have to change. Either she will accept the death of her father and mourn his loss appropriately, or Sean will have to come back.
- Or, better yet, Terry accepts that Sean died, and THEN Sean comes back! Look at this: Terry spent her whole childhood thinking her father was dead, and he was perfectly healthy. I think it's quite understandable that she's now insisting he's alive, but wouldn't it be ironic if she finally gave up the ghost...and it turned out she was right all along?
- Furthermore, the potential to develop Siryn's character based on her prodigious Daddy Issues runs considerably deeper than the recent fact of Banshee's death. According to X-Force 31, the logistics of her childhood are far more complex than she knows. When Tom Cassidy told Sean about Maeve's death, Sean lashed out in anger and attacked Tom before the news of Theresa's birth could be shared. Theresa, meanwhile, continues to this day to be unaware of her father's part in his ignorance of her childhood. As far as she knows, Black Tom never intended to tell his cousin about the baby girl waiting for him at the Keep, thus deliberately depriving Theresa of her father's presence for the first, what was it, 17, 18 years of her life? I think Theresa would experience a major emotional upheaval if she found out about this attack, and furthermore, I think she's long overdue to find out.
- We get the following passage from Madrox in X-Factor 28:
"There is no hope anymore. Layla is gone. There is no faith anymore. Rahne is gone. {snip} No faith, no hope...but I still have compassion. It's the one thing that still separates me from my enemies. {snip} I find myself wondering what will be required...to take my compassion away as well. What will the final thing be...that destroys everything I am."
And then it quite ominously cuts to the bar where Theresa is discussing the Sproglet with Monet. According to Peter David on his blog, this piece of timing was "deliberate." Oh, dear.
- What could the future hold, then, for a traumatized, pissed-off Madrox and an expectant Siryn? She'll need to tell him about her pregnancy sooner or later, preferably sooner, and when she does, I'm sure it'll stress his ass out, but Jamie's still a decent guy. He's not going to go all ballistic because he got drunk and knocked up his operative. I think he's going to go all ballistic over something else. Something like...
"It just seemed to me that, no matter what had happened, Madrox wouldn’t simply go in there blasting at a bunch of guys who were simply standing around talking. Now if the Purifiers had, for instance, captured Siryn and were about to execute her, that might be a different story…. " (from his latest X-Position.)
Why in the name of Mother Askani, I ask you, would he suggest such an occurrence for purely hypothetical reasons? It makes perfect sense to expect Siryn to end up in the Purifiers'--or some other anti-mutant faction's--crosshairs. She's a mutant who's well-known to the Middle East Side population, and she's now growing what will probably be only the second mutant child born since the Decimation. I'm not suggesting that she'll be the center of a second Messiah Complex, because Marvel only needs one Messiah Complex per decade or more. But let's say a mini-MC. News of the impending Sproglet Cassidy-Madrox will get around, and of course there will be some really sick people out there who don't look at that as good news. If not the Purifiers, then some other sickos will target Siryn for death before she can conceive again, and THEN Madrox will go berserk on them.
- Which brings me to another mutant team currently bloody-nosing the Purifiers. Wolfsbane has now left X-Factor Investigations to go join the new X-Force, though she has not told anyone more than half the truth about where she went and why she left. This is another condition of the present status that I call "unsustainable." (It's a word that Peace Corps wags use a lot; bear with me.) Theresa will have to tell Jamie and the rest of the team about her pregnancy sooner or later, she will have to accept her father's death eventually, and I see a similar tension in Rahne's departure: X-Factor will need to find out, eventually, where she is and why she went. Based on looking around various online fandom boards, it appears that I am far from the only fan who thinks that X-Factor either will or should have an encounter with X-Force. Both teams are busy picking fights with the Purifiers; Madrox hasn't progressed to outright killing just yet but he will go there if they start messing with his operatives, and they're looking increasingly likely to go after a certain Irish mutant mama-to-be. If X-Factor has to face off with the Purifiers in order to rescue Siryn, then X-Force is sure to be in the same place doing the same thing, because that's precisely up their alley. You do not threaten a non-evil mutant, especially one who is a known ally to the X-Men's cause and who is now carrying a valuable baby mutie, and not expect several jumped-up mutants to show up and eat you with too much mayonnaise.
In fact, it doesn't even have to take long enough for the Purifiers to find out about the impending Sproglet before X-Factor homes in on X-Force. Layla Miller showed up, at the X-Men's instruction, for the express purpose of preventing X-Factor from learning of the true cause of the Decimation, and once Jamie heard a few words from Damian Tryp, he made a call to Siryn, she made cute faces at Spider-Man, and the whole story came spilling out in about 3 minutes. If Jamie, or anyone else in the agency, really wants to find out what's up with Wolfsbane, it is more plausible to have them find out with remarkably little effort than to show otherwise. And as Peter David has suggested that some guest appearances by Wolfsbane are likely in future issues, X-Force is looking closer to X-Factor all the time.
- And when that meeting does happen, it's not just Wolfsbane who's connected to X-Factor! When was the last time we saw Jimmy Proudstar (who has mercifully re-adopted the nom de guerre Warpath and wisely let his hair grow back) interact with our Terry? It's been a while, from what I've been reading, and I'd like to see how they feel about seeing each other again.
- Which is not to say, of course, that I'm asking for them to get involved any time soon. All I'm asking to see is how much of that old, dear friendship is still alive. If they also find they have a bit of chemistry together after all this time, of course, then I'll be even happier, because, no, my dears, I have not given up on that 'ship just yet. The current run of X-Factor has brought up the ghosts of Madrox/Siryn and Rictor/Wolfsbane by acknowledging that there's at least some one-sided interest in there somewhere, and both of those romantic storylines are how many YEARS old? If time is the question, then Warpath/Siryn is not out of the question, because PAD gives me hope. He should probably stop doing that, before I get too excited. Really, though, if Jimmy's still got it goin' on with Hepzibah, then I wish them well, but if Hepzibah's not in the picture anymore, then, hey, look, Jimmy: Terry's available! Sure, she's got another guy's bun in the oven, but the other guy is not destined for love with her. He's already spoken for by a smart-assed little blonde currently stuck in a nasty-looking future. If Terry goes after Jimmy, it will not be because she "needs" a father for her child, but because she wants a piece of that Hot Proudstar Action and Jimmy isn't about to let another bloke's Sproglet be an obstacle. The child would be a part of their relationship, not an incentive or a stumbling block. And do not bore me with talk of how Warpath's with the new X-Force now because he's out for revenge: yeah, he's avenging the death of Caliban, and? He joined the old X-Force hoping to avenge the massacre of his whole freaking reservation, and he still had the capacity to love. Whom did he have the capacity to love, again? That's right.
- Do I expect to see all these things happen in succession? Of course not; there are other characters on the team to deal with, and there's only so much time available to settle Terry's Unresolved Issues. There are some vital questions, however, that will beg for answers: the issue of Terry's denial over Banshee, the anticipation of her child, whom I will call Sproglet Cassidy-Madrox or SCM for short from now on, and whatever combative--or possibly even romantic?--fallout that follows from there. The most satisfying way to answer those questions is not to see them handled one after the other, but to see them combined, interdependent, and coordinated into one storyline with a cohesive resolution. I won't try to predict how, or if, Peter David will choose to do that with our Siryn. He maintains the celebrity that he does on account of being a much better writer than I am. I'll state my theories as to the What, but I don't presume to foresee Where, When or How.
- The resolution to these disparate elements may be found in this interview with artist Pablo Raimondi, in which Pablo tells us, "I will say this, though: the eventual payoff to the pregnancy story is so mind-blowing that when then-editor Andy Schmidt told me about it I emailed Peter right away and made him promise me that even if it happens 50 issues from now (hey, comic-book time can stretch out for a while...), I'll be the one drawing it." Which would suggest that PAD's boasting of how he'll "light up the Internet like a Christmas tree" (at WWLA) is not simply big talk. How many directions of Crazy Shit will he pull when our Terry becomes the newest Mutant Mommy? I can't frickin' wait to find out.
- August 22nd: We now have more info regarding Sproglet Insanity! Because of Marvel's
advance solicits, we have some wonderfully offensive tidbits to work with. On October 15th,
we get X-Factor #36, in which the U.S.
government will attempt to put Siryn (still preggers) in "protective custody." Of course, when
it's the government pushing around a mutant, and that mutant happens to be a pregnant lady,
no less, and they're calling it "protective custody," and it's PAD writing about the government
and their "protective custody," we know that can't possibly be warm and cuddly. All this, so
close to my birthday?
As if that wasn't juicy enough, November 19th gives us X-Factor
#37, whose solicit doesn't say anything about Siryn, but it doesn't have to. "Madrox loses
all control." In the issue right after the government starts moving in on Terry and the SCM,
Madrox gets his psycho on. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that's the answer to
his question in #28 of what it would take to make him lose his compassion. It won't be the
news of Terry's pregnancy; we've already seen that he handled that like a man. It's gonna be
Val Cooper and her government forces!
- The available clues in the text suggest that the SCM is a boy, and that he will be named
Nathan. Although, I still think it'd be really, really funny if it turned out to be a girl.
I'm not quite ready to make another guess at what the "light up the Internet like a Christmas
tree" payoff to the Sproglet Insanity will be, though. I might not be able to guess it in
time, either. That 12:1 time ratio's been blown out of the water.