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Once upon a time, on an island far away, there was this woman who worked as some kind of a medical expert. She had a kid, who had an insane amount of mutant powers, so what does the mother do? She locked her son away, to protect him from the big bad world. And on top of all this, she had at one point been in a relationship with Charles Xavier. But that was a long time ago.

Does this sound familiar? Most fans of the X-Men that have followed the animated series from the nineties would say that the above paragraph is about Dr. Moira MacTaggert, and her mutant son, Proteus. Now change the setting from Muir Island to Northern Japan, and ethnic backgrounds from Scottish to Japanese, and voila! Now it is the story of Dr. Sasaki trying to lock away her powerful mutant son, Takeo, to protect him from the rest of the world. This is a fine example of Marvel plagiarizing itself.

The difference between a shameless storyline theft, and a fan service homage, is that homages tend to respect and deliberately honour the original source material, instead of passing it off as a new and emotional story. A good example of a properly done homage in this episode, was the illusion that Mastermind inflicted on Cyclops, wherein everybody is crucified. Fans of the comic will recognize this as a reference to the time when Wolverine was crucified onto the X. What it comes down to, is that fan service references are nice, but the actual storyline needs to be fresh. The X-Men anime has done a lot of things right to create something new, but why the writers ripped-off the Proteus storyline is just incomprehensible and unacceptable.

Tags: Marvel, X-Men, Anime, Wolverine, Iron Man, Blade, Reavers, First Class, Proteus, Hellfire Club