helens78:

codenamecesare:

I know this happens, because it seems to happen in every fandom, and Charles is shorter so he’s the one who gets this treatment. 😛

But… then there’s me and Helens78, who’ve been writing and writing and not so much having time to read very widely, and we tend to get recced things in line with our sensibilities. And we are SO disposed toward the interpretation of Charles being more dominant and more in control that it’s just our headcanon now. Erik in charge almost feels kinky. XD

Charles’s powers make it almost impossible for him to be naive. Erik calls him that, but keep in mind that he quickly follows it up by speculating that Charles isn’t naive, but arrogant. (Ding ding ding!) In XMFC, Charles is in charge. He’s the only one who knows what’s going on with mutation. Everyone looks to him for answers. He’s confident, he’s comfortable teaching and giving orders. When they’re getting ready to go to Cuba, who’s telling people to suit up and talking about what they’re going to do? Charles. Erik occasionally disagrees with him, but as soon as Charles is like “Erik, a word?” Erik trots right after him.

Erik isn’t leading, because he’s consumed by revenge and it makes him unreliable. Charles is the one setting their larger goals, and trying to reconcile and balance that with Erik’s vendetta. He’s a commander, trying to accommodate Erik as his valued and trusted but loose cannon lieutenant. Oh, and also, what’s Charles’s plan to try to strike up peace between mutants and humans? Showing the world that mutants are heroic badasses. It’s not exactly sweetness and light. Charles is also, it must be said, a WASP-y seeming, rich straight-presenting white guy in 1962, when that was somehow even more an automatic A+ on the report card of life; he’s accustomed to being in control. And Charles’s powers give him ultimate command of most situations. In various senses, bad and good, Charles is The Man.

All of this!  😀  I mean, we’ve written so much of Charles-in-command (I’m sorry, I come from the ’80s, I can’t say “Charles-in-charge” without laughing) that every so often I think, maybe I should write some Erik on top!  Because it would be SO PERVERSE and SO SUBVERSIVE.  And then I remember that, er, the rest of fandom is doing that.  So I duck my head down, take a deep breath, and go back to the ONE TRILLION WORDS of stuff we’ve got going on… XD

Quite possibly my biggest fandom pet peeve is Charles being naive. He’s not naive at all – he’s a telepath, and he’s fully aware of all the terrible, horrendous things that people are capable of. But the thing about Charles is that he’s hopelessly optomistic: he knows that people are also capable of doing very good things, and he always hopes that that’s what will win out.

I also find it rather rediculous that Charles seems to shrink at least 6 inches in many fics. McAvoy is not nearly that much shorter than Fassbender, and it’s a bit off-putting to read a fic where Charles is suddenly several inches shorter than me.