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I'd add to O'Brien's account a couple of other "clues".
1) The very first page we ever see Xorn, he looks a hell of a lot like Magneto. Seriously, check out the first page of the annual. The shadow on his helmet at this point fits in with where the gap to show Mags' face would be on his normal helmet, he's sitting on an enormous throne if you look at it right, and blue (electromagnetic) energy is crackling either side of him.
2) In the Xorn solo issue: "There is no word for monster in any mutant dictionary", said to a couple of cops - this is straight Magneto dialogue, particularly reminiscent of the way Millar wrote the character in Ultimate X-Men. The annoying thing is I even remember thinking how this was an oddly confrontational, Magneto-ish thing for Xorn to say, but just attributed this to Morrion making the X-Men themselves a little more militant, a little more separatist. (Also, Magneto would probably have been genuinely pissed off about the kid being killed before he changed into something really powerful...)
3) The Genosha issue: the electromagnetic fields are described as creating an effect of "air bending". This is very reminiscent of the way Xorn talks about perceiving major events (see his response to the Jean/Emma showdown, "like gravity bending space", as mentioned by O'Brien, but also the way he talks to Angel about the riot kicking off - "can you feel it?" - which in retrospect he has no intention of stopping, he's basically saying "watch and learn" here). I'm going to hypothesis that this isn't just acting, this is the way Morrison thinks Magneto perceives the world...
But in retrospect, the main thing I think everyone was thrown by may have been looking for a more complicated story than was ever there. As of issue #141, we knew there had to have been a master villain, and that they had to have had access to the school. We also knew that there was something seriously up with Xorn (killing the U-Men, being rather suspicious when 'helping' Quentin on his way...). Now, in retrospect, it's easy to see that "the real enemy" Quentin was referring to was Xorn, but at the time it seemed so obvious a hint that I took this for misdirection, and I'm sure others did too. No, it was exactly what it looked like...
Let's say we'd figured out, then, that Xorn was EVIL, and that Esme was working with him. Esme tells Bishop tauntingly "oh, if only you knew" (who she was working with/for). This doesn't make much sense unless she's working for someone with whom Bishop is familiar (if she'd taunted one of the NXM team/staff, it could have just meant "if only you knew it was Xorn", but Bishop barely knows Xorn).
So the really clever people amongst us could probably have figured out by this stage that Xorn = old X-villain. But we were all so busy with our clever theories about En Sabah Nnnnnhhh God I'm Repressed Summers, we missed the obvious stuff. Like the fact that Xorn's agenda clearly involves the Special Class, and who's the guy who always tries to steal Chuck's children out from under his nose? Not Apocalypse. Plus, if anyone is going to whip up an iron prison specially for the occasion...
I'm wondering if Magneto has now mastered Nano-Sentinel technology completely - if in fact, they were always "his" toys. At no point does Cassie say "aha, AND I bet you're feeling really shit and run down thanks to MY Nano-Sentinels!", does she? If that's the case, they could be the reason Logan didn't smell Mags - they could also enable him to pull off just about any trick imaginable... |
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