I was willing to cede to there being some overlap between Picard and Xavier that admittedly made casting Stewart a little lazy, but Xavier more like Kirk? Wow. If anything, Scott is like the strategic, tactical expert that was Kirk, no?
At this point there is a Rorschach test where a character once stood, but the guy who faked his death and then demanded the X-Men get their shit together to go fight aliens with no explanation is kind of a defining thing for my take on the Professor.
He trains his students in a room that can kill them.
He's not a happy, loving uncle. He's a scared and fierce warrior.
He's happy enough to see it if the X-Men ever live long enough to grow old. He's prouder of them than he could ever tell them-- but he's got a dedication to his mission that blots out everything else when the chips are down.
But that's me and I'm not sure JB would agree, so I'll leave it there.
And given those questionable actions you've mentioned, I always did find Scott's unquestioning fealty to him a little creepy, although I've heard similar objections to Reed Richards' judgement in endangering his family with the flight that bombarded them with radiation. Marvel's flawed heroes includes its grouo leaders, it seems.
At this point there is a Rorschach test where a character once stood, but the guy who faked his death and then demanded the X-Men get their shit together to go fight aliens with no explanation is kind of a defining thing for my take on the Professor.
•••
Xavier didn’t fake his own death. When he accepted the Changeling’s offer to take his place, neither had any notion Changeling would be killed. Yes, he was dying, which was his motivation for his altruism, but being killed in action was NOT part of the plan. This is something I touched upon in XHY.
(That’s all in-story context, of course. Changeling—who had previously demonstrated no shape-shifting abilities—was a retcon. The original plan had been to take Xavier permanently out of the equation. Later, that was judged to have been a mistake.)
Love that eye, and that is not easy to pull off, not just the eye itself but the angle of her gaze .... that could have easily gone wrong and looked awkward.
- the Danger Room is not built to kill students. It is possible to sabotage the controls and make it lethal but it is not the default setting. And the mindset is a logical one: you want to pit yourself against difficult challenges. If you can only face easy problems, you won't be able to handle real threats.
- Reed didn't deliberately endanger anyone. His calculations told him the shielding was sufficient; it wasn't, but how exactly could he have known that in advance? He and Ben were supposed to be on the flight, Sue and Johnny were late additions, born from necessity. It was an adventure that turned into a lifetime of adventures--not a deliberate, coldblooded calculation that "sure, they could die but I'll get what I want out of it." (Sheesh. Enough Reed-bashing, fans.)
- making the founders/leaders of teams into jerks is a recent and frankly hateful thing. In the name of "pushing those feet of clay up to their chins," otherwise known as "trying to make them interesting," some writers have shown they have zero understanding of what heroic actually means. And they ruin characters they don't comprehend.
Roger Stern (him again) noted of one writer at Marvel that he was no good at writing superheroes because he could not conceive of someone more noble than he was—which was not very.
As the audience has shrunk, the outliers have moved closer to the center. People who, like Roger’s example, have a gloomy view of authority figures and, given the opportunity, will tear them down.
Sadly, there are many in the audience—themselves pretty pathetic specimens—who embrace and encourage this.