LogFAQs > #914832794

Zeus posted...

It's not about being flashy, it's about being consistent. They come from a universe where sports teams have uniforms. It's the same concept.

It really isn't. Because they're not a sports team. That's basically like saying that, because cheerleading teams exist in the real world, the US military should wear mini-skirts and pom-poms into combat, and no one should think that's a weird idea at all if you made a movie where that happened.

The X-Men are essentially a paramilitary black-ops team. If anything, they should be wearing full-on SWAT gear or other ballistic outfits, preferably with color schemes chosen for each mission to blend in (black or very dark blue for night, green camo for forest or jungle, white for snow, tan for desert, etc). For social dynamic purposes (ie, trying to talk your way into a crime scene past a suspicious security guard) they should probably look as "official" or "military" as possible, not like a PR crayon explosion (ie, the motivation behind Captain America's costume). There really is very little logic for wearing over-the-top comic-book style outfits in any universe that doesn't HAVE public costumed heroes, and in which you're trying to remain somewhat covert and undercover.

The only real exceptions you should have are where there's a logical reason for divergence. Like Havok having to wear a special suit to regulate his power, or Storm wanting to wear something lighter and with extra cloth so she can use it to fly, or Cyclops needing his visor. Because even more so than in the comics, we're emphasizing that these people are a TEAM, not a collection of individual heroes (which is what the X-Men sort of evolved into, during the periods where everyone had their own unique costume that didn't match anyone else).

An argument could be made that a hypothetical training team of younger mutants (New Mutants, if you will) should wear matching uniforms that might lean more towards school uniform look than tactical operator, but those students should never be leaving the school grounds to have "adventures" in the first place, and if they do they should change into more practical gear instead. That's something that actually happened in the comics - the New Mutants mostly wore the older yellow/black school uniforms, but when they snuck out out to do hero things they changed into their actual "hero" costumes (which they changed at least 3-4 times over the years, which is why most of them don't really have "iconic" looks like the X-Men tend to.

Though in the New Mutants' case, the other problem is that, other than their original "hero" outfits, every look they go for is almost painfully tied to the time period they got them in, which means they age VERY poorly almost immediately. Most of their 1980s outfits still look kind of nice today, but their 90's costumes and X-Force costumes kind of look absolutely terrible for all of them.


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