LogFAQs > #914871334

Zeus posted...

....so uniforms?

I never actually disputed the idea of wearing uniforms. I objected to the idea of sports-style uniforms as opposed to utilitarian-style military uniforms. And pointed out that it was a poor analogy in the first place.

There are plenty of professions in the real world that wear uniforms. Most of them don't involve putting people in flashy day-glo outfits to appeal to an audience. The closest military really comes to that is when you see soldiers in "dress uniform" (which isn't what they wear in combat), and even that tends to be more sedate and staid than the usual clashing colors and logos of sports teams.

The X-Men aren't a sports team. They also aren't janitors, fast food cashiers, flight attendants, or anyone else who wears a uniform. They aren't even wearing uniforms in a private school sense (in spite of being a private school). They're essentially a private military, and wear their uniforms for the same reason militaries wear them, for both identification and team-building purposes, but also for the utilitarian aspects of military gear. They're more or less literally soldiers in Xavier's private war (something that gets brought up constantly in more modern stories). They are covert operatives, which means attention-drawing costumes are pretty much the LAST thing they should be wearing.

They're not even really like the Fantastic Four, where they're wearing deliberately flashy outfits for PR purposes (at least not in the movie version, which is what we're talking about). Nor can they really fall back on the usual comic excuse (ie, there are costumed heroes in the universe, therefore the idea of costumed heroes is normalized), because they're essentially the only heroes with powers in their universe.

So at most, I could theoretically justify something like the matching yellow spandex outfits as "training uniforms" students wear in the Danger Room or when in more physical classes, sort of like modern school gym uniforms. But it would still be kind of weird for academic classes, and definitely bad for the adults who are running black-ops missions where they're literally having their psychic members blur the memories of anyone who sees them. Standing out is pretty much the LAST thing they want to do.


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