‘Legion’ Took an Obscure X-Men Character and Created A Space For Mental Illness Representation

Off top, gotta give daps to Noah Hawley (show creator/writer/director). Marvel and Fox’s collabo mixtape Legion was a masterful and trippy work of visual fiction. Props for: A: Utilizing some of the most obscure X-Men material. B: Turning it into a coherent narrative. C: For television. D: Not at HBO? Brave. I can clearly recall seeing a preview poster for it at the New York City Comic Con back in October 2016, and deadass thinking to myself:

If we’ve said it once at BNP, we’ve said it eleven million times, Representation. Is. Important. Particularly in normalizing lifestyles and lived experiences not viewed as mainstream. That said, consider the groups represented thus far. Luke Cage doubles down on ‘Black noir’, check. Jessica Jones served us a badass detective story centered on a (white) woman recovering from gas-lighting, check. Iron Fist delivered a weak ass Wolf of Wall Street with ninjas’ plot – with a trust fund having, whip/nae-nae fighting stance looking, ‘I’ma renovate a pre-war brownstone in an up and coming neighborhood’ ass White dude. Check(?). Someone went out of their way to make sure the one percent were represented in the Netflix/Marvel universe, but I digress. There’s always been a giant gap in media representation of folks with anything considered a ‘disability’. The most dynamic of which to date being Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Everything prior to Furiosa pales in comparison, so much of what existed was relegated to autistic savant…