It occurred to me that while #XMen is wildly popular, the same few arcs keeping getting adapted so most people don't know how utterly BIZARRE and/or SOAPY #XMen lore is.

So in no particular order a thread of things that are absolutely #Marvel cannon:

Beast has an evil twin from another dimension. He’s a sociopathic mad scientist and once walled Hank up Cast of Amontillado style so he could steal his life.

A woman showed up to the X-Mansion all Addison Shepherd style, and revealed she was Gambit’s wife. Apparently he was part of an arranged marriage in the New Orleans criminal underworld. Oh and also he murdered his brother-in-law in a duel.

Rogue essentially has multiple personalities. She has had various character’s consciousnesses trapped in her mind and occasionally one or the other will try to take over, most notably Captain Marvel’s.

There was an arc where Storm was infected by a space parasite and turned into a giant bug

Jean Grey used her psychic powers to out Iceman

Turns out Cyclop’s “dead” dad is alive and actually a space pirate who’s dating an anthropomorphized cat lady.

Bishop coordinated a series of terror attacks and plagues around the globe in an attempt to kill a baby.

Psylocke is a rich white lady named Betsy whose mind has been put into the body of a comatose Japanese ninja assassin named Kwannon.

After 29 years Marvel realized maybe this wasn’t the best idea and gave Kwannon her body back. So now Betsy wields Excalibur and defends the mystical quasi-British realm of Otherworld. And Kwannon is fighting a murderous rogue AI that thinks she’s its mom.

There was an evil plot to make Nightcrawler the pope.

Kitty has a pet dragon. They’re psychically linked. He’s from space. And he a big Kitty/Piotr shipper.

Wolverine has found out that he has at least eight different secret children and at one point he accidentally slaughtered a bunch of them.

A time traveling teenage version of Angel dated Wolverine’s Daughter/Clone

Jubilee became a vampire via vampire suicide bomber. She stayed that way for almost a decade.

Unlike Storm who was only Dracula’s bride for a single issue.

At 6 Ilyana Rasputin wound up trapped in a hell dimension. She pieces of her soul were harvested and turned into a magic sword. Time works differently there so when she was a teen her powers emerged and she teleported back to Earth… moments after she disappeared.

Dazzler and Longshot are Shatterstar’s parents but also because of time travel hijinks Longshot is a clone of Shatterstar. So… think about that.

At one point one student looking to impress a girl (one of five aged down hivemind Emma Frost clones) formed a mutant superiority cult and attempted to take over the school. (She was not impressed.)

Mystique’s longterm girlfriend, a precog named Destiny, told Forge he'd love Mystigue. Forge, who had long been with Storm, didn’t believe it. But he got Destiny killed Mystique had a psychotic break. Feeling guilty, Forge took it upon himself to help Mystique and well…

Colossus returned to Russia because his family was being mysteriously murdered one by one. Turns out Mister Sinister was killing them because they were descended from Rasputin??? And if all his descendants died Rasputin would be reborn. Also these were Piotr’s uncle’s last words

A demon businessman once brainwashed to Kitty think she was a ninja and sent her to assassinate Wolverine.

Magneto had amnesia for a while and wound up joining the X-men. JK! Turns out that was a clone.

Scott married Madelyne Pryor, a woman who wouldn’t you know turned out to be a clone of Jean Grey.

When Scott chose Jean, Mady started consorting with demons, called herself the Goblin Queen, revenge fucked Scott’s brother and now she rules a hell dimension so… yeah. Tough breakup but she came out on top.

Psylocke murdered an alternate reality version of her twin brother who was trying to rape her.

Nightcrawler’s father is Satan. Like legit, actual Satan. (They backpedaled this one, but it still merits mentioning)

For a hot minute Iceman ‘permanently’ had a hole in his chest. Until Emma basically just told him to try harder to fix it and revealed he was one of the most powerful mutants in the world.

Years after being orphaned, Jubilee had a distant aunt adopt her. She left the X-mansion to go live a normal life but turns her aunt was a cyborg assassin. (To be clear she really was Jubilee’s aunt this wasn’t some sort of con)

The team was sucked into a blackhole and came out in an alternate dimension where people worshiped Colossus as a god. This was because they mistook him for their previous messiah, his older brother a Russian cosmonaut who Peter thought had died years ago.

Magneto Rogue and Gambit were in a love triangle for a bit. That was weird.

Jean and Scott’s 2000 year old daughter interrupted their honeymoon to pull their consciousness 2000 years into the future into replicated bodies. They stayed for over a decade and raised Scott’s son who had previously been kidnapped and thrown forward in time.

Psylocke once dated mutant/cyborg Fantomex, who had 3 brains. Eventually each brain got it's own body. Psylocke wound up cheating on the original Fantomex with a new female Fantomex. It got complicated and they broke up and female Fantomex got together with Fantomex.

Forge proposed to Storm and she said she needed to think about it. Due to some Shakespearean misunderstandings and Destiny’s old prophecy about Mystique, he became convinced Storm would say no so he broke up with her. Storm planned to say yes.

He, frankly, didn’t deserve Storm and Jean agrees with me.

Storm had to dual a sewer dwelling mutant gang leader to save Angel from becoming her 'husband'/sex slave.

Scott and Jeans various descendants will not stop traveling back in time.

Kitty spent two years trapped inside a giant bullet that was lost in space. Then when she finally got home she was trapped in a ghost form and couldn’t touch Colossus (or anyone)

Mystique posed as a student in a long con to seduce Gambit and prove to Rogue, her foster daughter, that he wasn’t boyfriend material.

There was an arc where the X-men were vaporized on national television. Only after they died Merlyn’s daughter (Yup that Merlin) resurrected them and made them invisible to cameras so they could live an anonymous life in the Australian Outback.

Beast pretended to be gay to break up with a girlfriend and then just… went with it for several issues?

Magik eventually got deaged to her correct age. But later she contracted the Legacy Virus (a THINLY veiled metaphor for AIDS) and eventually dies from it.

There was a big argument at her funeral. Magneto, who had been presumed dead at the time, showed up and Colossus became a bad guy for quite a while actually.

Colossus eventually came back around to being a good guy, but he mourned the loss of Ilyanna for years ultimately sacrificing himself to cure the Legacy Virus.

There’s an alternate universe where Dazzler is Thor.

There was that time Jean was framed for exploding the head of the UK Ambassador outside of the UN.

Bishop was stranded in the year 6700 AD and fell out of the comics for like a decade. Then he suddenly reappeared in the present possessed by a Demon Bear.

Gambit went blind for a bit and in one random issue he got the ability to see the future using playing cards?????

There’s a run where Scott and Jean’s time traveling son sucks almost the entire mutant population into a dystopia where everyone was a mutant and love is a crime.

Emma and Scott had a psychic affair. And after one of Jean’s many deaths, they formally started dating by making out ON JEAN’S GRAVE.

Storm once had amnesia and of course during that time she was framed for murder.

Colossus became the Juggernaut for a while.

Magik accidentally gets stranded in ancient Egypt where she teams up with Storms ancestor to defeat an evil sorcerer.

Wolverine’s fiance was murdered so every year on the anniversary of her death he hunts down the man who poisoned her and cuts a new body part off.

Rogue went on a self discover arc where she found her biological mom’s ghost and used her powers to absorb it.

Kitty’s subconscious made her go incorporeal in the middle of her wedding. Then she left Colossus at the altar. Rogue and Gambit just decide to get married instead.

Gambit and Rogue took their Honeymoon to space but got interrupted when they had to protect an egg from Deadpool.

I know she’s a minor character but it bears noting that Magma is from an Ancient Roman colony hidden in the modern day Amazon rainforest because…what?

One of the X-men’s recurring villains is a were-pterodactyl from a secret Antarctic jungle who is able to hypnotize people.

Another is a morbidly obese murderous cybernetic slug/television producer from an alternate universe.

Then there’s Shadow King, an eternal malevolent entity who lacks corporeal form but lurks the astral plain in hopes of possessing powerful psychics, he mainly rides around in the body of a Nazi ally named Amahl Farouk.

Plus Xavier’s still born twin sister who he murdered in the womb (in self defense of course) because she was actually a psychic parasite who willed a corporeal form into existence. Dying was a bump in the road. She eventually willed herself another body.

I’m not even going to try and explain Xorn.

So what is the current state of the X Universe, you ask? WELL

Mutants formed an independent nation on a sentient mutant island. Everyone put their differences aside and over 90% of the world’s mutants live there, including various genocidal maniacs who have key government seats.

Also they’ve figured a way to work together and achieve immortality which is a big plus, but honestly just formalizing the way X-men have always worked.

It is NOT cannon that Scott/Jean/Wolverine are in a throuple….

It IS cannon that the Summers family now lives on the moon… and Logan lives in their house… and he, Scott, and Jean have individual bedrooms with adjoining doors… and Logan and Scott had this conversation…

And that’s just the bananas things I could think of. I’m sure I missed a whole bunch of stuff especially with the many, many, many, mutants I didn’t bother to bring up.