Cyclops has always been popular. Lemme pull up the wiki article quote:
"In 2006, IGN.com rated Cyclops #1 on their list of Top 25 X-Men from the past forty years. Wizard Magazine also ranked Cyclops the 106th Best Comic Book Character of All Time. In 2011, IGN ranked Cyclops 39th in the Top 100 Comic Book Heroes and readers of Comic Book Resources voted him the 9th Top Marvel Character of All Time. "
It's just Cyclops has been increasingly getting crapped on since the movies. In the first two he was relegated from leader to minor character. In the third one he was murdered off-screen.
In an effort to make him "darker" as the people who didn't like him complained about his boyscout image, they did lots of things that damaged his character. He got possessed by Apocalypse and donned a black costume. He became Basilisk in an alternate reality where his eyelids had been cut off. He took a piece of The Void into his mind. He started a relationship with Emma, and it was all downhill from there.
Then everyone in the comics was attacking Cyclops for creating a new X-Force team. Note, I said new. Cable had previously controlled X-Force, and back then it was also a team filled with teen heroes who did the X-Men's dirty work, AND it was sanctioned by Xavier. Still, Cyclops did the same thing, and suddenly this was horrible. They didn't get upset with the people on the actual team, but with Cyclops for putting it back together. They also didn't get upset with Wolverine for pretty much immediately after doing the exact same thing.
Then Schism happened, and that's when people really started calling BS. When Cyclops first joined the X-Men, he was a teenager. So were all the other team members, with Iceman being the youngest. When the next team rolled around, it was also made up of teenagers, except for Wolverine. Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, all teens, not to mention a couple members that died.
Then there was New Mutants, Generation X, the X-Terminators, New X-Men, and previous incarnations of X-Force. All teams with young mutant heroes, which no one ever had any problem with.
Then Idie kills some Hellfire Club mooks who had just taken out the entire team of X-Men, and Logan blames Scott. Nevermind that Scott didn't order her to do it, nevermind that Logan was supposed to be there but instead chose to get drunk at a bar, it was all Scott's fault. Logan had previously made no effort to the students, he'd skipped lectures and outright told them he did not care about them. Then he kills a bunch of illegitimate kids he didn't know he had, and he has a mid-life crisis.
Suddenly the entire idea of the X-Men is bad because you know, Cyclops is in charge. So Logan goes all alpha dog and starts peeing everywhere, and takes half the X-Men and leaves, then names the school after the only member of the X-Men to have killed more people than him.
Now we've got this event. It was one thing that everybody turned against Scott, it was one thing for him to end up imprisoned, but Marvel's developed a history of doing this. Remember the end of Civil War? Captain America gets put in prison, and shot? And before that he's given a speech about how he's out of touch for not using myspace? Remember the New Warriors, and how Speedball was imprisoned for the crime of surviving an explosion he didn't cause? He wasn't even the one that attacked Nitro. It would be like your friend attacking someone with a grenade, and then getting arrested for surviving the blast. So Speedball became bleedball for a while, and that was just sort of swept under the rug when people didn't go for his new dark and edgy look. The rule seems to be, in Marvel events now, the good guy goes to jail at the end.
Hulk loses it, comes back to Earth, World War Hulk. Admittedly I didn't read all of that event, but I seem to remember him going nuts and imprisoning and torturing a bunch of heroes. Daredevil went evil with Shadowland. Wolverine has gone evil so many times now they have specific protocols for dealing with him. Archangel became Apocalypse, and in the end had all his memory erased and became a new person. Iron Man's excuse for all the messed up stuff he did during Civil War was having his mind rebooted.I feel like I could keep going forever. Quicksilver went nuts and stole the Terrigan Mists, and was powering up depowered mutants with glowing red eyes. Scarlet Witch wished for no more mutants resulting in the near death of her entire species. Justice went to prison for killing his father in self defense.
My point is, in all of these cases these crimes were forgiven, forgotten and excused within months. The only other hero to have gotten this kind of treatment really was Pym for slapping Wasp and he's mostly been forgiven for that these days.
Cyclops meanwhile, is all but entirely innocent in this situation. Nobody thinks Jean is evil for the things she did while she was the Dark Phoenix, but Cyclops is when the same thing happens to him? He was the only member of the Phoenix Five not to be corrupted until the very end, and to begin with the only reason he became the hose was because of Iron Man's meddling. It's one thing for him to accept responsibility for the others, that's what a hero does, but these pages, the way the other characters are talking about him.
Captain America throwing a tantrum over Scott declaring this a win, Havok calling him an insane egotist and a disgrace and insulting him, Wolverine asking him if he's killed anyone, and taking time during Professor Xavier's euology to tell everyone how very much he wants to kill Cyclops. It's garbage. Complete and total garbage.
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