"Misunderstood Characters Pt. 3 - Colossus"
by David (Rhyme)

This is final part of a three part article concerning some characters hated or liked by fans-for the wrong reasons! I end this week with a character that has recently gotten a lot of pressure because he is misunderstood.

I was having a veryhard time figuring out who to write about for this weeks article. But then I went upstairs to my room, and as I looked at the cover of my recently bought UXM #367(yes, I was very late,) it all came to me. I recalled some very heated discussions and so I decided that for this week's article I would write about Colossus.

One of the most turmoil times on the boards since I began posting in June of '98 was the thread entitled, "Die........Colossus......die." Basically, a poster created this thread saying that he hated Colossus, and he was a traitor, and that...he should die. The discussion got very heated as you can imagine, and many people were TOS'd including me. I had defended Colossus a little too uh...strongly. After that post was deleted by the board supervisor, Gena, discussion about Colossus stopped for awhile. But about a month later a lot more discussion was done about the X-Man that would be dying, and many wanted it to be Colossus, as was proven by a loit of polls. I couldn't really understand the people's reasoning. They claimed that he was more of a traitor that Gambit, because he hit Bishop from behind. Many of us Colossus fans tryed to reason with them, providing the fact that he had been suffering from brain damage at the time. They said the excuse was not good enough, and he was not really suffering from brain damage at the time. Even some Colossus fans were turning and saying that Colossus needed to be killed because he really wasn't the same character he had been in the Claremont days. Give me a break people. Of course he's not the same as when Claremont wrote him. None of the characters are. That day is over. But all the same, Colossus is a romanticist. He is an artist. At the time he betrayed the X-Men, he was going through a very turmoil period of his life. Don't tell me that when you had a bad day, you never yelled at a friend for no reason. Well, Colossus was feeling like this was his bad year, his bad decade, his bad life. His sister had just died, and he hadn't even been there to see her pass into the next phase. His evil brother was dead at periods, coming back and causing trouble, and basically just screwing his history to all heck. Colossus had no one at the time. Even his family-the X-Men-could not understand his feelings. And then there was his brain damage. It was stated in Excalibur that Colossus was suffering from brain damage at the time he betrayed the X-Men.

So now that we're past all that gritty traitor stuff, let's focus on the heroic side of Colossus. Many people hated the Magneto War. Many have claimed there was so characterization or character development. I liked it. For the first time since Colossus has come back to the X-Men, he acted like a real hero and suffered pain to help friends. The Acolytes were causing making lots of problems for the X-Men, and the X-Men were running out of time to stop Magneto. There was Colossus, right in the middle of all the Acolytes-in human form! And then at the pivitol moment, he basically took them all out by, doing as Kitty describes it, "he acted like a lightening rod--took the brunt of the blast--and took out most of the Acolytes."

I could focus on the artist side of Colossus as well, but I will only touch on it briefly. This is one of the reasons I love Colossus so much. I can really identify with him, because he can express himself, as I love to do through writing and art.

Please, before you say, "Colossus die!" think to yourself about the path he's lead in life.