Latest / Vigilante Vibes Podcast / Ep. 256. Who is Onslaught from Marvel Comics?!

Transcript

Ep. 256. Who is Onslaught from Marvel Comics?! · Vigilante Vibes Podcast

• 0:10
  Hello Marvel fans, comic geeks, and all the nerds in between.
• 0:13
  My name is Megan with vigilante vibes and I'm here with another
• 0:15
  character breakdown. And it is an odd character that
• 0:19
  I feel like a lot of people heard of but don't quite know
• 0:22
  too much about. So we're going to talk about
• 0:23
  Onslaught. Onslaught first fully appeared
• 0:26
  in X-Men volume to #53 in April of 1996.
• 0:30
  While he had a few earlier appearances in different forms,
• 0:33
  this was his first real showing. He was created by Chris
• 0:37
  Claremont, Bill Manslow, Dave Cockrum, William Robert Brown,
• 0:41
  Mark Wade, and Andy Kubert. Charles Xavier always tried to
• 0:47
  bury the darker parts of himself, The side that want to
• 0:49
  control power and maybe a little dominance.
• 0:51
  A lot of dominance. He mentally locked all that
• 0:54
  away. But when his psychic defenses
• 0:57
  slipped, that darkness didn't just stay buried, it turned into
• 1:00
  something very, very real. The first time it showed up was
• 1:03
  after Xavier got knocked unconscious fighting Fire Lord.
• 1:07
  He was already mentally worn down from nightmares about
• 1:10
  Lelandra, and in that weakened state, his suppressed evil side
• 1:15
  surfaced and nearly drove him insane.
• 1:17
  It eventually got pulled back inside of him, but things
• 1:21
  escalated years later, as they tend to do.
• 1:24
  After Magneto unleashed a global EMP that caused a massive
• 1:28
  destruction, planes falling from the sky, hospitals failing,
• 1:32
  countless indirect deaths, Xavier finally decided enough
• 1:36
  was enough. He led an attack on Magneto's
• 1:39
  space fortress. During the fight, Wolverine
• 1:43
  slashed Magneto, and Magneto retaliated by ripping the
• 1:46
  adamantium straight out of Wolverine's bones.
• 1:49
  Wolverine barely survived. And if this sounds familiar to
• 1:52
  you and you didn't read the comics, that means you watched
• 1:55
  X-Men 97. And that was what we were given.
• 1:59
  Wolverine's adamantium. It was a big problem, but who's
• 2:06
  to know what's going to happen? That was Xavier's breaking
• 2:08
  point, though. After decades of tolerating
• 2:11
  Magneto's crimes, Xavier snapped.
• 2:14
  He used his telepathy to completely shut down Magneto's
• 2:16
  mind, leaving him catatonic. But during that psychic contact,
• 2:21
  Magneto's rage, grief, and thirst for revenge flooded into
• 2:25
  Xavier's consciousness. Those emotions mixed with every
• 2:29
  negative feeling Xavier had suppressed over 30 years.
• 2:32
  Frustration, doubt, anger, guilt, all of that combined into
• 2:37
  a new personality inside him. That personality was Onslaught.
• 2:41
  At first, Onslaught stayed dormant, but Xavier's dream of
• 2:46
  peaceful mutant human coexistence kept taking hits,
• 2:49
  rising anti mutant hysteria, mutants dying from the Legacy
• 2:53
  virus, and even his failed attempt to rehabilitate
• 2:57
  Sabretooth. Then anti mutant extremists
• 2:59
  killed a young mutant near the Xavier Institute.
• 3:02
  That was it. Onslaught fully awakened his
• 3:06
  first move. It was to target Jean Grey.
• 3:08
  It's always Jean, he pulled her into a psychic realm while he
• 3:13
  was casually in a mall and tried to convince her the world was
• 3:16
  built on hypocrisy. Side note, why is it always a
• 3:20
  mall with the X-Men? I don't understand it.
• 3:24
  But anyways, he showed her that no one around her would even
• 3:30
  care if she vanished. He eventually simulated an
• 3:34
  attack just to prove how selfish people were.
• 3:37
  Then he took her to grade on Creed's anti mutant campaign to
• 3:41
  show how hollow and politically motivated it all was.
• 3:44
  Jean pushed back. She was not impressed, so
• 3:48
  Onslaught dropped a bomb. The bomb.
• 3:51
  He revealed that Xavier had once been secretly in love with her
• 3:54
  when she first joined the team and had physically forced
• 3:57
  himself to forget it. Which was the writers could have
• 4:03
  just pretended that whole thing didn't happen, but they brought
• 4:07
  it back up for some reason. Jean was shaken, but she still
• 4:12
  refused to join him. Onslaught sent her back,
• 4:14
  branding his name into her mind. That was the world's first real
• 4:18
  encounter with Onslaught. From there, he escalated fast.
• 4:22
  After a clash with the Juggernaut, Onslaught
• 4:25
  infiltrated a government Sentinel base, downloaded their
• 4:28
  tech specs, and wiped memories. He later manipulated Nate Gray,
• 4:33
  who is X-Men, using him to pull Xavier's body fully into the
• 4:38
  astral plane, something no one had ever done before.
• 4:42
  That gave Onslaught the chance to break free from Xavier's mind
• 4:45
  and operate independently. Posing as Xavier, he gathered
• 4:50
  the X-Men and tried to push them into all out war against
• 4:54
  humanity. When they refused, he revealed
• 4:58
  himself. Bishop, remembering a future
• 5:01
  trader who destroyed the X-Men, realized it was Xavier's
• 5:04
  Onslaught. Onslaught escaped with Xavier's
• 5:07
  body, now Luz. He went bigger.
• 5:11
  He created a childlike psychic projection named Charlie to
• 5:15
  befriend Franklin Richards, a kid with reality warping powers.
• 5:19
  After capturing Franklin despite rescue attempts from the
• 5:22
  Fantastic Four, Onslaught also captured Nate Gray.
• 5:27
  He reprogrammed the Sentinels, sealed off Manhattan, and
• 5:31
  prepared to reshape humanity into a single hive mind.
• 5:34
  The X-Men, The Avengers, and the Fantastic Four all fought him.
• 5:39
  After Xavier was rescued from him, Onslaught evolved into pure
• 5:43
  psychic psionic energy encased in armor.
• 5:47
  In the final battle in Central Park, Gene, who's now Phoenix,
• 5:51
  shut down Bruce Banner's rational mind, unleashing a
• 5:54
  fully savage Hulk. Hulk tore Onslaught's armor
• 5:57
  apart, triggering a massive psionic explosion.
• 6:01
  But Onslaught was not done. Now he was pure energy.
• 6:05
  Thor flew straight into him to destabilize him.
• 6:08
  Realizing that would not be enough, the non mutant Avengers
• 6:11
  and Fantastic Four, including Doctor Doom threw themselves
• 6:14
  into the energy form to disrupt him from within.
• 6:17
  The X-Men could not join. If Onslaught possessed a mutant
• 6:20
  host, he'd become unstoppable. Onslaught dissolved and the
• 6:24
  heroes who entered him vanished. They weren't dead though.
• 6:27
  Franklin Richards had subconsciously created a pocket
• 6:30
  universe which is called Counter Earth where they were reborn.
• 6:34
  Months later, they returned. Years later, when Scarlet Witch
• 6:37
  depowered most mutants, that chaos triggered Onslaught's
• 6:41
  rebirth. He went after Franklin once
• 6:43
  again. Franklin escaped into another
• 6:45
  recreated pocket world and battled him with recreated
• 6:48
  heroes. Eventually, Onslaught was
• 6:51
  knocked into the Negative Zone, but did he stay gone?
• 6:55
  He did not. He later possessed Ricky Barnes,
• 6:59
  revealed she had actually died in the Negative Zone, and tried
• 7:02
  to use her as a vessel to return.
• 7:05
  Ricky ultimately had gravity kill her to stop him from coming
• 7:08
  back. And even then, that was not the
• 7:11
  end. On Krakoa, the mutant nation
• 7:13
  founded by Xavier and Magneto, the Anti Mutant Group Orcas
• 7:17
  secretly smuggled Onslaught in as an invasive exotic anchored
• 7:23
  inside the fragile mind of a mutant named Lost.
• 7:26
  He became known as the Patchwork Man.
• 7:28
  He fed on the negative emotions, mutants loss during the
• 7:32
  resurrection, and amplified paranoia and self-destructive
• 7:36
  behavior across the island. At one point he possessed nearly
• 7:40
  every mutant on Krakoa and orchestrated a twisted event
• 7:44
  called the Crucible, a party that would have ended in a mass
• 7:48
  murder without resurrection backups.
• 7:51
  Nightcrawler, Legion, and others eventually figured out what was
• 7:54
  happening. Through psychic strategy,
• 7:57
  sacrifice, and resurrection, they unanchored Onslaught from
• 8:01
  Lost. He tried possessing Magneto and
• 8:03
  Xavier again, but this time the mutants didn't fight him with
• 8:06
  force. They embraced him by accepting
• 8:10
  and integrating their darkness instead of repressing it, they
• 8:13
  weakened him. Finally, Nightcrawler crushed
• 8:15
  what was left of Onslaught. In the end, Onslaught was never
• 8:19
  just a villain. He was everything Xavier refused
• 8:22
  to admit about himself, rage, ego, doubt, hypocrisy weaponized
• 8:27
  into a psychic God. So that is Onslaught.
• 8:30
  He was a whole problem. He was horrendous.
• 8:35
  And I liked the drama of it all. So yeah.
• 8:39
  So if you did not know, now you do know.
• 8:41
  So thank you for watching this video.
• 8:43
  If you will be so kind to like and subscribe so you don't miss
• 8:45
  anything else I put out because I put out a lot of stuff and a
• 8:48
  lot of stuff that I'm very excited about.
• 8:50
  So with that being said, have a marvelous day.