QUOTE: Out of curiosity-- how does someone without powers dodge light-speed optic blasts which Cyclops aims by looking?  These same blasts were used at a lower power level to tear a Trask Sentinel to pieces.  If the writer played fairly with this idea, Cyclops cannot miss and can blast through almost anything she hides behind.

Unless he has X-Ray vision, he has to know where she is. Why not give Storm a gun at this point, have both characters stand in front of each other and determine who should be boss? His optic blast is just a natural weapon he has. It doesn't automatically give him the edge over everyone and everything.

I don't have any real life fighting skills, but you can defeat players who use boosted characters in most video games with a crappy character if you truly have skills and know what you're doing. Raw power isn't everything!

Al Cook wrote: I'm just saying I reject the notion of the Onion AV Club being a reputable source of any information.

Different editorial staff.  Different writers.  Saying you can't accept as fact that the Onion AV club does anything seriously or question their veracity is like saying you can't accept that a porn magazine can do serious interviews with political figures and on topical issues. Doesn't make sense.

I will play Devil's Advocate and defend the "you're a dick line" in that if that scene had been in Angel with Angel trying to determine whether Spike is the actual Spike, it would have worked without undercutting Angel as a character. We know that Spike thinks Angel is a dick and that's a pretty quick means of alerting Angel to the fact that this is the genuine article (as a fake Spike wouldn't know the status of their relationship).

This might have been the intent with the Cyclops/Wolverine exchange. I think the big problem with that was that it might not have worked for those characters. Worse, because of the poor casting and writing for Cyclops, the audience's sympathies were with Wolverine. When the audience thinks Cyclops is a dick and that Jean should be with the much cooler Wolverine, there's a serious problem. Of course, that problem is unfortunately not unique to the movies.

Unless he has X-Ray vision, he has to know where she is. Why not give Storm a gun at this point, have both characters stand in front of each other and determine who should be boss? His optic blast is just a natural weapon he has. It doesn't automatically give him the edge over everyone and everything.

I don't have any real life fighting skills, but you can defeat players who use boosted characters in most video games with a crappy character if you truly have skills and know what you're doing. Raw power isn't everything!

***

If Storm ambushed Cyclops so that he never got to see her and release his blasts, I can see her winning. 

But once they have anything like a "fight" Cyclops has to win over a depowered Storm IF (and that's a big "if") the writer is playing by what's been established for these characters.  Cyclops has stood alone against Sentinels -- saying "Raw power isn't everything" has no relevance.  Cyclops is highly trained AND equipped with something far more powerful than any gun. 

The idea that Cyclops' blasts could travel any less than light speed means that you would see them hit you before they hit you-- it seems unlikely to me.  I've never seen it established how fast they travel, but they must be many times the speed of sound to do some of the things he's done. 

Has it not been established in virtually all of the fights that Cyclops has been in that he CAN and DOES in fact miss his target often? Yes he does have incredibly good aim and has an uncanny skill at geometry (take the pool sceen from the X-Man/Titans book as an example) but hitting moving and DODGING targets is something else.

I never got the rational behind the idea that he hits whatever he looks at. I have never seen anything to support that, other than the extrapolation from the fact that he shoots from his eyes and therefore the beams go where he looks. Faulty logic. Just like saying that Dazzler can't "miss" when she points at something (and we KNOW that her beams travel at the sped of light because they ARE light).