YMMV / New X-Men: Academy X

• Alternative Character Interpretation: After all that happened to him in this series and later, many fans belive Julian is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
• Angst? What Angst?: No matter how many bad things happens to Pixie, she is angsty about it only when somebody directly pushes the issue.
  • While Rockslide has his greatest failure with the deaths of the students on the bus, he's still possibly the best-adjusted member of the cast, and absolutely loves being a mutant and an X-Man. The fact he's not exactly bright tends to help the angst roll off him.
• Broken Base:
  • The DeFilippis and Weir run — a refreshing change of pace, or bog-standard teen drama filled with one-note characters?
  • The Kyle and Yost run — jarringly Darker and Edgier, or the kind of high-stakes action and character work the series was crying out for?
• Catharsis Factor: After racking up a considerable mutant children kill count, seeing William Stryker taken out was quite satisfying.
• Cult Classic: The DeFilippis/Weir run. The later Kyle/Yost run has a more traditional sort of fanbase.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Hellions, to the point that not only they got their own mini, but under Kyle & Yost, the series basically became "Surge and the Hellions", before the cast expanded.
  • Pixie and Rockslide under Kyle & Yost - since the cancellation of the New X-Men, they are the two members of the cast most used. Megan even got her own limited series and Santo had a huge supporting role in the Wolverne & Jubilee miniseries.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Elixir/Wither, for both the obvious and the fact that their powers cancel each other. But mostly the obvious. Wither is also more commonly paired with Mercury than his canon crush, Wallflower.
  • Also, Hellion/Surge is quite a popular pairing - their early rivalry provides nice chemistry and they have much more in common than they would like to admit. Shared Jerkass Woobie status also helps.
  • Even Ship Sinking by Marjorie Liu hasn't stopped Hellion/X-23 from being the preferred ship for both characters.
• Flanderization: Combined closely with Demoted to Extra - a common complaint by fans of the characters is that since New X-Men ended, Julian and Noriko only show up whenever the writers need somebody to act like a jerk to the main characters, Victor has been reduced to the token gay character, and Santo exists solely to say something funny from time to time.
• Friendly Fandoms: There is big overlap between fans of New X-Men, Avengers Academy, Runaways and Young Avengers, so these four fandoms are likely to stick together.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Elixir/Wither/Wallflower love triangle, now that all of them are dead in the Marvel continuity. Poor Elixir died twice, once in the Wolverines mini-series before being resurrected by Brian Michael Bendis for All-New X-Men. And then he was killed again for Uncanny X-Men in favor of Triage. The three of them got better.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • X-23's Odd Friendship with Dust, which leads to the former going to considerable lengths to save the latter from Stryker and his Purifiers.
    • Although Hellion was a bit of a dick to her when they first met, he becomes one of the first people to actively try to help her learn that she's better than what the Facility made her. Logan may have talked a big game, but it was Julian who made the first real steps in her later development.
  • Nate Grey is getting those in the new series, first with Cyclops assuring him he is finally home and second with Hope Summers taking him under her wings, despite all the issues she must have with his pressence.
• Moment of Awesome: Laura playing The Cavalry during Stryker's attack on the school in New X-Men. The adults present are quickly rendered ineffective, and except for Dust, the kids are only able to put up a token defense at best. Then Laura arrives and utterly destroys the Purifiers attacking the school. Single-handed.
  • She takes part in yet another during Messiah Complex: Laura is a part of the X-Force team who arrive to take on Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers after they previously ambushed Cable. Laura is very angry, and makes very short work of Deathstrike for nearly killing Hellion.
  • Mercury probably takes the crown in the X-men’s World War Hulk tie-in in which she gives the vengeful green giant himself a Breaking Speech about how he’s not the only person that has suffered reminding him that he’s standing the schools cemetery full of dead mutant and former mutant children. It works and he agrees to leave the school without further fighting. She’s one of the few people in the marvel universe to successfully stand up to the Hulk solo and she did it with words. What a kid!
• My Real Daddy: Several of the characters featured in this series, like Icarus and Dust, originated in other X-Men series, but became much more popular thanks to Academy X giving them more prominence.
• The Scrappy: Icarus. You'd think this would be because of acting like a moron and inadvertently getting himself and half his friends killed in the first Kyle/Yost arc... except nobody much liked him under DeFilippis and Weir, either. Perhaps he still had the stench of the infamous Chuck Austen Uncanny run (the first run to prominently feature him, though he'd been a background Guthrie child in older comics) about him?
• Strawman Has a Point: Kevin Ford (AKA Wither) is hiding out in a junkyard after accidentally killing his dad with his disintegration abilities. While trying to lay low, he ends up killing the dog belonging to the junkyard's owner. A confrontation ensues, and at the last second, Dani Moonstar rescues Kevin and beats up his attackers. While we're supposed to root for Dani and not the bigoted junkyard owner, it's hard not to sympathize with him given that a mutant just trespassed on his property and killed his innocent pet. And then when Wither decides he doesn't want to stay at the school, after having no on-panel counselling or training to control his powers, and after having to be stopped from deliberately killing someone, Xavier just lets him go on his way. You're supposed to be on Xavier's side for letting a kid choose his own life, but when the kid has already killed someone and his mutant power is dissolving any organic matter he touches, you kind of feel like getting the cops involved might be a good idea, and maybe the pro-registration crowd have a point.
• Tear Jerker: The funeral issue. Both of them. Heck, the yearbook issue, too, if you know what's coming.
• The Woobie: Oh boy, does it have several. At the end of Kyle and Yost run you can say all of students are this, having been put through so much their definition of good day is "nobody has been killed or maimed today".
  • Iron Woobie: Pixie, hands down. What she went through with Kyle and Yost was only the start of hell other writers subjected her to, yet she never loses her smile.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Hellion is a bit of a jerk, even if with heart of gold, but not only did DeFilippis and Weir have his parents effectively disinherit him, under Kyle and Yost his life has been turned into endless series of kicks in the face. And then they kicked him even more in X-Force. Surge and Prodigy could also qualify, considering some questionable choices they made in last arcs, that were directly caused by the crap they've been through before.