Podcast / Cerebro

Don't worry about it.

"Welcome to Cerebro, the X-Men podcast where a homo and his friends dig deep into the history of homo superior."

Cerebro is a weekly podcast hosted by Connor Goldsmith, where he and a guest sit down and talk about the history of a single character from the X-Men comics. Beginning shortly after the beginning of the Krakoan Age, it presents itself as a way for new readers to understand the long backstories and contexts present in the various winding stories of the franchise. It's very conversational and comedic in tone, often beginning with current news about the comics before moving into the guest's origin story of becoming an X-Men fan and fan of the spotlight character in particular. Somewhere in the middle, Connor will cut to the "Cerebro Character File," which will be a (nearly) complete history of the character as told by Connor.

There have been a number of guests on the podcast who have also been writers for the X-Men comics, including Tini Howard, Gerry Duggan, Fabian Nicieza, Ann Nocenti, Steve Orlando, Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing, Mike Carey, and Jonathan Hickman.

You can find it here.

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Tropes included in Cerebro:

• Advertised Extra: When Connor lands a noteworthy guest from the industry (who doesn't already have a character in mind), he'll pick one with a smaller impact so that the episode can be more of a general interview with them.
• Alternate Character Interpretationinvoked: Crops up plenty when Connor and his guest discuss how they might explain or justify a character's actions in light of later developments or their own headcanons. An early example of this is Jay Edidin suggesting that Cyclops is on the Autism spectrum; he posits the character's powers being a metaphor for disability and that him abandoning Madelyne and baby Cable was because he took her accusation ("If you walk out that door, don't bother coming back!") literally and thought he couldn't return after leaving.
• Amicable Exes: Connor and writer Anthony Oliveira. When he was the guest on the episode about Bobby Drake, Connor introduced him as "the only recent Marvel writer I've had sex with." Later, on the Stryfe episode, he's introduced as "the only recent Marvel writer who has seen me naked."
• Armored Closet Gay: Connor and Anthony Oliveira's interpretation of Juggernaut. He's trying to kill Charles because he read Cain's mind and realized he's a power bottom.
• Big "WHAT?!": The Ladies Mastermind episode includes a recreation of a scene where Spiral goes "The stupid X-Men are coming" and Storm responds "The stupid ''what''?"
• Blunt "No": When Anthony Oliveira starts saying his Real Housewives taglines for Iceman, one of them is "I trimmed my cubes for this?" Connor's response is a simple "No."
• Brief Accent Imitation: Almost every time Connor reads a character's dialogue, he will try (with various success) to imitate that character's accent. He also does it during listener mail when they tell him what accent to use for them.
• Catchphrase: "Don't worry about it." It was used so often by Connor to basically wave away weird stories that it just naturally turned into a catch phrase. It should be noted it's not always used negatively, but also for stories that are fun but relatively inconsequential. Just listen to how many times he says it during the Monet St. Croix episode.
• Closet Key: Connor has mentioned that one of the things that made him realize his attraction to men is certain hunky drawings of Angel from the 70s.
• Crossover: The guest for the Scott Summers episode was Jay Edidin, from fellow X-Men podcast Jay & Miles X-Plain The X-Men. Connor returned the favour by appearing on that podcast. Similarly, Connor appeared on the Patrick (H) Willems web video series, with Patrick later guesting on an episode of Cerebro.
• Depending on the Writer: Connor highlights how Madelyne Pryor's characterization changed after Jean Grey was resurrected for X-Factor, noting that Chris was committed to making sure Madelyne was a character in her own right while Louis Simonson has admitted that she never saw her as anything but a replacement from Jean Grey.
  Connor: I was struck yet again by how insane it is to read those issues where it jumps between him and Weezy, and it's like one ongoing conversation, and in the Weezy issues she's a mustache-twirling supervillain, and in the Claremont issues she is a Euripedean tragic heroine, and it's really kind of fascinating.
• Dramatic Unmask: Whenever Stryfe takes off his helmet to reveal he's identical to Cable, it's this. "Surprise, bitch, I'm you!"
• Dumb Blonde: The Ladies Mastermind, even though Regan is the only one who is blonde. They are so delightfully stupid, it's made them fan favorite characters.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the early episodes, Connor would end each episode by having the guest play his game of "The Real Housewives of Krakoa" and think up a Real Housewives-style tagline for the character. After several guests stated that they had never seen any Real Housewives shows, Connor decided to end the game. This wasn't before getting some hilarious moments from it, however.
  • The very first episode is only an hour and twenty minutes long, and Connor himself says he and Tini should wrap things up around the hour mark because he doesn't think anyone would be willing to listen to the podcast for longer than an hour. It was only a few episodes later where episodes started regularly surpassing two hours, and these days are usually three hours at least. It says a fair bit that Connor once tweeted that the issue with having two gays talk about Emma Frost is that you can’t get the episode under two hours; now, there are six hour episodes on Nekra.
• Gaydar: During the Bobby Drake episode, there was a lot of discussion over moments that indicated Bobby was gay before he was officially outed. Some of those include having no interest in Jean Grey when she shows up in the very first issue of X-Men, going on a road trip with Rogue in the '90s and struggling to talk with her about his home life, and also dating Polaris - which, as per Connor and Anthony Oliveira, "Dating Polaris is gay."
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Connor has taken to measuring how many appearances a character has in "Zaladanes", or twelve issues (which is how many times Zaladane herself appeared). He has a rule that a character must have at least one Zaladane to get an episode about them.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All episodes are named after the spotlight character's civilian name, as long as they have one and it's canonical to their home universe. It gave Connor some contention because he doesn't like Rogue's civilian name of "Anne-Marie" that was carried over from the movies. It also means Marrow's episode is just titled "Sarah", as she's never gotten a surname on page.
  • The Madelyne Pryor episode is split into five parts, and each is subtitled with the title of an Uncanny X-Men issue that was part of the Inferno event ("Vanities", "Strike the Match!", "Fan the Flames!", "Burn!", "Ashes!")
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Connor refers to the mainline Marvel universe as "Six-Sixteen" instead of the more common "Six-One-Six", as he feels the latter doesn't sound right to him.
  • He also puts emphasis on the last syallable of "sorceress".
  • On the Sooraya Qadir episode, guest Khaliden Nas tells Connor that he has to say "Predator X" in the same tone that everyone does in the comic. It's carried over to later episodes as well.
  • Val Cooper must always be described as "The Bitch Val Cooper".
• LGBT Fanbaseinvoked: The podcast acknowledges the highly queer fandom of the X-Men and the many parallels between them and mutantkind, and fully plays into it since Connor is gay and many of his guests are variations of queer.
• Mad Libs Catch Phrase:
  • "This is not a [blank] podcast." It's usually brought up to blur over the characters' involvement in other titles, usually The Avengers but there are plenty of other teams and tie-ins that are referenced depending on the episode. Connor also sometimes uses this phrase as a way of cutting off a digression and bringing the topic back to the focal character of the episode ("This is not a The Real Housewives podcast").
  • "The [blank] of it all."
• Milestone Celebration: The 100th episode was a planet-sized special on Madelyne Pryor's entire publication history, which had to be split into five parts because the total run time after editing was over 18 hours.
• Mood Whiplash: Some episodes, like the Regan & Martinique Wyngarde episode are hilarious and fun, while others, like the Erik Magnus Lensherr one, are much more serious due to the nature of the character.
• N-Word Privileges: If Connor ever makes a joke about being gay, being Jewish, or being Irish, he'll point out that he's all three and allowed to make such jokes.
  • Also discussed in the Threnody episode.
  Jordan Blok: Threnody can say "faggot" to Mister Sinister.
  Connor: Threnody can say "faggot" to me!
  Jordan: Yes, please!
  • It has also been concurred that Selene and Spiral can say the F-slur.
• Never Live It Downinvoked: There are some characters who can never escape having certain actions mentioned. Most notably:
  • Emma Frost killing Firestar's horse Butterrum.
  • Magma making her debut in brownface.
  • Jean Grey killing the D'Bari broccoli people.
  • Rahne Sinclair having a romantic affair with Josh Foley while he was her student. Notable in that this event is treated with more seriousness than the preceding examples because it was both uncomfortable and, in Connor's opinion, made the character so toxic to write about that she didn't get a chance to be rescued from that characterization until years later.
  • Kate Pryde saying the N word three times in her teens.
• Once per Episode: The Cerebro Character File, within which Connor will unfailingly start wrapping it up with the phrase "In the 2019 soft reboot House of X and Powers of X by writer Jonathan Hickman" - even if it's to say that the character hasn't been seen much on Krakoa. As time goes on, some episodes go a little further than that as the characters get more story lines post HoXPoX.
• Phrase Catcher:
  • Listener emails often begin with "Greetings Connor and Esteemed Guest", and usually end with a variation on "Make Mine Cerebro".
  • Recurring guest Sarah Century is always introduced as Cerebro's "Official Lesbian Correspondent".
• Precision F-Strike: After every other Cerebro Character File up to that point had started with the character's name before going into the biography, Connor starts the Stryfe file (in Episode 30) with "Alright, here we fuckin' go."
• Running Gag:
  • Bringing up Zaladane and her relationship with Polaris (Zaladane tried to convince Lorna that she was her sister). It's gotten to the point where Zaladane has become the unofficial mascot of the podcast, twelve issues (how many times Zaladane has appeared in the comics) is referred to as "one Zaladane", and the fans of the show are referred to as the "Zalagang".
  • Connor bringing up Madelyne Pryor and how she was mistreated by the Marvel writers.
    • This extends to a lot of female characters, who Connor will regularly point out are introduced with a lot of power and potential before going "ca-razy!"
  • Ignoring Inhumans vs. X-Men because, in Connor's opinion, everyone is acting out of character.
  • The Monet St. Croix twist is often described as some variation on "two eight-year-olds in a trenchcoat".
  • Connor will praise creators he especially loves (usually Vita Ayala, but there are plenty others) by saying he'd "read them write the phone book".
  • "Marvel, if you're listening." Mentioned whenever Connor or a guest has an idea for a story. Sometimes Marvel is replaced by something else, and it's taken on a different tone as time went on since Connor's profile has risen and the possibility of him actually writing something for Marvel is somewhat possible.
  • Calling Connor "Madelyne Pryor's personal defense squad" or some variation thereof.
• The Scrappyinvoked: There are various characters and creators that Connor and his guests will criticize heavily the moment they come up.
  • Noriko Ashida (Surge) will be put on blast for her unrepentant racism against Sooraya Qadir (Dust).
  • Amara Aquila (Magma) isn't really hated, but Connor and others will bemoan her eating up time in New Mutants because she's just not very interesting. During her episode, a listener asked Connor and guest Alex Abad-Santos to say three nice things about her; they audibly struggled to do so.
  • Peter David's X-Factor (2006) is rarely left unscathed due to the infamous storylines around the pregnancies of both Siryn and Rahne.
  • Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men is similarly criticized by Connor, as he feels it aborted several interesting plots and forces characters into spaces he feels were reductive.
  • It's fair to say that Connor is not a fan of Wanda Maximoff (the Scarlet Witch), mainly because of her actions triggering the massive Audience-Alienating Erainvoked for the X-Men that was the Decimation.
• Serial Escalation: As called out in the Madelyne Pryor episode, the episodes started off under two hours. The Madelyne Pryor episode was so long it had to be split into five parts, each of which is over three hours.
• Verbal Tic: Connor tends to pronounce "screamed" as "scah-reamed" for emphasis. He'll also, when speaking as a character and paraphrasing, start sentences with "Hey". To the point that Krakoa Welcomes could make a supercut of it.

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