YMMV / X-Factor (2006)

• Die for Our Ship: Some fans of Rictor/Shatterstar REALLY hate Rahne, especially after she tells Rictor he's the father of her baby. Well, she never explicitly stated he was the father, he just assumed when she gave a Suspiciously Specific Denial in response to the question. Mind you, she encouraged that assumption because she had religious problems with his relationship with Shatterstar and was trying to Cure Your Gays.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Shatterstar has been the subject of extensive online debate, beaten up The Thing, kissed almost as many people as the rest of the cast put together, been featured prominently in nine different covers, made himself a very likely candidate for a limited series, and just generally stolen the spotlight both in-universe and out; all this in, what, 10 issues or so? Not bad for a character who the writer refused to allow anywhere near the book for quite some time.
  • Ruby Summers is pretty popular, with some fans hoping that she would be brought into the mainstream universe.
  • John Maddox, for not only his great introductory story arc, but also for being such a Nice Guy while still retaining Jamie's snark.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A lot of Jamie fans would like very much to ignore anything that happened to Jamie after this series ended.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The series ends with Layla and Jamie getting a happy ending, retiring to Jamie's original home to raise their kids... then Jamie got a bridge dropped on him in Death of X, with no attempt at explaining why he'd leave that life. Then Matthew Rosenberg got his mitts on Jamie in Multiple Man and his run on Uncanny X-Men, and turns him into a complete moron who's insulted and killed repeatedly for no reason.
  • One of the villains in this series was an alternate universe Dr Doom who had taken over the body of the Reed Richards of his universe. Three years later, another Science Hero would have his body snatched by one of his enemies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In a scene where she is playing chess with Shatterstar, Monet says that she'd "rather avoid the white queen". In Cullen Bunn's Uncanny X-Men, Monet has joined Magneto's incarnation of the Hellfire Club as the White Queen.
  • The Nation X one-shot has Shatterstar attempting to flirt with Iceman. Iceman later came out as gay.
• Humor Dissonance: In one issue late in the run, Polaris and Siryn crack jokes about the time Rahne followed Havok around in the government X-Factor days. The reason she did so was because she'd been subject to Mind Rape by the Genoshan government, and genetically conditioned to be loyal to Havok, who was working for them at the time (amnesia was involved), and unable to turn back to human without losing her sense of self. So rather than a light-hearted crack, it makes them look like insensitive assholes making fun of one of the worst periods of Rahne's life (of which there are many).
• My Real Daddy: Layla Miller was introduced in House of M by Brian Michael Bendis as a living Deus ex Machina, but her more well-known "I'm Layla Miller. I know stuff."-persona and subsequent Character Development was the work of Peter David here.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Jamie Madrox absorbing his own son.
  • Also the mutant internment camps of the future.
  • The birth of Rahne's son. Just... Rahne's son.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Layla again. She was previously regarded as nothing but a human Deus ex Machina for House of M, but X-Factor has turned her into a genuine, interesting character.
  • Shatterstar as well.
• Replacement Scrappy: Polaris got a lot of this during the end of the series due to the fact that another team member Siryn was Put on a Bus to Hell for helping her. This got even worse when she became team leader for the follow up series. This is probably because she and Havok are written as Satellite Character to interact with the rest of the team and rarely have any ongoing storyline or character development during their time in the series.
• Ron the Death Eater: Rahne seems to be the most common target of this. She's either a kind-hearted woman with some very serious emotional issues, or an evil manipulative she-bitch out to ruin everything.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The romantic relationship between Rictor and Shatterstar. Despite receiving immense popularity and critical praise, PAD simply decided to stop developing their relationship (more specifically developing Shatterstar as a character and how he deals with his new-found sexuality) and reduced it to a Running Gag (which many LGBT fans considered insulting). It is painfully notable in any issues that they appeared on-panel together as it clearly shows that the two of them have immense chemistry and interesting dynamic compared to any other romantic couples in the series.

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