unforgott3n:codenamecesare:unforgott3n:What I think is hilarious about the middle panel is that Char
unforgott3n:codenamecesare:unforgott3n:What I think is hilarious about the middle panel is that Charles is losing badly (has, in fact, already lost): he’s down to his king, while Erik still has his queen, a bishop, and a few pawns…My personal headcanon is that neither of them is really all that good at chess, so pretty much this is what happens whenever they play, one of them gets all the other one’s pieces and then chases the king around until they manage checkmate and/or the other tips their king and/or they go to bed. And half the time they’re playing strip chess anyway, so the number of pieces they capture is far more important than checkmating the king anyway….And everyone thinks, “oh, Magneto and Prof. X spend so much time across a chess board, they must be really good at it,” and neither of them ever contradicts anyone for this, they’re happy to let people think that the reason they never play against anyone else is that no one else is ~good enough to match them.There was a post going around saying that for the earlier movies, McKellan and Stewart didn’t know the first thing about chess, so the director brought in a chess master to choreograph their games. Maybe the filmmakers didn’t bother this time around— orrrr, perhaps whoever was in charge of setting up the prop game was told to make it so Charles was badly losing, since First Class can be seen as Charles losing the opening volley to Erik-turned-Magneto.If it was deliberate, it would actually be fairly appropriate for Charles to be down to his lone king while Erik has his queen.Haha yeah, I remember the McKellen and Stewart thing.While Charles losing as symbolism here would indeed be very appropriate, it still makes the both of them bad chess players (assuming they weren’t just very distracted by their debate during this particular game, which I admit as a possibility even though it’s not as amusing to me). Charles is bad because he couldn’t stop Erik from taking all his pieces, Erik is bad because he couldn’t manage to checkmate Charles without taking all his pieces…this is the way my brother and I used to play chess when we were kids. XDWhen I played with my brother as kids, I lose a lot more pieces but win eventually by making him constantly choose….My headcanon is that Charles and Erik plays chess because it’s only about 8:30pm and they want to be alone but don’t want to be undressed yet just in case something comes up. They probably really only started to play chess at the mansion; before then, they knew the rules and even those not well, which means they always played in the library. Chess becomes something that they shared together, studying rules, strategies, each other’s eyes, body languages, growing increasingly distracted until it becomes late enough that the night’s quiet, all the children are asleep, and it’s time for them to go to bed.XMFC supposedly presents the “beginning”, a “before”. Before there were chess games in prison, there were Charles and Erik arguing what exactly WAS an illegal move for a knight. I like to believe that the X1 X2 chess games between Charles/Erik represents something that they could really call their own after a lifetime. They’ve never play with anyone else except each other. So, of course the ending of X3 is…well. If there had been an X4, Erik would glance up and there would be Charles sitting down opposite him. “Another game, my friend?” -- source link
#headcanon#charleserik#cherik dynamics