A to Z Challenge 2015: X - X-Men

Only two more letters left!

If you've made it this far: congrats! X is one of the hardest letters, so here goes...

I remember when the first X-Men movie came out. Huge comic fans as kids, we'd grown out of it a bit by then, but my roommate Nate and I caught it in the theater opening night. At the Cinerama in Seattle.

With a star-studded cast, headlined by the incredible pair of Captain Jean Luc Picard and Gandalf Stormcrow the Grey Pilgrim, it was everything we'd hoped it would be.

So today's 2015 April A to Z Blogging Challenge story for the letter X:

X-Men

Here is the summary, from IMDB:

Two mutants come to a private academy for their kind whose resident superhero team must oppose a terrorist organization with similar powers.

Director: Bryan Singer
Writers: Tom DeSanto (story), Bryan Singer (story), David Hayter (screenplay)
Stars: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen

That's it! Only two more days to go.

A to Z Challenge: X - Xenophobia

Xenophobia

There are some really disturbing photos for this word if you do a Google image search. I'm not sharing them here, not because I don't care about what's wrong with the world, I do, but activism is not really the point of this blog.

Anyway, although it might seem similar, xenophobia is not quite like racism or bigotry. It's not about prejudice or hate, it's about fear. Japan was a very xenophobic society in the Meiji era. You might say the United States has a lot of xenophobes in it today.

xen·o·pho·bi·a [zen-uh-foh-bee-uh] n. intense and often irrational fear of foreigners or strangers, or of that which is foreign or strange

Synonyms: there are no direct synonyms, but some related words are: nationalism, isolationism, ethnocentrism, jingoism, racialism

Etymology: 1903, from xeno- "foreign, strange" + -phobia "fear" (see phobia). Earlier (c.1884) it meant "agoraphobia."