User blog comment:Pijuyo2/Sabretooth vs. Daken, who's the best Wolverine Nemesis/@comment-3443897-20110223094553/@comment-3443897-20110223235740

@Pijuyo2: Point taken of course. And yet I still feel like we can't blame the shortcoming on the archaic origins of Sabretooth's character. So what really if he started as a Luke Cage villain? Most people don't even know that. Like most people these days don't know Peter Parker made his own webshooters. Or like how most people don't know Cyclops is in fact the first X-Man (which will be further aggravated by the new X-Men Film).

I attribute the loss of development on Sabretooth to the failure of Marvel writers to take the same kind of focus they've put on Daken and put it on Sabretooth's character. Sure, I may not agree with how they totally cleared up Logan's memory after House of M, but then why haven't they really explored Logan's past? If his memory was all cleared up, then why (moving to Wolverine for the moment) haven't they bothered developing him dealing with what we old fans always wondered was his incredibly dark past (which at every point in life should have included Sabretooth). Wolverine got cheated out of his age-old mystery, his lifetime long unremembered adventures that make him the "best there is", and in the process, cheated all his old fellow characters like Sabretooth, like Alpha Flight, like the WWII characters, of their own relationships with him. Like how when they introduced Sentry he became the focal point of EVERY SINGLE MARVEL CHARACTER'S LIVES.

So just to juxtapose, I mean, Spider-man over the eons has been developed, re-developed, replaced, retconned, re-retconned, but they focus good writing on him so that even if there's some bad, we always have some good. From student, to photographer, to street hero, to Avenger!

Cyclops: from class wuss, to team leader, to ex-team leader, to Xavier's angry son, to no-longer-boy-scout-I-am-an-angry-mutant-protect-my-people-at-any-cost-dictator.

I guess I'm just having difficulty explaining my disappointment or bad writing. I mean really, they could have just as easily written that Sabretooth killed Itsu instead of Bucky (who at that point really was a point of skepticism because lots of people wanted to keep him dead. But good writing prevailed). If they'd done that, imagine the 3-way anger issues between all three of them?

Well, we take the good with the bad. And with great developments come characters who are thrown into comicbook limbo. Heck, I'm totally in disagreement with how they killed Nightcrawler just because the writers believe that he's obsolete now because of Pixie.

So yeah, I'm just waiting for some good writer to pick Sabretooth up and re-write him back to how epic he used to be. And I've always believed that it wasn't that Logan WOULDN'T kill Sabretooth, but that no matter how hard he tried he COULDN'T. It was never easy for Logan. Every time he wanted to either he would lose to Sabretooth, or he was struggling with the keeping the image of the people around him that he was in fact human (which has more than once prevented him). The Muramasa Blade for me hasn't been as great as a development as others see it to be. I've always thought it was a cheat to instantly kill any characters with epic healing factors. I.e. without his healing factor, of course Sabretooth is nothing. But without the Muramasa Blade, could Logan really have killed Sabretooth? He could chop him up and throw his pieces far away from each other. But, could Logan successfully slice Sabretooth up into many little pieces? I don't think so. Sabretooth has always been good enough to be looked at as Wolverine's equal.

I'm liking this conversation. So hard to find Marvel fans who aren't bigots. Don't worry, Daken's okay in my book. But I think he still has a lot of development to go through before he deserves a spot in the list of 100 greatest villains of all time.