X-Men: Dark Phoenix Trailer Seems to Kill Off Mystique

The second official trailer for X-Men: Dark Phoenix dropped early Thursday morning and -- get ready nerds -- seems to feature the death of one of the franchise's canonically bisexual, genderqueer, shapeshifting blue queen, Mystique.

Dark Phoenix is yet another take on X-Men's most infamous storyline, in which the telekinetic Jean Grey (Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner) unleashes the full night of her destructive powers after coming into contact with a cosmic entity known as the Phoenix Force. It's unclear how closely the film will follow this storyline -- the trailer also shows the X-Men journeying to space and Jean turning into what looks like a celestial supernova, so we could finally be getting a more faithful film adaptation of the comic book narrative.

But the most shocking part of the movie's plot comes early in the trailer, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) tries to subdue and comfort Jean and seemingly dies. While her death isn't shown, there's a shot of a funeral scene and another clip of Jean asking the force inside her why it "made her do that." "She was my friend," Turner sobs, before the trailer cuts to a distraught Professor X (James McAvoy), who in this iteration of the X-Men was Mystique's adoptive brother.

X-Menhas always been the most queer comic book, it's mutant outcasts stand-ins for real life marginalized communities -- the mutant Pride parade, the Legacy virus that only impacted mutants, making commentary on AIDS, the introduction of the first mutant drag queen -- and then of course there were the queer mutants themselves. Mystique is canonically queer (her main love interest in the comics is the precognitive mutant Destiny) and as a shapeshifter she's often understood to be genderqueer -- in fact, X-Men writer Chris Claremont has said the he originally intended a storyline in which Mystique fathered her son Nightcrawler by having sex with Destiny while in the form of a man.

But the most pressing question about this trailer remains: Will Professor X and Magneto finally bone? See for yourself whenX-Men: Dark Phoenix hits theaters June 7.

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