Deadpool 2 Characters With More Meaning Than You Realized

Like a dove soaring on the breeze to the dulcet tones of Celine Dion, Deadpool 2 has arrived in theaters, unsheathed its swords, and proceeded to rack up the kind of bloody body count nobody ever expected to come from a dove, let alone a superhero movie.

Well, okay, maybe they expected it from this superhero movie.

True to the original film — and the regenerating degenerate himself — Deadpool 2 doesn't hold back on the violence, profanity, and fourth wall breaks, taking everything great about the first movie and turning it up to 11. In the same vein, Deadpool 2 also introduced a ton of new characters, and then...well, let's just say that there are plenty of spoilers ahead.

Whether or not they came out on top in the movie, some of those characters carry a lot of weight in the comics...and a few have even saved the world once or twice. Let's take a look at all the characters in Deadpool 2 who mean more than you realized.

Ever since his official introduction in the pages of X-Force #82, Jesse Aaronson, a.k.a. Bedlam, has been one of the core members of the crimefighting team. A mutant with the ability to influence electronics through his own bioelectric field, Bedlam played a pivotal role in several missions. And like he says in the movie, he really can directly affect people's brains, which came in handy when the citizens of San Francisco were turned into brainwashed zombies and Bedlam was able to reverse it without killing them all.

But once upon a time, Bedlam also almost destroyed the planet. In X-Force #87, he left the X-Force to join up with his long lost brother Christopher on a team called the New Hellions. Bedlam later found out that, in a series of jerk movies, Christopher had killed their parents 14 years earlier and was planning to revive a mutant named Armageddon Man with the power to sweep the world with natural disasters. In other words, it was a bad family reunion.

Realizing the error of his ways, Bedlam rejoined X-Force to put a stop to Armageddon Man, and they all learned a valuable lesson about friendship. Two crisp high fives, baby.

Black Tom Cassidy's biggest contribution in Deadpool 2 is giving Deadpool an excuse to remind Cable that indiscriminately shooting people who belong to another race isn't cool. It's a great, layered, ultimately meaningless (Black Tom isn't African-American) message for Deadpool to make, and we'll leave all of that stuff to him. We're just here to talk about Black Tom in the comics.

In those comics, Black Tom Cassidy is a mutant infected with the same techno-organic virus that affects Cable. Just like in the movie, Black Tom was incarcerated at the same prison as Juggernaut, and he was also shot by Cable. Here's where the two paths diverge, however: in the comics, after Cable shoots him, Black Tom gets healed and gains the ability to control plants (because why not?) and also gains Deadpool's healing factor.

That's exactly the kind of villain that could come back to haunt Deadpool, especially if another movie takes up the recent Avengers theme of "everything we do has consequences." But maybe without the plant thing. That might be too weird, even by Deadpool standards.

Sure, she was around for most of the movie, but Domino also seemed to Dirk Gently her way through all the events of Deadpool 2 on a path of her own, looking for her purpose for being there. When you break it right down, Domino has some of the most useful powers in the whole film, and she used them plenty of times to get both Deadpool and Cable out of tight spots. She also gets one of the coolest sequences in the movie. But she only showed them off a few times. What can her powers do? We mean really do?

The answer is, even she doesn't know. As a basic explanation, Domino can generate fields of good luck around her. That also means that her enemies experience bad luck. She's about to get shot in the head? Uh-oh, the gun jams. Good for her; sucks for the soldier trying to shoot her. She's also afraid of chickens, but that's beside the point.

The point is, when she wants to, she can even get the best of Deadpool with just a few well-timed words and that good ol' luck, which makes her one of the most formidable mutants on the team. Any future Deadpool film is bound to feature a ton of Domino showing off how powerful she really is. And despite what Deadpool may say about it, that's going to take some really good writing.

For longtime comics readers, the appearance of Juggernaut in Deadpool 2 was a wonderful surprise. Not only because he wasn't featured in any of Deadpool 2's marketing, but because the guy was already in one of Fox's Marvel movies — X-Men: The Last Stand — and Vinnie Jones' portrayal of the villain isn't exactly known for its popularity among fans. So not only was the audience not expecting it, but this much more impressive Juggernaut redeemed that earlier attempt.

Juggernaut isn't a mutant in the comics. Though he's a regular enemy of the various X-teams, Cain Marko got his powers from a magical gem. His strength rivals that of some of the strongest heroes in Marvel, he's physically invulnerable, and no force can stop him once he starts moving.

By the end of Deadpool 2, it looked like Juggernaut was done for. But if his powers mirror those of the comics closely enough, that isn't necessarily the case. The Juggernaut of Marvel Comics doesn't need oxygen to survive. Amazing Spider-Man #229 opens with him stepping slowly and easily across the ocean floor. Then again, the electric attack that fells Juggernaut in Deadpool 2 wouldn't even faze the comic book version (in spite of its creative placement), so who knows how different Cain Marko is in the movie?

At least one thing is similar. In Deadpool 2 we hear Juggernaut telling Rusty that Professor X is his brother. In the comics they are, in fact, stepbrothers. Whether or not Juggsy appears on the big screen again and that relationship gets fleshed out at all remains to be seen.

Just like Bedlam and Zeitgeist, the new characters of Yukio and Shatterstar were all over the trailers, only to barely see any screen time in the movie. So why are we adding them here, let alone putting them in the same section? Well, in the film, Shatterstar is a sword-wielding mutant from Mojoworld. In the comics, he's also a sword-wielding mutant from Mojoworld, along with some extra weirdness that also made him his own dad's father, but that's not where we're going here. After a long history in comics, X-Factor #45 had Shatterstar come out as gay and featured a panel of him locking lips with fellow male mutant Rictor.

In true internet form, the decent half of the internet applauded the writers of Deadpool 2 for featuring a gay mutant. But now that the movie is out and the only social stigmas Shatterstar shattered were some helicopter blades (well, they shattered him, to be exact), all the attention in that arena falls on Yukio, who's now in an onscreen relationship with Negasonic Teenage Warhead.

Let's unpack that a little — Deadpool 2 featured a gay mutant, decided not to make him noticeably gay, and then stuck a different mutant into the mix and made her gay. In a way, there's some serious subversive Deadpool-esque beauty to that scenario. Marvel movies have technically featured LGBTQ characters before — Korg in Thor: Ragnarok and Ayo in Black Panther have been portrayed as gay in the comics, but neither movies made those preferences explicit. Deadpool 2 put that representation right in the forefront, but only after making everyone think it was going to come from somewhere else. You sly bastard, you.