unlike pyro in the mcu, mine is a few years older and obviously australian, as he is in the comics. but like in the mcu, he does consider bobby to be a good friend ( much more than either film or comic canon acknowledged, but i do bc that’s such a potentially nuanced relationship ), and he does eventually join the brotherhood.
his choice to leave comes from a place deeper than pride or teenage rebellion, though ; his beliefs about the treatment of mutants truly align more so with magneto’s than they ever did with xavier’s, though he did try for a time. he wanted to be a good person like his friends, but
when he couldn’t easily agree with xavier the way bobby could, he felt like an outcast among his own people. he felt like a part of him was broken, and then he realized his anger and resentment towards non-mutants was just much more all-consuming. he’s darker and more tumultuous and looks up to magneto, almost like the father figure he never had ( despite magneto not playing into the role much, if at all— but give john an inch of attention or pseudo affection and he’ll take a mile ).
while defecting to the brotherhood was initially about exploring the range of his powers, like i said, it was ultimately more about deeper philosophic differences. john actually genuinely believed he was on the right side, doing the right thing— though in the wake of the fight in the last stand( or whatever major confrontation eventually happens in this verse ), he still feels guilt and shame for what his anger drove him to do to people he’d once lived with, even called friends ( similar to the guilt he felt about his grandmother back in sydney ). whether bobby saves him in this verse as he did post-tls or he manages to break away from the fighting and aftermath himself, he will always end up isolating himself.
in some ways, he then tries to atone for the things he did while with the brotherhood, but he’s more of an anti-hero, burning people who commit crimes— and not just the people who he thinks deserve it, something he used to get in trouble for back when he still attended xavier’s ( for instance, this scene would have gone a little differently with this john ; there would’ve been far more injuries, for one ). even then, he still slips up, and he still can’t stand the way mutants are treated. by this point in his main arc, he will have killed and seriously maimed a number of people, on top of the ones he maimed on trips to nyc while he was still at xavier’s.
