Who cleans that house?
They don't have a maid, and I doubt a bunch of teenagers, mutants or not...can keep a house THAT clean
shareI like to imagine that they have a cleaning service and private catering, with the kids doing occasional chores like dishes as punishment and stuff. I get annoyed when fanfics give them dinner duty and whatever on top of Schoolwork
AND saving the world! It just doesn't sound realistic to me to rely/make one person feed a school of, like, 30 or more people. 0_o
(Yeah, it sounds weird considering I mentioned dish duty, but like I said, I imagine that as a punishment and not a regular thing. Just like Jones said, it's doubtful a bunch of kids can keep a house _that_ clean, much less concentrate on
cooking every night.) Anyway, that's how I've been doing it in my fanfics lately and it just makes more sense then having the kids be saddled with so much.
Granted, I did have them order pizza in one fic for dinner, but I didn't think that one through and I guess there could be a couple days out of the week where a home cooked meal is made, or maybe there's a backstory there where the whole catatering staff contracted the flu for the week or something. Eh, who knows with my brain.
I'm sure everyone has their theories as to how such things are done, so that's my theory, and I have to say it sounds the most plausible. ^_^
Apparently, the students and staff divide up the house-keeping duties among themselves. In the Season 3 episode where Rogue's powers go out of control, there is a scene of the mansion during breakfast time. All the characters are cooking for themselves. There's another scene I remember seeing at some point with Jean and Nightcrawler doing the dishes together.
I don't think it's terribly unrealistic for the team to be collectively responsible for cooking and cleaning. Keep in mind that the New Mutants in later seasons do not regularly take part on missions. People go to the institute to go to school and train at the same time. Only Wolverine and Storm are full-time X-men members, with Jean and Scott being the senior students who most often miss school to save the world.
Assuming that Professor Xavier kept the kitchen constantly stocked, it wouldn't be that ridiculous for them to be able to feed themselves. It seems like that's how it worked in the comics, too. In real life, lots of colleges and schools have a co-op system, where residents are expected to divide up cooking and cleaning duties. With enough people, that means you're only responsible to do certain tasks every few weeks.
After all, one of the important qualifications for being part of the institute was discipline. Just as the students were expected to allot time for Danger Room practice, they would be expected to respect the house. I think that, throughout the series, they did a good job of showing how the kids were really pushed by Xavier, Storm, and Wolverine to be more responsible than the average teen. Cyclops and Jean were probably the best examples of disciplined students, and I think that it's implied that they were the first teen recruits.
Why would a banana grab another banana? Those are the kind of questions I don't want to answer.