There are few villains more joyfully brutal and extremely violent than X-Men’s darkest timeline, Sabretooth is actually a hero. When Professor X’s son, Legion, went back in time to kill Magneto, he accidentally killed his father, skewing the timeline tremendously and creating what came to be known as the Age of Apocalypse. In this altered future, almost everything is different than how it was on Earth-616, including Sabretooth’s newfound heroism.
The best example of Sabretooth being depicted as a genuinely good person, as well as a truly heroic one, was in a comic printed under the Age of Apocalypse banner, The Astonishing X-Men #2 by Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira. In the issue, Apocalypse’s son and Horseman, Holocaust, descends upon a city and begins murdering thousands of people while the X-Men are among the civilians working to evacuate the area. Instead of attacking Holocaust, the X-Men realize the only thing they can do at the moment is escape the area with their lives. Far away from the action, Sabretooth, who in this reality is an established member of the X-Men, asks the teleporting mutant Blink to send him to Holocaust’s location so he can fight the villain to give his teammates more time to escape his reign of terror, even though the mission would most certainly mean Sabretooth’s demise.
Sabretooth is willing to sacrifice himself to save others when he decides to go toe-to-toe with the much more powerful Holocaust. The reason he makes that decision shows fans that Sabretooth isn’t just some reluctant hero who has a driving force to do the right thing, but that he has genuine empathy for not only his fellow X-Men but for the humans that are being killed by Holocaust. While this issue is probably the best example of Sabretooth’s heroism, he is a hero throughout the entire Age of Apocalypse run, fighting side-by-side with the more established X-Men to take down the evil that was Apocalypse.
While Sabretooth is a hero in the X-Men’s darkest timeline, he certainly is not one in the main Earth-616 universe. In the current X-Men books, Sabretooth was imprisoned in the depths of the mutant Island Nation of Krakoa for doing the exact opposite of what he did in the Age of Apocalypse timeline, which was unnecessarily slaughtering a number of humans for nothing more than the fun of it. Now, Sabretooth is gearing up for his comics with his own limited series Sabretooth in which the titular villain could see to the downfall of Krakoa himself.
Sabretooth has almost always been portrayed as a villain, from his first appearance to his latest one. However, in a universe full of gratuitous death and destruction, something the normal Sabretooth would very much be into, Sabretooth is a hero ready to sacrifice himself for the betterment of the world. While assuredly an initial shock to fans, Sabretooth is a hero in the X-Men’s darkest timeline, and he proves to be as good a hero as he is a villain.
