This is all Anole's fault and he should feel bad.
So the mutant chan made me write an essay about why Julian is the way he is. Then I did.
Background
To begin with, being a mutant in the Marvel world kind of sucks. In Marvel, a mutant is explicitly defined as being someone with a certain gene, and a clear distinction is drawn between mutants and other characters with super powers. There's an off-hand mention in another series that deals with non-mutant super powered teenagers in the Marvel universe, where its said that they have powers in the way that God intended. The corollary relating to mutants is unfortunately obvious, and that's before going into the rest of it.
It's a common story amongst the mutants that Julian went to school with that they were not accepted by their parents when their mutation manifested, and were pretty much immediately shipped off to the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning or were shipped off when they could not control their powers. Considering that for the vast majority of them they would not be able to at all times, this is a deeply unfair thing to impose on them, but hey! They're abominations, so they should be grateful that they weren't killed for being mutants. Most of them are disowned by their families, with guardianship signed off to one of the teachers at the school. We see this happen explicitly with Josh Foley, a student who at that point only had the ability to heal injuries and illnesses of himself and other people, but given the sheer number of disowned kids in the series there's probably a lot of guardianship being signed over. Except if you're Julian Keller, but I'll get to that later.
So basically, the X-Men are, for all intents and purposes, the guardians of a bunch of teenagers with super powers. Unfortunately, they are not so great at the whole "guardianship" thing. Some of the things are actually not their fault: it's not their fault that extremists keep trying to kill them and blow up a bus of children, or that the school keeps getting blown up. However, some things are their fault. It's noteworthy, for example, that not one child has received any kind of counselling after witnessing the deaths of forty-two of their classmates, or that at one point the X-Men disband after Charles Xavier is shot in the head (…he gets better?) and essentially leave the children to their own devices. I mean, the problem is that the X-Men themselves are deeply damaged and so shouldn't be looking after minors, but unfortunately they are the only ones who will take them. So that's a thing.
In case the mutants forget that they live on by the sufferance of everyone else, a constant presence at the school are Sentinels. While there are exceptions, Sentinels are designed to hunt down and kill mutants. The ones outside the school are unique in that they require a human pilot to consciously choose to kill a mutant or not. I'm not sure how this is much better, in part because we actually hear them talk about their charges and they are pretty derisive of them, including at one point saying that they deserve everything they get. Which is a lovely sentiment, I'm sure. However, after the school gets blown up one time too many, they disband the X-Men … and then reform them after the government declares martial law against mutants and starts arresting them, tying them down to a machine and stripping their powers from them daily in order to power a government sanctioned weapon. I'm simplifying horribly because this is comics and therefore kind of messy but you get the idea.
Currently the mutants mostly live on "Utopia" - which is essentially a hunk of rock just inside international waters near the coast of San Francisco, because nowhere else will have them. They still get attacked by Sentinels, they still get treated like crap, only now the baby mutants get to learn all about subsistence farming and how pissing off Magik will get you sent to Hell and no-one will care. (Sorry, Victor :'( ) This is subject to change when the current crossover - Schism - is over, where the X-Men split into two teams, centralised in two locations and with two aims. Interestingly, the thing that is causing the divide is how they are using the younger mutants. It's a conflict between keeping the children sheltered from the conflict and letting them grow up, or using them as soldiers … though perhaps it would hold more weight if the two lead proponents of the views would actually fight rather than letting the very children they are arguing about fight for them.
Julian before losing his hands
We actually don't know that much about Julian prior to coming to Xavier's. We know that when his powers manifested that his parents gave him an ultimatum that he either control them or get shipped off and Julian claims he refused … though personally I'm a little skeptical that he could have even if he wanted to. But I digress. Anyway, he goes to school, he gets disinherited by his parents for bullying his way through homeland security and forcing them to allow his friends (two of whom are visibly mutated) to fly on a plane, a bunch of interesting character stuff happens in the Hellions mini after that, and then M Day happens.
M Day is when a lot of mutants lost their powers. And by a lot I mean over 90%. It kind of sucked. At the school, after they determined who had and hadn't lost their powers, students without powers were encouraged to go home … in that they were put on a bus and sent home. Except, unfortunately, the bus got blown up by human extremists as it left the school and all forty-two people on the bus died, in front of their classmates and despite their classmates' best efforts. This left scars on them. We actually see that Julian is visibly haunted by this event some time later, though he is hardly the only one. It's a rallying point for the baby mutants, but it also left them with a pretty amazing sense of survivor's guilt. Things only get worse from there, with a highlight being that one time that the class was sent to hell. Except for Julian and Nori, who actually bullied someone to send them to hell to rescue their classmates, which is possibly one of the few times that someone has actively wanted to go to hell but hey.
The culmination of all this is that towards the end of the NXM series, when they are preparing to rescue the first mutant baby born post-M Day, Julian is grimly self-aware that the world he lives in hates him, would kill him if it could, and no-one would really care if he died outside of the other mutants. He acts as Nori's 2IC as they go in to rescue said mutant baby … and then promptly gets his ass handed to him by Lady Deathstroke, getting impaled on her claws and almost dying for his troubles.
Now the actual being injured isn't that big a deal. I mean it sucks! Julian is not keen on being injured! But it's what happens afterwards that's the issue. Julian finds out about the whole "X-Men disbanding" thing after waking up from his coma, still hooked up to medical machinery, starts panicking and is knocked out. After he wakes up again, he goes to see his parents … and then finds out that they abandoned him. I don't think he has a guardian at this point, though I assume at some point Emma Frost would have to step in or something. Anyway! Julian is horribly hurt by all of this and then starts chasing down Magneto to let him join his cause. What Magneto says in reply is actually really interesting and a really good snapshot of what's going on with Julian, so I'm going to quote it in its entirety:
"Everything you thought you were is gone, and the only thing left, the thing you held on so tightly was that you were an X-Man. Your teachers abandoned you. Your friends died. Your heart broke. Your beliefs shattered. The X-Men failed you. So you find me, their greatest enemy. You love them so much you want to hurt them. But I won't use you, and I won't kill you. You are a mutant, one of the few remaining. After everything you've been through you still don't see that Cyclops has given you a gift. He's given you time. Enjoy it, Hellion, because soon enough, war will come again for all mutants. And it will consume you…"
(Divided We Stand #1)
(I just also want to say that Magneto must have gigantic balls of titanium, saying all of that while Julian is throwing a spectacular telekinetic temper tantrum around him and Magneto has no powers at this point.)
The three important things that are raised in this quote that come up later are the concept of Julian's identity, abandonment and that he hurts the people he loves the most. Remember these! They'll come up again later.
After this, he gets turned into a weapon to try and blow up the UN Building to prove how dangerous mutants are (which does not succeed thanks to Josh Foley curing him before he - and Nori - blow up everything) and then it seems like he's looking for a cause to vent his anger on. Martial law is declared and mutants are required to follow a curfew or be arrested. Julian decides to stage a protest and be arrested for it, which was meant to be a peaceful demonstration until he decides to set stuff on fire for some ungodly reason. I don't know either. Anyway, he gets arrested, dumped in prison and basically gets his powers ripped out once a day after being strapped down in this machine thingy until he gets rescued. I should note that the person who arrested him was his old teacher, Emma Frost. She had her reasons for being there, but they don't matter so much to Julian.
So basically at this point, Julian has been failed in just about every single way. He's been abandoned, he's hurting and he wants to hurt the people he loves in the same way they hurt him. There's a lot of righteous hurt fury and he doesn't really have anywhere to direct it.
Julian after losing his hands
To summarise Julian's involvement in Second Coming, a few hundred thousand Sentinels come from the future to kill the remaining known mutants (which is less than two hundred) after an impenetrable barrier is set up around Utopia, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. A few people do try anyway, such as Thor (which is why Julian is respectful of Thor in camp; not many people would try to crack it open) but nada. Julian is one of the people trying to fight the Sentinels, and one blasts his hands off. He then appears later on kind of resentful as hell that Karma is getting fitted with a prosthetic leg but he doesn't get any hands, which is, to be fair, a fairly reasonable thing to be angry about but not that consistent with his attitudes later on.
The thing is, the issue that Julian has with losing his hands isn't losing his hands, though he is kind of super angry about that in its own right. It's the three things that Magneto mentioned before: loss of identity, abandonment and wanting to hurt the people he loves.
The loss of identity is explicitly outlined in Generation Hope #9, where Pixie remarks that she can understand why Julian is so angry, because he lost everything that made him Hellion. She says that if it happened to her, she wouldn't be Pixie any more, but the Amazing No-Hands Girl. This is part of why Julian is so miserable! Being Hellion was pretty much the only thing he had left, and through a freak accident he now doesn't even have that. He still has his powers, he can still fight … but he isn't Hellion anymore, but instead the Amazing No-Hands Boy. This is an identity he hates because it's one that is imposed on him, and reminds him all the time about the time he lost his hands. It seems to him that Hellion died fighting the Sentinels, and what's left is this handless freak (to use his own words here). He doesn't like this identity, and he feels helpless that there is nothing he can do about it. People see the hands before they see him, and he hates it. He hates the offers of assistance, he hates the fact that to pass as a normal person he has to wear these prosthetics (which he pretty much never does) and he hates that his hands basically meant that his friends stopped talking to him.
This ties into his abandonment thing. Julian is fairly codependent and desperately wants to belong somewhere. Unfortunately what happened was that after he lost his hands he was kind of a lot angry and bitter and hostile, and spent a lot of time rebuffing people trying to help him. Eventually what happens is that his friends stop trying to engage him, deciding that he doesn't want them to offer their help. Or at least that's my charitable reading because what the fuck, Legacy :|. Anyway! Julian is aware that they stopped trying to talk to him and that when he was actually ready to try interacting with people again … they actually don't even acknowledge him. Again, I am taking a charitable reading and assuming that they just didn't see him, because there is no way that the baby mutants would not try to engage him if they saw him around.
Finally, there's the whole "wanting to hurt the ones he love the same way they hurt him" thing. This is important! He snaps and snarls at the people he loves - the more he actually likes them, the more he lashes out at them for the perceived abandonment. Which does absolutely nothing for the whole abandonment thing, I might add. I never said this was an adaptive approach to trauma! In fact, the more hostile he is towards someone, the more he actually loves them and is desperately hurt that they abandoned him, I should point out. It's very healthy, as you can see, and definitely not destined to create the very situation that makes him desperately unhappy!
Unfortunately, Julian has also started to channel his fury internally as well as a result of these three things. He says some spectacularly derisive things about himself in fits of miserable fury, he is very clearly a profoundly unhappy individual, and he spends most of his time when not being forced to interact with people by Rogue in his room. These are totally healthy responses. I personally read him as being depressive at this point and there's a fair amount to support that reading. Not that it really matters: it's canon that he withdraws into his room, he hates himself and he wants everyone he loves to hurt like he has because of the horrible losses he's suffered and how they abandoned him afterward.
This leads me to camp.
Julian in camp
First up, Julian … definitely still has times where he just locks himself in his room and refuses to come out. But it's not as consistent as it is in canon, and he's not as notably withdrawn as he is in canon. Julian is actually capable of having a conversation where he makes jokes, teases people and is sometimes able to pass as a functional human being! He can't do this in canon.
The reason for this is actually pretty simple: Julian is needed in camp. Julian in canon is a natural leader, though his leadership style is quite different to everyone else's that we see. Julian is very, very people oriented in his leadership style - he basically finds out what his team wants and goes about getting it for them, and wins their loyalty to him that way. It's a consistent trait of Julian's that he is very devoted and kind to his friends, even when he is the leader of the group, because they are friends first. And so when he came to camp, he kind of was tooling around a bit, but it wasn't until he really met Brianna that the whole leadership switch thing was flicked. Here is the youngest mutant he has ever met bar Hope Summers, and she lives in a crappy world with no infrastructure and this asshole running the place? To hell with that. He's going to save her. She is going to be the person that he saves, because he couldn't save anyone else.
Things then got rather more complicated when more people arrived from the Marvel world, and Julian's massive survivor's guilt kicked in. Now it's not just enough to save Brianna, but he wants to save them all. To hell with the cost to him, his life sucks anyway. He has no hands, his identity is in shreds and no-one cares about him anyway in his own time. In fact, he gets called a monster at one point, which he has internalised in a big way and comes out when he is feeling particularly self-loathing. But it doesn't matter if he's a monster, that he is a pathetic handless freak, because if it means that if his friends - who, remember, he loves dearly - get to live a happier life? Then he is on board with this.
However! The baby mutants have pretty much been wearing down his resistance. Cessily has, just by being Cessily, gotten Julian to the point where he will listen to people when they speak to him, even if he flips them off and goes I DO WHAT I WANT. He's still listening! And he'll even take things on board! Jubilee encourages his really terrible urges and thinks he's funny when he makes a joke, which helps a lot. Victor has been all LOGIC!! at him, which has been working a lot as well. Charles has been telling him that he's hurting people and that he's not a monster despite his own terrible commentary. Erik actually takes him seriously and as someone whose experiences have shaped him, rather than someone to ignore and dismiss! Kurt, upon listening to his story, changed his stance and no longer treats him as someone who is just acting out for attention! Rogue … basically said that he's an asshole who deserved what he got but hey, you can't win them all. Aaaaand then there's Jay. Julian is deeply conflicted about Jay, because he's kind of dead in Julian's time but alive in his and he just wants Jay to live. But with the combined effort of everyone, Julian has reached a point where he has realised that his survivor's guilt doesn't justify his taking away Jay's autonomy and he is going to tell him that he does die and that is why everyone is acting super weird around him.
(He is also unspeakably angry at the comparison between him and Emma Frost, I might add, but that's not that important for this essay. He has issues with her that boil down to "I LOVED YOU AND YOU TREATED ME ABYSMALLY I HATE YOU BUT NOT REALLY" ps APP EMMA FROST :'D)
I mean, not everything is better. He still gets told to get over his depression, that he really doesn't have anything to complain about and that he's an asshole that probably deserved everything that happened to him. But the thing is, his team needs him, and doesn't need him in the sense that they need him in canon: another warm body to fight a Sentinel/do the chores/get sent to hell by Magik. They need him as a leader, as someone who can unite them and he's trying to rise to the challenge. He knows he used to be able to do it! He's going to try again!
…he's just not very good at it yet. It's a work in progress. But the mutants need him, and underneath all that misery and self-loathing is someone who wants to be needed and who is a natural leader. He just sometimes needs to slam the door to his room and not do anything for a few hours too.
Now everyone else has to write one too.
Background
To begin with, being a mutant in the Marvel world kind of sucks. In Marvel, a mutant is explicitly defined as being someone with a certain gene, and a clear distinction is drawn between mutants and other characters with super powers. There's an off-hand mention in another series that deals with non-mutant super powered teenagers in the Marvel universe, where its said that they have powers in the way that God intended. The corollary relating to mutants is unfortunately obvious, and that's before going into the rest of it.
It's a common story amongst the mutants that Julian went to school with that they were not accepted by their parents when their mutation manifested, and were pretty much immediately shipped off to the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning or were shipped off when they could not control their powers. Considering that for the vast majority of them they would not be able to at all times, this is a deeply unfair thing to impose on them, but hey! They're abominations, so they should be grateful that they weren't killed for being mutants. Most of them are disowned by their families, with guardianship signed off to one of the teachers at the school. We see this happen explicitly with Josh Foley, a student who at that point only had the ability to heal injuries and illnesses of himself and other people, but given the sheer number of disowned kids in the series there's probably a lot of guardianship being signed over. Except if you're Julian Keller, but I'll get to that later.
So basically, the X-Men are, for all intents and purposes, the guardians of a bunch of teenagers with super powers. Unfortunately, they are not so great at the whole "guardianship" thing. Some of the things are actually not their fault: it's not their fault that extremists keep trying to kill them and blow up a bus of children, or that the school keeps getting blown up. However, some things are their fault. It's noteworthy, for example, that not one child has received any kind of counselling after witnessing the deaths of forty-two of their classmates, or that at one point the X-Men disband after Charles Xavier is shot in the head (…he gets better?) and essentially leave the children to their own devices. I mean, the problem is that the X-Men themselves are deeply damaged and so shouldn't be looking after minors, but unfortunately they are the only ones who will take them. So that's a thing.
In case the mutants forget that they live on by the sufferance of everyone else, a constant presence at the school are Sentinels. While there are exceptions, Sentinels are designed to hunt down and kill mutants. The ones outside the school are unique in that they require a human pilot to consciously choose to kill a mutant or not. I'm not sure how this is much better, in part because we actually hear them talk about their charges and they are pretty derisive of them, including at one point saying that they deserve everything they get. Which is a lovely sentiment, I'm sure. However, after the school gets blown up one time too many, they disband the X-Men … and then reform them after the government declares martial law against mutants and starts arresting them, tying them down to a machine and stripping their powers from them daily in order to power a government sanctioned weapon. I'm simplifying horribly because this is comics and therefore kind of messy but you get the idea.
Currently the mutants mostly live on "Utopia" - which is essentially a hunk of rock just inside international waters near the coast of San Francisco, because nowhere else will have them. They still get attacked by Sentinels, they still get treated like crap, only now the baby mutants get to learn all about subsistence farming and how pissing off Magik will get you sent to Hell and no-one will care. (Sorry, Victor :'( ) This is subject to change when the current crossover - Schism - is over, where the X-Men split into two teams, centralised in two locations and with two aims. Interestingly, the thing that is causing the divide is how they are using the younger mutants. It's a conflict between keeping the children sheltered from the conflict and letting them grow up, or using them as soldiers … though perhaps it would hold more weight if the two lead proponents of the views would actually fight rather than letting the very children they are arguing about fight for them.
Julian before losing his hands
We actually don't know that much about Julian prior to coming to Xavier's. We know that when his powers manifested that his parents gave him an ultimatum that he either control them or get shipped off and Julian claims he refused … though personally I'm a little skeptical that he could have even if he wanted to. But I digress. Anyway, he goes to school, he gets disinherited by his parents for bullying his way through homeland security and forcing them to allow his friends (two of whom are visibly mutated) to fly on a plane, a bunch of interesting character stuff happens in the Hellions mini after that, and then M Day happens.
M Day is when a lot of mutants lost their powers. And by a lot I mean over 90%. It kind of sucked. At the school, after they determined who had and hadn't lost their powers, students without powers were encouraged to go home … in that they were put on a bus and sent home. Except, unfortunately, the bus got blown up by human extremists as it left the school and all forty-two people on the bus died, in front of their classmates and despite their classmates' best efforts. This left scars on them. We actually see that Julian is visibly haunted by this event some time later, though he is hardly the only one. It's a rallying point for the baby mutants, but it also left them with a pretty amazing sense of survivor's guilt. Things only get worse from there, with a highlight being that one time that the class was sent to hell. Except for Julian and Nori, who actually bullied someone to send them to hell to rescue their classmates, which is possibly one of the few times that someone has actively wanted to go to hell but hey.
The culmination of all this is that towards the end of the NXM series, when they are preparing to rescue the first mutant baby born post-M Day, Julian is grimly self-aware that the world he lives in hates him, would kill him if it could, and no-one would really care if he died outside of the other mutants. He acts as Nori's 2IC as they go in to rescue said mutant baby … and then promptly gets his ass handed to him by Lady Deathstroke, getting impaled on her claws and almost dying for his troubles.
Now the actual being injured isn't that big a deal. I mean it sucks! Julian is not keen on being injured! But it's what happens afterwards that's the issue. Julian finds out about the whole "X-Men disbanding" thing after waking up from his coma, still hooked up to medical machinery, starts panicking and is knocked out. After he wakes up again, he goes to see his parents … and then finds out that they abandoned him. I don't think he has a guardian at this point, though I assume at some point Emma Frost would have to step in or something. Anyway! Julian is horribly hurt by all of this and then starts chasing down Magneto to let him join his cause. What Magneto says in reply is actually really interesting and a really good snapshot of what's going on with Julian, so I'm going to quote it in its entirety:
"Everything you thought you were is gone, and the only thing left, the thing you held on so tightly was that you were an X-Man. Your teachers abandoned you. Your friends died. Your heart broke. Your beliefs shattered. The X-Men failed you. So you find me, their greatest enemy. You love them so much you want to hurt them. But I won't use you, and I won't kill you. You are a mutant, one of the few remaining. After everything you've been through you still don't see that Cyclops has given you a gift. He's given you time. Enjoy it, Hellion, because soon enough, war will come again for all mutants. And it will consume you…"
(Divided We Stand #1)
(I just also want to say that Magneto must have gigantic balls of titanium, saying all of that while Julian is throwing a spectacular telekinetic temper tantrum around him and Magneto has no powers at this point.)
The three important things that are raised in this quote that come up later are the concept of Julian's identity, abandonment and that he hurts the people he loves the most. Remember these! They'll come up again later.
After this, he gets turned into a weapon to try and blow up the UN Building to prove how dangerous mutants are (which does not succeed thanks to Josh Foley curing him before he - and Nori - blow up everything) and then it seems like he's looking for a cause to vent his anger on. Martial law is declared and mutants are required to follow a curfew or be arrested. Julian decides to stage a protest and be arrested for it, which was meant to be a peaceful demonstration until he decides to set stuff on fire for some ungodly reason. I don't know either. Anyway, he gets arrested, dumped in prison and basically gets his powers ripped out once a day after being strapped down in this machine thingy until he gets rescued. I should note that the person who arrested him was his old teacher, Emma Frost. She had her reasons for being there, but they don't matter so much to Julian.
So basically at this point, Julian has been failed in just about every single way. He's been abandoned, he's hurting and he wants to hurt the people he loves in the same way they hurt him. There's a lot of righteous hurt fury and he doesn't really have anywhere to direct it.
Julian after losing his hands
To summarise Julian's involvement in Second Coming, a few hundred thousand Sentinels come from the future to kill the remaining known mutants (which is less than two hundred) after an impenetrable barrier is set up around Utopia, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. A few people do try anyway, such as Thor (which is why Julian is respectful of Thor in camp; not many people would try to crack it open) but nada. Julian is one of the people trying to fight the Sentinels, and one blasts his hands off. He then appears later on kind of resentful as hell that Karma is getting fitted with a prosthetic leg but he doesn't get any hands, which is, to be fair, a fairly reasonable thing to be angry about but not that consistent with his attitudes later on.
The thing is, the issue that Julian has with losing his hands isn't losing his hands, though he is kind of super angry about that in its own right. It's the three things that Magneto mentioned before: loss of identity, abandonment and wanting to hurt the people he loves.
The loss of identity is explicitly outlined in Generation Hope #9, where Pixie remarks that she can understand why Julian is so angry, because he lost everything that made him Hellion. She says that if it happened to her, she wouldn't be Pixie any more, but the Amazing No-Hands Girl. This is part of why Julian is so miserable! Being Hellion was pretty much the only thing he had left, and through a freak accident he now doesn't even have that. He still has his powers, he can still fight … but he isn't Hellion anymore, but instead the Amazing No-Hands Boy. This is an identity he hates because it's one that is imposed on him, and reminds him all the time about the time he lost his hands. It seems to him that Hellion died fighting the Sentinels, and what's left is this handless freak (to use his own words here). He doesn't like this identity, and he feels helpless that there is nothing he can do about it. People see the hands before they see him, and he hates it. He hates the offers of assistance, he hates the fact that to pass as a normal person he has to wear these prosthetics (which he pretty much never does) and he hates that his hands basically meant that his friends stopped talking to him.
This ties into his abandonment thing. Julian is fairly codependent and desperately wants to belong somewhere. Unfortunately what happened was that after he lost his hands he was kind of a lot angry and bitter and hostile, and spent a lot of time rebuffing people trying to help him. Eventually what happens is that his friends stop trying to engage him, deciding that he doesn't want them to offer their help. Or at least that's my charitable reading because what the fuck, Legacy :|. Anyway! Julian is aware that they stopped trying to talk to him and that when he was actually ready to try interacting with people again … they actually don't even acknowledge him. Again, I am taking a charitable reading and assuming that they just didn't see him, because there is no way that the baby mutants would not try to engage him if they saw him around.
Finally, there's the whole "wanting to hurt the ones he love the same way they hurt him" thing. This is important! He snaps and snarls at the people he loves - the more he actually likes them, the more he lashes out at them for the perceived abandonment. Which does absolutely nothing for the whole abandonment thing, I might add. I never said this was an adaptive approach to trauma! In fact, the more hostile he is towards someone, the more he actually loves them and is desperately hurt that they abandoned him, I should point out. It's very healthy, as you can see, and definitely not destined to create the very situation that makes him desperately unhappy!
Unfortunately, Julian has also started to channel his fury internally as well as a result of these three things. He says some spectacularly derisive things about himself in fits of miserable fury, he is very clearly a profoundly unhappy individual, and he spends most of his time when not being forced to interact with people by Rogue in his room. These are totally healthy responses. I personally read him as being depressive at this point and there's a fair amount to support that reading. Not that it really matters: it's canon that he withdraws into his room, he hates himself and he wants everyone he loves to hurt like he has because of the horrible losses he's suffered and how they abandoned him afterward.
This leads me to camp.
Julian in camp
First up, Julian … definitely still has times where he just locks himself in his room and refuses to come out. But it's not as consistent as it is in canon, and he's not as notably withdrawn as he is in canon. Julian is actually capable of having a conversation where he makes jokes, teases people and is sometimes able to pass as a functional human being! He can't do this in canon.
The reason for this is actually pretty simple: Julian is needed in camp. Julian in canon is a natural leader, though his leadership style is quite different to everyone else's that we see. Julian is very, very people oriented in his leadership style - he basically finds out what his team wants and goes about getting it for them, and wins their loyalty to him that way. It's a consistent trait of Julian's that he is very devoted and kind to his friends, even when he is the leader of the group, because they are friends first. And so when he came to camp, he kind of was tooling around a bit, but it wasn't until he really met Brianna that the whole leadership switch thing was flicked. Here is the youngest mutant he has ever met bar Hope Summers, and she lives in a crappy world with no infrastructure and this asshole running the place? To hell with that. He's going to save her. She is going to be the person that he saves, because he couldn't save anyone else.
Things then got rather more complicated when more people arrived from the Marvel world, and Julian's massive survivor's guilt kicked in. Now it's not just enough to save Brianna, but he wants to save them all. To hell with the cost to him, his life sucks anyway. He has no hands, his identity is in shreds and no-one cares about him anyway in his own time. In fact, he gets called a monster at one point, which he has internalised in a big way and comes out when he is feeling particularly self-loathing. But it doesn't matter if he's a monster, that he is a pathetic handless freak, because if it means that if his friends - who, remember, he loves dearly - get to live a happier life? Then he is on board with this.
However! The baby mutants have pretty much been wearing down his resistance. Cessily has, just by being Cessily, gotten Julian to the point where he will listen to people when they speak to him, even if he flips them off and goes I DO WHAT I WANT. He's still listening! And he'll even take things on board! Jubilee encourages his really terrible urges and thinks he's funny when he makes a joke, which helps a lot. Victor has been all LOGIC!! at him, which has been working a lot as well. Charles has been telling him that he's hurting people and that he's not a monster despite his own terrible commentary. Erik actually takes him seriously and as someone whose experiences have shaped him, rather than someone to ignore and dismiss! Kurt, upon listening to his story, changed his stance and no longer treats him as someone who is just acting out for attention! Rogue … basically said that he's an asshole who deserved what he got but hey, you can't win them all. Aaaaand then there's Jay. Julian is deeply conflicted about Jay, because he's kind of dead in Julian's time but alive in his and he just wants Jay to live. But with the combined effort of everyone, Julian has reached a point where he has realised that his survivor's guilt doesn't justify his taking away Jay's autonomy and he is going to tell him that he does die and that is why everyone is acting super weird around him.
(He is also unspeakably angry at the comparison between him and Emma Frost, I might add, but that's not that important for this essay. He has issues with her that boil down to "I LOVED YOU AND YOU TREATED ME ABYSMALLY I HATE YOU BUT NOT REALLY" ps APP EMMA FROST :'D)
I mean, not everything is better. He still gets told to get over his depression, that he really doesn't have anything to complain about and that he's an asshole that probably deserved everything that happened to him. But the thing is, his team needs him, and doesn't need him in the sense that they need him in canon: another warm body to fight a Sentinel/do the chores/get sent to hell by Magik. They need him as a leader, as someone who can unite them and he's trying to rise to the challenge. He knows he used to be able to do it! He's going to try again!
…he's just not very good at it yet. It's a work in progress. But the mutants need him, and underneath all that misery and self-loathing is someone who wants to be needed and who is a natural leader. He just sometimes needs to slam the door to his room and not do anything for a few hours too.
Now everyone else has to write one too.