#like the idea of mutants who are genocidal again. there's lots of characters who are like this that i like

[lovecatsys]

marvel is sooo obsessed with the "mutants killed my child so now i hate mutants forever" thing its so annoying. that is not how bigotry works lol

[aaronymous999]

I’m sure this has been talked about to death but the third X-Men movie ( I believe it’s The Last Stand-? ) is such a blatant disability metaphor to me especially with the talks about “curing”. Some of the conversations are directly what I’d expect to hear from this discussion and it’s kinda interesting.

For example, characters like Storm insists that there’s nothing to cure, but characters like Rogue who have a mutation that makes it very hard for her to live has a different outlook. I really like how the movie makes it clear that it was her choice and she wasn’t just doing it for Bobby by the way. To me this storyline does not work with a racial, jewish or LGBTQ metaphor, and if you assigned those metaphors to this storyline it would make zero sense. I think the X-Men are more than a racial metaphor like some assume and I think honestly the metaphor changes depending on the storyline. I think most often it’s a Jewish and racial metaphor, but sometimes it’s a disability or LGBTQ metaphor and I enjoy the variation :3

Also not saying this is the best way this storyline could be handled the way it was written just reminds me of conversations I’ve seen before, this is your friendly reminder that a lot of disabled people don’t want a “cure” and have been living the way they have for so long that it would actually be detrimental to suddenly change to a different way of living! Some disabled people would like a hypothetical “cure” and some don’t and both of those are okay! Generally though the idea that ALL disabled people want “cures” is very prevalent in media and it’s kinda annoying which is why in writing advice you often see that you shouldn’t “cure” your disabled characters.

To clarify I’m not disabled- ( physically at least- technically mentally but it doesn’t impair my life enough that I’m comfortable calling it a disability, that’s me personally though however someone wants to label themselves is up to them! ) and this opinion will forever be bare bones until I hear the opinion of a disabled person and their thoughts on the matter. I think this movie didn’t actually handle it as poorly as they could of, because unlike other media it’s a complex issue. Mutants against the “cure” are very right in a lot of ways and the government is certainly being predatory here, but the Mutants on the other side of the coin do have a point for them personally. Because for a lot of them, as seen in the comics, mutations can literally be life or death and ruin all their relationships because y’know. They kill the people they touch. But there’s also more complex things in between here, like Angel being forced a “cure” and having non-mutants speak for his needs. And I imagine there’s also mutants who want a cure solely to be accepted by society. Lots of little interesting things in here, and to a lot of Mutants this could also be seen as straight up genocide, which may seem odd for me to bring up but in the perspective of a character like Storm, the government views Mutants as a DISEASE. And wants all of them to no longer be mutants, which could also be seen as a jewish metaphor as well. Just in this case they aren’t killing mutants, they’re removing a core aspect of them. It’s just a muddled issue in this movie because some mutants legitmately want the “cure” while others view it as drastic as genocide.

Idk it’s just an interesting movie viewed on a metaphorical lense, I’ve always been interested in minority metaphors and issues because well I am a few of them lmao- so this movie had a lot for me to chew on! If I’ve gotten anything wrong though please correct me! My mind is always open! :D

( Also want to clarify that again not disabled- the X-Men franchise is not very good with disability representation as it is so take this with a bucket of salt. Charles Xavier in particular, at least from the opinions I’ve seen online is often a genius wheelchair user stereotype to a lot of people- and also he’s NEVER played by an actual wheelchair user or physically disabled actor. Not all characters need to be played by an actor that shares part of their identity but here it’s kind of annoying because wheelchair users are NEVER played by wheelchair users and Charles Xavier is arguably one of the most iconic wheelchair users in fiction. Also Magneto is never played by a jewish man which BOTHERS ME SO MUCH YOU HAVE NO IDEA… )

[kurt-wagner-official]

Post #66: UXM issues 196-197

In this issue, we jump straight back into Xavier teaching another psych class at Columbia. I'm still sad we didn't get to see his first class, and even in this issue we don't see much actual teaching, but it's nice to at least have one story in this very brief status quo, although Xavier himself barely has a part. His injuries have been aggravated to the point where he had to take drugs to suppress his powers so they don't overwhelm him. But while in a huge lecture, one especially strong thought breaks through- a student planning a murder. The trouble is, Xavier has no idea who the killer or victim is, and he'll have to figure it out the old fashioned way. Out in the Serengeti, Ororo finds herself face to face with a friendly lion who's silver mane matches her hair. Before she can approach it, though, both she and the lion are shot by those rich pricks she humiliated recently. The action zig-zags back to New York, where Xavier is telling the X-Men that they need to solve this murder before it happens. He doesn't tell them about his powers bring in the fritz, instead spinning some BS about an experiment he's doing with some drugs that are suppressing his powers. The scene is made a lot more interesting by the fact that it takes place in a restaurant where Xavier has taken out the team plus Magneto and Lee for lunch. Our heroes know Magneto isn't truly evil and have been willing to work with him in both Secret Wars, but having lunch is pushing it, especially cause his date is Scott's ex. Rachel sees the Beyonder at the counter ordering food, but he disappears into thin air, although he'll continue to stalk everyone from the shadows throughout the issue. The restaurant setting also gives an excuse to include some random people talking about how great Nimrod is. Rachel still hasn't made the connection between Nimrod and the Project Nimrod that future Kate went after. Kurt didn't show up to lunch, because he's visiting his priest to have a crisis of faith. In the past, he's turned to religion as an anchor when the horrors of X-Men life get to him, but he's starting to worry that the the Beyonder is God. And if he's not, than how can he trust a God who would allow such a being in the world? A lot of X-characters hit low points when faced with a huge traumatic event, like Ororo and losing her powers. We come back again to the bend or break theme. Ororo refuses to let things get to her, but the things keep coming, so she get bruised and hurt until she finally get knocked down. Then she begins the process of picking herself up. Kurt's more willing to roll with them punches, so rather than resist until he's knocked down, he lets The Horrors push him. But sometimes the punches just don't stop coming, Kurt's been getting pushed down so much he can't stand up straight. At the end of Lifedeath, he almost gave up, and though Rachel lifted him some, that was still the culmination of a lot of punches, and they've kept coming since then with the stress of leadership. All this to say that Claremont has been very gradually building to Kurt's crisis of faith for a long time, and using Secret Wars II as the catalyst for the peak of that crisis is a brilliant way to not have the crossover derail the book. Back to the rest of the team, they're investigating all of Xavier's students. Rachel and Anna are a pair, and have a conversation about Magneto. These are definitely the two who are least skeptical about his redemption, because Anna went through the same process and Rachel grew up with a heroic Magneto. They're sidetracked by a bunch of people jumping a guy in an alley. They save the guy, but he runs away from them, and they realize he was spray painting anti mutant graffiti. Rachel gets mad and blows up the wall. Rachel's arc through her time in this book is an inverse to Magneto's. They've both loved through a genocide and want to prevent another one. But while Rachel came back in time and told Kurt that the X-Men couldn't give up on being the X-Men, every day she's starting to doubt more and more whether their methods can actually lead to any other outcome. She's approaching the mindset that Magneto is moving away from as he comes closer and closer to joining the X-Men. He doesn't truly believe in the pacifist ideals of Xavier, but he wants to try to. Kitty and Logan are on another part of campus investigating other leads. Logan has his doubts about Magneto, but he believes in redemption and he trusts Xavier. Kitty is probably the most doubtful about Magneto, but she's also been growing a lot recently and learning to accept the possibility of change. She's also trying to be more like Logan, which we see when she tries to smoke his cigar and instantly regrets it.  She goes into the physics lab to investigate the next batch of suspects, who she knows from classes she's taking at the college. These are the culprits, which she suspects by the way they go quiet when she enters, but what she doesn't realize until it's too late is that these are the guys who mugged Xavier. They did it because he's a mutant, and they think she is too, cause she goes to his school. Kitty uses the n-word again, in the same context as in God Loves, Man Kills. I forgot that was coming, and it's terrible for obvious reasons, but I already talked a lot about that in the GLMK post, so I won't say any more here. Anyway, they chloroform her. In Xavier's office, Rachel is telling him and Magneto that she's been sending the Beyonder's presence following them. He appears in the room, but only to her, and when she tries to reach out, she triggers a psychic booby trap that Xavier has hidden that he apparently forgot to mention. It blasts all her power back on her, causing indescribable pain and briefly amplifying her psychic sense, giving her a vision of Kitty about to be murdered. Suddenly she's in her hound uniform and flies off to rescue Kitty (who she calls "my Kate," in case you were wondering if she was really in gay love with her). She blasts away all the would be murderers, and one of them takes a shot at her with his gun. She blocks the bullet and sends it back at him, but just before it hits him Magneto arrives and stops it. He knows exactly what she's feeling; she wants to make these people pay not only for their crimes but for all the crimes that other people inflicted on her. He doesn't even necessarily disagree that they deserve it, but he tells her that fighting hatred and fear with hatred and fear can never produce anything but more hatred and fear. He's spent his life fighting fire with fire, and the world is no better a place than before. She tells him and Kitty the truth about her past as a hound, and Magneto releases his hold on the bullet, telling her the decision has to be hers. She drops it to the ground and erases the minds of the humans before leaving alone. Kitty tells Magneto he really is a hero, but he denies it, saying he's just a man who's done unforgivable things and had worse done to him. But he believes that he can help Rachel find a better path. The big difference between Rachel and Magneto in his younger years is that Rachel isn't alone. Both of them began their crusades motivated by love for their families, but Magneto's wife and children condemned him. He was left alone,but carried on with his cause, becoming more bitter and corrupted over the years. But Rachel still has the love of a family, so she's able to hold on to the love that's still motivating her. Magneto's redemption has the same moral as God Loves, Man Kills. When he wanted to be the savior of mutant kind, he failed, but now that he's learned humility, he has a chance to be a part of that salvation. Similarly, Xavier's idealism can be an inspiration to his students, but he himself can't be a savior, because he's also a man who can be corrupted. For mutant kind to ever be saved, it'll take people like Rachel, who've walked on both sides of the old Xavier/Magneto divide and now toe the line. They can't do it alone without falling to one side or the other, but other people can help them keep their balance, as we see here. In a true masterstroke of improvisation in the face of event tie-ins, Claremont even weaves the Beyonder into this theme; earlier, both the Beyonder and Magneto questioned whether a god could truly evolve and learn. As we see in the end, they can, but only if they accept that they aren't a god. Magneto has finally accepted that, and the Beyonder is inspired to try the same. Unfortunately, the Beyonder also observes that Rachel is coming closer and closer to godhood every day. Whether she can come through it with herself intact is a question that writers will be asking of her for years to come.

Issue 197 opens with a dream sequence starring Peter. He's on the Shi'ar cruiser that the X-Men spent what they believed would be there last day alive during the Brood Saga, and he's fighting an imposter version of himself to save Kitty. He tosses the imposter out of the ship, but Kitty is a Brood Queen, and attacks him. He flees, and finds safety in the arms of Zsaji. But then she tells him she's still dead and she wants him to join her. He runs again, this time finding himself in the first scene we ever saw of him, saving Illyana from a runaway tractor. But then she tells him that by saving her life, he condemned her to eventually meet Belasco. All three women approach him, saying they trusted him and he failed them. He wakes up screaming, and finds that he and Kitty have been kidnapped in the night and taken to Murderworld. In Alaska, Scott wakes up to a call from Moira telling him he needs to return to the mansion. He promises Madelyne he'll be back soon. Back in Murderworld, Arcade explains why he's brought the two of them there. Doctor Doom is somewhere in Murderworld, out to kill him, and he's coercing the heroes into protecting him in exchange for their families' safety from his assistant, Miss Locke. They're suspicious of why Doom is playing by Arcade's rules, but they have no choice but to play along until they can figure out what's going on. We cut away again to see Nimrod hanging out in a diner with his friend Jamie. He's starting to adjust to life as a human, but when some guy comes in the rob the place, Nimrod incinerates him. He's met with applause by the other patrons for protecting the city. Back to the plot, Arcade supplies the heroes with an army of his X-robots to fight alongside them as an army of Doom minions attacks them. In the end, Peter believes Kitty is killed by Doom, but it turns out she put one of the robots in her place so she could ambush Doom just before he killed Arcade. It turns out to be not Doom, but Miss Locke, who was trying to kill Arcade for fun. As usual, the X-Men don't know how to make charges stick to Arcade, so they go their separate ways. This issue isn't as deep as most of the Peter-centric ones, but it was still pretty good. He's spent his whole life trying to lift other people's burdens and his whole time on this team trying to learn to share those burdens. But in this issue, he's forced to let Kitty carry her own burdens. He's been beating himself up for failing to protect the people he loves from himself and from villains. Here, he gets excited when he saves Kitty from a big robot, thinking that this is the way he can redeem himself for hurting her and for failing Zsaji and Illyana. But when that Kitty turns out to be a robot, and the real one outsmarted both him and Arcade, he has a more profound realization- Kitty isn't his to save. He does save her sometimes, but other times she saves him and herself. He's been freaking out trying to find a way to forgive himself, but Kitty already forgave him, and he's starting to realize that that's the sign he was waiting for. In the cliffhanger, Ororo wakes up in the Serengeti and waves off the vultures surrounding her. This was a okay issue, but like I said not the best Peter story. I realize that it would be out of character for Peter to not feel years of guilt over the Kitty/Zsaji situation, but (a) I hate it, as everyone should know, and (b) regardless of how I feel about it, it shouldn't be the only thing Peter's been dealing with for now over a year in the main book. We've still seen very little of him interacting with Illyana since learning she has magic. Last issue, we didn't get to hear his take on Magneto. In the Alpha Flight mini, we saw him in a situation where he couldn't sacrifice himself and had to decide to sacrifice others. Are you telling me someone who doubts himself this much wouldn't still be thinking about that? Peter is a hard character to write, because he'll always keep putting himself through the same cycle of self hatred. But that can be very interesting as long as you're finding new things to throw at him. He can keep being tortured by his every mistake, but in order to keep being an interesting character he needs to add some new mistakes. The material is right there, and it's frustrating to see Claremont still laser focused on the Kitty part of his life when there's so much more he could be dealing with. But if I'm remembering correctly, this is the last time Claremont does a Peter/Kitty centric story before Kitty spins off to Excalibur, so hopefully this is my last rant about that for a while. Next issue is Lifedeath II, one of Claremont's best issues and a huge turning point for Ororo.

[imperiuswrecked]

To me, it doesn’t make sense to make Magneto the main villain because it has been done so much before and it would connect it so much to the Fox Films. Also I think there is a GREAT laziness in writing Magneto especially in films. He generally didn’t want to kill all humans, subjugate them yes because he doesn’t trust them. Which isn’t a ‘good guy’ move in itself and he slips in and out of.

He legit murdered genocide I think when he was going to kill all humans. Like no.

I also think that the average cinema goer likes Magneto too much… or maybe that is me. It would also require them to recast the most famous faces of the franchises?

Like is anyone going to care if they recast Jean, Scott, Iceman, Rogue, Kitty, Beast even Mystique but Magneto? I don’t know. I have long been a fan of an actual Jewish actor playing Magneto but following Ian McKellan would be difficult for the casual fans to accept. I don’t think Fassbender left such an amazing impression.

Even my most average MCU fans friends (and god they love the MCU 😤 but I see past it) still talk about how much they want to see a Magneto solo film.

To me I would put the focus on their reveal and sentinels. Then again I thought they’ll go through Krakoa stuff. Like it turns out the mutants have been living on this Island etc

With the ‘simpler times’ comment I have to for the sake of my sanity have to think that it was because Pietro knew where he was. Things were clear to him, as much as it hurt he had his sister. The following trauma had not occurred. Again I don’t think this is true but I am trying to reason bad writing. He didn’t doubt his morality but was indebted and controlled. Shitty actions were out of his control.

I don’t read Avengers so I didn’t know he was shelved for so long.

I think the Trial of Magneto is trying to ride on the coattails of Wandavision because even though she’s not a mutant a lot of the internet was wanting Magneto to show up. So what is the best way to get those fans who wanted to see that? Set up a family comic book where they establish the family again because I guess the MCU fans heard they’ve changed their background and themselves didn’t like it.

I see the Trial of Magneto as something poorly thought out as they saw what the audience was interested in. The timeline kind of clashes uncomfortably with Inferno. Which makes me think it was wedged in there to ride the Wandavision train and undo the retcon on the side of the main storyline.

Thank you for reading my essay/rant

Ok so I'm going to first say you have a lot of great thoughts and great on picking up the whole forced feeling. You are right, it does feel wedged in there and it does feel forced because that's exactly what Marvel did.

The Trial of Magneto was supposed to be an X-Factor plot, it was Leah Williams next arc, here's an article link talking about her podcast: link (yes I know it's bleeding cool but I don't have time to listen to the podcast)

Leah Williams tells us that X-Factor was canceled because Leah's pitch for the Magneto/Wanda story for X-Factor, now called Trial Of Magneto, became such a popular pitch at Marvel but they thought the reader numbers for X-Factor wasn't big enough for this story, so they wanted it as a separate comic. And canceled X-Factor #10 rather than seeing it run as originally planned, with the Trial beginning in X-Factor #15. Williams says she only learned about the cancellation of X-Factor when she was writing #9, so as she had to finish the series quickly, squeezing six issues worth of story into those last two issues, calling it "cramped and rushed".

So I'm not a fan of Leah but the way Marvel treats it's writers has always been terrible so this cancellation doesn't surprise me. Could this be about W*ndaVision? It's likely, but it's more likely this has to do with Hickman bowing out. It's no secret literally everyone hated the retcon and I always knew it would be undone but I didn't think it would take 6 years but here we are.

Hickman leaving is a bigger thing, he stated in an interview ( link ) that he had planned Krakoa and X-Men to be a 3 arc story, and he wasn't allowed to move onto the 2nd arc because the clowns at Marvel liked the idea of Krakoa too much and I'm so mad because that's exactly the kinda behavior that annoys me with the fans, them thinking Krakoa is just a fun playground for the mutants to mess around with.

"Oh, plans have changed entirely," Hickman says. "When I pitched the X-Men story I wanted to do, I pitched a very big, very broad, three-act, three-event narrative, the first of which was House of X. And while this loosely worked as a three-year plan, I told Marvel upfront that I honestly had no idea how long the first part would last because there were a lot of interesting ideas that I had seeded that other creators would want to play with, and so, we left this rather open-ended. I was also pretty clear with all the writers that came into the office what the initial, three-act plan was so no one would be surprised when it was time for the line to pivot." Hickman continues, "However, I also knew that I was cooking with dynamite, and it was very possible that what I had written in House of X, and the ideas contained within, was not actually the first act of a three-act story, but something that resonated more deeply and worked more like Giant-Size X-Men, where it would represent a paradigm shift in the entire X-Men line for a prolonged period of time. So, during the pandemic, when the time came for me to start pointing things toward writing the second-act event, I asked everyone if they were ready for me to do that, and to a man, everyone wanted to stay in the first act. It was really interesting, because I appreciated that House of X resonated with them to the extent that they didn't want it to end, but the reality was that I knew I would be leaving the line early."

I'm so MAD because the thing I was predicting, that Hickman would have it come crashing down and everything would be revealed to be terrible and Mutant Death Sex Cult Island wasn't a paradise is never going to happen because the fucking CLOWNS at Marvel don't want him to move past it. I may have my personal gripes about some of Hickman's writing but we can't deny the man wrote one of the best if only the best Marvel Event with Fantastic Four/Avengers/Secret War.

As for the simpler times comment, like I have my theories that I wrote out here, and that's what I think is most likely but I do think Pietro's life has never been easy or simple once his adoptive parents died. Pietro could be drinking to a time before the Brotherhood.

I would love for a Jewish actor to play Magneto and any other characters who are Jewish. I would love for a Jewish writer to be able to write them too. However Ian's performance literally set him in the minds of the people as Magneto, not even Fassbender's bleh one note Magneto could compare. Imo the only reason people liked the younger Magneto was because he was young, handsome (? ig idk i dont simp for him) and they could ship him with young professor X (cowards. where is the old man ship???) But I feel like a new actor could definitely fill the role if they are Jewish and the writing was good.

Magneto's writing in comics... well I just wish we could have a Jewish writer for him. There's some great stuff for him but I feel like characters like him and Doom could be written better by non white/american writers.

Although by today's standards the og X-Men trilogy doesn't hold up I will defend the first two movies with my life simply because after Blade these movies opened up the idea that a good serious, non campy version where characters called Magneto and Cyclops were taken seriously. X2 in my mind was the definitive X-Men movie. Was it totally comic accurate? No, but it doesn't do what the MCU does, it doesn't treat the watcher like they need to have their hand held through all the military propaganda and "hints to the comics". Also side note; the reason no one cared about any of the other X-Men being recast is because all through most of the X-Men movies the focal story point has been Professor X vs Magneto. If they really want people to care about those characters/actors then we would need stories that focused on them. Not like how Storm barely had any character growth or plot in the og X-Men and even young Ororo got mishandled by the script. This is why I feel we should have "origin movies" for the X-Men that don't do what Wolverine Origins did and try to make a whole new cast but instead should use the stories as they are. If it was Kurt's story then we would see him join the X-Men, and have the other actors revolve around that. Same with each of the others, the X-Men work best when they are working off each other and each given enough screen/page time to shine. Unfortunately we all have our favorites, even movies and writers, so those are who are going to be pushed for fans to love.

Thank you for your long rant and sorry for my own long rant/reply.

[traincat]

would you say it'd make sense for kitty to have tattooed a star of david? it's my personal headcanon as to why (in-universe) she stopped wearing the necklace, but i'm not jewish so idk if there's any rule (?? probably not the right word, sorry, english is not my first language) or something against tattooing symbols like this

The closest thing to a direct answer is probably to say that yes there is a rule against tattoos, or a rule that is traditionally interpreted as being against tattoos, but Jewish views on tattooing vary from individual to individual and among different factions of the Jewish identity, especially in the modern day. The idea that there's a rule against Jewish people having tattoos is related to a somewhat pervasive belief that you can't be buried in Jewish cemeteries if you have a tattoo, which is certainly not true for all Jewish cemeteries. There is also a lot of much more recent heaviness attached to the link between Jewish people and tattoos stemming from the numbers tattooed onto those in concentration camp during the Holocaust. Some Jewish people won't get tattoos because of this history (I personally have a difficult time with the idea of getting a tattoo myself because of this history) while others feel that their own decision to get tattoos is reclaiming the practice and their history. Again, it's an individual choice, and there's no right or wrong answer here. I feel like there were some bad faith readings about my criticisms over Kitty Pryde's recent-ish Marauders knuckle tattoos but I never said Jewish people can't or don't get tattoos, I said that the scene where Kitty gets tattooed is offensive because on the same page where Bishop speaks about the M brand he received in the fictional mutant concentration camps, Kitty and her Jewish history and the very real concentration camps the fictional ones were blatantly based on were given no such attention or compassion. That was what's offensive, the silence on a very real and very recent genocide in comparison to a fictional one, not the tattooing itself.

So I think it's fine to headcanon Kitty with a Magen David/Jewish star tattoo, or other Jewish symbols -- I think that that can be done with a lot of respect for the character and her history. From a personal standpoint, especially since Kitty canonically has family who were in the Holocaust, I would avoid tattoos in the general forearm area -- for me, Marauders' knuckle tattoos were a little too close in a way where a tattoo on a different part of the character's body probably wouldn't have triggered the same reaction for me -- but that's not a hard rule so much as what I would advise as cultural sensitivity if you're not Jewish. Thank you for sharing your headcanon and for asking!

[brw]

Hey random question but like if you had the chance would you scrap krakoa as an idea as a whole or try to make it work?

Hi anon! Despite how many "anti" posts I make about Krakoa I do in fact like it a lot; character's do feel very OOC, but it's something new and inspired and definitely feels like the most unique thing X-Men comics have had in about... oh, a decade or so? Like, I do get tired with all the "oh no, someone mass genocided us >:(" plotlines there are, or timeline fuckery, etc etc. Krakoa is a break from that and puts a new spin on things and allows us to see old characters brought back from Limbo, or reimagined into something completely knew. From a storyline perspective Krakoa is the best thing mutants have had in ages!

But, still, Krakoa does feel very like? textually... not good?? Like they literally murder children so they can "prove" themselves worthy of the mutation that was unjustly taken from them (even though that was SUPPOSED to be restored in AxV and again in Uncanny Avengers but I digress), they allowed a literal n*zi eugenicist and another fascist eugenicist to be on their government, and allowed the n*zi to make his own team, there's those n*zi incest twins that are just... allowed to fuck around, there's multiple r*pists & p*dophiles like Mastermind who are allowed because under Krakoa all previous laws have been forgiven, they banned pregonatives because they would ask too many questions, Exodus is reciting cult speak to a bunch of kids, and I mean, Hank McCoy literally commited genocide on Terra Verde.

Krakoa is interesting but it also very obviously is not a force for good in all this. Which, I have nothing against! I find the story Hickman is building very interesting and I look forward to see where it goes next. I just find it odd how people act as though this is supposed to be "empowering" or whatever. Like, they literally went to a "barren, dead, uninhabited" etc etc etc world and changed it so people can live there, and idk about you but I am of the opinion that just because nobody is living somewhere, that does not automatically make it free real estate, you know?

Anyway. Personally if I had a say, I would want all the data pages from HoxPox & in the more recent comics to link up more, and I would want to see more of those future mutants, and definitely more of the upcoming X-Men vs A.I. stuff we saw in HoxPox and again in X-Men #20. I am biased in this though, because I am hopeful this may end up including some of the Avengers A.I. crew, and maybe we'll get something from Hank Pym, who as we know has a lot to do with A.I., especially since he got merged with his. But, generally, I'm having fun with Krakoa thus far, it's just the unexplained changes in characters & fandom reaction that I get annoyed by lol

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on House of X #5

Time for the issue where HoX/PoX horniness kicked off!

Society Comma We Live in One:

Time to talk about an issue that definitely merited the coverted red issue status. The issue starts with Magneto and Polaris having a dialogue on society that comes off as a bit writerly, more about Hickman creating an opportunity for him to talk about his ideas about society than what Magneto and Polaris would actually be saying to one another (unless Polaris just arrived on Krakoa and is being given the tour, but that doesn’t quit fit her dialogue).

To start with, Magneto is making an argument that “the one good thing humanity taught us was society,” but attaches this to the concept of human beings shifting from settler-gatherer to agrarian cultures. Notably, in Magneto’s version, this shift also has implications for national identity, what with the whole “this is a good place - it is...ours, and from this land we will not be moved.” 

At the same time, it would be highly inaccurate to suggest that hunter-gatherer cultures don’t have societies or engage in (what Magneto is really getting at here) cooperation. The main difference between hunter-gatherer and agrarian modes of cooperation is that, by creating substantial surpluses that allow more people to not engage in food production, the agrarian mode enables a new form of cooperation based on specialization.

All of this applies pretty directly to Krakoa and the resurrection ceremony that Magneto and Polaris are witnessing: as long as mutantdom was constantly fighting for survival (the time when “the greatest necessary traits in mutantdom” would be “strength and aggressiveness”), it was essentially stuck in a hunter-gatherer paradigm. But once mutantdom established themselves on Krakoa, “intelligence, ingenuity, and creativity” started to come to the fore: the Krakoan flowers and medications, Doug’s interface and the resulting Krakoan systems, KASA, Cerebro, and now a new one. Contrary to certain implications from the Librarian in Powers of X #6, rather than simply relying on their “natural” mutant powers, Krakoan society is technologizing them. 

The “Five” are a great example of this process at work. I’ll get more in detail on how this particular Krakoan biomachinery works when we get to the infographic (which brings together all of the information into one place), but there’s some more subtle details at work here:

I love how the (Fab) Five’s social/cultural status is prefigured by their on-page introduction, which looks like nothing so much as the slow-motion group shot from Resevoir Dogs combined with a supergroup pose complete with spotlights.

As many people have pointed out, Hickman’s reinterpretation of Goldballs’ “seemingly benign and pointless power” shows how a different social and technological context completely changes the way we think about the value of different x-genes. 

As someone who’s spent their fair share of time studying the history of science, I do like how much the Five’s introduction re-emphasizes themes of cooperation and specialization rather than the Lone Genius myth: even with Goldballs’ limitless “eggs,” he still needs Proteus to make the eggs viable, and so on and so forth. As Magneto puts it, ““separate...they are great mutants, but only significant, not transcendant. Together..."

An interesting commonality in Krakoan biotechnology is the use of psychics and other mutants - in this case, Hope plays a similar role to the Cuckoos in KASA - to allow the group to work in unison without the need for the literal hiveminds of the machine consciousness. Something to keep one’s eye on.  

At the same time, the Five’s biomachine relies on two other forms of technology of varying levels of technology. As the red diamond on the syringe confirms, Mister Sinister provides the DNA to grow the husks and (and this is one of the Big Reveals of the issue) Cerebro downloads the mind into the body. 

Playing her role in the Socratic dialogue admirably, Lorna raises the vital question of whether these clones are “just their bodies...not them.” What’s really interesting about Magneto’s response is that he’s not just talking about downloading the mind of the mutant, but also “the essence..the anima...[the] soul” of the mutant, which implies a pretty strongly spiritual conception of Cerebro’s primary purpose. (It’s an interestingly monist approach to the question of the soul as a form of data that can be copied, uploaded, downloaded, etc. I wonder what Nightcrawler thinks of this?)

Xavier’s statement that “even knowing I could bring you back...a part of me dies when any of you do” really backs up what I was talking about re: Xavier’s motivation for changing his worldview. Resurrection doesn’t change the emotional impact of death, especially since the system requires Xavier to be psychically linked to the X-Men he’s sending into harm’s way, so that he’s experiencing all their pain and suffering. This also reads quite differently in the wake of Powers of X #6, because it suggests that (quite aside from his broader plans for Krakoa), Xavier’s shift to being even more of a pragmatist has a lot to do with years of compounding trauma.

BTW, a clear sign that there is a high degree of continuity of consciousness going on is that Scott’s first thought after being resurrected is “did it work?” For all intents and purpsoes, this is the Scott Summers who died on Sol’s Forge.

We See Them, Do We Know Them?

I’m going to take this opportuntity to get on my high horse for a second and take parts of the X-fandom to task. While I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse anyone of arguing in bad faith, I do think there has been a tendency to not grapple with the text in an honest way when it comes to certain characters or themes, with the Resurrection Ceremony as Exhibit A in this tendency.

Rather than being about cults or nakedness (more on both of those soon), what this scene is actually about is the coming together of the foundational aspects of Krakoan society/culture, and how two groups of heroes - the five and the strike team - will be treated in this new world. 

As we might expect, there are both parallels and differences in how the Krakoan masses treat and are expected to treat these groups: as we’ll learn later from the Resurrection Infographic, the Five are “universally revered...as cultural paragons [something sacred to be treasured].” 

Storm’s exhortation provides the text that is supposed to shape and give purpose to this popular attitude, that the Krakoan masses should “love them...for they have righted the wrongs of men and defeated our great enemy death.” As with many RL human cultures, historic grievances are used to define in-group and out-group, but at the same time, the Five’s “miracle” is defined as a victory over “our great enemy death,” (which neatly ties together anti-mutant violence, mutant-specific epidemic diseases, all the forces of the “on the brink of extinction” stories we’ve seen for almost twenty years). 

Given that the Five are responsible for A. reversing mutant genocides which have directly and indirectly affected all mutants in profoundly traumatic ways B. making mutants functionally immortal, it would be utterly unprecedented if a cultural and social change of this magnitude did not have some element of spiritual or religious feeling behind it. World religions have been founded on far less than this.

By contrast, the Strike Team are described in more secular terms. For removing the existential threat of Mother Mold (let alone Nimrod) which had loomed over mutant society, Storm describes them as “heroes of Krakoa,” but not so much cultural heroes as secular military heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation: “through their deaths...a great victory was won for our people.” 

Another sign of difference is that the Strike Team’s public reception is conditional, requiring a further ceremony where the community asks “we see them, but do we know them?” I love the way that Hickman turns the meta-question of whether these resurrected mutants are the real thing or “just clones” into a cultural question. 

Thus, he has Storm act as the Master of Ceremonies for a ritual that’s all about recognition and confirmation of individual and social identity, and uses X-comics continuity nods that readers will recognize in the same way that Storm does as the clues:

Cyclops remembers losing the leadership to Storm in UX #139, and I like this particular deep cut because it’s a great contrast to their present-day respect and affected, and because Scott’s inability to commit to his marriage to Madelyn Pryor will help kick off Inferno.

Similarly, Jean recalling line-for-line what she said to Storm in UX #242 works especially well because it’s a line about asserting your identity in the wake of death, resurrection, and the existential questions of cloning, and because once again it recalls Inferno. I’m not sure whether it’s a good sign or a bad sign that Hickman gets Jean’s voice better here when he’s quoting earlier authors rather than writing original dialogue.

And finally, in a great Rule of Three joke format, Monet breaks the pattern by going for a character beat - Monet has strong personal space boundaries - rather than a deep continuity callback.  

Having done my close-reading due diligence, let me get to the point: this is not a cult, and you don’t need to take much in the way of Anthropology coursework to see that. Call-and-response between an officiant and the congregation are incredibly common across many religions, as are ceremonies in which the individual’s membership in the group is confirmed, and so on and so forth. If you want to describe this as a cult, or cult-like, you need to point to qualities that are specific to cults as opposed to other forms of religious activity.

Similarly, I find it quite strange to describe Storm as acting out-of-character in this sequence. Storm, who’s all about giving speeches at the top of her lungs, who’s been worshipped as a goddess in multiple countries, would have a problem with giving a sermon and carrying out a basic ritual? This is the sort of thing that makes me think that a lot of these comments are just people trying to disguise personal preference as story critique.

The scene ends with pulling back to see Xavier and Magneto reacting to all of this, and their feeling of tempered joy is a pretty good synecdoche for how things stand at the end of HoX/Pox: while the “good work” is clearly a cause for joy, it’s clearly at a very early and vulnerable stage, and there’s a feeling of determination that it has to continue “until it is done.” Interestingly, both Charles and Erik view this aspect of Krakoa as more “foundational” than any other element, and I wonder whether this could be part of why they don’t quite see eye-to-eye with Moira any more.

Another sign that things are not as secure as they’d like is that Krakoa still hasn’t gotten over the hurdle of UN recognition, which requires getting around a veto from a permanent member of the Security Council.

Resurrection Infographic:

So let’s talk about the Resurrection process, now that we have all of the information in front of us.

The Infographic really confirms that Mister Sinister is absolutely crucial to the Genetic Base working - “without this, we have nothing.” But given that we learn in Powers of X #6 that this was very much in opposition to Moira’s wishes, I wonder how the original plan envisioned this working. I wonder whether Magneto’s statement to Emma Frost in Powers of X #5 that “we are not ahead of ourselves...we are woefully behind” suggests a motive. Mister Sinister already had a comprehensive DNA database on the go, they might have gone to him because they wanted to accelerate the time table for reversing the Genoshan genocide.

At the same time, you can already see how Sinister has become the snake in the garden. At the moment, Xavier and Magneto have “limited...current mutant modifications...to “optimal aging,” but we can already see Sinister’s influence in the line “it is believed that in the future, designer modifications will be possible.” Unless they are very, very careful, this is how the chimera singularity could topple all of this into the abyss of the singularity.

The Five:

As I discussed above, each of the Five are a crucial element of the overall process.

Fabio Medina (Goldballs): produces limitless eggs for limitless husks. Without Goldballs, the resurrection process would be extremely limited in how many people could be brought back at any time by all kinds of resource constraints; with him, the process can be turned into one of mass-production.

Kevin MacTaggart (Proteus): turns unviable eggs into viable eggs; without Proteus, Goldballs’ innovation would be effectively stillborn. Kevin’s presence here is also a strong indicator that this was part of Moira’s plan, so as with so much in HoX/PoX what we’re talking about is a question of means vs. ends. 

Joshua Foley (Elixir): “kick-start[s] the process of life, initializing cell replication and husk growth.” Without Elixir, the DNA might sit dormant within the egg; with Elixir, you have a bridge between the raw building blocks of life and the end product of a viable husk. 

Eva Bell (Tempus): “temporally mature[s] a husk to a desired age.” This is potentially an under-appreciated aspect of the whole process: without Tempus, you’d still have to wait decades for resurrected mutants to come to maturity and all throughout that time, the process would be incredibly vulnerable; with Tempus, mutants are brought back to life as fully-grown adults capable of doing their part for Krakoan society. 

Hope Summers (Hope): has the more nebulous task of “enhancing and synergizing...to ensure the success of each resurrection.” As Magneto explains, resurrection is “delicate, almost impossible work.” Hope’s unique power set allows her not only to boost the powers of the rest of the five, but also to improve coordination and thus quality control, so that the overall process has a success rate of 100%.  

As we can see already, this is a system with a lot of irreplacable parts, which means a bunch of potential points of failure. No wonder, then, that Krakoan minds are at work trying to overcome these problems. We already see that “Synch or Mimic” have been floated as “upgrades/extensions/stand-ins” for the Five, which suggests that they’re already thinking about ways to improve functionality by adding to the “circuit” or about ways to maintain service if one of the Five needs to be replaced. 

Similarly, I love how the “Proteus problem” shows how Resurrection is changing our perceptions of so many things in Krakoan society. From his introduction, Proteus has been shown as inherently dangerous because of the way that his powers damage his body - but with the Resurrection system, Proteus is just a mutant who happens to have a chronic illness that can be treated. One interesting question...why is Proteus’ “backup mutant husk” based on Charles Xavier? Charles isn’t his father, so it’s not a question of genetic compatibility. 

The Mind:

Here’s where we really get into the philosophy of identity. Hickman gets really emphatic here that these are not “just clones,” because the backups include “the essence of each mutant, how they think, how they feel, their memories, their very being.” 

I’m personally inclined to agree with Hickman. Even without transference of consciousness as a real thing, I don’t think a strict view of continuity of consciousness can really hold, given the fact there are plenty of breaks in said continuity - we don’t consider people who get knocked out or blackout drunk or just have a nap to no longer be the same person, so what’s the rationale for saying that any of the Strike Team aren’t the same people who they were before?

I also love how the Cerebro part of the system adds all kinds of new problems: there’s the technical complexity of scanning every mutant mind on the planet and then storing and copying that datat to “multiple redundant “cradles,” as well as new philosophical and ethical issues about what happens when you put someone’s mind in someone else’s body, etc. More on this in a bit. 

Scale:

So at least at the time that this document was written, it looks like the mutant population is back to 100,000 (although how much was the Five isn’t clear), but that there are 1 million de-powered mutants (many of whom might want to use the system to regain their powers), and 16 million mutants who were murdered and whose resurrection is a key ideological drive for Krakoa.

As Hickman points out, this brings up issues of productivity and efficiency that we’re used to seeing in industrial and technological processes. The Five’s initial rate of 200 a day would take 300 years to accomplish the goal of reversing Krakoan genocide, which is way too long a timeline.

However, it turns out that there’s a mutant version of Moore’s law: the more the Five do this, the better they get at it (with a nice nod to Wolverine, so “its estimated that capabilities could possibly reach around 30,000 a week” (or 6,000 a day), bringing the timeline down to a far more manageable decade. 

A final bottleneck: Charles Xavier “is not capable of” 6,000 daily downloads, and we already seen Krakoan minds thinking about “a workaraound or a team of telepaths” to supplement someone who’s also busy attending U.N meetings, Quiet Council sessions, plotting world domination, etc.

On a policy wonk side note, I was trying to figure out how Hickman worked out these numbers, and I realized that his math assumes that Krakoa has a five day work-week. As we’ll see in House of X #6, there are major open questions about what kind of economic policy (and thus, what kind of society) this new nation-state will have. Good to see that Actual 19th Century Robber Baron Sebastian Shaw isn’t getting his own way.

One particularly odd thing about Krakoan biomachinery, according to “extensive testing,” the Five don’t actually experience “exertion,” but rather a “blissful experience” of self-actualization. This suggests the psychological equivalent of a perpetual motion machine - rather than requiring more and more labor, the damn thing requires less and less and produces “total fulfillment” as a byproduct. Weird.

Another interesting side effect is that the Five have become “an inseparable family unit” who are undergoing a process of symbiosis - given all the discussion of mechanical hiveminds, it’s worth wondering whether we’re seeing a biological one forming and to what extend is individuality being maintained.

A final, slightly odd note: this Infographic describes the Five’s socio-cultural status as that of “cultural paragons” rather than “something achievable through works,” even though the Five are explicitly described as having carried out “good works.” So what gives?

Resurrection Protocol:

One last bottleneck: the whole process seems to take at least 42 and as much as 52 hours to complete. Although they can clearly work on multiple eggs in one batch, getting that figure down would no doubt be useful in further increasing productivity.

An interesting sign of the cultural/philosophical impacts of the system: Krakoan society now has “fears regarding duplication” of an explicit moral character, and thus requires an elaborate system of confirmation to bring someone back from the dead. Thus, we start to see the formation of mutant law-enforcement entities to deal with “mutant missing persons and suspected deaths and murders,” which is presumably going to be X-Factor rather than X-Force as initially believed (since X-Force turns out to be the intelligence service instead).

A Grateful Nation:

Speaking of the burdens of statecraft, the scene shifts to the aftermath of the U.N recognition vote, where it emerges that Emma Frost used her telepathy to push the Russian ambassador to abstain rather than veto, which Xavier is ok with. Krakoa is now an internationally-recognized nation-state in good standing, something that previous mutant nations never quite managed. 

This gave some parts of the fandom a good deal of trouble, but let me say as someone who’s taken a couple courses in diplomatic history, this is really quite mild stuff compared to the usual run of vote selling, wiretapping, blackmail, threats of economic or military retaliation, and other kinds of skullduggery and corruption. The world of nation-states is not one of moral purity.

Also, if we’re talking about characters being in and out of character, as much as Charles Xavier has been described as an idealist when it comes to his ultimate ends, he’s always been a pragmatist when it comes to his means when it comes to psychic powers. Mental compulsion, altering or erasing memories, mind-wiping people into mental vegetables - as long as it’s for the greater good. 

I’m curious what Emma Frost’s reward will be. This scene explicitly comes after she made her bargain with Xavier and Magneto for a fifty-year monopoly for the Hellfire Trading Company and three seats on the Quiet Council, so I wonder what this bonus will be.

Mutant Diplomacy Infographic:

Speaking of the moral ambiguity of international relations, we learn from this infographic that “all current mutant diplomacy...is dependent on relationships with human nations centering on their need for mutant pharmaceuticals.” On the one hand, it’s better than basing your diplomacy on military aid. On the other hand, it’s notable that Krakoa isn’t building its diplomacy on the basis of human rights or cultural exchange or other elements of “soft power,” it’s all very transactional. (It’s also not a good sign that “nations that have rejected a trade treaty with Krakoa are considered to be naturally adversarial.)

We then get a list of non-treaty nations. Some of these inclusions make sense, others are a bit puzzling, and I have some questions about why certain nations didn’t make the list.

Asia:

Why just Iran in the Middle East? OPEC should be losing their minds about the potential for Krakoan portals to undermine the value of oil. Likewise, plenty of Middle Eastern regimes might be worried about other ethnic minorities using the Krakoan precedent to redouble their own pushes for national independence. And if it’s religious ideology, why is it only a Shia issue and not a Sunni issue?

Madripoor: given where Krakoa is located, this is probably an issue of being afraid of a new power in their sphere of influence. Also, Madripoor has tended to get up to a lot of mutant-related crimes, so they’d probably be worried about this.

North Korea: this being listed as an ideological issue is a bit strange. The official state ideology of North Korea is really peculiar, even among putatively Communist regimes, so it’s hard to tell 

Europe:

I imagine the E.U’s role in negotiating trade deals probably is responsible for the relative lack of European nations on the list, but I’m surprised that none of the right-wing populist governments that have sprung up in central/eastern Europe in recent years who aren’t particularly friendly to real world minorities wouldn’t have an issue with a powerful nation of mutants.

Latveria: probably because Doom is a paranoid, egomaniacal autocrat who pursues economic autarky generally. I am curious, however, about other Marvel-specific nation states - we know that Namor isn’t going to go to Krakoa, but what is Atlantis’ foreign policy on this issue? What do the Inhumans think? Etc.

Russi: as we’ve seen from House of X #1, Russia fears a new global superpower. What’s interesting is we don’t see them exerting any successful influence on Central Asian or Baltic or ex-Soviet eastern European nations. 

South America:

Brazil: is this Bolsanaro's cultural conservatism at work or something else? Because...

Venezuela: is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum from Brazil’s current government, so it would be odd to see them on the same side of this issue. The only thing I can think of is that this might be due to Chavezista anti-imperialism. Because...

Santo Marco: contrary to what Magneto said in House of X #1, mutants have not been entirely free of the sins of conquest and imperialism, and in one of his first appearances, Magneto conquered the Republic of Santo Marco and ruled it in an extremely brutal fashion. That’s the kind of thing people remember for a long time, so I’m not surprised that you see some South American countries taking a negative view of Krakoa as a result.

Terra Verde: Similarly, Terra Verde’s government was briefly overthrown by the supervillain Diablo, and although mutants were not involved, they may be generally wary of superpower-led nation states. 

Central America:

Honduras: it’s not that I think it’s implausible, but what makes Honduras different from other Central American countries on this issue?

Africa:

This is where we get a potentially really juicy plot hook. As late as X-Men Red, Wakanda has been generally positive towards mutants, especially since not only does T’challa have a personal relationship with Storm, but in the current run of Black Panther, Storm has been popularly worshipped as Hadari Yao, the Walker of Clouds. 

Given that Wakanda is seen as a threat because “they do not need mutant drugs,” this may be a case of Krakoan/Moira’s paranoia that Wakanda’s advanced technology and self-sufficiency might mean that the post-human revolution might start there. 

At the same time, the fact that the rest of the “Wakandan economic protectorate” also reject a trade treaty might suggest that we’re just seeing a simple story of nation-state competition for spheres of influence.

Krakoa Is For All Mutants:

In a very straight-forward example of X-Men dissenting from Xavier’s plan, we see Wolverine - who’s about to take up a significant post in Krakoa’s national security infrastructure - has a big enough problem with the amnesty program that he mentions wanting to beat “Chuck” to death for general smugness and condescension. 

A whole bunch of supervillains cross-over, but while some of them will become significant as members of the Quiet Council or Captains, Apocalypse is framed as the most significant one, because he’s the only one with a pre-existing connection to Krakoa

Indeed, he goes full Disney Princess on page 27 because Krakoa “knows me, and I Krakoa,” which might be a big problem later on if Krakoan’s earlier and deeper connections to Apocalypse come into conflict with its more recent alliances with Cypher and Xavier.

At the same time, at least for the moment Apocalypse is the most ideologically on board with Xavier’s broader project, seeing it as the culmination of his life’s work. 

Thus, he’s happy to say the words: “we submit to the laws of this land, be what they may, and acknowledge from this day forward, we all serve a higher purpose than want or need. One people from this day forward.” It’s an oath of citizenship, but it also speaks to the conditionality of the amnesty. And there are penalties for breaking it. 

[scarletwitching]

So i want to know your opinion on wanda joining an x-men team if she becomes a mutant again? i always felt pietro benefited a lot from having his conection to lorna/x-factor over the years, and i feel the only true way to get the horrible decimation plot line is have wanda go trough the x-men special "you did something kinda bad, but you werent in control and you are a member so its all water under the bridge uwu", id personaly love to see her in excalibur with roguex

That seems fine. I don’t have any particular desire to see Wanda on an X-Men team, but I’m not one of those people who is vehemently against it either. I have a general wariness about anything new involving Wanda because the last fifteen years have given me many reasons to be wary. I don’t think I’m wrong to be apprehensive, especially given how badly something like this could go.

I also don’t subscribe to the notion that things would be fixed if there was some kind of reconciliation. I don’t think it’s fixable by anything, except a large scale retcon (which is maybe why I’m not 100% against the idea of a reboot, even though I know it wouldn’t go well). The whole redemption arc... thing makes me uncomfortable. It’s been poorly done, sure, but I don’t know that there is a good way to do it in the first place. “Redemption for genocide” is not a thing. And if you think that’s too harsh, I could say the same thing about other characters.

But this is all The Problem of Continuity. You can’t fix it without breaking the whole thing.

Of course, it’s also the problem of editors and writers dealing with what they see as problems with their universe (”there are TOO MANY mutants”) by shifting the blame and accountability for their mistakes onto fictional characters and letting it hang there for a decade and a half, as if [Miranda Priestly voice] this has nothing to do with them, but whatever, whatever, whatever.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

So earlier I said the MCU should probably make Magneto a black man if they put him in a future X-Men movie. I didn’t elaborate on it before, so let me elaborate now:

Let me begin by saying Magneto is probably one of my favorite comic book characters. His very concept - not only a mutant, but a survivor of the Holocaust, leading to a life where he has been persecuted at every turn, leading to not wholly unjustified anger - is a great one, albeit one not always utilized to its greatest potential or well-written. I think Magneto is a crucial piece to why X-Men works as an allegory for things like racism, because Magneto, in the hands of talented writers and frankly just in general, is always painted as a complex figure, and the fact he is hero as often as villain really shows this.

Here’s the thing though: Magneto’s origins were extremely relevant when he was first conceived, and when his backstory was first conceived. At the time, it was absolutely conceivable there could be someone who survived the Holocasut running about and getting into superpowered smackdowns. Not so much anymore. If they were to keep Magneto’s backstory as it was originally conceived, we would need to have an 80 - 90 year old Magneto at least, which is kind of pushing things. I do understand this is a world with flying men, cyborg suits, and Howard the Duck, but when even Cap decides to pass on his shield when he becomes an old man, I feel like someone like Magneto would be feeling his age, mutant powers or no.

I’m not saying this because I want Magneto’s backstory to be changed, as again, I think it adds an important layer to his character; I’m saying that, in a logical sense, it is fast becoming inconceivable to belivably have a near-100 year old whose only power is mastery of magnetism also have survived the Holocaust. There are ways around this. Obviously, the easiest (and cheapest) way out would to just plop Michael Fassbender into the MCU via wormholes r something. He managed to get through the 80s and 90s looking the same as he did in the 50s, so there we go. They could just not adapt Magneto at all and save themselves the trouble, as we all know Disney loves cutting corners in order to avoid offending the people writing their checks (cough Ancient One cough). 

Or they could make Magneto black.

Now I say “black,” but really, you could put any sort of oppressed minority there. Armenian, Palestinian, any country that China is trying to put under its boot, someone who survived under communist dictatorships... The Holocasut is a famous example, but there is a vast history of oppression and genocide in the twentieth century that has gone on into the 21st, meaning if you really wanted to make a younger magneto, one that could realistically be in fighting shape, there are options closer to the present of the MCU (which is now a few years ahead of our own world even).

I basically went to “black” because I remember there were rumors the two would be recast by black actors, and because it works on a lot of thematic levels. Most obviously, the whole “Magneto = Malcolm X, Xavier = MLK” thing; those were two of the most famous civil rights activists ever, and they werre black, so why not make their superpowered inspirations black too? And while making Magneto black isn’t a perfect translation, it does work on the same sort of levels. Say Magneto is American. I don’t think I need to explain the long, dark history of brutal racism that has existed in America from conception to present day. It would be pretty easy to have a Magneto who grew up as a child in the Jim Crow era and then finding he’s a mutant lead to him becoming embittered as no matter how much the world claims to be progressing, he is still persecuted, and it fills him with not unjustified anger. It also works because it would be a lot more relatable to modern audiences; there’s still plenty of racism alive and well today, and one need only look at the numerous mass shootings or reports of cops murdering innocents to see that.

This does run into problems, though. The biggest one from a story and creative standpoint is that this would lead to Magneto being very similar to Killmonger. I think this is easy to work around, though: just keep Magneto alive. Frankly, killing Magneto would be gross and insulting, considering what the character represents in the first place. 

Overall though, I just want to see what they do to Magneto. The fun thing with comic book characters is you can reinterpret and mold them in any number of ones, and transform them to better fit with the times when adapting them. Do I want them to alter Magneto’s backstory in such a way? Not particularly. But would I rather have him in a film, keeping his core concepts and ideas while delivering a recognizable yet fresh take on a character I had previously watched for the better part of two decades in another franchise? Hell yes.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball GT Retrospective (3/7)

[Note: This was originally written on January 12, 2013.   My  leg got better, but Dragon Ball GT didn’t.]

My leg is still broken, and Dragon Ball GT still sucks. 

This time I'm covering the Baby Saga, where Baby comes to Earth and the series starts to resemble a bad parody of DBZ instead of a weak tribute to early Dragon Ball.   

Up to this point, Baby had just been the Suprise Final Boss of the Machine Mutants.   Their leader seemed to be Dr. Myuu until Baby revealed (to the audience at least) that he had been calling the shots all along.   Baby's actually a pretty good villain, but only if you ignore the fact that he spent all that time secretly running the Machine Mutants and the Luud Cult. Neither of those groups really seemed to forward his agenda, and he really only gets rolling once he's rid of them.   So I don't know why he started those organizations in the first place.  He said that he created Dr. Myuu to serve as a caretaker as he matured to full power, and Lord Luud was designed to feed his victims' energy to Baby, but they both sucked at those things, so I don't know.   Initially, Baby seemed obsessed with the GT crew--Goku, Trunks, and Pan.  At first, this might have seemed like a simple quest to avenge his overthrow on M2.   Alternately, it could be nothing personal at all, since Baby can inhabit and control living beings, and Goku or Trunks would make a stronger host.  But after their fight at the Space Hospital, the GT gang loses Baby in the planet's population, and they move on, never seeing him again while they wrap up their hunt for the Black Star Dragon Balls.  This concerns Goku, since he was sure Baby would come after them again sooner or later.   Instead, Baby infests a space tourist and makes his way to Earth.  There, he seeks out the Saiyans living on the planet, hoping to possess one of them now that he's matured.   See, at the Space Hospital, Baby managed to infest Trunks' body, but Trunks went Super Saiyan and this drove him out again.   Baby wanted the power, but he was physically too weak to control it, so he had to bide his time and feed off other hosts until he could make his next move.  It's never really clear how Baby "feeds", exactly.  You don't see him eat people, or drain them or anything like that.  He just says that he feeds off unlucky beings.   I don't think he does it while he inhabits their bodies, since his hosts don't weaken while he's there, nor do they keel over dead when he leaves.  Really, there's a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to Baby.   Physically, he behaves like the T-1000 robot, shifting from liquid metal to his solid form depending on the situation.   He has to enter a host body by seeping into an open wound, but he never tries going in the mouth or nose or anything like that.  I guess he needs life energy from organic beings, but you'd think such an advanced machine would be able to plug himself into the electrical grid in a pinch.  For whatever reason, his head is shaped like a Smurf hat.   A major plot hole is that Baby somehow determined that Saiyans live on Earth, but he has no idea where they live or who they are.   He finds Goten, Goku's son, seemingly at random.   This is accomplished by possessing several different human thugs and causing trouble until Mr. Satan and Goten happen to come along.   Goten is eager to fight Baby to impress his girlfriend, but once he goes Super Saiyan, Baby liquifies and enters a cut on his arm.   That's another odd quirk about Baby.  He seems to prefer to enter his host when they're at maximum strength.   Now controlling Goten's body, Baby pretends that Goten simply destroyed him in the battle, then heads to Capsule Corporation, based on Goten's memories of where the other Saiyans live.  Baby's goal is to possess the strongest Saiyan, Vegeta, but he runs into Goten's brother Gohan first, who quickly recognizes that Goten is being controlled by a malevolent intelligence.  Baby quickly switches over to possessing Gohan's body, since Gohan is stronger than Goten, and then Piccolo shows up.  Gohan takes out Piccolo with an energy blast, seemingly finishing him off.  With that settled, Baby Gohan locates Vegeta and attacks him.   Goten shows up soon after, and it turns out that he's still under Baby's control, even though he's inside Gohan's body now.  The brothers taunt Vegeta until he powers up to his maximum, and then Baby makes the jump to his body, which he inhabits for the rest of the storyline.   The whole Vegeta/Gohan/Goten sequence is vintage GT Logic, since none of the battles make sense.  When Gohan and Goten fight, Goten uses his Super Saiyan form, while Gohan defends in his base form.  When Gohan and Goten fight Vegeta, it's Goten's turn to stick to base form while the other two use Super Saiyan.  Gohan and Vegeta can both use Super Saiyan 2, but their short haircuts make it difficult to tell which form they're in at any given time.  The bigger sticking point for fans is that Gohan uses any Super Saiyan form at all, since he had a power-up near the end of Dragon Ball Z, which enabled him to reach his ultimate strength without transforming at all.  It's not clear whether Gohan could transform after that experience, or whether or not it would even do him any good.  The point is that this "Ultimate" Gohan (so-called for the sake of clarity) was strong enough to fight Majin Buu on his own, where Vegeta could barely last two minutes as a Super Saiyan 2.    GT seems to be implicating that the "Ultimate" power-up was temporary, and after it wore off, Gohan went back to using his Super Saiyan transforms and taking a back seat to Vegeta.   I don't really have a problem with that in itself, but it's irritating that the script never explains any of that.  Instead it's just "Vegeta's stronger than Gohan now, whatever."   In any case, the bigger annoyance is that these three characters all use Super Saiyan to enhance their strength, and yet they stupidly switch back and forth like it doesn't matter.   It's kind of important, if only for the sake of internal logic.   If a base Saiyan can fight a Super Saiyan for even a few minutes without getting annihilated, then what's the point of transforming at all?   On another note, it's really stupid watching Baby Gohan and Baby Goten fight Vegeta because they all look exactly alike now.   They're all wearing street clothes and they all have the exact same haircut and they're all sneering because Vegeta's a jerk and Gohan and Goten are evil.  There was a reason everyone on DBZ wore different color pajamas and had goofy-looking hairstyles.   It was so you could tell them apart.   For some reason the only major characters who got to keep their original hair were Goku and Trunks, which is fine except they didn't need help standing out.   Goku's the only one who gets to keep his martial arts uniform, and Trunks has purple hair.   They could both get flat-tops and we'd still be able to recognize them.   Anyway, as Baby confronts Vegeta, we finally learn his convoluted origin.   This all goes back to the Tuffle race, a retcon established as part of Saiyan history on Dragon Ball Z.   The Tuffles lived on the Planet Plant, and they were an advanced race that looked more or less human.   Depending on which version you hear, they either co-inhabited the planet with the Saiyans all along, or the Saiyans invaded Plant.   Either way, there was a Saiyan/Tuffle War, and it ended with the Saiyans kicking the Tuffles' asses and wiping them out.   The Saiyans' ruler, King Vegeta, named the planet after himself, and the newly christened Planet Vegeta served as the Saiyan homeworld until Frieza blew it up  a generation later.   The Tuffles really aren't that interesting, but they keep getting brought back as villains who want revenge on the Saiyans even though the Saiyans are virtually extinct too.  This gag was first used in the 1993 home video title "The Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans."  That story was about a Tuffle refugee named Dr. Raichi who attacked the Earth's Saiyan survivors using a killer robot, poison gas, and ghosts.  It didn't work.   Dragon Ball GT revives this idea with Baby, who was a similar revenge scheme engineered by the Tuffle's last king.   As the Saiyans completed their genocide of the Tuffles, the Tuffle king combined his DNA with a genetic experiment of some sort, and then had it rocketed away from Plant to keep it safe.  It's not immediately clear what the Tuffle king was hoping to accomplish with this, but the end result is that Baby considers himself to be a Tuffle, even though he's a freaky-deaky machine parasite inhabiting Vegeta's body.  It is pretty sweet revenge, since King Vegeta's son has to linger on as a host to a Tuffle bioweapon.   Where things get a little weird is that Baby is determined to spread his infestation and control the entire population of Earth.   He does this by "laying eggs", like the ones he laid in Goten and Gohan to maintain his control over them after he left their bodies.  The eggs don't make a lot of sense to me.   They're not treated like Baby's offspring in any meaningful way.   It's more like a collective consciousness, since all the infected victims share Baby's goals, but they act and speak as individuals.   For instance, Krillin gets infested, and he just keeps acting like Krillin, save for his loyalty and admiration to Baby and the Tuffle cause.  So whatever hatched out of the egg inside of him doesn't seem to have any personality of its own.   By the time the GT crew return to Earth, the whole planet has been conquered, including Dende and Mr. Popo, to whom Goku hands over the Black Star Dragon Balls.  They go home, only to discover that their loved ones despise them as enemies of Baby.   Trunks is quickly added to Baby's fold, since he's had one of Baby's eggs inside him the whole time.   The only ones left to help Goku and Pan are Mr. Satan and Majin Buu.    Buu, being a genie with a similar power to change his shape, is able to spit out Baby's eggs.  As for Mr. Satan, he got Buu to absorb him, so he could hide inside of Buu's body and ride out the invasion.  We never actually see these eggs get laid.   I don't know if Baby Vegeta had to fly around and poop metal spheres into everyone, or maybe his followers did it for him, or what.   Buu takes Mr. Satan and Pan to safety, while Goku tries to fight Baby Vegeta.   He tries to use Super Saiyan 3, but his child body can't handle the strain of the transformation.   More importantly, Baby Vegeta is strong enough to withstand it, so it doesn't really matter if Goku can maintain SSJ3 or not.    Baby has Vegeta and Goku's kids give him their energy, and he transforms to become even more powerful.    He then calls upon the infested population of Earth to give him even more energy, which he uses to launch a "Revenge Death Ball" at the battered and beaten Goku.   Overkill much?  This is what sucks the most about the Baby storyline.   It takes forever to get on with the story.   Baby had Goku dead-to-rights as soon as he set foot on Earth, but instead he has to make a bunch of speeches and gather power he didn't need.  I don't mind his thoroughness, except that it takes a whole two episodes to get this fight over with.   With Goku removed from the equation, Baby uses the Black Star Dragon Balls to wish the Tuffle homeworld back into existence.   It's not clear if Baby understands that using the Black Star balls will destroy the Earth, but he plans to relocate everyone to the other planet, so I guess he doesn't care.  On the other hand, he stupidly wished for Planet Tuffle (aka Planet Plant aka Planet Vegeta) to be put in orbit right next to the Earth.   So you'd think that when Earth explodes, Planet Tuffle would be imperiled.  Also, relocating everyone would take a while, and it's not clear if Baby considered the logistics before making his wish.   While all of this is going on, Goku is stuck in another dimension, because the Supreme Kai tried to teleport him to safety during Baby's final attack, but he screwed it up and lost him.   This is mostly an excuse to waste two more episodes on pointless crap.   Baby continues his big migration plan, Pan's upset that her Grandpa is dead, Goku farts around in a limbo realm that looks like a game board.  The whole deal with GT is that it's not based on any original comics like the other Dragon Ball series, so this time they didn't have to include side-stories and filler while they waited for the comic to catch up.   And yet they kept writing dumb crap like this anyway.  Goku finally manages to escape to the Supreme Kai planet, where the Elder Kai convinces him to train for the final conflict with Baby.   This is the big setup to Goku's ultimate transformation: Super Saiyan 4.   The "training" is in fact just a bizarre treatment to regenerate Goku's tail.  In the early episodes of Dragon Ball, Goku's tail was his biggest weakness and his ace-in-the-hole.   If you grabbed him by the tail and squeezed it, he'd clench up and become as weak as a kitten.   On the other hand, if he happened to see a full moon, the light would trigger a transformation into a giant ferocious ape, called an "oozaru".  This was a tragic power because Goku never knew about it.   Once, he killed his own grandfather as the oozaru, and on two other occasions he turned on his own friends in his mindless rampage.   Each time, he would change back with no memory of what he had done.  The only way to stop the oozaru was to cut off his tail or somehow remove or obscure the moonlight that caused the transformation.  Goku's tail would always grow back, but eventually Kami managed to remove it permanently.   Other Saiyan characters would lose their tails as well, although it was never explained how they were kept from growing back.  From a plot standpoint, the simple fact was that the Saiyan characters became powerful enough that the oozaru transformation was obsolete.  Turning into a Super Saiyan was a better power-up anyway.     With Super Saiyan 4, GT was introducing the idea that a Super Saiyan with a tail could become the strongest Saiyan of all.  The recipe was to turn into an oozaru, then go Super Saiyan (becoming a "Golden Oozaru").   As long as the Saiyan is able to retain his conscious mind while in ape-form, he can then transform again and become a Super Saiyan 4.   Somehow, the Elder Kai managed to figure all of this out, even though he seemed to have never heard of Saiyans when he was first introduced.   Maybe he did some research between DBZ and DBGT, but it's odd that he worked out this whole plan, while the Supreme Kai and the Saiyans themselves never even contemplated it.  Anyway, step one was regrowing the tail, so the Elder Kai had Goku turn a giant coffee grinder.   I have no idea how this was supposed to work, but it's the Elder Kai's gimmick to use mundane chores to accomplish great results.   Goku gets frustrated with the slow pace, and so the Elder Kai switches to a different method: Tugging on Goku's ass with a pair of pliers.   This is probably the stupidest thing ever done on the show, because it looks like they're just yanking a furry turd out.  I wonder how many Japanese kids saw this show and tried to pull on their cats' tails to make them longer.   Oh well.   For some reason, the Elder Kai never explains to Goku why his tail will improve the situation, or what he needs to do to power up.   Instead he just stupidly sends Goku to fight Baby again, and Goku naively powers up to Super Saiyan 3 and gets his ass kicked just like the last time he tried it.  Fortunately, he looks up and sees the Earth in the skies of Planet Tuffle, and the Earthlight triggers his Golden Oozaru transformation.   Of course, if Baby had just snapped his neck or they fought on the other side of the planet, then this whole plan would have been a bust.   As it is, Goku still nearly screws things up because he still can't control himself in Giant Ape form. Pan manages to fix that by showing Goku a photo of the whole gang at the beach, and that helps him remember who he is.   Immediately, Goku shrinks to the size of an adult human, only he's still covered with ape fur, but red and black instead of brown or Super Saiyan yellow.   Curiously, Goku's pants grow back, even though his clothes ripped to shreds when he aped out, and even though they were kid-sized in any event.  Doesn't matter, he just shrinks back to adult size and suddenly he's wearing pants and boots whether it makes sense or not.   His shirt doesn't come back, though.   The most annoying thing about Super Saiyan 4 was how long they spent dragging it out.   Somewhere around Episode 28 they changed the opening and closing credits of the show to include images of Goku and Baby in their new forms, even though they weren't ready to fight until Episode 35.  In the meantime, all the audience wants to see is Goku's new power, but the show keeps jerking us around.   It's basically marking time because everyone understood that Baby wouldn't be defeated by anything less than a Super Saiyan 4, so everything that isn't Baby vs. SSJ4 Goku is a wasted effort.  Uub shows up to challenge Baby and gets his ass kicked.   Majin Buu merges with Uub to ramp up his powers, but it still doesn't help.   Goku farts around as a SSJ3 and a Golden Ape, but all that does is give Baby the bright idea to become a Golden Ape himself.   So finally Goku fights Baby on equal footing, and it begins to feel like we're getting back to the Dragon Ball Z formula.  Bulma--still under Baby's control--designs a "Blutz Wave Amplifier", which enables Vegeta's body to transform into a Golden Ape despite his lack of a tail.   This allows Baby to match Goku's power, although Baby never becomes a Super Saiyan 4 himself.   It doesn't really matter, because the Golden Ape Baby Vegeta is tough enough to make things even.  Goku gets worn out from the fighting, but Baby can recharge using the Blutz Wave Amplifier, so now Goku's back on the defensive.   Meanwhile, the Kais start liberating Goku's allies by stealing Sacred Water from Kami's Lookout.   Sacred Water was introduced during the Garlic, Jr. story arc of DBZ.  Then, it was a cure for the Black Water Mist, a demonic substance that corrupted anyone who inhaled it.   Even though the Supreme Kai is much stronger than Dende and Mr. Popo, he still runs away like a pussy when they try to stop him from using it.  Still, he manages to free Dende and Popo, along with Trunks, Gohan, and Goten, who go to help Goku in his hour of need.   What follows is a pretty stupid mid-battle conference.   Goten and Trunks suggest using the Fusion technique against Baby, which would have been really awesome because it would mean we'd get to see Super Saiyan 3 Gotenks as an adult.   Hell, a fused SSJ3 would probably knock Baby on his ass, even if Gotenks could only hold the form for a few minutes.   But instead, Goku warns them that they wouldn't be able to win that way, and their only chance is to donate their power to himself, recharging him so he can keep fighting Baby solo.  Toei kept using this gag in a lot of the DBZ movies, where the bad guy beats everyone and Goku has to draw power from his weakened allies to save the day.  It never makes much sense, because the good guys working together while they're fresh doesn't work, so why would pooling the last dregs of their power into one guy do the job?   Somehow, Goten, Trunks, and Gohan are too weak to fight alongside Goku, but they're exactly strong enough to recharge him?   I don't get it.  I mean, it's fine from a storytelling standpoint because it's Goku's show, but it sucks ass because everyone wanted to see adult Gotenks do cool shit, and Toei basically said "no".   Once rejuvenated, Goku puts Baby down as he promised, and he fires an energy blast to cut off Vegeta's tail.     Yeah, I know I said Vegeta didn't have a tail, but somehow his body grew one while turning into a Great Ape.  If Bulma's machine could transform Vegeta even though he lacked a tail, then why would cutting it off have any effect whatsoever?   As long as he's getting those amplified Blutz waves, he's fine, right?   The answer, of course, is GT Logic.   As Vegeta shrinks back to his base form (His clothes grow back, too.  Even his shirt!), Baby abandons ship.   I think the reason for this is that Baby has gotten too powerful from being in a Golden Ape to be contained any longer in Vegeta's humanoid form, but they don't bother explaining that in the English dub.   I'd sooner believe that Baby is just hoping he can use Vegeta's body as a diversion to cover his escape.  Anyway, it doesn't work, and Goku kills him by firing a Kamehameha at his ship, forcing it into the sun, which is probably the most decisive way to kill anybody in the Dragon Ball universe.   With Baby dead, the good guys distribute the Sacred Water to purge the Earth's population of Tuffle parasites, and the only nagging detail left is Baby's wish on the Black Star Dragon Balls.   Somehow an entire fifty weeks have passed between Episodes 30 and 40.   Most of those episodes merely depicted Baby fighting Goku and Uub in a single day.  I guess you could argue that Baby's relocation program took a lot longer than it appeared, and Mr. Satan and Pan spent months in hiding, but the script itself never really reflects that.  A more sensible explanation is that it wasn't enough to just return the Black Star balls to Earth; some sort of ritual was required to stop the Earth from exploding, and Baby using the Balls again prevented this from taking place.   Fortunately, there's a whole other planet ready for use as a refuge.   Vegeta proposes relocating the Earth's population to Planet Tuffle, even though you'd think he'd insist on calling it "Planet Vegeta", but whatever.   Actually, Goku's the one who reconquered it, so they should name it after him.   They spend the remaining two weeks evacuating the Earth using spaceships and teleportation, and they just barely pull it off.   Goku has teleportation powers, but they quit working right when he was turned into a child.   I don't see why, since it doesn't require a lot of strength or stamina to do, and if anything shunting his smaller body around ought to be even easier.  Fortunately, he can still use Instant Transmission as a Super Saiyan 4, but he runs out of juice on the last trip.   Luckily, Piccolo shows up and lends him a little more power to help him save the final stragglers.   I have no idea what Piccolo had been doing since he went MIA in Episode 26, but now that he's back, he's decided to stay on Earth and die as it explodes.   Piccolo's decision makes some sense, just not enough.   See, it was an earlier incarnation of Piccolo who created the Black Star Dragon Balls.  When the creator of a set of Dragon Balls dies, the Balls become inert, turning into useless stones.  Given the problems the Black Star Balls have caused, Piccolo figures the best thing to do is to let himself die to ensure they can never be used again.  Great, except Piccolo could have killed himself two years ago and saved everyone a lot of trouble.   Alternately, he could have just destroyed the dragon, since that's a proven method for bricking a set of Dragon Balls.   I suspect the truth of the matter is that Toei really didn't know what to do with Piccolo anymore, and they decided killing him off would be more interesting.   Fair enough, except his death seems like a total waste as it’s depicted.   Miraculously, Earth explodes without damaging the Planet Tuffle.   The good guys borrow the Namekian Dragon Balls and use them to wish back Earth, and I suppose they spent another two weeks relocating everyone back.   They never bother to explain what happened to Planet Tuffle.   The planet itself doesn't matter much anymore, but you'd think it'd raise some interesting questions now that everyone on Earth has been there at least once.   Much of the mythology of Dragon Ball is an open secret.  The general public has no idea about aliens, energy blasts, or Saiyans, and the Dragon Balls are little more than an obscure legend.   Baby's victims retained little memory of their infestation, so even that could have been plausibly covered up, but now that the entire Earth has been destroyed and rebuilt, and its people relocated to and from an alien world by a Super Saiyan 4, there's bound to be some consequences. Shouldn't Goku be a huge celebrity?   Wouldn't the public want to know more about this new planet?   Wouldn't businesses want to exploit an empty world for its natural resources?   Who owns Planet Tuffle anyway? Vegeta, since he's the heir of its last ruler?   King Furry, since it's orbiting the Earth?   Oh well. NEXT: Blackest Night, only dumber

[positivelyamazonian]

Not to question your preferences but isn't Legend was tr1's vision but made in 'updated' tech? You did heavily criticized the game for it's outfits & hypocrisy from the devs. Is there anything you find in legend similar to tr1? Like Lara's character for example. I thought legend was what they were going for in tr1 but more 'out there'. trU felt more closer to tr2&3's Lara imo & the less I say about anni the better. Aside from the pr abomination, you think CD did a gj with Lara's portrayal?

I’ve answered before when being asked about my opinion on LAU’s trilogy - I just can’t find the ask now, but it should show up eventually in the “my answers” tag - and why Legend is the one I most dislike from that trilogy; in fact, I’d say it’s the TR I most dislike ever. I don’t see the resemblance with TR1; if at all, Crystal was trying to go for TR1 resonances when making Anniversary… which they upright stole from Core Design’s, btw. But Legend? I can’t really see the similarity at all.

Just to summarize what I’ve said before, in other asks, for me Legend is an abomination and so it’s their Lara’s portrayal - which is not Lara but actually LAUra to me, they are different characters. But I guess you don’t want to hear again about changed bio, canon divergences, mommy issues and so. You ask me about the rest. Will try to syntethize it.

Even if I forget LAUra is just raiding tombs to find her disappeared mother and has deep family issues, a big amnesia concerning everything that has happened to her before - since she’s been rewritten, revamped, rebooted and erased of all her character arc in Core’s era - I still think Crystal did a very poor job with her portrayal. Crystal Dynamics’ version of Lara is James Bond-esque. She looks and acts more like a secret agent or an action soldier than a tomb raider, or a pseudo-archaeologist, which was her real nature.

She has forgotten her politeness and delicacy to act towards her enemies with rudeness and passive-aggressiveness, justified with her damaged soul because she lost her mom and needs to find her. Her lines and dialogues are very cliché, she just throws narcissistic and pre-cooked sentences that sound very inflated (”every breath of yours is gonna be a gift from me”, “repeat that thing again when you were begging for your life”. “this is a tomb I’m gonna make them feel at home”) that are good for a bombastic Hollywood blockbuster but don’t portray the real spirit of Lara, who talked little but very effectively. LAUra is all jabbing and jabbing. She just says things to see the effect they cause, but are void of any meaning.

Furthermore, LAUra has no moral guidelines. She uses the artefacts she finds as weapons against her enemies, something that Classic Lara would have never done. She’s just focused on the goal, which is to find her mother, and releases very dangerous powers on her enemies just to crush them if it suits her. Classic Lara never used an artefact in this sense. In fact, all the Tomb Raider arc was based in taking ancient artefacts to be stored away from power hungry and genocidal sociopaths because they’re too dangerous to be handled. LAUra uses the Excalibur sword mercilessly against soldiers only armed with mere firearms, not on equal footing. And does it again in Underworld when assessing herself the right to handle Thor’s belt, gloves and hammer. Which is directly immoral and a barrier Classic Lara never dared to cross.

When Crystal Dynamics portrayed LAUra in the LAU trilogy they were only wanting to appeal to the crowd fans’ mass who only had a superficial grasp of the character, and contented themselves with viewing a supposed Tomb Raider who in fact managed herself more than a villain, or a James Bond, and of course based more their work in the movies than in the classic games.

The movies should not be considered canon since the directors never played a real Tomb Raider and only elaborated about the idea they had of Lara. Same with the comic series artists and writers. And to these people who never bothered to play a real Tomb Raider, turned Crystal Dynamics to when elaborating LAUra and LAU trilogy. Of course, they had never cared for Core Design’s canon in the first place, so why bother to do so.

There you’ll have EXPLOSIONS!!!! And DEEP CLEAVAGES!!! AND LOUIS VUITTON PANTIEES!!! And very very snarky PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE REMARKS no one asked for because YOU ROCK!!! And interminable BATTLES with lots of ENEMIES and eternal BOSS FIGHTS with talking bosses and inconsistent difficulty!!! AND A VERY EPIC SOUNDTRACK WITHOUT LARA’S THEME!!!! And now rescue your POC DAMSEL IN DISTRESS because you’re the hero and must save HERRR!! And KILL ALL THE GUYS!!! And now use the EXCALIBURRRRRR BECAUSE THEY STAND BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR MOMMA!!!! And now threaten your old friend but now villain enemy who doesn’t give a shit about your personal goals BECAUSE SHE HAS TO PAY!!! SOMEONE HAS TO PAY!!! MY MOTHER DISAPPEARED YOU OBVIOUSLY STOLE HER!!!! I’m gonna shoot and yell and threaten and go berserker in a mindless rampage because you want to know WHERE!!! IS!!! YOUR!!! MOTHEEEEEEEEERRRR!!!

But in the meantime you also need a high-tech specialist to guide you through the adventure and he’s constantly telling you what to do because you will get lost surely and a PhD lecturer to teach you about History and Archeology because you aparently have no idea about it. Welp.

Oh yes, she still wears pants and top, she still has dual pistols, she still uses medipacks, and vehicles, and raids tombs, sorta, because the puzzles are an insult to intelligence. Does that make her Lara again? For me it doesn’t. Lara Croft went of adventures because it was fun and had a very strict moral code about it. LAUra probably would have stabbed herself with the Dagger of Xian and become THE DRAGON!!!! And then DRACARYS!!!! Or use the meteorite artefacts to mutate herself and become A POWERFUL ABHORRENT BADASS MUTANT!!! Or stick Amulet of Horus in Seth’s face BECAUSE I AM GONNA BATTLE YOU ANYWAY AND KEEP THIS SHIT BECAUSE MINE!!! And of course, accept Karel’s offer in TRAOD as long as he can bring your Mom back.

I am sorry but context is everything. If Lara Croft is just a girl with shorts and tank and dual pistols, then anyone can do Lara Croft. The thing is that she was something else. And for that, I have not the least sympathy for this Hollywood-esque, James Bond female agent who is all the time looking too cool and too angry to mind anything but find the absent mother.

No, definitely I don’t see anything coming from Legend that reminds of TR1, or in LAUra that reminds me of Lara except some gadgets any character could have. Sorry for the rant, you asked. :)

[eddycurrents]

X-Men Black: Mystique #1 “One Short Day”

Writer: Seanan McGuire | Artist: Marco Failla | Colourist: Jesus Aburtov | Letterer: Joe Caramagna

Published by Marvel | 17.10.2018 | $4.99

X-Men Black: Mystique is the third of this series of one offs and the first where the villain is actually outright villainous. It’s made even more interesting in that Mystique is currently the only one of them that’s also ostensibly acting on the side of angels in Weapon X.

Also unlike the previous issues, this is pretty much just a straightforward tale, no real social issues tackled beyond surface-level mutant-hating. It’s basically a heist story.

Seanan McGuire writes a devious, diabolical Mystique, still somewhat as playful as previous depictions, but in a much more harsh manner. Through the narration and action, she takes pleasure in taking down her marks and doing so in some particularly cruel and devilish ways, but also incredibly intelligent. It’s somewhat refreshing to see this kind of Mystique again. The one that is calculating and will most definitely stab you in the back, rather than the numerous attempts to redeem her, especially in light of the X-Men movie franchise.

The art from Marco Failla and Jesus Aburtov is quite nice. Failla has a style that reminds me a lot of many of the recent X-Men Blue artists including Marcus To, RB Silva, and Jorge Molina, but a bit more simplified. It works well for the action sequences and I particularly like the transition scenes of Mystique changing from one person to another.

Given how the Magneto and Mojo one-shots went to lengths to show heroic actions from the villains, I find it funny that there are absolutely no redeeming qualities to Raven in this story. In broader context, it also kind of undercuts my idea that these one-shots were building to something more with this particular group of villains and working heroism into our minds in order to make a team or something out of them.

On its own, though, this is still an entertaining story. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see in an annual or an anthology, and it works well as its own standalone thing.

“Apocalypse - Degeneration Part Three”

Writers: Zac Thompson & Lonnie Nadler | Artist: Geraldo Borges | Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg | Letterer: Cory Petit

The third chapter of this story shows us an even more bizarre version of Apocalypse, presenting him in a way that we’ve really never seen before. Where the last chapter showed more humanity in Apocalypse, doubt, even as his hubris still attempted to lift him up as superior, Thompson & Nadler give us something very, very different here as he has to fight for survival.

And fails.

Seeing what happens next, and the hint at what’s really gone on with the misfire of his experimental genetics advancement device thingy, is very compelling. A potentially humbled and humiliated Apocalypse, or whatever it is that he is now, could be an even more dangerous thing than our normal genocidal Apocalypse. I’m very interested to see what’s next.

Especially as Geraldo Borges and Rachelle Rosenberg’s art also keeps adapting for the story. Here taking on the brutality and danger of the simian-like creatures that serve as antagonists to Apocalypse.

Quick Bits:

Astonishing X-Men #16 launches the rescue mission for Havok’s team members captured by ONE by working with unlikely allies. I like the humour Matthew Rosenberg is injecting into the book, even as it seems like Alex is continuously being punked out by everyone.

Mr. & Mrs. X #4 has a fairly interesting discussion about Rogue’s personal agency amidst escaping from the Shi’ar Imperial Guard and rubbing elbows with the Starjammers and whatnot. It’s a discussion that’s probably overdue since at least the re-purposing of X-Men Legacy to be a Rogue-led team, probably even before that, and it’s nice to see Kelly Thompson begin tackling it. Also, explosions and brilliant fight scenes illustrated by Oscar Bazaldua and Frank D’Armata.

Old Man Logan #49 is certainly ensuring that this series isn’t going down without a fight. Or twelve. Glorious artwork from Ibraim Roberson and Carlos Lopez, who along with Ed Brisson and Cory Petit deliver one of the most brutal instalments of this series.

Weapon H #9 continues the expedition to Weirdworld. I quite like the team that Greg Pak has been building around Clay, bizarre, humorous, and offbeat characters that round out some of the more serious and deadly plot elements.

The Unexamined: Secret Agent Deadpool #4

d. emerson eddy keeps wondering why none of the X-Men are turtles. They should have at least one turtle. Who practices martial arts. I mean, even Quicksilver has a turtle now. So...yeah.

[robobrainmurdermysterytheatre]

RE: This post (sort of) because I feel like I derailed the OPs post and I literally don’t know them and I feel awkward posting on it more lol 

BTW if y’all are sick of talking to me about this no worries, nobody owes me a reply, I just like talking about the game and I have learned a lot from what other people have to say so here we are.

Fuck this got really long so I’m cutting it but it’s about Elder Maxson. Again. Sort of. And Synths. And I want to preface by saying I’m all about love what characters you want, you do you. I’m not trying to hate on anyone for liking or disliking fictional characters or organizations. But I have a lot of feelings.

So I’ve been thinking about a few things and a few things have been brought to my attention that I haven’t seen brought up before. So the quest for Teagan, with the crops and stuff, I know this is a sticking point and possibly could be disregarded because it’s an optional quest, but if Teagan knew Maxson wouldn’t approve of strong arming settlers for crops, why would he tell *you* to do it? I know you can complete the quest other ways, but looking at his voice lines he’s pretty gung-ho on the strong-arming part. He has zero reason to think you wouldn’t march on up to Maxson and tell him Teagan’s trying to put you up to strong-arming settlers, which would lead me to believe he doesn’t have a problem with Teagan putting you up to strong-arming settlers at all. 

Also I just... I don’t know if I can believe that Maxson feels bad for killing or trying to kill Danse (depending on how you choose to do it). Like I *want* to believe he does, but Jesus, he’s just so cruel about the whole thing, even if you convince him to spare Danse. And afterward, when you get promoted to Paladin if you clapback at him when he says all of Danse’s stuff is yours now he says “To the victor go the spoils. Being a part of the Brotherhood, you should learn to appreciate that sentiment.” and he is sinister about it, it literally says in the dialogue direction ‘sinister smile’ I feel like there is A LOT loaded into that sentence, knowing that real, actual armies IRL historically and even now operate like this, especially armies who are allowed to operate at will without or with very little government oversight, their whole agenda is to win, take shit and expand and be more formidable. Maxson and the BoS won’t outright say it ever in the game, but looking at their actions and their sentiment, it seems, to me, like that is kind of part of their agenda. Which, I mean, you could argue is fine because they’d be keeping order and killing super mutants but they’d be running things their way, uncontested. Eventually they’d weed out all the synths and kill them - so bye Danse, bye Curie, bye Nick, don’t forget Magnolia and Sturges also - of course they would kill Strong so bye Strong too. They probably wouldn’t let me keep my cool robot workbench or my badass enormous sentrybots with skull faces and minigun hands because that kind of technology isn’t fit for civilians so I’d guess I have to say bye to Ragnarok and Lilith and Lucifer and Azrael (please do not judge my precious children by their sinister names) and Jezebel and Ada too. Oh, and Synth Shaun. They would definitely kill Synth Shaun too. 

The thing I learned today which is part of the reason I’m back on this bullshit besides that thread ☝ is after Blind Betrayal Maxson has Danse’s records in the BoS stripped. I just got done in Fallout 3 doing the beginning of the Brotherhood stuff there and I have to go talk to that wizard-looking scribe lady (god I love their stupid outfits in 3, but I digress) and she makes A REALLY BIG DEAL about how their records are so important, every member has a record of the stuff they’ve done and how they’ve died and that’s their legacy. It’s mean, like vindictive. Like, synth or not, he did all of whatever he did. Aside from that, Maxson has literally altered the historical truth - there’s not even record that says “we accidentally a synth, this is what he did and we killed him because synths are bad” Again, like, thinking about real-world historical examples of people intentionally altering pieces of history to erase people or groups of people or what people have done -  the reason behind actions like that have never been good. 

And I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole, the people of the Commonwealth are bigots thing a lot. Yes, they are scared of synths because of the wrath The Institute has brought down on the people. They’re also scared of Raiders and Gunners. They’re scared of anything that stands between them and being safe and fed. Like, listen, they understand the difference between a human dude walking up into their settlement and a Raider, I feel like if someone bothered to take a second to explain to them Not All Synths(tm) work for The Institute and a lot of them are actually really nice and might brew you a stimpack or help you solve a noir mystery or take care of your feral infestation down the road they would be receptive to it. They would be especially receptive of it if the person telling them that was the head of the organization keeping them safe and fed >.> Would they be perfectly accepting? Probably not, but they would probably let them live for two seconds without throwing a fit. They would probably not shoot-to-kill on sight. Even the people in Diamond City who talk shit about Nick aren’t out there trying to murder him. 

Kind of in that same vein, let’s talk about Desdemona and the Minutemen for a second. Because I feel like, and maybe I’m wrong about the intention, my girl got slandered into making it look like she doesn’t support The Minutemen. If you fail your covert op any number of ways, she literally says you can use them to forcibly liberate the Synths. Hell, if you haven’t met Preston yet, she’ll tell you where he is and to go find him because she thinks The Minutemen can help. She’ll only go off on you if you don’t sound the evacuation alarm. If you destroy The Institute with The Minutemen and you sound the alarm, like Preston tells you on no uncertain terms to do, she’ll call you “The destroyer of the Institute. Liberator of the synths.” and say “My only regret is we couldn't have been there when you did it.“ When you talk with her about the people trying to hurt the Synths that made it out of the destruction of The Institute and she says “ They're vigilantes and bigots. They don't recognize anyone's laws. Not even yours.” I don’t think she’s talking about ALL the people, she’s talking about people who are vigilantes and bigots which, if you do the quests to go rescue the Synths, usually bring you to Raider dens, who aren’t your people and you’re working against anyway. The gangs that hunt Synths that she has you clear out after The Institute is destroyed are Raider gangs. John the Farmer in buttfuck egypt out by the glowing sea isn’t slaughtering Synths, he’s busy with his farm and his water purifier that doesn’t work and Gunners attacking him weekly. When it comes down to it, how many people like John the Farmer are going to bite the hand that feeds them and fixes his water purifier and fucks up the Gunners if that hand is The Minutemen and they say Synths are OK (because they are, generally)? 

and RE: danger synths and Acadia and stuff... so I’m trying to unpack the whole, weird Acadia lore that magically allows for DiMA to insert memories that he didn’t have in the first place into synth replacements  (e.g. you kill Tektus, stuff his body in a wall, but DiMA can make a “perfect replica” of him with nothing to go on?) I’m assuming when it was said that synths pose a unique danger that humans don’t, this is what was being referenced - that Synths can be messed around with to replace humans in order to manipulate whatever. Putting Acadia aside for juuuuuuust a second - because of the weird magic lore contradiction - there’s a couple of points about this. We see very few people in the game who have the resources, the technology and the know how to actually mess with a Synth’s brain. Even the people supposedly the best at replacing people with “perfect copies”, The Institute, are still kind of shit at it. Every single infiltrator that we see in the game knows what they are and gets called out by someone who figures out what they are. The “perfect copy” idea is hysteria - possibly even propaganda from The Institute itself. The only contradiction to that is what DiMA did in Acadia and honestly, I have no idea how to explain that. That’s all aside from the fact that, technically, in this universe humans have the ability to do the same thing. We know humans can be face changed. Deacon says he was both a girl and a ghoul (the ghoul incident is legit and backed up by terminal entries in the Railroad) and to be either of those from being human dude Deacon, you would have to get a voice change so that has to be a thing, right? Take a human who knows enough about another human, physically turn that human into the other human, and you have someone replaced, no Synths needed. And even Far Harbor, who will, with certain choices, go destroy Acadia don’t destroy them just because they’re synths, they destroy Acadia because Acadia murdered and replaced Avery. 

Which brings me to the final thought I had because holy crap I just wrote for like two hours and I’m tired and out of steam now. I keep really, really wanting to like the BoS and Maxson because they have the neat stuff and a lot of their people are cool and my friends like them but I just, like, can’t as long as they’re a faction that advocates for the genocide of Synths. That’s the one sticking point I have. I could maybe even tolerate them hanging around the Commonwealth where they maybe shouldn’t be, I could maybe see them through a nefarious lens than I do if I knew they wouldn’t come to Sanctuary and wipe out a third of my population because of how they were made - if they weren’t trying to kill my friends and my synth son. Honestly, I love a lot of fanon stuff about Maxson and the BoS because it changes that but canon, in the game, that’s what they would do. 

[newx-menfan]

X-23 and the Direction of the X-Men

I’ve talked a lot about what I don’t like with what Marvel has been doing, so I thought I’d talk about what I DO like with the X-23 solo series and how the X-Men line in general could benefit from doing the same…

Mariko Tamaki’s solo series utilizes elements of Morrison, Kyle and Yost, Liu, and Taylor; without being dependent on them. While examining Laura and Gabby’s histories as clones; I don’t feel like this story arc is TRYING to be ‘Innocence Lost’, ‘Target X, ‘the Four Sisters’, 'Riot at Xavier’s’, or 'Planet X’ . It’s very much it’s own story, instead of a continuation of previous stories.

One of the major reasons for this is Mariko doing something different with Laura’s clone narrative; by having her story parallel the Stepford Cuckoos, characters Laura has been around but never really interacted with.

This helps bring out BOTH a different side to Laura and a different side to the Cuckoos that we didn’t get to see before. Mariko examines Laura’s, Gabby’s, and the Cuckoos motivations thoroughly in this series; making the big motivating factor being different characters psychologies and points of view.

The Cuckoos motivations ARE relatable- wanting their family back. They also both connect to Laura’s inability to somewhat see herself as a individual- by dressing and acting as one; and Gabby’s desire for independence-be having different personalities and personal tastes. Esme wants to both be THE ONLY Cuckoo while simultaneously wanting to merge the Cuckoos power; essentially being permanently connected with her sisters.

Another big change is the risk factor; before in All New Wolverine there was little fear that Gabby was at risk. While Taylor did put her in dangerous situations; rarely as a reader did you question whether or not Gabby would come out of the situation okay. The change is, Mariko’s willingness to allow BOTH Gabby and Laura to go through conflict. While Gabby WILL more than likely come out of the situation physically unharmed, there is the question of-'How will this situation change or shape Gabby as a person?’ What changes will Laura and Gabby go through because of this story arc?

Good writing NEEDS conflict, because conflict is the biggest connector to humanity we have. Conflict can be anything from 'I lost my keys’ to more complicated conflicts like 'Who am I?’. Conflict can be Internal (man vs. self) or External (man vs. nature, man vs. man/society, ect…). But the universal truth is that everyone will experience some form of conflict in our lives and that conflict will shape us.

These elements are what have made the recent X-23 solo a really solid book (well that and Juann Cabal/Nolan Woodard’s art and inking…). It’s also the upcoming problems I see with the recent 'Uncanny’ and 'X-Force’.

Kelly Thompson, Matthew Rosenberg, and Ed Brisson ARE right-The series hasn’t released yet, so I can’t completely comment whether or not it will have these elements or not; but all of the indicators from solicits and interviews DON’T look very convincing…

If Brisson , Rosenberg, or Thompson were introducing a new villain- I’d give them the benefit of the doubt; but the character they are using is the rather overused Apocalypse.

If they were showing a different side of Apocalypse through some difference in plot, that would be one thing-but from the looks of it, it’s playing off 1995 storyline 'Age of Apocalypse’ where David Haller creates a new timeline when accidentally killing his father after traveling back in time to kill Magneto; the only minor difference appears to be is having the 'Horsemen of Salvation’ and kinda in representing Nate Grey as a messiah (a role he regularly rejected…).

We’ve seen the mutant 'messiah’ before-with Jean, with Rachel, with Cable, and with Hope. At the very LEAST you could have done someone NOT tied to the Summer’s…

We’ve seen Angel as a horseman; maybe having Angel being 'Life’ instead of 'Death’ will bring out a new facet to his character, but from the looks of it, the story will heavily hinge on his on again/off again relationship with Betsy.

Are we seeing a new team lineup-from the looks of it, not really; the focus seems to be Iceman, Jean Grey, Beast, Cannonball, Storm, Bishop, Nightcrawler, Jubilee, Psylocke and X-23.

*X-23 and Cannonball are really the only new additions.

*One of the covers heavily featured Legion, hinting that he will AGAIN play a part in kicking this story off.

*Bishop in the original 'Age of Apocalypse’ storyline was the character to notice the timeline WAS wrong and fought to fix it-so it’s not all that surprising to include him.

*X-Man was the main protagonist in the original 'Age of Apocalypse’- maybe their plan is to SUBVERT this trope by making HIM the antagonist and thus making a commentary around organized religion…but I kind of doubt it….

Pixie, Glob, Rockslide, and Armor are SUPPOSED to be the Horsemen of Apocalypse but I am somewhat doubtful that this will largely impact their characters developmentally any more than 'Age of X’ impacted Julian’s, or any of the OTHER ALTERNATE UNIVERSES have largely impacted any of the characters.

Can playing with old storyline’s and nostalgia BE fun: yes, but too much nostalgia becomes empty. It becomes desperately trying to grasp a time period long past that you are inevitably romanticizing and coloring with personal connections. It inevitably showcases how out of touch the writer is with current society…

It would have been one thing if X-Men HADN’T been over utilizing past teams and stories- but in the last few years we got 'the Original Five’ (both time displaced and living adult members…), the Exiles, Generation X, New Mutants/X-Factor hybrid, BloodStorm, Gold with a Claremont reminiscent team, Gambit and Rogue back together, Kitty and Colossus back together, Magneto reverting back to his roots as a villain, Emma reverting back to her roots as a villain, Xavier back, and multiple extinction storyline’s trying to be M-Day or the Legacy Virus…

It would be one thing if X-Men had taken a break from AU characters- but in the last few years we’ve had time displaced Original Five, Jimmy Hudson, baby Cable, Raze, clone Kid Apocalypse, BloodStorm back in focus, Old Man Logan, Exiles characters, ect…

Maybe this title is different and people are 'Pre-Judging’ it; but when in the last few years has Marvel given fans a lot to go on?! The recent interview could essentially be copied and pasted from 'ResurrXtion’-promising big changes before reverting to a overplayed status quo… Maybe this IS a new take on 'Age of Apocalypse’- but hasn’t Marvel promised that beforehand?! They promised a new take with the 'Original Five’ coming back, with the extinction plotline, and with countless other storyline’s-yet Jean and Scott’s romance is heavily the focus, the mutant population inexplicably recovers from mass genocide without any lasting effects, and little character growth actually happens.

I’m not saying this to 'rain on the writers parades’ or target them; but this has been promised BEFORE and all signs indicate this IS the exact same empty nostalgia we’ve seen for years…

I’m not writing this to be negative or condescending. I WANT to be wrong…but I don’t think I am, because I honestly don’t think the writers WOULD be getting defensive if this wasn’t a by the numbers homage to 'Age of Apocalypse’. You don’t NEED to get defensive if you have a trump card or brand new idea up your sleeve.

Whether you love or hate Morrison, Whedon, or Kyle/Yost; there’s no denying they are iconic runs BECAUSE they did something new.

Morrison created villain Cassandra Nova and countless other characters, utilized Emma as a main character to create a new dynamic, and examined population changes with having Mutants become the majority and create their own culture. Even Morrison’s representation of Scott, while controversial, still took a new look at Scott as a character.

Whedon created several characters including Danger, Armor, and Blindfold; explored Xavier’s more questionable decisions, and focused heavily on character dynamics and psychology of the characters. One of the defining relationships was the conflict between Emma and Kitty; utilizing old animosity but examining it under a new lens of Emma being a hero and interacting with Kitty (they did not interact when Emma was part of Generation X).

Kyle and Yost created X-23, creating a new examination into Wolverine’s mythos and a new dynamic. They heavily utilized some of the newer teen characters, to again create a new dynamic. While using older stories (Nimrod, William Stryker, Magik’s origin) by injecting new characters they created something refreshing instead of empty nostalgia. It also examines the darker side of X-Men, by questioning the choice of teens being recruited to essentially be a 'paramilitary group’…

Are all these writers still using old storyline’s- yes, but by adjusting lineups of characters, adding new dynamics, creating new characters, and examining the X-Men under a different social lens: it can dramatically change the story.

The original 'Age of Apocalypse’ also did this when first written by analyzing what the world would be like ruled by Apocalypse and changing character motivations and relationships.

X-Men doesn’t HAVE to change drastically; but it does need some variation. I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again- I don’t think fans are being unfair by questioning if this was a good choice to semi reboot the X-Men. This by all appearances doesn’t LOOK like a 'Fresh Start’. Sorry but people are going to 'pre-judge’ things; it’s one of the things that sucks about being a writer.

It would be one thing if X-Men had been knocking it out of the park storyline wise, for the past few years- but the truth is, is they haven’t. You can’t blame fans for being tired of giving Marvel a chance only to watch them make the same pitfalls over and over again.

If you don’t want the criticism-maybe take a chance and try something NEW…

X-23 PROVES Marvel CAN get it right- they just need to put the same thought into the X-teams that they put into her solo.

[salarta]

Analysis: Harley Quinn, Polaris, men in their lives

I don’t talk about Harley Quinn as much on here as other topics. My main view is that she was my favorite character of DC comics, the “rebirth” ruined her by throwing away her entire harlequin character theme to make her more or less “clown girl,” and any popularity we see for her today is much less than she could’ve had if DC hadn’t thrown away her identity.

Right now, I’m bringing this up not for Harley Quinn, but for Polaris and the way @marvelentertainment seems to see and treat her.

Harley Quinn

Despite my complaints, my reasons for those complaints, and what I’m certain would be happening if DC did things right by Harley Quinn, there’s still an important truth that must be acknowledged: Harley Quinn is currently incredibly popular. She could be more popular if done right, and much of her popularity right now is due to DC shoving their “reimagining” of Harley down everyone’s throats, but it doesn’t change the end result.

So why is current “Harley Quinn” popular? People can cite a lot of different things. People can disagree, or bring up a huge mishmash of elements. However, there’s one specific aspect of her newfound popularity that applies here: the popularity of “Harley Quinn” is not because of Harley’s connection to Joker but in spite of it.

Harley Quinn was created to be Joker’s henchgirl in the animated TV series. She became popular with her initial appearance and got recurring roles. This led to Harley getting fleshed out as a former psychiatrist that was seduced by Joker’s nature and ultimately became a domestic abuse survivor. Essentially, that was her origins - to be “beneath” Joker, to be his victim that was once a smart professional woman.

Fast forward. As Harley grew as a character, her horizons expanded. She developed a lesbian relationship with Poison Ivy. She had zany adventures in her own solo series (which I read, and was great up until somewhere around issue 25 or so). That was, I believe, the height of her popularity pre-”rebirth”. History with Joker came up, but amazingly, it was stories not involving Joker that got pursued the most when she was at her best.

Likewise, the popularity of the current “Harley Quinn” is never tied to stories involving Joker. One of the most popular relationships “Harley” has had in recent years is with Power Girl, to the point where a whole set of comics was made focused on it. When the Suicide Squad film came out, most of the tweets I saw concerning that version of “Harley Quinn” were about how great she was in the film when Joker wasn’t part of the story. And, as WB plans to make a Joker solo film, I see TONS of complaints from people about how shitty such a film would be vs wanting a Gotham Sirens sort of film featuring Harley.

Long story short? Harley Quinn was created to be “beneath” Joker, but when she finally got real, deliberate focus on herself as her own character, people came to love her more than Joker. The guy she’s supposedly “beneath.”

Polaris

Here’s the connection for Polaris: Havok.

I’m going to be fair to Havok, for Havok fans. He’s not a villain like Joker. When he’s actually written respectfully, he’s not an abusive shitheel.

However, how he is when written well does not change how their relationship was written for decades and how it always gets written when writers at Marvel try to bring it back.

Polaris was created as the daughter of Magneto who wants to be her own woman. The late 60s did still have sexism which trickled into some of her treatment, but Lorna was quite independent and more feminist than your average female character at the time.

Over time, and especially in the 70s and 80s, the idea of Lorna as “beneath” Havok (and several other characters) got pushed more and more at Marvel. Unlike DC with Harley Quinn, she wasn’t created with that toxic relationship. The toxic relationship was forced on her.

Their relationship is always Lorna acting as a supporting character for Havok’s stories.

Sometimes she’s written crying on his shoulder and blaming herself for crimes she didn’t commit, for no reason other than for the “big strong man” Havok to look good “comforting” her.

Sometimes she’s being tortured by the villain so we can see Havok’s “suffering” at hearing her in pain.

Sometimes, for no damn reason whatsoever, any concept of agency for herself is thrown out so she can spout about “what Alex would do.”

Sometimes, her entire purpose on a book is exclusively to be a reminder of “how wonderful the great and glorious Havok” is supposed to be, through things like having her spout “this isn’t you” or having her memories used to “restore” him after a multiple-issue story with him at the center.

And sometimes, big moments for her - like when she gets her origin story, or when she leads her own team for the first time - just have to have Havok shoved into them just so he can benefit.

Long story short: Marvel’s attitude toward Lorna is that she’s “beneath” Havok, and they keep going back to that over and over and over again.

They keep giving Havok opportunities they refuse to give Polaris. They keep forcing him into her stories and giving him a big voice, often even letting him hijack her whole damn story.

Marvel keeps refusing to let Lorna be her own character with her own amazing stories told, new relationships developed, her own spotlight that has nothing to do with this toxic relationship she’s had with this specific man that executives and editors and writers working at Marvel can’t stop nutting over.

And you know what?

Harley’s Success Could Be Polaris’

Harley Quinn is popular and succeeding right now in spite of setbacks like throwing out her harlequin theme. As said, “Harley Quinn’s” popularity comes because Joker isn’t forced into her stories and dragging her down. In fact, during the whole “rebirth,” the initial Suicide Squad stories where the Joker connection was played up most are actually the least liked.

The same applies with Lorna. Aside from some Austen moments, the great majority of full-bore Polaris fans do not fan over her because of Havok. They’re fans because of her mental health difficulties. Or her support of mutant rights issues when treated well. Or her history and subsequent development as a survivor of the Genoshan genocide. Or her place within the broad Magnus family, or so many other things.

Polaris is an awesome badass with many layers of complexity and massive amounts of untapped potential. What’s happening with Harley Quinn demonstrates that even if Lorna was a pale imitation of her full self, she would still be immensely popular as long as Marvel stopped dicking her over by forcing Havok on her and treating her like she’s “beneath” him.

Hell, we see that right now with Gifted. That version of Polaris isn’t really the full, true Lorna, it’s just one aspect and interpretation of her. It’s more faithful than what Marvel tends to do with her, but it’s still not fully her. And in spite of that, she’s the most popular character on the show. She’s more popular than Havok was in the films.

Lorna couldn’t just be as successful as Harley, she could be more successful. She has decades of history to draw from. Decades of fandom. Immense untapped potential. And a real, proper focus on her would be something more than what DC does for Harley, giving Lorna an edge.

The only thing standing in Lorna’s way is old, awful, entrenched fanboy biases against her at Marvel. Any argument made by anyone at Marvel along the lines of “she’s not popular enough” or “she’s not enough of a character” or anything like that is just people at Marvel trying to justify their bias.

Harley Quinn started out as a minor supporting character for Joker’s stories and look where she is now. Lorna didn’t even start out as that. She started as her own character and got turned into a minor supporting character for Havok’s stories.

If DC can do great things for Harley, then Marvel sure as hell can do them for Lorna too. They just have to care and stop making excuses.

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on Powers of X #2

We’re working on a deadline here, so let’s get to it!

Once Again, We Return...to Octopusheim (X^0):

In this section, Charles and Moira go to Octopusheim to share what they’ve learned with Magneto in order to gain his support for their whole mutant unity masterplan. 

Thanks to the timeline infographic from last issue, we know exactly when this particular meeting at Octopusheim is happening - it’s Year 43, four years before the “Moira/Xavier/Magneto schism,” six years before the Genoshan genocide, and nine years before the present day. This timing is quite interesting, because it suggests a high degree of patience on their part. After all, it’s been twenty six years since Moira first introduced herself(herselves?) to Charles, which is a lot of time to not make moves. On the other hand, having a head start didn’t help in earlier lives, so there may be some other rationale. 

There’s a really interesting echoing of Giant-Sized X-Men #1, with Xavier explicitly in the role of recruiter once again (we’ll see other pitches of his throughout the rest of HoX/PoX). The difference is that rather than relying on his normal posture of benevolent, almost wizardly, superior knowledge, Charles is using an admission of mutual fault to put them on an even level, which is necessary to gain Magneto’s trust for the psychic link to Moira. 

Incidentally, when it comes to character voice, Hickman does an impressive job of nailing not just Magneto but the specific era of Magneto when Chris Claremont re-invented him as the Miltonian anti-villain holding the world to ransom in the name of enlightened despotism and mutant self-protection. “Who determines waht is truly good and truly evil?...I do. I decide.” is particularly well-observed, right down to his ironically Nietzschean self-conception. 

At the same time, Moira’s query is clearly meant to shift the terms of discussion from the scientific (”you’re a specialist, specializing in the behavior of mutants”) to the religious. As her warning that “my truth is profound and life changing. It’s primal...” suggests, Moira is testifying in the Protestant sense of the word. 

What follows is a series of psychic images of failure that bring the Satanically-proud Magneto to his knees, but remain really ambiguous: his death by Sentinel could be from pretty much any life other than 9, although 4 or 5 seem most likely;  given his costume, the image of him in chains seems to be from the Trial of Magneto, which could be in Life 4 or 10; the central image of him with furious glowing eyes could be generic or perhaps a reference to the couple times he’s used artifical power-boosters; the image of him in a SHIELD tank being observed by Nick Fury is unclear; and him fighting the Shadow King is particularly singular, since the Shadow King has yet to show up in the narrative. Interestingly, we don’t see Moira showing him his death at Apocalypse’s hands in Life 9. 

For his own part, Xavier is preaching a much more secular argument: mutant unity in order to not merely survive but thrive, which is very Adam Smithian. I’m not the expert that Nir Revel is when it comes to drawing parallels between Israeli history and HoX/PoX, but even with the one course I’ve taken in Israeli history, I could see the parallel between the bargain that Magneto strikes with Xavier (”I won’t acquiesce to sympathy or doubt...I won’t give an inch, I will check you at every moment of weakness”) reads a lot like the compromises made at the founding of the State of Israel between the leaders of the various political parties.

Then again, I think the allegory works for political leaders at the time of the founding of any number of nation-states, which is one of the things that makes the business of nation-building so very difficult. At every step, there are innumerable obstacles of the moment, yet the decisions made on how to overcome them will always have unforeseeable long-term consequences. Something to keep one’s eye on for the future.

Does It Need Doing? (X^1):

In a direct follow-up from Powers of X #1 and House of X #1, Cyclops gets briefed on the Mother Mold/Nimrod mission. Incidentally, I think this segment is a great counter-example to the somewhat overblown statements from some in the fandom that all of these characters are mindless pod-people who are acting out of character; throughout this briefing, Scott is consistently snarky in a very dry way that feels very in character to me.

Magneto’s pointed reference to Operation Paperclip with regards to Orchis I think further emphasizes an ongoing theme that Hickman’s working on with regards to nation-states, nation-building, and nationalism: no nation is free from sin. Even after fighting “the good war” against fascism, the U.S recruited Nazi scientists to give it a technological edge in the Cold War for the same stated reasons of necessity that drive both Krakoan and Orchis policy.

Following on from House of X #2, not only are humans a mere road-bump compared to Sentinels, but even Mother Mold itself is viewed as a secondary problem compared to the hostile AI singularity that is Nimrod. 

And further showing how everything links to everything, this mission happens because of the information that Moira brought back from Life 9/X^2. More on this in a bit.

Machines Are Pure Information (X^2):

Speaking of which, we shift to another briefing on Krakoa, one life and a hundred years distant, in which Rasputin and Cardinal brief Apocalypse about the fruits of their own partially-successful clandestine mission.

While Apocalypse is very Apocalypsy in this segment, what with the idea that civilization is the fruit of war and that he’d happily sacrifice Rasputin and Cardinal both for the information he’s received, it is really interesting to see him talk about the powers and perils of information and the dangers of analysis paralysis; this last topic is particularly important as the series continues to explore the nature of these vast, universe-spanning consciousnesses. More on this in a bit.

Speaking of which, we see Nimrod the Lesser getting really distracted by trying to figure out what the mutants were up to, something that will arguably be his downfall. Incidentally, Nimrod’s casual execution of two humans for mouthing off to him not only suggests the lie at the heart of the Man-Machine Supremacy, but also that whatever kind of A.I he might be, he absolutely did not pass the “Heller-Faust line,” because he’s clearly a sociopath who lashes out violently due to emotional impulse. 

 Going back to Asteroid K, we go back to a discussion of how the machines’ problem is that they “archive every moment of everything,” which makes it impossible for them or anyone else to actually make use of the data. If we apply the same problem to the Phalanx and the other universe-spanning consciousnesses, which for all their vaunted intelligences seem to restrict themselves to consumption of resources and calculation of data without any higher purpose, I’m left wondering whether these singularities are actually idiot gods capering at the heart of the universe.

By contrast, the mutant resistance find their purpose in transcending the bare necessities of survival in the name of transcendant meaning. 

Nimbus Infographic:

This infographic, read together with the one that ends the issue, is where we really start to see what X^3 is about, namely Hickman’s thinking on technological/mechanical transhumanism.

To begin with, we learn that the people I’ve been referring to as blutants describe themselves as “post-human,” which suggests that the “human-machine-mutant war” ultimately ended in some sort of synthesis between mutant and machine. Not only do the post-humans have “seer-selves,” but we see that Nimbus started as the “copying - and integration - of their minds into a single thinking machine.”

Moving on, it’s interesting to note that the language of X^3 is entirely focused on terms of assimilation between cultures - will it take place as a consensual “suitor-alliance” or forceful consumption of the lesser by the greater? Is there a difference, when we’re talking about the “ascension” of copied minds?

It’s not a good sign that Nimbus’ interaction with Niburu is all about using “force...to inject” a planet with consciousness, or that the Worldmind decides to take a detour to “consume multiple Saturinian and Jovian moons ino order to increase its...intellect.” Over and over again, intellect and consumption go hand in hand, but we never see intellect actually getting used for anything meaningful (transcendant or otherwise).

Universal Predators (X^3):

Speaking of which, we see in the next section that the whole project of the post-human Outreach project is to negotiate the terms of ascension so that their culture is “preserved” rather than “mined,” in a context in which civilizations interact seemingly only in terms of predator and prey.

It’s particularly ominous that the Phalanx’s opening words are that they “ate your worldmind,” in a process that involves a lost struggle for “sovereignty” - a term that should ring particularly ominously given Krakoa’s struggle to be recognized as a sovereign nation-state.

That the post-humans’ goal is ascension is likewise troubling, because of how closely it tracks the self-abnegating human religion of X^2 (which we’ll see in the next issue) and suggests that the post-humans have abandoned the biological transhumanism of the X^2 mutant resistance.

Types of Societies Infographic:

This infographic reads very differently in the wake of Powers of X #5, suggesting a trans-universe taxonomy of intelligences, with each rung on the ladder thinking it’s the biggest and baddest out there, only to become fodder for the next higher up.

As people have noted, Xavier’s backup of mutant minds through Cerebro potentially puts Krakoa on the ladder, since they’re potentially far above the SI:1 (Machine) level if they ever combine the backups.

At the same time, we’ll see in future issues a number of biomachines - the eight-person long-distance communications system we see in Powers of X , the Five-person (or six-person, given the integral role that Xavier/Cerebro plays) resurrection system, the six-person Krakoan systems (Interface, Transit/Monitoring, Defense/Observation, Secondary/External, Overwatch/Data Analysis), and possibly the five-part Cerebro system - that would seem to be a parallel to the SI:10 (HIve) level of machine consciousness.

Similarly, Cerebro’s database of mutant minds (or the population of Krakoa) could potentially go straight up the chain from Intelligence (SI:100-10,000) to Phalanx (SI:1,000,000)...if the database was turned into a consciousness of its own following the uncommon Kree model, although that would seem to run counter to Krakoan taboos.

Speaking of my skepticism about the intellect of these machine consciousnesses, the deception at the heart of the Technarch (SI:10,000) and Phalanx relationship suggests that, on a universe-wide scale, the Technarchs seem to be rather mindless drones whose only purpose is providing resources to their masters.

One thing that’s slightly odd about Hickman’s description of the Worldmind (SI:100,000) is that, based on its descriptions here, it really should be a Type I Kardashev civilization rather than a Type II, since the line between I and II is planetary vs. solar system-wide energy usage/control.

A final note on the ambiguity of the suitor-alliance vs. consumption relationship - while the post-humans view Ascension as an alternative, this infographic describes Ascension as “consuming” for the purpose of “adding to its intelligence needs.” Either way, you’re just food for thought.