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zenosanalytic · 5 years

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Breaking The Wheel

A Summarized Analysis of the first three books of HoxPoX: House of X #1&2, and Powers of X #1

Ok so, I’ve been working on/thinking about this for awhile now, mostly because life just keeps interrupting and so I haven’t had the time to just sit down and finish it, but also partially cuz I’ve been struggling with the form I want to put it in. Honestly you could write multipage analyses of EACH of these books, as well as the Stuff they share and conflict over, but I’m going for something more condensed than that so that I can FINALLY move on to just reading the rest of the series! In later posts I’ll be getting into specific themes and instances of symbolism, but first I just want to get my basic observations&guesses abt the series(which everyone else has already read X|) down. So here we go:

Resurrection/Rebirth:

HoX#1 opens with the XMen emerging from some sort of plant-eggs. My guess(which is p much confirmed for me since I’ve read Excalibur #1) was that this is a resurrection. There’s a heavy cthonic tone to the whole Deal, and Xavier is visually placed in an ambiguously parental/godly role to the XMen as they emerge. Of course, in our culture resurrection and rebirth are heavily conflated and so the symbols INVOKING resurrection here --egg shapes, trees, chrysalises, golden light-- are all ALSO symbolic of fertility and rebirth and, as I love puns&multiple meanings, I absolutely think that’s important too. Beyond informing the action of the page, on a meta level this is obvsl also a powerful thesis & statement of intent for X Men, a long-running and hugely popular comic book property: a declaration of both reviving a moribund past, and the intention to do something new with it. The decision to bring back old costumes and classic art styles, and to center it on long-forgotten locations, plot points(like Krakoa itself), and typically overlooked or underwritten characters(like Moira McTaggart and Mystique’s supporting cast), absolutely suggests a dedication to this task, and the intention to accomplish it moving forward.

Cycles:

Related to this is the importance of repeating, “inescapable” Cycles to the work. HoX 1 moves from this scene of resurrection to scenes of planting and plant growth which cycle through both seasonal phases and phases of the day. HoX 1 then carries this forward by taking place over the COURSE of a single day.

PoX 1 repeats this with cycles of Time and information gathering: Mystique delivering the usb from Damage Control in (Year 10); Rasputin and Cardinal retrieving & delivering information from The Nexus in Year 100; The Librarian trying to recover information from Cylobel(a mutant bred, rebelled, then captured by the sentinels), now part of the Mutant Library, in Year 1000. This is supported subtly in the art of all three books(but made explicit in the opening scenes of PoX 1 where Moira meets Xavier) through cycles of color: Green/Teal, Gold, and Purple. The symbolic meaning of the colors are various and contextual, I’ll get more into it later, but the basic foundation seems to be Green=Naivety/Beginnings/Ambiguity, Gold=Power/Knowledge, Purple=Death/Endings/Rebirths. PoX 1 ends with Beginnings: The Librarian fondly regards an Eden-like Zoo for what remains of “pure-strain” homo sapiens, and Rasputin(a mutant freedom fighter in Year 100) delivers her information just as Mystique did in the first section after the introduction of the book.

Hox 2 continues and solidifies the pattern of cycles. It ends were PoX 1 began: with Moira and Xavier’s meeting at the fair(a mobius double helix reach around, perhaps :p). It begins with Moira’s birth and a recounting of her first, entirely human, life. It continues through the cycles of her lives and deaths as she grapples with her Groundhog Day existence(a personal struggle which parallels and microcosms the larger struggle within humanity over mutation), which in a tenuous way seems to be narratively structured around the stages of grief. First she isn’t aware&trying to understand what’s happening(denial), then out of resentment of what she has lost from her first life, she rejects mutation and tries to “cure” it(anger), then seeks coexistence, and increasingly tenuous proposition over lifetimes(bargaining), before giving up in despair and wallowing in mutually destructive conflict(depression). The color symbolism is retained: The sickbed where her resurrection powers manifest is bathed in gold light, her first human childhood surrounded by naive greens, with the death/rebirth of her 2nd life gestated in wombly fuschias, and continued with a pink-purple dress in her 2nd toddlerhood. The sentinels, the mechanical agents of death throughout her lives, are purple, as ever.

However, HoX 2 ultimately struggles against, and seeks to subvert, the cycles even as it repeats them, suggesting to me that Escape is the ultimate endpoint of the series. While HoX&PoX 1 are told from within the cycles, HoX 2 is an outside recounting of them. At least one of Moira’s lives seems to be missing, likely hidden, and the end of another is obscured in eternal war. Moira breaks the 4th wall to discuss her mutation, and it’s impact directly with the audience; literally displaying her ability and desire to break out of the cycles. Her actions within each cycle are either to carry information between them, or motivated by what she’s learned from previous ones, thereby breaking the boundaries btw them and flattening out the cycles into a single linear narrative. In fact by the time of the series, by her 10th life, ending the violent cycles of her lives and deaths(and thus, the cycles of intrahuman conflict over mutation) is Moira’s declared and explicit goal(and HoX2 presents the series as the story of Moira). Her 10th life is canonically either her last or second to last life. In the “stages of grief” model, the last stage is “acceptance”; synthesizing and integrate one’s grief and loss into a new, healthy life. Both narratively and thematically, HoX 2 positions HoXPoX as a Dune-scaled epic narrative; not as the story of a particular conflict, but as a Historical narrative; as the story of structural patterns of behavior reinforced by instinctive dispositions, repeated throughout time, and one attempt to escape them for something better.

Ambiguity:

The narrative takes the point of view, and thus also the side, of the mutants, but that isnt to say it presents the mutants as unquestionably the “good guys”, or the human-AI alliance as necessarily the “bad guys”. While the forces of ~Human Purity~ and supremacy, those rejecting the shared humanity of mutants(Orchis: a mega organization of Marvel’s secret societies&black-ops orgs), are clearly presented as fascist, both visually and narratively, supremacist talk ALSO abounds on the mutant side which, when combined with trophically sinister visual cues suggests the mutant-nationalist sepratist project contains its own dangerous contradictions(further lampshaded by setting one of the major plots of HoX 1 in Israel, thus drawing parallels btw the two). Meanwhile the AIs, who carry out the Purists’ genocidal campaign, are presented as a sort of blameless technological inevitability; aware of the wrongness of what they do, and yet unable to stop doing it due to their programming. In this way, I suspect, they are meant to act as a commentary on the mutant-non-mutant conflict itself; on the way in which humans(both mutant and non) are primed to reject each other as fully human by both instinctive impulse and cultural structures emphasizing competition-based interpretations of evolution. I suspect this is even further and more directly lampshaded in the series at two points: In HoX#1 with discussion of “the cro-magnon problem”, and in HoX#2 through Moira’s off-hand reference to this idea in her 4th life(when she first decides to give Xavier and coexistence a shot). The idea both times that other homo species were “wiped out” by competition with Homo sapiens because they SEEM to no longer exist, but this is a false conclusion. In rreality genetic studies show significant admixture of the other homo branches within the sapiens line. The reality of pre-historical hominid interaction wasn’t genocide, but synthesis. The inability to conceive of this(in other words, the inability to conceive of all homo sapiens as equally human, and mutants as a new evolutionary stage; the drive to cling to “ethnic purity”) is, I believe, the core problem the series will posit drives human&mutant conflict, which needs to be gotten past in someway. Obvsl this guess could be wrong.

Alright that’s the first post on my read through of the first 3 books. Like I said I’ll be posting more detailed analysis later.

#Marvel #HoXPoX #HoX 1 #HoX 2 #PoX 1 #X Men #Hickman et al #analytic posts

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