How many times does stuff like this happen. Not just when writers back-track on their decisions and make it known in the story, but when characters suddenly have different beliefs for a major arc then return to what they were before afterwards.
Pic is how Charles would've been at the begining of the Krakoa story, not the end.
>Blame Hickman and his compulsion to write his characters in a specific way.
So he's a Mark Millar, no wonder I couldn't get into Krakoa from the start
How many times does stuff like this happen. Not just when writers back-track on their decisions and make it known in the story, but when characters suddenly have different beliefs for a major arc then return to what they were before afterwards.
Pic is how Charles would've been at the begining of the Krakoa story, not the end.
This isn't that out of character. Moira in HoXPoX mentions that she had to "break" Xavier to convince him to make Krakoa. Even then, Xavier still had the bright idea to bring on Sinister even though he betrays them in every timeline.
Moira post HoxPoX is an OC who just shares a name with a classic X-man character. I wouldn't be surprised if they at some point reveal THIS Moira comes from some other timeline where she and Proteus were switched, so she was the reality-bending mutant and he was the human
>Why do writers have characters lie in stories only for the truth to be revealed in the third arc
At the start of Krakoa Xavier goes to Namor to invite him on board, and Namor tells him to try again when he actually believes in what he's doing.
You can criticise having Xavier give up and suddenly change course in the first place, but the idea that Xavier's went with Krakoa because he broke rather than believing in it has come up a few times across the era.
Because the writers are hacks and this is what the call course correcting. They saw their shit was not doing well and now are writing that the story is changing direction to see if fans like that.
It's what happens when there is no editor to speak of.
Bro I can't believe the writers would would default to giving Professor X his most well-known and iconic personality traits instead of the ones invented entirely for this single arc. How dare they un-derail his characterization?!
This storyline always has to have an unsatisfying wrap up to get back to status quo, but some dumb 90's twist that Xavier was an imposter or being kind controlled would have been better than this.
So do they just never explain his evil grins, forbidding monologues and creepy body language from the start of this storyline? Xavier didn't "bend", he completely bought into this shit from the start.
Not really. At best it got folded into Hickman's overall plans for the Dominions, with the Super Dominion fricking with the X-men being revealed to be the original Sinister given a robot upgrade and with Omega Sentinel and Nimrod his willing servants. No talk of what's going on with any of the rest of it, like what'll happen to the overwritten Karima Shapandar after this, but all indications are that they'll just ignore/drop it altogether.
Nimrod/Omega Sentinel's endgoal is kill everyone, human and mutant, on Earth to summon a Dominion and merge with it. But the Dominion Omega Sentinel wants to summon is really Nathan Essex, who manipulated Sinister's save scum machine based off of using Moira clones, to achieve Dominion status and cut a deal with Moira to have her become a "Titan" inside of his "Dominion" (meaning she's part of Essex but retains free will) because by achieving Godhood via save scumming, Essex is locked into a paradox situation existing outside time and space but only able to access Earth 616 and not the entire multiverse and needs Moira to do some unknown task to grant him access to the multiverse like a true Dominion. And that Xavier put something in Moira's head as a child when he failed to kill her that is now part of Essex, along with the fact that this ties into Destiny's prediction that Moira "will have ten lives, and the chance at an eleventh life if she makes the right decision in the end".
And as this is happening, Nimrod is summoning some sort of massive city-tier flagship warship called Sentinel City to destroy all life on Earth while Xavier may or may not have killed Rachel Summers (who kept him from killing Moira due to her point blank refusing to allow Xavier to erase Krakoa from existence as the simplest way to eliminate Essex) to send her to the White Hot Room to save Jean and the Phoenix, which is dying and is the only other option available to kill Essex while preserving Krakoa.
I tried reading this post and imaging it play out as a comic book story in my head and it just comes out as gibberish. Is this really the stage we're at with the X-Men? This is anime tiers of convoluted bullshit nonsense
That's actually the dumbed down version of it. I didn't mention the convoluted mess of HOW the Essex Dominion got power to achieve Dominion status or the shit in Dead X-Men.
2 months ago
Anonymous
who wrote this? This sounds like you need a fricking flowchart to slowly walk you through it
2 months ago
Anonymous
NTA but amusingly the comics did have flowcharts in them.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Hickman does tend to use charts as a crutch for weak storytelling in a lot of his books, and other x-men writers picked up on it to varying levels.
2 months ago
Anonymous
The thing is, it's several stories:
-Duggan has been writing the "mundane" stuff: X-Men vs Orchis, Nimrod trying to destroy all life, etc.
-Gillen (with some additions by Spurrier and Ewing) has been writing the more metaphysical stuff, with the mutants in the White Hot Room, Xavier and his team outside of time trying to prevent Enigma*.
-Foxe is writing the Dead X-Men stuff, which is kind of ancilliary to Gillen's but more focused on chasing a rogue Moira from one of her dead timelines.
*Because the other anon teased it:
Essex foresaw the rise of the "Machine Gods", and created a plan to become one himself.
He made 4 clones (3 of himself, one of his wife), and set them, unbeknownst to each other, to explore 4 different ways to ascend to Godhood:
-Mr Sinister through mutants
-Dr Stasis through human enhancement
-Orbis Stellaris through space technology
-Mother Righteous through magic
All of them achieved it in different timelines, but Essex's trap card activated each time, stealing their Godhoods and using them to become the most powerful Dominion, Enigma.
It sounds convoluted but it's not so much. We get half the reveal in the Sins of Sinister event, and the rest in the last issue of Immortal X-Men. And if the reaction in the storytime threads here is anything to go by, the setups and payoffs were well done and satisfying.
I'll admit tho, they're rushing through the end of the era, and that has affected the pacing a lot in this last leg of it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I'm sorry but it still sounds like convoluted garbage. When you make the plot of Avengers Forever look simplistic you're gone too far
I tried reading this post and imaging it play out as a comic book story in my head and it just comes out as gibberish. Is this really the stage we're at with the X-Men? This is anime tiers of convoluted bullshit nonsense
The simplest explaination would be that Xavier is lying in the OP picture. He was all in when it looked like things were going well, with the orgies and the mind raping and the legs, but now they aren't its all crocodile tears about The Dream™ and how its everyone else's fault.
I want you to know that I wish I could draw anon, because I can see this so clearly. The glorious sunset, Cyclops and Jean slump-shouldered gazing out into the ocean, cyclops holding one leg limply by the ankle.
This is so blatantly not what Hickman was going for. We saw him made the most ominous fricking speeches, he didn't show an ounce of emotion as he talked about crashing the world economy or telepathically fricking every non-mutant on the planet. What a bunch of garbage. Is this how they're going to motivate the mutants being allowed in the US again? "We're sorry we did a bad thing!"
>"No." >Emma: "Yes." >"N- Yes...?"
It was stupid anyways because she's a known telepath and you'd have to be stupid not to wear psi blockers around the b***h, but the X-Men were even more open than usual about their wanton use of telepaths to change minds and shift opinions in this era. Fricking Monet went ballistic because someone dared to have anti-telepath countermeasures to prevent her from just trying to snatch information from a person's head.
And where exactly were they using telepathy to change the minds of people on a massive scale? Why didn’t they just mind control every country to accept them if they regularly did that?
Xavier admits to mind controlling everyone so they'll never launch a nuke. Even Beast mind controlled several dignitaries with plant notNanoviruses and Orchis used that against them to create an incident. Emma fought Tony to destroy and monopolize an anti-mind control chip so mutants weren't opposed in telepathic control. Orchis has anti-telepath measures from being ran by Sinisters & MODOK so it's probably only reason they're fodder villian so Xavier & Emma don't Cerebro jam/control them.
>If you don’t want to cure cancer don’t take their drugs
Which would have been believable had it not been for the X-men having a group specifically made to outright smuggle said drugs into the countries that turned them down specifically to enforce their control over the drug trade and by proxy all the humans taking them. So they literally won't accept you turning their "kindness" down that's being used to force nations to allow them to go wherever they want unhindered and with blanket diplomatic immunity.
And where exactly were they using telepathy to change the minds of people on a massive scale? Why didn’t they just mind control every country to accept them if they regularly did that?
Cause they don't need to control all the people, just take control of all the world leader's minds so that they're unable to launch any of their nuclear armaments unless Xavier wills it. At least, that's what they retconned in as the reason Xavier doesn't just make people stop being racist, cause he's basically holding the world hostage without their knowledge.
Oh noooooo mutants are helping people with cancer by smuggling in life saving drugs to people who want to use them! What horrible people, we have to murder every single mutant now!
No, not really, they were using the drug smuggling as an excuse to "conveniently" cart off the mutants IN said countries at the same time they were doing that. Which I'll preempt is something 100% in line with the X-men's stated mission, but there's zero altruism behind that. Besides, if they really thought it was that important that everyone gets their anti-cancer drugs, they'd be giving it away for free with no strings attached. The whole drug trade was a shitty political tool being used by a nation to basically blackmail the planet into forcing the planet to turn a blind eye to an island full of terrorists, and more importantly a shitty plot device to basically excuse away why the world would put up with the X-men doing whatever they wanted.
2 months ago
Anonymous
And what happened to that? They will retgone the magic drug plants? I don't follow X-men closely in ages. Everyone will be ok with having cancer back?
2 months ago
Anonymous
They've had MULTIPLE cancer cures from various individuals in the Marvel U for some time now. There's always been one super convenient or stupid reason or another why they weren't distributed though, so the mutant drugs weren't even unique in that respect.
well well well
Funny how Xavier and Doom are on the same wavelength now, supervillains with inflated egos.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I can't think of Doom as a villain ever since Valeria was born
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Funny how Xavier and Doom are on the same wavelength now
Honestly Doom is more likable. At least he's honest about who he is.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>They've had MULTIPLE cancer cures from various individuals in the Marvel U for some time now.
Wakanda has even considered using theirs as a bargaining chip with the west on occasion. Norman Osborn has a cure that he's weaponized against targets with healing factors.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Orchis sabotaged the drugs and made people who took them die, kill themselves, or go berserk.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>flood market with free drugs >everyone complains you're putting people out of jobs and crashing their economies
>ignore mutants suffering in oppressive countries >people b***h xmen are buttholes for turning blind eye to genocide
>humanity was held hostage with anticancer drugs for the last few years?
we're really going to pretend Richards, Stark, Pym, or even fricking Cho coulden't have taken care of that? But no, it's the mutant's fault they won't share their miracle cancer cure?
Also anon is saying "held hostage" but iirc all the countries had to do for the drugs was recognize Krakoa's sovereignty and even then I think the Marauders were getting it into those countries.
Also they didn't like Give people cancer which held hostage implies
They also had to give every Krakoan diplomatic immunity. Saying that the only way you get life-saving medication is to render their citizens functionally immune to all laws, enforcing a total monopoly on the drugs by literally destroying any possible competition, and operating criminal black markets to smuggle the drugs into nations that rejected the deal for the purpose of politically destabilizing them might not be "held hostage" but it's not exactly anything good.
Anon I hate to break it to you but not many of the villains who went to Krakoa had any form of redemption arc. Apocalypse is the one who did, and I think it was successful. Sinister ended up being as bad as before or worse, Shaw and Selene instantly tried to oust Xavier when he showed weakness,Omega Red was caught in like three waves of being fricked over and the rest mostly just collaborated with the "heroes" because they were all doing the same horrendous shit now.
Ironically by far the best Krakoa idea was making sure Sabretooth was in no way interested in joining them, kept being the same butthole he's always been, and fricking off from Krakoa with his crew. That book raised a lot of extremely good point about putting every mutant into a pressurecooker and turning up the heat.
Poccy didn't have an arc, he had a retcon.
Everyone was given clean slate blanket pardon and your behaviour after joining Krakoa defined you. So people like Selene, Fenris twins, etc. were still bad apples, Sabretooth kept being a murdering scumbag even if he got fricked over by Hickman’s hamfisted storytelling. Apocalypse meanwhile worked entirely in favour of Krakoa and wasn’t evil. Most other villains either worked for Krakoa without being evil or backstabbing Krakoa or just chilled and did nothing villainous.
Redemption was largely happening with people who worked to make Krakoa work without sabotaging the nation. So Sebastian Shawn was not redeemed but he never pretended to be anything except self serving individual, Greycrow had redemption through his service to Krakoa, Omega Red similarly achieved redemption by being a team player after being released from control that forced him to follow orders, etc.
The two of you are using different definitions of redemption.
>and operating criminal black markets to smuggle the drugs into nations that rejected the deal for the purpose of politically destabilizing them
Pretty sure your own government saying sorry we can’t save your life because we hate mutants too much is already doing that.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>let me commit any crime I want or I'll keep life saving medicine from dying people >also you can't make your own life saving medication
Honestly my main issue with the setup is that the entire world seeming goes along with Krakoa's claim that drugs work when the era didn't even last long enough for half the claimed effects to be tested.
Was the Wakanda thing also Hickman? I remember he portrayed Wakanda as a real douchebag nation and got them genocided by Atlantis. Pretty funny just before Black panther released
This is why real world politics and comic books don’t mix. They’ll pile on every stupid idea and ridiculous contrivance that distort the world into a caricture of itself but god forbid the muggles every get so much as a lick of any of these wonders.
Yeah it's always been some sort of contrived fantasy that offers no real solution due to it being highly contrived from the get go. An example would be like giving a mutant an ability to perceive time faster than others so she's actually 35 years old in her mind and mannerisms but in reality her physical body is still that of a 5 year old. And she wants to have alot of sex because by the time she is of age, she'd be a dementia-ridden geriatric in a 18 year old's body. So the question becomes about the consent of minors despite it being convoluted from the get go. That's it, that's the kind of philosophical cases X-men puts forth.
And Hickman was always the main issue with the Krakoa era being bas. Glad we could establish that. Now that it’s ending we can go back and mostly ignore Hickman’s writing. Just like we did with his Avengers.
Anon don't be a moron. Hickman literally has Xavier take off the spooky helmet and give a speech to the world about how he still loves humanity specifically so that the reader knows he's not a brainwashed copy of himself.
I remember in storytimes when House of X was coming out that before that moment, people were genuinely convinced that Professor X had been switched out with the Maker, and all this Krakoa stuff was one big Maker ruse. It took that moment of Professor X taking off the helmet for readers to finally drop the theory
Krakoa was always a compromise between three competing visions of the mutant future. Otherwise we have to reconcile that Xavier was somehow okay with the ritualized murder arena or the endless torture pit
The gladiator pit was there to disincentive people, especially depowered mutants, from killing themselves so that they could get resurrected and have powers again. Because the queue was already enormous due to Genosha alone.
On paper. In actual practice and likely writer's intent, it was a very explicit form of indoctrination both for the depowered mutants and the people watching it. Like, shit, Aero's own family was literally holding back Cannonball as he was struggling to watch his own sister get beaten to death in front of a live cheering audience. That kind of glorification of mutant violence would absolutely do the opposite of disincentivizing mutants from killing themselves.
>That kind of glorification of mutant violence would absolutely do the opposite of disincentivizing mutants from killing themselves.
Not really because they don’t just KO you with one bunch. It’s an actual trial of combat where you’re beaten up and you have to show you don’t just want to die easily. Most people wouldn’t want to undergo that.
And it’s super funny how people now just whine about orgies and the pit but nobody says anything about the cultish resurrection process that had far more emphasis.
>Most people wouldn’t want to undergo that.
Oh yeah they would. In New Mutants, a girl who was mutilated by her powers emerging outright begs Dani Moonstar to kill her in the Crucible under the belief she'd get her original body back. And in Nightcrawler's book, he gets begged by another mutant to kill her in the Crucible as well on the grounds he'd have done it in a more painless fashion. Fact is, the X-men books have long equated a mutant's worth to their powers (despite any evidence to the contgrary), and that only with said powers can they be considered a mutant, so the idea that they wouldn't want to undergo literal death to get their powers back, especially when the X-men have so thoroughly convinced the populace of Krakoa that death has no purpose that the teens were literally killing themselves for laughs to quote unquote "pop their death cherry"...
Yeah. They'd probably stab a goddamn baby if it would return their powers. The X-men and all the civvie mutants have become very fricked up like that.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Again, you don’t just step in and get killed. It isn’t as simple as that. That doesn’t automatically earn your death or resurrection. It’s one thing to say you want it, it’s another thing to actually undergo the process to the end.
You’d think you knew that considering how much this place is full of posers.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Again, as we've seen in the actual books, there are in fact a number of people who would allow themselves to be brutally beaten to death for the chance at getting their powers back.
Hell, you don't even need to take my word for it that the Crucible is a fricked up indoctrination ceremony, Si Spurrier outright lays it out for the readers in the same book he shows said mutant begging Kurt to explain why he didn't essentially euthanize them in favor of Magneto's murderous torture session.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Your own words show that the methods being used (murderous torture session) are dissuading mutants from just getting jumping in to be killed to get their powers back
2 months ago
Anonymous
I take it you just ignored the part where it accurate notes >Crucible is therefore billed as offering a measure of dignity to one who seeks death and reincarnation
Again, actual children were trying to enter the damn thing despite knowing they were being beaten to death with no hope of being able to actually survive.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>one example
I'm sure there are outliers in every commonly held belief or way of thinking; don't confuse them for the majority
2 months ago
Anonymous
>that doesn't count cause uh it just doesn't
Fine. Here's a second one. One that makes it clear that neither the mutant in question nor Nightcrawler sees it as a fight among equals but a glorified suicide pact to be given the privilege of being whole again. So yeah, again, this shit doesn't discourage death, it's outright telling the populace to embrace it at large via the glorification of it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I never said it doesn't count, don't pretend to confuse my words to suit yourself
2 months ago
Anonymous
The point is to not stop anyone doing it. It’s to stop people from killing themselves and abusing the resurrection system. Brutality of the crucible is there to also disincentivise people from going from that route, but obviously some will still do it and bear it and in such cases they will get resurrection. It’s a society where death doesn’t exist anymore. So of course it’s going to be a bit fricked up when you want to stop people from just not caring about death at all.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Well, as the story shows, the Crucible and all their attempts to stop people from acting like death has no meaning absolutely failed. And shit, the fact that the Crucible all but guarantees that you've got the top spot in the the resurrection queue if you can endure the hazing ritual of a brutal beating means there's no downsides.
Society right now tells kids they can’t frick, drink booze, drive, enlist in the military, work dangerous jobs (although republicans are pretty keen to reverse that now), etc. until they’re old enough to be considered old enough to make such decisions themselves. You are not making any kind of a proper argument, you’re just ranting about something being bad.
>you’re just ranting about something being bad
Yes? Are you arguing otherwise, anon?
2 months ago
Anonymous
It didn’t fail. If it had people would just commit suicide all the time or the crucible would have island long lines, which it didn’t have.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>If it had people would just commit suicide all the time
Actually, Way of X showed that the teens were turning their deaths into a sport, outright nicknaming it "popping the death cherry". And we see an example of it when Pixie decides to get her head shotgunned off to impress her friends after hearing them unironically goad her into doing it while talking about how much of a rush they felt from their own deaths.
2 months ago
Anonymous
How do you write this? How does an editor see this and think it's okay? HOW IS THIS A MAINSTREAM SUPER HERO COMIC BOOK! This is so offensively stupid and bad I can't believe it's real. This feels like a joke someone makes parodying comic book death.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Si Spurrier was an edgelord even before this series, anon.
But yeah, now we have to live in a reality where canonically the original Pixie happily committed genocide so she could be replaced by a clone.
I think that's the most fricked up thing that's been in a canon Marvel book in a long fricking time.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I mean I've seen some dumb shit in mainstream comics. I've seen Carol get raped by her future son to give birth to him. I've seen Spider-man make a deal with the devil. I've seen a lot. But the X-men turning into a sect of death worshipping suicide cultists who tell teens to blow their own heads off with SIC MOVE BRO is just .. I can't even process this.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>It's a fanbase mostly made up of people who never read X-Men before and jumped in with hoX/PoX because of the hype around Hickman
This shit pisses me off because it's unquantifiable no true scotsman shit. People can like the same old X-Men comics you do and also Krakoa.
[...]
and Nightcrawler's there supporting them even!!!
Nightcrawler should be waking up in a cold sweat every night for the rest of his life with the image of Pixie laughing as she gets her head blown to chunks etched in his mind.
2 months ago
Anonymous
How do you write this? How does an editor see this and think it's okay? HOW IS THIS A MAINSTREAM SUPER HERO COMIC BOOK! This is so offensively stupid and bad I can't believe it's real. This feels like a joke someone makes parodying comic book death.
Krakoa is where mutants became everything that sodom and gomorrah had with all of its sodomy included.
A literal Republic of Mutant Weimar.
And still this shit wont end with them learning that all they did all of the hedonistic shit only fueled mankind's hatred against them thanks to Chuck.
X men returning to status quo constantly is dumb why do you guys care still? It always happens
Because marvel gave the new status quo you homosexuals wanted it, and it turned out to be every shit Marvel Humans warned what mutants would do.
And made it even worse to a point shit like Orchis had to be made to stop it, instead of Chuck coming to his senses .
2 months ago
Anonymous
Poor Kurt. Imagine dealing with this shit as a Catholic.
2 months ago
Anonymous
"Poor Kurt" who spends all of Way of X seeing the other mutants he hung out with and was friends with descending into a spiral of hedonistic nihilism and doesn't do or say anything in the end, just wrings his hands and says maybe he should start a mutant branch of religion and maybe that'll help.
2 months ago
Anonymous
A mutant branch of a religion without any real dogma, practice or ethical framework beyond "its nice to be nice" where the priesthood ALSO doubles as the society's police force, enforcing laws that are intentionally vague enough to allow anything (and which don't apply to the upper classes anyway) was certainly a choice.
Incidentally, the Catholic Church has quite a bit of teaching on cloning and oddly enough they aren't fans. They particularly aren't fans of creating a clone to replace someone who died, as the clone I'd considered its own person, like a twin, so has its own inherent dignity and deserves a chance to live its own life.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I hate Way of X so much. So fricking much.Si Spurrier went straight to the top of the shit pile for me next to Duggan
2 months ago
Anonymous
Its so strange, because I really liked his Legion book (and others things he's written going all the way back to his Games Workshop stuff) and this certainly seems to have been pitched as a continuation of that. Way of X was just so shallow compared to what I know he can do. I think it was hamstrung by the fact that (a) the new characterisation of Kurt as all on board for Krakoa from the get go (especially the baby making) and on the ruling council with the psychos curtailed character development (b) the series wasn't long enough to tell the story properly, so it zoomed ahead to "and then we banished the bad vibes ghost and all was good" without building a solid enough foundation to justify itself (c) the series wasn't going to cause any major changes to the new status quo, so there's no payoff to the "wow, our society is fricked up" commentary (d) Spurrier seems to have wanted to write another Legion book, so the Nightcrawler bits are undercooked and tacked on. All you have left is a couple of weak adventures, an even weaker "solution" to the problems that boils down to "let's join hands and sing kumbaya" like a wet blanket vicar's response to church child abuse allegations, and some plot threads that to be followed up on with varying degrees of success.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Did Spurrier do X-Force during Krakoa? The two X-books I felt he worked on where Legion and X-Force and both have a very different kind of tone than Way of X. But yeah I see what you mean about the plot tying him down
2 months ago
Anonymous
Was there even a reason why the Crucible had to be some gladiatorial thing rather than a medical waiting list? I never really understood that.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Cause Apocalypse decided to do it that way and nobody had the guts to tell him to stop. Nor did they ever dismantle it even after En Sabah Nurr left to go back to his wife, they just handed it off to Silver Samurai and never really talked about it again.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I take it you just ignored the part where it accurate notes >Crucible is therefore billed as offering a measure of dignity to one who seeks death and reincarnation
Again, actual children were trying to enter the damn thing despite knowing they were being beaten to death with no hope of being able to actually survive.
Oh, yeah, there was a reason I stopped reading X-men. They did kind of turn into an insane literal cult there for a while, huh?
2 months ago
Anonymous
"for a while"
It's still going until july. it's been five years
2 months ago
Anonymous
And they didn’t actually allow kids to enter, you fricking idiot. Kids want to do all kinds of stupid shit irl and the adults in the room are always similarly saying no you can’t.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I don't know about you, but any society where an adult has to explicitly tell the kids that they can't enter a suicide arena to look pretty again is a fricked up one that probably shouldn't be doing that to begin with
2 months ago
Anonymous
Society right now tells kids they can’t frick, drink booze, drive, enlist in the military, work dangerous jobs (although republicans are pretty keen to reverse that now), etc. until they’re old enough to be considered old enough to make such decisions themselves. You are not making any kind of a proper argument, you’re just ranting about something being bad.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Where in the Hell did they find braces in GIANT FRICKING HORROR SHOW size?
2 months ago
Anonymous
She got disfigured by her own powers. She already had the braces when her power activated, and they were affected too.
2 months ago
Anonymous
So the process actually dealt with the problem of people just intentionally killing themselves in hopes of getting resurrected and the handful of people who go through the crucible actually earned their right to get at the head of the line while most people can’t go through it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>the hoi polloi
2 months ago
Anonymous
What's wrong with saying "hoi polloi", anon?
2 months ago
Anonymous
It's a dismissive statement used to disparage those you deem the mindless masses of people who don't matter to you. It is not a phrase used by people whoa re the good guys.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Damn you mean Dr Nemesis, who worked with nazis, might be at best an butthole?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Ironically, that's perfectly inline of how mutants see non-mutants, they just don't want to admit it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>From the Desk of Doctor Nemesis
Like, if it was Storm or Pre-shittified Beast or Cyke saying it, I'd understand the concern. But even when he isn't a fricking Nazi, Nemesis is an Assbandit.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Putting "the" in front of "hoi polloi" outs you as hoi polloi somewhat ironically.
If you want to be pretentious at least do your homework.
2 months ago
Anonymous
This man was a literal, actual, willing Nazi. He was going to nerve gas the US for Hitler.
2 months ago
Anonymous
You're not as smart as you think you are bro
2 months ago
Anonymous
They really did turn them into the Inhumans, didn't they? That's basically how they feel about terrigenesis
On paper. In actual practice and likely writer's intent, it was a very explicit form of indoctrination both for the depowered mutants and the people watching it. Like, shit, Aero's own family was literally holding back Cannonball as he was struggling to watch his own sister get beaten to death in front of a live cheering audience. That kind of glorification of mutant violence would absolutely do the opposite of disincentivizing mutants from killing themselves.
Krokoa is fundamentally and in all ways the literal worst
Everybody called bullshit on this page when this issue released, because it was so abrupt as an out to Xavier's shitty behavior and the behavior of his peers and it came completely out of nowhere, since we heard almost no pushback or grumbling from the mindjacking of diplomats, the destruction of Terra Verde, exploiting Mysterium to be used as leverage in the galactic economy, taking Mars for mutants, Xavier erasing part of Reed's mind all because he found a way to mask the X-gene, etc.
I like the stream of tears pouring out of just one of his eyes. Really sells the whole "oh woe is me, I willingly colluded with murderers and supremacists" thing.
It's crazy to me that they were reminding everyone about the Ultimate universe at the same time that they wanted you to ignore Xavier cosplaying as The Maker (for no reason I guess).
The irony in this is it's extremely in line with Claremont's reinvention of Magneto with the holocaust survivor background since his inspiration was Zionists and not Malcolm X like all the casuals claim. Menachem Begin in particular. A lot of Magneto's views make a lot more sense when you're aware of that
I miss the classic mentor who may have been forced to do some things he regrets but ultimately had his heart and morals in the right place. When did it truly go so wrong? It feels like between Deadly Genesis and all that crap in Whedon's run that the X-office has been determined to vilify chuck to make other characters look better
Aren’t pretty much all Marvel “heroes” ethically compromised now? They’re all a bunch of jerks to the point that Wolverine and Deadpool are the ones pointing it out.
Thing, Captain America, Beta Ray Bill, Silver Surfer, Nova, from off the top of my head. Wolverine and Deadpool have body counts higher than most Marvel villains and have done extremely unscrupulous shit in their lives, the former actually having innocent blood on his hands, so they don't have any room to talk on that front.
Bah. It's a cycle at this point. Just need the right writer to come along and completely deconstruct him from his fall, and build him back up by giving opportunity for facets of his character to shine through until, ultimately, he is reconstructed. It's not easy, but it can be done.
>a property of Marvel/Disney.
So he'll become a hermit and reclusive shell of his former self, until he's found by an even more powerful double omega telepath who berates him for being white, and he grovels at her feet.
Goddamn you gays have a serious persecution complex
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Stop pointing out shit that happens repeatedly!
2 months ago
Anonymous
I'd tell you to stop being a b***h and man up but that seems to be your only setting
>a property of Marvel/Disney.
So he'll become a hermit and reclusive shell of his former self, until he's found by an even more powerful double omega telepath who berates him for being white, and he grovels at her feet.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Xavier isn't an omega, tourist
2 months ago
Anonymous
NTA but odd that is what you chose to refute.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I can't refute things that never happened, Anon
2 months ago
Anonymous
Xavier isn't omega. The mary-sue that would find him in this scenario would be Double Omega Super Saiyan X.
2 months ago
Anonymous
The only omega telepath isn't special enough already?
anyone got that page where Brand thinks mutants and their homosexual superior hype are completely moronic, because they're just another flavor of Earthling
[...]
anyone got that page where Brand thinks mutants and their homosexual superior hype are completely moronic, because they're just another flavor of Earthling
Yeah but that's framed as her being a villain, so her character is basically fricked now if she even makes it past the ending to Krakoa
I hate these talking head panels. I feel like this should be one large discussion with more dramatic framing and stuff happening instead of some MTV real world crap.
At least the Magneto one bothers to give it a bit more flavor sorry with him eating during it. Though monologing while eating is something you can only get away with in comics.
>All this shit Xavier says.
How about he taught mutants to be decent people and use their powers responsibly without being dicks? Especially fricking telepaths.
I bet that if Spider-Man had a bunch of mutant kids under his wing, then he'd make them into heroes far greater than the X-Men are.
I blame Star Trek TNG. I realize that Counselor Troi isn't really the same kind of telepath. But she was still useless. >Enemy shop bombards Enterprise with heavy fire >I'm sensing great hostility, Jean Luke
Kirk wouldn't have needed his therapist in hand holding range is all I'm saying.
Dominions aren't any more interesting or threatening than any of the other huge and epic cosmic threats. It's basically Knull without the edgy bullshit surrounding it and more wank
It's ending nowadays but the fanbase is divided on it. There's the side talking about how it betrays basically everything the X-Men is about with everyone being comically evil while there's deadhard supporters who love it for the power fantasy angle along with "it's not another mutant genocide at the mansion" story.
>It's ending nowadays but the fanbase is divided on it.
The fanbase didn't do anything. The people who claim to like this shit aren't the fanbase. They don't buy books.
Love how this board spent several years jerking off to the Hickman hype and only now when it’s ending people suddenly are pulling a 180 and saying it was terrible. Every time with you people. It’s like clockwork
Like 95% of discussion was hype, especially early on. Barely any criticism or complaints. And until last week nobody was making KRAKOA SUCKS AND ALWAYS DID threads.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Krakoa has been controversial from the start and on Cinemaphile especially
2 months ago
Anonymous
This kind of trolling is so moronic, this board has hated krakoa for the last 3 years
It is but everyone makes it out to be a binary and how you misunderstand the X-Men if you tire of it. It's not like I think discrimination can't be a topic the X-Men should tackle, I just don't see why it's a choice between ethnonationalism and mutant genocide stories.
>It's ending nowadays but the fanbase is divided on it.
The fanbase didn't do anything. The people who claim to like this shit aren't the fanbase. They don't buy books.
Even if you think that, you know I'm right about how Krakoa's fans see the era.
Love how this board spent several years jerking off to the Hickman hype and only now when it’s ending people suddenly are pulling a 180 and saying it was terrible. Every time with you people. It’s like clockwork
I thought it was an interesting idea when I thought it was going to be a criticism of the idea. It wasn't really besides a few spots
It'd be controversial but personally I think mutants need to be decoupled from the allegory. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing they should drop discrimination as a topic but we've long since had enough characters from different backgrounds to actually address this stuff than how it's typically handled. This would also make the status of mutants more flexible since they aren't tied down by some nebulous concept of discrimination. I think it'd allow more freedom in both directions in the kinds of stories you can tell.
[...]
Personally I avoided any Krakoa discussion because I found the concept offputting and the fans too aggressive.
Yeah, I think the concept works a lot better when you treat being a mutant as a completely fictional thing on top of their background. Then you can be dynamic with it since the X-Men could actually have tangible victories with acceptance (and even failures). You can still explore "otherness" with mutants and I think everyone wins with that kind of direction. People overthink it
i think it would be more straightforward to get some of the mutants off of planet earth and give them shit to do in outer space
Forge should lead a team of cyborgs and A.I., he could do missions for hospital planet where sentient life shares medical and engineering knowledge. Forge, Danger, Deathlok, Douglock and even Vision could be on a team
2 months ago
Anonymous
The last time there was a team or robots, it didn't go well.
As a slow /shelf/ gay who doesn't care for X-men beyond claremont/morrison, is there any chance the Krakoa stuff would fit in an omnibus or two? the concepts discussed itt are interesting but until it's collected in an accessible format i'm not touching it
From what I've gather, the interesting part is the ethical dilemmas it asks but the Krakoa saga answers them all in the most trite highschool-tier philosophy that it doesn't push through any line of profoundness because they can never accept the fact that the prejudice the mutants face are well-founded and justified. And creating a military and state power structure behind that makes it worse.That's the answer some writers never want to accept because they can't divorce it from the exegesis of a civil rights movement.
A lot of the stuff Krakoa did was already done in works like Miracleman and Dune. That they managed to even get this far by trying any of those ideas in the rather confused mess that is the X-men is already a shocker in and of itself, but the fact there were people who unironically tried to excuse away the very visible flaws in the foundation of the framework of Krakoa that were begging to be questioned says that some people REALLY just wanted to see an "X-men but they're the winners" storyline without caring how they got it.
On some level, I empathize with those people because it's easy to understand why they feel that way. I don't think the next era's going to fix them or anything but I do think it'll put them in a better position for somebody to finally sort out the X-Men's shtick which was needed for awhile now.
I give it to the people who just wanted to see the X-men on top instead of on the run, most of them at least were honest about not giving a shit about the darker implications Hickman threw in for Krakoa and just wanting their old favorites back. But I do agree that even if it's not as daring as HoxPox, it's probably better in the long term to put the X-men into a less let's say 'ambitious' status quo for the time being so that writers can sort out where the X-men actually stand in the Marvel setting let alone their own stories.
Krakoa was never going to be anything except an era of experimentation before going back to the more classic way to do X-men.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I'm just hoping it means we'll be leaving the Decimation style status quo for good where the X-men were constantly worried about some kid sneezing means the entire mutant population is going to be Holocaust'd. I'm not going to get my hopes too up, mind, I don't have THAT much faith in Marvel. But it'd be nice to get away from that.
It'd be controversial but personally I think mutants need to be decoupled from the allegory. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing they should drop discrimination as a topic but we've long since had enough characters from different backgrounds to actually address this stuff than how it's typically handled. This would also make the status of mutants more flexible since they aren't tied down by some nebulous concept of discrimination. I think it'd allow more freedom in both directions in the kinds of stories you can tell.
Like 95% of discussion was hype, especially early on. Barely any criticism or complaints. And until last week nobody was making KRAKOA SUCKS AND ALWAYS DID threads.
Personally I avoided any Krakoa discussion because I found the concept offputting and the fans too aggressive.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I think if they actually remembered that most of the X-men characters are from different countries and with different life experiences, it'd help.
2 months ago
Anonymous
The idea of an artificial ethnostate where nobody shares anything beyond genes is super interesting. It's obviously most similar to Israel but then marvel also decided to not do anything to explore that concept because the Krakoa tiles almost universally only deal with the big famous characters. The idea that common people mutants who haven't been on an X-Team or with an evil mutant group or whatever, the regular schmoes, are just able to suddenly give up their thoughts about culture, ethnicity, religion, social class and what have you is really fascinating and should have been dealt with, but instead the only time we see mutants who declined to go the Krakoa they are just treated as idiots for it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>but instead the only time we see mutants who declined to go the Krakoa they are just treated as idiots for it
Reminds me of the time Whirlwind showed up and was asked why he'd turn down a free shot at paradise, and he gave probably the most logical answer in the entirety of the X-men books
2 months ago
Anonymous
2 months ago
Anonymous
Exactly. Like if you're not a character who has been swept up into the big race struggle your whole career what the frick does being a mutant mean to you? Do you automatically like another person more because he/she is a mutant? That's like saying you automatically like someone because they happen to have solid earlobes like you.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Wait, Whirlwinds entire reason for not going to Krakoa was because he thinks it's a bad idea for mutants to be living together? I feel like that's an entirely wrong reason to go about things. Them living together is incidental. It's that they are playing power games with nations that can't do anything about it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Whirlwind is a thug, anon. He doesn't give a shit about their lack of ethics and morals. All he knows is that the X-Men have a tendency to invoke the wrath of the heavens and he doesn't want to be there when it happens.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I think the concept works a lot better when you treat being a mutant as a completely fictional thing on top of their background. Then you can be dynamic with it since the X-Men could actually have tangible victories with acceptance (and even failures). You can still explore "otherness" with mutants and I think everyone wins with that kind of direction. People overthink it
2 months ago
Anonymous
that’s what I wanted. What it means to build a society. I wanted parliamentary politics and fights about whether people could bring their human, inhuman, or robot relatives. I wanted an adult story written for adults by adults.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I feel like there was a lot of missed potential for mutants with shitty powers but actual relevant experience in stuff needed to run a nation and trying to include them instead of it being just a popularity contest.
But honestly while I can blame the writers for not doing that, I know full well that stories like that wouldn't have sold no matter how well executed they were
2 months ago
Anonymous
>I feel like there was a lot of missed potential for mutants with shitty powers but actual relevant experience in stuff needed to run a nation
Man we needed an uprising story where the ordinary mutants of Krakoa rose up against the leadership. Call it Krakoa Vs X-Men or Mutants Vs X-Men or whatever to draw in the readers or whatever and finally address the social hierarchy that exists in X-Men stories.
If Inhuman Vs X-Men was considered good enough to draw in X-Men readers despite being designed to dunk on the latter, then it should be ok when the opponents have a sympathetic point. You can still have the popular A-list characters join the people.
2 months ago
Anonymous
From Utopia onwards the narrative of the X-books has been that the community leaders are the protagonists and everyone else is a good loyal soldier or an NPC, and anyone opposing or questioning the leaders was some kind of race traitor. In both the talent pool of writers and in the fandom, the environment just doesn't exist to create a story of a rebellion against the leadership where that rebellion has just motivations and a reasonable point.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Reminder that Storm lacks a formal education and what little education she might have received would have been a few years of self-directed education that ended prior to her adolescence. Despite being her native language, English would probably be her third language after Masri and a Bantu dialect. She probably reads and writes Arabic better than English.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Okay see THIS is the shit I want to actually see in X-Men. Not as the major theme or plot but just the emphasis on that these people are from different cultures and places and have very different views of life. Storm isn't going to respond to things like a bland average middle american, despite being originally born in the US. Logan grew up in the 1800s in a posh rich family, I wish they would actually use that for anything. Colossus and Illyana are country bumpkins from poor-ass bumfrick corner of Russia, they will have a hugely differing viewpoint on life than Betsy who is a literal posh British noblewoman. THAT is the kind of diversity I WANT to see. But it requires them to get some writers who understand that there's a world outside the US
2 months ago
Anonymous
Reminder that Storm lacks a formal education and what little education she might have received would have been a few years of self-directed education that ended prior to her adolescence. Despite being her native language, English would probably be her third language after Masri and a Bantu dialect. She probably reads and writes Arabic better than English.
They never bothered to find real teachers when it was just a school where clearly nobody took even the basics of a Safeguarding training course, so its par for the course really.
At least there were people on the Quiet Council with real world experience of running small countries and large commercial enterprises, like several time el Presidente Magneto, or Mr Sinister, or Apocalypse, or Sebastian Shaw... hmm. Seems to be a bit of a pattern there.
There's no return from Krakoa.Take that as a bad thing or a good thing. But the X-Men franchise will now always be affected it. The characters are going to be compared to their actions during this era by fan discussion for years and decades to come, and a lot of us will never be able to forget the fricked-up, disgusting shit that the writers put in there and then never had the guts to actually try to resolve.Way of X pretended as if Nightcrawler was finally going to step up and say something but ultimately nothing happened. It was a weak, flailing effort to try and acknowledge how fricked up and degeenrate Krakoan society was, and it only served to put extra attention to it.
And now these people, these FRICKING people who have held people hostage over cancer cures, mindwiped humans to agree to their politics, genocided entire human nations, threatened to crash the global economy, held ritual death games, put thousands and thousands of unwanted babies into the world are going to be back in the "real" world. And they're going to pretend like they can just go back to being superheroes. No, that isn't how it fricking works, you fricking buttholes. You ruined any likeability the X-Men characters had left. You dragged everyone through a stain of liquid shit and now you're not even trying to clean it. It's not enough to have Storm tell Xavier to frick off in the final year of Krakoa, it's not enough to have Xavier suddenly go all weepy and claim it wasn't his fault after all the garbage he stood by for or participated in.
If you wanted people to be able to sympathize with these buttholes in the future then HAVE THEM ACT LIKE FRICKING HEROES. Otherwise keep the island. Keep this setup. Because the characters are useless outside of it now. That is the thing that gets me the most, they ruined any hope for empathy for the cast and then they even take away the status quo where those personalities are acceptable.
They won't because Krakoa still has a large fanbase. It's a fanbase mostly made up of people who never read X-Men before and jumped in with hoX/PoX because of the hype around Hickman and the offer of a new "epic" status quo. From what I have seen observing the most rabid Krakoa fans on social media over the years, they aren't very concerned about things like character likeability and relatability because they treat it more like people who jumped into Game of Thrones. big sweeping story with awful people doing awful things to each other. And now just like GoT it has fallen into its own event horizon and just turned into steaming shit. But Marvel knows if they disown Krakoa then they will lose those readers and lose trade/collection sales and they will never do it. Not for something as unimportant as the soul of the X-Men franchise going forward.
>It's a fanbase mostly made up of people who never read X-Men before and jumped in with hoX/PoX because of the hype around Hickman
This shit pisses me off because it's unquantifiable no true scotsman shit. People can like the same old X-Men comics you do and also Krakoa.
How do you write this? How does an editor see this and think it's okay? HOW IS THIS A MAINSTREAM SUPER HERO COMIC BOOK! This is so offensively stupid and bad I can't believe it's real. This feels like a joke someone makes parodying comic book death.
>People can like the same old X-Men comics you do and also Krakoa.
Considering how much of what made the Old X-men work is spat in the face by Krakoa? No. No you can't. I refuse to believe anyone who's read any amount pf x-men for any amount of time can not only tolerate this filth but like it on top of that is bullshit. No.
I know you'll just call me a liar but they do exist. I'm at least one. Sorry.
[...]
Way of X is so fricking bad because with this framing, how can you expect this to be anything but a scatching renouncing of the way Krakoan society is going? Kurt is spiritual, he believes in greater purpose, and here he is exploring a society that has become materialistic and hedonistic to the extreme, where children commit suicide like a game, where basic empathy has become eroded.So what happens? You get a weak-ass limp-wristed ending with Kurt going "Maybe I should change things?" and the idea he'll start a mutant religion. And then it's over. And then it's barely even mentioned. So effectively, the only reason Spurrier wrote all this fricked-up shit was to get it on the page, get it out there for the shock value.
At least this is a critique of the book and not getting mad at shit that didn't happen.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>At least this is a critique of the book and not getting mad at shit that didn't happe
Thanks. I won't lie and pretend like I read every Krakoa book but this one I did read and I absolutely loathed it because it brought out all the dirtiest, most unpleasant ideas possible about Krakoan life, hung a big fat sign on them so you'd know they were there, and then ultimately didn't do anything to address them. Which game me the feeling that Kurt is too weak-willed or meek to even try to do anything even after seeing things that should freeze your piss. It's so disappointing and grimy and weak and it could have been so much more.
I'm a long time X-Men reader (since 1995) and I enjoyed seeing the Krakoa era because I enjoyed seeing villains team up with the heroes. It's my favorite trope, villains turn heroes. Mastermind working with X-Corp, Pyro with the Marauders, Apocalypse with Excalibur, the Hellions, Omega Red with X-Force, Storm showing the Arakko mutants a new path, Fenzy, Random, and the MLF with SWORD. I voted for Tempo to join the X-Men. I'm happy to see Juggernaut working with them again
I like Dragon Ball for the same reason; Vegita was comitting global genocide and selling planets for a living, now he's a family man. The Klingons signed a peace accord, even the Romulans play nice with the Federation. William the bloody was a soulless monster for centuries. Megamind. Venom. Zuko. Lex Luthor even joined the Justice League. Seeing a villain turn their life around is always a favorite of mine.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Hero/Villain team-ups can be fun but where Krakoa lost me is I see the X-Men as straight up villains during it. That's not the usual dynamic with those kinds of stories and I don't like it because I feel it goes against the message of the X-Men.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>I see the X-Men as straight up villains
And I don't.
2 months ago
Anonymous
That's cuz you're probably a homosexual
2 months ago
Anonymous
Anon I hate to break it to you but not many of the villains who went to Krakoa had any form of redemption arc. Apocalypse is the one who did, and I think it was successful. Sinister ended up being as bad as before or worse, Shaw and Selene instantly tried to oust Xavier when he showed weakness,Omega Red was caught in like three waves of being fricked over and the rest mostly just collaborated with the "heroes" because they were all doing the same horrendous shit now.
Ironically by far the best Krakoa idea was making sure Sabretooth was in no way interested in joining them, kept being the same butthole he's always been, and fricking off from Krakoa with his crew. That book raised a lot of extremely good point about putting every mutant into a pressurecooker and turning up the heat.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I disagree and I listed the villains I thought had arcs. I didn't mention Sinister, Shaw or Selene, because they didn't
2 months ago
Anonymous
>It's my favorite trope
You're full of shit
>It's my favorite trope, villains turn heroes.
So go read Thunderbolts and shut up
2 months ago
Anonymous
You have anger issues. Also, I did read Thunderbolts
2 months ago
Anonymous
Krakoa was more like heroes turning into despicable villains
2 months ago
Anonymous
That's cuz you're probably a homosexual
I love you, Anon. And I believe that even you could one day be an hero.
I mean I've seen some dumb shit in mainstream comics. I've seen Carol get raped by her future son to give birth to him. I've seen Spider-man make a deal with the devil. I've seen a lot. But the X-men turning into a sect of death worshipping suicide cultists who tell teens to blow their own heads off with SIC MOVE BRO is just .. I can't even process this.
Way of X is so fricking bad because with this framing, how can you expect this to be anything but a scatching renouncing of the way Krakoan society is going? Kurt is spiritual, he believes in greater purpose, and here he is exploring a society that has become materialistic and hedonistic to the extreme, where children commit suicide like a game, where basic empathy has become eroded.So what happens? You get a weak-ass limp-wristed ending with Kurt going "Maybe I should change things?" and the idea he'll start a mutant religion. And then it's over. And then it's barely even mentioned. So effectively, the only reason Spurrier wrote all this fricked-up shit was to get it on the page, get it out there for the shock value.
Way of X's greatest sin was it being a complete softball of a look at Krakoa that got blown out of the water by the Sabretooth minis in terms of self-critique. In the end the most effective moment in the entire book is the painting of a dickless, ball-less, crucified Nightcrawler, because that was an actual call out.
Whirlwind is a thug, anon. He doesn't give a shit about their lack of ethics and morals. All he knows is that the X-Men have a tendency to invoke the wrath of the heavens and he doesn't want to be there when it happens.
Shit, if the Sentinels ever tore through Manhattan to take their shot at him he's got a decent chance of the Avengers showing up to save his ass.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Way of X's greatest sin was it being a complete softball of a look at Krakoa that got blown out of the water by the Sabretooth minis in terms of self-critique. In the end the most effective moment in the entire book is the painting of a dickless, ball-less, crucified Nightcrawler, because that was an actual call out.
Oh my god thank you for agreeing with me. That series SHOULD have been the hard-hitting "What the FRICK are you doing" expose of Krakoa turning into a shithole. Instead it took the actual villains in the Exiles to take that stand.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Krakoa lacked conflict that it should have had. The X-men fighting with each over parliamentary debates would have been awesome.
>and Nightcrawler's there supporting them even!!!
Nightcrawler is trying to stop her on that very page anon. It's what kickstarts his crisis of faith for the arc.
[...]
Way of X is so fricking bad because with this framing, how can you expect this to be anything but a scatching renouncing of the way Krakoan society is going? Kurt is spiritual, he believes in greater purpose, and here he is exploring a society that has become materialistic and hedonistic to the extreme, where children commit suicide like a game, where basic empathy has become eroded.So what happens? You get a weak-ass limp-wristed ending with Kurt going "Maybe I should change things?" and the idea he'll start a mutant religion. And then it's over. And then it's barely even mentioned. So effectively, the only reason Spurrier wrote all this fricked-up shit was to get it on the page, get it out there for the shock value.
I think the issue was a lack of central direction across the titles. A lot of the different titles tackled the issues of Krakoa and had characters express dissatisfaction, but it could never be paid off in any way that affected the larger status quo. So you just had characters condemn the problems and then wash their hands of the problem or swear to fix it and then get distracted by a big emergency.
I can't believe you responded to a post I made like 15 hours ago, anon. But yeah I understand the lack of cohesion and direction was the issue but I would have prefered to not just have these stories pretending to be examining Krakoa and then inevitably not doing anything about it because of the rest of the lineup. It makes Kurt especially look like a huge ineffectual idiot. And Logan also said he'd frick off and the instantly came back. Meanwhile it took forever until somebody like Storm told Xavier to frick off and I don't think Jean EVER did.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>I can't believe you responded to a post I made like 15 hours ago, anon
How long have you been here if that's not happened to you before?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Jean kinda did when she and Scott left to do X-Men stuff.
I do like we finally have people who stopped saying "They need to go back to superhero stuff" when there was the whole thing about the X-Men leaving Krakoa and living in NYC
2 months ago
Anonymous
I think when they said "They need to go back to superhero stuff", I think the implication was also they needed to get away from basically being another Krakoa agency. And to be fair, despite Scott and Jean having no problem telling the Council to frick off, they're equally happy to go along with all their decisions and proclamations, like how they just agreed to force Scott into putting on a doofy Captain Krakoa costume to protect Krakoa's interests (covering up for the resurrection protocols) rather than just ask him to consider finding a replacement or faking his recovery or something. That and, well, using the X-men as intergalactic goons to protect Krakoa's intergalactic interests despite the X-men's thing being that they're supposed to have the freedom to decide who to save and when of their own volition independent of the Quiet Council.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I think part of the problem is that in the beginning of Way of X one could get the impression was going to be about the people willing to put the hard work in to deal with the issues of Krakoa. But then it turned into Kurt being completely OC though pointless handwringing and faffing about until he finally decided that the whole thing was morally, philosophically, and psychologically dead, at which point he just kinda stuck around to handwring and faff about. If you weren't going to have your book do anything about the shitty things it was about, then at least they could have had Kurt go "this shit is irredeemable and I refuse to be a part of it anymore," and bail. He and Stacy X could have packed up the Whorphanage and started a farm in Montana with 30 dumpster babies or something.
2 months ago
Anonymous
All of these "there's something wrong with our society" stories unfortunately ended up with the character(s) still collaborating with the Council anyway, with the notable exception of the Sabretooth and Exiles series which genuinely went for "Your island is shit, goodbye". That was such a release to read and I'm amazed they made me agree with Sabretooth of all fricking people. The guy probably eats babies on his off time.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Because Sabretooth is the Ubermensch in the most sociopathic way possible. Krakoa represents stagnant, self-obsessed society of the Last Man and has nothing to offer him.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Thank you Nietzsche-chan.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>with the notable exception of the Sabretooth and Exiles series which genuinely went for "Your island is shit, goodbye".
Unfortunately even that is pinned down by the inability of a title to affect anything. The story builds up Creed's war with Krakoa and the Exiles grudge with the nation, but ultimately they get sidetracked with Orchis and then Creed had to go fight Wolverine for a title event and the Exiles only get any kind of closure by chasing down Sabertooth, following the will of Krakoa again. The dissatisfaction from the lower class mutants gets a token mention on influencing the disillusion of the Quiet Council but even that gets distracted by an emergency.
The Quiet Council never has to face what they created, and despite his wallowing Magneto instantly drops any pretence of care about the Pit so he can go fight Orchis and think about Charles instead. If he's lucky most of them will be dead by the end of Sabertooth Wars and he'll only have to deal with Oya.
I'm thankful for Percy for bringing LaValle in and I know their friends, but it was painful to hear him reference his mini series as non-essential side-stories. I suspect there's truth to it from an office perspective, and LaValle just wrote what felt like one of the most important stories on his own violation, but I doubt there was ever a plan to tie it into the other titles.
Which sucks majorly because how do you not book end the era with Sabertooth condeming Krakoa's to face it's sins, when Krakoa kicked off with his unfair trial and imprisonment?
And now you have the "Kill No Man" rule going out the window but no one's around to go "is it weird that we're carrying out what we sentanced the lower-status Mutants for?" Or imagine if it was Sabertooth who pulled a populace movement to wipe out Orchis?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Orchis should have wrapped up a year ago and the lead in to Enigma as a flashy, high-stakes finale for the Main Characters. Then they all walk back to Krakoa, unbelieving that they survived all that and relieved to have saved the Krakoa'n project and how maybe it was all worth it in the end.
Only Victor Creed is sitting at the head of the council, the rest of the seats occupied by the Exiles and they turn around to see themselves surrounded by a pissed and tired mutant population who want some answers and action, and not necessarily from them.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I concede all your points but I still enjoyed LaValle's writing there more than say Spurrier's awful shit in trying to explore Krakoa. As you said it sucks ass that he feels his stuff was just a side adventure because I think if he was allowed main title and was allowed agency he could have done a story that blew Krakoa right open, exposing all the hypocrisy and de-humanizing rethoric (de-mutantizing?). But his hands were tied from the start by Hickman's bizarre and contrived need to Sabretooth to be a very particular scapegoat and then tied again by having to adhere to all the big nonsense events that kept dragging everyone back to work for the Council again regardless of what they said in their own books.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>But his hands were tied from the start by Hickman's bizarre and contrived need to Sabretooth to be a very particular scapegoat
Hickman left before Sabertooth started. Hell Sabertooth's shady trial is one of the seeds planted, and it's weird no one picked it up till the newbie came on board.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Sabretooth crying crocodile tears wouldn’t have much impact. Sure, Krakoa was rules by hypocrisy but so what. Sabretooth went right back to being a guy massacring everyone, including mutants, because he just felt like butchering people for his personal delight, not really giving a shit about anythings else.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Sabretooth went right back to being a guy massacring everyone, including mutants, because he just felt like butchering people for his personal delight
See that's part of the Sabertooth War event where Creed got sidetracked by his boner for Logan. If we got the story the first mini built up then Creed would hold off his murder rampage long enough to play on the dissatisfaction among the populace and maybe make himself the face of the Kill-No-Man backlash.
He was half way there by the end of the first mini. In the real world people go >Well yes we know he's terrible, but he's making a good point and no one else is doing anything about it...
All the time
2 months ago
Anonymous
>>Well yes we know he's terrible, but he's making a good point and no one else is doing anything about it...
Which in a way was also the rationale for filling Krakoa's government with psychotic villains in the first place, many of whom Creed had either worked with or for in the recent past, so it would have worked well as a counterpoint.
2 months ago
Anonymous
That would require Creed be anything but the selfish butthole he is, controlled entirely by his core desires.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Creed can be pretty clever depending on the writer. LaValle's whole angle on him was his skills as a CIA agent and it was fun seeing him connect with the Exiles to use them for his own ends and win over the Orchis prisoners.
Seeing him fight his own bloodlust long enough to do maximum damage to his enemies, and then finally let loose in the climax would make for good tension and pay off.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Nah Sabertooth was shit since people used it as a cudgel to point out how shit Krakoa was ignoring that LaValle hates the American incarceration system even more and probably would have some stuff to say about superheroes tacitly enforcing it.
They won't because Krakoa still has a large fanbase. It's a fanbase mostly made up of people who never read X-Men before and jumped in with hoX/PoX because of the hype around Hickman and the offer of a new "epic" status quo. From what I have seen observing the most rabid Krakoa fans on social media over the years, they aren't very concerned about things like character likeability and relatability because they treat it more like people who jumped into Game of Thrones. big sweeping story with awful people doing awful things to each other. And now just like GoT it has fallen into its own event horizon and just turned into steaming shit. But Marvel knows if they disown Krakoa then they will lose those readers and lose trade/collection sales and they will never do it. Not for something as unimportant as the soul of the X-Men franchise going forward.
I think most people are mad at how Krakoa is ending and how what's coming next seems like a step back to the dark ages of 2005-2019 more than the fact it is ending. I think a lot of fans do understand how superhero comics work
>like a step back to the dark ages of 2005-2019
Compared to what happened in 2005-19 Krakoa IS the dark ages. This is, without question and as of this writing, the worst era in X-men history.
Why would you say that when there is no indication you’re going to get more verge on being an extinct species next. If anything the reverse seems to be back to 2004 era prior to House of M/Decimation, which was what the books briefly were doing after mutants made a comeback around 2010-2012 al generation Hope.
I know some people are claiming it's going to be X-Men 97 synergy. I'm probably jynxing it but I'd be fine with that and it'd be one of the few cases I don't mind synergy.
>Why would you say that when there is no indication you’re going to get more verge on being an extinct species next. If anything the reverse seems to be back to 2004 era prior to House of M/Decimation, which was what the books briefly were doing after mutants made a comeback around 2010-2012 al generation Hope.
There is absolutely nothing indicating they're going for a Decimation/Utopias situation. Everything we've seen from the solicits is about the mutants trying to live with other people again, not isolating themselves. There's also going to be as many books after the relaunch as there are now, so this isn't some culling event. That anon is just making a bad faith argument to make it seem like the relaunch is doomed.
Do you think doom posting by Krakoa anons is mostly due to it being so long since the X-Men had a "normal" status quo? They've been stomped on for so long both in-universe and out that there's probably people too young to remember "normal" for them. FOX no longer exists so there's no reason to keep them in that state.
2 months ago
Anonymous
If we go by Marvel's own claims their median reader age is between 25 and 35 with younger and older demographics as outliers. If we post someone who is 30 who magically happened to decide to get into the X-Men when they were say 14 years old then their first X-Men comic would have been in 2010, right during Fraction's utopia era. not the absolute nadir of modern X-men runs but it's also really nothing special or noteworthy, and if this imaginary reader continued a few years down the line they'd get punched in the dick by a series of increasingly awful runs. So I really do think this may be a case that they literally have never experienced an era when the X-Men status quo wasn't just endlessly being kicked while they're down with no respect from any other characters and no hope for the future.
So I guess I can kinda see where the doomposting comes from in that regard.
2 months ago
Anonymous
It's never something that occurred to me before. I always assumed anyone who got into comics would be really autistic about it and get familiar with their favorite's whole history but I'm wrong
2 months ago
Anonymous
People absolutely read older comics but there's always a chance that they will assume their first view of a character or team is the "correct" one and won't be able to appreciate a very different one. I'm not saying this doesn't happen. I've seen lots of young readers who love Claremont X-Men.
But I think some people look at the pre-Morrison comics and see them as dated and hokey, filled with cliche morals and boring social stuff, wordswordswordswords from Claremont and forever betwen the big epic event issues.
2 months ago
Anonymous
It would explain why my X-Men opinions clash so hard with what I've seen from the fanbase. I'm on the younger side but I decided to jump head first into Lee/Kirby and work my up.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I am actually super curious what your thoughts are on those older comics, like 60's-80s. I'm an oldgay, I started on the Claremont stuff and I often feel like I'm one of the last people alive who likes that era.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I have a soft spot for the O5 even if their stories weren't always the best. Bendis bringing them back for a bit would've been pandering to me specifically...if it wasn't Bendis and didn't go on for so long.
Claremont was pretty good but it's been awhile since I went back to it. You can tell people only think of the big things like the Phoenix or DoFP rather than all the goofy misadventures they'd get up to.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Claremont was pretty good but it's been awhile since I went back to it. You can tell people only think of the big things like the Phoenix or DoFP rather than all the goofy misadventures they'd get up to.
Big fan of them going clothes shopping and finding Jubilee while fighting a goofy team of Mutant-Busters (Ghostbusters parodies)
2 months ago
Anonymous
They are 25 to 35 but they definitely didn't start as kids
2 months ago
Anonymous
It'd be accurate to my experience at least. I didn't really get into comics until I was a teenager. Ironically it was in the ANAD era where I used to get called a middle aged white man for saying the replacement characters suck ass.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Ironically it was in the ANAD era where I used to get called a middle aged white man for saying the replacement characters suck ass.
where?
Most of the krakoa era people are 100% new to x-men, and mostly because they lean into the ethnostate / "this setting reflects my political beliefs" angle.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>where
Most places online. Cinemaphile generally pushed back on it from what I remember but Cinemaphilemblr was already a meme at the time and you'd have a few die hards defending them. My close circle wasn't like that but in larger spaces, it'd start fights if you complain about Captain Falcon or Whor.
>Most of the krakoa era people are 100% new to x-men, and mostly because they lean into the ethnostate / "this setting reflects my political beliefs" angle.
I could believe this too. I've seen too many posts where people are basically mask off and go "UwU wholesome" to a fascist's wetdream
2 months ago
Anonymous
Most of the praise I could see were from twitter, youtube, shill news sites, and very entrenched X-men fandoms like on Reddit and CBR. In general comic book fora and other nerddom talking points, opinions were far more divided like on here.
It's always a sign of trouble when Mojo thinks the X-Men aren't watchable anymore. It's happened a few times and he's usually right. For a giant life-devouring alien slug he has really good senses for what is marketable and not.
[...]
Well yeah.
Precisely. It's also funny that the X-men installed Wind Dancer to basically babysit Mojo for the X-men, and iirc after that she stopped showing up in Krakoan group shots unless necessary and explained why she stopped visiting 'her home' for the same reasons Mojo eventually dismissed the original X-men as his favorite film subjects; Cause they were living on an island full of buttholes and turning into buttholes themselves, and she wasn't too interested in being around that
2 months ago
Anonymous
The best way to use Mojo has always been to lampshade the bad tendencies of your current X-Men status quo. Claremont made fun of his own wordiness and messy storylines when he did the X-babies story. That's what Mojo should always be. Not some dramatic threat but a big shitpost about whatever going on that's worth mocking. And I can see so much that Mojo would mock about krakoa.
Hell, I would end that story with Mojo learning that this brand new epic project that everyone was so excited for at the start is now a giant flop and he grouchily demands they go back to the classics, and it's something like X-MEN TWO: BACK TO THE MANSION, feature movie.
I just want the mutants to frick off from the other corners of Marvel if they're still going to be up their own ass, just without the benefit of an ivory tower like Krakoa. They make Doctor fricking Doom somehow look more tolerable to deal with at this point.
Someone define "redemption arc." Working for the nominal heroes but never changing your overall attitude or outlook on things, and not facing legitimate punishment for past crimes is not redemption. >Mutants: "You're good, we give you a pass" >Aggrieved parties of "redeemed" individual: "We fricking didn't. That guy killed thousands and hasn't seen a day in court." >Mutants: "Yeah, well, that's not your choice to make, they're with us now."
It's this very creepy and fricked up state of things that they wrote mass murderers and serial rapists as people worth trying to redeem, or trying to make the audience think they're redeemed. The only person they even bothered treating with the actual degree of punishment he deserved was Sabertooth, a mass murdering, raping, child-killer, but that's only because he wasn't going to play ball with their system, not because of his crimes.
They don't even show a redemption process for their big mutant clemency process. In a world where they actually cared they should have shown that people like that would have to submit to intensive screening, supervision and therapy to try to see how honest they were.
They've already admitted people like Gorgon and Daken and played their antics off for laughs. It's not like they weren't aware of their backgrounds, it's that they just didn't care.
Everyone was given clean slate blanket pardon and your behaviour after joining Krakoa defined you. So people like Selene, Fenris twins, etc. were still bad apples, Sabretooth kept being a murdering scumbag even if he got fricked over by Hickman’s hamfisted storytelling. Apocalypse meanwhile worked entirely in favour of Krakoa and wasn’t evil. Most other villains either worked for Krakoa without being evil or backstabbing Krakoa or just chilled and did nothing villainous.
Redemption was largely happening with people who worked to make Krakoa work without sabotaging the nation. So Sebastian Shawn was not redeemed but he never pretended to be anything except self serving individual, Greycrow had redemption through his service to Krakoa, Omega Red similarly achieved redemption by being a team player after being released from control that forced him to follow orders, etc.
It's more Keiron Gillen, king homosexual supreme, thinks Krakoa went too far. A guy who helped set the stage for Gamergate and unleashed the cancer and AIDS that was homosexual America Chavez upon comics and first wrote Nazi Cyclops, thinks Krakoa sucks and did unspeakable damage to the X-Men franchise.
Gillen started as a writer writing video game reviews (IIRC for the UK gaming magazine Euro-Gamer). His "reviews" weren't actually reviews: he'd ramble on about his cats and anything BUT the game he was supposed to review and generally speaking, set the stage for people who hate video games reviewing video games and being full of nothing but contempt towards people who wrote the magazine complaining about how Gillen's "reviews" were rambling blog posts that barely if ever talked about the game. Which culminated in him submitting a game "review" that was nothing but photos of him as a mime doing mime shit that Euro-Gamer published because they shared his contempt for their readership.
I still think half the shit people on here complain about with the Krakoa era is nonsense. >Muh degeneracy! >Muh mutants being weird with death now they're immortal! >Muh X-Men not acting like heroes!
None of that matters. This is all fine writing. They're sick of trying and failing to integrate and found a compromise with their enemies where the threat of force and abusing a few politicians (the only actual subhumans irl) let them live in a borderline paradise for themselves. Them getting into weird sex stuff and letting themselves die for sport after becoming immortal is also interesting writing and totally in line with something people could do after getting that kind of power.
The actually valid critiques I'll accept for Krakoa are: >Moira as a whole is an awful fricking retcon used to try justify too much of the setup that removes any interesting character development for Charles that lead him to this >Not enough focus is placed on the normal average joe mutants who flocked to it and how they adjusted plus the conflict between so many people of diverse backgrounds living together in an ethnostate >Now that it is winding down the attempts to pivot back to the status quo are already turning out poorly, like Xavier's sudden turn of heart >There's been several points where stuff just felt like the author's barely disguised fetish being inserted (like anything Leah Williams touched)
Nah, deciding to try something new with them after several decades of more or less uninterrupted "The X-Men keep trying to make it work" no matter what gets thrown at them is fine. Marvel stories have to run hypothetically forever unless they finally pull a New 52, they have to try new things with the big groups eventually to keep things fresh. Spending a few years exploring the X-Men trying out their own version of mutant separatism where they don't go full cartoon villain like their enemies wanted to and just forcefully rebuke the rest of the world instead of conquer/destroy it is a cool premise for a couple years of storytelling.
The issue is that so far making them decide to return to trying to make integration work has been done poorly.
>The issue is that so far making them decide to return to trying to make integration work has been done poorly.
because there's no good reason for them to do so. krakoa is great, the only issues are down to certain major c**ts being let join it - the "logical" move here is removing them and not reviving them after. instead they're all going to give up on mutant paradise and go back to living in charles' basement while the rest of the world wants them dead because suddenly they'll remember their old political stances as if they just forgot them instead of deciding to change them.
They were told by Moira that various different attempts, including Xavier’s dream and Magneto’s mutant supremacy routes, eventually end in horrific outcomes like mutant eradication etc. in the future. So the entire Krakoa nation building project was a final ditch effort to combine different factions under one unified roof in hopes that would be enough to change the game. Because divided and trying to do it on your own small group leads to failure.
And of course now we know Moira was lying and manipulating things and her motives were not as clean as people thought they were and she actually is pretty anti-mutant for selfish reasons.
From a meta perspective anyone familiar with Marvel cosmology noted right off the bat that Moira's ten lives were completely worthless against an infinite multiverse with infinitely branching timelines. Even within the X-characters alone there are at least 3 timelines not covered by Moira.
Moira is by far the single worst part of the Krakoa era.
I refuse to believe Hickman intended for Moira to be a secret villain. Ruthless yes, unpleasant yes, but there's no indication she's lying or misconstruing the prediction stuff at the start of HoXPoX. This feels like desperate cope to find a way to get rid of Krakoa without also saying that now the mutants are doomed because of Moira's predictions.
I think this was the plan from the start because it's the easiest route to restoring the status quo but it is still terrible writing that was not set up at all.
Krakoa was always going to fail. Moira being at least partially behind that and all the convoluted bullshit and need for secrecy does make it seem like there was some intent at Moira having an evil arc. It doesn’t really make sense otherwise to go so out of your way to retcon so fricking much of Moira’s history to bring her back as le epic mastermind behind Krakoa and showing her going to insane extremes in other timelines.
Moira instantly banning precogs from Krakoa was clear evidence that she didn't want anyone else to look into the future and blow the whistle on the fact she was lying about it.
Which would have been fine if the heroes didn't compromise their morals while doing so. But they did, and to such an egregious degree that they seem like villains now. Which kinda does make it shit writing.
And again we come back to Hickman being a hack writer who cares more about his grand design than logical and consistent characterisation. I was saying since day one it was ridiculous how Hickman didn’t bother to show ANYONE being critical of the giant changes or question things. Everything was acting on blind faith or drinking brainwashing koolaid. He just expected you to accept it. And of course this is all because Krakoa was supposed to only be a short term thing before the next step in the storyline.
Which is insane, because who the frick does such a gigantic status quo shift and then writes it out before you’ve even gotten around setting the basic rules and foundation for it, let alone do anything with it in a franchise with multiple titles, before it was already erased. The only way this would even have a chance to work is if Hickman personally wrote the only title where everything happened and it was over within a very short period of time rather than taking years and dozens of issues per book.
>They were told by Moira that various different attempts, including Xavier’s dream and Magneto’s mutant supremacy routes, eventually end in horrific outcomes like mutant eradication etc. in the future
Because the x-men don't already have a half dozen people all from distinct independent futures running around. You realize this isn't the point right? In fact needing a character to mouth piece why you need to give up is all the more reason this shit is stupid. Heroes are supposed to fight against bad future not accept it. Why do you moron keep using in universe bullshit to try and justify out of universe moronation.
>Because the x-men don't already have a half dozen people all from distinct independent futures running around.
and in every one of those, mutants are...? moira just confirmed all their worst fears there.
And again we come back to Hickman being a hack writer who cares more about his grand design than logical and consistent characterisation. I was saying since day one it was ridiculous how Hickman didn’t bother to show ANYONE being critical of the giant changes or question things. Everything was acting on blind faith or drinking brainwashing koolaid. He just expected you to accept it. And of course this is all because Krakoa was supposed to only be a short term thing before the next step in the storyline.
Which is insane, because who the frick does such a gigantic status quo shift and then writes it out before you’ve even gotten around setting the basic rules and foundation for it, let alone do anything with it in a franchise with multiple titles, before it was already erased. The only way this would even have a chance to work is if Hickman personally wrote the only title where everything happened and it was over within a very short period of time rather than taking years and dozens of issues per book.
it is fricking insane how short krakoa lasted relative to how big a change it is and even worse that moira being retconned lazily is what both started and ended it.
>let me commit any crime I want or I'll keep life saving medicine from dying people >also you can't make your own life saving medication
Honestly my main issue with the setup is that the entire world seeming goes along with Krakoa's claim that drugs work when the era didn't even last long enough for half the claimed effects to be tested.
did any mutants actually use the diplomatic immunity for fricked up shit or did krakoa just use it to get stray mutants out of those countries and let their """diplomats""" leave negotiations that turned hostile ala the UN one? i can't remember any of them using it to just go commit crimes in random countries
Nature Girl. Krakoa didn't give a shit about her murder spree until it started drawing enough heat. In general though, diplomatic immunity has very specific grounding in international relations and specific criteria, so anyone demanding a blanket immunity for its citizenry regardless of actual diplomatic function raised the question of why they'd need it unless they were planning on committing crimes. Also the story ignores that diplomatic immunity may be revoked, a person can be declared persona non grata, and diplomatic immunity actually does have specific criteria for its application.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Krakoa didn't give a shit about her murder spree until it started drawing enough heat
But they were going after her from the start, because what she was doing was wrong and causing trouble. If they didn’t care they wouldn’t have sent iirc Wolverine after her until it was already a giant problem
2 months ago
Anonymous
The story tried to frame it as Wolverine trying to “quietly” remove a problem before it got out of hand…AFTER it was already causing international news that a mutant kid is going on a killing spree. Even then, it was clear they didn’t take either the bad press nor Nature Girl’s growing insanity even remotely seriously until she started posting nature terrorist footage on LiveLeak. And even then, it wasn’t the gorn that did it, it was calling herself one of the X-men that made them get of their fat asses to actually do something well after shit had hit the fan.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Initially it was just okay that kid connected to nature is going bonkers, it’s kinda understandable if deranged, get her back before this gets bad but do it quietly because we’re a country now and we don’t need this trouble. Not a high priority when we’re dealing with Nimrod. Then it became oh frick she’s absolutely insane and she makes this look like she’s literally representing Krakoa officially with her actions shut it down now. And then they captured her and threw her in the pit for her crimes only for Krakoa itself thinking actually that’s rad what you did here’s a free get out of jail card.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Cuz eco-terrorism is ALWAYS justified.
2 months ago
Anonymous
In an instance where people are directly connected to nature and regularly witness and feel the destruction happening on a global scale by humanity I mean kinda? Just how much destruction are you expected to be okay with and do nothing? Humanity has literally eradicated entire species. In the past century there an incredible amount of animals that have gone extinct due to human actions.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>extinct animals
Which specie would be able to contribute in a situation of a space rock going to end all life on Earth?
2 months ago
Anonymous
She stabbed a convenience worker in the throat over a turtle dying that he had zero interaction with beyond selling a customer the plastic bag it ate. There’s saving the planet, and there’s murderous insanity, and it was very clear the kid was too focused on justifying her murderous impulses to ever truly be the planetary savior she believed she was
2 months ago
Anonymous
Plus she wasn't important or powerful enough to be on the ruling council or one of the many black ops death squads, so she had to be stopped.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>beyond selling a customer the plastic bag it ate
And zero interest or empathy over the fact the animal had died
2 months ago
Anonymous
Only on person has committed murder, even if you want to push equal worth between a human and an animal (and animals wouldn't give a damn about said turtle either)
2 months ago
Anonymous
Being a cog in the ecological destruction machine doesn’t really relief you of the
collective guilt and responsibility. Especially when someone shows what your actions result in and you go “…so?”
2 months ago
Anonymous
see
>extinct animals
Which specie would be able to contribute in a situation of a space rock going to end all life on Earth?
That clerk had more objective worth for the future of the planet than the turtle
Nature Girl should learn basic history of species on the planet, plenty went extinct without human involvement. Disasters (dinosaurs), bad evolutionary choices (sabertooth) and other animals (cats alone killed like 60 species) took a bigger tool
But the main point stands: without humans, the planet is defenseless against space rocks. Until we reach the level of reliably stopping them, all is secondary
And she is a murderer
2 months ago
Anonymous
>That clerk had more objective worth for the future of the planet than the turtle
Do they though, when basically all they do is directly is contribute to the overconsumption of resources and increased pollution?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Can turtle have a future genius son who would save the planet?
>without humans, the planet is defenseless against space rocks.
That’s all purely theory at this point. Meanwhile every day we pollute and bit by bit destroy the biodiversity that sustains the entire planet and help make life on Earth become more and more difficult by spreading microplastics, making the planet warmer with CO2 emissions, destroy natural habitats and waterways with mining, oil spills and damn building.
What we did to end ice ages? The % of atmosphere filled with our CO2? The area devastated vs area gained (greener Sahara and such?). And blame greens for opposing atom, the statistically most clean and efficient energy. >but Chernobyl
Check on Ukraine how the modern Russian tech fares vs 30 years old one from US. Atom is safe unless soviet
And space rocks aren't theory. We know what hit the Earth. We know what was caught by Jupiter. And we don't know if we won't detect anything world ending tomorrow. Focusing on small picture satisfies only instant gratification.
2 months ago
Anonymous
To be fair, our ability to stop one is what is theory. If we were to discover a K-T event size asteroid tomorrow that was due to strike the Earth in, say, 6 months, what could we do to prevent its impact?
2 months ago
Anonymous
>but wot if space rock fall in urff an we dunt have genius to build rocket
And that theoretical genius maybe one day in the future existing justifies all the damage we carelessly do is okay because….? You’re basically just saying it’s okay for humans to cause damage because maybe one day in the future we do something beneficial to Earth by preventing space rocks falling here.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>without humans, the planet is defenseless against space rocks.
That’s all purely theory at this point. Meanwhile every day we pollute and bit by bit destroy the biodiversity that sustains the entire planet and help make life on Earth become more and more difficult by spreading microplastics, making the planet warmer with CO2 emissions, destroy natural habitats and waterways with mining, oil spills and damn building.
2 months ago
Anonymous
the spirit of the world itself appeared before her and told her to frick off because humans are her children too and in the ecological scale she exists at the death of some species and climate changing is insignificant so she doesn't have her permission to go around punishing us for out-competing all other life on earth on her behalf
2 months ago
Anonymous
Her opinion is unimportant when she's presented as a crazy b***h
2 months ago
Anonymous
Getting nowhere close to warranting murder.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Turns out the evil living island is evil
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Nature Girl.
Ah, right, totally blanked on her bullshit.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I'm reminded of the wife of that American diplomat spy who killed a teenager in England in a road accident, immediately fled the country and the US refused to do anything about afterwards. Krakoa could actually work as a 2000ad style satire of the worst aspects of American foreign policy and rah-rah exceptionaism, but it would require a level of self-awareness that just wasn't there.
2 months ago
Anonymous
America does not prosecute road-killing animals.
2 months ago
Anonymous
All countries do this. I was in Asia a few years back and some Romanian who worked for the embassy also fled after a hit and run.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Yes but the US and UK are very close politically and culturally which makes it worse than two random thirdies with little in common
2 months ago
Anonymous
The real thing about nature girl is she's a great example of how the X-Men should have stopped and asked themselves if maybe isolating a child/teen and indoctrinating her into seeing them as her parental figures for all intents and purposes before teaching by example that human lives lack value compared to mutant ideals was maybe a fricking mistake and a sign that they'd gone too far but instead they just blame the kid they made be like this instead of having any self awareness whatsoever.
Nature Girl was a brainwashed crazy b***h who ultimately was just following the example she was given in the end but the X-Men and the writers at the time both didn't want to talk about the fact that she was the monster they made.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Except she was being corrupted by another mutant, Curse. It also wasn’t X-men ideology brainwashing her. Nor was it isolation. It was Nature Girl having the ability to communicate with and understand nature and being increasingly angry at the level of destruction happening around her while nobody gave a a shit because humanity and other mutants think they’re superior to other life forms so needless pollution based death of animals isn’t a tragedy to them.
Imagine for a second a random animal suddenly took over the planet started causing human deaths as a mere side-effect or byproduct of their dominance. You would think it was horrendous. But when you as a human do it to other animals it’s “natural” and you don’t care because there are no direct consequences to you.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Thing is, the X-men are still for all intents and purposes still Nature Girl's guardians. And all of this shit still went down on their watch. Hell, even if you want to absolve them of the responsibility of giving Curse the opportunity to corrupt Nature Girl, as well as the fact they did nothing but passively observe Nature Girl's increasing distress from the state of the world, the fact remains that she ran away from home twice to go murdering people, and the X-men as a whole failed to treat her or the situation with the level of seriousness they warranted until she was trying to destroy the planet.
And it's a running theme that terrible things keep happening to the X-kids because the X-men are so busy saving the world they have no time to properly guide or communicate with the next generations they claim to be doing everything for. And it's something that's gone on well before Krakoa, before you think it's yet another whine about that. There was Quentin Quire and his gang going on that school rampage, there was that mole Spider-Man was hired to search for in Wolverine's school among the neglected students, there was...all the messy, messy, messy drama of all the Academy X students, and shit, on Krakoa the children were explicitly outright left to fend for themselves after the X-men put in the minimal effort to jam their education in and then frick off to continue fricking and getting high, putting the kids in a dangerous position to get manipulated by Farouk. Hell, even on their mutant island paradise, there were STILL people who were very visibly upset and isolated and alone like that little toerag Curse and that spider clone of Gwen.
So, yeah. Thematically, the X-men have always had issues with failing in some manner to properly guide the next generations that they say are more important to the survival of the mutant race than anything else. And Nature Girl's no different in that regard.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Dude, whoever went on to push all of this morloch levels of shit in x-men deserves to be lashed with a chain electrified whip
this is fricking moronic
2 months ago
Anonymous
Honestly, now that I think about it, Krakoa would work great as some dystopian TTRPG setting, like something out of World of Darkness.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Stop. You're defending someone who killed someone's father because one of his customers - not even him - threw a bag in the ocean. Stop it. Stop the hypotheticals and the analogies and the whataboutisms.
She killed a man.
Over a bag.
Someone else threw in the ocean.
2 months ago
Anonymous
And how many other animals has his indifference killed over the years?
2 months ago
Anonymous
How many had yours?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Who knows. It probably has happened though. And that’s bad karma.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Well not to worry, just jump in front of a truck or something and your painful death will make up for it
2 months ago
Anonymous
Should i be killed for it?
How many had yours?
Who knows. It probably has happened though. And that’s bad karma.
Should you be killed for it?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Perhaps.
2 months ago
Anonymous
The turtle deserved to die from being weak enough a plastic bag kills it.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Mutantkind are the plastic chokes and mankind are the turtle's necks. Sooner or later, they are gonna meet face to face and it ain't gonna be pretty for one of them.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Plastic chokes are limited in power to what they were born with while turtles can use magic and weapons to surpass their current self?
Moira has personally lives through several lifetimes in alternative timelines so that alone makes her experiences more reliable than any singular potential timeline that’s based on specific events. And it is shit writing by Hickman due to the enormous retcons and lol just accept it premise, but there is clear logical rationale behind it. Moira’s past lives directly show what x, y and z will result in and it’s all bad news. Hence why the need to compromise because they’ve been shown how pigheadedly trying to do it your way alone doesn’t work.
Honestly, for what it’s worth, 9 very radically different lives feels like a massively small test sample size compared to the fricktillions that every future vision mutant can see, and especially compared to the numerous time travelers that are casually living with the X-men after averting their own futures with little cosmic repercussions. So yeah, them immediately taking Moira X at her word with “only” 9 lives worth of experience does feel a bit stupid. Like ffs, several of those lives had her committing cartoon villainy, or joining Magneto or Apocalypse to just murder everyone rather than unite ANYONE. So, no, I don’t believe she’s any more reliable than any other whack job time traveler.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Friendly reminder that Moira never even tried to unite the X-Men more with any of the non-mutant superheroes in any of her timelines.
>Not enough focus is placed on the normal average joe mutants who flocked to it and how they adjusted plus the conflict between so many people of diverse backgrounds living together in an ethnostate
That's my biggest complaint yeah, we never saw how Johnny Mutant was able to adapt to a semi post scarcity ethnostate. As far as we can tell the only thing people did was "beach"
Hickman always intended Xavier to have the look first when he prepping to write New Avengers, as far as having Xavier run around masked all the time.
But Bendis and the others writing AvX decided to kill Xavier off and Hickman, who in turn had to rewrite his New Avengers plans with Beast instead of Xavier, went and recycled the visual for Ultimate Reed wearing a mask full time when he started writing him.
Just use Mkraan crystal or Mephisto to retcon Krakoa era out of existance, simply as, put as some AoA/House of M alternate timeline, it worked before. So X-Men as nominal heroes but in reality mutant supremacists who engage in dirty realpolitiks would be removed from the continuity. With that they could fix Iceman being gay, Pietro and Wanda not being Magneto kids and so forth and forth.
>Just use Mkraan crystal or Mephisto to retcon Krakoa era out of existance
tbtbh i'd prefer they not do that and instead try really grapple with the fallout of this. the earth finally has a legitimate reason to fear mutants and distrust the x-men and a lot of them now have to deal with the fact they gave up on their beliefs over a lie.
i'd prefer if krakoa's pseudo-neutrality implodes and the x-men end up fighting every other faction to prevent them from taking out mankind, and then adjust to living as part of the world again without their immortality or all their omega level allies to put them in a position of power. they just have a shitty nation state made up of rejects from all over the world, some of whom might still sympathise with the villain factions, and have to try work out a way to co-exist and do the right thing again instead of dictate terms to humanity.
>immortality
X-Men by now are either gholas or revenants. Either the ressurection is just clones with implanted memories or necromanced spirits forced into cloned bodies. That thing is another fricked up thing they added to the characterization.
It's not even the real Captain America, it's some sort of imaginary friend cooked up by a cosmic cube deluding itself into thinking it was a real american little girl.
I think they reversed that so that now Hydra Steve is the imagined duplicate and the original was just buried inside the cosmic cube until he got released, precisely for the really unpleasant implications of Captain America no longer being himself but an imagined avatar of himself given flesh
It's best not to think about it too much because it immediately falls apart if you take it at face value, which is that the team makes a perfect clone then a backup of the original's memories get uploaded to it. Meaning the original is still dead. Best to just pretend Cerebro is storing and re-implanting souls somehow because that is how the story treats it.
[...]
I don't even think they all went mask off, at least not in the sense they're villains. They've got reservations about abusing/killing innocents still even if they are more than happy to treat the governments like their borderline enemies after what they've been through with most of them, they'd still view human lives as having value. But they have clearly shown that if given the option they'll work with absolute monsters who have killed tens if not hundreds of thousands in order to secure peace for themselves and put the restof the world at arm's length when they feel they are backed into a corner - their morals and supposed belief in human/mutant equality have limits. They're not necessarily evil but they have definitely betrayed their old ideals and shown on some level they value their own differently to how they value humans.
Seeing them grapple with that fact and dealing with the realisation they're hypocrites, trying to be better and earn the public's/former friend's trust again, would be interesting.
But yeah it'd probably be written like shit in practice.
For what it's worth, I don't say 'mask off' as a way to just indirectly call them villains since we do see that the guys who actively liked helping people still were willing to do so of their own free will. I was saying it more to emphasize that X-men have basically shown that when push comes to shove, they'd ultimately side with someone they know is evil but a mutant like them over people that are good but aren't "of their kind", essentially. That and how they've bought into the idea of mutant supremacism and the false idea of "mutants being the next stage of evolution" in a betrayal of Xavier's original principles and dream regarding mutants and humanity needing each other to reach a future golden age together.
And as much as it'd be interesting to see the writers acknowledge that the X-men themselves have so very vastly changed from their roots for both good and ill, I know they're too cowardly to, cause even during the Krakoa era where the X-men were the most visibly separatist in how they freely used mutant-themed slurs like "flatscan" or calling outdated concepts "human"/"sapien", the X-men were still being written as very much in denial on having turned their back on any of their principles and/or blaming all the shit they've gone through as justification for being buttholes.
I'm just not going to get my hopes up with the X-men so soon, really. And I know they aren't "mine" and that they have no obligation to acknowledge the X-men have made mistakes, but I still think it'd be interesting character writing, even if it ain't gonna happen.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Actually the canon for Hydra Cap is that he's a parallel Earth evil Cap that Red Skull/Kubic grabbed from another earth and the real Cap was trapped inside Kubic, the cosmic cube that walked like a girl
2 months ago
Anonymous
That somehow feels even more complicated than one of them being a cosmic cube creation, but thanks for the clarification.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Also a retcon of course, originally they were totally gonna keep OG Steve as the Hydra one.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>the original Steve was gonna be a nazi
Totally, dude
2 months ago
Anonymous
Iron Man is on multiple levels of dubious about identity so it doesn't matter.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>it doesn't matter.
I know, Anon. I'm not the one crying about them being ghouls
Nah is the other.
Iron man is a worse case, and not only because bendishit, his memories and even body got fricked before that
2 months ago
Anonymous
Iron Man and Black Widow are the peak of Marvel losing the plot with characters that should be very simple and iconic. With characters like Spider-Man they have tried but their popularity makes retcons (mostly) bounce off and them returning to status quo. But with a second-stringer like Tony or Natasha, all that shit sticks to them like driftwood. It doesn't MATTER, not unless you for example try to read the Iron Man comics printed since 2008 in order. But it is dumb and pointless.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>It doesn't MATTER, not unless you for example try to read the Iron Man comics printed since 2008 in order
Which is sad because Tony comics after fraction are garbage(even worse than Spiderman post Back to Black)
Not like after late Busiek and before Marvel Now were great but have at least some decent stories.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah. People ask why Iron Man isn't more popular in comics after the massive boost he had in the movies and the answer is unfortunately simple. His comics have just been shit for almost the entirety of his MCU career and since. Fraction was the last great Iron Man writer and his run ended over a decade ago. Everything since has been an increasing level of hot garbage with retcon after retcon, death, new Tony, retcons again, the sixth time in 10 years Tony has to re-learn what it is to be a hero. I don't understand how such a simple, iconic concept is so fricking hard for people to comprehend without bringing in clones and mystery parents and secret brothers and retcon after retcon
2 months ago
Anonymous
It has to be said that most of the writers Marvel has put on the Iron Man book have been guys they considered "big names", even if they actually suck, they're the ones Marvel treats like their top guys, people like Ellis, Fraction, Gillen, Bendis, Sloth and Duggan. They all just didn't get how to write Iron Man, or wanted to spend their run tearing him down because he's everything they've been indoctrinated to hate IRL.
There's also the issue that the movies generally aren't bringing in new comics readers, so the Iron Man comic readership remains at a similar size as it was before the MCU, getting occasional boosts from a relaunch or "star" talent working on the book, the same as every other character.
2 months ago
Anonymous
I think the problem is what you said, that all these big guys with the possible exception of Fraction weren't interested in developing a nice stable status quo for Tony to work in. They all did big dramatic upheavals and then Tony had to deal with that for the rest of the run. We haven't had a normal Iron Man run where he gets any time to breathe since Fraction and that's only because Fraction stuck around for more than one arc. It's really frustrating, really, because 80s and 90s iron Man was great and had a solid if unexciting reader base.
2 months ago
Anonymous
That's a wider problem with superhero comics in general, where nobody wants to just work within a book's normal default status quo and do normal villain of the month superhero stories anymore, they just want to veer from one huge status-quo shattering crisis event to the next without stopping to catch their breath. They've forgotten that all the classic upheaval stories they're trying to top only worked because they were surrounded by YEARS of normal villain of the month stories so they stood out.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Oh I fully understand this. Those writers you mentioned are all conditioned to think of each run as a big bombastic event that will throw everything about the character into chaos. Death, resurrection, new origin, radical status quo change, replacement, whatever the frick. And they also look at the previous guys who did that and try to top it. And there's never a point where you hit "normal". You never get stories that show how Tony lives with his current status quo, what effect it has on his decisions or life. What does it mean that he's dedicating himself to the environment side of megacorps now? We will never know because it's a big decision he comes to at the very end of a run and then a new writer takes over.
It's best not to think about it too much because it immediately falls apart if you take it at face value, which is that the team makes a perfect clone then a backup of the original's memories get uploaded to it. Meaning the original is still dead. Best to just pretend Cerebro is storing and re-implanting souls somehow because that is how the story treats it.
As interesting as it would be to have the writers force the characters to deal with the consequences of their reputations being shot to shit, much like Steve Rogers after Secret Empire or Spider-Man after Superior Spider-man, I don't expect the writers to actually try and address the fact that the X-men did go full mask-off in regards to how they feel regarding the humans they say they want to protect. Frankly, I'd be surprised if they even acknowledged Krakoa beyond the X-men complaining that people hate them again 'for no real reason' while waxing nostalgic about living in a beautiful gated community island where only the elite and genetically privileged lived.
I don't even think they all went mask off, at least not in the sense they're villains. They've got reservations about abusing/killing innocents still even if they are more than happy to treat the governments like their borderline enemies after what they've been through with most of them, they'd still view human lives as having value. But they have clearly shown that if given the option they'll work with absolute monsters who have killed tens if not hundreds of thousands in order to secure peace for themselves and put the restof the world at arm's length when they feel they are backed into a corner - their morals and supposed belief in human/mutant equality have limits. They're not necessarily evil but they have definitely betrayed their old ideals and shown on some level they value their own differently to how they value humans.
Seeing them grapple with that fact and dealing with the realisation they're hypocrites, trying to be better and earn the public's/former friend's trust again, would be interesting.
But yeah it'd probably be written like shit in practice.
>Best to just pretend Cerebro is storing and re-implanting souls somehow because that is how the story treats it.
But the writer themselves were not helping at all. Didn't they put Cypher talking to his original body who was reanimated by necromancy? It's a frick up from day one.
No, it was Exploding Boy. But it was just reanimated bodies, not souls.
In any case, clones already had the implication of "drawing in the original soul" from the whole Ben Reilly Jackal stuff, HOXPOX does mention Xavier bringing "the anima" of the resurrected person into the new body, and the Living Tribunal counted Krakoan resurrection as a true kind of resurrection, which was one of the several kinds (Green Door was another) that were eroding the concept of death so much that Death was dying.
So it's real resurrection, with the souls and everything.
And yet, there's the case of Laura, resurrected while still alive, so there were 2 for a while. What happened to the soul? I guess it duplicated or split.
By that token, do classic clones have souls anyway? Ben and Kaine and Maddy and Evan and so on? Are they new souls or dupes or splits from the originals?
2 months ago
Anonymous
>and the Living Tribunal counted Krakoan resurrection as a true kind of resurrection, which was one of the several kinds (Green Door was another) that were eroding the concept of death so much that Death was dying.
That was blatantly a retcon introduced after thousands of comments about how Krakoan "resurrection" wasn't at all that. Like I remember after the big exposure of the Crucible stuff people were pretty freaked out by the idea that healthy people would suicide to create a powered clone of themselves. People were more accepting when it was just for people who got vaporized by an Orchis drone because that person was dead ANYWAY
2 months ago
Anonymous
>And yet, there's the case of Laura, resurrected while still alive, so there were 2 for a while. What happened to the soul? I guess it duplicated or split.
Word of God (in that arc itself) is that the second Laura was a frick-up. She was essentially like another Laura clone with her own soul but with the original Laura's memories (up until a certain point). Yes I know that this doesn't make much sense to make that distinction but they literally put it into the omniscience narration so we kinda just have to accept it.
Also it's kinda fricking shitty that the only person who may actually incontrovertibly be dead after this much is original Laura because Talon is so insanely dead now. I guess we'll just have to accept Laura 2.0.
>They're not necessarily evil but they have definitely betrayed their old ideals and shown on some level they value their own differently to how they value humans.
They've been like that ever since they kept falling over themselves to defend Magneto at damn near any cost. It's a thing older than myself and most anons on this board.
As interesting as it would be to have the writers force the characters to deal with the consequences of their reputations being shot to shit, much like Steve Rogers after Secret Empire or Spider-Man after Superior Spider-man, I don't expect the writers to actually try and address the fact that the X-men did go full mask-off in regards to how they feel regarding the humans they say they want to protect. Frankly, I'd be surprised if they even acknowledged Krakoa beyond the X-men complaining that people hate them again 'for no real reason' while waxing nostalgic about living in a beautiful gated community island where only the elite and genetically privileged lived.
Walkbacks like these are never not funny. Scenes are gonna dogpile up so fast with every writer is trying to scramble make sure their characters are on the right side of the current history.
The funniest thing about the Krakoa cloning is that Miles Warren, a fricking college professor, cracked this exact process decades ago by reading old notes left behind by an Inhuman scientist. This one guy achieved the exact same thing that it took a giant mutant island and five different mutants to achieve and he did it in the literal cellar of a NYC campus. Of course despite there being absolutely zero difference in the outcome, Jackal clones have never even once been considered equivalent to the original and are distinguished as copies even when they establish their own lives, like Ben Reilly. Hell we literally have a storyline in Spider-Man RIGHT NOW with the clone Ashley Kafka /Goblin Queen and the fact she is NOT accepted as the original resurrected despite having pitch perfect memories and DNA. It's all so fricking laughable and it's clear Hickman doesn't do any research or think of the actual role his shit plays in the Marvel Universe.
One of the funny things about this era of X-Men is that things that were done before were treated as a monumental achievement, everything that came before doing the same thing just didn't matter because it would undercut the story they were trying to tell, which is something not unique to Hickman even if he's very notorious for it.
Will Cinemaphile ever stop making Krakoa threads filled with people claiming all sorts of weird fanfiction shit is what actually happened? Honest question here because I imagine a lot of the same people post in these threads since there is one daily. And they're always filled with wild fricking fanfiction, misinterpreting clearly explained events and shit like blaming Hickman for non-Hickman comics (Duggan comics being especially common). Are these people just trying to work themselves up over imagined Krakoa things or what?
I think it's 3 things.
-People who didn't read and only got the outrage highlights about "orgy island", "Cyclops is a cuck", "X-Men are villains now".
-People who read but didn't get that a lot of the things they complain about are being presented as bad. See in this thread someone complaining about The Crucible, when the very issue that introduces it shows characters being uncomfortable with it, and it launches a storyline about how lack of death is causing mutants to lose respect for life.
-The writers of secondary books who do actually treat all the morally questionable things as outright good because fun hippy party island yeah.
That last part is depressing because I have also seen it happen. Some of the books literally treat it like they're on a Key West vacation where everyone gets good food and drink and dances on the beach. That's disingenuous because it undermines the story as a whole in addition to creating wild tonal whiplash. You can definitely explore the good sides of Krakoa but you can't present it as an unproblematic haven, because that is not what it is. That's never what it was. It was always meant to be nuanced and flawed, showing a post-scarcity society dealing poorly with the removal of societal basics. But we never did get that Krakoa grassroots book either so we know so very little of what went down with regular people on the island.
Like all dystopic fiction, there's a class of people or a veneer of society where everything is gilded parties, limitless entertainment, and the only enemy is boredom.
All this covers up the horrific reality of what it takes to create this illusion.
The problem is that these people don't see it as a dystopia. In her view, it's just a utopia fueled by magic with no downsides. These aren't the majority of fans but I have definitely seen this from both creators and fans
Oh, I agree with you.
The majority of writers that infest Marvel and DC are utterly tone deaf, read and write at an kindergarten level, and have the same temperament as a den of vipers. Some of them can now even count driving a man to suicide on their resume
That last part is depressing because I have also seen it happen. Some of the books literally treat it like they're on a Key West vacation where everyone gets good food and drink and dances on the beach. That's disingenuous because it undermines the story as a whole in addition to creating wild tonal whiplash. You can definitely explore the good sides of Krakoa but you can't present it as an unproblematic haven, because that is not what it is. That's never what it was. It was always meant to be nuanced and flawed, showing a post-scarcity society dealing poorly with the removal of societal basics. But we never did get that Krakoa grassroots book either so we know so very little of what went down with regular people on the island.
The last one is why I hate Krakoa personally. That in turn makes me hate all the questionable stuff and see the "X-Men are villains now"
Seeing fans try to basically explain away the Crucible as "not as bad as it looks" or that all the flaws were really supposed to be good things is the part that baffles me the most. Like they genuinely unironically want the X-men to act this weirdly smug and unquestioning of the extremely strange and out of character actions everyone's taking. Especially when you consider that there was a character who, for years, was outright being controlled by someone against his will and was daily BEGGING for someone, anyone, to fricking start questioning what the hell is going on with him aka Colossus and yet zero people even so much as blinked whenever he said something super questionable.
>See in this thread someone complaining about The Crucible, when the very issue that introduces it shows characters being uncomfortable with it, and it launches a storyline about how lack of death is causing mutants to lose respect for life.
That's a huge part of the issue some had with it. The heroes knew it was questionable and were uncomfortable with it, and yet still went along. The same heroes that for decades have unflinchingly stood against any form of injustice, and would leap into action stopping heaven and earth just to save a kid's lost puppy (hyperbole). And yet here they see something sus going on, but only shrug and wring their hands. It's a massive tonal shift and complete disconnect from their previous characterizations. No surprise some readers find that annoying.
I am CONVINCED that at least early on that was intended to be a plot point of sorts.
See here Moira talking about Zen via biology, I thought there'd be a reveal about Krakoa replicating the neuroleptic effect of the womb; not quite mind control but at least making them more susceptible to accepting these moral transgressions.
Wolverine and Laura, both healing factor mutants, were some of the few who felt wary of the island in early issues.
But if it ever was part of the plan, it clearly didn't move forward.
iirc there was a mobile game that ran with the idea of Krakoa affecting people in that way which some shill sites were claiming "spoiled the ending" back when we thought it was ending sooner. I don't remember which
No, I think that was just Hickman spouting his usual pseudo-intellectual tripe in a vain effort to appear intelligent. And undoubtedly plagiarized from some other source that did it better.
Its >outrage highlights
Of which we can at least admit was there was too damn much
1 or 2 is acceptable, 15 fricking outrageous bullshit with mutant elitism if not outright extremism all wrapped around self righteous >-People who read but didn't get that a lot of the things they complain about are being presented as bad.
That doesnt fricking matter, those affairs tainted all characters involved. >The writers of secondary books who do actually treat all the morally questionable things as outright good because fun hippy party island yeah.
That would be the major one for me. But as far as im concerned theyre all connected.
Krakoa was shit. Simple as. If for no other reason than that none of them will ever be held accountable for the dystopian shit they pulled.
None of the ritual human murder
None of the legions teenagers they brainwashed into thinking that life is cheap, death is temporary, and Mutants are greater than humans.
None of the other nations of the world will hold Krakoa to account for threatening them, ignoring their laws and borders, and kidnapping their citizens, however undesirable those citizens may be to the nation.
None of the hundreds of super criminals that are now running free.
None of the mutants will ever be made to answer for the insanity that was committed on that fricking island.
There will be no fall out. No comeuppance. No epilogue to Krakoa beyond a snarky, "Well, THAT just happened."
>Magneto killed millions with that EMP >writers only talked about thousands >nobody ever brings that up beside imageboard users, so it never happened
They will do the same with Krakatoa and it's murder pits, orgies, suicidal mutants, Beast doing whatever Geneva convention violations you can list and like.
This isnt news, Krakoa was meant to be a compromise solution because nine other ways to ensure mutant survival failed. The first thing Moira did in the tenth life in the bench was show him how his dream was doomed.
>Your dream is doomed. >But you need to keep pretending it’s fine for decades and act like you never heard this and don’t know I’m a mutant, through even your dark side breaking free and nearly destroying the world, multiple mutant genocides, and your own death. THEN, after you come back, you can do something.
If you want to make it worse, Marvel's equivalent of LiveLeak has uploaded footage of their teens committing suicide all over the place. Right along with Nature Girl stomping a guy's head like a watermelon.
It's entirely in character for Mojo too. He's always been used to satirize whatever was popular in franchises at the time. In the 80s it was babyfied kids shows. Then it was gladiator sports shows. So why wouldn't be be edgy, violent "epic" fantasy shows now?
Plus you can explain all inconsistencies and bad characterization as writers being swapped out, actors being exchanged and Mojo running out of budget and having to run cheap filler episodes
To be fair, there was an X-men Infinity issue about that, sorta. Mojo kidnapped some of the few mutants that weren't on Krakoa in order to basically force them to star in his X-Men '97 ripoff on repeat because the X-men on Krakoa were dropping fast in popularity in Mojoworld's polls due to, well, the fact they were acting like supremacist buttholes and turning off audiences. So even aliens addicted to television were saying that the X-men were being unwatchable jackasses.
It's always a sign of trouble when Mojo thinks the X-Men aren't watchable anymore. It's happened a few times and he's usually right. For a giant life-devouring alien slug he has really good senses for what is marketable and not.
That feels like it could too easily drift into everything the writer dislikes is the result of Mojo.
This is also part of the problem though. It's marvel addressing the issues to act like they're in on the joke or hip with t he fans but they're not actually fixing the problem. It's like going to your landlord and saying "my heater's not working" and he responds with "Yeah brah that totally sucks" but then you still freeze in the winter.
Screw this nihilistic shit where we have to have a fictional world full of terrible people. Why do writers feel the need to portray characters in the worst light and the humans in this world as almost all terrible people. Can they not be bothered to write anything else besides this race war that’s been done to death. Give me an arc where humans and mutants are actually trying to save the world for once.
That’s always been the problem with Marvel: the average human is an awful creature and aliens rightfully hate them
The problem is that there's no sense of balance between the terrible people. Everyone's either an irredeemable butthole, or will eventually be written as such if they aren't. It's fine to have the "protect the world that hates them" angle, but you need to have SOME good people for the to latch on to, with a variety of different viewpoints and perspectives that's understandable to the audience.
It's the main reason the Ultimate universe collapsed on itself, with Ultimate Spider-Man being the only thing anyone cares about. When everyone is just a different flavor of butthole, it only breeds apathy in the long run.
If all I want to read is Al Ewing’s stuff (S.W.O.R.D and X-Men Red), what’s the bare minimum essentials I need to read beforehand? Is it just HoX/PoX? I know his stuff takes place after X of Swords which is the big event so is that necessary too?
the only relevant XoS issue might be one of the Cable issues since that deal with the peak but even then it's not necessary
the only things you need to read for SWORD are HoX/PoX, Ewings GOTG and Empyre
It used to be because they have some cool characters and them being mutants was used as a generalized "outsider" analogy that people could relate to. For various reasons like Marvel lacking film rights caused them to go shit on a lot in the past 2 decades along with idpol morphing their previous in-universe "outsider" status into something it's not really.
Hey, remember that time Xavier admitted he only created the X-Men to police mutants because he viewed them as a fundamental threat to sentient life on Earth and he actually gave zero fricks about the equality shtick because mutants are dangerous and should be if not hated then feared?
>good writing
Ah. I see why people are getting confused. When the payrate is as low as it is for comics, volume is the only way to make money. You're never going to be getting the best any writer has to offer until they're getting paid enough to live on while focusing on a single project
Does Sublime every get mentioned cause I’m pretty sure Hickman’s plan was to have them all infected by it which is why they made their weird Zionist sex death cult
What irks me the most about Krakoa is that going in I thought I'd get a greater focus on sci-fi stories, and instead I got even more watered down slice of life bullshit, just with shitty YA "fantasy"schlock aesthetics tacked on top. Krakoa itself was also extremely boring as a setting as well. The X-Men went from hi-tech facilities to hanging out in swamps. Reading HoX/PoX the entire thing felt like Pandora back in '09, and it ended up being a backwater greenery patch. The stories themselves didn't do anything extraordinary, just reused the same idpol bull but this time with literally no stakes or interesting and varied locations.
This whole era was a nothingburger. Literally nothing happened. Same as the Post-SW era but with better publicity. Nothing went down. Just a bunch of awful retcons and new OCs. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the last time anything happened in the X-Verse was the Post-Schism era with X-Face Cyclops. It was cut short, but a decade later and I still remember the basic gist of it, the books had a direction, something was happening. The Krakoa era was literally just killing time, and the same will happen now with new books, until the MCU adaptation rolls around and they market another big relaunch.
Honestly, even as a Hickmangay I found it all a resounding failure past the first mini. Hickman's time on FF and then Avengers had him creating a memorable ~10 year story. It wasn't perfect, but it happened, disappointing ending aside. His X-Run was cut short, but he still wasted time on X Of Swords and all that nonsense. Honestly, the Dominion just wasn't an interesting big bad, and the Sinisters being main bad guys rung hollow. Sinister's a good enough X-Specific bad-guy but he's not Big Bad material. A revamped Apocalypse or HighEvo would've been better. When you're going to Cosmic+ a bunch of advanced robots aren't cool or big enough to warrant this much attention, especially when you've got reality warpers around.
>Dominion just wasn't an interesting big bad
Well yeah because it has Hickman chart syndrome explaining fricking everything about it and when it's all laid out you can see what a hackneyed attempt at being an original impressive cosmic big bad it is with contradictory nonsense that makes it look like it was lazily kludged together.
>So it's a giga computer that uses the power of some lesswrong bullshit to control a region of space and time to such a degree that it's basically a god >yeah >But how >what do you mean how? >Like are they using some kind of fricking reality editing devices or something because just dominating a space and span of time through raw brainpower would allow to to fake it to an extent but you'd get BTFO'd when something big enough came from outside those confines and shit would, constantly, throwing off your calculations almost as fast as you could redo them per the Sinking Ship paradox >Also none of this explains how they become genuinely Atemporal as a rule. And actually it seems like Dr. Strange solos unless it's one of the apparently rather rare magic ones. In which case I'm pretty sure a juiced up Thor still solos. How is this a bigger deal than the last dumbfrick apocalypse event exactly? >Shut up they just are okay.
It's just yudkowsky No Limits Fallacy fatalist bullshit about the scary AI God as a comic book villain, trying to pump it up into being a huge fricking deal by comic standards without stopping to bother refining it and work through things to fix the contradictions and bullshit because if you do that you can't wank it into fricking deep space.
Hickman's Beyonders were also bland nothingburgers, but the wider build-up and the Illuminati as the core were interesting, so the whole thing flowed better. This time it was all of Hickman's weaknesses coming to front without any redeeming qualities. Like you said, the whole thing seemed just too bland. Cape Event Big Bads are always literal gods existing on higher planes. An AI Dominion can be OP for a purely Sci-Fi setting, but in one with literal sorcerers who can visit alternate planes of existence and tussle with gods and devils, the whole thing is utterly insignificant.
Honestly, I think that this type of story and general setup doesn't work with the X-Men because at the end of the day, while many of them are OP, they're mostly flying bricks and telepaths at best, operating on an Earthly plane. His FF/Avengers Saga had Reed, Stark, Doom, Strange and all of these larger-than-life people to play with. The X-Men have Magneto and Xavier who get bodied in cosmic stories, and their only big players are Jean and Magik, who do not have the gravitas for it. So you're left with Cable and technically Nate, and Sinister and Apocalypse from the villain side, at which point the whole thing becomes trite. None of these people can carry an entire Hickman-level saga because there aren't any megaultragiga supergeniuses and kings there. Like he had Namor tell Xavier and Magneto, they're just pretenders. Then you add that the only true geniuses there are Beast and Sinister, maybe Magneto depending on the retcon, and technically Apocalypse, and the ingredients for a Hickman story just aren't there. The X-Men cap at Shi'ar level, they can't go higher despite having all these OP Omegas. Maybe it's the nature of the book.
If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites like Sunspot into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
>If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites like Sunspot into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
Sunspot and Cannonball were probably intended to star in the Shiar book that never happened. Which is why their plot beats got moved into New Mutants and X-Men.
Honestly, even when I read about his supposed plans, they still sound like trash. T'Challa and Storm's magic baby being the "Chosen One"? The whole run felt like Dune: Discount Edition. But Dune worked because everyone was an autistic eugenically bred space royal. The X-Men are a bunch of literal moronic walking WMDs throwing hissy fits. The story he wanted to tell just never fit with the actual characters and lore he was using.
>If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites... into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
So it was, in fact, the epitome of an X-Men run?
I think you need to take the "plans" you have read with a massive grain of salt.
Based on what we know now, the Dominions were likely not the final villains at, but more side-quest villains for Sunspot and the Shiar to deal, with which is backed up by Inferno.
Likely Storm/T'Challa's son was not a major piece since Krakoa would have fallen in Act 2 and Act 3 about the X-Men picking up the pieces in a post-Krakoa world.
2 months ago
Anonymous
You say that, but if not the Dominion than who? Surely not Nimrod.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Heh. Nimrod. Not sure why they haven't renamed it yet
2 months ago
Anonymous
Because the name was funny when introduced already. Looney Tunes is much older than X-Men.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Also the meaning you guys are thinking of only exists in some varieties of English. The robot is named after the Biblical hunter which is also why Bugs calls Fudd "nimrod"
>If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites... into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
So it was, in fact, the epitome of an X-Men run?
Part of it is that it seems like, this is such an obvious fricking thing that it raises the question of why we give a shit about Enigma. Like all it should take is Set or somebody similar looking at him and thinking "That might be tasty" and he's fricked because Enigma has no good answer to one of the things that can punk Galactus, his "natural predator" some fricking how, deciding he's an annoyance or worth eating.
It only makes sense if you assume from all his bullshit about absorbing other dominions made from himself that he's trying to become something beyond a Dominion who can actually handle that kind of threat but that would only work narratively in a world where Dominions are something that's been established and has street cred to make becoming a Dominion+ mean anything.
Because as it is it's just Hickman playing powerlevel autism and revealing how much of a newbie he is about it when all he could think of was Phoenix and Galactus wank when they aren't even the actual big boys of Marvel Cosmic/Magic, just the most overexposed. He invites people to play powerlevel bullshit games and when you actually do Enigma can flat out be punked by like a dozen fricking things that would 100% have the ability to know what Enigma is up to and the motivation to do it because of shit Kirby established as canon decades ago let alone shit people have done since.
Honestly, a Dominion is just a very bland endgame villain for your run. It's the same reason why people would rather stick with the cliffhanger from Dune rather than read Brian's books where it's all >lmao it was just killer robots
Killer robots aren't interesting or fun. They can be entertaining fodder, they can be cool, but after a while they're too bland. Ultron stands out and is interesting because he is an autistic kid throwing tantrums and has a human and overemotional personality. Having your big bad be past Essex who turned into a boring pulp sci-fi book AI "God" is extremely boring. But again the problem arises in that the X-Men don't have any such endgame villains. Bar Phoenix and the three times Apocalypse remembered that he's on a Celestial Mission, they cap at global level. They've got all these powers, but no villains that can stand up to them. Apocalypse is their Darkseid/Thanos and he gets bodied by Black Bolt shouting a bit.
Honestly, he should've just ripped off Mass Effect which ripped off Ultimate Galactus, and done a sort of "Celestial AI" as the villain and had Apocalypse finally do something and end up as the big bad. It makes sense. >has the Celestial connection >has magical knowledge >is their Big Bad (TM) >can go cosmic and get an upgrade
It made sense. Just write some bullshit about a new form of AI Magic and tie it to that. You can't just throw me a glorified metal ball that "sits outside space and time" when you've got reality warpers all around and the Earth has a ton of magicians who've deal with metaphysical gods before.
I'm a Hickmangay and the entire thing never sat right with me from the beginning. I remember him posting 2001 gifs, and I thought that finally he'd something with the X-Men/Apocalypse/Celestial connection, as I took it as a hint to Kirby's 2001 series. But no, all we got the last 5 years were >swamp setting >orgies >evil AI
It's astounding really.
There any good runs or comics for Apocalypse worth reading? I've only been vaguely aware of him because of the old animated series, and when I read Acts of Vengeance last month where he told Loki to go frick himself.
2 months ago
Anonymous
X of Swords are a Apocalypse books also he will be back in a new series “heir of apocalypse”
2 months ago
Anonymous
>There any good runs or comics for Apocalypse worth reading?
Start with 80s X-Factor, #19 and #24-26, Annual #3, then #50 and #65-68.
The X-Cutioner's Song event has Apocalypse get beat up a lot but he has some good character moments.
Age of Apocalypse is an AU but it's his biggest story ever.
Onslaught is a divisive event, and Apocalypse's role in it is small but he has some good moments there.
Also Hulk #455-457 and X-Men (1991 series) #182-186.
For pre-20th century Apocalypse, there's 3 minis; Rise of Apocalypse #1-4, The Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix #1-4 and Apocalypse vs Dracula #1-4, there was a trade collecting all of these but it's out of print now.
2 months ago
Anonymous
He's also in Hickman's S.H.I.E.L.D but not significant enough to read JUST for him. But it is an interesting preview of where the character would go.
>Ultron stands out and is interesting because he is an autistic kid throwing tantrums and has a human and overemotional personality. Having your big bad be past Essex who turned into a boring pulp sci-fi book AI "God" is extremely boring.
The more we see of Essex Enigma the more it points to him being an petty fool with an overinflated ego like all the other Sinister's. It'll probably be commentary on how A.I are behave according tor the data fed into it, and since Enigma is all Essex. He'll make exactly the same mistakes, limited by his self-centred world view.
The other Dominions have said they don't think he's dangerous because he's a threat, it's because he's an idiot.
The climactic threat probably won't be a fight with him, it'll be trying to stop him from accidentally unraveling the universe or something to that tune.
>If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites... into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
So it was, in fact, the epitome of an X-Men run?
The influence of Morrison's run is inescapable. Morrison dispensing with the soap opera aspect of X-Men and for better or worse focusing exclusively on the big important events with zero "wasted" space between each epic is still influencing X-Men writers today. The idea of a run where everything is surgically fit in to a specific plan rather than the wild and wooly "let's see where things go" of the 80s and 90s is compelling, but I feel like it also runs the danger of just making the story feel sterile, which is how I always feel about Morrison X-Men and Hickman's stint before he bailed. It's not for me, but I can definitely see why people like it. But I think grant had much better ideas for his villains than Hickman did, Xorn insanity nonwithstanding.
Even that shit was just Morrison aping the same industry trends that fricked the entire industry in the 90s, just a combination of the contracted market meaning he had a lower issue count and Morrison being an absolute fricking moron meant that it was way more fricking obvious.
It's that but also Morrison has never liked the Claremont school of writing super-teams. He's never liked the soap opera, he's never liked the quiet, humanizing moments. His Doom Patrol was an intentional attempt to push past that and his JLA has the exact same style where the characters barely have any moments and what little they get is incidental. It's also a very Morrison thing is to not have anythig stem from character interactions. Things happen and then the characters have to deal with them, it's all externalized. That's something Hickman also loves, the whole idea of Moira forcing Krakoa into being because of an external threat instead of it happening through any kind of organic development
2 months ago
Anonymous
A major difference is that all of Morrison's JLA roster either had an ongoing or had one within a few years. It's okay to skimp on character work when other writers and books are available or better positioned to cover it. There is only one X-Men character that you can count on to have an ongoing at any given point in time.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Exactly. With JLA Morrison's hands were tied by other books and he was stuck trying to use characters as best as possible. But there's no good reason why he would make his X-Men all about cinematic spectacle with little to no emotional depth. As I said earlier in this thread, Emma's character development happens off-panel before the first and second issues of the first arc. That's not the kind of writing I come to the X-men for.
>Morrison dispensing with the soap opera aspect of X-Men and for better or worse focusing exclusively on the big important events with zero "wasted" space between each epic is still influencing X-Men writers today
This also describes how they wrote JLA and it's impact
You easily could make it work with X-Men, just not the X-Men he chose. A story about the X-Men operating at the cosmic level with the caveat that all of their cosmic players are psychologically damaged, don't want to be there, or are outright insane and people like Xavier are, for all their bluster, barely holding things together would be interesting. But it means putting less popular characters front and center while leaving people like Wolverine with nothing to do so you'll never see it.
On a larger level the annoying thing is Marvel having to pretend the universe is a present-day civilization and not the advanced sci-fi society it actually is
On the one hand, they're definitely too incompetent to actually grapple with the technological and societal implications but I'd respect them more if they still tried.
It's been a long slippery slope from the open bigotry against humans of the early 2000s, and acting like they're above human laws, to the mutants-only segregation of the late 2000s, to the "we are your new masters" of the Krakoa era.
Krakoa era writing summarized:
Wow everyone is doing fricked-up shit. Should we do something?
We should do something!
But what?
I dunno I guess it's hopeless, we can't fight progress.
>Wow everyone is doing fricked-up shit. Should we do something? >No, its cool. We're number one! We're number one!
and
>Wow everyone is doing fricked-up shit. Should we do something? >Hey, look! It's that obscure character you like! They're here! Doing things! >Really? Important things? >Oh God no, get real.
One of my favorite things about krakoa was the wolverine family stuff( I adore the digital comic “Snikt family”) but it wasn’t all roses since we have two Lauras now due to their creepy cloning stuff that no one talks about I don’t want a X-men clone saga
I don't think Krakoa has lasting appeal. It's one of those "oh shit this is great" but then you never go back to it and new readers won't "get it". Like something like Lost, a total product of its time.
Or Homestuck - lots of early promise but ends in an overcomplicated mess, with a main villain who was always "already there" with supporting antagonists who are respectively a b***h and a violent idiot fratboy; its mostly bright and colorful but also a bit grim, with adventures in wacky alternate universes and alien planets; lots of distinct characters, but the interesting parts of the heroes get sanded down over time and the fanbase latches onto total douchebags who they insist did nothing wrong; the fan base itself dwindled over time and became much more weird about it, possibly because it was so very easy to invent special OCs with titles and abilities who could easily take over the world but spend most of their time in a tiki bar AU having lots of kinky sex...
There wasn't nearly enough kinky sex. Hell, as far as I can tell despite the show of resurrections, Krakoa wasn't even clothing optional which is the bare minimum for a Neo-Eden.
How many times does stuff like this happen. Not just when writers back-track on their decisions and make it known in the story, but when characters suddenly have different beliefs for a major arc then return to what they were before afterwards.
Pic is how Charles would've been at the begining of the Krakoa story, not the end.
Blame Hickman and his compulsion to write his characters in a specific way.
>Blame Hickman and his compulsion to write his characters in a specific way.
So he's a Mark Millar, no wonder I couldn't get into Krakoa from the start
This isn't that out of character. Moira in HoXPoX mentions that she had to "break" Xavier to convince him to make Krakoa. Even then, Xavier still had the bright idea to bring on Sinister even though he betrays them in every timeline.
It's out of character for Moira too.
>this isn't out of character except actually it is out of character, deal with it CHUD!
take Hackman's wiener out of your mouth
And you think Moira wasn't OOC herself?
Moira post HoxPoX is an OC who just shares a name with a classic X-man character. I wouldn't be surprised if they at some point reveal THIS Moira comes from some other timeline where she and Proteus were switched, so she was the reality-bending mutant and he was the human
>Why do writers have characters lie in stories only for the truth to be revealed in the third arc
At the start of Krakoa Xavier goes to Namor to invite him on board, and Namor tells him to try again when he actually believes in what he's doing.
You can criticise having Xavier give up and suddenly change course in the first place, but the idea that Xavier's went with Krakoa because he broke rather than believing in it has come up a few times across the era.
Because the writers are hacks and this is what the call course correcting. They saw their shit was not doing well and now are writing that the story is changing direction to see if fans like that.
It's what happens when there is no editor to speak of.
Bro I can't believe the writers would would default to giving Professor X his most well-known and iconic personality traits instead of the ones invented entirely for this single arc. How dare they un-derail his characterization?!
Oppressor this and that. But you never see that you are still throwing babies in garbage cans.
This storyline always has to have an unsatisfying wrap up to get back to status quo, but some dumb 90's twist that Xavier was an imposter or being kind controlled would have been better than this.
So do they just never explain his evil grins, forbidding monologues and creepy body language from the start of this storyline? Xavier didn't "bend", he completely bought into this shit from the start.
Same with everyone else, but that's not how they're going to treat it post-mortem and we all know it
Did the super ai stuff go anywhere at least?
Not really. At best it got folded into Hickman's overall plans for the Dominions, with the Super Dominion fricking with the X-men being revealed to be the original Sinister given a robot upgrade and with Omega Sentinel and Nimrod his willing servants. No talk of what's going on with any of the rest of it, like what'll happen to the overwritten Karima Shapandar after this, but all indications are that they'll just ignore/drop it altogether.
Sort of.
Nimrod/Omega Sentinel's endgoal is kill everyone, human and mutant, on Earth to summon a Dominion and merge with it. But the Dominion Omega Sentinel wants to summon is really Nathan Essex, who manipulated Sinister's save scum machine based off of using Moira clones, to achieve Dominion status and cut a deal with Moira to have her become a "Titan" inside of his "Dominion" (meaning she's part of Essex but retains free will) because by achieving Godhood via save scumming, Essex is locked into a paradox situation existing outside time and space but only able to access Earth 616 and not the entire multiverse and needs Moira to do some unknown task to grant him access to the multiverse like a true Dominion. And that Xavier put something in Moira's head as a child when he failed to kill her that is now part of Essex, along with the fact that this ties into Destiny's prediction that Moira "will have ten lives, and the chance at an eleventh life if she makes the right decision in the end".
And as this is happening, Nimrod is summoning some sort of massive city-tier flagship warship called Sentinel City to destroy all life on Earth while Xavier may or may not have killed Rachel Summers (who kept him from killing Moira due to her point blank refusing to allow Xavier to erase Krakoa from existence as the simplest way to eliminate Essex) to send her to the White Hot Room to save Jean and the Phoenix, which is dying and is the only other option available to kill Essex while preserving Krakoa.
We'd better have gotten good super AI art out of this because that sounds convoluted af.
That's actually the dumbed down version of it. I didn't mention the convoluted mess of HOW the Essex Dominion got power to achieve Dominion status or the shit in Dead X-Men.
who wrote this? This sounds like you need a fricking flowchart to slowly walk you through it
NTA but amusingly the comics did have flowcharts in them.
Hickman does tend to use charts as a crutch for weak storytelling in a lot of his books, and other x-men writers picked up on it to varying levels.
The thing is, it's several stories:
-Duggan has been writing the "mundane" stuff: X-Men vs Orchis, Nimrod trying to destroy all life, etc.
-Gillen (with some additions by Spurrier and Ewing) has been writing the more metaphysical stuff, with the mutants in the White Hot Room, Xavier and his team outside of time trying to prevent Enigma*.
-Foxe is writing the Dead X-Men stuff, which is kind of ancilliary to Gillen's but more focused on chasing a rogue Moira from one of her dead timelines.
*Because the other anon teased it:
Essex foresaw the rise of the "Machine Gods", and created a plan to become one himself.
He made 4 clones (3 of himself, one of his wife), and set them, unbeknownst to each other, to explore 4 different ways to ascend to Godhood:
-Mr Sinister through mutants
-Dr Stasis through human enhancement
-Orbis Stellaris through space technology
-Mother Righteous through magic
All of them achieved it in different timelines, but Essex's trap card activated each time, stealing their Godhoods and using them to become the most powerful Dominion, Enigma.
It sounds convoluted but it's not so much. We get half the reveal in the Sins of Sinister event, and the rest in the last issue of Immortal X-Men. And if the reaction in the storytime threads here is anything to go by, the setups and payoffs were well done and satisfying.
I'll admit tho, they're rushing through the end of the era, and that has affected the pacing a lot in this last leg of it.
I'm sorry but it still sounds like convoluted garbage. When you make the plot of Avengers Forever look simplistic you're gone too far
I tried reading this post and imaging it play out as a comic book story in my head and it just comes out as gibberish. Is this really the stage we're at with the X-Men? This is anime tiers of convoluted bullshit nonsense
Shit like this is why I hate Hickman’s writing.
LMAO. Getting mad at Hickman for stuff he didn't write, based as frick
The simplest explaination would be that Xavier is lying in the OP picture. He was all in when it looked like things were going well, with the orgies and the mind raping and the legs, but now they aren't its all crocodile tears about The Dream™ and how its everyone else's fault.
>the legs
>end of Krakoa
>Cyclops and Jean on the beach
>they find Xavier's legs
>OH NO HE RETURNED TO THE SEA
I want you to know that I wish I could draw anon, because I can see this so clearly. The glorious sunset, Cyclops and Jean slump-shouldered gazing out into the ocean, cyclops holding one leg limply by the ankle.
So Charles acting and looking almost exactly like The Maker was a set up for nothing?
This is so blatantly not what Hickman was going for. We saw him made the most ominous fricking speeches, he didn't show an ounce of emotion as he talked about crashing the world economy or telepathically fricking every non-mutant on the planet. What a bunch of garbage. Is this how they're going to motivate the mutants being allowed in the US again? "We're sorry we did a bad thing!"
How are they gonna explain how anti mutant sentiment isn't justified when humanity was held hostage with anticancer drugs for the last few years?
>held hostage
If you don’t want to cure cancer don’t take their drugs. If you want to cute cancer don’t try to commit mutant genocide. Sounds pretty easy to me
>"No."
>Emma: "Yes."
>"N- Yes...?"
It was stupid anyways because she's a known telepath and you'd have to be stupid not to wear psi blockers around the b***h, but the X-Men were even more open than usual about their wanton use of telepaths to change minds and shift opinions in this era. Fricking Monet went ballistic because someone dared to have anti-telepath countermeasures to prevent her from just trying to snatch information from a person's head.
And where exactly were they using telepathy to change the minds of people on a massive scale? Why didn’t they just mind control every country to accept them if they regularly did that?
Xavier admits to mind controlling everyone so they'll never launch a nuke. Even Beast mind controlled several dignitaries with plant notNanoviruses and Orchis used that against them to create an incident. Emma fought Tony to destroy and monopolize an anti-mind control chip so mutants weren't opposed in telepathic control. Orchis has anti-telepath measures from being ran by Sinisters & MODOK so it's probably only reason they're fodder villian so Xavier & Emma don't Cerebro jam/control them.
>If you don’t want to cure cancer don’t take their drugs
Which would have been believable had it not been for the X-men having a group specifically made to outright smuggle said drugs into the countries that turned them down specifically to enforce their control over the drug trade and by proxy all the humans taking them. So they literally won't accept you turning their "kindness" down that's being used to force nations to allow them to go wherever they want unhindered and with blanket diplomatic immunity.
Cause they don't need to control all the people, just take control of all the world leader's minds so that they're unable to launch any of their nuclear armaments unless Xavier wills it. At least, that's what they retconned in as the reason Xavier doesn't just make people stop being racist, cause he's basically holding the world hostage without their knowledge.
Oh noooooo mutants are helping people with cancer by smuggling in life saving drugs to people who want to use them! What horrible people, we have to murder every single mutant now!
No, not really, they were using the drug smuggling as an excuse to "conveniently" cart off the mutants IN said countries at the same time they were doing that. Which I'll preempt is something 100% in line with the X-men's stated mission, but there's zero altruism behind that. Besides, if they really thought it was that important that everyone gets their anti-cancer drugs, they'd be giving it away for free with no strings attached. The whole drug trade was a shitty political tool being used by a nation to basically blackmail the planet into forcing the planet to turn a blind eye to an island full of terrorists, and more importantly a shitty plot device to basically excuse away why the world would put up with the X-men doing whatever they wanted.
And what happened to that? They will retgone the magic drug plants? I don't follow X-men closely in ages. Everyone will be ok with having cancer back?
They've had MULTIPLE cancer cures from various individuals in the Marvel U for some time now. There's always been one super convenient or stupid reason or another why they weren't distributed though, so the mutant drugs weren't even unique in that respect.
Funny how Xavier and Doom are on the same wavelength now, supervillains with inflated egos.
I can't think of Doom as a villain ever since Valeria was born
>Funny how Xavier and Doom are on the same wavelength now
Honestly Doom is more likable. At least he's honest about who he is.
>They've had MULTIPLE cancer cures from various individuals in the Marvel U for some time now.
Wakanda has even considered using theirs as a bargaining chip with the west on occasion. Norman Osborn has a cure that he's weaponized against targets with healing factors.
Orchis sabotaged the drugs and made people who took them die, kill themselves, or go berserk.
>flood market with free drugs
>everyone complains you're putting people out of jobs and crashing their economies
>ignore mutants suffering in oppressive countries
>people b***h xmen are buttholes for turning blind eye to genocide
There is no winning move in any of this.
This is why people hate muties and should get genocided
>humanity was held hostage with anticancer drugs for the last few years?
we're really going to pretend Richards, Stark, Pym, or even fricking Cho coulden't have taken care of that? But no, it's the mutant's fault they won't share their miracle cancer cure?
Also anon is saying "held hostage" but iirc all the countries had to do for the drugs was recognize Krakoa's sovereignty and even then I think the Marauders were getting it into those countries.
Also they didn't like Give people cancer which held hostage implies
They also had to give every Krakoan diplomatic immunity. Saying that the only way you get life-saving medication is to render their citizens functionally immune to all laws, enforcing a total monopoly on the drugs by literally destroying any possible competition, and operating criminal black markets to smuggle the drugs into nations that rejected the deal for the purpose of politically destabilizing them might not be "held hostage" but it's not exactly anything good.
Poccy didn't have an arc, he had a retcon.
The two of you are using different definitions of redemption.
>Poccy didn't have an arc, he had a retcon.
He was given a waifu. The one way to cure a villain is by giving them pussy/the D
>and operating criminal black markets to smuggle the drugs into nations that rejected the deal for the purpose of politically destabilizing them
Pretty sure your own government saying sorry we can’t save your life because we hate mutants too much is already doing that.
>let me commit any crime I want or I'll keep life saving medicine from dying people
>also you can't make your own life saving medication
Honestly my main issue with the setup is that the entire world seeming goes along with Krakoa's claim that drugs work when the era didn't even last long enough for half the claimed effects to be tested.
>But no, it's the mutant's fault they won't share their miracle cancer cure?
Yeah, why should they share something that Wakanda won’t share?
Was the Wakanda thing also Hickman? I remember he portrayed Wakanda as a real douchebag nation and got them genocided by Atlantis. Pretty funny just before Black panther released
No, it’s from Hudlin’s run ages ago.
This is why real world politics and comic books don’t mix. They’ll pile on every stupid idea and ridiculous contrivance that distort the world into a caricture of itself but god forbid the muggles every get so much as a lick of any of these wonders.
Yeah it's always been some sort of contrived fantasy that offers no real solution due to it being highly contrived from the get go. An example would be like giving a mutant an ability to perceive time faster than others so she's actually 35 years old in her mind and mannerisms but in reality her physical body is still that of a 5 year old. And she wants to have alot of sex because by the time she is of age, she'd be a dementia-ridden geriatric in a 18 year old's body. So the question becomes about the consent of minors despite it being convoluted from the get go. That's it, that's the kind of philosophical cases X-men puts forth.
And Hickman was always the main issue with the Krakoa era being bas. Glad we could establish that. Now that it’s ending we can go back and mostly ignore Hickman’s writing. Just like we did with his Avengers.
>This is so blatantly not what Hickman was going for.
How many times have we done this song and dance by now?
Anon don't be a moron. Hickman literally has Xavier take off the spooky helmet and give a speech to the world about how he still loves humanity specifically so that the reader knows he's not a brainwashed copy of himself.
I remember in storytimes when House of X was coming out that before that moment, people were genuinely convinced that Professor X had been switched out with the Maker, and all this Krakoa stuff was one big Maker ruse. It took that moment of Professor X taking off the helmet for readers to finally drop the theory
Krakoa was always a compromise between three competing visions of the mutant future. Otherwise we have to reconcile that Xavier was somehow okay with the ritualized murder arena or the endless torture pit
And the orgies.
The gladiator pit was there to disincentive people, especially depowered mutants, from killing themselves so that they could get resurrected and have powers again. Because the queue was already enormous due to Genosha alone.
On paper. In actual practice and likely writer's intent, it was a very explicit form of indoctrination both for the depowered mutants and the people watching it. Like, shit, Aero's own family was literally holding back Cannonball as he was struggling to watch his own sister get beaten to death in front of a live cheering audience. That kind of glorification of mutant violence would absolutely do the opposite of disincentivizing mutants from killing themselves.
>That kind of glorification of mutant violence would absolutely do the opposite of disincentivizing mutants from killing themselves.
Not really because they don’t just KO you with one bunch. It’s an actual trial of combat where you’re beaten up and you have to show you don’t just want to die easily. Most people wouldn’t want to undergo that.
And it’s super funny how people now just whine about orgies and the pit but nobody says anything about the cultish resurrection process that had far more emphasis.
>Most people wouldn’t want to undergo that.
Oh yeah they would. In New Mutants, a girl who was mutilated by her powers emerging outright begs Dani Moonstar to kill her in the Crucible under the belief she'd get her original body back. And in Nightcrawler's book, he gets begged by another mutant to kill her in the Crucible as well on the grounds he'd have done it in a more painless fashion. Fact is, the X-men books have long equated a mutant's worth to their powers (despite any evidence to the contgrary), and that only with said powers can they be considered a mutant, so the idea that they wouldn't want to undergo literal death to get their powers back, especially when the X-men have so thoroughly convinced the populace of Krakoa that death has no purpose that the teens were literally killing themselves for laughs to quote unquote "pop their death cherry"...
Yeah. They'd probably stab a goddamn baby if it would return their powers. The X-men and all the civvie mutants have become very fricked up like that.
Again, you don’t just step in and get killed. It isn’t as simple as that. That doesn’t automatically earn your death or resurrection. It’s one thing to say you want it, it’s another thing to actually undergo the process to the end.
You’d think you knew that considering how much this place is full of posers.
Again, as we've seen in the actual books, there are in fact a number of people who would allow themselves to be brutally beaten to death for the chance at getting their powers back.
Hell, you don't even need to take my word for it that the Crucible is a fricked up indoctrination ceremony, Si Spurrier outright lays it out for the readers in the same book he shows said mutant begging Kurt to explain why he didn't essentially euthanize them in favor of Magneto's murderous torture session.
Your own words show that the methods being used (murderous torture session) are dissuading mutants from just getting jumping in to be killed to get their powers back
I take it you just ignored the part where it accurate notes
>Crucible is therefore billed as offering a measure of dignity to one who seeks death and reincarnation
Again, actual children were trying to enter the damn thing despite knowing they were being beaten to death with no hope of being able to actually survive.
>one example
I'm sure there are outliers in every commonly held belief or way of thinking; don't confuse them for the majority
>that doesn't count cause uh it just doesn't
Fine. Here's a second one. One that makes it clear that neither the mutant in question nor Nightcrawler sees it as a fight among equals but a glorified suicide pact to be given the privilege of being whole again. So yeah, again, this shit doesn't discourage death, it's outright telling the populace to embrace it at large via the glorification of it.
I never said it doesn't count, don't pretend to confuse my words to suit yourself
The point is to not stop anyone doing it. It’s to stop people from killing themselves and abusing the resurrection system. Brutality of the crucible is there to also disincentivise people from going from that route, but obviously some will still do it and bear it and in such cases they will get resurrection. It’s a society where death doesn’t exist anymore. So of course it’s going to be a bit fricked up when you want to stop people from just not caring about death at all.
Well, as the story shows, the Crucible and all their attempts to stop people from acting like death has no meaning absolutely failed. And shit, the fact that the Crucible all but guarantees that you've got the top spot in the the resurrection queue if you can endure the hazing ritual of a brutal beating means there's no downsides.
>you’re just ranting about something being bad
Yes? Are you arguing otherwise, anon?
It didn’t fail. If it had people would just commit suicide all the time or the crucible would have island long lines, which it didn’t have.
>If it had people would just commit suicide all the time
Actually, Way of X showed that the teens were turning their deaths into a sport, outright nicknaming it "popping the death cherry". And we see an example of it when Pixie decides to get her head shotgunned off to impress her friends after hearing them unironically goad her into doing it while talking about how much of a rush they felt from their own deaths.
How do you write this? How does an editor see this and think it's okay? HOW IS THIS A MAINSTREAM SUPER HERO COMIC BOOK! This is so offensively stupid and bad I can't believe it's real. This feels like a joke someone makes parodying comic book death.
Si Spurrier was an edgelord even before this series, anon.
But yeah, now we have to live in a reality where canonically the original Pixie happily committed genocide so she could be replaced by a clone.
I think that's the most fricked up thing that's been in a canon Marvel book in a long fricking time.
I mean I've seen some dumb shit in mainstream comics. I've seen Carol get raped by her future son to give birth to him. I've seen Spider-man make a deal with the devil. I've seen a lot. But the X-men turning into a sect of death worshipping suicide cultists who tell teens to blow their own heads off with SIC MOVE BRO is just .. I can't even process this.
Nightcrawler should be waking up in a cold sweat every night for the rest of his life with the image of Pixie laughing as she gets her head blown to chunks etched in his mind.
Krakoa is where mutants became everything that sodom and gomorrah had with all of its sodomy included.
A literal Republic of Mutant Weimar.
And still this shit wont end with them learning that all they did all of the hedonistic shit only fueled mankind's hatred against them thanks to Chuck.
Because marvel gave the new status quo you homosexuals wanted it, and it turned out to be every shit Marvel Humans warned what mutants would do.
And made it even worse to a point shit like Orchis had to be made to stop it, instead of Chuck coming to his senses .
Poor Kurt. Imagine dealing with this shit as a Catholic.
"Poor Kurt" who spends all of Way of X seeing the other mutants he hung out with and was friends with descending into a spiral of hedonistic nihilism and doesn't do or say anything in the end, just wrings his hands and says maybe he should start a mutant branch of religion and maybe that'll help.
A mutant branch of a religion without any real dogma, practice or ethical framework beyond "its nice to be nice" where the priesthood ALSO doubles as the society's police force, enforcing laws that are intentionally vague enough to allow anything (and which don't apply to the upper classes anyway) was certainly a choice.
Incidentally, the Catholic Church has quite a bit of teaching on cloning and oddly enough they aren't fans. They particularly aren't fans of creating a clone to replace someone who died, as the clone I'd considered its own person, like a twin, so has its own inherent dignity and deserves a chance to live its own life.
I hate Way of X so much. So fricking much.Si Spurrier went straight to the top of the shit pile for me next to Duggan
Its so strange, because I really liked his Legion book (and others things he's written going all the way back to his Games Workshop stuff) and this certainly seems to have been pitched as a continuation of that. Way of X was just so shallow compared to what I know he can do. I think it was hamstrung by the fact that (a) the new characterisation of Kurt as all on board for Krakoa from the get go (especially the baby making) and on the ruling council with the psychos curtailed character development (b) the series wasn't long enough to tell the story properly, so it zoomed ahead to "and then we banished the bad vibes ghost and all was good" without building a solid enough foundation to justify itself (c) the series wasn't going to cause any major changes to the new status quo, so there's no payoff to the "wow, our society is fricked up" commentary (d) Spurrier seems to have wanted to write another Legion book, so the Nightcrawler bits are undercooked and tacked on. All you have left is a couple of weak adventures, an even weaker "solution" to the problems that boils down to "let's join hands and sing kumbaya" like a wet blanket vicar's response to church child abuse allegations, and some plot threads that to be followed up on with varying degrees of success.
Did Spurrier do X-Force during Krakoa? The two X-books I felt he worked on where Legion and X-Force and both have a very different kind of tone than Way of X. But yeah I see what you mean about the plot tying him down
Was there even a reason why the Crucible had to be some gladiatorial thing rather than a medical waiting list? I never really understood that.
Cause Apocalypse decided to do it that way and nobody had the guts to tell him to stop. Nor did they ever dismantle it even after En Sabah Nurr left to go back to his wife, they just handed it off to Silver Samurai and never really talked about it again.
Oh, yeah, there was a reason I stopped reading X-men. They did kind of turn into an insane literal cult there for a while, huh?
"for a while"
It's still going until july. it's been five years
And they didn’t actually allow kids to enter, you fricking idiot. Kids want to do all kinds of stupid shit irl and the adults in the room are always similarly saying no you can’t.
I don't know about you, but any society where an adult has to explicitly tell the kids that they can't enter a suicide arena to look pretty again is a fricked up one that probably shouldn't be doing that to begin with
Society right now tells kids they can’t frick, drink booze, drive, enlist in the military, work dangerous jobs (although republicans are pretty keen to reverse that now), etc. until they’re old enough to be considered old enough to make such decisions themselves. You are not making any kind of a proper argument, you’re just ranting about something being bad.
Where in the Hell did they find braces in GIANT FRICKING HORROR SHOW size?
She got disfigured by her own powers. She already had the braces when her power activated, and they were affected too.
So the process actually dealt with the problem of people just intentionally killing themselves in hopes of getting resurrected and the handful of people who go through the crucible actually earned their right to get at the head of the line while most people can’t go through it.
>the hoi polloi
What's wrong with saying "hoi polloi", anon?
It's a dismissive statement used to disparage those you deem the mindless masses of people who don't matter to you. It is not a phrase used by people whoa re the good guys.
Damn you mean Dr Nemesis, who worked with nazis, might be at best an butthole?
Ironically, that's perfectly inline of how mutants see non-mutants, they just don't want to admit it.
>From the Desk of Doctor Nemesis
Like, if it was Storm or Pre-shittified Beast or Cyke saying it, I'd understand the concern. But even when he isn't a fricking Nazi, Nemesis is an Assbandit.
Putting "the" in front of "hoi polloi" outs you as hoi polloi somewhat ironically.
If you want to be pretentious at least do your homework.
This man was a literal, actual, willing Nazi. He was going to nerve gas the US for Hitler.
You're not as smart as you think you are bro
They really did turn them into the Inhumans, didn't they? That's basically how they feel about terrigenesis
Krokoa is fundamentally and in all ways the literal worst
Mutants Have a Right to Defend Themselves
But Humans don't apparently
Humans trying to genocide an entire group of people are not doing self-defence.
I see what you did there.
Marvel humans deserve genocide.
Mutants deserve something worse than genocide at this point.
Everybody called bullshit on this page when this issue released, because it was so abrupt as an out to Xavier's shitty behavior and the behavior of his peers and it came completely out of nowhere, since we heard almost no pushback or grumbling from the mindjacking of diplomats, the destruction of Terra Verde, exploiting Mysterium to be used as leverage in the galactic economy, taking Mars for mutants, Xavier erasing part of Reed's mind all because he found a way to mask the X-gene, etc.
Maybe you should apologize for letting a bunch of the dumb kids who believed in you get killed and replaced them with plant-made meat robots? No?
Gee it would've been nice to see this part of him not after the entire thing went to shit.
I like the stream of tears pouring out of just one of his eyes. Really sells the whole "oh woe is me, I willingly colluded with murderers and supremacists" thing.
It's crazy to me that they were reminding everyone about the Ultimate universe at the same time that they wanted you to ignore Xavier cosplaying as The Maker (for no reason I guess).
well well well
Same energy
It's pretty funny
The irony in this is it's extremely in line with Claremont's reinvention of Magneto with the holocaust survivor background since his inspiration was Zionists and not Malcolm X like all the casuals claim. Menachem Begin in particular. A lot of Magneto's views make a lot more sense when you're aware of that
WHY CANT WE GET OG CHUCK X BACK?
It is always the same shit post Onslaught and Claremont.
They deserve it.
If it was DC, the mutie orgy nation would had been burned out by Fat Waller and Black Adam.
And for Right and obvious reasons.
I miss the classic mentor who may have been forced to do some things he regrets but ultimately had his heart and morals in the right place. When did it truly go so wrong? It feels like between Deadly Genesis and all that crap in Whedon's run that the X-office has been determined to vilify chuck to make other characters look better
>determined to vilify X to make other characters look better
modern audiences writing 101
Aren’t pretty much all Marvel “heroes” ethically compromised now? They’re all a bunch of jerks to the point that Wolverine and Deadpool are the ones pointing it out.
Thing, Captain America, Beta Ray Bill, Silver Surfer, Nova, from off the top of my head. Wolverine and Deadpool have body counts higher than most Marvel villains and have done extremely unscrupulous shit in their lives, the former actually having innocent blood on his hands, so they don't have any room to talk on that front.
Lobdell started the ball in another of his """""""""""innovative""""""""""" attempts to reinvent the franchise
>WHY CANT WE GET OG CHUCK X BACK?
You can't un-spill the milk. The deed is done.
He has supervillain level morality at this point.
Bah. It's a cycle at this point. Just need the right writer to come along and completely deconstruct him from his fall, and build him back up by giving opportunity for facets of his character to shine through until, ultimately, he is reconstructed. It's not easy, but it can be done.
>Just need the right writer
I'm sorry but Charles Xavier is a property of Marvel/Disney.
AND he's white, so he is thoroughly fricked.
Goddamn you gays have a serious persecution complex
>Stop pointing out shit that happens repeatedly!
I'd tell you to stop being a b***h and man up but that seems to be your only setting
I accept your concession.
>and he's white
haha not for long he aint
>a property of Marvel/Disney.
So he'll become a hermit and reclusive shell of his former self, until he's found by an even more powerful double omega telepath who berates him for being white, and he grovels at her feet.
Xavier isn't an omega, tourist
NTA but odd that is what you chose to refute.
I can't refute things that never happened, Anon
Xavier isn't omega. The mary-sue that would find him in this scenario would be Double Omega Super Saiyan X.
The only omega telepath isn't special enough already?
anyone got that page where Brand thinks mutants and their homosexual superior hype are completely moronic, because they're just another flavor of Earthling
Never mind. Found it. Sad that duckduckgo is now better than google image.
Yeah but that's framed as her being a villain, so her character is basically fricked now if she even makes it past the ending to Krakoa
I hate these talking head panels. I feel like this should be one large discussion with more dramatic framing and stuff happening instead of some MTV real world crap.
At least the Magneto one bothers to give it a bit more flavor sorry with him eating during it. Though monologing while eating is something you can only get away with in comics.
I can’t read these nine panel talking head pages anymore without choking on my rage thanks to Bendis and King.
The KDS has caused permanent brain damage in these poor anons. They're beyond saving now...
Bait
>All this shit Xavier says.
How about he taught mutants to be decent people and use their powers responsibly without being dicks? Especially fricking telepaths.
I bet that if Spider-Man had a bunch of mutant kids under his wing, then he'd make them into heroes far greater than the X-Men are.
You ain't wrong
Aye.
Also remembered the old USM run where he calls out Jean on her telepathic dickery.
When Spider-man had the chance, his students questioned the X-adults for not teach them how to be responsible with their powers.
And the X-adults were too busy shiting on Spidey to actually pay attention to their kids.
And thus Spider-Man should run the X-Mansion.
Man that comic was a fun read.
>woe is us, woe is me
>we will send beast to do the dirty work for us and maintain our economic standing on the planet
>but hurr durr purity failed for these other mutants on the council
>hurr durr purity failed when we had villains on the council
>Xavier thread
What's going on her…AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!111!11!
I swear they did this to make sure Xavier wouldn't trivialize various encounters.
that show and Justice League convinced young me for years that psychic powers were useless and lame as frick
the power to moan and scream and pass out
I blame Star Trek TNG. I realize that Counselor Troi isn't really the same kind of telepath. But she was still useless.
>Enemy shop bombards Enterprise with heavy fire
>I'm sensing great hostility, Jean Luke
Kirk wouldn't have needed his therapist in hand holding range is all I'm saying.
baldy finally talking sense again
>Our oppressors
Why is he talking like a homosexual?
Dominions aren't any more interesting or threatening than any of the other huge and epic cosmic threats. It's basically Knull without the edgy bullshit surrounding it and more wank
I've been at this Krakoa fatigue stage for years and it's still trucking along?
It's ending nowadays but the fanbase is divided on it. There's the side talking about how it betrays basically everything the X-Men is about with everyone being comically evil while there's deadhard supporters who love it for the power fantasy angle along with "it's not another mutant genocide at the mansion" story.
>It's ending nowadays but the fanbase is divided on it.
The fanbase didn't do anything. The people who claim to like this shit aren't the fanbase. They don't buy books.
Love how this board spent several years jerking off to the Hickman hype and only now when it’s ending people suddenly are pulling a 180 and saying it was terrible. Every time with you people. It’s like clockwork
>this board spent several years jerking off Hickman
This is the revisionism part not whatever you typed afterwards.
Like 95% of discussion was hype, especially early on. Barely any criticism or complaints. And until last week nobody was making KRAKOA SUCKS AND ALWAYS DID threads.
Krakoa has been controversial from the start and on Cinemaphile especially
This kind of trolling is so moronic, this board has hated krakoa for the last 3 years
You can do an X-men story without it being a race war, I've been frankly tired of that shit too as it's been done to death in decades.
It is but everyone makes it out to be a binary and how you misunderstand the X-Men if you tire of it. It's not like I think discrimination can't be a topic the X-Men should tackle, I just don't see why it's a choice between ethnonationalism and mutant genocide stories.
Even if you think that, you know I'm right about how Krakoa's fans see the era.
I thought it was an interesting idea when I thought it was going to be a criticism of the idea. It wasn't really besides a few spots
>the ol israeli oppression v black oppression argument
idpol sucks, time to read karl marx and get class conscious
Personally I still think my solution is obvious.
i think it would be more straightforward to get some of the mutants off of planet earth and give them shit to do in outer space
Forge should lead a team of cyborgs and A.I., he could do missions for hospital planet where sentient life shares medical and engineering knowledge. Forge, Danger, Deathlok, Douglock and even Vision could be on a team
The last time there was a team or robots, it didn't go well.
Stop saying the n word Kitty
She can't, as
brought up, she even went back in time to invent racism
What if we liked it because we liked seeing the power fantasy angle get deconstructed by how hapless and corrupt Krakoa is as a nation?
As a slow /shelf/ gay who doesn't care for X-men beyond claremont/morrison, is there any chance the Krakoa stuff would fit in an omnibus or two? the concepts discussed itt are interesting but until it's collected in an accessible format i'm not touching it
From what I've gather, the interesting part is the ethical dilemmas it asks but the Krakoa saga answers them all in the most trite highschool-tier philosophy that it doesn't push through any line of profoundness because they can never accept the fact that the prejudice the mutants face are well-founded and justified. And creating a military and state power structure behind that makes it worse.That's the answer some writers never want to accept because they can't divorce it from the exegesis of a civil rights movement.
A lot of the stuff Krakoa did was already done in works like Miracleman and Dune. That they managed to even get this far by trying any of those ideas in the rather confused mess that is the X-men is already a shocker in and of itself, but the fact there were people who unironically tried to excuse away the very visible flaws in the foundation of the framework of Krakoa that were begging to be questioned says that some people REALLY just wanted to see an "X-men but they're the winners" storyline without caring how they got it.
On some level, I empathize with those people because it's easy to understand why they feel that way. I don't think the next era's going to fix them or anything but I do think it'll put them in a better position for somebody to finally sort out the X-Men's shtick which was needed for awhile now.
I give it to the people who just wanted to see the X-men on top instead of on the run, most of them at least were honest about not giving a shit about the darker implications Hickman threw in for Krakoa and just wanting their old favorites back. But I do agree that even if it's not as daring as HoxPox, it's probably better in the long term to put the X-men into a less let's say 'ambitious' status quo for the time being so that writers can sort out where the X-men actually stand in the Marvel setting let alone their own stories.
Krakoa was never going to be anything except an era of experimentation before going back to the more classic way to do X-men.
I'm just hoping it means we'll be leaving the Decimation style status quo for good where the X-men were constantly worried about some kid sneezing means the entire mutant population is going to be Holocaust'd. I'm not going to get my hopes too up, mind, I don't have THAT much faith in Marvel. But it'd be nice to get away from that.
It'd be controversial but personally I think mutants need to be decoupled from the allegory. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing they should drop discrimination as a topic but we've long since had enough characters from different backgrounds to actually address this stuff than how it's typically handled. This would also make the status of mutants more flexible since they aren't tied down by some nebulous concept of discrimination. I think it'd allow more freedom in both directions in the kinds of stories you can tell.
Personally I avoided any Krakoa discussion because I found the concept offputting and the fans too aggressive.
I think if they actually remembered that most of the X-men characters are from different countries and with different life experiences, it'd help.
The idea of an artificial ethnostate where nobody shares anything beyond genes is super interesting. It's obviously most similar to Israel but then marvel also decided to not do anything to explore that concept because the Krakoa tiles almost universally only deal with the big famous characters. The idea that common people mutants who haven't been on an X-Team or with an evil mutant group or whatever, the regular schmoes, are just able to suddenly give up their thoughts about culture, ethnicity, religion, social class and what have you is really fascinating and should have been dealt with, but instead the only time we see mutants who declined to go the Krakoa they are just treated as idiots for it.
>but instead the only time we see mutants who declined to go the Krakoa they are just treated as idiots for it
Reminds me of the time Whirlwind showed up and was asked why he'd turn down a free shot at paradise, and he gave probably the most logical answer in the entirety of the X-men books
Exactly. Like if you're not a character who has been swept up into the big race struggle your whole career what the frick does being a mutant mean to you? Do you automatically like another person more because he/she is a mutant? That's like saying you automatically like someone because they happen to have solid earlobes like you.
Wait, Whirlwinds entire reason for not going to Krakoa was because he thinks it's a bad idea for mutants to be living together? I feel like that's an entirely wrong reason to go about things. Them living together is incidental. It's that they are playing power games with nations that can't do anything about it.
Whirlwind is a thug, anon. He doesn't give a shit about their lack of ethics and morals. All he knows is that the X-Men have a tendency to invoke the wrath of the heavens and he doesn't want to be there when it happens.
Yeah, I think the concept works a lot better when you treat being a mutant as a completely fictional thing on top of their background. Then you can be dynamic with it since the X-Men could actually have tangible victories with acceptance (and even failures). You can still explore "otherness" with mutants and I think everyone wins with that kind of direction. People overthink it
that’s what I wanted. What it means to build a society. I wanted parliamentary politics and fights about whether people could bring their human, inhuman, or robot relatives. I wanted an adult story written for adults by adults.
Yeah, I feel like there was a lot of missed potential for mutants with shitty powers but actual relevant experience in stuff needed to run a nation and trying to include them instead of it being just a popularity contest.
But honestly while I can blame the writers for not doing that, I know full well that stories like that wouldn't have sold no matter how well executed they were
>I feel like there was a lot of missed potential for mutants with shitty powers but actual relevant experience in stuff needed to run a nation
Man we needed an uprising story where the ordinary mutants of Krakoa rose up against the leadership. Call it Krakoa Vs X-Men or Mutants Vs X-Men or whatever to draw in the readers or whatever and finally address the social hierarchy that exists in X-Men stories.
If Inhuman Vs X-Men was considered good enough to draw in X-Men readers despite being designed to dunk on the latter, then it should be ok when the opponents have a sympathetic point. You can still have the popular A-list characters join the people.
From Utopia onwards the narrative of the X-books has been that the community leaders are the protagonists and everyone else is a good loyal soldier or an NPC, and anyone opposing or questioning the leaders was some kind of race traitor. In both the talent pool of writers and in the fandom, the environment just doesn't exist to create a story of a rebellion against the leadership where that rebellion has just motivations and a reasonable point.
Reminder that Storm lacks a formal education and what little education she might have received would have been a few years of self-directed education that ended prior to her adolescence. Despite being her native language, English would probably be her third language after Masri and a Bantu dialect. She probably reads and writes Arabic better than English.
Okay see THIS is the shit I want to actually see in X-Men. Not as the major theme or plot but just the emphasis on that these people are from different cultures and places and have very different views of life. Storm isn't going to respond to things like a bland average middle american, despite being originally born in the US. Logan grew up in the 1800s in a posh rich family, I wish they would actually use that for anything. Colossus and Illyana are country bumpkins from poor-ass bumfrick corner of Russia, they will have a hugely differing viewpoint on life than Betsy who is a literal posh British noblewoman. THAT is the kind of diversity I WANT to see. But it requires them to get some writers who understand that there's a world outside the US
They never bothered to find real teachers when it was just a school where clearly nobody took even the basics of a Safeguarding training course, so its par for the course really.
At least there were people on the Quiet Council with real world experience of running small countries and large commercial enterprises, like several time el Presidente Magneto, or Mr Sinister, or Apocalypse, or Sebastian Shaw... hmm. Seems to be a bit of a pattern there.
I'd trust Shaw to run a country.
X men returning to status quo constantly is dumb why do you guys care still? It always happens
Because without X-men, what do I have left?
You have to realize the stories will never be good X men is always
>Fjght for acceptance
>acceptance might actually happen
>something moronic happens and mutant human relationships are at an all time worse
Then throw in random alien/super natural stuff that’s actually interesting or the x men interacting more with the main marvel universe more.
Return to status quo is literally super hero comics 101, it isn't unique to X-Men
Okay but what if I just want cool shit to happen and hot sexy mutant women to be half naked?
Why do people leave Kitty out so much
Because she doesn't really look all that distinctive.
Kitty is hot dude, she’s utterly perfect in every cartoon interpretation
Yes but she's always playing second fiddle to somebody else. And that somebody is always Rogue.
her whole appeal was being cute, not sexy. They fricked it up but the fans never forget
Idunno I thought ninja kitty in this comic the threads about is cute
Then you're based and like me. (I only read gambit solos because they have both usually)
There's no return from Krakoa.Take that as a bad thing or a good thing. But the X-Men franchise will now always be affected it. The characters are going to be compared to their actions during this era by fan discussion for years and decades to come, and a lot of us will never be able to forget the fricked-up, disgusting shit that the writers put in there and then never had the guts to actually try to resolve.Way of X pretended as if Nightcrawler was finally going to step up and say something but ultimately nothing happened. It was a weak, flailing effort to try and acknowledge how fricked up and degeenrate Krakoan society was, and it only served to put extra attention to it.
And now these people, these FRICKING people who have held people hostage over cancer cures, mindwiped humans to agree to their politics, genocided entire human nations, threatened to crash the global economy, held ritual death games, put thousands and thousands of unwanted babies into the world are going to be back in the "real" world. And they're going to pretend like they can just go back to being superheroes. No, that isn't how it fricking works, you fricking buttholes. You ruined any likeability the X-Men characters had left. You dragged everyone through a stain of liquid shit and now you're not even trying to clean it. It's not enough to have Storm tell Xavier to frick off in the final year of Krakoa, it's not enough to have Xavier suddenly go all weepy and claim it wasn't his fault after all the garbage he stood by for or participated in.
If you wanted people to be able to sympathize with these buttholes in the future then HAVE THEM ACT LIKE FRICKING HEROES. Otherwise keep the island. Keep this setup. Because the characters are useless outside of it now. That is the thing that gets me the most, they ruined any hope for empathy for the cast and then they even take away the status quo where those personalities are acceptable.
Just retcon it. All of it. Forget it even happened or existed and relegate it to its own thing. This is the Big 2 we're talking about. It can be done.
They won't because Krakoa still has a large fanbase. It's a fanbase mostly made up of people who never read X-Men before and jumped in with hoX/PoX because of the hype around Hickman and the offer of a new "epic" status quo. From what I have seen observing the most rabid Krakoa fans on social media over the years, they aren't very concerned about things like character likeability and relatability because they treat it more like people who jumped into Game of Thrones. big sweeping story with awful people doing awful things to each other. And now just like GoT it has fallen into its own event horizon and just turned into steaming shit. But Marvel knows if they disown Krakoa then they will lose those readers and lose trade/collection sales and they will never do it. Not for something as unimportant as the soul of the X-Men franchise going forward.
>It's a fanbase mostly made up of people who never read X-Men before and jumped in with hoX/PoX because of the hype around Hickman
This shit pisses me off because it's unquantifiable no true scotsman shit. People can like the same old X-Men comics you do and also Krakoa.
and Nightcrawler's there supporting them even!!!
>People can like the same old X-Men comics you do and also Krakoa.
Considering how much of what made the Old X-men work is spat in the face by Krakoa? No. No you can't. I refuse to believe anyone who's read any amount pf x-men for any amount of time can not only tolerate this filth but like it on top of that is bullshit. No.
I know you'll just call me a liar but they do exist. I'm at least one. Sorry.
At least this is a critique of the book and not getting mad at shit that didn't happen.
>At least this is a critique of the book and not getting mad at shit that didn't happe
Thanks. I won't lie and pretend like I read every Krakoa book but this one I did read and I absolutely loathed it because it brought out all the dirtiest, most unpleasant ideas possible about Krakoan life, hung a big fat sign on them so you'd know they were there, and then ultimately didn't do anything to address them. Which game me the feeling that Kurt is too weak-willed or meek to even try to do anything even after seeing things that should freeze your piss. It's so disappointing and grimy and weak and it could have been so much more.
I'm a long time X-Men reader (since 1995) and I enjoyed seeing the Krakoa era because I enjoyed seeing villains team up with the heroes. It's my favorite trope, villains turn heroes. Mastermind working with X-Corp, Pyro with the Marauders, Apocalypse with Excalibur, the Hellions, Omega Red with X-Force, Storm showing the Arakko mutants a new path, Fenzy, Random, and the MLF with SWORD. I voted for Tempo to join the X-Men. I'm happy to see Juggernaut working with them again
I like Dragon Ball for the same reason; Vegita was comitting global genocide and selling planets for a living, now he's a family man. The Klingons signed a peace accord, even the Romulans play nice with the Federation. William the bloody was a soulless monster for centuries. Megamind. Venom. Zuko. Lex Luthor even joined the Justice League. Seeing a villain turn their life around is always a favorite of mine.
Hero/Villain team-ups can be fun but where Krakoa lost me is I see the X-Men as straight up villains during it. That's not the usual dynamic with those kinds of stories and I don't like it because I feel it goes against the message of the X-Men.
>I see the X-Men as straight up villains
And I don't.
That's cuz you're probably a homosexual
Anon I hate to break it to you but not many of the villains who went to Krakoa had any form of redemption arc. Apocalypse is the one who did, and I think it was successful. Sinister ended up being as bad as before or worse, Shaw and Selene instantly tried to oust Xavier when he showed weakness,Omega Red was caught in like three waves of being fricked over and the rest mostly just collaborated with the "heroes" because they were all doing the same horrendous shit now.
Ironically by far the best Krakoa idea was making sure Sabretooth was in no way interested in joining them, kept being the same butthole he's always been, and fricking off from Krakoa with his crew. That book raised a lot of extremely good point about putting every mutant into a pressurecooker and turning up the heat.
I disagree and I listed the villains I thought had arcs. I didn't mention Sinister, Shaw or Selene, because they didn't
>It's my favorite trope
You're full of shit
>It's my favorite trope, villains turn heroes.
So go read Thunderbolts and shut up
You have anger issues. Also, I did read Thunderbolts
Krakoa was more like heroes turning into despicable villains
I love you, Anon. And I believe that even you could one day be an hero.
Way of X is so fricking bad because with this framing, how can you expect this to be anything but a scatching renouncing of the way Krakoan society is going? Kurt is spiritual, he believes in greater purpose, and here he is exploring a society that has become materialistic and hedonistic to the extreme, where children commit suicide like a game, where basic empathy has become eroded.So what happens? You get a weak-ass limp-wristed ending with Kurt going "Maybe I should change things?" and the idea he'll start a mutant religion. And then it's over. And then it's barely even mentioned. So effectively, the only reason Spurrier wrote all this fricked-up shit was to get it on the page, get it out there for the shock value.
Way of X's greatest sin was it being a complete softball of a look at Krakoa that got blown out of the water by the Sabretooth minis in terms of self-critique. In the end the most effective moment in the entire book is the painting of a dickless, ball-less, crucified Nightcrawler, because that was an actual call out.
Shit, if the Sentinels ever tore through Manhattan to take their shot at him he's got a decent chance of the Avengers showing up to save his ass.
>Way of X's greatest sin was it being a complete softball of a look at Krakoa that got blown out of the water by the Sabretooth minis in terms of self-critique. In the end the most effective moment in the entire book is the painting of a dickless, ball-less, crucified Nightcrawler, because that was an actual call out.
Oh my god thank you for agreeing with me. That series SHOULD have been the hard-hitting "What the FRICK are you doing" expose of Krakoa turning into a shithole. Instead it took the actual villains in the Exiles to take that stand.
Krakoa lacked conflict that it should have had. The X-men fighting with each over parliamentary debates would have been awesome.
>and Nightcrawler's there supporting them even!!!
Nightcrawler is trying to stop her on that very page anon. It's what kickstarts his crisis of faith for the arc.
I think the issue was a lack of central direction across the titles. A lot of the different titles tackled the issues of Krakoa and had characters express dissatisfaction, but it could never be paid off in any way that affected the larger status quo. So you just had characters condemn the problems and then wash their hands of the problem or swear to fix it and then get distracted by a big emergency.
I can't believe you responded to a post I made like 15 hours ago, anon. But yeah I understand the lack of cohesion and direction was the issue but I would have prefered to not just have these stories pretending to be examining Krakoa and then inevitably not doing anything about it because of the rest of the lineup. It makes Kurt especially look like a huge ineffectual idiot. And Logan also said he'd frick off and the instantly came back. Meanwhile it took forever until somebody like Storm told Xavier to frick off and I don't think Jean EVER did.
>I can't believe you responded to a post I made like 15 hours ago, anon
How long have you been here if that's not happened to you before?
Jean kinda did when she and Scott left to do X-Men stuff.
I do like we finally have people who stopped saying "They need to go back to superhero stuff" when there was the whole thing about the X-Men leaving Krakoa and living in NYC
I think when they said "They need to go back to superhero stuff", I think the implication was also they needed to get away from basically being another Krakoa agency. And to be fair, despite Scott and Jean having no problem telling the Council to frick off, they're equally happy to go along with all their decisions and proclamations, like how they just agreed to force Scott into putting on a doofy Captain Krakoa costume to protect Krakoa's interests (covering up for the resurrection protocols) rather than just ask him to consider finding a replacement or faking his recovery or something. That and, well, using the X-men as intergalactic goons to protect Krakoa's intergalactic interests despite the X-men's thing being that they're supposed to have the freedom to decide who to save and when of their own volition independent of the Quiet Council.
I think part of the problem is that in the beginning of Way of X one could get the impression was going to be about the people willing to put the hard work in to deal with the issues of Krakoa. But then it turned into Kurt being completely OC though pointless handwringing and faffing about until he finally decided that the whole thing was morally, philosophically, and psychologically dead, at which point he just kinda stuck around to handwring and faff about. If you weren't going to have your book do anything about the shitty things it was about, then at least they could have had Kurt go "this shit is irredeemable and I refuse to be a part of it anymore," and bail. He and Stacy X could have packed up the Whorphanage and started a farm in Montana with 30 dumpster babies or something.
All of these "there's something wrong with our society" stories unfortunately ended up with the character(s) still collaborating with the Council anyway, with the notable exception of the Sabretooth and Exiles series which genuinely went for "Your island is shit, goodbye". That was such a release to read and I'm amazed they made me agree with Sabretooth of all fricking people. The guy probably eats babies on his off time.
Because Sabretooth is the Ubermensch in the most sociopathic way possible. Krakoa represents stagnant, self-obsessed society of the Last Man and has nothing to offer him.
Thank you Nietzsche-chan.
>with the notable exception of the Sabretooth and Exiles series which genuinely went for "Your island is shit, goodbye".
Unfortunately even that is pinned down by the inability of a title to affect anything. The story builds up Creed's war with Krakoa and the Exiles grudge with the nation, but ultimately they get sidetracked with Orchis and then Creed had to go fight Wolverine for a title event and the Exiles only get any kind of closure by chasing down Sabertooth, following the will of Krakoa again. The dissatisfaction from the lower class mutants gets a token mention on influencing the disillusion of the Quiet Council but even that gets distracted by an emergency.
The Quiet Council never has to face what they created, and despite his wallowing Magneto instantly drops any pretence of care about the Pit so he can go fight Orchis and think about Charles instead. If he's lucky most of them will be dead by the end of Sabertooth Wars and he'll only have to deal with Oya.
I'm thankful for Percy for bringing LaValle in and I know their friends, but it was painful to hear him reference his mini series as non-essential side-stories. I suspect there's truth to it from an office perspective, and LaValle just wrote what felt like one of the most important stories on his own violation, but I doubt there was ever a plan to tie it into the other titles.
Which sucks majorly because how do you not book end the era with Sabertooth condeming Krakoa's to face it's sins, when Krakoa kicked off with his unfair trial and imprisonment?
And now you have the "Kill No Man" rule going out the window but no one's around to go "is it weird that we're carrying out what we sentanced the lower-status Mutants for?" Or imagine if it was Sabertooth who pulled a populace movement to wipe out Orchis?
Orchis should have wrapped up a year ago and the lead in to Enigma as a flashy, high-stakes finale for the Main Characters. Then they all walk back to Krakoa, unbelieving that they survived all that and relieved to have saved the Krakoa'n project and how maybe it was all worth it in the end.
Only Victor Creed is sitting at the head of the council, the rest of the seats occupied by the Exiles and they turn around to see themselves surrounded by a pissed and tired mutant population who want some answers and action, and not necessarily from them.
I concede all your points but I still enjoyed LaValle's writing there more than say Spurrier's awful shit in trying to explore Krakoa. As you said it sucks ass that he feels his stuff was just a side adventure because I think if he was allowed main title and was allowed agency he could have done a story that blew Krakoa right open, exposing all the hypocrisy and de-humanizing rethoric (de-mutantizing?). But his hands were tied from the start by Hickman's bizarre and contrived need to Sabretooth to be a very particular scapegoat and then tied again by having to adhere to all the big nonsense events that kept dragging everyone back to work for the Council again regardless of what they said in their own books.
>But his hands were tied from the start by Hickman's bizarre and contrived need to Sabretooth to be a very particular scapegoat
Hickman left before Sabertooth started. Hell Sabertooth's shady trial is one of the seeds planted, and it's weird no one picked it up till the newbie came on board.
Sabretooth crying crocodile tears wouldn’t have much impact. Sure, Krakoa was rules by hypocrisy but so what. Sabretooth went right back to being a guy massacring everyone, including mutants, because he just felt like butchering people for his personal delight, not really giving a shit about anythings else.
>Sabretooth went right back to being a guy massacring everyone, including mutants, because he just felt like butchering people for his personal delight
See that's part of the Sabertooth War event where Creed got sidetracked by his boner for Logan. If we got the story the first mini built up then Creed would hold off his murder rampage long enough to play on the dissatisfaction among the populace and maybe make himself the face of the Kill-No-Man backlash.
He was half way there by the end of the first mini. In the real world people go
>Well yes we know he's terrible, but he's making a good point and no one else is doing anything about it...
All the time
>>Well yes we know he's terrible, but he's making a good point and no one else is doing anything about it...
Which in a way was also the rationale for filling Krakoa's government with psychotic villains in the first place, many of whom Creed had either worked with or for in the recent past, so it would have worked well as a counterpoint.
That would require Creed be anything but the selfish butthole he is, controlled entirely by his core desires.
Creed can be pretty clever depending on the writer. LaValle's whole angle on him was his skills as a CIA agent and it was fun seeing him connect with the Exiles to use them for his own ends and win over the Orchis prisoners.
Seeing him fight his own bloodlust long enough to do maximum damage to his enemies, and then finally let loose in the climax would make for good tension and pay off.
Nah Sabertooth was shit since people used it as a cudgel to point out how shit Krakoa was ignoring that LaValle hates the American incarceration system even more and probably would have some stuff to say about superheroes tacitly enforcing it.
it was sarcasm making fun of anon
fair enough
Now get to the part where you join the ACK
tl;dr
You’re wrong
How
>TL;DR for the entire thread like this: "Not muh X-Men! Not muh X-Men! Not m-AAACCCCKK!"
>Nooooo muh ethnostate power fantasy!... what no I didn't buy the book, but I did post some screen grabs on twitter to pwn the chuds.
Why the frick did you reply to the bait?
I think most people are mad at how Krakoa is ending and how what's coming next seems like a step back to the dark ages of 2005-2019 more than the fact it is ending. I think a lot of fans do understand how superhero comics work
>like a step back to the dark ages of 2005-2019
Compared to what happened in 2005-19 Krakoa IS the dark ages. This is, without question and as of this writing, the worst era in X-men history.
>step back to the dark ages of 2005-2019
Why would you say that when there is no indication you’re going to get more verge on being an extinct species next. If anything the reverse seems to be back to 2004 era prior to House of M/Decimation, which was what the books briefly were doing after mutants made a comeback around 2010-2012 al generation Hope.
I know some people are claiming it's going to be X-Men 97 synergy. I'm probably jynxing it but I'd be fine with that and it'd be one of the few cases I don't mind synergy.
>Why would you say that when there is no indication you’re going to get more verge on being an extinct species next. If anything the reverse seems to be back to 2004 era prior to House of M/Decimation, which was what the books briefly were doing after mutants made a comeback around 2010-2012 al generation Hope.
There is absolutely nothing indicating they're going for a Decimation/Utopias situation. Everything we've seen from the solicits is about the mutants trying to live with other people again, not isolating themselves. There's also going to be as many books after the relaunch as there are now, so this isn't some culling event. That anon is just making a bad faith argument to make it seem like the relaunch is doomed.
Do you think doom posting by Krakoa anons is mostly due to it being so long since the X-Men had a "normal" status quo? They've been stomped on for so long both in-universe and out that there's probably people too young to remember "normal" for them. FOX no longer exists so there's no reason to keep them in that state.
If we go by Marvel's own claims their median reader age is between 25 and 35 with younger and older demographics as outliers. If we post someone who is 30 who magically happened to decide to get into the X-Men when they were say 14 years old then their first X-Men comic would have been in 2010, right during Fraction's utopia era. not the absolute nadir of modern X-men runs but it's also really nothing special or noteworthy, and if this imaginary reader continued a few years down the line they'd get punched in the dick by a series of increasingly awful runs. So I really do think this may be a case that they literally have never experienced an era when the X-Men status quo wasn't just endlessly being kicked while they're down with no respect from any other characters and no hope for the future.
So I guess I can kinda see where the doomposting comes from in that regard.
It's never something that occurred to me before. I always assumed anyone who got into comics would be really autistic about it and get familiar with their favorite's whole history but I'm wrong
People absolutely read older comics but there's always a chance that they will assume their first view of a character or team is the "correct" one and won't be able to appreciate a very different one. I'm not saying this doesn't happen. I've seen lots of young readers who love Claremont X-Men.
But I think some people look at the pre-Morrison comics and see them as dated and hokey, filled with cliche morals and boring social stuff, wordswordswordswords from Claremont and forever betwen the big epic event issues.
It would explain why my X-Men opinions clash so hard with what I've seen from the fanbase. I'm on the younger side but I decided to jump head first into Lee/Kirby and work my up.
I am actually super curious what your thoughts are on those older comics, like 60's-80s. I'm an oldgay, I started on the Claremont stuff and I often feel like I'm one of the last people alive who likes that era.
I have a soft spot for the O5 even if their stories weren't always the best. Bendis bringing them back for a bit would've been pandering to me specifically...if it wasn't Bendis and didn't go on for so long.
Claremont was pretty good but it's been awhile since I went back to it. You can tell people only think of the big things like the Phoenix or DoFP rather than all the goofy misadventures they'd get up to.
>Claremont was pretty good but it's been awhile since I went back to it. You can tell people only think of the big things like the Phoenix or DoFP rather than all the goofy misadventures they'd get up to.
Big fan of them going clothes shopping and finding Jubilee while fighting a goofy team of Mutant-Busters (Ghostbusters parodies)
They are 25 to 35 but they definitely didn't start as kids
It'd be accurate to my experience at least. I didn't really get into comics until I was a teenager. Ironically it was in the ANAD era where I used to get called a middle aged white man for saying the replacement characters suck ass.
>Ironically it was in the ANAD era where I used to get called a middle aged white man for saying the replacement characters suck ass.
where?
Most of the krakoa era people are 100% new to x-men, and mostly because they lean into the ethnostate / "this setting reflects my political beliefs" angle.
>where
Most places online. Cinemaphile generally pushed back on it from what I remember but Cinemaphilemblr was already a meme at the time and you'd have a few die hards defending them. My close circle wasn't like that but in larger spaces, it'd start fights if you complain about Captain Falcon or Whor.
>Most of the krakoa era people are 100% new to x-men, and mostly because they lean into the ethnostate / "this setting reflects my political beliefs" angle.
I could believe this too. I've seen too many posts where people are basically mask off and go "UwU wholesome" to a fascist's wetdream
Most of the praise I could see were from twitter, youtube, shill news sites, and very entrenched X-men fandoms like on Reddit and CBR. In general comic book fora and other nerddom talking points, opinions were far more divided like on here.
Precisely. It's also funny that the X-men installed Wind Dancer to basically babysit Mojo for the X-men, and iirc after that she stopped showing up in Krakoan group shots unless necessary and explained why she stopped visiting 'her home' for the same reasons Mojo eventually dismissed the original X-men as his favorite film subjects; Cause they were living on an island full of buttholes and turning into buttholes themselves, and she wasn't too interested in being around that
The best way to use Mojo has always been to lampshade the bad tendencies of your current X-Men status quo. Claremont made fun of his own wordiness and messy storylines when he did the X-babies story. That's what Mojo should always be. Not some dramatic threat but a big shitpost about whatever going on that's worth mocking. And I can see so much that Mojo would mock about krakoa.
Hell, I would end that story with Mojo learning that this brand new epic project that everyone was so excited for at the start is now a giant flop and he grouchily demands they go back to the classics, and it's something like X-MEN TWO: BACK TO THE MANSION, feature movie.
It's too long a period too, that's at least like 3,4 X eras. Maybe Post-Decimation/Pre-Hope, Hope, Schism/AvX, Bendis
I just want the mutants to frick off from the other corners of Marvel if they're still going to be up their own ass, just without the benefit of an ivory tower like Krakoa. They make Doctor fricking Doom somehow look more tolerable to deal with at this point.
Dr. doom would never allow the depravities of Krakoa to occur
Oh great the fricking Krakoan defense league are out to white knight their favorite comics against those pesky critics again.
Someone define "redemption arc." Working for the nominal heroes but never changing your overall attitude or outlook on things, and not facing legitimate punishment for past crimes is not redemption.
>Mutants: "You're good, we give you a pass"
>Aggrieved parties of "redeemed" individual: "We fricking didn't. That guy killed thousands and hasn't seen a day in court."
>Mutants: "Yeah, well, that's not your choice to make, they're with us now."
It's this very creepy and fricked up state of things that they wrote mass murderers and serial rapists as people worth trying to redeem, or trying to make the audience think they're redeemed. The only person they even bothered treating with the actual degree of punishment he deserved was Sabertooth, a mass murdering, raping, child-killer, but that's only because he wasn't going to play ball with their system, not because of his crimes.
They don't even show a redemption process for their big mutant clemency process. In a world where they actually cared they should have shown that people like that would have to submit to intensive screening, supervision and therapy to try to see how honest they were.
They've already admitted people like Gorgon and Daken and played their antics off for laughs. It's not like they weren't aware of their backgrounds, it's that they just didn't care.
Everyone was given clean slate blanket pardon and your behaviour after joining Krakoa defined you. So people like Selene, Fenris twins, etc. were still bad apples, Sabretooth kept being a murdering scumbag even if he got fricked over by Hickman’s hamfisted storytelling. Apocalypse meanwhile worked entirely in favour of Krakoa and wasn’t evil. Most other villains either worked for Krakoa without being evil or backstabbing Krakoa or just chilled and did nothing villainous.
Redemption was largely happening with people who worked to make Krakoa work without sabotaging the nation. So Sebastian Shawn was not redeemed but he never pretended to be anything except self serving individual, Greycrow had redemption through his service to Krakoa, Omega Red similarly achieved redemption by being a team player after being released from control that forced him to follow orders, etc.
Your view reminds me of that stonetoss comic about concent where a literal imaginary man is used as a strawman
It's more Keiron Gillen, king homosexual supreme, thinks Krakoa went too far. A guy who helped set the stage for Gamergate and unleashed the cancer and AIDS that was homosexual America Chavez upon comics and first wrote Nazi Cyclops, thinks Krakoa sucks and did unspeakable damage to the X-Men franchise.
And he's right. It doesn't matter how much of a homosexual he is otherwise, he is 100% right.
How did Gillen start Gamergate?
Gillen started as a writer writing video game reviews (IIRC for the UK gaming magazine Euro-Gamer). His "reviews" weren't actually reviews: he'd ramble on about his cats and anything BUT the game he was supposed to review and generally speaking, set the stage for people who hate video games reviewing video games and being full of nothing but contempt towards people who wrote the magazine complaining about how Gillen's "reviews" were rambling blog posts that barely if ever talked about the game. Which culminated in him submitting a game "review" that was nothing but photos of him as a mime doing mime shit that Euro-Gamer published because they shared his contempt for their readership.
when will this meme of calling magneto max be over
I still think half the shit people on here complain about with the Krakoa era is nonsense.
>Muh degeneracy!
>Muh mutants being weird with death now they're immortal!
>Muh X-Men not acting like heroes!
None of that matters. This is all fine writing. They're sick of trying and failing to integrate and found a compromise with their enemies where the threat of force and abusing a few politicians (the only actual subhumans irl) let them live in a borderline paradise for themselves. Them getting into weird sex stuff and letting themselves die for sport after becoming immortal is also interesting writing and totally in line with something people could do after getting that kind of power.
The actually valid critiques I'll accept for Krakoa are:
>Moira as a whole is an awful fricking retcon used to try justify too much of the setup that removes any interesting character development for Charles that lead him to this
>Not enough focus is placed on the normal average joe mutants who flocked to it and how they adjusted plus the conflict between so many people of diverse backgrounds living together in an ethnostate
>Now that it is winding down the attempts to pivot back to the status quo are already turning out poorly, like Xavier's sudden turn of heart
>There's been several points where stuff just felt like the author's barely disguised fetish being inserted (like anything Leah Williams touched)
No. Not it is not FINE writing. Your super heroes giving up trying because it got hard is the exact opposite of good writing. This is twat writing.
Nah, deciding to try something new with them after several decades of more or less uninterrupted "The X-Men keep trying to make it work" no matter what gets thrown at them is fine. Marvel stories have to run hypothetically forever unless they finally pull a New 52, they have to try new things with the big groups eventually to keep things fresh. Spending a few years exploring the X-Men trying out their own version of mutant separatism where they don't go full cartoon villain like their enemies wanted to and just forcefully rebuke the rest of the world instead of conquer/destroy it is a cool premise for a couple years of storytelling.
The issue is that so far making them decide to return to trying to make integration work has been done poorly.
>The issue is that so far making them decide to return to trying to make integration work has been done poorly.
because there's no good reason for them to do so. krakoa is great, the only issues are down to certain major c**ts being let join it - the "logical" move here is removing them and not reviving them after. instead they're all going to give up on mutant paradise and go back to living in charles' basement while the rest of the world wants them dead because suddenly they'll remember their old political stances as if they just forgot them instead of deciding to change them.
You know they aren't actually going back to Xavier's school, right?
I give it a year before they do once this arc is over.
>because it got hard
They were told by Moira that various different attempts, including Xavier’s dream and Magneto’s mutant supremacy routes, eventually end in horrific outcomes like mutant eradication etc. in the future. So the entire Krakoa nation building project was a final ditch effort to combine different factions under one unified roof in hopes that would be enough to change the game. Because divided and trying to do it on your own small group leads to failure.
And of course now we know Moira was lying and manipulating things and her motives were not as clean as people thought they were and she actually is pretty anti-mutant for selfish reasons.
Moira is by far the single worst part of the Krakoa era.
From a meta perspective anyone familiar with Marvel cosmology noted right off the bat that Moira's ten lives were completely worthless against an infinite multiverse with infinitely branching timelines. Even within the X-characters alone there are at least 3 timelines not covered by Moira.
to be fair all three of those timelines not covered by her still went terribly for mutants
I refuse to believe Hickman intended for Moira to be a secret villain. Ruthless yes, unpleasant yes, but there's no indication she's lying or misconstruing the prediction stuff at the start of HoXPoX. This feels like desperate cope to find a way to get rid of Krakoa without also saying that now the mutants are doomed because of Moira's predictions.
I think this was the plan from the start because it's the easiest route to restoring the status quo but it is still terrible writing that was not set up at all.
Krakoa was always going to fail. Moira being at least partially behind that and all the convoluted bullshit and need for secrecy does make it seem like there was some intent at Moira having an evil arc. It doesn’t really make sense otherwise to go so out of your way to retcon so fricking much of Moira’s history to bring her back as le epic mastermind behind Krakoa and showing her going to insane extremes in other timelines.
Moira instantly banning precogs from Krakoa was clear evidence that she didn't want anyone else to look into the future and blow the whistle on the fact she was lying about it.
Which would have been fine if the heroes didn't compromise their morals while doing so. But they did, and to such an egregious degree that they seem like villains now. Which kinda does make it shit writing.
And again we come back to Hickman being a hack writer who cares more about his grand design than logical and consistent characterisation. I was saying since day one it was ridiculous how Hickman didn’t bother to show ANYONE being critical of the giant changes or question things. Everything was acting on blind faith or drinking brainwashing koolaid. He just expected you to accept it. And of course this is all because Krakoa was supposed to only be a short term thing before the next step in the storyline.
Which is insane, because who the frick does such a gigantic status quo shift and then writes it out before you’ve even gotten around setting the basic rules and foundation for it, let alone do anything with it in a franchise with multiple titles, before it was already erased. The only way this would even have a chance to work is if Hickman personally wrote the only title where everything happened and it was over within a very short period of time rather than taking years and dozens of issues per book.
>They were told by Moira that various different attempts, including Xavier’s dream and Magneto’s mutant supremacy routes, eventually end in horrific outcomes like mutant eradication etc. in the future
Because the x-men don't already have a half dozen people all from distinct independent futures running around. You realize this isn't the point right? In fact needing a character to mouth piece why you need to give up is all the more reason this shit is stupid. Heroes are supposed to fight against bad future not accept it. Why do you moron keep using in universe bullshit to try and justify out of universe moronation.
>Because the x-men don't already have a half dozen people all from distinct independent futures running around.
and in every one of those, mutants are...? moira just confirmed all their worst fears there.
it is fricking insane how short krakoa lasted relative to how big a change it is and even worse that moira being retconned lazily is what both started and ended it.
did any mutants actually use the diplomatic immunity for fricked up shit or did krakoa just use it to get stray mutants out of those countries and let their """diplomats""" leave negotiations that turned hostile ala the UN one? i can't remember any of them using it to just go commit crimes in random countries
Nature Girl. Krakoa didn't give a shit about her murder spree until it started drawing enough heat. In general though, diplomatic immunity has very specific grounding in international relations and specific criteria, so anyone demanding a blanket immunity for its citizenry regardless of actual diplomatic function raised the question of why they'd need it unless they were planning on committing crimes. Also the story ignores that diplomatic immunity may be revoked, a person can be declared persona non grata, and diplomatic immunity actually does have specific criteria for its application.
>Krakoa didn't give a shit about her murder spree until it started drawing enough heat
But they were going after her from the start, because what she was doing was wrong and causing trouble. If they didn’t care they wouldn’t have sent iirc Wolverine after her until it was already a giant problem
The story tried to frame it as Wolverine trying to “quietly” remove a problem before it got out of hand…AFTER it was already causing international news that a mutant kid is going on a killing spree. Even then, it was clear they didn’t take either the bad press nor Nature Girl’s growing insanity even remotely seriously until she started posting nature terrorist footage on LiveLeak. And even then, it wasn’t the gorn that did it, it was calling herself one of the X-men that made them get of their fat asses to actually do something well after shit had hit the fan.
Initially it was just okay that kid connected to nature is going bonkers, it’s kinda understandable if deranged, get her back before this gets bad but do it quietly because we’re a country now and we don’t need this trouble. Not a high priority when we’re dealing with Nimrod. Then it became oh frick she’s absolutely insane and she makes this look like she’s literally representing Krakoa officially with her actions shut it down now. And then they captured her and threw her in the pit for her crimes only for Krakoa itself thinking actually that’s rad what you did here’s a free get out of jail card.
Cuz eco-terrorism is ALWAYS justified.
In an instance where people are directly connected to nature and regularly witness and feel the destruction happening on a global scale by humanity I mean kinda? Just how much destruction are you expected to be okay with and do nothing? Humanity has literally eradicated entire species. In the past century there an incredible amount of animals that have gone extinct due to human actions.
>extinct animals
Which specie would be able to contribute in a situation of a space rock going to end all life on Earth?
She stabbed a convenience worker in the throat over a turtle dying that he had zero interaction with beyond selling a customer the plastic bag it ate. There’s saving the planet, and there’s murderous insanity, and it was very clear the kid was too focused on justifying her murderous impulses to ever truly be the planetary savior she believed she was
Plus she wasn't important or powerful enough to be on the ruling council or one of the many black ops death squads, so she had to be stopped.
>beyond selling a customer the plastic bag it ate
And zero interest or empathy over the fact the animal had died
Only on person has committed murder, even if you want to push equal worth between a human and an animal (and animals wouldn't give a damn about said turtle either)
Being a cog in the ecological destruction machine doesn’t really relief you of the
collective guilt and responsibility. Especially when someone shows what your actions result in and you go “…so?”
see
That clerk had more objective worth for the future of the planet than the turtle
Nature Girl should learn basic history of species on the planet, plenty went extinct without human involvement. Disasters (dinosaurs), bad evolutionary choices (sabertooth) and other animals (cats alone killed like 60 species) took a bigger tool
But the main point stands: without humans, the planet is defenseless against space rocks. Until we reach the level of reliably stopping them, all is secondary
And she is a murderer
>That clerk had more objective worth for the future of the planet than the turtle
Do they though, when basically all they do is directly is contribute to the overconsumption of resources and increased pollution?
Can turtle have a future genius son who would save the planet?
What we did to end ice ages? The % of atmosphere filled with our CO2? The area devastated vs area gained (greener Sahara and such?). And blame greens for opposing atom, the statistically most clean and efficient energy.
>but Chernobyl
Check on Ukraine how the modern Russian tech fares vs 30 years old one from US. Atom is safe unless soviet
And space rocks aren't theory. We know what hit the Earth. We know what was caught by Jupiter. And we don't know if we won't detect anything world ending tomorrow. Focusing on small picture satisfies only instant gratification.
To be fair, our ability to stop one is what is theory. If we were to discover a K-T event size asteroid tomorrow that was due to strike the Earth in, say, 6 months, what could we do to prevent its impact?
>but wot if space rock fall in urff an we dunt have genius to build rocket
And that theoretical genius maybe one day in the future existing justifies all the damage we carelessly do is okay because….? You’re basically just saying it’s okay for humans to cause damage because maybe one day in the future we do something beneficial to Earth by preventing space rocks falling here.
>without humans, the planet is defenseless against space rocks.
That’s all purely theory at this point. Meanwhile every day we pollute and bit by bit destroy the biodiversity that sustains the entire planet and help make life on Earth become more and more difficult by spreading microplastics, making the planet warmer with CO2 emissions, destroy natural habitats and waterways with mining, oil spills and damn building.
the spirit of the world itself appeared before her and told her to frick off because humans are her children too and in the ecological scale she exists at the death of some species and climate changing is insignificant so she doesn't have her permission to go around punishing us for out-competing all other life on earth on her behalf
Her opinion is unimportant when she's presented as a crazy b***h
Getting nowhere close to warranting murder.
Turns out the evil living island is evil
>Nature Girl.
Ah, right, totally blanked on her bullshit.
I'm reminded of the wife of that American diplomat spy who killed a teenager in England in a road accident, immediately fled the country and the US refused to do anything about afterwards. Krakoa could actually work as a 2000ad style satire of the worst aspects of American foreign policy and rah-rah exceptionaism, but it would require a level of self-awareness that just wasn't there.
America does not prosecute road-killing animals.
All countries do this. I was in Asia a few years back and some Romanian who worked for the embassy also fled after a hit and run.
Yes but the US and UK are very close politically and culturally which makes it worse than two random thirdies with little in common
The real thing about nature girl is she's a great example of how the X-Men should have stopped and asked themselves if maybe isolating a child/teen and indoctrinating her into seeing them as her parental figures for all intents and purposes before teaching by example that human lives lack value compared to mutant ideals was maybe a fricking mistake and a sign that they'd gone too far but instead they just blame the kid they made be like this instead of having any self awareness whatsoever.
Nature Girl was a brainwashed crazy b***h who ultimately was just following the example she was given in the end but the X-Men and the writers at the time both didn't want to talk about the fact that she was the monster they made.
Except she was being corrupted by another mutant, Curse. It also wasn’t X-men ideology brainwashing her. Nor was it isolation. It was Nature Girl having the ability to communicate with and understand nature and being increasingly angry at the level of destruction happening around her while nobody gave a a shit because humanity and other mutants think they’re superior to other life forms so needless pollution based death of animals isn’t a tragedy to them.
Imagine for a second a random animal suddenly took over the planet started causing human deaths as a mere side-effect or byproduct of their dominance. You would think it was horrendous. But when you as a human do it to other animals it’s “natural” and you don’t care because there are no direct consequences to you.
Thing is, the X-men are still for all intents and purposes still Nature Girl's guardians. And all of this shit still went down on their watch. Hell, even if you want to absolve them of the responsibility of giving Curse the opportunity to corrupt Nature Girl, as well as the fact they did nothing but passively observe Nature Girl's increasing distress from the state of the world, the fact remains that she ran away from home twice to go murdering people, and the X-men as a whole failed to treat her or the situation with the level of seriousness they warranted until she was trying to destroy the planet.
And it's a running theme that terrible things keep happening to the X-kids because the X-men are so busy saving the world they have no time to properly guide or communicate with the next generations they claim to be doing everything for. And it's something that's gone on well before Krakoa, before you think it's yet another whine about that. There was Quentin Quire and his gang going on that school rampage, there was that mole Spider-Man was hired to search for in Wolverine's school among the neglected students, there was...all the messy, messy, messy drama of all the Academy X students, and shit, on Krakoa the children were explicitly outright left to fend for themselves after the X-men put in the minimal effort to jam their education in and then frick off to continue fricking and getting high, putting the kids in a dangerous position to get manipulated by Farouk. Hell, even on their mutant island paradise, there were STILL people who were very visibly upset and isolated and alone like that little toerag Curse and that spider clone of Gwen.
So, yeah. Thematically, the X-men have always had issues with failing in some manner to properly guide the next generations that they say are more important to the survival of the mutant race than anything else. And Nature Girl's no different in that regard.
Dude, whoever went on to push all of this morloch levels of shit in x-men deserves to be lashed with a chain electrified whip
this is fricking moronic
Honestly, now that I think about it, Krakoa would work great as some dystopian TTRPG setting, like something out of World of Darkness.
Stop. You're defending someone who killed someone's father because one of his customers - not even him - threw a bag in the ocean. Stop it. Stop the hypotheticals and the analogies and the whataboutisms.
She killed a man.
Over a bag.
Someone else threw in the ocean.
And how many other animals has his indifference killed over the years?
How many had yours?
Who knows. It probably has happened though. And that’s bad karma.
Well not to worry, just jump in front of a truck or something and your painful death will make up for it
Should i be killed for it?
Should you be killed for it?
Perhaps.
The turtle deserved to die from being weak enough a plastic bag kills it.
Mutantkind are the plastic chokes and mankind are the turtle's necks. Sooner or later, they are gonna meet face to face and it ain't gonna be pretty for one of them.
Plastic chokes are limited in power to what they were born with while turtles can use magic and weapons to surpass their current self?
The turtles can always just swim away.
Moira has personally lives through several lifetimes in alternative timelines so that alone makes her experiences more reliable than any singular potential timeline that’s based on specific events. And it is shit writing by Hickman due to the enormous retcons and lol just accept it premise, but there is clear logical rationale behind it. Moira’s past lives directly show what x, y and z will result in and it’s all bad news. Hence why the need to compromise because they’ve been shown how pigheadedly trying to do it your way alone doesn’t work.
Honestly, for what it’s worth, 9 very radically different lives feels like a massively small test sample size compared to the fricktillions that every future vision mutant can see, and especially compared to the numerous time travelers that are casually living with the X-men after averting their own futures with little cosmic repercussions. So yeah, them immediately taking Moira X at her word with “only” 9 lives worth of experience does feel a bit stupid. Like ffs, several of those lives had her committing cartoon villainy, or joining Magneto or Apocalypse to just murder everyone rather than unite ANYONE. So, no, I don’t believe she’s any more reliable than any other whack job time traveler.
Friendly reminder that Moira never even tried to unite the X-Men more with any of the non-mutant superheroes in any of her timelines.
Imagine writing an entire essay trying to bait anons, lol you're a loser
-100/100
>Not enough focus is placed on the normal average joe mutants who flocked to it and how they adjusted plus the conflict between so many people of diverse backgrounds living together in an ethnostate
That's my biggest complaint yeah, we never saw how Johnny Mutant was able to adapt to a semi post scarcity ethnostate. As far as we can tell the only thing people did was "beach"
I haven't read A x men Story since the SCHISM event. Is it worth even catching up or reading the recent stuff
Krakoa is one of the worst things to happen to comics
Jonathan Hickman in general is one of the most toxic and damaging people to work in comics. He's exactly what Marvel doesn't need
Did the ever say why he was cosplaying as the Maker?
Hickman always intended Xavier to have the look first when he prepping to write New Avengers, as far as having Xavier run around masked all the time.
But Bendis and the others writing AvX decided to kill Xavier off and Hickman, who in turn had to rewrite his New Avengers plans with Beast instead of Xavier, went and recycled the visual for Ultimate Reed wearing a mask full time when he started writing him.
Just use Mkraan crystal or Mephisto to retcon Krakoa era out of existance, simply as, put as some AoA/House of M alternate timeline, it worked before. So X-Men as nominal heroes but in reality mutant supremacists who engage in dirty realpolitiks would be removed from the continuity. With that they could fix Iceman being gay, Pietro and Wanda not being Magneto kids and so forth and forth.
>Just use Mkraan crystal or Mephisto to retcon Krakoa era out of existance
tbtbh i'd prefer they not do that and instead try really grapple with the fallout of this. the earth finally has a legitimate reason to fear mutants and distrust the x-men and a lot of them now have to deal with the fact they gave up on their beliefs over a lie.
i'd prefer if krakoa's pseudo-neutrality implodes and the x-men end up fighting every other faction to prevent them from taking out mankind, and then adjust to living as part of the world again without their immortality or all their omega level allies to put them in a position of power. they just have a shitty nation state made up of rejects from all over the world, some of whom might still sympathise with the villain factions, and have to try work out a way to co-exist and do the right thing again instead of dictate terms to humanity.
>immortality
X-Men by now are either gholas or revenants. Either the ressurection is just clones with implanted memories or necromanced spirits forced into cloned bodies. That thing is another fricked up thing they added to the characterization.
Captain America, too
It's not even the real Captain America, it's some sort of imaginary friend cooked up by a cosmic cube deluding itself into thinking it was a real american little girl.
I think they reversed that so that now Hydra Steve is the imagined duplicate and the original was just buried inside the cosmic cube until he got released, precisely for the really unpleasant implications of Captain America no longer being himself but an imagined avatar of himself given flesh
For what it's worth, I don't say 'mask off' as a way to just indirectly call them villains since we do see that the guys who actively liked helping people still were willing to do so of their own free will. I was saying it more to emphasize that X-men have basically shown that when push comes to shove, they'd ultimately side with someone they know is evil but a mutant like them over people that are good but aren't "of their kind", essentially. That and how they've bought into the idea of mutant supremacism and the false idea of "mutants being the next stage of evolution" in a betrayal of Xavier's original principles and dream regarding mutants and humanity needing each other to reach a future golden age together.
And as much as it'd be interesting to see the writers acknowledge that the X-men themselves have so very vastly changed from their roots for both good and ill, I know they're too cowardly to, cause even during the Krakoa era where the X-men were the most visibly separatist in how they freely used mutant-themed slurs like "flatscan" or calling outdated concepts "human"/"sapien", the X-men were still being written as very much in denial on having turned their back on any of their principles and/or blaming all the shit they've gone through as justification for being buttholes.
I'm just not going to get my hopes up with the X-men so soon, really. And I know they aren't "mine" and that they have no obligation to acknowledge the X-men have made mistakes, but I still think it'd be interesting character writing, even if it ain't gonna happen.
Actually the canon for Hydra Cap is that he's a parallel Earth evil Cap that Red Skull/Kubic grabbed from another earth and the real Cap was trapped inside Kubic, the cosmic cube that walked like a girl
That somehow feels even more complicated than one of them being a cosmic cube creation, but thanks for the clarification.
Also a retcon of course, originally they were totally gonna keep OG Steve as the Hydra one.
>the original Steve was gonna be a nazi
Totally, dude
Iron Man is on multiple levels of dubious about identity so it doesn't matter.
>it doesn't matter.
I know, Anon. I'm not the one crying about them being ghouls
Oh, so you're wrong in general
Nah is the other.
Iron man is a worse case, and not only because bendishit, his memories and even body got fricked before that
Iron Man and Black Widow are the peak of Marvel losing the plot with characters that should be very simple and iconic. With characters like Spider-Man they have tried but their popularity makes retcons (mostly) bounce off and them returning to status quo. But with a second-stringer like Tony or Natasha, all that shit sticks to them like driftwood. It doesn't MATTER, not unless you for example try to read the Iron Man comics printed since 2008 in order. But it is dumb and pointless.
>It doesn't MATTER, not unless you for example try to read the Iron Man comics printed since 2008 in order
Which is sad because Tony comics after fraction are garbage(even worse than Spiderman post Back to Black)
Not like after late Busiek and before Marvel Now were great but have at least some decent stories.
Yeah. People ask why Iron Man isn't more popular in comics after the massive boost he had in the movies and the answer is unfortunately simple. His comics have just been shit for almost the entirety of his MCU career and since. Fraction was the last great Iron Man writer and his run ended over a decade ago. Everything since has been an increasing level of hot garbage with retcon after retcon, death, new Tony, retcons again, the sixth time in 10 years Tony has to re-learn what it is to be a hero. I don't understand how such a simple, iconic concept is so fricking hard for people to comprehend without bringing in clones and mystery parents and secret brothers and retcon after retcon
It has to be said that most of the writers Marvel has put on the Iron Man book have been guys they considered "big names", even if they actually suck, they're the ones Marvel treats like their top guys, people like Ellis, Fraction, Gillen, Bendis, Sloth and Duggan. They all just didn't get how to write Iron Man, or wanted to spend their run tearing him down because he's everything they've been indoctrinated to hate IRL.
There's also the issue that the movies generally aren't bringing in new comics readers, so the Iron Man comic readership remains at a similar size as it was before the MCU, getting occasional boosts from a relaunch or "star" talent working on the book, the same as every other character.
I think the problem is what you said, that all these big guys with the possible exception of Fraction weren't interested in developing a nice stable status quo for Tony to work in. They all did big dramatic upheavals and then Tony had to deal with that for the rest of the run. We haven't had a normal Iron Man run where he gets any time to breathe since Fraction and that's only because Fraction stuck around for more than one arc. It's really frustrating, really, because 80s and 90s iron Man was great and had a solid if unexciting reader base.
That's a wider problem with superhero comics in general, where nobody wants to just work within a book's normal default status quo and do normal villain of the month superhero stories anymore, they just want to veer from one huge status-quo shattering crisis event to the next without stopping to catch their breath. They've forgotten that all the classic upheaval stories they're trying to top only worked because they were surrounded by YEARS of normal villain of the month stories so they stood out.
Oh I fully understand this. Those writers you mentioned are all conditioned to think of each run as a big bombastic event that will throw everything about the character into chaos. Death, resurrection, new origin, radical status quo change, replacement, whatever the frick. And they also look at the previous guys who did that and try to top it. And there's never a point where you hit "normal". You never get stories that show how Tony lives with his current status quo, what effect it has on his decisions or life. What does it mean that he's dedicating himself to the environment side of megacorps now? We will never know because it's a big decision he comes to at the very end of a run and then a new writer takes over.
It's best not to think about it too much because it immediately falls apart if you take it at face value, which is that the team makes a perfect clone then a backup of the original's memories get uploaded to it. Meaning the original is still dead. Best to just pretend Cerebro is storing and re-implanting souls somehow because that is how the story treats it.
I don't even think they all went mask off, at least not in the sense they're villains. They've got reservations about abusing/killing innocents still even if they are more than happy to treat the governments like their borderline enemies after what they've been through with most of them, they'd still view human lives as having value. But they have clearly shown that if given the option they'll work with absolute monsters who have killed tens if not hundreds of thousands in order to secure peace for themselves and put the restof the world at arm's length when they feel they are backed into a corner - their morals and supposed belief in human/mutant equality have limits. They're not necessarily evil but they have definitely betrayed their old ideals and shown on some level they value their own differently to how they value humans.
Seeing them grapple with that fact and dealing with the realisation they're hypocrites, trying to be better and earn the public's/former friend's trust again, would be interesting.
But yeah it'd probably be written like shit in practice.
>Best to just pretend Cerebro is storing and re-implanting souls somehow because that is how the story treats it.
But the writer themselves were not helping at all. Didn't they put Cypher talking to his original body who was reanimated by necromancy? It's a frick up from day one.
No, it was Exploding Boy. But it was just reanimated bodies, not souls.
In any case, clones already had the implication of "drawing in the original soul" from the whole Ben Reilly Jackal stuff, HOXPOX does mention Xavier bringing "the anima" of the resurrected person into the new body, and the Living Tribunal counted Krakoan resurrection as a true kind of resurrection, which was one of the several kinds (Green Door was another) that were eroding the concept of death so much that Death was dying.
So it's real resurrection, with the souls and everything.
And yet, there's the case of Laura, resurrected while still alive, so there were 2 for a while. What happened to the soul? I guess it duplicated or split.
By that token, do classic clones have souls anyway? Ben and Kaine and Maddy and Evan and so on? Are they new souls or dupes or splits from the originals?
>and the Living Tribunal counted Krakoan resurrection as a true kind of resurrection, which was one of the several kinds (Green Door was another) that were eroding the concept of death so much that Death was dying.
That was blatantly a retcon introduced after thousands of comments about how Krakoan "resurrection" wasn't at all that. Like I remember after the big exposure of the Crucible stuff people were pretty freaked out by the idea that healthy people would suicide to create a powered clone of themselves. People were more accepting when it was just for people who got vaporized by an Orchis drone because that person was dead ANYWAY
>And yet, there's the case of Laura, resurrected while still alive, so there were 2 for a while. What happened to the soul? I guess it duplicated or split.
Word of God (in that arc itself) is that the second Laura was a frick-up. She was essentially like another Laura clone with her own soul but with the original Laura's memories (up until a certain point). Yes I know that this doesn't make much sense to make that distinction but they literally put it into the omniscience narration so we kinda just have to accept it.
Also it's kinda fricking shitty that the only person who may actually incontrovertibly be dead after this much is original Laura because Talon is so insanely dead now. I guess we'll just have to accept Laura 2.0.
>They're not necessarily evil but they have definitely betrayed their old ideals and shown on some level they value their own differently to how they value humans.
They've been like that ever since they kept falling over themselves to defend Magneto at damn near any cost. It's a thing older than myself and most anons on this board.
>But they have clearly shown that if given the option they'll work with absolute monsters
So do humans
Human beings are one monolithic group like mutants always turn into when given the opportunity.
As interesting as it would be to have the writers force the characters to deal with the consequences of their reputations being shot to shit, much like Steve Rogers after Secret Empire or Spider-Man after Superior Spider-man, I don't expect the writers to actually try and address the fact that the X-men did go full mask-off in regards to how they feel regarding the humans they say they want to protect. Frankly, I'd be surprised if they even acknowledged Krakoa beyond the X-men complaining that people hate them again 'for no real reason' while waxing nostalgic about living in a beautiful gated community island where only the elite and genetically privileged lived.
Walkbacks like these are never not funny. Scenes are gonna dogpile up so fast with every writer is trying to scramble make sure their characters are on the right side of the current history.
The funniest thing about the Krakoa cloning is that Miles Warren, a fricking college professor, cracked this exact process decades ago by reading old notes left behind by an Inhuman scientist. This one guy achieved the exact same thing that it took a giant mutant island and five different mutants to achieve and he did it in the literal cellar of a NYC campus. Of course despite there being absolutely zero difference in the outcome, Jackal clones have never even once been considered equivalent to the original and are distinguished as copies even when they establish their own lives, like Ben Reilly. Hell we literally have a storyline in Spider-Man RIGHT NOW with the clone Ashley Kafka /Goblin Queen and the fact she is NOT accepted as the original resurrected despite having pitch perfect memories and DNA. It's all so fricking laughable and it's clear Hickman doesn't do any research or think of the actual role his shit plays in the Marvel Universe.
Did you forget when Ben ressurected Gwen and she died again, only for Death herself to tell him that she had been legitimately Gwen?
All the writer after that ignored that, even slott
One of the funny things about this era of X-Men is that things that were done before were treated as a monumental achievement, everything that came before doing the same thing just didn't matter because it would undercut the story they were trying to tell, which is something not unique to Hickman even if he's very notorious for it.
Will Cinemaphile ever stop making Krakoa threads filled with people claiming all sorts of weird fanfiction shit is what actually happened? Honest question here because I imagine a lot of the same people post in these threads since there is one daily. And they're always filled with wild fricking fanfiction, misinterpreting clearly explained events and shit like blaming Hickman for non-Hickman comics (Duggan comics being especially common). Are these people just trying to work themselves up over imagined Krakoa things or what?
I think it's 3 things.
-People who didn't read and only got the outrage highlights about "orgy island", "Cyclops is a cuck", "X-Men are villains now".
-People who read but didn't get that a lot of the things they complain about are being presented as bad. See in this thread someone complaining about The Crucible, when the very issue that introduces it shows characters being uncomfortable with it, and it launches a storyline about how lack of death is causing mutants to lose respect for life.
-The writers of secondary books who do actually treat all the morally questionable things as outright good because fun hippy party island yeah.
That last part is depressing because I have also seen it happen. Some of the books literally treat it like they're on a Key West vacation where everyone gets good food and drink and dances on the beach. That's disingenuous because it undermines the story as a whole in addition to creating wild tonal whiplash. You can definitely explore the good sides of Krakoa but you can't present it as an unproblematic haven, because that is not what it is. That's never what it was. It was always meant to be nuanced and flawed, showing a post-scarcity society dealing poorly with the removal of societal basics. But we never did get that Krakoa grassroots book either so we know so very little of what went down with regular people on the island.
Like all dystopic fiction, there's a class of people or a veneer of society where everything is gilded parties, limitless entertainment, and the only enemy is boredom.
All this covers up the horrific reality of what it takes to create this illusion.
The problem is that these people don't see it as a dystopia. In her view, it's just a utopia fueled by magic with no downsides. These aren't the majority of fans but I have definitely seen this from both creators and fans
Oh, I agree with you.
The majority of writers that infest Marvel and DC are utterly tone deaf, read and write at an kindergarten level, and have the same temperament as a den of vipers. Some of them can now even count driving a man to suicide on their resume
The last one is why I hate Krakoa personally. That in turn makes me hate all the questionable stuff and see the "X-Men are villains now"
Seeing fans try to basically explain away the Crucible as "not as bad as it looks" or that all the flaws were really supposed to be good things is the part that baffles me the most. Like they genuinely unironically want the X-men to act this weirdly smug and unquestioning of the extremely strange and out of character actions everyone's taking. Especially when you consider that there was a character who, for years, was outright being controlled by someone against his will and was daily BEGGING for someone, anyone, to fricking start questioning what the hell is going on with him aka Colossus and yet zero people even so much as blinked whenever he said something super questionable.
>See in this thread someone complaining about The Crucible, when the very issue that introduces it shows characters being uncomfortable with it, and it launches a storyline about how lack of death is causing mutants to lose respect for life.
That's a huge part of the issue some had with it. The heroes knew it was questionable and were uncomfortable with it, and yet still went along. The same heroes that for decades have unflinchingly stood against any form of injustice, and would leap into action stopping heaven and earth just to save a kid's lost puppy (hyperbole). And yet here they see something sus going on, but only shrug and wring their hands. It's a massive tonal shift and complete disconnect from their previous characterizations. No surprise some readers find that annoying.
I am CONVINCED that at least early on that was intended to be a plot point of sorts.
See here Moira talking about Zen via biology, I thought there'd be a reveal about Krakoa replicating the neuroleptic effect of the womb; not quite mind control but at least making them more susceptible to accepting these moral transgressions.
Wolverine and Laura, both healing factor mutants, were some of the few who felt wary of the island in early issues.
But if it ever was part of the plan, it clearly didn't move forward.
iirc there was a mobile game that ran with the idea of Krakoa affecting people in that way which some shill sites were claiming "spoiled the ending" back when we thought it was ending sooner. I don't remember which
No, I think that was just Hickman spouting his usual pseudo-intellectual tripe in a vain effort to appear intelligent. And undoubtedly plagiarized from some other source that did it better.
Its
>outrage highlights
Of which we can at least admit was there was too damn much
1 or 2 is acceptable, 15 fricking outrageous bullshit with mutant elitism if not outright extremism all wrapped around self righteous
>-People who read but didn't get that a lot of the things they complain about are being presented as bad.
That doesnt fricking matter, those affairs tainted all characters involved.
>The writers of secondary books who do actually treat all the morally questionable things as outright good because fun hippy party island yeah.
That would be the major one for me. But as far as im concerned theyre all connected.
>Are these people just trying to work themselves up over imagined Krakoa things or what?
yes
Krakoa was shit. Simple as. If for no other reason than that none of them will ever be held accountable for the dystopian shit they pulled.
None of the ritual human murder
None of the legions teenagers they brainwashed into thinking that life is cheap, death is temporary, and Mutants are greater than humans.
None of the other nations of the world will hold Krakoa to account for threatening them, ignoring their laws and borders, and kidnapping their citizens, however undesirable those citizens may be to the nation.
None of the hundreds of super criminals that are now running free.
None of the mutants will ever be made to answer for the insanity that was committed on that fricking island.
There will be no fall out. No comeuppance. No epilogue to Krakoa beyond a snarky, "Well, THAT just happened."
>Magneto killed millions with that EMP
>writers only talked about thousands
>nobody ever brings that up beside imageboard users, so it never happened
They will do the same with Krakatoa and it's murder pits, orgies, suicidal mutants, Beast doing whatever Geneva convention violations you can list and like.
When will you Black folk learn? Capeshit is the worst possible genre because nothing is ever allowed to stick.
Anon, the person who made this thread didn't want Krakoa to stick
Hell, the people who loved it (and got the point of it) didn't want it to stick.
Because the point was always "this is gonna crash and burn, and we're watching them plant the seeds of their downfall"
He was right and you know it.
This isnt news, Krakoa was meant to be a compromise solution because nine other ways to ensure mutant survival failed. The first thing Moira did in the tenth life in the bench was show him how his dream was doomed.
>Your dream is doomed.
>But you need to keep pretending it’s fine for decades and act like you never heard this and don’t know I’m a mutant, through even your dark side breaking free and nearly destroying the world, multiple mutant genocides, and your own death. THEN, after you come back, you can do something.
That whole bit was one of those moments that completely breaks immersion and forces you to think of it as a comic
pixie got shotguned in the face for this garbage. xmen are a joke. evil, self pitying bawds the lot of them.
If you want to make it worse, Marvel's equivalent of LiveLeak has uploaded footage of their teens committing suicide all over the place. Right along with Nature Girl stomping a guy's head like a watermelon.
And she asked the man to do it. Gleefully. And Nightcrawler got spattered by her brain matter. And he ended up doing NOTHING about it.
Sublime
Sublime infecting the whole population of Krakoa would honestly be one of the best retcons.
But my favorite is the one that Krakoa is an edgelord streaming show created by Mojo to capitalize on the current love for gritty butthole reboots
That would be hilarious.
It's entirely in character for Mojo too. He's always been used to satirize whatever was popular in franchises at the time. In the 80s it was babyfied kids shows. Then it was gladiator sports shows. So why wouldn't be be edgy, violent "epic" fantasy shows now?
Plus you can explain all inconsistencies and bad characterization as writers being swapped out, actors being exchanged and Mojo running out of budget and having to run cheap filler episodes
To be fair, there was an X-men Infinity issue about that, sorta. Mojo kidnapped some of the few mutants that weren't on Krakoa in order to basically force them to star in his X-Men '97 ripoff on repeat because the X-men on Krakoa were dropping fast in popularity in Mojoworld's polls due to, well, the fact they were acting like supremacist buttholes and turning off audiences. So even aliens addicted to television were saying that the X-men were being unwatchable jackasses.
It's always a sign of trouble when Mojo thinks the X-Men aren't watchable anymore. It's happened a few times and he's usually right. For a giant life-devouring alien slug he has really good senses for what is marketable and not.
Well yeah.
This is also part of the problem though. It's marvel addressing the issues to act like they're in on the joke or hip with t he fans but they're not actually fixing the problem. It's like going to your landlord and saying "my heater's not working" and he responds with "Yeah brah that totally sucks" but then you still freeze in the winter.
That feels like it could too easily drift into everything the writer dislikes is the result of Mojo.
Screw this nihilistic shit where we have to have a fictional world full of terrible people. Why do writers feel the need to portray characters in the worst light and the humans in this world as almost all terrible people. Can they not be bothered to write anything else besides this race war that’s been done to death. Give me an arc where humans and mutants are actually trying to save the world for once.
That’s always been the problem with Marvel: the average human is an awful creature and aliens rightfully hate them
The problem is that there's no sense of balance between the terrible people. Everyone's either an irredeemable butthole, or will eventually be written as such if they aren't. It's fine to have the "protect the world that hates them" angle, but you need to have SOME good people for the to latch on to, with a variety of different viewpoints and perspectives that's understandable to the audience.
It's the main reason the Ultimate universe collapsed on itself, with Ultimate Spider-Man being the only thing anyone cares about. When everyone is just a different flavor of butthole, it only breeds apathy in the long run.
If all I want to read is Al Ewing’s stuff (S.W.O.R.D and X-Men Red), what’s the bare minimum essentials I need to read beforehand? Is it just HoX/PoX? I know his stuff takes place after X of Swords which is the big event so is that necessary too?
the only relevant XoS issue might be one of the Cable issues since that deal with the peak but even then it's not necessary
the only things you need to read for SWORD are HoX/PoX, Ewings GOTG and Empyre
I don't understand the appeal of the Xmen.
People with superpowers fighting each other.
It used to be because they have some cool characters and them being mutants was used as a generalized "outsider" analogy that people could relate to. For various reasons like Marvel lacking film rights caused them to go shit on a lot in the past 2 decades along with idpol morphing their previous in-universe "outsider" status into something it's not really.
yeah they seem like very much of a "you had to be there" type of thing
Hey, remember that time Xavier admitted he only created the X-Men to police mutants because he viewed them as a fundamental threat to sentient life on Earth and he actually gave zero fricks about the equality shtick because mutants are dangerous and should be if not hated then feared?
Why do people talk about these characters as if they're actual people and not fictional mouthpieces for a variety of writers with differing opinions?
Obviously they're the latter, but good writing requires at least a veneer of an illusion of the former.
>good writing
Ah. I see why people are getting confused. When the payrate is as low as it is for comics, volume is the only way to make money. You're never going to be getting the best any writer has to offer until they're getting paid enough to live on while focusing on a single project
>NOOOOO!! I actually didn't WANT mutants to separate themselves!!!
A little bit too late to say that now, dontcha think?
Does Sublime every get mentioned cause I’m pretty sure Hickman’s plan was to have them all infected by it which is why they made their weird Zionist sex death cult
I think he was in that godawful Marauders book, but it was like his origin or something like that, millions of years in the past.
Kitty Pryde indirectly created him by seeding the past with Genoshan DNA
You know, Kitty creating sublime would explain a lot....
>Kitty Pryde indirectly created him by seeding the past with Genoshan DNA
>israelite creates genocidal immortal monster
Well. They nailed this one.
I wish Jean HAD used the M'Krann crystal to wipe this shit off the timeline. Just burn Moira X out of history.
>S-stupid M-Moira it's not that I LIKE being a fascist or anything... baka!
Actual translation
What irks me the most about Krakoa is that going in I thought I'd get a greater focus on sci-fi stories, and instead I got even more watered down slice of life bullshit, just with shitty YA "fantasy"schlock aesthetics tacked on top. Krakoa itself was also extremely boring as a setting as well. The X-Men went from hi-tech facilities to hanging out in swamps. Reading HoX/PoX the entire thing felt like Pandora back in '09, and it ended up being a backwater greenery patch. The stories themselves didn't do anything extraordinary, just reused the same idpol bull but this time with literally no stakes or interesting and varied locations.
This whole era was a nothingburger. Literally nothing happened. Same as the Post-SW era but with better publicity. Nothing went down. Just a bunch of awful retcons and new OCs. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the last time anything happened in the X-Verse was the Post-Schism era with X-Face Cyclops. It was cut short, but a decade later and I still remember the basic gist of it, the books had a direction, something was happening. The Krakoa era was literally just killing time, and the same will happen now with new books, until the MCU adaptation rolls around and they market another big relaunch.
Honestly, even as a Hickmangay I found it all a resounding failure past the first mini. Hickman's time on FF and then Avengers had him creating a memorable ~10 year story. It wasn't perfect, but it happened, disappointing ending aside. His X-Run was cut short, but he still wasted time on X Of Swords and all that nonsense. Honestly, the Dominion just wasn't an interesting big bad, and the Sinisters being main bad guys rung hollow. Sinister's a good enough X-Specific bad-guy but he's not Big Bad material. A revamped Apocalypse or HighEvo would've been better. When you're going to Cosmic+ a bunch of advanced robots aren't cool or big enough to warrant this much attention, especially when you've got reality warpers around.
>Dominion just wasn't an interesting big bad
Well yeah because it has Hickman chart syndrome explaining fricking everything about it and when it's all laid out you can see what a hackneyed attempt at being an original impressive cosmic big bad it is with contradictory nonsense that makes it look like it was lazily kludged together.
>So it's a giga computer that uses the power of some lesswrong bullshit to control a region of space and time to such a degree that it's basically a god
>yeah
>But how
>what do you mean how?
>Like are they using some kind of fricking reality editing devices or something because just dominating a space and span of time through raw brainpower would allow to to fake it to an extent but you'd get BTFO'd when something big enough came from outside those confines and shit would, constantly, throwing off your calculations almost as fast as you could redo them per the Sinking Ship paradox
>Also none of this explains how they become genuinely Atemporal as a rule. And actually it seems like Dr. Strange solos unless it's one of the apparently rather rare magic ones. In which case I'm pretty sure a juiced up Thor still solos. How is this a bigger deal than the last dumbfrick apocalypse event exactly?
>Shut up they just are okay.
It's just yudkowsky No Limits Fallacy fatalist bullshit about the scary AI God as a comic book villain, trying to pump it up into being a huge fricking deal by comic standards without stopping to bother refining it and work through things to fix the contradictions and bullshit because if you do that you can't wank it into fricking deep space.
Hickman's Beyonders were also bland nothingburgers, but the wider build-up and the Illuminati as the core were interesting, so the whole thing flowed better. This time it was all of Hickman's weaknesses coming to front without any redeeming qualities. Like you said, the whole thing seemed just too bland. Cape Event Big Bads are always literal gods existing on higher planes. An AI Dominion can be OP for a purely Sci-Fi setting, but in one with literal sorcerers who can visit alternate planes of existence and tussle with gods and devils, the whole thing is utterly insignificant.
Honestly, I think that this type of story and general setup doesn't work with the X-Men because at the end of the day, while many of them are OP, they're mostly flying bricks and telepaths at best, operating on an Earthly plane. His FF/Avengers Saga had Reed, Stark, Doom, Strange and all of these larger-than-life people to play with. The X-Men have Magneto and Xavier who get bodied in cosmic stories, and their only big players are Jean and Magik, who do not have the gravitas for it. So you're left with Cable and technically Nate, and Sinister and Apocalypse from the villain side, at which point the whole thing becomes trite. None of these people can carry an entire Hickman-level saga because there aren't any megaultragiga supergeniuses and kings there. Like he had Namor tell Xavier and Magneto, they're just pretenders. Then you add that the only true geniuses there are Beast and Sinister, maybe Magneto depending on the retcon, and technically Apocalypse, and the ingredients for a Hickman story just aren't there. The X-Men cap at Shi'ar level, they can't go higher despite having all these OP Omegas. Maybe it's the nature of the book.
If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites like Sunspot into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
>If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites like Sunspot into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
Sunspot and Cannonball were probably intended to star in the Shiar book that never happened. Which is why their plot beats got moved into New Mutants and X-Men.
Honestly, even when I read about his supposed plans, they still sound like trash. T'Challa and Storm's magic baby being the "Chosen One"? The whole run felt like Dune: Discount Edition. But Dune worked because everyone was an autistic eugenically bred space royal. The X-Men are a bunch of literal moronic walking WMDs throwing hissy fits. The story he wanted to tell just never fit with the actual characters and lore he was using.
...You're not wrong about that.
I think you need to take the "plans" you have read with a massive grain of salt.
Based on what we know now, the Dominions were likely not the final villains at, but more side-quest villains for Sunspot and the Shiar to deal, with which is backed up by Inferno.
Likely Storm/T'Challa's son was not a major piece since Krakoa would have fallen in Act 2 and Act 3 about the X-Men picking up the pieces in a post-Krakoa world.
You say that, but if not the Dominion than who? Surely not Nimrod.
Heh. Nimrod. Not sure why they haven't renamed it yet
Because the name was funny when introduced already. Looney Tunes is much older than X-Men.
Also the meaning you guys are thinking of only exists in some varieties of English. The robot is named after the Biblical hunter which is also why Bugs calls Fudd "nimrod"
>If you ask me, he tried to shoehorn all his favourites... into being important in the larger scheme while not fitting the roles, and he ended up making a mess of things, with the following writers ruining it even further.
So it was, in fact, the epitome of an X-Men run?
Part of it is that it seems like, this is such an obvious fricking thing that it raises the question of why we give a shit about Enigma. Like all it should take is Set or somebody similar looking at him and thinking "That might be tasty" and he's fricked because Enigma has no good answer to one of the things that can punk Galactus, his "natural predator" some fricking how, deciding he's an annoyance or worth eating.
It only makes sense if you assume from all his bullshit about absorbing other dominions made from himself that he's trying to become something beyond a Dominion who can actually handle that kind of threat but that would only work narratively in a world where Dominions are something that's been established and has street cred to make becoming a Dominion+ mean anything.
Because as it is it's just Hickman playing powerlevel autism and revealing how much of a newbie he is about it when all he could think of was Phoenix and Galactus wank when they aren't even the actual big boys of Marvel Cosmic/Magic, just the most overexposed. He invites people to play powerlevel bullshit games and when you actually do Enigma can flat out be punked by like a dozen fricking things that would 100% have the ability to know what Enigma is up to and the motivation to do it because of shit Kirby established as canon decades ago let alone shit people have done since.
Honestly, a Dominion is just a very bland endgame villain for your run. It's the same reason why people would rather stick with the cliffhanger from Dune rather than read Brian's books where it's all
>lmao it was just killer robots
Killer robots aren't interesting or fun. They can be entertaining fodder, they can be cool, but after a while they're too bland. Ultron stands out and is interesting because he is an autistic kid throwing tantrums and has a human and overemotional personality. Having your big bad be past Essex who turned into a boring pulp sci-fi book AI "God" is extremely boring. But again the problem arises in that the X-Men don't have any such endgame villains. Bar Phoenix and the three times Apocalypse remembered that he's on a Celestial Mission, they cap at global level. They've got all these powers, but no villains that can stand up to them. Apocalypse is their Darkseid/Thanos and he gets bodied by Black Bolt shouting a bit.
Honestly, he should've just ripped off Mass Effect which ripped off Ultimate Galactus, and done a sort of "Celestial AI" as the villain and had Apocalypse finally do something and end up as the big bad. It makes sense.
>has the Celestial connection
>has magical knowledge
>is their Big Bad (TM)
>can go cosmic and get an upgrade
It made sense. Just write some bullshit about a new form of AI Magic and tie it to that. You can't just throw me a glorified metal ball that "sits outside space and time" when you've got reality warpers all around and the Earth has a ton of magicians who've deal with metaphysical gods before.
I'm a Hickmangay and the entire thing never sat right with me from the beginning. I remember him posting 2001 gifs, and I thought that finally he'd something with the X-Men/Apocalypse/Celestial connection, as I took it as a hint to Kirby's 2001 series. But no, all we got the last 5 years were
>swamp setting
>orgies
>evil AI
It's astounding really.
There any good runs or comics for Apocalypse worth reading? I've only been vaguely aware of him because of the old animated series, and when I read Acts of Vengeance last month where he told Loki to go frick himself.
X of Swords are a Apocalypse books also he will be back in a new series “heir of apocalypse”
>There any good runs or comics for Apocalypse worth reading?
Start with 80s X-Factor, #19 and #24-26, Annual #3, then #50 and #65-68.
The X-Cutioner's Song event has Apocalypse get beat up a lot but he has some good character moments.
Age of Apocalypse is an AU but it's his biggest story ever.
Onslaught is a divisive event, and Apocalypse's role in it is small but he has some good moments there.
Also Hulk #455-457 and X-Men (1991 series) #182-186.
For pre-20th century Apocalypse, there's 3 minis; Rise of Apocalypse #1-4, The Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix #1-4 and Apocalypse vs Dracula #1-4, there was a trade collecting all of these but it's out of print now.
He's also in Hickman's S.H.I.E.L.D but not significant enough to read JUST for him. But it is an interesting preview of where the character would go.
>Ultron stands out and is interesting because he is an autistic kid throwing tantrums and has a human and overemotional personality. Having your big bad be past Essex who turned into a boring pulp sci-fi book AI "God" is extremely boring.
The more we see of Essex Enigma the more it points to him being an petty fool with an overinflated ego like all the other Sinister's. It'll probably be commentary on how A.I are behave according tor the data fed into it, and since Enigma is all Essex. He'll make exactly the same mistakes, limited by his self-centred world view.
The other Dominions have said they don't think he's dangerous because he's a threat, it's because he's an idiot.
The climactic threat probably won't be a fight with him, it'll be trying to stop him from accidentally unraveling the universe or something to that tune.
The influence of Morrison's run is inescapable. Morrison dispensing with the soap opera aspect of X-Men and for better or worse focusing exclusively on the big important events with zero "wasted" space between each epic is still influencing X-Men writers today. The idea of a run where everything is surgically fit in to a specific plan rather than the wild and wooly "let's see where things go" of the 80s and 90s is compelling, but I feel like it also runs the danger of just making the story feel sterile, which is how I always feel about Morrison X-Men and Hickman's stint before he bailed. It's not for me, but I can definitely see why people like it. But I think grant had much better ideas for his villains than Hickman did, Xorn insanity nonwithstanding.
Even that shit was just Morrison aping the same industry trends that fricked the entire industry in the 90s, just a combination of the contracted market meaning he had a lower issue count and Morrison being an absolute fricking moron meant that it was way more fricking obvious.
It's that but also Morrison has never liked the Claremont school of writing super-teams. He's never liked the soap opera, he's never liked the quiet, humanizing moments. His Doom Patrol was an intentional attempt to push past that and his JLA has the exact same style where the characters barely have any moments and what little they get is incidental. It's also a very Morrison thing is to not have anythig stem from character interactions. Things happen and then the characters have to deal with them, it's all externalized. That's something Hickman also loves, the whole idea of Moira forcing Krakoa into being because of an external threat instead of it happening through any kind of organic development
A major difference is that all of Morrison's JLA roster either had an ongoing or had one within a few years. It's okay to skimp on character work when other writers and books are available or better positioned to cover it. There is only one X-Men character that you can count on to have an ongoing at any given point in time.
Exactly. With JLA Morrison's hands were tied by other books and he was stuck trying to use characters as best as possible. But there's no good reason why he would make his X-Men all about cinematic spectacle with little to no emotional depth. As I said earlier in this thread, Emma's character development happens off-panel before the first and second issues of the first arc. That's not the kind of writing I come to the X-men for.
>Morrison dispensing with the soap opera aspect of X-Men and for better or worse focusing exclusively on the big important events with zero "wasted" space between each epic is still influencing X-Men writers today
This also describes how they wrote JLA and it's impact
You easily could make it work with X-Men, just not the X-Men he chose. A story about the X-Men operating at the cosmic level with the caveat that all of their cosmic players are psychologically damaged, don't want to be there, or are outright insane and people like Xavier are, for all their bluster, barely holding things together would be interesting. But it means putting less popular characters front and center while leaving people like Wolverine with nothing to do so you'll never see it.
There was literally nothing interesting about hickvengers
Smasher's butt?
This. I can't even remember how it ended. I can't even remember what the point of having 345 different OCs in the books in the end?
Old Steve in power armor vs Tony blaming each other as existence dies around them
On a larger level the annoying thing is Marvel having to pretend the universe is a present-day civilization and not the advanced sci-fi society it actually is
On the one hand, they're definitely too incompetent to actually grapple with the technological and societal implications but I'd respect them more if they still tried.
When exactly did the X Men transition from "mutants deserve equal rights" to embracing Magneto style racial supremacy?
It's been a long slippery slope from the open bigotry against humans of the early 2000s, and acting like they're above human laws, to the mutants-only segregation of the late 2000s, to the "we are your new masters" of the Krakoa era.
Krakoa era writing summarized:
Wow everyone is doing fricked-up shit. Should we do something?
We should do something!
But what?
I dunno I guess it's hopeless, we can't fight progress.
I would say its more a combination of
>Wow everyone is doing fricked-up shit. Should we do something?
>No, its cool. We're number one! We're number one!
and
>Wow everyone is doing fricked-up shit. Should we do something?
>Hey, look! It's that obscure character you like! They're here! Doing things!
>Really? Important things?
>Oh God no, get real.
>Wow, I can't believe this Z-lister character rejected Krakoa and left. Truly this validates the entire island's frickery
They mean Fall of the House of X, right?
One of my favorite things about krakoa was the wolverine family stuff( I adore the digital comic “Snikt family”) but it wasn’t all roses since we have two Lauras now due to their creepy cloning stuff that no one talks about I don’t want a X-men clone saga
I don't think Krakoa has lasting appeal. It's one of those "oh shit this is great" but then you never go back to it and new readers won't "get it". Like something like Lost, a total product of its time.
Or Homestuck - lots of early promise but ends in an overcomplicated mess, with a main villain who was always "already there" with supporting antagonists who are respectively a b***h and a violent idiot fratboy; its mostly bright and colorful but also a bit grim, with adventures in wacky alternate universes and alien planets; lots of distinct characters, but the interesting parts of the heroes get sanded down over time and the fanbase latches onto total douchebags who they insist did nothing wrong; the fan base itself dwindled over time and became much more weird about it, possibly because it was so very easy to invent special OCs with titles and abilities who could easily take over the world but spend most of their time in a tiki bar AU having lots of kinky sex...
There wasn't nearly enough kinky sex. Hell, as far as I can tell despite the show of resurrections, Krakoa wasn't even clothing optional which is the bare minimum for a Neo-Eden.
See you all for the nex thread created by some idiot who hasn't read the comics. Place your bets what he'll lead off with this time
t. I love ethnostares