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Stories that you hate
I thought it'd be fun to ask because I just love the raw passion and rage people have when they talk about something truly awful.
What are some stories, arcs or runs that you absolutely hate? It could be because it's full of plot holes, or because your favorite character was completely OOC, or because it was majorly disappointing, or whatever. What would you consider to be among the worst X-Men stuff, and why?
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Peter Mulligan's entire run. Gambit was an incompetent clown. Rogue was weak and emo. Iceman was a baby. Havok was a coward. It was bad. The Black Panther crossover had one of Gambit's worst moments where he stupidly tries to help Polaris take down some cameras and hit a gas pipe taking out the whole team.
Chunks of Chuck Austen's run like blind Gambit and the Draco.
The current Hickman Krakoa era. Too many retcons and OOC X-Men.
The Age of Apocalypse revisits. Lots of plotholes and pointless deaths.
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AvX. Logan sides with work friends over family and Cable is sidelined in a coma for the whole event… the underlying cause of which he spent 17 f’ing years of his life preparing Hope for, only to have her learn what she needed to know from Spider-man and Iron Fist in the end. What a piece of $#!t that was.
As a Cable and Wolverine fan, that event was the absolute worst! For a Cyclops fan too I’d wager.
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[B]I'll start with the low hanging fruit first [/B]
Inhumans v X-Men: The whole confilct is contrived nonsense and Emma Frost's 'heel' turn ignores decades of character growth and for what?
AvX : Cyclops was clearly right - I can forgive most of it's sins ([I]as we're in a crossover so we are acting out of character-itis[/I]) but I despise how it doesn't do anything meaningful with Rachel's time as the Phoenix.
Austen Run: Someone else will cover it more eloquently than myself, but good god who let this man right an X-Men book? The Draco is the single worst X-Men story of all time.
Young X-Men: The series that killed off editorial interest in the New X-Men kids. Guggenheim wrote a dreadful series centred on his own new character the awful Ink (who's not even a mutant). Why introduce boring one note new characters like Ink and Graymalkin when fan favourites like Surge, Hellion etc.. aren't being used elsewhere.
Rosenberg's Uncanny: A miserable murder fest, trans panic murder of Rahne, dead characters return for a few panels (with no explanation) just to be immediatley killed off. Larrocca's art at the worst it's ever been. I sympathise that he knew his run was a placeholder pre HOX/POX but this was a massive disaapointment. I loved his New Mutants: Dead Souls mini and this series didn't even give that an interesting conclusion.
Milligan's X-Men Run: It might be the most boring run of X-Men of all time. Nothing offensivley dreadful happens it it, but at least Chuck Austen's stories can be read in a 'so bad it's good way'.
[B]Maybe Less Popular Suggestions: [/B]
Planet X: I'm pretty mixed on Morrison's run. Mostly it's just ok with art I don't like, with some good arcs (Riot at Xavier's & Murder at the Mansion) mixed in with good ideas and a large disregard for continuity. As someone who has always enjoyed Magneto as someone trying his hardest to be a hero - the whole Xorneto thing was a disaster. Nevermind retconning it, Marvel should never have allowed Xorn to be Magneto in the first place.
E is for Extinction: I really dislike this story. It's well written but I feel the murder of 16 million mutants is too much too soon. With the sliding timescale, Magneto must have barely run Genosha for 2 weeks. How has it become a thriving country with 16 million mutants so quickly and how did we get to a mutant population in the millions that fast? Morrison also introduced a lot of interesting ideas on mutant culture in their run, so why are they blowing up the only Mutant country? Surely the best place to explore mutant culture is on a mutant nation we've barely explored.
Wolverine and the X-Men: Wolverine is at his worst in this era, coming off of Schism and with AvX happening at this time - Marvel are encouraging me to activley dislike the main character of the book they are trying to sell me! All of the interesting Academy X-Kids are shunted off to be background characters and are replaced by one note characters like Shark Girl, Eye Boy & Kid Gladiator. I also can't get my head around Quentin being a good guy? He's a creepy incel in Riot at Xavier's and I liked him better as an unapologetic areshole. Finally, the Hellfire brats are the worst villains in all of X-Men history - I can't take them serious at all and they seem to be the main villains for the entirety of Aaron's run.
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The one two punch of Austen followed by Milligan literally made me quit reading comics for over a decade because I was so disgusted by how my favorite characters were being written and how those writers seemed completely ignorant of previous continuity.
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Seconding Inhumans vs. X-Men, plus the Terrigen Cloud poisons mutants plot leading up to it- I don't think anyone, either X-Men or Inhumans fan, actually wanted this. I certainly didn't want mutants to be slowly dying because of the cloud, I just wanted to read new Inhumans stories completely disconnected from the X-Men. I didn't want Emma getting dragged through the mud, or the Inhumans being made even more unlikable by ignoring the mutants. And all that weirdness with Cyclops being treated as some massive war criminal, and it turns out all he did was destroy one of the clouds that was killing mutants. The whole thing was silly forced conflict.
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Anything Mojo or Mojoworld.
Bringing in a forgotten or seldom used character just to be killed off (Alchemy, Diamond Lil).
Hickman’s monochrome characters.
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The Messiah Complex is without any doubt the worst, hot served platter of delirious, defecation induced fever dream of writing in the history of wack X-Men stories. BAR none!
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[QUOTE=dkrook;5824317]The Messiah Complex is without any doubt the worst, hot served platter of delirious, defecation induced fever dream of writing in the history of wack X-Men stories. BAR none![/QUOTE]
[COLOR="#000080"]You beat me to it. It ranks as the worst case of character assassination in X-Men history. Then they tried to make him a cyborg.[/COLOR]
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The Milligan run was bad but Bizarre Love Triangle was especially awful.
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Pretty Much Everything from House of M thru and including AvX that whole era had very few bright spots for me especially Hope "plot device Summers.....honestly the aftermath with Bendis with the past X-Men brought to the future sucked to......especially all the Decimation stuff especially on the heels of E is for Extinction which was also an extinction type story but better written imo....but left the X franchise in healthier state to thrive then house of M did.
IvX
Apocalyse the twelve
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1. IvX. The less said, the better.
2. Rosenberg's run. Shockingly bad the whole way through.
3. Aaron's Wolverine and the X-Men. The characters he introduced came off like bad jokes, the Hellfire Kids were especially heinous but Shark Girl was awful too. Also, pairing Husk with Toad? Gross.
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On the macro? Avx/IvX. Seriously uncool meta at display.
On the micro? Whenever a writer tries to make Sabretooth/Legion look good. See above.
Honorable mention to Howard's Excalibur. Hardly the most offensive/detestable book out there, but I cannot for the life of me remember a modern legit x-book (read: basically anything but Uncanny Avengers) that was simultaneously godawful and seemingly took it upon itself to casually tell off its non-regulars during crossovers.
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All Rogue and Gambit fans are obligated to hate Milligan's run.
[SIZE=1]don't one of you dare try to contradict me after this!11![/SIZE] :cool:
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IvX - Not just a terrible storyline in and of itself, but a decision so short-sighted and terribly executed that it poisoned an entire branch of Marvel's IP.
Austen run - Ugh. Just ugh. Never seen a single writer so blatantly miss the point of so many characters while projecting his personal issues upon them.
Aaron's Wolverine and the X-Men - This was an early warning of things to come.
Lemire and Rosenberg - Not just badly executed, but a blatant exercise in killing time at $4 an issue. I don't hold it against the writers because they were severely hobbled, but the end results were still rank.