What's wrong with the X-Men and how to fix the franchise
First, if you are a fan of the Krakoa era and where the X-Men are now, I would recommend not engaging. I don't want this to be a place of arguments or a gloat fest. I assume there are pro-Krakoa threads and I don't go there to make trouble. But back to the point of the thread.
It is clear to me and many other X-Men fans that the franchise is in a bad place.
I feel that stems from a few specific problems.
• Shift in ideology
[INDENT]The X-Men have now completely dropped Charles Xavier's goal and the entire raison dêtre. Sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them. Fighting to prove that non-powered humans and mutants can live together in peace. Fighting mutants who seek to harm non-powered humans and non-powered humans who seek to harm mutants. A duty to help protect mutants, but not go to Magneto's old view that mutants should take over because of their superiority. The franchise started to stray from that when people in the X-Men were determined to make more mutants. Not caring about the suffering of the people who would gain powers. If the powers are even useful and don't cause death and destruction. And then came New Krakoa. I could somewhat understand Utopia, as the X-Men were living in retreat and it was understood as a temporary situation. Though I suppose you could say it planted the seeds. But Krakoa is a different animal. As horrible people are invited in if they are mutants. And horrible people doing horrible deeds are protected because they are mutants. And mutant children are separated from their non-mutant parents. Not as in going to a boarding school. But becoming a citizen of a new country where you become way more disconnected from the rest of the world. And mutant powers are worshipped to such an extent that you can be killed in a ritual to be reborn with powers.[/INDENT]
• Characters continuously going off model
[INDENT]I would say that a lot of this started in Morrison's run. Making many X-Men characters suddenly immoral. Total jerks. Cyclops having an affair with Emma. Beast is made into a jerk. Jean is made into a jerk. And that only worseed as time went on. Save a few fleeting runs that were good. And it was still nowhere near as bad as it would later get. Tying into the first bullet point, a character like Cyclops becoming indistinguishable from villainous Magneto was a sight to behold. There are other character traits that were massively changed. Jubilee adopting a baby she found and the X-Men supporting that rather than telling her the baby would be safer if anyone else adopted him. In a manner similar to the episode of Boy Meets World. Where the child wanted Eric to adopt him, but Eric chose not to, even though he wanted to. Because he knew the child would have a better life with adoptive parents more equipped than himself. But going back to personalities. Several X-Men characters have had their sexual orientations changed. And their personalities have been changed too. People love to pretend that these retcons make sense but many of them go completely against established canon. And the people defending said changes have usually never read comics published earlier than twenty years ago. Creating new characters causes no issues. But changing old characters where the creators never agreed on it should not happen. Going off model also applies to villains. I think Magneto being antiheroic okay and I like him that way. But it really should end there. IMO, Sinister, Apocalypse, Shaw, Sabretooth, Mystique, and I would also say Emma, should remain villainous. Though, I suppose you could say most mutants are now villainous if they are okay with Krakoa. The X-Men I remember would've fought tooth and nail against it.[/INDENT]
• Clones, retcons, and resurrections
[INDENT]I'm okay with some clones and alternate reality versions of characters, but it can also go too far. I already mentioned retcons of deep character traits, but I wanted to have room to mention the Moira retcon, Danger, and having Pietro and Wanda no longer being Magneto's children. Truly awful retcons. Moira should not be a mutant. And resurrections. I am one who thinks a lot of comic book deaths shouldn't have happened. And would like to see old characters that have been killed off come back. But the way Krakoa does it is screwed up. Creating an entirely new body. Making it that death is pretty much meaningless.[/INDENT]
• Writers and artists
[INDENT]We have so many great X-Men creators still with us. And they are not allowed to write the main books. We got them on X-Men Legends. Which was the first X-Men series where they actually felt like the X-Men in a long time. But many of the new writers are very bad. And there is no reason to hire them over the greats who would still happily work. And this goes to the editors too. As they seem to not know the premise of the X-Men and from what I heard, took Hickman's idea of a temporary story and took the temporary out of it. I don't know what he had planned. But letting Krakoa unravel over an arc and have it be like another horrible alternate timeline would have been decent. And there need to be editors who can tell writers no and can keep characters on model. A lot of the best writers did their best work under constraints because letting them run wild would've screwed it all up. But now we have writers allowed to run wild. And most of them aren't even good. It's too bad. Artists also need to go back to drawing characters idealized. I'm not asking to make Cyclops look like Arnold Schwartzenegger. But don't make him look like an average guy.[/INDENT]
• Celeb culture
[INDENT]The X-Men are not celebrities and would not engage in a dumb event like the Hellfire Gala on their stupid island. The Met Gala is beyond stupid IRL. And it's terribly pretentious to have real life celebrities hanging with the X-Men. Implying they would be pro-mutant in 616. I doubt it. Pop culture references only work when they're vague enough to be clever. Any other way, it's cringey and gets easily dated if you're not lucky enough to reference what will become a classic. But I feel like a lot of X-Men writers nowadays think of the X-Men more like celebrities they like rather than heroes.[/INDENT]
How to fix all of these problems.
It would take a lot of guts to do any of these, but the only ways I can think of would would be:
A) Simply erasing the last few decades of continuity (maybe take it from the end of Lobdell's run). Could keep concepts and new characters that worked, but get rid of the baggage and allow the characters to be on model again. And have great writers write them like they did Legends.
B) Reveal that the Krakoan X-Men are imposters and the real X-Men are trapped somewhere. Maybe Mojo's doing.
C) Blame it all on a reality warper. Proteus screwed with reality somehow. And turn it back in a way that can get rid of a lot of the bad canon.
Thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
