Who do you blame for the mutant wipeout at the end of House of M?

[Iron Maiden]

You could say it was consenting I suppose but one does wonder why King Arthur keeps companions around to be assigned to his guests. Kings are known to keep mistresses around.

brettc1 I am quite aware of what happened with the other companion. Since it was just a spell it could probably have been countered at some point, probably by Merlin. It just wasn't considered something the author needed follow up.

Were in that in that issue does Tony take advantage of the women that was in his room? All he did was admire her beauty. That's all that is shown.

They did spend the night together. I said Tony is taking advantage of the freebie, in that she does offer her "companionship" for the night. I guess you might want to believe they did little more than play tiddly winks The scene stops there and then we don't see Tony again until the next morning when King Arthur tells him Doom left during the night.

[Iron Maiden]

I think what you mean here is Editorial used its power to fix a godawful mess.

Any fix of what Bendis did to Wanda in Disassembled and House of M was bound to be a mess since he disregards many things about Wanda from Darker than Scarlet onward. It still makes me cringe to think about the scene where she calls Magneto "Daddy". She never really held that kind of affection for Magneto especially when she and Pietro were in the brotherhood. Perhaps it was meant to demonstrate her confused mental state.

Heinberg never really takes all of the blame off Wanda and shifts it over to Doom. The only flashbacks that shows us something that is previously unrevealed is when she went to Doom for help and then she flies off to whatever scene follows. It's even unclear when this happened. Did it happen after Jan set off the trigger by mentioning her children? or she confronted and then killed Agatha? The other flashback is when she appears in front of Doom to ask for his help in another matter about the plight of her people. Wanda still accepts responsibility for House of M and the fate of the mutants even to the present day.

[Iron Maiden]

Rubbish. Peter Parker was the same age fighting Dr Octopus.

Cassie's age has been a bit inconsistent over the years, particularly since the days when she was a frequent visitor to Four Freedoms Plaza when her father worked as tech support for the Reed-less Fantastic Four. She looked to be barely older than Franklin, who is an admittedly problematic yardstick to use. But she became Stature when was younger that Parker was when he became Spider-Man. He was in high school and she was probably in middle school. IIRC she was the youngest of the YA. Fighting Doctor Octopus wouldn't be the equivalent to fighting a powered up Doom anyway.

[Iron Maiden]

Even more confusingly, Heinberg rewrote a lot of the dialogue in Children's Crusade for the trade, mostly to cut down the wordier pages, but in the flashback in the floppy version, Wanda says she doesn't remember anything that happened after she went to Doom and Doom narrates almost the whole story, while in the trade version, Wanda does remember and co-narrates the "Life Force" story with Doom.

Really most of this is on Tom Brevoort. He should have established an "official" explanation for how and why Disassembled and House of M happened and told writers to stick to it. But instead there's no agreed-upon version of what happened and different writers seem to be working with completely different ideas of what exactly Wanda did and why. Rick Remender had dibs on Wanda for years and he implied a couple of times that she was Doom's puppet. Other writers imply otherwise and most just ignore the whole thing.

This is the kind of thing that really needs an Avengers Forever type of thing sifting through all the contradictory stories and coming out of it with a simple explanation that everyone can refer to. I guess Al Ewing would do it if they asked him, but I doubt they'll ask him.

Because until then all the arguments about what happened seem pointless. Wanda's fans won't accept that she wiped out mutantkind in a fit of insane rage against daddy, because that's not the character they know from any other story. That all this was part of Doom's master plan also seems hard to swallow from other stories, but that's the point, there is no version of the story that makes sense and the editors have made it clear that they don't want to provide one.

Agree totally with this. Heinberg really only adds one aspect to Bendis's story and that was to come up with a source of power to account for the world wide effect of House of M. To make matters worse, I recall some debates here (and there were quite a few) where readers of the X- titles contended that her "No More Mutants" spell or whatever you want to call it spread out into the multiverse. Some claim that this meant billions of mutants were wiped out. Once again, IMO editorial should have controlled that.

[gurkle]

Heinberg never really takes all of the blame off Wanda and shifts it over to Doom. The only flashbacks that shows us something that is previously unrevealed is when she went to Doom for help and then she flies off to whatever scene follows. It's even unclear when this happened. Did it happen after Jan set off the trigger by mentioning her children? or she confronted and then killed Agatha?

This is really not clear in the story, but Brevoort has said that Wanda didn't kill Agatha and that she has been dead all the time Wanda thought she was talking to her. That's why, when Agatha's corpse is discovered in Disassembled, someone says she's been dead a "long time." Which means that when she confronts Agatha, she's talking to either a delusion or a construct of her own.

Since almost everything related to Wanda in that story is based on that one Byrne West Coast Avengers story, Bendis is picking up on the fact that Agatha just mysteriously turns up alive in that story after seemingly dying at the stake years earlier. Byrne left before explaining it (if he ever intended to). It sort of fits because in Kurt Busiek's Avengers Wanda was the only one to see or talk with Agatha, so while it doesn't fit all continuity or explain exactly when she died, it's not a totally implausible idea. But it was done so confusingly in the story that many people think Wanda killed Agatha, and this is even repeated a couple of times in Robinson's Scarlet Witch series.

Agree totally with this. Heinberg really only adds one aspect to Bendis's story and that was to come up with a source of power to account for the world wide effect of House of M. To make matters worse, I recall some debates here (and there were quite a few) where readers of the X- titles contended that her "No More Mutants" spell or whatever you want to call it spread out into the multiverse. Some claim that this meant billions of mutants were wiped out. Once again, IMO editorial should have controlled that.

Children's Crusade actually has Beast tell Wanda that the entire omniverse might have been affected by her spell, and Cyclops mentions that mutants died because of the lost of their powers or died trying to get them back. Say what you will about Heinberg, he did a lot of homework and tried to work in continuity from both the Avengers and X-Men offices.

The problem is that the X-Men editors had no incentive to "protect" a character controlled by the Avengers office, so they were free to show the worst possible consequences of the M-day spell without needing to worry about how it would make Wanda look when she came back (if ever).

[Iron Maiden]

This is really not clear in the story, but Brevoort has said that Wanda didn't kill Agatha and that she has been dead all the time Wanda thought she was talking to her. That's why, when Agatha's corpse is discovered in Disassembled, someone says she's been dead a "long time." Which means that when she confronts Agatha, she's talking to either a delusion or a construct of her own.

Since almost everything related to Wanda in that story is based on that one Byrne West Coast Avengers story, Bendis is picking up on the fact that Agatha just mysteriously turns up alive in that story after seemingly dying at the stake years earlier. Byrne left before explaining it (if he ever intended to). It sort of fits because in Kurt Busiek's Avengers Wanda was the only one to see or talk with Agatha, so while it doesn't fit all continuity or explain exactly when she died, it's not a totally implausible idea. But it was done so confusingly in the story that many people think Wanda killed Agatha, and this is even repeated a couple of times in Robinson's Scarlet Witch series.

Ah, thanks for that correction. Having drifted in and out of comics in the 90s I did lose track of what exactly happened to Agatha. Now that you mention Robinson's Scarlet Witch series, which I enjoyed quite a bit, I hope we get that version of Agatha the next time she appears. I'd rather have her looking like Helen Mirren than Martita Hunt in "Great Expectations" Her look and her attitude is something writers should follow up with.

Children's Crusade actually has Beast tell Wanda that the entire omniverse might have been affected by her spell, and Cyclops mentions that mutants died because of the lost of their powers or died trying to get them back. Say what you will about Heinberg, he did a lot of homework and tried to work in continuity from both the Avengers and X-Men offices.

The problem is that the X-Men editors had no incentive to "protect" a character controlled by the Avengers office, so they were free to show the worst possible consequences of the M-day spell without needing to worry about how it would make Wanda look when she came back (if ever).

Sometimes I think they figure if enough time passes, the readers will forget all about it anyway. Heinberg IMO did the best that he could with what he had to deal with. Much like Byrne suddenly left WCA and left things in Roy and Dann Thomas's hands, Bendis never really explained Wanda's sudden power up in Disassembled.

We never really know what state of mind Wanda is in when she goes to Doom or the details of their "negotiations". Was it right after she talks with "Agatha"? Does she meet with Doom before he begins the attack on the FF in Unthinkable? Maybe around the time he's searching for Valeria so he can seal the deal with the demons? Because he wouldn't exactly be available after that. I also found it a bit troubling that most of the time during Disassembled, when things start to go bad, Wanda really doesn't say much. If she was in some kind of altered state of mind, why didn't anyone notice?

[brettc1]

You could say it was consenting I suppose but one does wonder why King Arthur keeps companions around to be assigned to his guests. Kings are known to keep mistresses around.

Ladies of the court would no doubt be present. Perhaps Arthur is simply not as prudish as in some modern telling someone and accepts that women have their own ability to choose what happens behind closed doors.

brettc1 I am quite aware of what happened with the other companion. Since it was just a spell it could probably have been countered at some point, probably by Merlin. It just wasn't considered something the author needed follow up.

Or, as is more likely, it was a reminder to the readers that Dr Doom is a villain and will trample anyone to achieve his own narcissistic ends.

And no, Merlin could not have fixed it. The story had already established he was out of commission thanks to another sorceress having imprisoned him. That was why he does not appear in the issue, and he was not freed unto Iron Man 300 in the future.

They did spend the night together. I said Tony is taking advantage of the freebie, in that she does offer her "companionship" for the night. I guess you might want to believe they did little more than play tiddly winks The scene stops there and then we don't see Tony again until the next morning when King Arthur tells him Doom left during the night.

I'm sure they did have sex, considering what Arthur said to Tony in issue #300. But of you think that Tony having consental relations with an adult woman is worse than Dr Doom turning a woman into a vegetable we simply have no common frame of reference.

[Relugus]

Writers who retconned or threw shade at House of M:

David Sexton
Jeff Parker (TWICE; he wrote Mystic Arcana: Scarlet Witch and What If: Avengers Dissassembled)
Dan Slott
Allan Heinberg
Rick Remender

Writers associated with Avengers and Mystic Marvel have aggressively retaliated against Bendis and diminish A and HoM.

Meanwhile, X-Men writers have followed Bendis definition of Wanda's powers ("because Magneto" is the term I use for it) continuously to this day, even after the 2015 retcon.

Theres a clear schism.

[Iron Maiden]

Ladies of the court would no doubt be present. Perhaps Arthur is simply not as prudish as in some modern telling someone and accepts that women have their own ability to choose what happens behind closed doors.

Or, as is more likely, it was a reminder to the readers that Dr Doom is a villain and will trample anyone to achieve his own narcissistic ends.

Of course, we have to have a contrast between the antagonist and the protagonist. Michelinie & Layton tend to write a Doom with more noble aspects than say, a Steve Englehart. We can accept that what he does is villainous and he leaves before bringing her out of the spell. He's placing the welfare of this courtesan below his ongoing quest to free the soul of his mother. So they do balance things out a bit in that regard. For Doom the means always justifies the ends and damn the cost. But bringing up the motivation behind it makes it a bit less villainous. Maybe not so much for you but YMMV.

And no, Merlin could not have fixed it. The story had already established he was out of commission thanks to another sorceress having imprisoned him. That was why he does not appear in the issue, and he was not freed unto Iron Man 300 in the future.

But we do see Merlin appear in the next installment of Michelinie & Layton's time travel trilogy in Iron Man #249-250. Obviously from that story, Merlin can appear throughout the timestream at any given time. In any case, at this point Doom is still seeking instruction in the dark arts from various past masters like Cagliostro and Morgan Le Fey so his magic isn't that strong as in the present. The spell could simply fade on its own.

I'm sure they did have sex, considering what Arthur said to Tony in issue #300. But of you think that Tony having consensual relations with an adult woman is worse than Dr Doom turning a woman into a vegetable we simply have no common frame of reference.

I'm not weighing one against the other. It does show an interesting contrast in that Tony takes time out for some "recreation" while Doom is still focused on his goal. IMO that's the point the writers are making and the lengths he goes to in order to achieve them.

[Michael Watkins]

Rubbish. Peter Parker was the same age fighting Dr Octopus.

not to mention that Cassie had already been getting Camp Hammond training.

[Michael Watkins]

She was in over her head and should not even have gotten involved. A father should also keep his child out of danger. Legally, Doom is guilty of involuntary manslaughter because he was the one that was attacked. He underestimated his new power levels because he says I can do the same to you so back off.

and how would the mighty Doom underestimate the power to alter reality? he could have just teleported her away. that's how she got to be on the battlefield, in the first place. she shouted at him that he killed her father (who was newly back from the dead & not Cassie's legal guardian, btw). he responded that he could do the same to her. so, for everyone playing at home, this all-powerful god killed Scott Lang in cold blood (as far as he knew). he then threatened a teenager before killing her, too. she shouldn't have been in any danger around Doom; unless he's a depraved individual who doesn't know how to wield power responsibly. do you see Doom as that kind of individual? and, again, I'd like to point out that even his regular gauntlet blasts would have put Cassie in the hospital at that range. him killing her while only intending to maim doesn't free him from being a creep. he's supposedly practiced in self-defense. where was Doom's vaunted strength and skill? his temper got to him. and he lashed out in murderous rage. it's what happened at the end of Fraction's FF run, too. Doom took advantage of Wanda's grief. he fully intended to abuse the life force. and that's what happened. case closed.

[chaosfist]

I hope that whoever calls someone else with a mental illness crazy never has to deal with one themselves or with one of their loved ones. This is why mental healthcare is so poor in the US. To many it's the fault of the individual for having a mental illness instead of looking at it like a disease without personal animosity. Anyone who disagrees can go kick rocks.

[BroHomo]

If we're applying real world laws...id say any sympathy for a person suffering from a mental illness stops short of that person committing genocide :/

[Starter Set]

I blame Bendis.

[Carabas]

I blame Bendis.

Nah. This was one of Quesada's three genies he wanted to put back in their bottles, and if not Bendis then somebody else would have written it.