Quote Originally Posted by PsychoEFrost View Post
Hickman's "victory" was never foreshadowed, never mentioned, and just happens out of nowhere with virtually zero resistance. Mutants go from "about to be extinct" to "undisputed masters of planet Earth" in a mini. If you don't see how that's a massive storytelling problem, especially for the mainline universe, I don't know what to tell you.

The rest of your issues with my post are nitpicks. My point stands.

As of right now, there is zero reason why the mutants don't just take over the planet. Their entire army is functionally immortal, they have no less than 15 mutants that could destroy entire countries by themselves, and the humans have shown that they absolutely deserve to be annihilated with around 80% of the humans being overt racists that even Fox News would ask them to tone it back a bit. When the only reason the plot doesn't end is "because the writer doesn't want it to"... THAT'S BAD WRITING.
I look at it as Hickman taking everything that has been written since, heck, lets go all the way back to the attack on the Massachusetts Academy and move forward from there. So many children, adults, families dead just because they are mutants. The X-Men keep fighting the good fight but they keep getting forced back to retreat further and further.

After decimation they were confined to the Xavier Institute where the O.N.E. was slowly being corrupted by to not assist mutants but to actually end them. Sure there were a few good soldiers in the O.N.E. and even Val Cooper meant well at first, but eventually it just became an armed camp to detain the mutants indefinitely.

The X-Men packed up and moved operations to San Francisco but then they were attacked again and again. They allied with Namor and moved operations to Utopia and established what they hoped would be an independent nation under the protection of Atlantis. They kept getting attacked until they were torn apart by internal factions that wanted to stop fighting and the other faction that wanted to keep fighting with everything they had.

This was definitely poor writing, it was done to make Scott and Emma's Utopia team look like the bad guys and Logan and the Jean Grey School were the good mutants who behave themselves and don't stir up things like resistance and revolution against oppression, they just want to be good mutants and stay in their space and not offend the humans. They aren't those revolutionary mutants who live on Utopia that want freedom and rights for mutants. Sorry, my bias against Logan and his stupid decision to split everyone up screams hypocrisy for me because he still ran X-Force and he still killed people.

Then when the Phoenix was returning to Earth, Scott and Emma had concerns but on the other hand they thought that this might be the one and only chance to undo the decimation so they encouraged Hope to try and be the host of the Phoenix (even though Emma thought Hope was totally the wrong person).

The Avengers attacked Utopia and destroyed the island and went to war with the X-Men. Even some of the people who were with Wolverine thought that the Avengers were nothing more than agents of the government trying to detain and contain mutants and ended up joining Scott's team. In the end after the idiot Tony Stark caused the Phoenix Five, when the Phoenix finally merged with Hope, omg, Scott was right and the Phoenix undid the Decimation. Big surprise.

Ever since then it just kept getting bleaker and bleaker. Everyone was building Sentinels because suddenly scary mutants were appearing all over the world again. SHIELD and other government agents were deploying as soon as a new mutant was detected so they could contain these dangerous young children who Scott and Emma just wanted to teach to use their powers.

Then when Scott finally decided to change tactics and go for a more peaceful protest route (the march on Washington) just before Secret Wars II, right after the Terrigen Mists were killing mutants and Scott died on Muir Island in the initial poisoning event along with everyone else. In order to get the Inhumans to get rid of the clouds the X-Men actually had to force the Inhumans into War because Medussa didn't want to destroy her precious mutant killing clouds.

Then you have Hydra take over North America and tell Emma Frost that if she doesn't keep her mutants in line in New Tian then Hydra Captain America is going to round them all up and kill them all.

Then you have a Senator of the United States fund an operation to unleash Sentinels and eventually a reformed Legacy Virus on mutants (X-Men Gold).

In X-Men Red you have Jean Grey leading her team as Cassandra Nova just stokes up pre-existing human hatred of mutants to the max and encourages humans to hunt and kill as many mutants as possible.

Then a mutant hating fanatic leads his team in an attack on the X-Men to try and ensure that they never gain freedom and rights for mutants ever and to guarantee his future where mutants are either killed or permanently enslaved by humans.

Then after the majority of the X-Men disappear from the world the human governments are emboldened and of their own volition they move to purge the entire planet of mutants by using the cure to get rid of the X-Gene forever. Any mutants that would refuse the cure would be apprehended and tortured till they participate or killed.

After all that, Hickman has to start rebuilding the story of the X-Men. So what do you do with that as a writer. If you want to change the story you have to change the terms of the story. The first step is to change the status of the mutants so that they aren't running and retreating all the time, you need to give them the potential to be seen as equal with humans, so you give them a nation, but this time it is done properly, instead of using the threat of force, you offer a carrot of medicines to help the world and in exchange you just want legal recognition of the new nation.

The way that the X-Men are changed is that they are now the military of Krakoa. Each group represents a different military division or a different department in Krakoa.

That doesn't mean they won't be heroes and help the world, it means that they have a responsibility to defend and protect their homeland and their people.

Heck, they even pass a law that makes it illegal under the constitution of Krakoa to murder a human. So even though they granted amnesty to most of their villains, those villains are still expected to adhere to military command of Krakoa (Sabretooth was on a military op with a no kill order issued), and they have to adhere to the constitutional laws set forth by the Quiet Council of Krakoa. Sabretooth violated the military command not to kill on his mission and he was technically court martialed as an agent of the Krakoan armed forces and sentenced to life in prison for murdering those humans. People get into the whole whether he was being retroactively charged, he was an agent of the military and he was told not to kill on the mission, he violated a no kill order and that would lead to a life sentence for any soldier disobeying a direct order from his commander and killing people indiscriminately. Sabretooth agreed to the chain of command and he can be tried under the military rules of the chain of command rather than the civilian laws that were enacted later by the council.

I guess it depends on what you want, but Hickman is stuck with decades of stories showing the increasing persecution and genocide of mutants in the Marvel Universe. It's gotten so bad that the mutants were nearly completely exterminated only 8 months ago.

So I give Hickman kudos for finding a way to give the mutants a new and more hopeful direction. You can see that there are some threads of stories to come that may challenge the stability of Krakoa, but it's very possible that the nation, it's people, and the X-Men will rise to this challenge and successfully come out this with the nation of Krakoa intact in the Marvel Universe.