X-Men Monday #14 (06/03/19)

[spirit2011]

Nitpicking but there weren’t only 198 mutants left, those were the only mutants that got catalogued. There were still an upwards of 300-400 mutants left. And the hate didn’t mostly come from regular citizens, it came mostly from Stryker and the Purifiers who felt that this was a sign from God that mutants weren’t the next step in evolution and needed to be exterminated and smaller numbers meant an easier job. In fact, humans still had roughly the same attitude towards mutants that they did pre-Decimation.

Looking this way, Purifiers wanted to full exterminate mutants.

Decimation was a bad event. Then we had ivX with mutants at the risk of going extinct and now what is goin gon on Uncanny. This theme exhausted

[MarvelMaster616]

These are the best parts of my Monday.

Love his assessment on events and his opinion on Schism. I know that story hasn't exactly aged well, but I still thought it was a well-done story that proved to be a major game-changer for the X-Men. It really set the tone for the challenges they would face for years to come. And it still has a special place in my heart. When Wolverine and Cyclops fight, beautiful things can happen.

[Tycon]

They aren't a minority at that point though. If there are only 300-400 worldwide, they're practically an endangered tribe. He's right that mutants are mostly irrelevant at that point. My old middle school had more people than that. They're a statistical irrelevancy

A minority doesn’t stop being a minority until it beats the majority. So even if it reaches “endangered tribe” levels, it still qualifies as a minority. And the numbers being so few is why Stryker decided to attack. That was the whole point of the Crusade arc in New X-Men, that Stryker was looking for a sign and he saw that mutants were being “punished” for being abominations and God provided Nimrod as a weapon to wipe them out.

[Tycon]

Looking this way, Purifiers wanted to full exterminate mutants.

Decimation was a bad event. Then we had ivX with mutants at the risk of going extinct and now what is goin gon on Uncanny. This theme exhausted

Decimation should’ve happened years later instead of right when the status quo for Morrison was going places. But besides that, the event wasn’t written poorly. It did put mutantkind in a unique position that they weren’t really in before, even Fall of the Mutants and Mutant Massacre only affected specific mutant sects. IvX and Rosencanny trying to recreate that feeling without realizing why Decimation/Utopia/Messiah Trilogy was so receptive is their undoing, or at least for the former since Rosenberg’s run hasn’t ended yet.

[Snoop Dogg]

Wanda should've puckered her lips and erased half of mutantkind. Cyclops leads the X-Men on a Phoenix heist to undo the puckering where they beat the **** out of it on like the rings of Saturn or whatever and capture it in butterfly nets. Sekat ti revetahw.

[Omega Alpha]

Great answer about House of M and Decimation. And of course he loves Schism, as people that work at Marvel, and almost only they, do.

A minority doesn’t stop being a minority until it beats the majority. So even if it reaches “endangered tribe” levels, it still qualifies as a minority..

Yes, but an endangered tribe is very different. Essentially, everyone on Earth knows gay people (even if they don't know it, because they live in places where is illegal or heavily frowned upon), or people from religious and ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, only a few researchers, government employees and people that work in the area know people from an endangered Amazon tribe. Their culture and ideas will never spread out and a bad case of food poisoning or the flu can kill everyone. It's a very different dynamic.

Also makes isolationism as a policy not a choice, but inevitable, and reduces drastically the number of choices in stories.

[Glio]

I do not argue that Decimation was not bad, but then everything about IvsX what was it?

Decimation can not be the worst when Extraordinary did the same but worse.

[Tycon]

Yes, but an endangered tribe is very different. Essentially, everyone on Earth knows gay people (even if they don't know it, because they live in places where is illegal or heavily frowned upon), or people from religious and ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, only a few researchers, government employees and people that work in the area know people from an endangered Amazon tribe. Their culture and ideas will never spread out and a bad case of food poisoning or the flu can kill everyone. It's a very different dynamic.

Also makes isolationism as a policy not a choice, but inevitable, and reduces drastically the number of choices in stories.

Well no one suddenly forgot who mutants were. They went from millions to 400ish in one day. That drastic and suddenly population decline is different than modern-day attitudes towards a tribe that may have slowly decreased in size or been harshly affected hundreds of years ago. That sharp turn in mutantkind and their message of evolution meant something to Stryker.

[Glio]

Now that Wanda is not a mutant, she must be the heroine of all the antimutant racists on earth.

Awkward.

[Maestroneto]

I do not argue that Decimation was not bad, but then everything about IvsX what was it?

Decimation can not be the worst when Extraordinary did the same but worse.

They were both bad. Though Decimation's biggest crime is that it lasted 7 years and they were winging it for the vast majority of time. It could've been a tightly planned 2-3 year long story.

[Glio]

They were both bad. Though Decimation's biggest crime is that it lasted 7 years and they were winging it for the vast majority of time. It could've been a tightly planned 2-3 year long story.

I think it must have ended in Second Coming, I agree that it was too long. Also, we would have avoided Schism and Avengers vs. X-Men.

What I can not understand is to hate Decimation and love Schism. Schism is a direct consequence of Decimation, the decision that the students had to fight was precisely because of the extreme circumstances of Decimation.

[Uncanny X-Man]

That Bachalo page is drool-worthy. I hope we're getting him back on an X-book, pronto.

[salarta]

Speaking on things pointed out to me or others have talked about (I don't really read these).

I'll admit, the whole statistical zero angle is something I hadn't thought of before. So kudos on that. There's a difference in context wherein mutants being small numbers in the 60s was a sign of their future rise, while small numbers due to a culling implied they're in decline and likely to go away soon.

However, thinking more on this, in-universe, mutants had a massive population explosion in a relatively short time frame. They went from basically X-Men and Brotherhood as most visible elements, to whole cities and a nation, in the same time frame it took for the O5 to go from teens to adults in their late 20s/early 30s. Even if we ignore the aging aspect and say an actual 30-35 years passed between early X-Men and Decimation, that's still massive growth. Are people going to be less scared of mutants cause they're less likely to run into them now? Sure. Are people going to think they're basically gone? Nope. Plus the narrative for mutant haters as I've seen it has always been less whether or not you run into them and more "you never know who could be a mutant, and this unknown variable could ruin your life."

Of course, writers of the time didn't seem to pick up on this population explosion aspect - at least of what I've seen. So if they didn't, it's natural for readers of those events to not consider it too. I mean, look at white supremacist rhetoric nowadays where they fearmonger about the idea of minority demographics (mainly black) getting bigger than white demographics. That's with slow growth over a couple centuries. Imagine much bigger growth in less than half a century.


I think a bigger issue with Decimation was that it seems to have killed the franchise in general. It would've worked as a very temporary idea. Unfortunately, Marvel ran with it for like a decade and a half. Pre-Decimation, there was progress. Momentum toward doing new things. Post-Decimation, Marvel went into a cycle of "using what they have" - which they interpreted as "let's obsess over our nostalgia trips even more and make those our focus instead of breaking real new ground." Which is why Utopia is just a repeat of Genosha without all of Genosha's players, for example. X-Office feels like Decimation meant the population is too small to do anything meaningful, so they start doing endless AUs or time travel or pulling in AU versions of characters while ignoring various characters' development because they don't think it matters anymore.

[theoneandonly]

was he feeling idiotic in this particular instance? reducing minorities to statistical irrelevance is going to appease haters? in a universe where races are wiped out to be revived once again like the kree after the Nega bomb and the skrull the extremists were never going to tolerate a SINGLE mutant living for fear of a resurgence. then he says that the gosh awful schism was a underrated event.smh.

[Ambaryerno]

The biggest problem with Decimation was that it did the extinction plot a HELL of a lot better than the subsequent fifty or so extinction plots they've run since, and led to a lot of great character development and storytelling in its aftermath.

Decimation > Fart Cloud > X-Man Breakdown.