Originally Posted by
Ravage
Actually joined up here just to discuss this point, because it's going to be a bit of an issue for me, going forward.
The simple fact is, at least based upon the evidence we have seen, the original characters are dead and gone. In the Marvel Universe it has long been established that there is an afterlife, and that when a character dies, their soul travels to another place, whether it be "heaven", "hell", Valhalla or wherever else. Everything that makes that person who they are continues to exist, outside of their physical form. And sometimes they return, in newly created bodies. Take what happened with Nightcrawler in recent years, or going back much further, Warlock, Gamora and Pip returning from inside the Soul Gem and recreating their physical forms at the start of Infinity Gauntlet. This demonstrates a clear continuation of their individual existences, going between the physical and the spiritual, then back again. It's always happened that way, in the MU.
That, therefore, creates a problem with this method of resurrection, because as far as I'm aware, there is no point in the process that involves collecting the souls of the recreated mutants from whatever afterlife they happen to be in. Take Sunspot, as a recent example. He died at the end of the X-Men War of the Realms mini, and his spirit or soul was seen alongside other fallen warriors, suggesting that he was heading to Valhalla. He even spoke with Dani after his death. Who he was continued to exist. Now, we know that Sunspot is alive again in the next New Mutants run, but unless there is some currently unknown process that has retrieved Roberto from Valhalla, then the original version is still there, partying with the Valkyries. Meaning that the Sunspot we'll be reading about from here on is a copy. A perfect copy, perhaps, and just as real, but still a copy. As such, that will be true for every other dead mutant that has return, be that Wolverine, Cyclops, Havok, Jean or anyone else. These are copies and the originals are now dead.
The truth is that if these really were the original characters, there would be no need to artificially back up their personalities and memories, because people of the MU don't forget who they are in the afterlife. Kurt never forgot his life and came back just fine. It would be a simple matter of putting the soul back in a newly created body and job done. No need for a complicated process of copying their minds and memories. The only reason to duplicate something is if you need to make a copy. Which is what these new versions are.
So the issue I mentioned earlier for me is, put simply, do I care about following the adventures of these copies, when I know the charcters I actually care about are gone, albeit happily existing in the MU afterlife. The answer right now is that I don't know that I do. No offence to this new copy of Wolverine, but he's not the Logan I've always read about. Marvel have been taking this direction with a lot of their characters in recent years. We still don't know which version of Steve Rogers is to be considered the original anymore. Black Widow is basically now a copy in the same way as the X-Men are, and even Tony Stark might be nothing but a digital alternative to the true version. I guess I'm just not certain that I want to be reading about copies of all my favourite characters, and it's frustrating that the situation has gotten so bad that I'm starting to not care about reading the comics at all, when the MCU is giving us a much better alternative. Anyway, time will tell.