X-Men #1 Discussion Thread [Spoilers]

[Havok83]

Thats like saying Polaris betrayed the XMen when Malice possessed her or Storm betrayed the XMen when Emma switched their bodies.
Karima is very much a victim in this situation.

Karima is a victim and it sucks for her but the human that existed prior to the transformation is essentially dead. What we have now is an omega sentinel that can and has tried to kill the X-men multiple times. It ALWAYS ends this way with her. Her factory settings are her default and its what she always returns to. Any attempts to redeem her has been a temporary bandage. She should not be allowed on Krakoa and they need to wipe their hands of her for good bc there are innocent mutants and children that they put at risk by accepting her. Outside of maybe Thunderbird, they dont have a personal connection to her and she isnt worth the hassle.

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

Thats like saying Polaris betrayed the XMen when Malice possessed her or Storm betrayed the XMen when Emma switched their bodies.
Karima is very much a victim in this situation.

An argument could be made that the real Karima Shepard died the instant she was turned into a prime, and all the interactions we've had since then have been with a friendly ghost in the shell.

[People Of The Earth]

You start by providing them with safety and security. Magneto didn't tell the children that he wanted them to go to war with the humans, he said that he himself is tired of fighting with humans, that he will protect them with all his powers and prevent humans from hurting mutants on Krakoa. I know Magneto gets into his whole god complex stuff, but on the other hand his philosophy right now is just to provide safety and security for the mutant children so they have a chance to grow up without being subjugated and oppressed.

And that is a noble sentiment to have… if he actually stuck to that.

When Israel was first founded they had pretty strict controls on who could travel there. The Jewish people who survived WWII just wanted safety and security for themselves, they just wanted to know they could leave their homes and go for a walk or go to the theatre without being attacked or arrested or rounded up to a train to go to the gas chambers.

Did they FORBID ALL foreign presence on their soil completely though? Because I wager they didn't. Krakoa DOES.

Do you think it's any different for mutants right now. In the last few years in the Marvel U, the human organizations have been so horrendous and extreme that even I felt in Rosenberg's Uncanny X-Men that all the hope had gone out of the world for mutants, that it was just bleak endless oppression, subjugation, torture, and genocide being inflicted on mutants by humans.

Which is laughably absurd over the top typical X-verse nonsense. Even Bendis understood how skewed and obsolete such description of sapiens was, and I have no love lost for this writer. It is ABSURD.

They finally have a safe place where they don't have to be afraid all the time, that they don't have to worry that people are going to come and kill their children. They are being cautious. We don't know if they have rules for people to visit yet, because it hasn't been discussed. We don't even know if the Starjammers were prevented or allowed to visit the mainland. But seriously, Scott and the Council most definitely trust the Starjammers because they gave them a flower portal which allows them to return to the Moon Biome from anywhere in the universe.

So blanket ban isn't adapted then.

Personally, I would vote for a closed border if I was on the mutant council. The reason is that they are still building the infrastructure of their country and trying to get everyone settled. They are building a standing police force, standing military, standing intelligence service. If a human does come to Krakoa they need to be able to deal with the possibility that said human may be a terrorist trying to kill or bomb everyone. Also, if they do allow VISA's to visit the main island, then they have to have the process and be ready to do a background check on the visitor.

So they can have the means to launch military operation thousands to millions miles away, and medically deal with the influx of dozens of mutants daily, live off-world on Moon then Mars… but they can't handle securing their frontier. When they litterally control who can and who cannot set a foot on the Mainland, who can and who cannot use their flower network. Their telepaths can scan UN diplomats and help traumatized children, but they can't scan people allowed through the portals BY THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE… They have Shi'ar Technology and access to Advanced science and resources, but wouldn't know how to deal with a sapien. That, again, cannot. Use. Their network. WITHOUT THEIR APPROBATION. In the first place… Yep. That whole "security is an issue" stance? That's the flimsiest of excuse I've ever read

I am sure there are lots of humans that are supportive of mutants rights. The problem is they are not the ones in charge of the governments, they are not running the government agencies. I remember when Maria Hill was trying to walk the fine line of trying to be sympathetic to mutants, but the problem was some of her own agents wanted to kill mutants. She was fighting elements of her own agency to try and use her authority to be better to mutants. Of course Dark Beast took advantage of that and used SHIELD as a weapon against Wolverine's school, but SHIELD had also secretly built super Sentinel weapons that Maria Hill wasn't even aware they had which was revealed at the tail end of Battle of the Atom.
So even when you have a human trying to help mutants, you have 100 others trying their damnedest to kill every mutant they can.

I don't think the sapiens willing to visit their relatives living on Mainland Krakoa have to warn their countries Consulates about it. Whenever you go abroad, you have to deal with the respective countries rules for entering their territories however, meaning their ambassies, that much is true. Which goes back to what I mentioned earlier, about the Kraked having total control over who can get to them.
Save for trying to parachute themselves from the sky, try to reach it by boat or teleporting themselves on the island, no one can get on the Mainland and for the two first options, there is no way the Kraked can't detect such attempts to reach Krakoa.
Beyond the fact of this being outside the realm of 99% of the civilians living in 616.
Which is the kind of folks we are debating about here, not extremist, spies or super-villains.
Also, not every parent of a mutant is SHIELD. Not every friend of a mutant is SHIELD. SHIELD isn't ORCHIS to begin with. Try and tell the Guthries their parents are a security issue to Krakoa. Or Corsair, since he's the one being in the issue.

To me the current state is tenuous and volatile. Even with all the peace agreements the nation of Krakoa is living under the potential threat of an imminent devastating attack. They are a nation that is less than a year old and they are still building their infrastructure and defences against a very hostile world. So yeah they are putting restrictions on travel to their country, because the civilian population of Krakoa are exhausted from the constant threat of genocide and are just trying to enjoy a moment of freedom.

I could imagine for some mutants the site of a normal human would actually trigger massive PTSD and anxiety, after everything they have done to mutants and the fear the mutants have lived with.

Quite the departure from the Dream... The X-Men might as well call themselves the Acolytes in that case.

[JKtheMac]

Karima has ALWAYS betrayed the X-men. I dont get why anyone is surprised/disappointed, nor why they continue to give her multiple chances to try and kill them. I dont beleive there hasnt been a stint that hasnt ended that way. She may have been accepted into their ranks in the past but she is and always will be a sentinel and as such a natural enemy to mutantkind. I dont believe she can ever truly be reformed bc she is a machine who's programming is strong and easily susceptible to being corrupted back to its original directive

I see this as directly related to the theme of post-humanity. Just as on a macroscopic scale certain humans are consolidating and forming a philosophy that in Moira’s other lives has spread through complex means to take over all of humanity and lead them down a path to post-humanity, so does that process happen on the microscopic scale to transform Karima.

If we are not to write-off humans then we are presumably not supposed to write-off Karima.

[Havok83]

An argument could be made that the real Karima Shepard died the instant she was turned into a prime, and all the interactions we've had since then have been with a friendly ghost in the shell.

thats the way Ive always seen it

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

Outside of maybe Thunderbird, they dont have a personal connection to her and she isnt worth the hassle.

She, Charles, and Magneto were pretty close for a while there. Magneto saved her life from Frenzy, and she saved him from Exodus, and they both protected Xavier. It was pretty nuanced. They were downright flirtatious.

[RachelGrey]

And that is a noble sentiment to have… if he actually stuck to that.



Did they FORBID ALL foreign presence on their soil completely though? Because I wager they didn't. Krakoa DOES.



Which is laughably absurd over the top typical X-verse nonsense. Even Bendis understood how skewed and obsolete such description of sapiens was, and I have no love lost for this writer. It is ABSURD.



So blanket ban isn't adapted then.



So they can have the means to launch military operation thousands to millions miles away, and medically deal with the influx of dozens of mutants daily, live off-world on Moon then Mars… but they can't handle securing their frontier. When they litterally control who can and who cannot set a foot on the Mainland, who can and who cannot use their flower network. Their telepaths can scan UN diplomats and help traumatized children, but they can't scan people allowed through the portals BY THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE… They have Shi'ar Technology and access to Advanced science and resources, but wouldn't know how to deal with a sapien. That, again, cannot. Use. Their network. WITHOUT THEIR APPROBATION. In the first place… Yep. That whole "security is an issue" stance? That's the flimsiest of excuse I've ever read



I don't think the sapiens willing to visit their relatives living on Mainland Krakoa have to warn their countries Consulates about it. Whenever you go abroad, you have to deal with the respective countries rules for entering their territories however, meaning their ambassies, that much is true. Which goes back to what I mentioned earlier, about the Kraked having total control over who can get to them.
Save for trying to parachute themselves from the sky, try to reach it by boat or teleporting themselves on the island, no one can get on the Mainland and for the two first options, there is no way the Kraked can't detect such attempts to reach Krakoa.
Beyond the fact of this being outside the realm of 99% of the civilians living in 616.
Which is the kind of folks we are debating about here, not extremist, spies or super-villains.
Also, not every parent of a mutant is SHIELD. Not every friend of a mutant is SHIELD. SHIELD isn't ORCHIS to begin with. Try and tell the Guthries their parents are a security issue to Krakoa. Or Corsair, since he's the one being in the issue.



Quite the departure from the Dream... The X-Men might as well call themselves the Acolytes in that case.

You are assuming that humans are absolutely banned from the island, when we don't actually know if that's true at all. We probably won't know until it actually comes up in a comic. What Magneto says to international representatives who are also spies is different from what Sam Guthrie might say to his Mom and Dad.

Right now, we don't know if humans can or can't go to Krakoa. If they aren't allowed on Krakoa, we don't know if this is just temporary until everything is up and running smoothly.

The establishment of Krakoa is an exodus of mutants to flee persecution to a new land. They did not establish Krakoa to dominate the world, they established it to find safety and succor from persecution, subjugation, torture, and death.

In the face of such extremes they have no choice but to be cautious about people coming and going from their land. They have to be very careful because people have found a way to bypass their security before. The O.N.E. developed a device that could hind a mind from telepathy. Ahab had tech that made him resistant to mutant abilities and some of that tech may be in the hands of the humans now.

To me the mutants have fled from the persecution of humans and created their own land where they can be free from the endless persecution and suffering inflicted on them by humans. Are there some good humans, sure I agree with you that there are, and right now we have no idea what the current status for them is.

Personally, I wonder of Magneto let Briar Raleigh come to Krakoa or not. I am genuinely curious about that. She is one of his staunchest allies and she joined his new Brotherhood in X-Men Black: Magneto, so I would love to know if she can visit Krakoa or not.

I guess we'll see as things progress.

[tuck frump]

Even before Legacy in Excalibur Magneto and Xavier helped her overcome her sentinel programming. Which youd think would be a major plot point rn.

[Havok83]

She, Charles, and Magneto were pretty close for a while there. Magneto saved her life from Frenzy, and she saved him from Exodus, and they both protected Xavier. It was pretty nuanced. They were downright flirtatious.

They're primary objective now is to protect and make more mutants so any affection they may have had for her is likely thrown out the window considering her primary objective is to kill all mutants

[JB]

They're primary objective now is to protect and make more mutants so any affection they may have had for her is likely thrown out the window considering her primary objective is to kill all mutants

Plus Hickman gave us the data page showing that there are clear levels of programming an Omega goes through. As others have said, it seems she is at the final stage. No going back.

But like someone mentioned a moment ago, it was indeed odd that she didn't try to kill the mutants as her programming should have made her do. And she definitely is in an observer role so there's more to the story for sure. Nevertheless, she pushed crazy lady to shoot Scott in the head so whatever for her.

[CGAR]

I think having people on this board showing us just a few panels of humans being decent to mutants is nice. But that's not enough for the last 20 yrs of mutant hate towards mutants.

And humans got even more extreme Post Decimation IMO.

[Devaishwarya]

Plus Hickman gave us the data page showing that there are clear levels of programming an Omega goes through. As others have said, it seems she is at the final stage. No going back.

But like someone mentioned a moment ago, it was indeed odd that she didn't try to kill the mutants as her programming should have made her do. And she definitely is in an observer role so there's more to the story for sure. Nevertheless, she pushed crazy lady to shoot Scott in the head so whatever for her.

Yupp.

She's obviously "passed the point of no return" so...I am quite done with Karima.

[JKtheMac]

Even before Legacy in Excalibur Magneto and Xavier helped her overcome her sentinel programming. Which youd think would be a major plot point rn.

It kind of is, only now thematically. Not everything has to be explicit and in the main text. She has had a long and complex battle with the machine, and now humanity will be having that battle. She was aided by mutants and now mutants will be trying to stifle the same thing happening on a macroscopic level to the whole of humanity.

[gambitxremy]

Children of tomorrow made by evil reed RichardS from the ultimate universe

616 version of children of the vault

Hickman made them when he was writing in the ultimate universe

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

Yupp.

She's obviously "passed the point of no return" so...I am quite done with Karima.

Is it a matter of being 'done' with her, though? None of this is her fault. She's a victim of the singularity who always tried to do the right thing and always suffered for it. The quintessential fallen angel, except not by her own design.