The recent behavior of the X-Men: right or wrong?

[RachelGrey]

True enemies being everything and everyone that's not a mutant? Counter-genocide?

...see how frayed I am because of this status quo?

But it isn't really a counter genocide. So far they are just defending themselves from genocide. A genocide that is still going on in the world at large, hence why the Marauders is necessary, and why X-Force is necessary, because they are still fighting against the forces of genocide and trying to rescue and save as many mutants as they can.

I guess all I can say is I understand why this goes against the grain for some people. In some ways the X-Men books are about the mutants trying to flee from war and genocide and they are stories about how that impacts them. They haven't consolidated enough to work as super heroes again because they are still trying to defend their island from attacks. In a sense the X-Men are in a constant state of war with several world wide factions seeking to kill and purge them from the Earth. Moira already told Charles and Erik that she doesn't think this is going to work, and that they will still all be killed by the human/machine ascendancy, so even with a small sense of hope, there is still an underlying potential that they will still all get purged in a human/machine perpetuated genocide.

I think as Krakoa becomes more stable some of the stories will intersect with other books to show the X-Men standing up as heroes to defend the Earth. But when they do defend the Earth, they do it as representatives of the Krakoan nation, like a peacekeeping force being deployed to New York to assist in protecting from an alien attack.

So I understand why you don't like the new direction, the X-Men have become about politics, war, racism, and genocide and how a nation of people defends themselves against genocide and extinction. But it has been this way ever since Decimation, and even before that with the destruction of Genosha. The progressing genocide of mutants has grown more and more pronounced and the tragedy and death within the X-books have become a core part of the story of these characters. All of the X-Men have seen friends and family die from the genocide, that colors how people see the world, because the story is now about trying to survive in the face of the horrors of genocide.

[Londo Bellian]

Look, the moment the phrase "X-Men and villains finally consolidated to fight the true enemies," my mind went to the logical extreme and my hands typed on the keyboard.

[spirit2011]

What this runs is about exactly, I wonder… I hope it's more than Hickman saying "Look, people, how much I'm clever…" He certainly doesn't make a proposition that is very uplifting… everyone can be saved providing they found an island and they gather the power to defend themselves.
Well, it is more or less the world where we are living and this fiction doesn't offer anything better than nations looking at each other with distrust and resent. Right, X-men was for me about something else. Ugliness and horror exist in our world but it shouldn't make us forget that the world isn't made only of that. The mutants look after their own, fine for them. So what? It's not an exemple of generosity and heroism.

Yes. Mutants now are on for Us vs them. If mutants surive and not humans? they will be fine and mission accomplished.

Look, the moment the phrase "X-Men and villains finally consolidated to fight the true enemies," my mind went to the logical extreme and my hands typed on the keyboard.

true enemies = humankind.

Sinister, apocalypse, Selene and others would happily kill and torture mutants too.
This is total failure on the ethics an dmorality of Krakoa

[Londo Bellian]

I guess it also rankles that under the Age of Krakoa, it seems absolutely no other types of stories can be told where mutant characters are concerned, even those mutant characters created outside of the X-office like Franklin, who looks like he is actively being poached off the FF, his parents, by Krakoa. If it's about a mutant in 616, it can only be about becoming part of Krakoa, "us vs. them," genocide and how to stop it cold. Nothing more.

[spirit2011]

I guess it also rankles that under the Age of Krakoa, it seems absolutely no other types of stories can be told where mutant characters are concerned, even those mutant characters created outside of the X-office like Franklin, who looks like he is actively being poached off the FF, his parents, by Krakoa. If it's about a mutant in 616, it can only be about becoming part of Krakoa, "us vs. them," genocide and how to stop it cold. Nothing more.

There is Fallen Angels, where psylocke is trying to save human kids and is said that they going out of krakoa to save humans is not well seen by krakoans.
We even have Paige questioning if human genocide is their problem.

It really took a turn for the darkness

[Devaishwarya]

You don't know that.
We are only in the first opening arcs of these DoX books. There are lots of stories in the works.
Have some Krakoa tea...it will do wonders to settle your frayed nerves.

[Londo Bellian]

You know the more you go in-character with the Krakoa thing at me, the more I shy away from any sort of rapport with you. I already established myself having a dislike for the concept, and you just double down.

[Astroman]

But that's just it, there are books written for young readers in comics right now. Squirrel Girl, Ms Marvel, and in DC we have Far Sector about a young teenage green lantern. There are comics that are directed at younger readers.

This isn't just about readers, this about finding creative writers who want to challenge the story and move it forward. Heroes grow up, they become adults, they get married, they have children, they have to deal with real world issues of racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious persecution, and other forms of bigotry that is entrenched in modern society.

The readers who originally read Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Justice League, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman all grew up into adults, but part from nostalgia and part from just loving the characters they wanted the stories to grow up with them. Many gifted writers came on and were recruited to write for comics, some of them novel or screen writers who want to try the comic medium out for a while. (i.e. Ta-Nehisi Coates, JJ Abrams, Joss Whedon, Neil Gamon) No one can argue that Neil Gamon's Sandman, Death, and other series were directed at adults. No one can argue that Wolverine is more or less a comic character that isn't really for children, and that the X-Men became a lot more complex and adult focused when Claremont was writing. Chris Claremont infused the X-Men with a level of sex and violence, and pushed the limits of the comic code authority to the max. If he had been a little more blatant while he was writing they would have had to move the X-Men to Marvel Max because Claremont pushed the standards. Many writers did over the years and the stories became more complex and less archetypical. By the 1990's Emma Frost wasn't a villain anymore, she was an anti-hero who wanted to protect her students and was willing to use any means to do so. She had become a female version of Wolverine who used her cunning and wiles to protect her students from the rising racism in the Marvel Earth! Magneto went from being a 1 dimensional villain, to becoming a compelling anti-hero and guerrilla freedom fighter who resorted to terrorism to fight against the entrenched racism of the humans.

So many characters changed over the years. Tony Stark became an alcoholic, Carol Danvers was kidnapped and raped, Carol Danvers had her memories forcibly removed from her, and Rogue who did that was horrified by her own actions in that incident and reformed herself to become a hero because of it.

Under Claremont the Reavers tried to crucify the remaining X-Men in Australia, and they actually did crucify Logan, and this was written in the 1990's X-Men book.

I am sorry, a character being crucified in a comic is not a comic that is directed at children, and that was almost 30 years ago.

Superman who is the epitome of the pure and noble hero, his comic is not directed at children these days. They try to have a more hopeful theme in the comic, but Clark Kent is an adult, he's married, he has a child. His comic just went through a recent run dealing with a genocidal maniac who wanted to purge the universe of Kryptonians.

The X-Men were only archetypical superheroes in the 1960's. When Claremont took over and after Giant Size X-Men, the themes of the X-Men became much deeper and adult. Suddenly these weren't teenage characters, they were adults, doing adult things. Storm, Kurt, Logan, and Piotr were all over 20 and they had lived lives of hardship, they were experienced as individual super powered individuals, and they had to overcome personality differences to work as a team. They weren't children learning to fight, they were adults learning to fight as a unit.

Heck, they had a very limited student body until much later, and when Emma and Scott were running the school together that is when they emphasized that it was a full blown school with a large student body. Just compare Emma's original Massachusets Academy to the Xavier Institute. Emma had a mix of human and mutant students at her school, and the mutants were being trained in the underground facility beneath the school. The Xavier Institute maybe had 20 students only, and they were all mutants like the New Mutants Roberto, Sam, Dani, Xi'an, Illyana, Rahne, Doug, Kitty, etc.. When Emma reformed and merged her operations with Xavier, even she went to just having a limited student body at her school with no human students anymore. Because people now knew that Emma was openly allowing mutants at the Massachusets Academy, and they didn't want to send their human kids there, so it was just Sean and Emma teaching the younger kids to be a team together.

The X-Men isn't really a superhero story, it hasn't been since Giant Size X-Men, the X-Men is the story of the mutants in the 616 Marvel Earth and how they have struggled to be free to be themselves and to live in society peacefully. Some mutants became so disillusioned with humanity that they became terrorists, i.e. Amelia Voght, and Marrow. Some mutants preferred to be outright villains like Sabretooth because they get pleasure from hurting people. Some mutants worked as mercenaries, spies, and assassins, selling their services to the highest bidder, like Mystique and her Brotherhood.

I look at the X-Men as a science fiction story, what if we lived in a society where people could be born with super abilities and powers because of a quirk of genetics. What if more and more of these mutants were being born each year, how would the world react, what would the world do. All of the writers of X-Men since Claremont have been trying to answer that question.

If we are going to be purists and say that the X-men shouldn't have changed from how Stan Lee and Jack Kirby interpreted them to be, then that means the X-Men ended in the run in the 1960's and never came back. The pure story as it was originally written had some interesting concepts, but the execution was rather generic storytelling with simple archetype heroes and villains who didn't have any growth.

Even Archie Andrews and Riverdale have changed. Those kids are still in high school, but the owners of the Archie/Sabrina IP have been hiring writers to do mini-series that are much darker and more adult themed. They revamped the entire line a few years ago to make the characters reflect current high school dynamics a lot more than they have in the past. They also changed the art style to be more realistic with the current day comic artists. So even the unchanging Archie Andrews has been revamped to reflect the modern era.

This is such an awesome post. Standing ovation!

[Astroman]

We should ban clear cut heroes and villains in fiction, or rather, I’d like to see creators move away from that paradigm. The world has never been black and white, so perpetuating that perception inevitably does more harm than good. Most of us are a mix of selfless and selfish, and most conflict stems from clashing priorities rather than some grand struggle between good and evil. It’s no accident that Magneto took off as a character once he was fleshed out and made sympathetic. It’s no coincidence that the X-Men took off after those lines were blurred for him and for Jean.

Re: the bolded - Exactly.

[Devaishwarya]

You know the more you go in-character with the Krakoa thing at me, the more I shy away from any sort of rapport with you. I already established myself having a dislike for the concept, and you just double down.

Well...isn't that what you and others like yourself have been doing also? Doubling down?
I've come to the realisation a long while now (since the first thread of this nature showed up) that there are two different viewpoints on matters concerning Krakoa. And I abjectly do not agree with your (and their) positions. I clearly understand it but I will never agree with it.
So...rather than continue to beat a dead horse until nothing remains of said horse, I will offer tea. It's the polite and sensible thing to do, at this point.

[The Quiet Councilor]

I guess it also rankles that under the Age of Krakoa, it seems absolutely no other types of stories can be told where mutant characters are concerned, even those mutant characters created outside of the X-office like Franklin, who looks like he is actively being poached off the FF, his parents, by Krakoa. If it's about a mutant in 616, it can only be about becoming part of Krakoa, "us vs. them," genocide and how to stop it cold. Nothing more.

Storm is currently appearing in Black Panther, where Krakoa has been briefly alluded to once. It’s possible as shown there, but Krakoa has powerful narrative gravity by design. It may not be central to every story involving mutants, but it is something that is meant to impact every mutant.

[Filthy Mutie]

They're right.

But, the main thing in this ongoing "debate" is: They're definitely not wrong.

[RachelGrey]

Well...isn't that what you and others like yourself have been doing also? Doubling down?
I've come to the realisation a long while now (since the first thread of this nature showed up) that there are two different viewpoints on matters concerning Krakoa. And I abjectly do not agree with your (and their) positions. I clearly understand it but I will never agree with it.
So...rather than continue to beat a dead horse until nothing remains of said horse, I will offer tea. It's the polite and sensible thing to do, at this point.

I would love some tea, lets all have some now. I know there is this one variety of Krakoan flower tea that is absolutely divine!

[Tycon]

Yeah even countries that don’t recognize Krakoa recognizes why it exists.

[RachelGrey]

This is such an awesome post. Standing ovation!

Thanks Astroman, I appreciate it!!