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

[FUBAR007]

So far, Hickman has stacked the deck in the Krakoans' favor by not having them screw up. Aside from Sabretooth, none of the villians on Krakoa have gone rogue...so far. Aside from Sabretooth's kills, "collateral damage" has been due to the actions of others, not the actions of the Krakoans...so far. None of Xavier and Magneto's plans have backfired...so far.

If things like that happen, we'll see if Hickman and Marvel are really interested in telling more "realistic", morally gray stories or if this really is all just SJW wish fulfillment fantasy.

Keep in mind, too, that Hickman flat out said he likes to put the readers "in a hard position" with regard to how the characters are behaving. In other words, the divisive controversy is by design.

[Tycon]

SJW wish fulfillment.......talk about coded language.

[spirit2011]

It does make sense that some stories are like that, because some writers want to tell those stories. That's why we have young adult fiction writers and children's fiction writers. DC is doing a reasonably good job of developing this by doing the young adult novels that are directed at younger readers. They have a whole slate of stories about their characters but written in an AU with different history and backstories, and many of the characters are portrayed younger. There is a market for these kinds of materials, and Marvel has been working on developing the Marvel Rising line (although very slow and disjointed) with Ms Marvel, Squirrel Girl, Ghost Spider, and other younger heroes. This is being directed at a younger audience, primarily girls. They will probably start doing some young reader novels like DC is doing too. Now that they have Disney + there is a good chance that Marvel Rising will end up as an ongoing cartoon series to introduce a younger audience to Marvel characters.

So I don't think traditional Superheroes should be banned, I just think that there are places where they fit better. X-Men have been moving toward being the "story of mutant kind" for years, and Jonathan Hickman has just decided to fully embrace that. Hence the starting point was the amnesty that allowed the villains to come to Krakoa and join the new nation, to have their past crimes forgiven, and be granted a second chance. Some characters are going all in on the new status quo like Apocalypse and Exodus who both want to fully support this nation of mutants, others have a definite malicious intent like Sinister, Sabretooth, and Sebastian Shaw, others have uncertain motives like Mystique, Gorgon, Selene, Emplate where we don't know which direction they are going to go because they haven't been explored yet.

I like the complexity of this, how do these heroes and former villains get along. How soon before some of them come to blows over past grievances, how long can the peace on Krakoa hold before it starts to fall apart. Will we end up with a Krakoan civil war between different factions, or can the Quiet Council hold things together for a while? So many interesting questions and I can't wait to find out what happens next. I love the political themes in this story. Well mutants you finally have your nation you always wanted, but what will you do with it, and will you learn from past mutant mistakes and the mistakes of humanity and succeed where others have failed. Will Moira be proven right and no matter what you do the mutants will always die to the genocide that results from the human/machine ascendancy?

So tradidiotanal superheroes are for kids now?

True heroism is dead? I don't think so. Captain America got to be one of the most well known and loved superheroes of all time. When he showed up on infinity war whole theather cheered

[spirit2011]

So far, Hickman has stacked the deck in the Krakoans' favor by not having them screw up. Aside from Sabretooth, none of the villians on Krakoa have gone rogue...so far. Aside from Sabretooth's kills, "collateral damage" has been due to the actions of others, not the actions of the Krakoans...so far. None of Xavier and Magneto's plans have backfired...so far.

If things like that happen, we'll see if Hickman and Marvel are really interested in telling more "realistic", morally gray stories or if this really is all just SJW wish fulfillment fantasy.

Keep in mind, too, that Hickman flat out said he likes to put the readers "in a hard position" with regard to how the characters are behaving. In other words, the divisive controversy is by design.

he did it on Avengers when they started exploding parallel earths to avoid destroying their own earth.

I ownder what is the main conflict for x-men, probably save whole humanity or just save theirselves

[AbnormallyNormal]

So tradidiotanal superheroes are for kids now?

True heroism is dead? I don't think so. Captain America got to be one of the most well known and loved superheroes of all time. When he showed up on infinity war whole theather cheered

Movie audience != comic readers. You know this

Those films are for extreme casual mass audiences, including kids in foreign countries utterly unfamiliar with the deeper cultural references or history involved. It's about special effects "wow" moments, humor and so on....

Anyway, CA2:WS was a pretty provocative and political film BTW. Probably the best the MCU has done so far in terms of making you need to think, and show the potential subversive effects a Rogers would have in a contemporary world given his FDR-type New Deal ethics and distrust of powerful corporations/hatred of real-world rising Fascism and so on. His belief in Bucky and trying to save him in CA3 extended these themes although that film got diluted and weighed down by the ensemble cast and subsequent focus on IronMan. But it also was decent for showing Wanda's views as a proxy mutant, she knew what it was like to be so powerful that others fear you, and that you can't trust yourself all the time etc. So the Captain America movies really are the most ambiguous/thoughtful of the lot, contrary to your assertion

So far, Hickman has stacked the deck in the Krakoans' favor by not having them screw up. Aside from Sabretooth, none of the villians on Krakoa have gone rogue...so far. Aside from Sabretooth's kills, "collateral damage" has been due to the actions of others, not the actions of the Krakoans...so far. None of Xavier and Magneto's plans have backfired...so far.

If things like that happen, we'll see if Hickman and Marvel are really interested in telling more "realistic", morally gray stories or if this really is all just SJW wish fulfillment fantasy.

Keep in mind, too, that Hickman flat out said he likes to put the readers "in a hard position" with regard to how the characters are behaving. In other words, the divisive controversy is by design.

Well the entire concept of Krakoa is basically a deeply despairing and pessimistic mutant who keeps on reincarnating after having "tried everything possible" throughout 9 (long) lifetimes, and still believes in the end "we lose". Not sure I'd call that "An Easy Ride" or "Convenience" or "Nothing Going Wrong" myself.

[spirit2011]

Movie audience != comic readers. You know this

Those films are for extreme casual mass audiences, including kids in foreign countries utterly unfamiliar with the deeper cultural references or history involved. It's about special effects "wow" moments, humor and so on....

Of course I know the audiences are different, but they overlap very often.

Marvel movies are engaging because they also have characters moments, it's no tonly the humor or the Vfx

I'm not against grey area, but x-men comics these they are more into grey and even black than into the white area

[Zelena]

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.

I find disheartening this idea that a story must be bleak and hopeless to be realistic. I suggest that Marvel writers go out a little to see the world and meet people. Sure, there are bastards but there are very nice people too.

[AbnormallyNormal]

Of course I know the audiences are different, but they overlap very often.

Marvel movies are engaging because they also have characters moments, it's no tonly the humor or the Vfx

I'm not against grey area, but x-men comics these they are more into grey and even black than into the white area

As somebody who enjoys grey/darker stuff I find that the X-comics right now are just toying with it but not truly "going there".

Example: Marauders. I was very interested in Marauders as a journey of Kitty into Kate but it seems clear to me now they're simply going to make Shaw the bad guy, along with those stupid kids, and absolutely rehabilitate Emma along the way... and Kate's behavior is getting excused already by most fans as her just going through stress or something. Will she do anything "past the point of no return"? It seems not. Will there be any long term moral accountability for her? Does not look like it. So that's what I mean. The books PLAY WITH this darker shading but in the end it doesn't actually visit that space too much....

Also, check out how they've ALREADY begun unraveling Sinister into a Big Bad for some event. ALREADY the entire foundational premise of "Mutantkind Together" is coming apart at the seams and we see cracks and return to the old tropes. So yeah a lot of how "grey" this all is , has been tremendously exaggerated both by proponents and detractors

[The Quiet Councilor]

SJW wish fulfillment.......talk about coded language.

Indeed. That said, people who use it just reveal their utter foolishness for the rest of us to see.

I find disheartening this idea that a story must be bleak and hopeless to be realistic. I suggest that Marvel writers go out a little to see the world and meet people. Sure, there are bastards but there are very nice people too.

Nuance in storytelling doesn’t equate to bleakness or hopelessness. That’s not at all what I said or meant.

[Zelena]

Nuance in storytelling doesn’t equate to bleakness or hopelessness. That’s not at all what I said or meant.

Then you see nuance where I don't see it. The cynical work of a cynical man.

[Vishop_]

Because the story has changed, when it was just about "mutant rights" it was possible to live the dream of "We can all live together in harmony, only evildoers should be fought whether they be human or mutant", but over time the story has become a race of refugees fleeing from the human perpetuated genocide. It's no longer possible to live in human society because humans want to purge the Earth of mutants. You can't live every day fearing that the people with the black hoods are going to show up at your home and throw hood over your head and cart you off to the concentration camps. This is why people flee from genocide, you can try and fight it, but if you are vastly outnumbered you need to flee to a "high ground" where you can defend your position. Krakoa is the mutant "high ground" the defensible position from which they can try to fight against the world wide genocide of the mutant race. A lot of people who have fled genocide in their lives can see this, I haven't fled genocide myself but I have great empathy for people who have, and I can understand the appeal of being able to establish a safe nation where you can try to regroup and recover from the genocide.

Technically we have already seen this in the last 100 years of our history. One of the greatest genocides in modern history was the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazi forces all across Europe. People fled before this genocide, but they couldn't find succor because a lot of countries would force them back. In many ways the Allied Nations could be considered complicit in this genocide, because even when the Allies were aware of it, we still turned back Jewish refugees knowing they were going to be taken to camps.

After the war, people felt guilty, they saw the pictures of the gas chambers and the concentration camps, and they realized that they had allowed this to happen, they had allowed this tragedy to happen and they didn't do enough to stop it. This is why the gave the territory in Israel to the Jewish people to live in, it was a reparation for the horrendous evil that had been perpetuated against the Jewish people, but it was also to assuage the world wide guilt that people felt that they had allowed the worst genocide of that time to occur and didn't do enough to stop it.

In Marvel Comics the mutants have suffered under the worst genocide in Marvel Earth history. Nearly 20 million mutants dead in the last 30 years. That is a horrifying genocide, and though some super villains were involved in perpetuating this Cassandra Nova and Doom, there were many humans that were willing participants in this genocide and even built the means by which this genocide could be perpetuated (the Sentinel attack on Genosha).

Just recently the US Government controlled O.N.E. was doing experiments with the transmode virus to convert mutants into Sentinel Hounds to hunt, kill, or capture mutants and bring them in for extermination, termination, or force curing. This evil was specifically perpetuated by the US Government, but many other world governments were also peripherally involved and they openly supported this genocide of the mutant race. They had the mutants on the run, it was time to purge the world of them once and for all.

This is the state the world was in when House of X occurred and the founding of the Krakoan nation. Mutants from all over the world fled from the genocide to the newly established nation to try and be free from oppression and death.

I still haven't got a the definition of how u define heroism in this new chapter of X-Men or Mutants to be more realistic. As for mutants/refugees trying to make their own nation, if this is the only way of avoiding dystopia then Hitler would have unleashed his white supremacist empire by now. I think writers have already over-saturated this things for too long. They should take a break from all this because I don't think this things are going to work in general audience. People read superhero comic mythos because they gave us optimism or hope but over the last few decades they have lost the juice(or sales) because how they were written.

[CoCoBandz]

SJW wish fulfillment.......talk about coded language.

Eventually the true colors show.

I had someone in another post earlier "All lives Matter" me.

[The Quiet Councilor]

Then you see nuance where I don't see it. The cynical work of a cynical man.

I’m not following you down that cyclical man rabbit hole, but what I will do is point to how you yourself glossed over the nuance of the real world. The “bastards” you mentioned have their own points of view and reasons for their behavior, and sometimes they do things that aren’t so bastardly. Conversely, those “nice people” do some really shitty things sometimes. That’s the nuance I’m talking about that gets lost when we cast things in terms of good and evil. Obviously, there are some real exceptions, but by and large, we all do some things that hurt ourselves, other people, society, the planet, etc. and some things that help. Superheroes often gloss over this. Is Batman an actual crusader for justice or a rich white guy who beats up on poor people because he never properly dealt with the trauma of witnessing his parents’ murder? Or is it somewhere in between, a little bit of both, etc.?

[Zelena]

I’m not following you down that cyclical man rabbit hole, but what I will do is point to how you yourself glossed over the nuance of the real world. The “bastards” you mentioned have their own points of view and reasons for their behavior, and sometimes they do things that aren’t so bastardly. Conversely, those “nice people” do some really shitty things sometimes. That’s the nuance I’m talking about that gets lost when we cast things in terms of good and evil. Obviously, there are some real exceptions, but by and large, we all do some things that hurt ourselves, other people, society, the planet, etc. and some things that help. Superheroes often gloss over this. Is Batman an actual crusader for justice or a rich white guy who beats up on poor people because he never properly dealt with the trauma of witnessing his parents’ murder? Or is it somewhere in between, a little bit of both, etc.?

Nuance is certainly interesting, good people doing bad things leading by their emotions or thinking they're do the right thing or the opposite, also… interesting… I'm following you on all this… wonderful… But Hickman's run? Doesn't fit the bill for me.

[Astroman]

I find disheartening this idea that a story must be bleak and hopeless to be realistic. I suggest that Marvel writers go out a little to see the world and meet people. Sure, there are bastards but there are very nice people too.

I don't see hopelessness in the X-Books right now at all. In X-Men specifically Cyclops has rarely been happier. Issue 2 specifically had him spending time with his kids and leading to two sentient islands that had been separated for centuries reuniting in love. Maruaders has been filled with laughs and some truly heroic moments, New Mutants as well.

One may not like the direction, or the execution, but the content of the books themselves have not been bleak.