X-Men Monday #154 - Moira or What Have Been

[PolarIceFire]

... So yeah, it's one of those cases where everyone is a fucking idiot for the plot to happen, including Moira herself, because deciding to trust Emma and expect her to not be pissed over years of manipulation, man...

This, the contrived... *awkwardness* of Inferno [coupled w/the more chaotic, incoherent same from ToM, mind you], was palpable, and left me really soured & ever-increasingly... apathetic, I'm sad to say. Pretty sure I was so thoroughly discouraged by it all that I even stopped actually reading it right after issue 2, keeping up only via reviews & to a lesser extent, some skimming [if warranted].

[sunofdarkchild]

Yes. The plot-induced stupidity has been very strong recently, and I really started to pick up on it during Inferno.

[PolarIceFire]

I feel editorial is trying to keep the goodwill that was garnered in the early days of Dawn of X, but has squandered a lot of it.

I personally feel Moira X got shitcanned because the entire line changed focus from having a THREE year Krakoa run to a FOREVER Krakoa run. ...

... For sure X-men writers and editors are trying to keep the excitement and interest of the early days of Krakoa and they aren't doing a good job on many fronts

Most of this needs to stay framed in the context of the pandemic, and what I'm sure is the universal malaise & collective low morale we're all still experiencing [and then some] WW. We're not immune to it, and neither are they. Also, keeping up a good front & painting a rosy picture kinda comes with the territory, I'd say. That said, the way the interview was almost bookended with the following:

Obviously, I won’t beat around the bush completely and say sales are not a factor. Sales are a factor for sure. We look at what books are already selling strongly and what books could use a shot in the arm from a new number one. ...

I feel really happy about all the things that I’ve been privileged enough to work on in my career. All the way from the Marvel Adventures books and the New Exiles and stuff that I worked on in my very first editorial office all the way up through Deadpool, through Star Wars, through Guardians of the Galaxy to coming back to the X-Men and getting to work on the Krakoa era. It’s such a privilege and I feel so lucky to have been part of it all. And yeah, I want to share that with everybody.

a combination of acknowledgement and... *reflection.* I know the latter was in reference to his passion for the medium & why he enjoys doing interviews/Q&A w/the fans, BUT the *tone* of it had this faint ring of... finality to it, almost? Not sure what that would mean exactly & IDK, maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

There is a gap in enthusiasm, though, that's undeniable. And there likely would've been one no matter what, just with the usual novelty wearing off, that time normally brings with it. The difference in the severity of it notwithstanding, one way or the other, the thing I can't shake is it's not just with the fans... it's with the creators themselves. Like they're not as inspired & feelin' the... "spark" either, as intensely as they once were. There's this... talk a good game/actions speak louder than words/going through the motions = placeholder phase?... feel to everything lately. It could be because of the impending 'Judgement', I suppose, and they're holding back with that in mind. But IDK, something just seems... *off* to me, and it has for a while now.

Anyway, now going back pre-pandemic, to the very beginning: HoX, specifically the KRAKOA concept ALONE > PoX & everything else, including Moira-nator X, and all that 100/1000 yrs. in the future minutiae. That's what really hit hard & struck a chord with consumers. Interestingly enough, the fundamentals of the entire idea were something Hickman already had in mind for whatever & just applied it to the X-Men, it wasn't a development designed especially for and/or around them. So essentially, it was a prepackaged deal, that was adjusted to fit accordingly. Thought that might add some perspective.

[charliehustle415]

Truth to tell...I was always a bit skeptical on whether or not HiX-Man and co. would be able to deliver on all those big ideas. I said it early on when news of him coming on board was a done deal. He lacks focus. My experience with his writing has always been one of small disappointments where he either doesn't quite stick the landing or, the routine itself falters on technical and artistic presentation because of that lack of focus.

He spent all his X-Men books introducing idea after idea, plot after plot (and the other writers followed suit in their own books) and what should have been the main through-plot, Moira X/Nimrod/orchis, gets sidelined until she's relegated to a LS and a hastily tacked on at the end of a solo run (nothing that happened in XDoW and with Moira had anything to do with XLoW) heel-turn by another writer whose team book is a tragic mess of nothing happening.

It's why we got that Broo/Brood/Brood Egg plot relegated to a throwaway panel and the GGt's are guest appearing in a Digital Shit Show.

As much as I truly enjoyed the books I was reading I can honestly say that from the start of DoX to the end of RoX, plot-wise they were all lacking clear direction and focus. And the writers are ALL to blame for that.

And yes, they spent {wasted) a ridiculous amount of time and energy on a tedious and foolish 20 plus issues crossover and poorly written LSs and One-shots (what was the point of those?) that did absolutely nothing to develop the Mutant Existence/Experience on Krakoa other than to: introduce Arakko and the Arakkii and send them out to Mars; have Wanda atone for M-Day; make Franklin not a mutant....all of which had nothing to do with what was introduced in HoX/Pox.

Co-sign this whole thing! I think we are allowed to be disappointed with the sheer potential vs what we were served. Seems like a lot of wasted page space in the whole x line.

The thing with me is that Marvel does this all the time, they get a visionary for their vision and then hobble it. They did it with Morrison, Spencer, hell they did it with Claremont the godfather of the X-Men in the 90's.

Why not let it play out it's not like you can't mine alternate timelines forever, I mean we don't even know what happened between Rosenberg's run and Hickman's they could have mined the Krakoa era forever and allowed Hickman's plan to play out.

[Grunty]

Yes. The plot-induced stupidity has been very strong recently, and I really started to pick up on it during Inferno.

Which gets worse when one remembers the massive amount of resources and tools the status quo has also given the characters.

Some of the classic plot induced stupidity or necessary blindspots are a lot more justifiable when it's a small dedicated group of people having to deal with issues beyond their numbers or means, rather than a nation of super powered people who are also supposed to be better than everyone else, completely united and having access to near unlimited founds and wonderous technologies.

This is the X-men and co. at what could be argued to be the peak of their power, but making mistakes and failing to notice things worse than when they were still a dozen people in a mansion.

[PolarIceFire]

The line itself, much like the nation of Krakoa, took on a life of its own & became a bit of an unwieldy beast.

Life imitates Art, lol. Truth be told and to be fair, though, trial & error should be expected in something this ambitious & experimental.

And all is not...



*yet.* [The connections & parallels are there.]

From what I've seen of both actual orders/sales & other indirect data for Mar/Apr, mostly everything so far still seems fine. In fact, there were even some *surprisingly* encouraging signs. But it's early, and the natives already seem to be getting restless, myself included.

Luckily, and THANKFULLY...

we got what looks to be some really GREAT stuff coming up over the next few wks. w/these + Red #2 & LoX 1, etc.

[Devaishwarya]

Yupp.

Red and Immortal seem to be more focused on the premise they started and XM will finally get round to resolving the Gameworld plot ('boutfockintime)...hopefully.

[Lukmendes]

Truth to tell...I was always a bit skeptical on whether or not HiX-Man and co. would be able to deliver on all those big ideas. I said it early on when news of him coming on board was a done deal. He lacks focus. My experience with his writing has always been one of small disappointments where he either doesn't quite stick the landing or, the routine itself falters on technical and artistic presentation because of that lack of focus.

He spent all his X-Men books introducing idea after idea, plot after plot (and the other writers followed suit in their own books) and what should have been the main through-plot, Moira X/Nimrod/orchis, gets sidelined until she's relegated to a LS and a hastily tacked on at the end of a solo run (nothing that happened in XDoW and with Moira had anything to do with XLoW) heel-turn by another writer whose team book is a tragic mess of nothing happening.

It's why we got that Broo/Brood/Brood Egg plot relegated to a throwaway panel and the GGt's are guest appearing in a Digital Shit Show.

As much as I truly enjoyed the books I was reading I can honestly say that from the start of DoX to the end of RoX, plot-wise they were all lacking clear direction and focus. And the writers are ALL to blame for that.

And yes, they spent {wasted) a ridiculous amount of time and energy on a tedious and foolish 20 plus issues crossover and poorly written LSs and One-shots (what was the point of those?) that did absolutely nothing to develop the Mutant Existence/Experience on Krakoa other than to: introduce Arakko and the Arakkii and send them out to Mars; have Wanda atone for M-Day; make Franklin not a mutant....all of which had nothing to do with what was introduced in HoX/Pox.

Yeah I've been thinking about HoX/PoX on the last few days and I remember thinking it was hard to keep track, I thought it was because I didn't know much of X-Men, and while I still don't, it's because of the amount of nonsense Hickman was introducing.

Might be why the HoX comics were considered the ebtter ones, the plot was easier to follow.

Throwing so many ideas like Hickman did makes it hard to follow because there's not much focus, and if you forget key details because the issues themselves lacked focus, then yeah...

Isn’t that the problem for Marvel in general? Story gets pitched as a finite story. Response is good and marvel milks it for all it’s worth. Clone saga is perhaps the most famous example I can think of.

At the very least Clone Saga was happening during the comics crash, so milking that train wreck as much as they could is a bit more justified since, y'know, they were trying to avoid going bankrupt.

This, the contrived... *awkwardness* of Inferno [coupled w/the more chaotic, incoherent same from ToM, mind you], was palpable, and left me really soured & ever-increasingly... apathetic, I'm sad to say. Pretty sure I was so thoroughly discouraged by it all that I even stopped actually reading it right after issue 2, keeping up only via reviews & to a lesser extent, some skimming [if warranted].

I'm not sure if I actually stopped reading it while it was being published, but I do remember not really caring about what's going on.

Omega Sentinel in particular, the way it's suddenly revealed she's a time traveler and that she created Orchis by brainwashing that Devo guy, all I could think was "what the fuck", it happens so suddenly, and it might be evidence that this is a plot point Hickman was planning to use later, and not in Inferno.

Yes. The plot-induced stupidity has been very strong recently, and I really started to pick up on it during Inferno.

Even before Inferno you could see bits of it, HoX#4 had the characters having really stupid deaths, but most noticeably is Mystique, who's using her default form while on enemy base, instead of shape shifting into an enemy.

And it becomes even stupider once you check out X-Men#6 vol 5, in which we see more of what she did before dying there, and she did shape shift into an enemy, then shape shifted back to her default form? Like bitch, she might as well be asking to get killed.

There's also the whole thing about Moira being so against precogs being in Krakoa for any reason, and while I can understand her butthurt over getting killed by Destiny, it doesn't explain why someone like Blindfold couldn't be resurrected, no excuses are given, and Magneto and Xavier don't wonder why, they're just being her puppets and following what she says without questioning when it comes to that point about no precogs being allowed.

Maybe it could be excused that Ulysses caused a bad omen among precogs and Krakoa wanted to avoid having their own Civil War II .

Which gets worse when one remembers the massive amount of resources and tools the status quo has also given the characters.

Some of the classic plot induced stupidity or necessary blindspots are a lot more justifiable when it's a small dedicated group of people having to deal with issues beyond their numbers or means, rather than a nation of super powered people who are also supposed to be better than everyone else, completely united and having access to near unlimited founds and wonderous technologies.

This is the X-men and co. at what could be argued to be the peak of their power, but making mistakes and failing to notice things worse than when they were still a dozen people in a mansion.

Funnily enough, that was something that happened with Spidey in Slott's ASM run.

Slott brought back Spidey's intelligent side, amplified it to make him have super advanced tech, and even made Spidey learn martial arts to become a better fighter, in theory that should've made him stronger than ever, but Slott's Spidey was seriously incompetent to the point he had to be saved by someone else with annoying frequency (Which's even pointed out in the run itself "Spider-Man always has help" at the end of the Parker Industries arc).

I should've expected Krakoa era to have this too, just the resurrection protocols alone made them super busted, and then Nimrod wakes up and, they do nothing, then send a bunch of low tier teams to deal with him, and then Inferno itself makes it look like Magneto alone could handle him, but they never do so.

So yeah, that's the problem with making characters too strong, their competence has to be toned down to balance it out, so while Krakoa could be the most overpowered bullshit ever, they're, really not lol.

The line itself, much like the nation of Krakoa, took on a life of its own & became a bit of an unwieldy beast.

Life imitates Art, lol. Truth be told and to be fair, though, trial & error should be expected in something this ambitious & experimental.

And all is not...



*yet.* [The connections & parallels are there.]

That is honestly something I've had a problem with Hickman's writing style since I've seen his stuff, he really likes to build up stuff for later, but doesn't focus on the "now", and that can work in some issues where something interesting happens and then it ends with the possibility of something cool happening later, but we also may get the most boring comic in existence, but it ends with the possibility of something cool happening 50 issues from now lol.

So yeah, making the whole gimmick of a story about trying to get answers later can be really annoying...

[Zelena]

I agree. Even at the time I thought that was a mistake to make everything Xavier had claimed to stand for a lie. In hindsight I'd have preferred this to be something Xavier came up with after the destruction of Genosha and M-Day, and that his moves with Magneto and Sinister were done in that era rather than in the Claremont era like Hickman wrote. The resurrection of his students Illyana and Doug, who died when they were children before they could even become X-Men, could have given him the idea for the resurrections protocols. Doug's return in particular could have been the catalyst for the idea of communicating with Krakoa and turning the island into the new mutant nation. How much more meaningful would it be for those 2 to have their leadership positions if their deaths and resurrections were a large part of the motivation to build Krakoa and for Xavier to deal with his failures with them. It would explain Sinister's personality change under Gillen, if the mutant version killed the OG Sinister not long before. Then it could be interpreted as Xavier modifying his dream but not abandoning it entirely instead of his dream being a lie.

In hindsight, there was no purpose to the Moira retcon at all, because there were better ways to motivate Xavier to create Krakoa that wouldn't have rewritten decades of continuity, and Orchis didn't need Moira specifically to set it up. If they really needed to have Powers of X 's story they could have used Cable, Bishop, or an OC like Rasputin to come back in time to give the 'mutants always lose' warning, and even then, there was no need for that to be the catalyst for Krakoa's creation, only for the focus on the fight against Orchis/Nimrod. Maybe it could have been the reason Xavier reached out to villains like Apocalypse. There was no need for it to be Moira or to have so much focus on one character when the X-Men were busy building a nation.

I agree: there’s no need of a retcon to build a “safe haven for mutants”. It could have been done in a smoother way without Moira and this reset-universe-machinery. Charles Xavier would have take in account all the experiences he has made in his life to imagine a practical way to coexist with “the humans”. Before the building of Krakoa, all the X-men would have give their point of view on this new nation and the way to participate… and also about the inclusion of all the mutant villains. It would have been more classical storytelling but much more satisfying than “and one day Krakoa…”

[Saithor]

Luk, pretty sure they were extending the clone saga before the crash started happening anyway? Heck, part of it got extended so as not to interfere with X-men doing an event at the time for example.

I agree: there’s no need of a retcon to build a “safe haven for mutants”. It could have been done in a smoother way without Moira and this reset-universe-machinery. Charles Xavier would have take in account all the experiences he has made in his life to imagine a practical way to coexist with “the humans”. Before the building of Krakoa, all the X-men would have give their point of view on this new nation and the way to participate… and also about the inclusion of all the mutant villains. It would have been more classical storytelling but much more satisfying than “and one day Krakoa…”

The method of introduction makes sense if you assume it would be destroyed...which is honestly what I expected from the start since Hickman tends to not go for status quo changes with permanance that last this long.

[Lukmendes]

Luk, pretty sure they were extending the clone saga before the crash started happening anyway? Heck, part of it got extended so as not to interfere with X-men doing an event at the time for example.

Hm... Didn't the crash start in like 1993? Or at the very least significant sales drops, and 1994 is the year that Clone Saga started.

I do know that DeFalco got fired as an editor-in-chief midway through it 'cause Marvel was that desperate to keep Clone Saga around, which's what the story go from "Man, this has it's moments but it's bad" to "Holy shit".

The method of introduction makes sense if you assume it would be destroyed...which is honestly what I expected from the start since Hickman tends to not go for status quo changes with permanance that last this long.

Considering that Destiny mentions that Moira has only arbitrarily 10 lives, and will be 11 if she makes the right choice, Krakoa had a backdoor to be erased like this is DC from the start lol.

Moira is just another of Hickman's character shaped like a MacGuffin for the story, while Xavier alone could be used to create Krakoa as suggested above, Moira is around to make sure Krakoa could disappear like it never existed if readers hated it.