Originally Posted by
Huntsman Spider
Thanks for making and sharing this. My own perspective was that the reason neither side "won" was that ultimately, the X-Men were made to look like zealots and extremists willing to risk the planet burning for the sake of their people's revival (if you sided with the Avengers, as Marvel intended at the time), and the Avengers were made to look like sanctimonious, privileged hypocrites with no understanding or care for what their erstwhile mutant allies had endured, particularly due to the actions of one of the Avengers' own, and seemingly willing to condemn said allies to the effective extinction of their people (if you didn't side with the Avengers as Marvel intended at the time). That was just the beginning, and it even got worse halfway through, as the Avengers', particularly Tony Stark's, attempt to kill the Phoenix Force just split it into five pieces that possessed five X-Men and out of fear and ironically zealotry of their own, despite the Phoenix-powered X-Men proceeding to use that newfound power to end famines and wars, they insisted on picking fights with them, which just accelerated their "inevitable" descent into Phoenix Force-induced psychosis as they lashed out at those who continued to hound them despite the good they were trying to do, eventually culminating in a fully Phoenix-possessed and maddened Cyclops killing Charles Xavier and nearly burning the world before the Phoenix was separated from him.
Oh, and not helping matters, either, was how the Avengers used Avengers Academy as an impromptu prison (they called it "protective custody," but still) for the X-Men's students at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, out of the reasoning that the mutant kids could be combatants as well --- which ironically justified those siding with Cyclops over Wolverine in the X-Men's "Schism," since as they said, their mutant status meant they'd be seen as targets and threats first and foremost, not as children. In a nutshell, neither side was depicted as all that heroic in this event, even if (in my view), the Avengers came off looking worse, but then that tended to be the problem with a lot of these hero-on-hero events; though one side might be cast as more in the wrong than the other side, both would take actions or be depicted in ways that nonetheless tarnished their standing and character as heroes, or torpedoed any hopes of being seen in a sympathetic light by the readers and fans. Basically, there were (and are) better ways to depict moral ambiguity or gray areas than just making both sides out to be terrible people, but that was the option Marvel went with damn near every time, so . . .