X-men unlimited 45. We're going off the rail on the murder train.

[Dthirds3]

Golden girls: why are we letting the crazy stay hear, we're not baby sitters, the mole rat looking one keeps eating my food.
Golden girls in hover bead: I'm setting this snak on fire cause bord.
Boss of golden girls; This won't effect them becaue they don't want to save the planet there just crazy and I want to see how crazy they can get, this is grad A entertainment.

Mole rat aka curse : were on evey channel as xmen
Sauron : let us consume the flesh of these race trators purified in oil and flames.
Curse: that's fried chicken.
Sauron: there race trators to dinosaur they deserve no respect.

NG while eating fried chicken even though she supposedly protects animals : so there's this mutant called Armageddon man, he causes natural disaster and effects gravity. I can control him with nature. He had him self locked up to protect people from his powers, Well free him and use his powere to genocide the world. Now that the Golden girls hacked my staff; we can create Krakoa portals. we can break him out and I use him as our slave for murder. (Evil laughter)
Curse: the golding girls lit a snake on fire
NG: when we killed its master it tried to stop us, it's a trators to nature and deserves death, now eat your fried chicken.

All anti mutant news channels: xmen member nature girl, perpetrator of many brutal killings kills again.

Orches
Devos: so Mr travller you been good for business and have helped our pr team greatly.
Travller: as leader of the narratives petals this had been fun, clips of Thunder bird killing police, xforce's extra judicial killing, half the **** logan dose, Mr. Sinister, after a small misshap were a chip of Emma Frost belittling people made them more popular, this kids are a god send. I don't even have to do anything, evey action they do causes more problems for mutants then I ever could. It's amazing. My god I love xmen green. Now let's watch clips of her flaying people in the xmens name.

Krakoa
Alchemist: without a pirate hat, parrot and eyepatch your outfit is incomplete, you should feel bad and this is what you'll die alone/ every one you love leaves.
Kate pryde : I was just saying hello...
Alchemist: you needed to here that, call me when you need to turn trash in to treasure.

Quite concle.
Kate: ok so, natue girl and curse have been going on a murder spree for a like a year, the've killed hundreds, eaten people, and now are running around in cloths of flayed human skin. Cypher do you know how she could have gotten out of the pit, avoided all of our tech, and get a staff of magic krakoa bullshit ?

Cypher( laughs nervously): well you see...

We're moving towards the climax. I'm going to miss this when it ends.

[Rift]

That Alchemist part was amazing.

Also, the Garden Grandmas were such a dumb idea. I'm glad they were reduced to X-Men Green stories.

[ZephyrSurf]

In a not Dthirds3 summary

Hordeculture's leader reveals that the reason they're keeping the trio around isn't because they have faith in them, they view them as sociopaths and useful tools, useful specifically to control a particular Mutant known as the Armageddon Man (Mutant ability is to generate natural disasters beyond his control). They believe Nature Girl could potentially direct him.

Nature Girl knows she's being used, but is going along with it because she's a sociopath

Cut to Orchis, who have been manipulating the news channels with constant reports on X-men Green's actions. Judas Traveller is revealed to be the newest member and the agent in charge of PR. He's also revealed to be a mutant whose powers are illusions. His reason for joining Orchis calls back to Magneto's declaration that Mutants are the New Gods and He's first hand experienced what claiming to be that leads to.

Initially Traveller was using his illusions to make certain events (Such as Thunderbird's police station massacre) look way worse than it actually was, but with X-men Green he's had no need to even use his powers.


Kate is heading to address the Quiet Council about the X-men Green situation whilst Alchemist stops her to have a quick bit of banter about outfits and make fun of Kate looking like a Pirate. Kate mentions that Alchemist's banter is as terrible as ever.

Kate then addresses the council and directly asks Doug "How the hell did X-men Green get out of the pit?"

[Pumpkin King]

To me, the most interesting part of this story is the Krakoa/Council conflict. It wasn't just Doug, Krakoa itself decided that it didn't want Nature Girl (and Curse) imprisoned. That seems like it should be a big deal, when the very island they rely on for basically everything disagreed with a Council decision. I wonder if Krakoa will weigh in on the discussion.

[Kurolegacy]

To me, the most interesting part of this story is the Krakoa/Council conflict. It wasn't just Doug, Krakoa itself decided that it didn't want Nature Girl (and Curse) imprisoned. That seems like it should be a big deal, when the very island they rely on for basically everything disagreed with a Council decision. I wonder if Krakoa will weigh in on the discussion.

I’m curious as to how they’re gonna try to justify Doug and Krakoa’s decision to let them out because quite literally everything that they’ve done in this part of the story is on their shoulders. Like, things have gotten so ridiculous in the murder that there is no way to justify it. And if Krakoa is gonna go against the vote of the council in such a situation, the best option may just be to kill both Nature Girl and Curse and place them both so far down the resurrection protocol queue that it’d be years before either is resurrected because they’re both dangerous sociopaths with no intention to stop or change.

[Pumpkin King]

I’m curious as to how they’re gonna try to justify Doug and Krakoa’s decision to let them out because quite literally everything that they’ve done in this part of the story is on their shoulders. Like, things have gotten so ridiculous in the murder that there is no way to justify it. And if Krakoa is gonna go against the vote of the council in such a situation, the best option may just be to kill both Nature Girl and Curse and place them both so far down the resurrection protocol queue that it’d be years before either is resurrected because they’re both dangerous sociopaths with no intention to stop or change.

Yeah, the best that can be said for Doug and Krakoa in this situation is that they didn't realize how far Nature Girl would wind up going. Doug even told her, when releasing her, that she needed to be smarter. Even at her first capture she was still killing just a few people, and at least seemed....semi-rational. Now she's just completely off the rails. Krakoa's attitude seemed to be (in the initial story), that unlike the rest of the X-Men, it can't leave the Earth, so climate change and pollution are an issue that it wants mutants to handle, and Nature Girl is only one actively doing anything, even if her methods are terrible. I can imagine Krakoa like, "You guys completely terraformed Mars in minutes, but you can't clean up the planet where I have to live?" Maybe a compromise could be putting together a real X-Men Green, a team that actually helps with environmental problems in a reasonable, non-murderous way. That's basically what Kate was doing in the last issue. Put Doug and Krakoa in charge of it, and force Pyro to be on the team as well, since they were all complicit in helping NG. I don't even know what's to be done with NG and Curse. The Pit doesn't seem like an option for any mutant any more since the Sabretooth series. NG and especially Curse both seem irredeemable, but I would have said that about Apocalypse, and Hickman pulled a redemption on him. Nature Girl honestly just seems like she needs serious psychological help, especially given how quickly she went bad.

[Malachi]

I’m curious as to how they’re gonna try to justify Doug and Krakoa’s decision to let them out because quite literally everything that they’ve done in this part of the story is on their shoulders. Like, things have gotten so ridiculous in the murder that there is no way to justify it. And if Krakoa is gonna go against the vote of the council in such a situation, the best option may just be to kill both Nature Girl and Curse and place them both so far down the resurrection protocol queue that it’d be years before either is resurrected because they’re both dangerous sociopaths with no intention to stop or change.

They are pretty creative bankrupt as characters. So it’s better to just retire them until someone can come up with something interesting with them. Or just retcon this whole green chapter out of existence.

Doug is not looking good. Best would be to just have him admit it and we can get a look on how dangerous his role and Kraków’s role might be if they are going rogue. To have him try to explain it away will just make him look bad. Worse then taking full accountability.

[Pumpkin King]

They are pretty creative bankrupt as characters. So it’s better to just retire them until someone can come up with something interesting with them. Or just retcon this whole green chapter out of existence.

I have to admit, I'm half hoping this story will end with Nature Girl waking up from a nap on the beach, restored to her former self. "Wow, what a nightmare! I'm glad that didn't really happen!"

[ZephyrSurf]

Orchis is now 30% run by Mutants

[Nicoclaws]

The writing is actually not that bad. It's a fun book about villains, I'm ok with that. If it also means bringing really obscure characters into the fray, all the more reasons to love it.

[Nicoclaws]

Orchis is now 30% run by Mutants

Yeah that was funny, actually. Is Brand like, living there now ?

[Rift]

Orchis is now 30% run by Mutants

Affirmative Action.

[Nicoclaws]

Do Orchis have a Magic Petal ? If not, Maddie could bring something to the party.

[Grunty]

Orchis is now 30% run by Mutants

Considering how mutants were ironicaly quite involved in the continued creation of sentinels (Larry Trask created new ones after his father's death, Boliviar himself could have been a latent technopath mutant, Tanya's uncontrobable powers further convinced him that mutants need to be stopped, Sebastian Shaw was once the biggest producers of sentinels, Cassandra Nova claims to be a mutant because her body is made of Xavier's DNA) and Orchis is basicly just a tool for the sentinels to gain increased control over humanity while hindering mutants, it not that suprising.

[BobbysWorld]

I mean, I'm ngl I kinda sorta wrote X-Men Green off as eye-roll worthy and over the top from its first issues, and only tuned back in last issue because of Orlando's use of obscure characters, which are my jam......but like I was WONDERING if anybody would bring back the Armageddon Man this era (especially after Switch showed up), because he's a perfect example of how to put 'Krakoa is for all mutants' to the test. While also potentially showcasing how the leaps mutants have made by largely working together enable them to give opportunities to mutants who were never actually 'bad' or a threat to humanity because they were irredeemably evil, but rather because they had powers they couldn't control, or were put on the defensive from their first initial power manifestations but with their self-defense reframed as aggression, stuff like that.

The Armageddon Man is a particular interesting character to tackle, because even his one and only previous story (in John Francis Moore's X-Force) called out Xavier and the X-Men for failing to do right by him even if they didn't actively imprison and study him like this one shadowy government agency did. To be clear, no X-Men were called out by name so its not like its established that any specific X-Men even knew of his existence and turned a blind eye to his plight - from what I recall it was mostly just Pete Wisdom (not the world's most reliable narrator on superheroes in general) just referencing the X-Men in general as being no different from various other mutant factions like the MLF in not wanting to risk freeing the Armageddon Man from his cryogenic stasis, because of how dangerous and uncontrollable his powers were.

Basically his story was just that he was an unnamed mutant who was abducted and imprisoned from an early age, once his powers manifested and he basically became a living lightning rod for natural disasters. Any kind of natural disaster, he didn't pick them, he didn't summon them, couldn't control them....(though to be clear, its implied he was captured early on and it doesn't seem like he was ever given much opportunity TO try and learn control).

But in a nutshell his mutant power was just by being awake and present in a location, he sorta just.....drew possible natural disasters to him like a magnet. Whether this was some extreme butterfly effect form of probability manipulation or an elemental power or whatever....that was never previously established. Though it does seem from this issue that Orlando is going with a take on him as being an elemental and tied to the Earth in a similar manner to Nature Girl....with it to me being implied that there might even be some unconscious psychic overlap going on between the two, via that shared connection to the Earth. Guess we'll see. (And now I'm also no longer ruling out that Humus Sapien might actually make a return in this story, lol, given certain story characteristics he shares with what's going on here).

So yeah, the gist of the Armageddon Man was he was a mutant who was deemed from childhood to simply be too dangerous to let roam free...with the implication being that it wasn't just human bigots or exploitative government agencies that thought so, but even the various known mutant factions from the X-Men to others like the MLF or Brotherhood being aware of his existence, but also having kinda wrote him off as a sacrificial lamb in the name of 'the greater good.' All because nobody seemed to think that he COULD learn to control his powers, or that freeing him was worth the risk of that backfiring on them or letting him loose to possibly seek revenge on everyone that had stuck him in a hole and left him to rot based on the same 'he's potentially too dangerous' arguments they habitually defended other mutants from.

The only exception was King Bedlam's short-lived version of a Hellions squad (basically just him Paradigm, Tarot, Switch, Feral and Magma....but with Paradigm, Tarot and Magma's 'allegiance' being in doubt, with mind control likely involved). Christopher Bedlam found out about the Armageddon Man's existence somehow, and 'recruited' his Hellions team to free him - though not really in the name of any actual altruism, so much as just Bedlam looking to exploit him and his potential threat in pursuit of his other agendas. They were stopped by an X-Force lineup of Domino, Tabitha, Warpath, Sam, Berto, Siryn, Dani and Christopher's younger brother Jesse Bedlam, after Chris woke the Armageddon Man out of his cryostasis with a device that was supposed to let him control his mind. However, he was basically so traumatized from his years of captivity and isolation, he was described as 'mindless,' and seeing no way of getting through to him, X-Force put him back in his forced hibernation and then like. He was never heard from again? Which soooooorta heavily implies that he went back to being written off as an 'out of sight, out of mind' lost cause that not even other mutants wanted to risk opening the Pandora's Box of trying to help.

So yeah - this guy has actually always been on my shortlist of mutants I'd love to see make a comeback in this era, because his very premise challenges the notions Krakoa was founded on....that their country was for ALL mutants, no exceptions (with the uh, very noteworthy exception of Xavier, Mags and Moira excluding precogs but since nobody else knew that at first it was totally different shhhhh). But that acknowledged hypocrisy aside, the point stands: if you're going to talk the talk, about being for all mutants and being dedicated to finding ways to BRING all mutants in from the cold if they wanted it, or find ways for even previously villainous mutants like Selene and Emplate to appease certain villainous tendencies of theirs, like their bad habits of snacking on psychic essences like they were Jamie Lee Curtis filming an Activia TV spot.....

Then you don't get to make the same arguments other groups have applied to mutants and say 'no actually they're right about certain mutants being inherent threats with no solution to the dangers their powers present, its just a matter of degree'. Not unless you want someone at some point shining a big old spotlight on you and pointing you towards a tumblr meme that has your picture alongside Orchis and the caption "corporate needs you to find the differences between these two images."

Buuuuut given that it appears that at no point since the dawn of the Krakoan nation, has anybody aware of the Armageddon Man's existence like.....greenlit a rescue mission to go release him. Or contemplated scenarios like....maybe slip him through a gateway to an offworld site where telepathic therapists can try and help break through his trauma, alongside power-neutralizing mutants who can help him finally even get a CHANCE to learn about his power and find ways to control it, in a safe environment where he won't inherently be a danger to anyone until he's trained or given other tools/resources to manage his power WITHOUT being inherently destructive or harmful to others.

Well. The lack of any apparent drive TO find certain key figures like the Armageddon Man and use their new resources and options as an opportunity to help mutants even some of them wrote off as 'too dangerous to risk'.....that's a choice whose consequences have seemingly come home to roost, in this story. And while I may think Cypher's initial choices with Nature Girl and Curse were very shallowly driven by the narrative and didn't have a ton of actual thought behind what the original X-Men Green story was trying to say....I do think its at least thematically on point for the common thread between 'this chapter' and that first one to be some mutants saying "hey kinda thought our whole deal with Krakoa was supposed to be not writing our people off as lost causes just cuz its more convenient to throw them away."

Frankly, I DON'T have any clue how I would go about touching on the issues of Nature Girl and Curse's actual crimes and what some kind of 'ideal' take is there, so this isn't really about that because its honestly just not the part of the story I'm here for?

I found the whole direction for NG's character as environmental extremist with no actual nuance or viewpoint beyond 'people are a blight upon poor Mother Earth' to be a tone deaf rendition of DC's usual Poison Ivy problem: writers writing characters as eco-fascists and then calling them environmentalists while thinking they just made some kind of statement about environmentalists because they've missed that like, "Nah, that's an eco-fascist you just wrote there, that's what that is. In other news, squares and rectangles are both shapes with four sides, but if you said everything shaped like a square is going around murdering people in the name of Mother Nature and you blamed that on everything that's shaped like a rectangle, that'd be pretty dumb too, on account of this little known phenomenon in which Things Can Be Superficially Defined The Same Way While Still Not Being The Same Thing At All Cuz Nuance Exists And Its Pretty Neat, Actually."

So ngl, its not that I'm like yeaaaaaah go Nature Girl, kill some more gas station attendants in the name of the pine tree proletariat, that's the ticket.....its more just that I consider that aspect of the story to be fruit of the poisonous tree known as 'this character's inciting motivations were fucked and I don't think its likely Orlando can turn that **** into narrative gold even WITH the magnificently obscure Alchemist on the job.'

But throw the Armageddon Man into the mix, based on clear thematic parallels and leaning on the fact that this is a mutant who never had a damn bit of agency in any of the stuff held against him or that's used as justification to keep him hibernating in stasis his entire non-life.....its like okay, now that's a story thread I'm very curious to see untangled.