Interview: X-Men writers Gail Simone, Jed MacKay & editor Tom Brevoort

[Arthas]

And people criticizing the choice to have those characters be Krakoa's government made up a vast majority of every single thread ABOUT the Quiet Council, for literal years. Oftentimes on the basis that.....its very makeup didn't do a good job of representing mutants as a whole and they didn't seem particularly concerned with what the average Krakoan wanted or cared about, and literally nothing they did the entire era was actually remotely relevant to the actual running of a nation and finding ways to make their peoples' lives better.

Like. Are you wrong about the Quiet Council sucking and its members being the worst? No. Hard agree. Its been a core thesis of mine and most ppl I know for years. But again, does that actually validate and support the idea that 'its kinda inevitable that mutants are gonna have it rough because they've spent the past five years telling humans they're their new gods now and that doesn't go over well'? I mean....I don't think so because again, I refer you back to where my gripe about the Quiet Council is Shaw, Selene, Mystique, Exodus, Sinister and assorted others should've never been the spokespeople for mutants BECAUSE their perspectives and priorities aren't remotely likely to be aligned with the average Krakoan's.

Like, we're not in disagreement on THAT point, just, its fairly safe to say your preferred solution to this problem is throw out the whole Krakoan framework and be done with it already, whereas my solution also happens to be the reason WHY I'm so frustrated this era is ending now.....its literally WHY I was so interested in seeing what happened when the QC all publicly stepped down at the third Hellfire Gala and made room for an entirely new group to be voted in by Krakoans rather than handpicked by existing QC members.

I mean, after being very consistent and vocal about acknowledging that the QC's makeup makes no sense on a practical level and exists that way purely for the sake of cheap drama, since pretty much day one....with my take having always been that this particular element is a very obvious, baked in flaw at the foundation of Krakoa....but ALSO, it has a very obvious, very easy to implement solution that doesn't guarantee getting it right but at the very least is a positive change in the right direction.....ie.....write a reason for this QC to step down and bring in a new one that at least has a CHANCE of being effective so long as you dont also handpick this new one's members specifically TO be as ineffective and dysfunctional as possible, like was the case with the previous one.....

And then after literal years they go ahead and actually WRITE that VERY SET-UP! And it looks like they're FINALLY going to address that glaring foundational flaw and make a change for the better, and we'll FINALLY get to see what kind of stories can be told with this set up when the point isn't just 'messy bitches are messy but also, inexplicably in charge' but instead NOW its actually gonna be 'here's the new mutant government, can they get **** done, y/n'.....

....except then they turn around and say hahaha sike, we're not doing that at all, this is actually the end. And literally rub our faces in the fact that they were fully aware of how easy it would be to just.....do something different with Immortal X-Men, they just....aren't gonna. And after ALL THIS, we're quite literally NEVER going to get to read what a good faith effort at showing mutants making a go of this whole Krakoa thing might look like.....

Like yeah. That's frustrating as hell.

But absolutely none of that changes the fact that the flaw with the Krakoan era and set-up wasn't that mutants are all supremacists and have been running around for five years telling humans they're their new gods now.

It was that.....the editors and several of the biggest writers of the era weren't interested in the stories that could be told with the Krakoan era and setup, so much as they were interested in how messy could they make things with that set-up. And so they CHOSE, with intent, to keep the FOCUS on the characters you're talking about being so problematic in regards to humans, and that's what Brevoort's using to say 'yeah mutants were problematic about humans, as we all saw'....

And that's veeeeeery disingenuous. Because no. That's not 'mutants from around the globe' and its not proof that their collective opinions and attitudes were ever the issue. That's the handpicked-to-be-messy-as-**** assortment of drama queens and deliberately polarizing characters, and THEIR collective opinions and attitudes.......

Being used as a scapegoat to be like here's why Krakoa was bad and mutants are all tainted now by association.....

When the one thing we're ALL ACTUALLY AGREED UPON.....is that if there was ever actually a sincere, good faith effort made to engage with the Krakoan premise and focus on a cast of governing mutants and what they think about mutant/human relations and what are their priorities when it comes to representing the average Krakoan and making decisions that will affect their futures.....

The cast in that hypothetial scenario would've NEVER been the actual Quiet Council lineup we were stuck with the whole damn time.

Because we all know - and have always known - that this QC is not indicative or representative of most of the mutant characters outside of these 12.

And we also know, this lineup was literally never even DESIGNED to be an actual functional representative body for mutantkind.

It was designed to do one thing and one thing only: Make a fucking mess.

And shockingly, it performed as advertised. Which is fine, in isolation. Immortal was never my favorite book of the era, largely for this very reason. I enjoyed the era in spite of it, not because of it, and preferred the books whose writers seemed genuinely interested in the Krakoan premise and had thoughtful stories to tell with it, like Ayala, LaValle and Ewing.

The bitter pill part though, is just that now that the era's on its last legs and we're moving on to the next thing.....Brevoort and others are looking at the mess that was made in the book that literally only existed to be messy, and have chosen to take the angle......well, "mutants from all over the world" sure have a mess to deal with now, but it was kinda inevitable, because Krakoa made them all messy and problematic.

And that's....not what happened. "Krakoa = unavoidably flawed" and "mutants = collectively and equally problematic" are not empirical, immutable truths of the era that inevitably landed us where we are now.

Its just being treated that way, instead of "key writers prioritized controversy and drama over a sincere exploration of the Krakoan paradigm, but that says something about them, their chosen priorities, and the characters they chose to make and emphasize as deliberately controversial....it doesn't actually say anything about the Krakoan paradigm and all the characters those writers DIDN'T choose to focus on or write being controversial and were never actually remotely relevant to the story they wanted to tell about the dramatic messy bitches playing King of the Castle in their little clubhouse while everyone else on the island paid no attention cuz none of that actually had anything to do with them."

Man I wish I could upvote or give awards on this forum because this post deserves it.

My view on Hickman is that he is a great author but unless he is writing an elseworlds please keep him away from my favorites.

[gonnagiveittoya]

And people criticizing the choice to have those characters be Krakoa's government made up a vast majority of every single thread ABOUT the Quiet Council, for literal years. Oftentimes on the basis that.....its very makeup didn't do a good job of representing mutants as a whole and they didn't seem particularly concerned with what the average Krakoan want (snipped for length)

Yeah but it's not like all the other books were about how much they still believed in the dream. Most of them were still just about, and set on, Krakoa. The only book that was closest to not being that, outside of most of Duggans X-Men pre Fall was...X-Termintors? Wolverine kinda did but that was still just as him being off the island doing stuff for like X Force and stuff. It's not like they didn't have the opportunity to show the majority of mutants didn't feel that way. They just... basically didn't.

[gonnagiveittoya]

You cited an alternate future that was prevented from coming to pass by mutants themselves to argue that see, humans were right about Krakoans all being bad and supremacists after all, on account of the stuff they did in a timeline where they were forcibly brainwashed and altered on a genetic level against their will as the literal premise for why they were all like that in that future....

And you think actually no its OTHER people who are being disingenuous in this thread?

Of course mutants solved it. How would the humans have solved it, the mutants literally genocided all the humans in that reality

[mugen]

Of course mutants solved it. How would the humans have solved it, the mutants literally genocided all the humans in that reality

The mutants genocided no one in SOS, they were all killed and replaced by sinister people who took possession of their bodies once brought back by resurrection protocol, they are not responsible for what sinister did.

[Rev9]

The mutants genocided no one in SOS, they were all killed and replaced by sinister people who took possession of their bodies once brought back by resurrection protocol, they are not responsible for what sinister did.

I honestly feel if Storm made the right call a century in, the deaths wouldn't be in the trillions(and not just the deaths caused by Sinister's kill switch ,but the deaths caused by all the wars up to that point) She'd have inadvertently prevented Sinister from being a means for Enigma's ascension too. I guess because it's an AU and everything was re-set few will lay this at her feet.

[gonnagiveittoya]

The mutants genocided no one in SOS, they were all killed and replaced by sinister people who took possession of their bodies once brought back by resurrection protocol, they are not responsible for what sinister did.

Literally part of that was explicitly killing the humans

[Sdawg]

For the XMen to so call be a metaphor for minority and disenfranchised groups, this whole reversal comes off very, very, badly.

[gonnagiveittoya]

I don't think so. 97 shows that it's clearly still timely

[Sdawg]

That's not the point I'm making but ok.