Your Unpopular/Controversial Opinions on the X-Universe

[carmoc1234]

Another I was hoping to see used more was Candra. I mean what Mutants have an actual super-power to enhance Mutant powers? CANDRA DOES!!!!! But does that get used? no, instead Apocalypse turns her into part of his portal to Otherworld....

was there any fallout to rictor killing the externals to make that gate. i feel like there would be repercussions for killing four mutants permanently

[Frobisher]

was there any fallout to rictor killing the externals to make that gate. i feel like there would be repercussions for killing four mutants permanently

They’re basically just trapped in the stone though. It’s just no-one can be arsed to break them out so they can reincarnate.

[Doom'nGloom]

The more I think about it the more I dislike Moira retcon. Yes it clarified some things like how she caught legacy virus (though wasn't legacy-3 able to affect non mutants as well) but thinking abuut it in context of MU history or even X-men history just creates more questions. It feels like the retcon was done just to jumpstart the new era without much thought given to it at least now.

Oh and Mojo and Spiral are the best x villains and none can change my mind.

[Habis]

was there any fallout to rictor killing the externals to make that gate. i feel like there would be repercussions for killing four mutants permanently

The writers are getting out of the way as many powerful, ambitious supervillains as they can. Apocalypse and the Externals are out, Shadow King is neutralized for now. They are leaving the few ones who will have a role in the next act: Mikhail Rasputin, Vulcan, Mr. Sinister, Exodus, Sebastian Shaw, Mystique and I guess Selene.

Mikhail is manipulating Colossus.

Vulcan is back to his crazy self.

Exodus is in the Quiet Council, so I guess he will play a relevant role.

Sebastian Shaw is conspiring.

Mystique is going to blow everything up.

Mr. Sinister is being Mr. Sinister.

Not sure what Selene is up to, I will have to check.
.
Those are enough megalomaniac villains causing trouble from the inside... The Externals and Apocalypse will be out of the picture until the writers get rid of a few troublemakers.

[king of hybrids]

The story of X-Men Green, in which Nature Girl has been primarily killing lower class humans for the crimes of the powers that be, would probably have been less egregious had the X-Books not spent two years unironically fawning over mutant billionaires and megacorporations

[marhawkman]

They’re basically just trapped in the stone though. It’s just no-one can be arsed to break them out so they can reincarnate.

Which gets even worse when you think about the fact that of all the externals... Selene and Apocalypse are the WORST in terms of villainy. Candra's main act of villainy was empowering(literally) the thief and assassin guilds in New Orleans. Sure... still a super-villain, but... a lesser supervillain who sometimes did useful things... fun fact: Candra apparently got into fights with Apocalypse for.... External reasons.

Then you have Nicodemus, "Saul"(Garbha-Hsien), and Crule. Crule is a pretty mean dude, who really doesn't care about others and is almost as bad as Sabertooth sometimes. Saul and Nicodemus... well... Like Selene they're so old that they think of normal people like pawns on a chessboard. But... Nicodemus is seemingly a nice guy. And "Saul"... well... he's the man who taught En Sabah Nur what it meant to be an immortal. Apocalypse literally stabbed Saul in the back while Saul was trying to teach him to be a good person.

[king of hybrids]

Which gets even worse when you think about the fact that of all the externals... Selene and Apocalypse are the WORST in terms of villainy. Candra's main act of villainy was empowering(literally) the thief and assassin guilds in New Orleans. Sure... still a super-villain, but... a lesser supervillain who sometimes did useful things... fun fact: Candra apparently got into fights with Apocalypse for.... External reasons.

Then you have Nicodemus, "Saul"(Garbha-Hsien), and Crule. Crule is a pretty mean dude, who really doesn't care about others and is almost as bad as Sabertooth sometimes. Saul and Nicodemus... well... Like Selene they're so old that they think of normal people like pawns on a chessboard. But... Nicodemus is seemingly a nice guy. And "Saul"... well... he's the man who taught En Sabah Nur what it meant to be an immortal. Apocalypse literally stabbed Saul in the back while Saul was trying to teach him to be a good person.

That would require this run not treat Apocalypse as a totally justified (by right of a genetic marker) champion and visionary cruelly thwarted by the greed of the grasping monkeys who refuse to step quietly into the grave. To say nothing of everything with Howard’s take on Selene

Which leads to the other controversial opinion, and hands up I am way out of my lane on this, but do the X-writers that are unironically pushing the ‘mutants are the superior species and rightful rulers of the Earth’ thing know just how iffy some of this is?

I mean, it’s been hard enough to keep the metaphor going as is

[TheRay]

XMen TAS has aged just fine.

[Habis]

Which gets even worse when you think about the fact that of all the externals... Selene and Apocalypse are the WORST in terms of villainy. Candra's main act of villainy was empowering(literally) the thief and assassin guilds in New Orleans. Sure... still a super-villain, but... a lesser supervillain who sometimes did useful things... fun fact: Candra apparently got into fights with Apocalypse for.... External reasons.

Then you have Nicodemus, "Saul"(Garbha-Hsien), and Crule. Crule is a pretty mean dude, who really doesn't care about others and is almost as bad as Sabertooth sometimes. Saul and Nicodemus... well... Like Selene they're so old that they think of normal people like pawns on a chessboard. But... Nicodemus is seemingly a nice guy. And "Saul"... well... he's the man who taught En Sabah Nur what it meant to be an immortal. Apocalypse literally stabbed Saul in the back while Saul was trying to teach him to be a good person.

That probably was done on purpose. The "Evil" Externals sacrificing the "Good" Externals on Apocalypse's orders... that shows that there is a force within Krakoa willing to kill their own for their own benefit. Apocalypse, Selene and Gideon will eventually be part of the root that will eat Krakoa from within and destroy it.

If Apocalypse had sacrificed say Selene, Holocaust, the Sugar Man and Dark Beast, readers would think "good riddance". If he sacrifices (mutant) people who are better than he is, you realize what an evil act it is and that he would destroy Krakoa for his own benefit...

That would require this run not treat Apocalypse as a totally justified (by right of a genetic marker) champion and visionary cruelly thwarted by the greed of the grasping monkeys who refuse to step quietly into the grave. To say nothing of everything with Howard’s take on Selene

Which leads to the other controversial opinion, and hands up I am way out of my lane on this, but do the X-writers that are unironically pushing the ‘mutants are the superior species and rightful rulers of the Earth’ thing know just how iffy some of this is?

I mean, it’s been hard enough to keep the metaphor going as is

Mutants were always an AWFUL metaphor of discriminated minorities... I mean, there are like a dozen Hitler-like prominent mutant villains who want to wipe or enslave humanity, and even the "good" mutants think that they are superior to regular humans...

I think mutants work better as a concept if the whole "next stage in human evolution that will replace current humanity" thing stayed in the background and it wasn't spoken so much, save for the villains. It feels weird to have "heroes" claiming that people of different races are inferior to them... It sounds too much like what Europeans (and North Americans) used to say to justify Colonialism...

[davetvs]

Humans are inferior to mutants, though.

[Habis]

Humans are inferior to mutants, though.

And that's exactly what a XIX century European would have said about Africans... "Look, we made steam engines, telegraphs, telescopes, public lighting, chemistry...etc. It is obvious that we are the superior race!" And they would have shown you a bunch of engravings to "prove" that European brains are biologically superior to other race's brains...

As I said, the whole concept of a race wanting to rule/inherit the world because they believe they are biologically superior is distasteful... It's too similar to what happened during the uglier periods of our history...

And it feels really weird when the writers are simultaneously trying to look progressive by making a lot of parallels to real world discriminated minorities while pushing a narrative of "the natural right of the superior race to inherit Earth". It's as if somebody tried to mash together Martin Luther King's "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" and Adolf Hitler "Mein Kampf" into a single book...

[ZephyrSurf]

Krakoa needed more time in the oven.

By which I mean, the country itself needed more structure and clear design than what it has. Outside of places like SWORD and to a much lesser extent Marauders... for a nation it feels completely slap dash.

And some books take advantage of that to give a critique of that messy structure like Hellions and New Mutants, but most of the time it just feels like the books are telling you "don't think about it."

[king of hybrids]

The metaphor falls apart with the superior species/we will bury you/we will replace you rhetoric, mutants playing oppression olympics with non-X characters from RL minorities and the fact that the extant named living mutant population is ridiculously titled in favour of cishet white Americans.

As for imperialism, what in god’s name were they thinking when they explicitly likened Hellfire to the East India Trading Company. Of all the nefarious commercial entities in the last 500 years, why in gods name make that comparison and the unironically treat them as the good guys

[Grunty]

Humans are inferior to mutants, though.

One of the problems with this statement is that you can't form a "baseline" or "standard" of what a mutant is and what makes them "superior", without using normal humans as said baseline, because at the end of the day mutants are still just humans with an automatic chance at gaining an entirely randomized super powers (which are also notoriously interruptable) with further randomized degrees "usefullness".

Basicly the whole idea of a "mutant race" allready falls appart when one considers that there are seldomly more than two or three mutants who have the exact same power or even if they do have the same expression of said power.

Yes you can roughly group some into terms like "telepaths", "teleporters", "energy manipulators", etc. but you will hardly find two mutants who's expression of said powers are the same or even equaly in power.

For unpowered humans (and what is accepted as normal physical and mental qualities) you have a clear set of shared features, which seperates us from other animals. But mutants don't have such a clearly shared standards of physical or mental traits beyond those they typicaly share with the rest of humanity.

If you put Beak and Storm next to one another, without telling someone they share ONE magical unseen gene more with each other than they do with normal humans, would they be able to tell them to be the same "ethnicity" or even "species" compared to putting unpowered humans of different ethnicities next to one another? Or Feral and Cyclops? Or Wolverine and Rockslide? Or Rogue and Beast? Or Nightcrawler and Hemingway?
Very unlikely i would say.

And that's before we consider the irony that even among mutants, the majority is still mostly defined by physicaly being very close to normal humans, while mutants with truely alien appearances are not only rarer but also tend to stick out more among the "powerfull" ones, because most of them somehow tend to still look like the rest of humanity in appearance.

So with mutants having no clear "standard" of unique features to unify them compared to the unifying traits of rest of humanity, how can one compare them to said normal humans to judge either inferior or superior collectively?

Infact it's quit difficult to apply biological terms meant to distinguish members of different or the same species to a group of fictional people who's main trait to distinguish from the rest of humanity are super natural powers for which there exist no real world comparision.

Meanwhile if we are using normal humans as baseline, you run into the problem that there are far too many mutants who's super powers severely harm their quality of life or even downright kill them.

In addition to that most "backround filler" mutants seem to only have powers which make them look odd, but don't even get laws of physics breaking super powers to "elevate" them above the rest of humanity.
These aren't "superior" to normal humans, merely untypical to what should naturaly be the appearance of humans (in a super natural way of course).

And then there is the problem that when we consider the total number of mutants on Earth to be around 17 millions (16 million genoshan mutants, plus 1 million before House of M, by the newest retcon of numbers), less than a few hundred are named and detailed characters, with explicitly no way to form a baseline of how stronger they are to normal humans.
99% of them are basicly unseen masses or backround filling "people with odd shapes", who's appearance and super powers can't be put into a statistic to compare them in an empirical way to said known characters.

Which is just as fine given this is a super hero comic franchise in a shared super hero universe, with a focus on action adventures and good looking people with weird code names in elaborate or stylistic outfits fighting other such people but on the opposite end of the moral compass, but also means any statement of the quality of a collection of people with randomized super powers compared to the rest of their kind is uncomfirmable opinion only.

Oh and then there is the problem of even defining what a "normal human" in the marvel universe is anymore anyway, seeing how many different ways there are for them to gain super powers (including dedicated physical training) and the fact that the entire species was manipulated by the Celestials, which actively resulted in the mutants as a´natural development of humanity.

[marhawkman]

That probably was done on purpose. The "Evil" Externals sacrificing the "Good" Externals on Apocalypse's orders... that shows that there is a force within Krakoa willing to kill their own for their own benefit. Apocalypse, Selene and Gideon will eventually be part of the root that will eat Krakoa from within and destroy it.

If Apocalypse had sacrificed say Selene, Holocaust, the Sugar Man and Dark Beast, readers would think "good riddance". If he sacrifices (mutant) people who are better than he is, you realize what an evil act it is and that he would destroy Krakoa for his own benefit.

Well I was mentioning it because it really doesn't make sense for the Xmen to be cool with Apoccy killing Saul and Nicodemus.... Crule and Candra? enh... maybe. It does seem that in-universe there IS an explanation for why these four. Apoccy's weird magic requires him to have the bones of ancient mutants. Saul might actually be older than Selene. Nicodemus is also over 10k years old. Candra? we don't really know, she's over 1000 though. Crule? hard to be sure... no one ever explained his backstory, but he talks about stuff from the Hyborian age.... So he might be as old as Selene and Saul... might...

At any rate while Saul and Nicodemus are nice guys (as Externals go) the #1 nice guy External was actually Burke. But he's not an ancient Mutant, so Apoccy left him alone.

Mutants were always an AWFUL metaphor of discriminated minorities... I mean, there are like a dozen Hitler-like prominent mutant villains who want to wipe or enslave humanity, and even the "good" mutants think that they are superior to regular humans...

I think mutants work better as a concept if the whole "next stage in human evolution that will replace current humanity" thing stayed in the background and it wasn't spoken so much, save for the villains. It feels weird to have "heroes" claiming that people of different races are inferior to them... It sounds too much like what Europeans (and North Americans) used to say to justify Colonialism...

Thinking again... it occurred to me that the "Mutants are superior" angle is part of the explanation for why Mutants are feared and hated. Supposedly normals are instinctively afraid of Mutants because of it. So they have to go all in on it, or it gets diluted.

Honestly... that angle's been done though. Historically not all Humans have felt that way in the past. I mean, the RW angle? Most guys IRL would probably rather sleep with Monet (just for an example) than trying to kill her. This has been the case in the comics sometimes too. I mean... in the past... recently not so much.