Powers of X 02: We are together now, you and I *spoilers*

[TOTALITY]

I just read through 17 pages of discourse :O

General thoughts in no order:

- a lot of people seem to be taking the revelation of Charles and Magneto long ago learning of Moira’s past lives to mean that everything we’ve seen them do since then was because of that knowledge, OR that that knowledge isn’t compatible with what we’ve seen them do, so the meeting in today’s issue must have been an alternate timeline. I think it’s more simple AND more interesting if they knew what Moira showed them this whole time, but everything played out as we’ve seen it anyway. Hickman took care to show us that much of the X-Men’s history as we know it happens anyway without Moira (getting so far as Xavier’s public address from Morrison’s New X-Men happening as Moira watches on TV in her second life), thus showing that much of what we previously understood of their motivations is absolutely valid. And the notion that something as existentially seismic as what Moira shows them would still not prevent their egos and basic nature from leading them to petty conflict time and again rings true and slightly profound to me. It’s like how we can read about how climate change may violently upset world order in our lifetimes and then go on doing whatever we were going to do that day, and even literal world leaders can’t unite on it. That said I do think the meeting is likely meant to be a bit into the X-Men’s history, before Magneto’s reformation in the 80’s. I think “year one” is pretty loose and not necessarily just one year.

- Obviously prepared to eat my words but just going on general story sense as I perceive it, I seriously doubt that anything we’re being shown is going to be retroactively revealed to be any of Moira’s past lives, except mayyybe the future stuff being life 9. The “present” of the story with the newly-founded Krakoa has got to be the same prime timeline we’ve been reading for decades, and it isn’t getting reset at the end. I really think the entire concept of Moira’s many lives exists only to inform her character in the main story (in the past, and presumably the present before the miniseries is over) — not to set storylines there just to mitigate how much they “count.” Basically everything has got to count. If Moira’s power literally resets the universe, they’re not going to reboot the whole Marvel Universe or even this Krakoa setup after putting such work into it. If each life creates a splinter timeline, the perspective of the whole MU or even all the x-books isn’t going to shift to an 11th life just to follow Moira’s perspective — if she loops back to the womb an 11th time, I’m thinking it’s as a 2 page epilogue showing how she dies, at most. Though her “11th life” could be a form of transcendence.... or ascendance?

- I’m still leaving open the possibility that the year 100 and 1000 stuff could be Moira’s 9th life because that’s not as much a dramatic dead end as “the Magneto island meeting is really life 4” or “the 616 as we know it is really life 6” etc. If the future we’re being shown is Moira’s past, it can continue to inform her actions in the present in a kind of loop. I.e. she could do something in the present that we definitely aren’t expecting now, but will make much more sense based on forthcoming events in POX’s future settings.
— knowledge of this future could add urgency to the ongoing story in the present. That “this is when Nimrod comes online” could mean either the future sentinel who has occasionally timetraveled to annoy them in the present, or everything we see in POX, makes Cyke’s “oh, damn” read two very different ways!
—And there’s the obvious practical reason this might be the case for the same reason Days of Future Past or any “dark future” story has tended to end with that future -possibly- being averted: how do you keep telling stories in the present once you’ve given up so much of where it’s ultimately headed? I know this wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for everyone but in this case I would be surprised if they’re asking everyone to get on board with the ongoing prelude to mutants’ exodus from earth and eventual bid to join a galactic hivemind. I would be the first to try to convince all the discouraged fans why the stories “still matter” in that scenario but I’ll be surprised if I have to..

- Percival’s ability to make them invisible to machines makes me wonder if Hickman is working in Roma / the Siege Perilous somehow. Oh whoops, after googling some Arthurian legend that’s definitely the case and may have been obvious to anyone who knows that stuff as well as X-Men. The name “Siege Perilous” refers to an empty seat in King Arthur’s round table, and apparently Percival was a knight associated with that seat. In X-Men lore, Roma was the daughter of Marvel’s Merlyn who resurrected the X-Men in Australia after Fall of the Mutants, and made them invisible to technology indefinitely (basically until writers forgot about it.) She gave them a gem called the Siege Perilous which was able to open a portal through which anyone could escape their life, be judged, and potentially spat out elsewhere with a new life. (X-Men comics got pretty weird in the late 80’s.) I doubt any of this will be important to know but what a weird pull for Hickman.

[powerpax]

Percival making them undetectable to machines definitely made me think of Roma and the Siege. I'd geek out big time tbh

[Malachi]

One thought struck me when reading this. How the narrative towards saving life has changed.

Back in the days the X-men used to have human allies and fight to the end just to save one human life. Now it's all species versus species and humans being represented but not featured. It's just military, politicians, scientists who are suppose to represent the more shadowy portions of what humans can do. Here they are just taken as representants of their race.

The narrative has shifted over the years, it's not just the fact that Hickamn is playing chess on a larger scale here and the normal humans don't matter in the 1000 year strategies. Claremont spent years trying to redeem Magneto and that methodology worked because it was isolated and delibarate. Then we got alternative universes and there became a fascination in seeing characters enter new roles. In a AU you could allways throw out "well it's different" and go on. But when these changes started appearing in 616 there was a shift in values. A lessing of the value of a singel life. Magneto, Sabretooth, Mystique have killed thousands and to let normalise them as X-men members without letting them work for it over years of story inadvertely cheapened the value of the lifes they took. Suddenly it was to an extent justified, witch only more shifted the stories towards species versus species. In that context Magneto is more and more not only an acceptable compromise but an requirement.

To an extent we simply don't reflect on that the X-men doesn't fight to save a single human life any longer. A change even occured when humans switched towards single persons making choices,then towards political movements about survival. Finally it changed towards humans in general being counted as one whole uniformed block that at best could be divided into 2 parts, against or for.

[gambitxremy]

That was Santo Marco, not the Bermuda Triangle island. Claremont and Cockrum created the Bermuda Triangle island which first appeared (I think) in UNCANNY X-MEN #147.

X-men #4 is the Bermuda Triangle

[JKtheMac]

I just read through 17 pages of discourse :O

General thoughts in no order:

There’s the Hickman effect right there. Short essays on how we read a single issue. Thanks for your thoughts, I enjoyed reading them and agreed with a lot of them. I will pull out a few things to tease them out a bit.

I think it’s more simple AND more interesting if they knew what Moira showed them this whole time, but everything played out as we’ve seen it anyway. Hickman took care to show us that much of the X-Men’s history as we know it happens anyway without Moira...

Absolutely. Everyone seems to be poring over the timeline diagram as if it’s a word puzzle, and missing the obvious. So they look for mentions of X-Men and miss the obvious fact that they are only mentioned if Moira was something to do with them. There may be little clues there, but the main take away is that her past lives inform her actions. She knows where Magneto hangs out before Charles does, she understands him as a long term ally. I mean she probably understands these characters better than they do themselves, including inscrutable and frankly insane characters like Apocalypse.

Krakoa has got to be the same prime timeline we’ve been reading for decades, and it isn’t getting reset at the end.

Indeed. And, thank you for not using 616. This is a Hickman book not a Spider-Man book. <Pauses to give Nick Lowe a hard stare>

If Moira’s power literally resets the universe

This is the million dollar question. The problem is that we don’t really have a handle of the multiverse other than very broad statements and brief explanations by characters. Some fans love to claim that it’s really simple and that every tiny decision creates a new branch. If that is the case then inevitably there are untold billions of universes which sounds incredibly unwieldy and makes every alt-universe story redundant. The less extreme would say any time travel creates a branch and that’s something many characters have said, but we also have time platforms which prove this theory is not universal.

The theory that she literally resets things could be a key to the shape of this story and Moria’s motivation in it. This may be part of a big twist that is yet to be revealed. I think it would make sense of some of the disparate strands of the story, especially the future stories.

Where we differ is you believe the future stories are literally informing the present, and I think they are structurally informing it. That Charles’ actions are aimed at the future we are seeing not that the future we are seeing is being averted. But to have enough data points to predict such a long term plan is overwhelming. There will be crunch points. Key unpredictable moments when the plan could go awry, and we may be seeing the story of how those disasters were averted.

I think Hickman is playing with us. He knows we will naturally see any future as an alternative future. That’s an X-Men trope. The radical move on his part could be to remove alt-futures. We have had those stories already. We don’t need more. But I thought Hickman was trying to get rid of the multiverse as a collection of alt-timelines in Avengers, and Marvel clearly didn’t want that. They had the option and refused the opportunity.

As to Percival. My thoughts on Percival as an Arthurian fan and not as an Excalibur fan are almost entirely complimentary to you, so thanks for the info. I can’t help it. I cringe whenever US comics try and address Arthurian legends and I find them unreadable and so I don’t.

It does sound like this Percival is more informed by old plots than the failed grail knight, but we will see.

[JamJams]

One thought struck me when reading this. How the narrative towards saving life has changed.

Back in the days the X-men used to have human allies and fight to the end just to save one human life. Now it's all species versus species and humans being represented but not featured. It's just military, politicians, scientists who are suppose to represent the more shadowy portions of what humans can do. Here they are just taken as representants of their race.

The narrative has shifted over the years, it's not just the fact that Hickamn is playing chess on a larger scale here and the normal humans don't matter in the 1000 year strategies. Claremont spent years trying to redeem Magneto and that methodology worked because it was isolated and delibarate. Then we got alternative universes and there became a fascination in seeing characters enter new roles. In a AU you could allways throw out "well it's different" and go on. But when these changes started appearing in 616 there was a shift in values. A lessing of the value of a singel life. Magneto, Sabretooth, Mystique have killed thousands and to let normalise them as X-men members without letting them work for it over years of story inadvertely cheapened the value of the lifes they took. Suddenly it was to an extent justified, witch only more shifted the stories towards species versus species. In that context Magneto is more and more not only an acceptable compromise but an requirement.

To an extent we simply don't reflect on that the X-men doesn't fight to save a single human life any longer. A change even occured when humans switched towards single persons making choices,then towards political movements about survival. Finally it changed towards humans in general being counted as one whole uniformed block that at best could be divided into 2 parts, against or for.

ATM the only villain that is being featured that hasn't had his own direct redemption arc is Apocalypse, but he would never have one just by the nature of his character and that's the very same nature that will make everyone not trust him. However, indirectly Apocalypse has been dealt with morally when they introduced Evan. Sabretooth, Magneto, Mystique, etc have had plenty of stories in the past where they've either been forced or circumstances had them working with the X-Men and they dealt with their past deeds.

You are correct that human representation in the story has mostly gone out the window but narratively it went out the window because the X-Men stories started to drift away from Xavier's dreams in the early 2000s then went right out the window during Decimation. It only recently started moving slightly back towards it with the Jean Grey institute stuff and X-Men but for the most part it was still post-Decimation narrative. Now in Hickman's era we're getting another paradigm change and we'll see how much human perspective is really needed in the new mutant/human/machine struggle.

[thechronic92]

Can someone give me an overview on which characters appear in this issue?

From what I did read Xavier, Cyclops and Magneto are the main characters in this issue, but who else appeared?

I saw from the previous posts Nimrod, Apocalypse, Greeneto, Tree-Man (either Mondo, Blackk tom, Krakoa or a combo), New-Logan and Moira X appeared as well.

Cyclops makes a brief appearance, wouldn't call him a main character. The future stuff got the majority of the panel time.

[JKtheMac]

To an extent we simply don't reflect on that the X-men doesn't fight to save a single human life any longer. A change even occured when humans switched towards single persons making choices,then towards political movements about survival. Finally it changed towards humans in general being counted as one whole uniformed block that at best could be divided into 2 parts, against or for.

Interesting thoughts. I think some of us do reflect on these things. Even some of the stories try and tease these things out. I know I always cringe when I see needless death in comics. I certainly did when Creed was shown killing guards in HoX. I even tried to kid myself they were just unconscious until it was made clear otherwise.

We did become desensitised to this kind of thing during the crazy days of comics. Where everyone seemed to be an anti-hero and the reason people wore trench coats was to hide shotguns. I stopped reading them. They were not for me.

In very broad brushstrokes, seeing mutants as a species fighting for survival has proved to be a very rich seam. A character like Apocalypse is designed to tease out the ideas. He has evolution completely wrong. It’s like he made up his mind what it was without reading a text book. So IMO a good Apocalypse story contains the subtext that evolution is not about strength or direct competition.

It is harder to understand Erik sometimes. His stories rely on his ‘I have seen the dark side of humanity’ angle, which again works as a foil, as a kind of reverse Apocalypse. The perspective of the powerless when a culture wrongly believes evolution is about survival of the powerful. It is far more problematic to make this perspective work for a hero. Erik is stuck in the anti-hero stage, and anti-heroes are not really heroes. They are supposed to make us think hard about what is and isn’t moral from a perspective outside of cultural restrictions.

[Frobisher]

Magneto is more a tragic villain than an anti-hero. An anti-hero is still a hero.

[loke13]

The thing is, to many of us this is storytelling. It’s not linear and it’s fragmented, but it’s telling a unified story with interesting characters who have clear and compelling motivations. Yes it is a little dryer than some comics, and it’s more rarified in its pace, but that’s Hickman. People made these complaints all through his Avengers run, but it stands as one of my favourite runs of the last decade.

They sure did. But honestly I'm not surprised some people are being turned off by this Hickman has never gone this hard on lore/world-building before on his previous Marvel works, I can see how some people would find it boring/sterile/uninteresting. Personally I'm loving this stuff because Hickman is obviously building up for a bombastic finale where he brings it all of this together.

[JKtheMac]

They sure did. But honestly I'm not surprised some people are being turned off by this Hickman has never gone this hard on lore/world-building before on his previous Marvel works, I can see how some people would find it boring/sterile/uninteresting. Personally I'm loving this stuff because Hickman is obviously building up for a bombastic finale where he brings it all of this together.

His earlier F4 work was almost entirely world building. He admits it took him a while to find the family angle. But yes, I have posted many times that it is an entirely understandable critique.

When I was coming back to Marvel his F4 run was what I decided to read, along with Gillen’ JitM. I was very excited by both. The bold world building was what drew me back in.

[JKtheMac]

Magneto is more a tragic villain than an anti-hero. An anti-hero is still a hero.

Mmm. Not so sure I agree with the latter. Magneto does contain a lot of pain, granted. Such pain is not necessarily justification and this is where it drifts into anti-hero territory.

Briefly, because it is a huge tangent, I think the type of anti-hero we see in comics was born from an early examination and exploration of what we now call toxic masculinity. Don’t get me wrong though, this is a defence of the stories not a condemnation of them. They are genuine explorations and as such part of a wider exploration of masculinity in our culture.

[Killerbee911]

It is harder to understand Erik sometimes. His stories rely on his ‘I have seen the dark side of humanity’ angle, which again works as a foil, as a kind of reverse Apocalypse. The perspective of the powerless when a culture wrongly believes evolution is about survival of the powerful. It is far more problematic to make this perspective work for a hero. Erik is stuck in the anti-hero stage, and anti-heroes are not really heroes. They are supposed to make us think hard about what is and isn’t moral from a perspective outside of cultural restrictions.

Another thread with antihero stuff I can't wait to find the right thread to talk about the topic. You are very much wrong with the antiheroes aren't really heroes thing. The "law" which is suppose to protect can be bended to protect the wrong thing. A wide general example is America has gun problem,The simplest solution is to take away all guns,figure out a smart way to control guns, Then everyone who needs guns can have guns back again. What stops that from happening a law saying we are free to have guns.The big point is the system is set up to protect something sometimes prevents people from being protected. Anti heroes go outside the system to accomplish things that can't be done in the system.The quintessential Anti Hero is Batman who does not kill and he saves people but Batman beats crap out of people and functionally arrest people without due process and breaks all of rules and laws he is a vigilante. Antiheroes point out there are flaws in every system however good intention it may be.

I think your mistake is the most extreme version of Antiheroes like Venom,Punisher or Deadpool are given the label as well. Here is the thing there is line you can cross as antihero where the action makes you a villain. Magneto is antihero because he will use the same tactics the bad people use against them. Magneto cross the line when attacks are aimed at people who don't deserve it. Currently X-men are operating in Magneto territory we want peace and we will use violence means to get peace aka if you attack us we can attack you back and we can make the cost so high that even though you might not like us the best option is peace. X-men have always tried for peace with out using force back even when using force could bring peace.

[JKtheMac]

Another thread with antihero stuff I can't wait to find the right thread to talk about the topic. You are very much wrong with the antiheroes are really heroes thing. The "law" which is suppose to protect can be bended to protect the wrong thing. A wide general example is America has gun problem,The simplest solution is to take away all guns,figure out a smart way to control guns, Then everyone who needs guns can have guns back again. What stops that from happening a law saying we are free to have guns.The big point is the system is set up to protect something sometimes prevents people from being protected. Anti heroes go outside the system to accomplish things that can't be done in the system.The quintessential Anti Hero is Batman who does not kill,he saves people and is vigilante but Batman beats crap out of people and functionally arrest people without due process and breaks all of rules and laws. Antiheroes point out there are flaws in every system however good intention it may be.

I think your mistake is the most extreme version of Antiheroes like Venom,Punisher or Deadpool are given the label as well. Here is there is line you can cross as antihero where the action makes you a villain. Magneto is antihero because he will use the same tactics the bad people use against them. Magneto cross the line when attacks are aimed at people who don't deserve it. Currently X-men are operating in Magneto territory we want peace and we will use violence means to get peace aka if you attack us we can attack you back and we can make the cost so high that even though you might not like us the best option is peace.

The point is this isn’t the thread, and my understanding of the term is not the established definition anyway. Wikipedia would call it original research. If actively studying hundreds of stories over four decades as an interested party counts as research.

[loke13]

His earlier F4 work was almost entirely world building. He admits it took him a while to find the family angle. But yes, I have posted many times that it is an entirely understandable critique.

When I was coming back to Marvel his F4 run was what I decided to read, along with Gillen’ JitM. I was very excited by both. The bold world building was what drew me back in.

True but it was still (mostly) told in the way of a traditional comic book in my opinion much less info cards, graphs/charts, and blocks of paragraphs. It's like the holy lovechild between a comic book and an encyclopedia and I love it!