If they don't retcon Xorneto, Magneto never gets used again, full stop. The idea of Marvel promoting a character that literally herded characters into ovens isn't the kind of thing you can hand-wave away. It needed the retcon to not have the character be a toxic dumpster fire.
The Jean one is Jim Shooter being Jim Shooter, and after effects of the Comics Code. But the same applies: if the retcon doesn't happen, Jean doesn't get to come back period.
The retcon is a tool to be used when nothing else will work.
I have some questions. Sorry if it's been discussed already. But what happened to Fantomex Xavier? How big of a time gap was there between this and the end of Uncanny? If Xavier new Moira was alive why did he take her death so hard? Can Moira live forever? How else can the world go on if it will get wiped with her death? How do the clones keep their attachments like adamatium and metal wings and whatnot? Did Xavier know about all this stuff during the 90's, 2000s?
Have mutants been successfully cloned?
If they were to clone Moira before she dies/is killed, would that prevent another reset?
I dont care about if this is a retcon or not. This was a brave attemp to give the XMEN a win. and Apoccy and Mommy Askani knows they spent years losing. agaisnt the avengers, the inhumans.
And know they have their own country, culture and dont have problems between them. so great history and the scarier x men since the outback.
I feel like folks are treating this like an Either/or when it's not.
Reality is that you could have gotten to the exact same location without the sweeping retcons. That's one of the big problems of Hickman's run. Now I'm not saying you could do this story without retcons. I fully believe that the Moira Retcon was necessary for the thematic frame work and throughline of the story an the basis for the entire situation.
What I feel was unnecessary was essentially dragging everyone into the retcon and Hickman had to promptly justify and retcon various things to make that all work out. When it just wasn't needed.
What is actually gained by Xavier and Magneto being in on this from so early on?
Because it is a good thing. You don’t like it....that’s clear and that’s fine. But your distaste of retcons doesn’t make them objectively bad. I quite like retcons, when I think they’re handled well. And this one was handled well.
Change is good. The franchise had grown stale. They needed to do something that did the following:
- distanced itself from the recent past
- moved the whole concept forward a bit
- harkened back to the celebrated past
This story did that. It reversed a lot of what was bad about the X-Men and a lot of pointless errors made by past writers.
It has set the table for a more interesting dynamic than the franchise has seen in many years.
Was the retcon flawless? No....there are a few stories that don’t really make a lot of sense. Dream’s End comes to mind. But Dream’s End is pretty much dogshit, so I say good. I don’t care that it came first chronologically.
This is just my opinion. And it’s only as valid as yours. We just see it differently.
I do think that your assessment that the story has made “massive sweeping changes to the entire history of the franchise” is an overstatement. Talk about hyperbole. I think most of the history is still intact. In some cases, I find the changes even reinforce what we already know.
But really, I’m open to change. I’m open to creative reinterpretation. That’s my opinion. And that’s really all there is to understand.
Agree Hickman did quite a bit of clean up on the franchise. For example people are mad that all the villains are around on Krakoa but X-men have nearly all of old villians back now as well. Without hard reboot the franchise Hickman has manage to bring back every character worthwhile to the table. Hickman put all the toys back into toy box and fixed them. The franchise is in a 1,000 better shape because of the set up. When the run is over other writers will be able to play with all of X-men toys. All the good villains are around, All of the good X-men around. If you want to go full nostalgia everyone is alive except T-bird. And Hickman is doing something with Thunderbird dna and Mr Sinister.
Last edited by Killerbee911; 10-12-2019 at 09:59 PM.
I think a big part of what he did was to acknowledge how stupid it is to kill characters off without a really, really compelling reason to do so. Has there ever really been a poignant X-Men death?
I think Jean’s death at the end of Dark Phoenix is likely the only one that qualifies. But that was a long time ago and undone a long time ago.
Have there been any since?
Colossus sacrificing himself to cure the Legacy Virus? Seemed really contrived to me. Illyana’s death to motivate him in the first place? A two-fer, with a bit of fridging just for the hell of it!
Any other even remotely meaningful?
Maybe go all the way back to Thunderbird? An argument could be made that his death showed there were stakes in the (then) new era.
I can’t think of any X-Men deaths that were handled so well I’d prefer they stand.
When Morrison killed Magneto in E for Extinction, by punching his tower with a wild sentinel that had been mashed up with a 747 (PRE-911!), then followed up powerfully by giving Erik's ghost, together with the electromagnetic echoes of the Genoshan dead, a heartbreaking eulogy, conveyed through his grieving daughter.
(Do NOT remind me that the same writer undid his own work by bringing Mags back as a drug-addled deathcamp commandant while simultaneously erasing the wonderful character of Xorn...)
I'd emphasised that Morrison wrote the terror attack on Genosha months before 911 because the "eulogy" issue (Ambient Magnetic Fields) which was written after 911 then served as a form of closure and the impact of Erik's death (and Emma's survivor's guilt) was especially poignant for any X-Men reader who'd lived through the shock of those days