YMMV / Hellfire Gala

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sobunar of the Depths the Arakkii mutant with an endless ocean for blood became an instant hit with fans after upon his appearance in Planet Sized X-men.
• Genius Bonus: Since the mutants in S.W.O.R.D. (2020) work in space, artist Valerio Schiti designed all of their costumes with specific science fiction inspirations. According to the Hellfire Gala Guide, Manifold's costume is a "mix of lush royal orange and sizzling rocket ship," while Valerio Schiti's Twitter confirms that Frenzy's costume has elements of Patricia Laffan in Devil Girl from Mars.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In a dark kind of way. Over in DEATH BATTLE!, the team was preparing a match between Jean and Raven. Part of their recording had Boomstick mention that Jean had died 15 times and would probably die in 2024. She ends up dying the week before the episode dropped. Even more, she's killed by her opponent.
• Memetic Mutation: As soon as the initial designs for the Hellfire Gala were released, fans online immediately began creating their own outfits for mutants who haven't yet been given one and stamping the pieces with the Gala symbol.
• Shocking Moments:
  • The fireworks. Mars gets terraformed to become habitable, and Arakko is moved to Mars, making Mars (now renamed Planet Arakko) the first mutant planet and the capital of the Solar System.
  • The end of S.W.O.R.D. (2020) #6 is probably something nobody expected to see: the Scarlet Witch arrives and Magneto admits he still considers her his daughter and vows to make everything right.
  • And X-Factor #10 tops even that with Scarlet Witch’s corpse being discovered by Eye-Boy, and Magneto missing and the prime suspect for her murder.
• Tainted by the Preview: Previews for the 2023 Gala showing Kamala Khan’s resurrection on Krakoa have been met with backlash, with the most common complaint being towards the art. Many criticized Kamala barely resembling herself, lacking many of her ethnic features while looking more like a tanned white woman than a Muslim teenager. Other’s felt that the scene is also sexualizing her, as Kamala’s shown wearing a short silk robe that doesn’t even cover her thighs, when previously resurrected Mutants were given longer robes that covered their entire body, leading fans to wonder why Kamala is an exception to this.
  • It also doesn't help that R. B. Silva had also drawn that particular sequence owing to a miscommunication. Many considered his take Kamala's resurrection to be much less problematic than the final version as drawn by Adam Kubert.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The 2023 Gala introduced a new X-Men team with a seemingly-heavier diversity slant than before (including a Black woman, two Black men (one of whom is bisexual), two white women, and an Asian-American woman) before Nimrod pulverized most of the team a split second later. A number wished they had gotten their adventures in and hate the idea the next team might be a “safer”, less diverse team.

---