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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
The fact that there's been so much breadth of X-Men comics content due to their past populairty is probably one of the best benefits Marvel Studios gets now out of the Fox deal.
Regardless of when they even do the X-Men themselves, there was so much content tied up with the X-Mythos - even stuff that had nothing to do with the X-Men themselves - that we could see Marvel Studios having to write around in the past and which they no longer have to do, and a whole load of peripheral or tangential characters that they now have access to.
One of the big shames of the Fox days was that Fox barely used the content associated with the license they had - they mostly just told the same stories over and over. Meanwhile Marvel Studios probably could have. I remember it was a common comment back in those days that most of Marvel's non-white heroes and heroines were tied up in the license due to being mutants, for instance.
Or, hell, we were just talking about Alpha Flight and how cool it would be to have a movie of them. There's no way in hell Fox ever would have made one despite probably having them, because they're not really X-related characters (like Deadpool is), but we can actually get one now.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 18th 2020 at 9:59:58 AM
I still hope they properly have an event that creates mutants, or one that merges another X-men world into the MCU. Just kind of saying "Oh, mutants were here all along!" at this point would be pretty not good worldbuilding.
I had a huge case of the nitpicks when Doctor Strange introduced sorcerers to the MCU. The handwave about how they leave physical threats to organizations like the Avengers still leaves a bunch of mystical threats where the Sorcerers were absent. Why didn't the sorcerers intervene when Thor or the Destroyer first landed on earth? Why didn't the Wise One just slap Loki when he started playing with two Infinity Stones in NYC? Why wasn't the Tessarect guarded by Sorcerers when Red Skull first found it, and why didn't the Sorcerers claim it when people started abusing its cosmic properties? Why didn't the Sorcerers immediately shut down Malekith when he was targeting one of their Nexus cities with arguably the most magical of the infinity stones?
Now imagine that, but with a whole race of superhumans that (if the mythos remains the same) has been living on earth since prehistory. What were they all doing during the four or so potentially world-ending events that happened since 2012?
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You could handwave the sorcerers inaction as the Ancient One having seen the best possible future was for them to let the other heroes intervene. Possibly they were also helping from the shadows like the Ancient One is seen doing in Endgame. Pretty flimsy but there you are.
And there have been retcons in the MCU already as of late. Fury's speech in Avengers 2012 on the lines of "OMG there is an alien with superpowers out there, we have to prepare for a threat on those lines" sounds kinda strange after we find out in Captain Marvel that he's pal with a shapeshifting alien and has a physical goddess on speed dial.
Edited by C105 on Jun 18th 2020 at 7:25:15 PM
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.I'd argue that shoehorning a "and then this entire big thing happened all at once" explanation is ultimately weaker worldbuilding than weaving the concept into the universe as a whole and making them a part of its history, however gradually that takes.
Not to mention we would then have to wait for whatever movie depicts that one big event for them to start setup for it, rather than simply start now and create a stronger net for the mutants that way.
The typical response to "why wasn't X superhero there when Y event was happening in another title / movie" tends to be "they were busy."
Keep in mind also that The Ancient One purportedly has perfect cognition of the future up until the point where she dies, and thus would know that her assistance (and thus breaking the Sorcerers' secrecy) wasn't needed for any of those events.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 18th 2020 at 10:38:04 AM
Not to mention that we saw the Ancient One dealing with the Chitauri in Avengers: Endgame. I'll assume there were some sorcerers out helping during the Battle of New York, we just never saw them.
Edited by chasemaddigan on Jun 18th 2020 at 1:52:12 PM
I can accept the explanation that the Wise One decided her non-/limited intervention would lead to the best case scenario in all those events, but it still bugs me given how many tools she has at her disposal to have handled any of those conflicts quickly and discretely. Just put a portal here, do a mirror world banishment there, drain the magic from this, create an illusion of that, etc. They don't have to be seen, and nobody has to know the specifics of what happened to the boss or any involved infinity stones. In-universe, the Wise One probably has reasons not to do that, but without a well-laid-out explanation on screen, it feels more like a plot hole.
Also, just in general, leaving known infinity stones outside for the world to squabble over sounds counter to the sorcerer's mission statment. Surely, when the Wise One opted not to involve the sorcerers with Hydra and the Tessarect, and when she decided not to claim the Tessarect in the more than half-century it was with Shield, she must have foreseen that it would lead to the Battle of New York and ultimately the Ultron near-extinction event. I can't get a sense of how the Wise One's plan for the Space, Reality, or Mind stones match up with her stated goal of keeping the world safe from mystical threats.
In any case, that's all just nitpicky stuff. The sorcerers are trained experts and have many magical means by which they can remain unseen. More to the point, it's a lot easier for me to accept that we never saw a sorcerer before their MCU introduction than it will be for me to accept that we haven't seen a mutant before their MCU introduction, unless there's a really good on-screen explanation for why they've been a non-factor in the world leading up to their debut.
In every incarnation of the X-Men, it's always been the case that, while mutants have appeared occasionally throughout history, until very recently they were so rare that the world at large was unaware of their existence. Whether it's the comics, TV shows, or movies, X-Men series always begin in the wake of a massive mutant population boom; sometimes this is explained (the original, 1960's comics attributed the rise of mutants to atomic testing irradiating people), while in others it's simply inferred. Regardless, this sudden upsurge in mutant numbers means that, when a new version of the X-Men kicks off, the setting has either just become or is just about to become The Unmasqued World.
So why shouldn't the same apply to the MCU mutants? Maybe you can say the Snap triggered a lot of dormant X-genes, or you can chalk it up to the "next phase of human evolution" kicking in. Either way, saying that, until the last decade or so, there were only a handful of mutants in the world, not enough to draw a great deal of attention so long as they kept their heads down? That's standard operating procedure for the X-Men.
Of course, another way to approach it would be to simply make "mutant" a much broader term, and use it to refer to any person who's gained superpowers as a result of their body changing or "mutating". So, Spider-Man? Mutant. Captain America? Mutant. Black Panther? Mutant. Wanda? Mutant.
It'd avoid the "why do mutants get treated so differently from other superpowered folk?" conundrum.
The mutant's shtick has always been that they powers evolved naturally, which is why people fear them. They are afraid of being replaced.
Spider-Man, Hulk etc were science accidents. Dangerous ones, particularly in Hulk's case, for sure, but they were caused by human brilliance, which mitigates it somewhat in the eyes of the public.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianI also like this idea. In early X-Men lore it was explained that a larger number of Mutants were being born recently due to the invention of the atomic bomb, so the idea that something is causing more Mutants to pop up then there have been historically, that isn't unprecedented. In the MCU Hydra and Shield have been tampering with the Space Stone all throughout the second half of the twentieth century, but there's been a huge uptick in Infinity Stone usage starting in 2012 which would mean a huge uptick in Mutants manifesting their powers around 2024 (which is present day in the MCU). And The Snap and The Blip would result in an even larger uptick in Mutant births making it an inevitability that Mutants become a noticeable part of the world in the near future. And those two facts are why this group that has been small and hiding their existence up until now decides that it has become necessary to start acting.
I'd really love an explanation where the multiple snaps activated dormant mutants around the world. After how hard Perlmutter tried to replace X-Men with Inhumans, I'd be very delighted with the irony that the X-Men's genesis in the MCU is essentially what happened to the Inhumans in Infinity/Inhumanity.
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I've always had a problem with that distinction for two main reasons.
First, that's not how bigotry tends to work. Oh, I can believe that someone who got their superpowers through an accident or science experiment would use that logic to say that they are a completely different thing from mutants. But from the ordinary humans? Generally speaking, bigots don't draw many fine distinctions between people who are different from them. Like, if someone from America is prejudiced against Mexicans, odds are they're not gonna be hunky-dory with Argentinians or Dominicans, either.
Second, in a setting where the public does make such a distinction in their prejudice, you'd expect there to be a lot more cases where there's public uncertainty about whether someone is or is not a mutant. Given the prejudice they face, a lot of mutant superheroes would presumably want to claim they got their powers in some other way. And since that's such an obvious thing for mutants to do, presumably any superpowered person whose origins are not publicly known and verified would be suspected of being a mutant, and face the same prejudice.
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Actually I think the situation is very much comparable to minorities who can "pass" as white, but as soon as it is found out that they are, lets say, jewish, they receive double the amount of hatred.
Also, funny that you mention that, Goldballs, a relatively new mutant, has acted as Miles Morales side-kick. At first, he was beloved. But as soon as word got out that he was a mutant, they literally tried to kill him.
Edited by Forenperser on Jun 18th 2020 at 8:52:37 PM
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianCouple key differences there. First is that the X-gene is usually portrayed as being by far the most common source of superpowers in the Marvel Universe (if there's not a magical wish or Terrigen cloud killing them off, at least), so when any new superpowered person shows up, them being a mutant is going to be most people's first assumption. Second is that, given the whole "secret identity" thing, people will naturally be suspicious that heroes are hiding the truth about themselves from the public.
Rather than a superhero being beloved until they're outed as a mutant, they'd most likely be treated as a mutant automatically, unless they could provide solid documentation showing their powers came from another source (and even then, they'd likely attract some "mutant truthers").
The analogy for minorities who "pass" as white would be mutants whose mutation doesn't cause any noticeable changes to their appearance, letting them pass themselves off as regular, non-superpowered folk. Once they make it known that they have superpowers, I don't see how that could still work.
Edited by RavenWilder on Jun 18th 2020 at 12:13:52 PM
The easiest way to avoid that is to simply not treat it like a thing in the first place.
The reason the mutants are treated differently in the comics is because series like X-Men, or Spider-Man or Fantastic Four were not entirely made to be in the same universe from the ground up. They definitely are, but they - especially in the earliest days - featured entirely perceptions of the world and the setting, beyond the occasional crossover.
The reason for that separation is not Watsonian, it's Doylist.
This always comes up, this "the comics treat the mutants as separate from other superpowered people, so obviously the MCU would have to do the same thing," but there really any reason to think that in the first place.
In the MCU, they have the unique opportunity to introduce the X-Men however they want with absolutely no reason or Doylist obligation to present the same separation from mutants that the comics do. "Enhanced" people are already distrusted by the populace. Superheroes are already treated with scorn or even persecution the moment they step out of line.
There is no "mutates are the exception" in the MCU. There no reason for the MCU to make that a thing with the introduction of the mutants, either.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 18th 2020 at 12:18:04 PM
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I don't like an explanation that means that functionally the Mutants would have lived their whole lives as non-Mutants if not for later exposure to another supernatural force.
If Mutants are created by exposure to Infinity Stone radiation while in the womb then it would give fuel for the Mutant fearing public fuel to claim that the Mutants are a symptom of the world changing because of all of those darned superheroes running around, but if anyone ever says something like "I would have liked you better if you weren't a Mutant" then the non-Mutant version of you they're talking about is completely a figment of their imagination because you were never not a Mutant. I'm not that big a fan of the Mutant Metaphor, but I feel like Mutants being born Mutants and inevitably discovering that they are Mutants later in life is a key part of their whole thing.
If you treat the X-Men as just another superhuman group, they lose their signature trait.
They would basically be Avengers lite. Wouldn't work.
Protecting a world that hates and fears them is their entire concept.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian

AoS used the Inhumans as Captain Ersatz for the mutants, and that did not work too badly, apart from the fact of course that it prevented any canon mutant to appear.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.