X-Men In General

The scene from the final issue where he and Evan have a heart-to-heart is THE most important scene for Wade's character development in his entire history. Any writer who gets Deadpool and ignores Uncanny X-Force does so at their peril.

I believe Dracula first interacted with the X-Men in "Uncanny" #159.

The one where Wolverine tries to stop Dracula with a cross and fails.

Cause it turns out you need faith to make it work.

And then, Nightcrawler steps in.

Because if there's one thing Kurt Wagner has in abundance, it's faith. Old Vlad is on his knees in seconds.

that weakness to faith in something the other person believes in is funny because as shown in moon knight recently, zodiac was so narcissistic and sure of himself that his name on a chain was enough to have reese one of moon knights team who is a vampire, repelled by it

Uncanny X-Force made me a tremendous fan of Fantomex. One of my low-key faves among the second/third-tier cast of Mutants.

Its great when a run includes a character who rarely but it makes the absolute most of them. Like X-Factor did with Multiple Man and Strong Guy.

What makes it more ironic is that Charlie Cluster-7 isn't actually a Mutant but an engineered Mutate born and raised in an artificial environment like the Children of the Vault. Both were even created to be a counter to Mutants. The big difference is that while the Children saw themselves as different and superior to Mutants due to this, Charlie Cluster-7 grew to identify with them instead.

It's almost weird that Charlie Cluster-7 and the Children have never interacted with each other, since the Children are kind of an Evil Counterpart to him (though he was pretty amoral too).

It's even funnier that he's grown to be a genuinely cool and interesting character since he was deliberately created to invoke "cool" tropes in-universe. The Weapon Plus Project intended for "Fantomex" to be a Propaganda Hero of sorts for them. They figured the public would be more supportive of them if they had a cool super-spy agent as one of their Weapons.

Yeah, Fantomex is a great character. It's always a delight when he shows up.

I love runs that largely make use of lesser-used characters. In my experience, such runs often tend to be a lot better and more memorable than the "A-List" characters' books, since they have less editorial attention and fewer people clamoring to use them. Peter David's X-Factor that you mention is the shining example of it, along with most of David's work in general given he's openly said he prefers using B-C-and-D-Listers over A-Listers.

One of my least favorite Spider-Man trends is the retconning of Gwen Stacy from a selfish and spiteful individual who Peter Parker nonetheless loved and became close to the family of to this oh so special, pure in mind and spirit, fun personified more than even Mary Jane paragon. Marvel's even made fun of themselves for doing it, but, much like with Wolverine, they don't actually stop and to my chagrin the fandom actually embraced "Ghost-Spider", which ensures waiting it out simply won't be an option.

There is one thing to come out of the Gwen Stacy shilling I like though, an instance where I definitely prefer the "D list" character to the "A-B list" one. Since this is an X-Men thread you probably know what I'm referring to. A genetically engineered mutant Cyclops spider chimera Gwen Stacy struggling to fit in at school is such a MARVEL character I can't help but love it, her, the concept and the execution. I'm not sure whether or not I like Spider-Girl or Goddess more, but definitely think they can coexist. Perhaps not in the same book long term, but definitely in the same setting and with the occasional crossover where they just compare notes on a private Discord server.

You know, after five years of Krakoa, I still don't get what everyone found so revolting about Crucible. Yes, it's off-putting, but when you actually think about it, it's entirely opt-in and hurts exactly nobody in the long term.

I feel what Hickman wanted to do with a lot of the more eclectic Krakoan customs was to trip the reader's "yuck factor," but them have them sit on it for a bit and think, hang on, this isn't off-putting because it's wrong but because it's unfamiliar. Unfamiliar is not necessarily morally wrong, just as familiar is not necessarily morally right.

Edited by HamburgerTime on Apr 2nd 2024 at 4:43:16 AM

Forcing someone to experience being brutally and painfully beaten to death in a protracted blood sport by a giant blue man to get back something unfairly taken away from them isn't exactly what I'd call harmless, even with the revival after. That's like saying it's okay to skin someone alive because they consented to it and you're planning on stapling the skin back on. And the reason the person consented is because they're paraplegic and you're withholding their wheelchair from them for no reason.

OK that's a REALLY negative allegory. Like, there's no evidence that the participants are being blackmailed/extorted into doing so ie. their "wheelchair is being withheld."

It would admittedly be nice if they could've cut out the big blue middleman and just made it death by painless psychic bolt or something.

It's literally "do this or you'll never get your powers back because we won't do the thing that gives you your powers back". How is that not blackmail of the sort I was comparing it to? And yeah, you yourself highlight that there's no reason they can't just make it hyper-quick and painless.

I kinda get where you're coming from now; there was no reason to make it a big public spectacle. Though it still doesn't seem like anyone who went through it was particularly traumatized.

That was something weird about the Resurrection Protocols in general tbh. Nobody seemed to be especially affected by their deaths, even if they were horrific. Like how Banshee was more upset about Moira betraying him than by getting skinned alive.

They're mutants, they're used to the revolving door by now lol.

most of them probably dont remember actually dying

Did everyone forget that the resurrection backups originally left out the actual moment of death?

The people brought back did not actually remember dying.

When Kurt got resurrected with the memory of the actual death, he was a lot more disturbed.

Oh right, I forgot about that.

It's a ideological tool to turn mutants into murderers willing to die for Apocalypse's ideology, which remains pure evil.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking when I brought up the issues with the idea earlier. It was yet another way the Quiet Council pushed a toxic mutant supremacist ideology, no different from having Acolyte tell children scary stories to make them hate Scarlet Witch and humans in general or encouraging couples to have reckless unsafe sex and pop out kids to be dumped into state care.

That latter one is especially horrifying when you think about it, or rather, how it would've turned out if it had kept going. Imagine an entire generation of young mutants raised under Magnetoism, raised by the island government from birth to believe themselves inherently superior to others. And imagine what Sinister would've done with that, considering how much he loves to do his horrific evil science shit on kids.

I can kind of spot them the First Law - mutants are an endangered species after all, but you know what good intentions are often used to create...

throwing people in a hell pit when they pass out condoms?

In general I'm skeptical of the idea that Hickman intended Krakoa to be "rotten from the beginning." I've seen a lot of people say this recently, especially when contrasting to the considerably more black-and-white Duggan-led stuff, but... Hickman said constantly that he created Krakoa for mutants to finally be happy after all the genocide stories. I can't see him saying that if the point was going to be that the "experiment" was doomed all along, y'know?

I doubt that was Hickman's intention, whatever it was was probably more complex than the incredibly simplistic avenue Duggan went with.

Krakoa was flawed and built on Moira's lie. But it was improving and removing its worst bits. So it's still sad that outside forces messed it all up.