X-Men Red #7 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN RED vol 2 #7
“The Winning Side”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Stefano Caselli
Colour artists: Federico Blee & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer & production: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Storm fights Isca in the Great Ring chamber. This is another Judgment Day tie-in.
PAGE 2. Obituary for Mike Pasciullo.
PAGES 3-7. The aftermath of Magneto’s battle with Uranos.
Issue #6 ended with Storm, Magneto & co setting off to confront Uranos. Magneto defeated Uranos in A.X.E.: Judgment Day #4, and this picks up directly from the end of that scene. (Despite what it says on the recap page, at least the vast majority of this story takes place during Judgment Day #4, not after Judgment Day #5.)
“You have new gods now.” This comes from the end of Magneto’s speech to the human ambassadors in House of X #1.
Resurrection. In issue #4, Magneto and Storm both destroyed their backups in order to disavow the possibility of resurrection, and prove themselves to their Arakkii colleagues. Magneto’s refusal to waver on this in his last moments was something that impressed the Progenitor in Judgment Day #4. Storm is clearly less wedded to the idea – at least when it becomes a reality – and immediately proposes resurrecting Magneto even without the benefit of a backup. She seems clear that this would work, despite having presented the backup deletion as a crucial factor in issue #4. Presumably she’s anticipating the return of a blank-slate Magneto in that situation.
“Three began Krakoa. Moira betrayed us. I deserted my post.” The creation of Krakoa by Magneto, Professor X and Moira is covered in the Powers of X miniseries. Moira’s betrayal was exposed in Inferno. Magneto quit the Quiet Council and retired to Mars in Immortal X-Men #1 and X-Men Red #1.
Magneto’s philosophy has evolved by the time of his death: he no longer wants to protect just mutants, and extends it to uniting all “so-called undesirables”. His remaining fundamental difference with Professor X is that Xavier still fundamentally believes in integration, while Magneto continues to believe that the “undesirables” can only be safe and prosperous by going their separate ways. Magneto’s more immediate point here is that Krakoa was always a compromise between the visions of himself, Professor X and Moira, and now only Professor X remains – someone who does not ultimately believe in the separatism that lies at the heart of the Krakoan project.
Magneto also clearly sees Xavier not as an inherently good person, but as someone who is driven to act in a way that he believes will be perceived as good. That accords somewhat with Magneto’s view of himself as the principled one, but it also fits with the various stories in which Xavier has been written as manipulative, emotionally cruel and so forth when he either thinks he can get away with it, or simply doesn’t understand what he’s doing.
Anya is Magneto’s late daughter, whose death by lynching was a pivotal moment in his life. Judgment Day #4 indicates that this is actually the Progenitor appearing to him.
PAGE 8. Data page (in funereal colours). The quote here is a paraphrase from his speech to the World Court in his trial in Uncanny X-Men #200.
PAGES 9-15. Isca is confronted.
Isca betrayed the Arakkii and killed Idyll in issue #5, on the basis that her powers compel her to take the winning side. She did this before when she betrayed the Arakkii to join the Amenth side, which is what Lodus Logos is referring to when he calls her “Isca of Amenth”.
Tarn was killed in issue #3; as Ora Serrata points out, even though Tarn was a deranged, violent sadist, he did refrain from just directly attacking the other members of the Great Ring (except when actually challenged to a fight).
Xilo‘s lost memories result from his injuries sustained in issue #5.
“Earth and everyone of Earth is to be judged…” This is the premise of Judgment Day, and specifically places us during Judgment Day #4. It’s not clear how Storm knows that the Progenitor regards the population of Earth as extending to those Arakkii who were born on Earth, but perhaps she’s already encountered someone else who was in the same position.
Sunspot is recapping information about the sidelining and dissolution of the Seats of Night from a data page in the previous issue.
Genesis – Apocalypse’s wife – was the ruler of Arakko while it was in the dimension of Amenth, until she wound up being turned into Annihilation.
Isca. Sunspot’s basic point here is that for all Isca’s supposed unbeatability, her participation did precisely zilch to bring about an actual victory for either side. The obvious reason for that is that Isca’s power has consistently been defined as “cannot lose”, which is a different thing from “must win”, since (1) she doesn’t have complete control over which side she chooses to fight for, and (2) it’s consistent with a futile stalemate. Isca’s fundamental problem is that (perhaps compelled by her powers) she sees victory in relatively narrow terms and doesn’t see herself as “losing” merely because she is failing to achieve anything of value. Fisher King, in a sense repeating the trick that Sunspot tried in issue #3, forces her to change perspective by defining that as a victory condition.
Fisher King. The bit about Isca recognising the Fisher King, and him being a nuisance to the Amenth forces while in prison, is new – though the fact of him being in prison has been covered before.
PAGE 16. Data page expanding on Isca’s thought processes.
“One who has lived ten thousand [years] and more”. That would make Isca much older than Apocalypse, who was a child in the time of the Pharaohs. Apparently, Okkara dates that far back.
“Little Isca always lagged behind…” Because her powers only emerged at puberty, as used to be the norm for mutants.
“Her sister married a blue-lipped boy…” Genesis and Apocalypse.
“The First Summoners”. Some kind of priests who could control Amenthi demons. One of them showed up in X-Men #2 (2019) and hung around through to “X of Swords.”
“She took one … a genomic mage .. to be her lover.” Tarn, as strongly implied in issue #3 (when she reacted to his death).
“And that too was in some way because she could not lose.” In issue #3, Sunspot bet Isca that Tarn would beat Magneto, thus apparently forcing her to take the opposite position. (The obvious plot hole in that scene was that she didn’t accept the bet, but she apparently does accept Fisher King’s challenge. Maybe she accepted it in her mind and realised the implications before she could say so.)
PAGES 17-18. Isca resigns from the Great Ring and passes Progenitor’s test.
The implication is that Isca cannot be properly “of Arakko” without facing the threat of defeat, for precisely the same reasons that were advanced in issue #4 in relation to Magneto and Storm’s immortality – but she hasn’t previously recognised that hypocrisy.
PAGES 19-21. The Great Ring is reconstituted.
Lodus Logos, the artist, is using the Eternals as the basis of his argument that Arakkii society needs to change (something that he was recognising anyway over the previous two issues). The central premise of Eternals is that the Eternals are locked into a role dictated for them by the Celestials and, despite being aware of it, can’t break free of it – at least not easily.
Note that Storm forms Magneto’s helmet in the clouds as she takes the seat.
PAGE 22. Recap and credits.
PAGES 23-25. Epilogue: Cable and Wiz Kid discover Abigail Brand’s notes.
Cable and Wiz Kid were already working on salvaging the Keep last issue; they’ve also both been sceptical about Brand for a while now.
“My dead mom just gave me a thumbs-up.” That’ll be the Progenitor passing Wiz Kid. His parents (who have never been named) were killed in the same car crash where he lost the use of his legs, per X-Terminators #1 (1988).
“The Keep is a reality-warped duplicate of the Peak…” The Keep was created as a duplicate by the reality warper Jamie Braddock in Planet-Sized X-Men #1, at the time of the terraforming of Mars. The suggestion that it’s more closely linked than that to the original station is new.
“She’ll have left notes for herself…” Brand’s notes have been seen both in this book and its predecessor SWORD, and were kept for precisely the reason theorised here: to make sure she knew about her own scheming if she was resurrected with memory gaps.
“If she did kill Henry Gyrich…” She did, in S.W.O.R.D. #11.
“I say we take it to Nightcrawler first, rather than the Council.” Wiz Kid is implying that he doesn’t want Brand to be sent to the Pit for murdering a human, and is figuring that Nightcrawler and the cast of Legion of X will have a more forgiving attitude.
“What she’s been doing…” Brand has so many schemes that they could have discovered all manner of things, but the most obvious candidate is her dealings with Orchis.
PAGE 26. Trailers.
It’s notable how Ewing has been clearing the decks on Arrako. Isca & Tarn were the faces of it between XoS and XMR, and now one us dead and the other is gone. Plus, of those who voted to return to Amenth in #1, Tarn & Idyll are dead, the historian has amnesia, anf Ora is being blackmailed by Storm in LoX (And Isca technically abstained, but was clearly more sympathetic to that POV), while those who voted to stay on Mars are intact.
Paul> Storm is clearly less wedded to the idea – at least when it becomes a reality – and immediately proposes resurrecting Magneto even without the benefit of a backup. She seems clear that this would work, despite having presented the backup deletion as a crucial factor in issue #4. Presumably she’s anticipating the return of a blank-slate Magneto in that situation.
Waiting Room.
“Despite what it says on the recap page…”
Yeah, the MCP has immediately put this as happening entirely during Judgment Day #4.
How come Isca’s silly power didn’t factor in…or is it foresee…that Uranos would actually end up losing in his conflict with mutants? I guess she switched back to the Arakki side while she was still on Arakko as Storm and Magneto beat Uranos? Maybe her power should just prevent her from having allies and taking sides.
As the resident X-pert, I have to ask, Paul: how long before Magneto’s back? I’m thinking two years, one if sales drop
Dave: Isca’s power seems to have some precognition (since she attacked Idyl before they knew it was Uranus and other Eternals are kind of wussy) but not very far ahead (or she would always side with main characters of the book she is in
).
Since there have been so many changes to the Great Ring lately, here’s a summary of the seats and the people who currently sit on them.
TABLE DAWN
1. Seat of Victory > (vacant)
2. Seat of Stalemate > (vacant)
3. Seat of Loss > Storm
TABLE DAY
4. Seat of Above-Us > Lactuca the Knower
5. Seat of All-Around-Us > Lodus Logos
6. Seat of Below-Us > Sobunar of the Depths
TABLE DUSK
7. Seat of Law > Ora Serrata the Witness
8. Seat of History > ? the First Defender
9. Seat of Dreams > (vacant)
TABLE NIGHT
10. Seat of Nowhere > Syzya of the Smoke
11. Seat of Nothing > Fisher King
12. Seat of Nobody > Sunspot
ADJUNCT
13. Voice of Arakko > Redroot the Forest
14. Arakko
The previous members of the seats:
1. Isca the Unbeaten, Genesis
2. Idyll the Future Seer, Idyll the Ancestor
3. Magneto, Tarn the Uncaring
5. Storm, Nameless the Shape-Shifter
7. Uqesh the Bridge
8. Xilo the First Defender, Stulgid the First Defender
9. Lodus Logos
So the seats of Victory, Stalemate and Dreams are empty, the seat of History is crippled and the voice of Arakko is trapped in the Crooked Market.
Going forward, the-mutant-that-was-Xilo has to evolve and take another name. Sunfire has promised to rescue Redroot, so I’m sure that we’ll see that somewhere soon.
With so many empty seats, I suspect Vulcan might come back (under Brand’s prerogative, or maybe his own) and take one of them. If the late Idyll had any precognitive children, they might take the Seat of Stalemate. Ewing has also been hinting that Apocalypse and Genesis will be coming back, so perhaps Genesis might take up a seat again.
SanityOrMadness> Isca & Tarn were the faces of it between XoS and XMR, and now one us dead and the other is gone.
Ewing has been clearing out some seats so he can rotate other characters into them, but I don’t think he’s getting rid of these characters.
Isca has now gone on walkabout to search her soul, but I’m sure if something significant were to happen on Arakko, she’ll find her way
back into the story. As for Tarn, he’s a magic geneticist. He still has that Sinister clone in his employ so he’s just one clone body away from resurrection. He might even already be back, just lying low and biding his time.
Apropos of nothing: last night I had a nightmare that Paul has outsourced all the boring annotations in every issue to another blogger named Mike, and every annotation is now signed “Paul” or “Mike” at the end. Also the blog was now full of social media widgets with pop-ups, animations, videos, and sharing links on every single annotation.
Thank god it was just a dream!
Maybe Magneto can’t come back ’til Joseph has his chance at resurrection. Wait, is he dead right now?
If Isca’s powers is to not lose, and she needed to resign from the Great Ring to pass the Progenitor’s test, does that man that her power made Heer resign?
Dave> “How come Isca’s silly power didn’t factor in…or is it foresee…that Uranos would actually end up losing in his conflict with mutants?”
Based on how the first battle went, if she’d have stayed she likely would have been killed by Uranos. Considering his outlook he also wouldn’t have cared if she had been there and sworn fealty — she’d have just been another target. So her power ‘saw’ she needed to get out of there fast and forced a betrayal in front of a teleporter whose immediate action was to get her out of the and run away as soon as he could. Uranos’s fight wasn’t really her own, and Nightcrawler ran away, so as long as her fight isn’t ‘kill the blue elf’, she wins the shocking betrayal and is in the clear for the moment.
Not to say her powers aren’t plot malleable, but that one works well enough to without a lot of handwaving.
Following up, I’m realizing Uranos is probably the nightmare scenario for her powers. The mix of someone who is apparently strong enough that she can’t straight defeat them, but unlike Amenth unwilling to accept her as a minion. Thanos might see the use in her short-term. Galactus might accept her as a herald. But against Uranos her only choice is to start running before the battle starts and she’s stuck in a power paradox.
Michael> If Isca’s powers is to not lose, and she needed to resign from the Great Ring to pass the Progenitor’s test, does that man that her power made Heer resign?
That was certainly the implication. The Fisher King issued her a challenge that she couldn’t win, but her power forces her to not lose, so she took the only path available to her – resign from the Council to make the challenge void. FK was gaming her powers like Sunspot did previously, albeit in a more successful manner.
I don’t know about the Progenitor though. Why is it even judging people on Mars? Did the other Ring members get judged? I liked the judgment scene though, so I’m willing to let it slide.
I think Magneto will stay dead until the end of the Krakoan era. Xavier will resurrect him against his will, and a new rift will form between the characters. That way, future writers will be able to have Magneto be a villain again.
Good enough issue, but man this event is dragging.
Which is sad, I had high hopes for it.
Magneto dying is a big hit against this book for me.
It feels like his arc was just getting started.
Mike-I think it’s going to end up the opposite. Xavier has been/will embrace more of Magneto’s old ideology, that mutants should conquer humanity. Magneto will be resurrected to find himself standing opposite to Xavier again, this time as a new leader for the X-Men, who continue to strive for Xavier’s old dream against the mutant supremacy agenda of Krakoa, while Magneto will now begin to sympathize with humanity as the persecuted.
Dave> How come Isca’s silly power didn’t factor in…or is it foresee…that Uranos would actually end up losing in his conflict with mutants?
Uranos didn’t lose in his encounter with the Arakkii though, it was an easy victory for him. He broke the Great Ring and left a monument of skeletons where their Council chambers used to be. He then destroyed the gateways and went back into the Exclusion. Uranos’ battle with the mutants of Earth when Druig frees him later was an entirely different incident.
Isca doesn’t have precognition, she has the Omega version of Domino’s powers. Domino’s abilities force her to make the right moves to shift the odds in her favor during an hostile encounter whereas Isca’s abilities force her to actively not lose any encounter, even if it means joining the opponent.
When Uranos arrived on Arakko, Isca’s abilities told her he had the better odds against the entire Great Ring so she switched sides (changed skin color) and fought the Great Ring. This was an instinctual decision which I believe she has no active control over. Nightcrawler dropped her into the ocean to minimize the damage she could do, and she fought Sobunar’s offspring there.
Once Uranos had left and his machines were dismantled, the active threat was over so she switched back to being aligned with the Great Ring (her skin color turned back to gold).
Are to understand that in however many thousands of years, nobody has ever thought to trap Isca in a paradox until like a few weeks ago?
Chris V- I am now picturing Xavier seething on Krakoa as most of his former students leave with Magneto. That could work.
GN – that’s how I saw Isca’s arc as well. What I don’t quite buy is that she didn’t understand loss. Even if she never lost a challenge, she saw the drawbacks of her power in previous issues. Yes, she could be arrogant, but I’m very sure she understood how alienated from Arakki society she had become. Maybe her behavior in the first half of the issue was because of the heat of the moment?
@Chris V – I’m not sure if I entirely agree with this. I don’t think Xavier has ever embraced mutant supremacy. Namor has sensed this about him, Xavier even outright said this during the economic forum. His dream is the same, his methods are what has changed. His previous assimilationist way of kowtowing to human expectations of who mutants should be wasn’t working so he had to try something new.
I’m also not sure about Magneto leading the X-Men, since Jean and Scott are already leading it, unless you mean he’ll start a rival team of his own, which I suppose is possible.
In many ways, Jean and Scott are the natural inheritors of Xavier’s dream. A.X.E. X-Men 1 positioned Jean as Xavier’s heir (something the Morrison run also did). I’m sure something similar is true of Scott as well. Their new X-Men project is one that saves the world that loves and hates and fears and envies them. However, it is not a team that is subservient to that world.
On the other hand, Ewing is positioning Storm (and Sunspot) as the natural inheritors of Magneto’s dream. Storm is positioned as Magneto’s lover (see how they are framed in past two issues) and Sunspot as his student (he says Headmaster every time he sees Magneto). Storm symbolically takes Magneto’s place among mutants in this issue when he passes his doctrine onto her and she sits in his former seat with his helmet in the clouds.
Similarly, Ewing is positioning Cable as the natural successor to Brand. Teen Cable used to work under her and now Adult Cable works beside her, but disagrees with her methods. I suspect that once Brand is ousted, Cable will be take over her Spymaster role and lead a new X-Men Red of his own.
There is a theme here – Xavier, Magneto and Brand were people with strong ideologies but their personal failings ensured that their dreams couldn’t bear fruit. Their successors will learn from their mistakes and refine their methods to see those dreams realized.
(Oh, and Rictor is supposedly Apocalypse’s successor, but who knows where Howard is going with that one?)
The cynic in me says he stays dead until he shows up in an MCU movie or TV show.
Oh, I forgot to mention that Storm’s leading the Brotherhood now as well.
So we can see a pattern emerging here:
Jean Grey and Cyclops are leading the X-Men. (Xavier’s old role)
Storm is leading the Brotherhood of Arakko. (Magneto’s old role)
Cable will soon be leading S.W.O.R.D. (Brand’s old role)
The Stepford Cuckoos are leading the Hellfire Trading Company. (Frost and Shaw’s old roles)
Betsy Braddock is leading the Captain Britain Corps. (Brian’s old role)
I like this. A season of change among the mutants. And it was accomplished without sidelining the previous leaders who still play important roles.
Will Sunspot be leading the Shi’ar Empire sometime in the future?
Actually, now that I think about it, Kate Pryde leading the Marauders under the HTC positions her as Emma’s heir as well. Interesting.
That was earlier in the Krakoa era where Xavier was shown to have doubts. As the Krakoa era has progressed, Xavier was shown to be further embracing the mutant supremacy aspect of Krakoa, while Magneto seemed to be growing tired.
The idea would be that Xavier is too pessimistic about his dream of peaceful coexistence succeeding. So, instead, Krakoa would conquer humanity, forcing coexistence between humans and mutants as the only solution. It would be Xavier’s idea of a “benevolent” dictatorship, which is based on how Magneto described his agenda in God Loves, Man Kills. Magneto explained that mutants would conquer humanity, then use their powers to create an utopia providing for humans, while leaving humanity alone, so long as they don’t harm any mutants…Basically, Miracleman.
We also know from the alternate Life Ten that Krakoa did eventually conquer humanity, setting up a “benign” dominion of mutants over humans, waiting for humanity to eventually go extinct, replaced by mutantkind. In that light, it seems that Xavier had no problem with conquest as part of his new dream.
Also, Moira’s working with Xavier and Magneto was supposed to be based on the idea that Krakoa was transcending ideologies. It was Xavier’s and Magneto’s failures to give up on their ideologies which had proven disastrous for mutantkind, according to Moira.
In that light, Magneto then embracing Xavier’s ideology is all the more interesting.
Plus, Morrison also wrote the story about the younger generation moving on and learning from the mistakes of the past ideologies of Xavier and Magneto. While the idea that the X-books are going to move towards the direction opened by Morrison is tempting, I can’t see that happening. Especially in light of the current era being based around mutant supremacy and separatism.
There would need to be a large number of mutants leaving Krakoa to return to fight for Xavier’s old dream considering that there is an entire mutant nation.
This was just me throwing out ideas, not what I fully expect is going to happen.
It somehow took me this long to figure out that there’s a specific pattern to Lodus Logos’ dialogue: every utterance is six syllables, four syllables, five syllables. Which means that the note about him in issue #1 can be scanned like this:
Lodus Logos speaks in
metal. Lodus
Logos speaks in song.
Lodus Logos’ time is
coming. Lodus
Logos has not long.
As for Magneto himself, I’m sure he’ll be back soon via the Waiting Room or something similar. Sometime after the Sins of Sinister crossover is my guess. Unlike Apocalypse, who the writers can pack off to another dimension for a few years, Magneto is entirely too popular of a character to stay away too long.
That said, there’s no reason they can’t play with this for a while. Dave’s Joseph idea is a good one. With Magneto gone, Joseph can be brought back without infringing the ‘no duplicates’ rule of Krakoan resurrection. Maybe we’ll have Joseph around for a bit.
Does anyone really care about the Arakkan characters on Mars or elsewhere? Maybe if Hickman stuck around to finish his story I would feel differently, but they’re all kind of meaningless to me, and any attempts at adding meaning to an indifferent writer’s script are futile.
I don’t think Hickman wanted anything to do with the Arakkans. He basically ignored them after X of Swords. He threw Bei into “Inferno”, but she did nothing. I don’t believe Hickman wanted to bring those characters with the island of Arakko. I think that was Howard’s idea. They don’t seem to work with Hickman’s ideas now that we know the direction he was moving with the ending of “Inferno”. That seems to be the point where Hickman started to lose control of the line, and by the time Duggan had Arakko colonize Mars, Hickman was already preparing to leave the X-books.
Anyway, long answer to say, “I agree with you, Ben”.
@GN- “Domino’s abilities force her to make the right moves to shift the odds in her favor during an hostile encounter”
Except that doesn’t account for everything we’ve seen with Domino’s powers. We’ve seen, for example. guns aimed at her malfunction and people that were about to fall on top of her inexplicably veer off course. Domino’s powers alter probability- “things just fall into place for her”.
I don’t think Fisher King forced Isca into a paradox. She -won- the challenge. By reflecting on the tragedies of her past, she came to a greater understanding of loss than him. But with that understanding — as Fisher King was presumably counting on — comes realization of how sad her existence is, so she now sees she’s not fit for the Seat.
@Ben
Under Ewing’s pen, I’ve become quite fond of the Arakki.
“Does anyone really care about the Arakkan characters on Mars or elsewhere? Maybe if Hickman stuck around to finish his story I would feel differently, but they’re all kind of meaningless to me, and any attempts at adding meaning to an indifferent writer’s script are futile.”
I think Ewing has done a great job of not making them one dimensional monsters, but I still don’t care about 98% of them as characters. Having this veer back into the Brand plot is far more interesting to me.
Given the high probability of some sort of reset button at the end of A.X.E., it’s entirely possible Magneto might come back at the same time that they resurrect all the others who died fighting the Progenitor or during the judgement.
But then again, he may just remain dead for a while as part of the general clearing of the board, same as when Apocalypse mucked offstage. I guess it depends on what stories Ewing wants to tell in the wake of Magneto’s death.
Al Ewing has been making great use of the Arakki IMO. I also like Spurrier’s use of them.
But they are still rather odd characters, pretty much unrelatable by design. Most of them are personifications of abstract ideas, not entirely unlike JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’s “stands” or mythical Djinns. Even repeatedly seeing them fight, hurt and die does not make them seem very real or very biological in nature. That makes them rather unrelatable and, to a very large extent, unpredictable cyphers.
Which, to be fair, they always where. They actually originated in Otherworld, did they not? Ewing and Spurrier are writing stories that make good use of their nature, but they are no less unrelatable and inhuman for that.
What, the Arakki? They come from ancient Earth. They were imprisoned in some demonic realm (Amenth) and came up through Otherworld to try and conquer it. But they are descended from Earth mutants. Or, in some cases, where Earth mutants, like Isca and Genesis, who are apparently older than dirt. And Apocalypse.
*were
The Arakkii are basically Morlocks 4.0/Neo 3.0/Children of the Vault 2.0: a meaningless gaggle of characters who have less than a single dimension of personality between them, exist only as plot fodder, and will promptly cease to matter as soon as the writers actively pushing them move on
Storm yielding the seat of All-Around-Us seems fairly clearly to represent the abdication of her conquest of Arakko via the killing of Nameless, but I think I would have liked to see more leading up to her making this decision-maybe her seeing the negative consequences of enabling Krakoa’s attempted colonization of Arakko.
As it was, we mostly just had Isca and Brand quietly mocking her for her pretensions of equality and solidarity when she was clearly a conqueror and colonizer. This seems to happen a lot in X-men Red, where the villains are the only ones making certain very good points.
“was an entirely different incident”.
I guess this is what I wasn’t grasping. She can’t lose a BATTLE, even though that can mean joining the side that loses the war…and then having to switch back (which is still silly).
GN: Thanks for that list of the seats. I have one suggested correction though. I don’t think seat 9 is vacant. On page 20, Lodus Logus accepts “the weight of the noon seat *and the second vote*” (emphasis added). I think he has two seats now. Unprecedented, to be sure, but this whole scene is about doing the unprecedented.
I suspect the cosmic reset button will come when someone introduces Isca to The Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)) and it creates a universe-destroying paradox.
@Ceries: Considering Arakkii culture bases its entire identity and existence on “fight fight fight”, I don’t see how Storm can be considered a colonizer – as Ewing repeated ad nauseam, she’s “of Arakko” and they “see her”.
“On page 20, Lodus Logus accepts “the weight of the noon seat *and the second vote*” (emphasis added). I think he has two seats now.”
No, he’s referring to the fact that the holder of that seat has a casting vote. If he had kept his original seat, he’d have three votes, not two.
K said-
…
Thank god it was just a dream!
Apropos of even less, I must say I found yr dream hilarious and so very specific to our little corner of the internet!
Otherwise, still very much enjoying this book and curious to see where it’s headed. Things really would be so much simpler if Ewing would just take over writing the “flagship” book (and I don’t mean Gillen’s) as well.
As for Gillen, I was really enjoying Immortal X-Men until this damn event. Pretty disappointed in it thus far
@Dave: Joseph was turned ‘evil’ by Astra when she resurrected him in the Magneto: Not a Hero mini series (2012). He was then subsequently killed by Kwannon in the Rosenberg run just before Hickman. I don’t know where that would put him on the scale of good/evil.
Joseph’s resurrection would allow Charles a way around Eric’s wishes (and probably someone he’d see as more easily influenced). Joseph should’ve been brought him back already given the counsel’s new stance on clones.
@Chis V: I’ve always thought if anyone were to replace Charles and Eric, it would be Jean and Ororo despite many writers framing Scott and Logan as their successors.
Alexx Kay> Thanks for that list of the seats. I have one suggested correction though. I don’t think seat 9 is vacant.
Thanks!
Regarding Lodus Logos, like Paul said above, the Seat of All-Around-Us doubles as the seat of the Regent of Arakko. This means Logos will have two votes in his new position.
That said, I suspect that during times of war, the Seat of Victory of Table Day takes charge of the Ring. Genesis was ruler of Arakko during the millennia-long Amenth/Arakko War and she sat in Victory. This makes Isca’s betrayal worse in hindsight since she sat in Victory when Uranos attacked.
“Magneto’s philosophy has evolved by the time of his death: he no longer wants to protect just mutants, and extends it to uniting all “so-called undesirables”. His remaining fundamental difference with Professor X is that Xavier still fundamentally believes in integration, while Magneto continues to believe that the “undesirables” can only be safe and prosperous by going their separate ways.”
If he unites all undesirables, mutant and baseline human, isn’t that integration?
neutrino: to a degree, yes. I see it as more inclusive separatism. It’s definitely not full integration with any mainstream society.
I’m ready for a Joseph return, since now I know more about him thanks to Jay & Miles.
I didn’t read X-Men for many years prior to Morrison’s run, and I’m a lot more open to seeing characters and continuity from that period used again now that I’ve been following that podcast.
They’re launching a ‘Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants’ miniseries to replace X-Men Red for the Sins of Sinister crossover.
https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/nycc-2022-sins-of-sinister-round-up-annoucement
This is what I mean when I say Ewing is positioning Storm as Magneto’s successor, as someone who will implement a refined version of Magneto’s dream. If this was a few years ago, this kind of book would normally have been launched with Magneto as the lead.