X-Men: Book of Revelation #3

[superfangirl1]

Penciller



Inker: Sean Parsons

Comments

[thanekos]

Truly, we can only either have " I'm a Strong Individual, everybody do what I want " or " We're all A Gestalt, no individuality ".

[cainofdreaming]

Ego isn't "composed of everyone" he's always been a single being. You're thinking of the Uni-Mind, Doug. Or Overmind.

[thanekos]

It works in the " Gaia hypothesis " sense: " .. living organisms [forming] a synergistic and self-regulating complex system.. "

(Ego's still a single being - that singularity probably necessitates interdependency between the parts of his planet body.)

[cainofdreaming]

Ego didn't form. He was made by the Stranger (at least until another retcon changes it again). And his interdependency wouldn't be any different from that of, say, a human's. It's all Ego. The surface is his skin, the continental plates his bones and so forth. Only difference being his conscious control over their form.

[beyondthefringe]

And the Stranger himself is a gestalt being made up of the entirety of his race.

Given the track records of beings like the Stranger, Overmind, Uni-Mind, Ego... Doug's plan is horribly misguided and ill-advised.

[cainofdreaming]

He was until the retcon/reveal that he'd actually, unintentionally, killed the actual gestalt entity and just assumed its role to oppose Overmind to make amends (and to mess with people, I guess, as is his wont).

[beyondthefringe]

I think that retcon was retconned.
Then again, the Stranger has never been what I'd call a reliable narrator.

[mastermahan]

DOUG: I will merge everyone into... a Dominion! ...what do you mean editorial won't let people do another Dominion story? Fine, I'll do some other assimilation plot.

[icon_uk]

I still wonder, given the Phalanx future Dominion plotline which was there at the start of Krakoa and which sort of petered out, whether that WAS the original plan, with Doug as mastermind, until Hickman left and it became Moira suddenly going sadistically homicidal for questionable reasons, and Al Ewing wanted to write more Sinister.

[mastermahan]

The fandom was pretty sure the Trickster Titan was going to be Warlock in some capacity. I look forward to when we eventually learn what Hickman's original plan was, if only for out of historical interest.

[redorion]

Al Ewing retconned that in his Ultimates2 run where he merged some of Ego’s different origins so that now the Stranger’s experiment resulted in a scientist named Egros being merged with everyone of his race and every other thing on his world to form Ego, the Living Planet.

[icon_uk]

The irritating thing is that there's a better example from not that long ago in Doug's personal past. The "Ani-Mator's return" storyline from the 2009 New Mutant series, where Doug tries to get over his PTSD about being killed by re-visiting the island where it happens and discovers that the remains of the Ani-mator are now a form of cellular slime which is trying to do exactly what Doug is trying here, to render all the flora and fauna a part of itself whether it likes it or not.

It even ends with Doug/Lock managing to convince the local biosphere to become a balanced, but not conscious, environment for all the Bird-brain type mutates to live in harmony.

[blues32]

Wow...so Doug doesn't even know what he's talking about. Good grief. Ego is a living planet. Does he even have fauna on him?

[cainofdreaming]

No fauna, no flora. Nothing except Ego itself (and sometimes the engines Galactus stuck to him).

[icon_uk]

I thought Ego did have fauna, which serve as antibodies when something attacks the planet.

[cainofdreaming]

Ego's antibodies are just formed out of Ego. So they're also an extension rather than a genuinely different lifeform. The only thing that might qualify as another individual would be Ego-Prime. But he only gained sentience after the bit that became him was removed from Ego and experimented by a Rigellian Colonizer.

[iamrman]

I will be glad when this is over and the X-books return to normal. Then we can forget this ever happened.

[windleopard2]

Isn't the X-books returning to normal what people are complaining about?

[remial]

I thought Doug was supposed to be smart, this may be the dumbest plan I have heard since anything from Mister Sinister.

[beyondthefringe]

I'm sorry, writers, but this entire storyline is an offense to all 12 of Doug's fans from the '80s.

we remember.
and we are angry.
#justicefordoug

[thanekos]

You joke, but some 16 or 40 year old's probably hitting Jed MacKay up on social media with " You fucking idiot! " over this.

(Remembering incidents like Tom Taylor getting a " check your mailbox c*nt " tweet over a Nightwing line that either pushed Dick/Babs or Dick/Kory really takes the shine off fandom's investment in characters and their consequent relationships with creators.)

[onsokumaru]

I'm somewhat relieved. It's just Doug being an idiot for the plot. I was afraid the story would reveal that Warlock was a Phalanx plant and pushed Doug into a Dominion plan. Which would have damaged the character, even in the present.
I can go back to "only" be afraid of Future Cyclops in Present Cyclops body killing Doug and/or Warlock.

(Thanks to an annoying device in a certain card game, everytime I see Ego now, I hear "I am Ego and this is my domain" and I do the Excalibur face from Soul Eater.)

[scorntx]

Well, they killed Warlock briefly during the Krakoa era, so they're probably not going to kill him again so soon.

(... that sounded way more reassuring before I started typing.)

[icon_uk]

As I've said before, the irritating part of that is that present-Doug is one of the few characters who would probably listen to the problems this plan caused and then simply go "I did WHAT?? Okay, I'm definitely NOT doing THAT!" and instantly erase the timeline from existance (which is already messed up from the Beast/Cyclops timeshifting)

[blueprintstyles]

Revelation jumped the shark REAL QUICK

[icon_uk]

I have to give Jed Mackay credit here.

How Revelation is both saner and more insane than I think anyone had reason to believe, but in a way that works in context (Well... -ish).

What happened to Warlock, and that it was something that he wanted to happen (or maybe not)

Why Revelation adopted the trappings of a religion when Doug was never notably religious. (There are some nice little echoes back to Doug’s “old” personality layered within Revelation)

Who Elbecca is and what her plan is.

All evidence of “AoA 2 - Gold Repaint Boogaloo” to the contrary, Revelation’s approach IS aiming to be very different from Apocalypse in a way which seems logical to Doug, if ghastly to everyone else.

Just like when he was Cypher, Doug as Revelation is still smarter than most of those opposing him assume. Smart in an appalling, horrifying way, but… He really DOES play 4D chess and is near impossible to bluff.

I still wish this story had never happened as it’s doing so much damage to a character I’ve loved since the 80’s, but in a weird way he’s being treated with some respect here. Taking some of his classic character beats and amping them up to 11, way beyond the sanity event horizon but in a way that does make one think “If he was delusional enough this, IS something Doug might do thinking it was the right path to take”

[gnarll]

Catching the plant based on word use was a good moment.