Generation Hope 10

[shadowpsykie]

I posted these Images because a couple of people have been wondering "what Idie was thinking" when she went in to fight the Hellfire Club. What her motivations were. Also someone only saw the one panel that showed Idie saying "Is there anyone else i need to kill" and thought she was now a sociopath. admittedly without context that is what that panel makes her look like. so because of that I posted some context and the rest of that page the panel is from.

It miiight be pushing the page limit... so please let me know and i will adjust accordingly... its about two pages and a couple of panels...

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

Actually I think they have been playing down "Hope might go crazy" cuz it seems too obvious. Hope I think is pretty well adjusted all things considered, I think hope would have been equipped to take then out without killing, or been able to kill them if she had to. Idie on the other hand is hope's polar opposite in a way. She was not ready fir this, she was not ready to t take a life let alone a dozen. It e would not have the same tragic impact if Hope did it

[rallamajoop]

Hope I think is pretty well adjusted all things considered

She definitely is, but a lot of what's putting me off her as a character is that I can't buy that she could be that well adjusted, given her background. YMMV on that, of course, but to me it emphasises her role as a plot device who will do and act whatever the writers have decided is convenient, rather than a character who's grown organically out of her own experiences.

It e would not have the same tragic impact if Hope did it

Going to have to disagree with that. The X-Men's shiny new mutant messiah kills a bunch of people? That's got to have tragic impact.

[shadowpsykie]

I think because she had a mother for a while, and cable, and even friends. Her main problem though is she comes off very cold. Well not cold, but she see's the lights as soldiers, but they are not.

Hope killing them would have been kinda shocking, but to me it had more impact coming from Idie because with her it came from someone not " trained"and not prepared for this. From as place of fear and desperation. This is her first blood. Hope would have been cold and calculated

[rallamajoop]

I think because she had a mother for a while, and cable, and even friends.

I assume that's how the writers justify it, but to my mind that actually makes it worse. She had a mother until the age of, what, five? who was gruesomely murdered in front of her eyes (and then her father, who had refused to give her any name but 'little girl' until that moment, decides her dead mother's name will do. That sequence really did not work for me). She had a friend or two for brief periods before she lost them, or saw them gruesomely killed too, and even that was years ago. She aged a couple of years while unconscious in suspended animation, and from then until she returned to the present, it didn't look like she had any contact with anyone but Cable. Added up, I cannot make any sense out of how she could be remotely well-balanced.

but to me it had more impact coming from Idie because with her it came from someone not " trained"and not prepared for this.

I'm actually thinking about the impact on the X-Men themselves more than on the audience. We're a couple of steps diverged from the action, they're counting on Hope to save their entire species.

Mostly, it's the contrast that bugs me - for ages I've wanted to see some consequences of how Hope's fucked-up upbringing should have influenced her as a person. Now we're getting something much like that in her own title, but for a different character.

[shatners_bassoon]

Yeah, but as far as I can see (and I must confess that I have not quite been keeping up with the series), Generation Hope is focusing on the Lights rather than Hope because it's pretty uncertain who or what Hope actully is, in terms of her power and her influence over the Lights; the mystery is a key element of the series. I guess Gillen/x_editorial decided to sacrifice potential those interesting plot beats for Hope as a traumatised warrior/survivor in favour of the larger thread of her as the mutant messiah.

[rallamajoop]

Well, yes, but you've summarised pretty well why I've got so little interest in reading it. After the mystery of who Hope is has been dangled over our heads ever since she was born (which was, what, four or five major events ago?) I'm way past bored with the mystery, ready to have it answered already, and the poor girl given some role beyond being a plot device.

Obviously it's not their job to cater for my expectations alone and I can't speak for everyone else who's not buying the series, but the sales figures would suggest that the strategy they've chosen for the title isn't going down very well.

[shatners_bassoon]

Well that is fair enough, although there seems to be a lot of strong character work going into everybody else featured in the title - but then again Hope is the eponymous character to some extent, it's not unreasonable to want more focus on her.

I'm not sure you can point to low sales figures as a sign that the writing/plotting is off, though. I'm sure that's more a case of it being a book about 5 entirely new characters and one relatively recent semi-character/plot device, neither written or drawn by one of the blockbuster industry names; there's your recipe for failure. Great and interesting books along those lines crash and burn all the time, because there's no big name appeal.

[rallamajoop]

This is true, but unless you feel that Marvel are likely to be happy with the mediocre sales figures it's attracted, then they must have thought they had some sort of hook for the series, and presumably that hook was that they thought they'd created enough interest in Hope and the next generation of X-characters to have an audience for it. To clarify here, a lot of my irritation with it comes from the fact I'm actually one of the people who should have been interested in picking it up. I actually enjoyed Second Coming and was very curious coming out of it about where they were going with Hope as a character, but everything I heard about Generation Hope in the lead up to it's release put me off completely. (And that's not just because of the direction they went with Hope but the fact I find most of her supporting cast pretty dull, but that's a whole other subject.)

Overall, since I don't think this is coming through here, what I've been trying to say from the start isn't "Marvel should be doing this instead", but "It's a shame they're not doing this instead, because I for one would be more interested in reading it".