The curious case of Moira X

[laughing_tree]

House of X #2...

Comments

[lencannon]

This issue is wild. I don't know what I feel about it at all about it but boy we're going places.

[jlbarnett]

that's a terrible thing to do to Moira

[lordultimus]

Not a fan of this. The X-Men have too few human allies as it is.

[amaniwolf]

Agreed, and it's basically rewriting her entire origin and saying no one would've ever figured out she was a mutant all those years she was helping the X-Men.

[shadowpsykie]

wait what?

can some one please explain this to me?

[stubbleupdate]

Moira is a mutant.
She lives ten lives. They all start at the same point, and in the same person.
She remembers her past lives.

If you've haven't done so already, go read the First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. It is excellent

[the_engineer]

There's a novel by Ken Grimwood called "Replay" that uses the same idea.

[lencannon]

Essentially, Moira is a mutant whose power is reincarnation. Every time she dies, she starts back at 0 with full knowledge of her prior lives. The trick is that she has to live long enough to reach puberty so that her mutant powers can manifest themselves, if she doesn't she dies for good.

The entire universe we know has been Moira's tenth life. In previous lives she's joined Magneto, Apocolypse, created a military state, created a mutant cure, none of them prevented the defeat of mutants by sentinels. Destiny made a prediction during one of Moira's lives that Moira would only live 10 or perhaps 11 lives at most so this is her last chance to get it right and save the world.

[shadowpsykie]

it doesn't seem like Moira LIKES mutants very much (though her assessment of Xavier isn't WRONG perse....

[lencannon]

She gets over it after a a couple of lifetimes.

[mistersandman]

I thought the entire universe we know was Moira's 4th life? That's the only one that seems to follow X-Men history as we know it.

EDIT: Nevermind, the timeline at the end of the book makes it pretty clear that the 10th life is the same as 'our' timeline. It also suggests that the entirety of X-men history from Uncanny X-Men #1 to Grant Morrison's first issue of X-Men happened in a two year period? Unless I'm misunderstanding what "Moira/Magneto/Xavier schism" refers to.

[silverhammerman]

Down to the detached, almost textbook-like narration, this is so very very Hickman.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. As lordultimus notes, it's taking away one of the X-Men's most prominent human allies in favour of making her yet another mutant. Then again this could put Moira in a really interesting position of prominence.

How else is getting some heavy Sage vibes from this though?

[mindsweeper]

Prominence or plot device? Right now, she feels like a reboot tool to me more than a Layla Miller type character. Moira doesn’t actually know anything once she starts making changes, she’s as blind as anyone else and her power is useless. So what she can do is reboot the path so we can get an entirely new direction with no islands or dystopian futures or other cliches, but what then? It seems like she’d live her last life and that’s it.

[tcampbell1000]

To be honest, the last time I was heavily invested in Moira McTaggert was 1993, so I'm completely cool with this reinterpretation, and intrigued by the holes Hickman's left: there's nothing about her sixth life, and there's nothing about how or whether she died in her ninth...

[obsidianwolf]

and I'm out, this confirms exactly what kind of story Hickman is writing and it is not for me.

Maybe next relaunch after the mutants make it to the MCU perhaps for once coporate synergy will work out.

[arilou_skiff]

Yeah.... This feels like a good, high concept idea... Done with the wrong character.

[scorntx]

... well, it's an interesting concept, to be sure (even if it plays merry hell with Marvel's usual rules of time travel. Do the previous lives count as alternate realities? Don't they?)

And I suppose there is something to be said about Hickman compressing it largely into the space of a single issue, where some might've stretched it out, dare I say developed it, over a few more (though admittedly once the initial idea is presented, we can kind of get the gist).

Just maybe be more cool with it if it A: weren't Moira as the focus or B: In a different continuity.
And maybe if so much of it weren't delivered via that heavy Hickman exposition.

(also, if maybe someone gave the random italics a rest. It can't be healthy for a person to use that much italics...)

[beyondthefringe]

Mind blown.

In some ways, this makes a lot of weird sense, even the way in which they acknowledge the fact she was never detected as a mutant before. It also opens up some really interesting tangents about how valid those previous timelines/paths are and if (of course they will) they'll come back to influence things in this go-around. And the way that Hickman skips over Life #6 makes me wonder what happened there and how that will affect things. (Maybe 6 was the best possible outcome. Or the absolute worst. Maybe 6 was the prime timeline that we followed up to this point and the subsequent lives have been experimental ones up to where we are in House of X?)

I wonder if by the end of HoX/PoX we'll leap into #11 for one final MoiRaboot which is where we get Wave 1 and so forth.

I get where people might not like this retcon of a human ally into a mutant, especially one with such a weirdly specific ability, but as noted, she's also been dead and mostly forgotten for a while. Plus, human allies don't fare well in the X-Men either, and tend to be the pet characters of specific writers... (Tom, Sharon, Stevie, Lee Forrester, Nurse Annie... I think Claremont was the one most invested in getting the X-Men out to deal with humans.)

So hey, we'll see where this goes.

[wizardru]

Motto.

I haven't been this interested in the X-Men comics for a while; even if nothing here sticks, Hickman is doing some things and going some places and it feels compelling to me. This change to Moira is, on the one hand, a ludicrous retcon...but on the other hand it's a compelling narrative change with a lot of story potential (and has built in clean-up written into it).

I mean, I've been a fan of Moira since she was masquerading as the X-Men's housekeeper; this? This feels like an interesting use of the character and travels to some interesting places. Whatever else you say about Hickman's work here, it feels like he's trying something different. And I like that I'm not really sure where anything is going, here.

[mesmiranda]

Hang on, I feel like there's a missing beat here.

Moira's first marriage doesn't appear to have any problems--they have three kids and eight grandchildren, yay happy family reunions, no mention of a divorce before the age of 74.

Wouldn't she also remember the good times she had with her spouse? Why would she assume he would never change? Did they work on their problems (together and separately)? Is Hickman saying she's looping back on her own timeline and people's personalities play out the exact same way regardless, because if so she pursues science and Charles Xavier but not marriage counselling?

If she gets bored/frustrated with her husband after being with him for so long (from her perspective) and decides to leave him, fine, I get it, but it feels like there could have been a page or two explaining this instead of the jump from "happy life :)" to "mutantkind is a cancer".

[lencannon]

The issue goes into that. She's basically not the same person when they meet again and it doesn't work out. She's had a 100 years of life and knows everything about him and the spark doesn't catch the second time around

[mesmiranda]

Okay, that's totally fair and understandable. Complaint/question towards the comic retracted. :)

[beyondthefringe]

Yeah. In her second life, she realizes that she knows everything about him, she can't change his flaws, and she's not interested in doing things the same.

Second life, she eventually realizes she's a mutant, but dies before she can really follow up on it.
Third life, she pursues the mutant thing, but finds Xavier extremely offputting and goes in an anti-mutant route... before getting a wakeup call (and horrible death) which puts her on a more pro-mutant path...

and so on.

Honestly, I can't blame her. If I had to go through life a second time, knowing everything about my previous one, I'd probably want change also. Imagine 70 years of repeats without surprises or unpredictability.

[mesmiranda]

That absolutely makes sense, I get it now.

(I will say it's kind of interesting seeing a mutant with innate time-travelling powers; that seems to be more a magic/enhanced tech thing. I did some Googling and the most notable mutant time-travelers--that aren't using magic or advanced technology--are Tempus, Flashback, Tempo, Velocidad...)

[liliaeth]

there's also Rachel Grey, in her first appearance, her powers were supposed to be that she could push people's minds through time, or as she did later on, herself.

[laughing_tree]

I wonder what Claremont makes of this.

[scorntx]

Knowing Claremont?
"Needs more mind control."

[lordultimus]

Also, "not enough word balloons".

[scorntx]

And probably "could use more accents".

Though the amount of narration'd probably satisfy him.

[sarahnewlin]

I am confused. Does she remember Banshee, Proteus, and Mystique?

[stubbleupdate]

Why wouldn't she?

[lordultimus]

She meets them for the first time in later loops.

[gnarll]

Interesting and good. I am having a problem reconciling it with the Moria I remember though. Still, its enjoyable enough to hold my attention.