Marauders #4: The Red Bishop

[superboyprime]

Comments

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

The Hellfire Club was created to act as an institutional evil. Something that's is still relevant today.

And I have to say, using kids who sound like they escaped from a Captain Planet episode really undermines that.

[capnduckman]

They brought the Hellfire Kiddos back! This is awesome!

[sadoeuphemist]

Excuse me, Homines Verendi?

Latin definition for:
verendum, verendi
noun

declension: 2nd declension
gender: neuter

Definitions:
external sexual organs, private parts (pl.)
[partes ~ae => private parts]

[brerrabbit]

It means "The Fear Of People."

[sadoeuphemist]

Wouldn't that be "homophobia"?

[silicondream]

Nope, it would be "anthropophobia." The "homo" in "homophobia" is the Greek word for "same" (as in same gender), also found in "homogenize" and "homologous." It's not the same as the Latin "homo," meaning "person."

Ironically (kinda), "homosexual" is a Greek-Latin hybrid, but it inspired "homophobia" and that's back to pure Greek.

Oh, and "verendum" is basically a euphemism for the external sexual organs, meaning "the awe-inspiring parts." Not too different from "private parts" or "naughty bits," I suppose.

[silicondream]

Actually it means "the people to be feared" or "the awesome[in the older sense, not the party on sense] people."

[zachbeacon]

I'm honestly surprised more people in fiction don't worship superheroes.

Sure you have the occasional group that worships Superman or Storm but they're the exception rather than the rule. Omega level mutants, many cosmic heroes, the Eternals, ect are functionally gods anyway and then you have actual gods and demigods running around as superheroes.

Reed Richards is the smartest person alive (not counting his own daughter), can alter his form, has saved the world multiple times, has chased off cosmic horrors, has rescued souls from the afterlife and come back from the dead on several occasions, and has traveled across worlds, dimensions, and times. That sounds like a god to me.

[deh_tommy]

I think that was actually a plot point in Justice League Odyssaey that a few heroes we know ended up being worshipped as deities among alien cultures.

[locuatico]

I am still surprised that the general population seem to be mostly "huh" upon the existence of nordic and greek gods

[deh_tommy]

Does that bother anyone else that anyone even slightly critical of Krakoa ends up being either a villainous bigot or a bigoted villain?

[donnblake]

It does, a bit. I'm thinking that it might be that editorial's not willing to let anyone else drop the other shoe before Hickman gets there in the flagships.

[zachbeacon]

It would be more true to life if some people that raised valid points about a new nation with shady as hell leadership got dismissed as bigots because the nation is the homeland of a historically oppressed minority.

But I think Robert Kelly is still dead so I'm not sure who could raise that point and not come across as a monster to the reader. Val Cooper, maybe?

[owlbrigade1]

Why bother addressing valid criticisms when you can just make those raising them be assholes. It is from the same playbook as: when our heroes are assholes lets get the audience on side not by making them better, but by making the bad guy worse.

It is tired and off-putting, and just plain lazy storytelling.

[laughing_tree]

Does a good Batman story need to address the precarious ethics of vigilante justice? Is a Black Panther or Aquaman story not incomplete unless it acknowledges the injustice of a hereditary monarchy?

Sometimes, you just gotta accept that it's a fantasy world with a fantasy world morality that you can't and shouldn't map onto real world morality.

Not that deconstruction doesn't have its perfectly valid place, but that place shouldn't be "everywhere."

[owlbrigade1]

Is a hereditary monarchy really that unjust anyway? At least it is better than oligarchy.

Also Batman has the ethics baked in when he refuses to kill and leaves the criminals tied up for the cops to arrest (it is floor level Batman) because of his position outside the law. In this case though it is mutants continuing to do horrendous horrible things but we're supposed to handwave it because they are the title characters and someone else told a lie which in no way invalidates all the other points they were making. Krakoa was a mistake and I can't wait for it to fall, and frankly this time the Mutants will DESERVE to be hated and persecuted.

[laughing_tree]

A hereditary monarchy is a form of oligarchy, so...

But it's a fantasy story, so we accept that it's a "good" and acceptable form of government. And we accept that Batman's form of vigilantism is good and works. (I'm going to assume you wouldn't want vigilantes in the real world to be dangling crooks from heights as a form of interrogation. Hell, we wouldn't want cops doing that.) Fantasy worlds, fantasy morality.

And Krakoa has a "do not kill man" rule at the foundational level too.

[locuatico]

Batman does at least consistently have Bruce Wayne do more than just vigilantism, show that his vigilantism is done in a very specific context and that he does it with the support of Jim "I believe in the law" Gordon, who is never demonized whenever he goes against vigilantes.
... Which you could still argue is handwaving the issue away...

[deh_tommy]

I mean, in this context that kind of is Krakoa’s fault he ended up joining a cult of mutant supremacy (given how the X-Men now pretty much are a cult of mutant supremacy), and the way the handled her situation ended up radicalising her, so the whole “Mutants aren’t your scapegoats” thing falls flat.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

There's too much about Krakoa that's disturbing to worry about that point ;)

[jlbarnett]

if anti-mutant behavior had been even slightly nuanced before hand, maybe. But honestly with the state it was at before why would the bigots be silent at a time like this?

[super_fly]

Oh, they brought back Jumbo Carnation? That's nice. Should probably keep an eye in his recreational intake though.

[jlbarnett]

bringing back Jumbo Carnation suggests that they are going back in time, since his death should have been well before the mind backups were happening

[long_silence]

They brought back Synch, and he died before Jumbo Carnation

[mastermahan]

They brought back Changeling. Changeling. He died in 1968! Apparently Xavier has been making weekly brain copies as long as he's had a Cerebro.

[bruinsfan]

To be fair, Changeling died while impersonating Xavier and channeling some of his mental powers, so I can see a good justification for that one being possible before the whole resurrection setup was established. He might have gotten a psychic copy via feedback (like David Haller did with Jemail Karami) years ago and only now had the means to download it into a living physical body.

Has the series yet touched on how this resurrection process interacts with the proven existence of the human soul in the Marvel Universe? When Layla Miller raised Guido Carosella from the dead his soul didn't return, and there were consequences.

[mastermahan]

Good point. Who would the next oldest resurrectees be, then? The Hellions?

I've been reading this project as something Xavier's been working on since before X-Men #1. He and Magneto recruited Sinister to store DNA before they broke up. It's implied Legion and Proteus are so powerful because Moira and Chuck bred for them. Which is horrifying, and probably meant to explain why time-looping Moira would marry an abuser like Joseph MacTaggert.

As for Layla, I assume souls generally return automatically, and her power is the exception. Marvel's had scads of people stop being dead in scads of ways, and Layla's the only one that makes them sociopaths.