Excalibur #24 - "Colonialism is a good thing when we do it"

[deh_tommy]

Okay, the book’s not actually called that, but that might as well be the motto for this run.

The Captain Britains that Jamie Braddock created by splintering reality are being held on trial to determine their rights as people and not the chronal abominations Saturnyne thinks them to be when the Corps notices an unwanted presence watching the proceedings...

Comments

[tinygaylaura]

Anyone who says they are championing "Purity" is someone who I want to see get the shit beaten out of them so I can't wait to see Psylocke kick Arthur's ass here

I'm absolutely on the side of Krakoa, Saturnyne and Betsy Braddock against that whinging ancient waste of space Merlyn and his little puppet king

Can't say I much like King Arthur as a hero

I remember when that show Merlin was on the air

I was always rooting for Morgana and Morgause

[akodo_rokku]

Yeah this Arthur and Merlyn are extremely shitty.

[tinygaylaura]

Yep

Merlyn is canonically a fascist psychopath and Arthur

Well Arthur's just an annoying little witless cretin

[zachbeacon]

Putting aside that I can never keep track of which people claiming to be Merlin are really Merlin ... a LOT of those guys are villains.

And honestly Galahad might be the only one in those stories who isn't terrible. Well, maybe Nimue but I may be influenced by her DC counterpart.

[super_fly]

All I want
All I need
Is for someone to say to him, "I never voted for you!"

[tinygaylaura]

"Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

HELP HELP I'M BEING REPRESSED"

"BLOODY PEASANT!"

"OOOOO DID YOU HEAR THAT?"

[iamrman]

I don't have the faintest idea what's going on, but I like it. There's a fairy lady, a dragon, Gambit dressed as a kitten maid(!), a refugee from the 90's with rad double swords... and they're fighting King Arthur for some reason?

[lordy_co]

Yup, I dig it too. Howard is a pretty mediocre writer but this is some of that comicbook craziness that I love.

[tinygaylaura]

Excalibur has been really good I think

Howard can be hit or miss but I think she's a pretty good writer and the book has been fantastic lately

[iamrman]

I wouldn't be so harsh as to call Tini Howard mediocre. I like her writing just fine.

I did drop this series a while ago, for reasons I have forgotten, but I am glad I picked it back up.

[deh_tommy]

Trust me, that’s nowhere near as fun as that looks.

[alliterator]

It is actually really, really fun.

The fact that your post is backfiring on you is hilarious, though.

[tinygaylaura]

I'm very saddened at the lack off hot lesbian vampires trying to sink their horny teeth into Elisabeth's supple neck

Maybe it's the Claremont fangirl in me but I just feel like every time a heroine encounters vampires or telepaths there should be a hot woman, possibly in some kind of black leather, who I can live my kinky fantasies through

[deh_tommy]

I’m disappointed they didn’t even mention Jubilee in relation to the vampires. She was a vampire for ten years, you have juicy drama practically gift wrapped for you!

[tinygaylaura]

We need more scenes of her sensually licking blood from a woman's neck

[silverhammerman]

Say what you want about X-Force and the current characterization of Beast, but at least that book is textually about how fucked up their activities are. I'm right there with you on the weird colonial vibes of this book.

Yes, this (fictional) scenario is one in which the people challenging the mutants are bigoted and clearly in the wrong, but as I've noted before, I'm uncomfortable with a bunch of stories that basically offer a vision of a world in which colonialism is Good, Actually. It's a colonialist fantasy and it's deeply weird. I mean, maybe there's something transgressive to the idea that the invader draped in the British flag is colonizing English imagination in the name of Krakoa's Liberal American values, but that really doesn't seem to be the focus.

[deh_tommy]

They’re obviously wrong for stoking eugenic tensions and encouraging ethnic cleansing of Witchbreed, but is Merlyn necessarily wrong about Krakoa? They are the invaders here, they’ve forcibly conquered Avalon for the sake of their own interests and are filling that with their own to seize cultural and economic dominion over Avalon and beyond. This is the exact sort of thing King Arthur would fight against. Captain Britain shirks her responsibilities to her namesake (remember that she made no effort to so much as look for Arthur and let Coven Akkaba rise to power on her watch), has clear conflict of interest with regards to Krakoan favouritism, and destroyed the Amulet of Right so no one else but her would ever take “her” title from her. Why is she okay with the name Excalibur if she detests Arthur so much?

You can say “Oh, Arthur was actually a bad king the whole time, Avalon’s so much better off without him”, but HOW is that better without him? Why? Wasn’t the previous ruler Morgana le Fay? Isn’t the current King Jamie Braddock? How is either of them better? Heck, what evenwas Merlyn and Morgana’s great and terrible plan? Take Arthur off the throne just so they can put him back on again? And he’s apparently been missing for years and no one’s bothered looking? Ugh, this book makes me so mad...

[mastermahan]

If Krakoa had given the slightest fuck about the people of Avalon, they might have a claim here. But they put Jamie Braddock in charge. Jamie fucking Braddock, the guy who was slavetrading and murdering in Africa even before he became dangerously insane. This same issue has Betsy arguing that the alternate Captain Britains he created are real people and deserve to be treated as such - which means Jamie murdered Captain Jubilee. Even rewriting Arthur and Merlin, Krakoa has no claim beyond Finders Keepers.

[alliterator]

They are the invaders here, they’ve forcibly conquered Avalon for the sake of their own interests and are filling that with their own to seize cultural and economic dominion over Avalon and beyond.

Okay, what the fuck are you talking about? "Filling it with their own"? There is literally one mutant who has moved to Otherworld from Krakoa other than Jamie and that's a teenager from New Mutants. Other than that, the only mutants I can see are Death (and he's been made into a vampire in Sevalith) and Jim Jaspers, who lived there long before Krakoa even existed.

You appear to be taking the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory and applying it to a fictional fucking setting.

[tinygaylaura]

I don't really think Avalon was better off when it was run by people who were burning innocent people at the stake and not knowing what indoor plumbing was personally

And I don't think it's at all comparable to any of the shit Beast did

What has Avalon "lost" in this situation?

It's "Lost" a ruler who was a supervillain psychopath who was tossing her people in front of arrows and cannonballs and dragon fire as human shields because she was a deranged megalomaniac

It's "Lost" a delusional belief that anyone born different is inferior and its okay to commit hate crimes against them

It's "Lost" a future of poverty and neglect wallowing in some shitty dimension where no one cared if any of its people lived or died

Krakoa isn't oppressing anyone in Avalon. They aren't mind controlling anyone. They aren't doing anything besides saying "Hey knock off the hate crimes and warmongering

Krakoa made Avalon better than it was before they came along.

[alliterator]

Not sure why you are apologizing to Si Spurrier, considering Tini Howard wrote this. Also, not sure why you are calling this "colonialism" when its Merlyn and Arthur who are trying to kill all the mutants in Otherworld.

I mean, you might as well just title this post "I support genocide when it's people I don't agree with."

[deh_tommy]

I’m apologising to Si Spurrier because this flies in the face of his recent Arthurian stuff for MARVEL.

Don’t be silly, I’m not advocating for anyone’s genocide, fictional or otherwise. Arthur and Merlyn are clearly in the wrong for stoking tensions and trying to drive everyone to hate all witchbreed. But I take offence to Arthur being written as such in the first place when he hasn’t been before. This is clearly being done to justify why that was okay for Betsy’s dislike for Arthur, why no one even bothered to look for him when he went missing and why that’s okay for Krakoa to keep Avalon as a territory and not hand the reins back to the literal Once and Future King.

The best lies - the most insidious lies - use kernels of truth to make them seem legit. Merlyn’s right about Krakoa being an invading species trying to take over a new and unfamiliar world. Instead of addressing this in any significant way, or showing how or why that’s supposed to be wrong, the book just goes “shut up” and puts them in the mouths of straw men to justify not thinking too hard about the ethics of what our “heroes” are doing.

[tcampbell1000]

I think slamming the comics that one posts is generally a bad idea, unless you can be absolutely confident that everyone else will also regard them as cringe. Even then, I wouldn't.

[deh_tommy]

Sorry. I won’t do that again. That’s just... this sort of topic is near and dear to my heart, and seeing something as huge as the X-Men not only presenting this without any sort of introspection in the ethics of the matter but also bending over backwards to justify how that’s a good thing actually and nothing needs to change just really, really gets under my skin.

[stubbleupdate]

why?

You could say the same thing for offering fulsome praise.

Are we to offer scans with no context or commentary?