Hellions #16: Come Hurt With Us

[superboyprime]

"What I love about Hickman's whole thing here is that there are no easy answers; he's taken the rug and pulled it out from under us. Reading X-Men comics for years and years, they were these super-powerful characters but their goal was to protect the humans who feared and hated them. What a noble goal. It's still simple heroism. But as soon as you take that and say, 'Okay, well now they have a different goal, their goal is to make a society,' then easy answers disappear. Good and evil disappear, and as a human reader you lose that safety net of knowing these characters have your best interests at heart. There's something dangerous about the entire enterprise that I love as a writer, that I would not have had the guts to do myself, but as soon as Jonathan did it, I knew I needed to get in there and play. I knew it would challenge me and my own preconceived notions." - Zeb Wells

Comments

[armycat23]

I've been out of the loop for a long time. Wildchild can talk?

[sabertoothlotus]

Kyle has been through A LOT.
I'm glad he has hair again instead of looking like Nosferatu. He could always talk, except for that period after Sabertooth tore his throat out I guess? I can't keep track of whether he was dead or not before Krakoa, but either way I'm guessing magic mutant herbs/resurrection fixed the damage.
What bugs me is that he's wearing his Age of Apocalypse suit, which I guess was another time when he couldn't talk (but that was due to being mostly feral).

Anyway, I think I liked his best when he was in X-Factor back in the 90s and was crushing on Bishop's holographic sister.

[armycat23]

Gotcha, thanks.

The only reading I had of him was when he was feral.

[numeronone]

"Their goal is to make a society, [so] Good and Evil disappear."

At the risk of taking this too seriously: I no longer trust Zeb Wells.

That statement is one of the most colonial/imperialist sentiments I've ever read.

[onsokumaru]

Really? To me, it can also apply to cultural relativism. (which I don't think is positive either)

[numeronone]

Yeah...just the idea of "we've started our own culture so morals and ethics no longer need apply" seems very...white settler

[deh_tommy]

Come on, that’s not like they encourage suicide as the ideal solution to traumatic events of the past, overthrow other sovereign nations before they even have a proper non-provisional government of their own, barely tend or pay attention to their children’s needs, routinely break their only rules on a regular basis, physically and psychologically torture their enemies, encourage them to hate and fear non-mutants, resurrect mutants who historically hate what their powers have done to their bodies with no changes whatsoever, constantly dredge up and reinforce old trauma (if not encouraging people to be defined solely by their trauma and struggles), use paraplegia as punishment, love bomb new residents so they leave their old family behind, repurpose the same structural tools used to oppress them to get a stranglehold on the rest of the world, act like culture is something you can just pick and choose whatever from with no downside, encourage you to abandon your previous cultural ties in favour of devoting yourself entirely to your Krakoan one, let unrepentant and unreformed murderers and criminals roam free, mind**** people into supporting them or anything else I’m forgetting.

That’s clear you only take issue with this because you’re uncomfortable with ethnic/sexual/societal minorities reclaiming the narrative that was robbed from them. You’re in a position of privilege to whatever metaphor the mutants are standing in for and thus in no position to talk about this, I can’t imagine any other reason why you’d take umbrage with Krakoa.

[crabby_lioness]

It's "settler". "White" has nothing to do with it.

Pierre Boulle thought race had something to do with it when he volunteered to fight in WWII. He ended up in Southeast Asian, where he was horrified to see the Japanese practicing the same imperialist bigotry on other Asians. After the war he turned his realization that colonialism has no color into the novel, Planet of the Apes.

[deh_tommy]

To be fair, I think this has happened with essentially any (if not every) known nation, especially ones that are only just born. I’m not saying that should be this way, just that this has historical precedence.

The problem I have is both the X-Men and the narratives are constantly applauding themselves for being so superior and better than normal humans and the folly they call their societies as they proceed to make all the same mistakes we’ve made, but that’s treated as actually okay when they do that.

[numeronone]

...point of order: is your avatar from a Bionicle comic? Nothing to do with the discussion at hand, I'm just curious

[deh_tommy]

Yes! That’s Gavla from the 2008 story. Pretty sure I stole this avatar off of BZPower’s pre-built icons.

[silverhammerman]

That's where I am with all this. It's not that there's a problem with moral ambiguity in stories or depicting nation-building as a fraught exercise (indeed I think it would be rather boring to skip over all of that stuff), it's that few of the books seem to really be engaging critically with the ways in which it's fraught. I'm like 80% that most of the X-books aren't as smart or thoughtful as they pretend to be. From what I've seen, Hellions and New Mutants are the only ones bothering to interrogate anything.

Even Inferno so far seems more focused on how Mystique's been wronged and the machinations of various Great Men and Woman, rather than the way that the underlying assumptions of Krakoa and the way it conducts business is incredibly fucked up.

[lego_joker]

This reminds me of an old... I don't think it can be called a joke, but it feels apropos:

"We want equality!"
"You want to be equal to the guys who robbed and murdered their way to where they are? Well, first you've gotta find some underarmed, disease-ravaged people to steal 12 million acres from..."

(In a broader sense, I can't help but wonder if this is the point modern Leftism really splits on: whether Power (and its near-synonym Prosperity) should be treated as inherently, if necessarily evil or something that ought to be embraced under "the right circumstances".

[aperturedreams]

Other issues with this aside, just because a writer is trying to do something or write a character in a certain way doesn't mean that's indicative of their actual beliefs. Zeb Wells isn't trying to make a society, the X-Men are.

[alliterator]

That's not what he meant at all, you are cherry picking it. He's saying that they aren't exclusively working towards a noble goal -- that they are trying to build a society, which isn't itself completely good or evil.

[donnblake]

Well, Kwannon is taking that... better than she might have.

[silverhammerman]

It remains to be seen if Kwannon actually follows through on resigning as a captain and leaving Krakoa (which I hope she does, it's long overdue that we see some prominent characters who don't buy into the Krakoan dream) but if she does it'll really be another glaring example of weird alignment between the individual series and the linewide stuff. Like, it was a big deal when she became a captain in Inferno! If she just resigns in a comic released the next week it'll be hilarious!

[donnblake]

Especially if Sunfire's still on the X-men!

[lordultimus]

It's really hard to believe that "they're building a nation, so morality no longer applies" when they keep retconning things into being okay after all. We see this right here, with the whole "duplicates aren't people" thing with Maddie being introduced, only for New Mutants to just go "No, that was the Quiet Council being dicks, dupes are totally people". This, plus the fact that I get the feeling that Charles, Moira, and Magneto are going to be the scapegoats for everything and after Inferno they'll throw out stuff like the no humans rule, makes me wonder what's even the point of teasing Kwannon leaving Krakoa in disappointment and cynicism, when they'll probably go "Oh, that was the old Krakoa".

[tinygaylaura]

I hope they keep the no humans rule

I absolutely agree that the only humans that should ever be allowed to set foot on Krakoa are those who mutantkind have decided are deserving of this. Krakoa being off limits to humanity in general is one of the things I love about the concept

[shakalooloo]

Banning an entire group of people from entering a country just because of what they are is pretty bad. Because some muslims did a bad thing, ban all muslims?

[alliterator]

It's really hard to believe that "they're building a nation, so morality no longer applies"

Not what he said. He's saying building a society isn't the simple noble heroics that the X-Men are used to. Building a society isn't going to be black and white, it's going to be messy.

[lordultimus]

And that messiness disappears when the whole moral dilemma gets tossed aside with "X doesn't matter, Y was just being a dick".

[tinygaylaura]

I really thought I couldn't hate Beast any more than I already did but his sanctimonious whining at Emma here opened up new levels of hate

Oh yes how dare Emma prevent a mad scientist from gaining godlike power, how awful of her. If only she'd done something more heroic like mind controlling an entire country

Beast needs to shut the fuck up before someone does the Marvel universe a favor and makes him into a rug

I absolutely support what Emma did here. She made the only call it was possible to make and it's not like she intended for Kwannon's daughter to "die". Hell she didn't even know the AI copy of Kwannon's daughter existed when she gave Empath the order to take Sinister out if he tried anything like this

It's a terrible situation in that it's awful how badly it's hurt Kwannon, Greycrow and Alex but it still had to be done. Empath might be a bastard but he's a bastard who did the right thing here. An AI copy of one person was not worth the risk of just how many could die or suffer fates worse than death if Sinister hadn't been stopped

[lordultimus]

Oh, and I almost forgot: Krakoa still protects those who break its laws as long as they're powerful and obey the letter of the law over its spirit.

Why is the Quiet Council still around again?