Remender really does like to hear himself write… doesn’t he? Oh, and he needs a good slap.
Well, where to start? For one, I don’t care if Rogue is ‘taking Xavier’s death hard’, writing her like a little bitch is so not okay. Rogue has been through a lot of crap in her life, things that have effected her more than this, and she never was never this bitchy, not even when she left Gambit in Antarctica she wasn’t as bad as this. And Rogue would not be okay with just ‘sitting this out’, she was never one to shy away from her past and is proud of how far she has come. And the whole flirty thing with Alex… seriously? Did Remender not read any of X-Men Legacy?!?
Then you have the whole reducing Wanda into a love-triangle with Cap and Wonder Man. Really? I know that ‘randomly hooking up characters’ is kinda the hallmark of the soap opera that is the Marvel Universe… but is it really necessary right now, especially as there really hasn’t been a conclusion to Wanda/Vision yet. Yes, I don’t care for the paring but aren’t they technically still married?! Ugh. There is two women on this team (Janet just got there) and already they are fighting between each other and being reduced to ‘romantic fodder’.
To top things off, Wanda does get a few good lines and moments in there but they get ruined by her turning meek again. I can understand a level of insecurity after everything she did but, dunno, the way it’s portrayed just rubs me the wrong way.
The only decent thing that I’ve read in this title so far was the couple of pages bringing Sunfire back into the fold. That was actually pretty well done and was a great re-introduction of the character. Too bad almost nothing was done with it later and the character nearly forgotten for the rest of the issue.
But the thing that really got talked about in this issue is Alex’s desire to not hear anyone use the “m” word again. I can actually kinda understand this. True, it could be taken to mean that Alex is taking away the mutants identity which in a modern real world full of civil rights talk for certain groups seems like Alex is giving in to the hatred… but the world has a way of taking a term and turning it into something, as Alex puts it, divisive. Just think of all the words for a gay person, a black person, or females, that is no longer allowed to be said because they are divisive, words that originally had other meanings. Take the word ‘Oriental’ for example, those from East Asia and the Phillipines consider it a derogatory term.
If, in the X-Men universe, ‘mutant’ has come to gain a negative tone, and if it’s beyond salvaging, then perhaps Alex is right that individual mutants should be seen as individuals and not ‘mutants’.
I’m kind on the fence about this as I’m not totally sure what Remender is truly going for here, esp as, as far as I’ve read, mutant hasn’t been used as a derogatory term in other comics (at least not to the effect that would warrant such a change). But at least here I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt from a historical perspective in that words can gain whole other meanings and should stop being used.
X-Men: The (fan fic) Series 