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So this is X-Men vs X-Men vs X-Men? and are some of the X-Men Avengers?
3-D chess or Mornington Crescent? (Or Calvin Ball?)

I’m waiting for that scene shown at the end of Planetary.

Or that old comedic bit, where everyone from the future arrives to save Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, and they all bicker about who has dibs. (I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s got a great punchline!)

Heck, now that Bendis has broken Gruenwald’s Rules of Time Travel
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/09/04/the-new-marvel-rules-of-time-travel-courtesy-of-battle-of-the-atom-spoilers/
why doesn’t everyone show up at the same event?

Marvel could retcon “Mutant Massacre”, just like Deadpool did with that issue of Spider-Man! Retell the original story, but with new characters arriving! It would be like “What If?” but it would canon! No new stories would be required!

Or heck, go back and “fix” the Marvel Universe! Doom doesn’t blow up his dorm room, but instead partners with Reed Richards and uses Latveria to wage global economic dominance on the world! Of course, they recruit the best and brightest… Stark, Parker, Trask, Wyndham… (Meanwhile, Sue Richards is a part-time archeologist, along with Catherine Pryde and Vision-tech.)

Douglas Ramsey is taught international politics, religion, and diplomacy, and after making millions in the dot-com boom via Doom, becomes Secretary General of the UN.

Of course, one of the alternative rules of time travel is that you can’t affect the future. You create ripples in the pond, but the pond remains. So it might end up like Booster Gold (and superhero comics in general):
NOTHING HAPPENED, and NOBODY REFERS TO WHAT HAPPENED.

So instead of lots of X-Men in the room, you gets lots of elephants.

It has been executed quite well so far imo and added a kind of freshness to the X-verse, it’s been good to see the original teams dynamic with the trainwreck of a modern team and the differences bounce off each other. Although like ‘The Ultimates’ I know the quality rarely lasts so i’l enjoy it while it lasts.

And come on Torsten if comic books followed the rules and laws of this physical universe half the characters wouldn’t exist and you wouldn’t see cool stuff like characters pushing planets etc.

“…the reveal of Jean is not one which returns the version last seen in the hands of Morrison/Pak. Rather, this is the teenage version of Jean, if she stays in the present and ages normally.”

Good catch!

You pretty much completely missed the entire point…

I’d like to hear your thoughts, then?

What part of “people aren’t solely defined by the minority/majority group they belong to” didn’t you understand?

Americans always seem so eager to find stuff to get offend by…
(see what I did there?)

Thank you for pointing out the stupidity! You sum up my feelings on this pretty well.

“What part of “people aren’t solely defined by the minority/majority group they belong to” didn’t you understand?”

The part where Alex clearly said that ANY reference to that minority group as being unique in some way is a bad, bad thing, I would assume.

I saw the headline, and thought ‘Marvelman??’

Yes- this is a pretty freaky scene and I’m with you on this Steve. It has the tone of a strangely fascist speech though I’m not exactly sure what phrase strikes that note for me. Maybe it’s the odd triumphalism?
This solidarity he’s going for comes at the cost of hiding difference to put non mutants at ease.
Dislike.

I think I can see what Remender was going for with this idea, but it seems he didn’t really think it through very well, which ended up ruining the intended effect of Havok’s speech and generating quite a few dark implications.

The way the speech was written, it gives off the impression that “mutant” is a pejorative word, which is ridiculous in the context of the Marvel universe. The word has always been used as a means to refer to a particular group of people with a specific genetic configuration, and there’s nothing inherently pejorative in it. They are mutants, which of course doesn’t mean that they aren’t also humans.

It would have been perfect if instead of “mutant”, Alex condemned the use of the word “mutie” or something like that, which is a pejorative way of making reference to mutants, much like “nigger” is an offensive, pejorative way of calling people with black skin and “faggot” is an offensive, pejorative way of calling homosexual people.

Unless, of course, Remender aims to make Havok look like a fool. If so, I’d call this scene a resounding success.

(By the way, I’m not a hater. I enjoy this series. But this scene was very bad indeed)

Didn’t Peter David already cover this ground twenty years ago in X-FACTOR by having Guido/Strong Guy prefer the term “GeeCees” (Short for Genetically Challenged)?

I think what he was going for was something like this:

I’m left-handed. And in any conversation relating to handedness, obviously my left-handedness should be pertinent. But in pretty much any other conversation, it’s irrelevant. For mutants, their mutancy has been treated as if that is the whole of their person, as if being left-handed was something that was so important about me that it defined everything I did. So what Alex is saying is, don’t call me “Left-Hander” or suggest that all of us “left-handers” are some organized religion with common goals and traits (other than the one). “Left-hander” is perfectly fine to say when actually talking about handedness, but otherwise shouldn’t be referenced.

I agree with Chad B. This is a very well thought out speech that says what I’ve felt for a long time. People become to attached to their heritage, traditions, orientations, family history, and so on, to the point where they fear stepping outside of it. Media inflates and perpetuates these ideas and sells them back to the masses, encouraging stereotypes. Large groups of people buy into these stereotypes to the point where they fear stepping outside them, because of pride or social scorn from “their own kind” or bigots, and as a result, never give themselves the opportunity to define themselves as an individual. This does not mean turning away from those incidental details of where you come form, what color your skin is, or whom you chose to love. It just means that they don’t factor into who you are as defined by your intent and your actions. I am dyslexic, ADHD, and have Aspergers. They are part of what I am. I’m not ashamed of that, but they are not who I am. If that was all anybody ever thought of me as, or if they tried to use it to say that what I had to say or do didn’t matter, because of it, I’d be pretty mad. They are not the choices I make. Do you think Oscar Wilde wanted to be known as Oscar Wilde the gay man or Oscar Wilde the great writer? Being gay was incidental. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and it unfortunately wasn’t socially or legally acceptable in his time, but it didn’t define him as a writer. Nor does it Clive Barker, who is very proud to be gay. Steven Spielberg is Jewish. Do you think 100 years from now when people looked him up, all people would find about him was that he was a Jewish man, or do you think he’d rather people read about his accomplishments as a great director, who happened to be of that particular religious view. I know Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t like the “N word” and wouldn’t want to be defined by it, but rather as the man who said this: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” In other words, “Call me Alex.” If that’s alarming to anybody, than I’m a little alarmed at them. But hey, maybe that’s just the Aspergers talking, right?

@Glen Simpson:

Great point. But I think the speech failed because it didn’t draw a line between, on the one hand, using the word “mutant” as an instrument to forcefully and unecessarily set appart people that are essentially the same and, on the other hand, simply using it to describe people with certain genetic/social/fenotypical characteristics.

Applying what Havok’s speech to your example, he would have said that “left-handed person” is the “L-word” (“L-expression”, in this case”), which is weird to say the least

@Leandro – I guess I just took that as a given. He’s not talking to scientists or geneticists, he’s talking to regular people. So in his philosophy, regular people have no reason to use the word mutant on a day-to-day basis.

In some ways this ties to the whole business of why Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are heroes but the X-Men are freaks, because for some irrational reason the general public in the Marvel U thinks gaining powers through some accident is OK but being born with them is freaky.

@Christopher Moonlight – I think Spielberg would like to be remembered as a great director who was Jewish. I think Oscar Wilde would have be thrilled to see a world where the fact that he was gay was just as celebrated as his writing. Because I think you’re mistaken to say that neither of those facts define them as creators.

It’s been well established in Wilde biographies that he didn’t start to really flourish as a writer until he embraced his homosexuality. Furthermore, The Picture of Dorian Gray was roundly denounced when it came out because of the homoerotic undertones. And the “living a double life” theme returns over and over again in his work, because that’s what he was doing in his life. And he was imprisoned because he dared to love another man publicly. You can’t say “it’s not important to who he was” when his life was DESTROYED by anti-gay bigotry, driving him to an early grave. Maybe you don’t think it was important to his WORK, but it was a driving force in his LIFE, behind who he WAS.

Spielberg, meanwhile, has directed a number of films dealing with bigotry in its various stripes, not just anti-Semitism but also racism, and has set up a Holocaust remembrance project that records the testimony of survivors. Does he want his Jewishness ignored? I’m sure if you mentioned it to him, he’d smack you across the face. He grew up knowing that up until the year before he was born, people across the Atlantic were being slaughtered by the MILLIONS for a heritage they shared. Forget Schindler’s List, anti-Semitism still shaped who Spielberg IS.

Speaking as a woman, I can tell you that I don’t want my femaleness ignored when it comes to anything I do. I don’t want to be successful on the grounds of people pretending I’m not a woman, or “in spite” of the fact that I’m a woman, I want to be successful because people get over their preconceptions and entrenched prejudices, and accept my gender as part of the whole package. MLK said he didn’t want his children judged by the color of their skin, but I doubt he wanted it to be ignored either. Because you know what that says to women or people of color? It says “You’re so great I forgot you were black/a woman!” As if either of those things are mutually exclusive to achievement.

When the rights of your people are attacked, severely restricted, when your people have historically been imprisoned, killed, enslaved, raped, deprived of property and suffrage (and still are in certain parts of the world), or been told there are certain things they are constitutionally incapable of doing (e.g. reading, science, math, politics) because of WHO THEY ARE, it is a MASSIVE insult to suggest they aren’t profoundly shaped by that history. You even point out that “media inflates and perpetuates stereotypes”–as if the media starts out with clean hands, instead of being founded on the same prejudices as the rest of society. I don’t know a single woman, LGBT person, or person of color who doesn’t rail against the stereotypes the media perpetuates about them.

So when it comes to mutants in the Marvel Universe, who have historically been attacked, legally and physically, by homo sapiens, it rings so, so false to have Havok disown that identity. And I note that the person who wrote this scene is a straight white man. In my experience, straight white men are very, very fond of telling everyone else to stop talking about how “We’re all one race– the human race! I’m not a feminist, I’m an equalist! Love who you want, but don’t shove it in my face!” Each and every one of those phrases is guaranteed to piss off the group they’re directed to. Because IF ONLY it were that easy for us.

Ugh, in that last paragraph of mine, put “their differences” after “stop talking about”.

@Glenn Simpson: I wholeheartedly agree with you. Also, @Christopher Moonlight above also sums up brilliantly the problem that apparently Remender was trying to tackle. It really is something that plagues our society, and even worse than that is the fact that so few people realize how stupid this custom of sticking labels to people really is (with mainstream media being the greatest perpetuators of this shameful practice).

My problem with the speech is that – in my opinion – there was a gap between what Remender wanted to convey and what he actually had the character say.

I’m going to go out on the limb and await for someone to inevitably cut the limb while I’m out there. I don’t see what the character Alex says as being offensive at all. He’s asking to be included. If you swapped out today’s difficult social norm identifiers, it would make complete sense. We want identity but also uniqueness. A trans-woman wants to be called “she” and “woman” not a “trans-woman.” How is what Alex saying any different? He’s saying “mutant” is a label based on something physical that he had no choice in making. He identifies as a man and wants to be called a man. And like story arcs historically show us, he will probably change his own view of himself at least twice the way other X-gened people have.

Given Marvel’s sliding time scale, I think it’s safe to assume that Hiroshima is, no longer, part of Sunfire’s origin. If his mother died, then, the character would be pushing 70.

@Amber, a transwoman asks to be called “she” because she IDENTIFIES as a woman. But when lawmakers try to tell her she can’t get hormone therapy or change her gender on state documents or use women’s bathrooms, or when she’s beaten, raped, and/or killed for being trans (as far, far too many trans people are) saying “we’re all human, let’s get along” is a sick joke.

What I took away from this was Alex Summers denouncing his brother’s hubris while asking the world to start referring to mutants as “Alexes”.

Doesn’t it all depend on the connotations attached to the word in question? Of course “the L-word sounds weird;
Wog isn’t an acceptable word to describe African-Americans in the USA, but it is widely used in Australia with fewer negative connotations for a different ethnic group.
Mutant-kind’s reputation has recently been tainted in the Marvel universe so Havok wishes to dissociate himself from the connotations the word carries at the moment. I say fair enough.