WIDW #12 - House of M + DeciMation!
Nov. 11th, 2005 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Some spoilers for Marvel's HoM and Decimation if you don't already know, so all of it's going behind a cut.
Let's start with two basic plans that Marvel went with that I'm going to stick to, and then go my own way with:
1) House of M is generally as described, with Wanda reshaping reality to one that gives the heroes what they want and at the same time making Magneto in charge.
2) At the end, Decimation drastically reduces the mutant population.
-
Okay, so we had House of M, which was an okay but not great story involving Wanda changing reality so that mutants rule the world. Mostly it was seemingly designed to lead into Decimation, where the mutant population is drastically reduced. Here, there were good initial ideas behind the whole thing, but it wasn't executed very well.
The biggest problem, off the top of my head, for House of M, they didn't really delve into the whole question of 'should we try to change things back' as much as they should have. Sure, it was wrong to change the world, but on the whole there was the argument that, 'on balance, the world is better as it was'. Humans were an underclass but weren't horribly mistreated like mutants were in the normal world. In some titles they were organizations trying to turn humans into mutants to 'elevate' them, but I didn't see any organized oppression aside from terrorist groups and isolated countries. Yet only a couple people even mentioned the idea of leaving things as they were. And here's the big one... MYSTIQUE was on the fricken heroes side on this, with no explanation. If anyone, I'd think she would have thought, 'Hey, this world is a hell of a lot better than the one where I'm a wanted fugitive with a death sentence hanging over me, and my people are being exterminated in many places.'. But no, once she's filled in on the fact that reality has been changed, she teams up with everyone else to reverse it. That's just pisspoor writing. It also had some pacing problems, but I'll leave that be, it's Bendis.
My other annoyance was the HoM tie ins were poorly planned, projecting wildly different views of HoM, sometimes (from what I've heard) with completely different characterizations, and none really tied into the main story. From what I understand we have a plot in the Spider-Man HoM that has him losing all his fame and such without ever knowing about his real life, and yet in the main HoM book he's just walking along minding his own business when he's filled in on what happened.
So, HoM, here's What I'd Do:
1) More focus on whether it's the right thing to do. If that means adding an issue or two, so be it. Ideally, have at least two groups of people who get 'awakened' to their memories of the old reality - those who want to change it, and those who want to keep things the way they are. This can not only make the basic HoM story a lot more interesting, it can also lead to cool story developments after HoM, if some of the people who wanted things to stay the same were heroes. They fought against their friends and lost, on what would surely be a contentious moral issue. Let's play that up. Have it happen realistically, and, if necessary, paint the House of M world as a little more positive place to live. Not perfect, mind you, but ambiguous.
2) More co-ordination with the House of M tie-ins. Either they should be completely separate from the House of M (taking place in another part of the world with characters not appearing in the main HoM story), or they should tie in heavily. If you have a mini where Doctor Doom plots to gain the upper hand on Magneto, don't have him show up at Mags' birthday celebration as though everything is fine and DO NOTHING. Have him try something in the main book (like maybe, if he learned the truth about Wanda, trying to seize her for his own ends) just as a key moment arises. Have him try something in his tie-in book and be destroyed and not in the final battle. Don't have him in both. Likewise, if Wolverine or Spider-Man is in the main House of M title from the very beginning, it's not a good idea to have a HoM tie in.
Also, I would have really shifted the New X-Men tie in around a lot. It just seemed a bit too hokey to make everyone overly evil. SHIELD members happily trying to kill their teammates for being in the wrong place. The theme for this whole House of M event, more than any other, should be "everybody thinks they're right", rather than anyone being outright villains in the scenario. If Laurie and her father have their own sinister agenda, it should be because they believe they're right. The heroes who fight to keep the world as it is, do so because they think it's right (or more right, anyway). Also I would have used the opportunity to bring Illyana back to the main world, but portrayed better than she was in HoM.
Other HoM tie-in changes I would have liked to see... The Uncanny crossover was pretty bad, but it's Claremont. I still would have liked to see something done with the idea of Nocturne as a daughter of the Scarlet Witch, and thus related to Magneto, rather than it just being an excuse to chase her and get into a fight.
I'd have liked to see at least one House of M title that was like a little anthology series of parts of the Marvel U we don't normally get to see, in the House of M. I mean, nobody would buy, say, Power Pack: House of M, but maybe a few pages in this anthology series would have been fun to see.
Decimation:
Okay, so you want to drastically reduce the mutant population. Fair enough, I could see that being a good idea. But don't do it by completely savaging the B-list characters and leaving the main ones untouched except for a token couple of characters.
1) Big mutant communities are no more. No more Mutant Town, no more Genosha, no weird Arctic Colony that should never have been there in the first place. That's a fair enough change, although Mutant Town has the potential for a lot of stories (one could still have it after the change, if mutants decide to gather in one place).
2) YES, there are still new mutants going to be popping up. Not all the time, use some restraint on it, but putting a complete moratorium on new mutants is a bad idea IMHO. One of the small joys in the X-universe is following a new mutant from their introduction to... well, where ever they wind up, storywise. Maybe they'll make it onto a team. Maybe they'llbe a cool supporting character. The rule of thumb for creating new mutants is that the story should be about them, and every mutant should be important: Don't do a story about a mutant community if only one mutant plays a part in the story and the rest are nameless mutant faces. But you can still do 'lone mutant' stories, or about a new batch of mutant villains. (Because as things stand currently with Marvel's policy, there's no room for new mutant villains, and that's a bad thing, considering how few good ones they've had)
3) The following mutants (off the top of my head) get depowered, from the core casts:
Xavier: Let him cope without being a mutant and still deciding to hold onto his dream for mutant human coexistance.
Alex: He loses his powers, while his brother keeps his. Will he still be an X-Man? Can he find a place for himself?
Gambit: His role on the team is more about being a master thief than about being a mutant anyway, and there could be good stories from him sticking around.
Iceman: Because you have to have one of the original batch go down.
Warren: He's already lost his wings once and had them replaced by technology. It might be interesting to see him attempt to try it on his own, although without Apocalypse interference.
Lorna: Never liked her. Yes, it's lame, but it's my WIDW. Go do your own if you want to keep her. :)
Psylocke: We have too many telepaths/telekinetics or whatever it is she is now, and her backstory's too convoluted. She should have just stayed dead, really.
Sage: She works fine as a really smart human, which is what she was for most of her early appearances. Plus this gets rid of her magic 'jump start' powers.
I'd almost suggest the seriously timeforbed characters like Bishop, Rachel, and Cable simply 'disappear'. They may be dead, maybe alive, but 'elsewhere', but for now, they're gone from the MU. I like some of them, so I can't definitively say that it's something I'd do, but I'd strongly consider it. It might even make a nifty side title - Cable, Bishop, Rachel, Nocturne, and a couple other characters get shunted to another world. I'd say get rid of Cable at least. I think Cable & Deadpool would work fine as just Deadpool. Or Deadpool could go along on the 'alternate timeline characters team book' seeing as how he's linked to Cable now. That might be fun, actually. Maybe call it X-Men: The Lost.
Out of New X-Men, the following:
Jay Guthrie, Kevin/Wither, Rockslide, Tag, Noriko, Josh/Elixir, most of the background mutants. Although it might be interesting to play with the idea that Josh keeps them and eventually learns he can restore mutancy with his powers. From faculty, maybe Karma. Her power always struck me as almost incidental to her character, and at the same time potentially way too powerful (possessing multiple people at once kinda auto-defeats most threats that could come to the kids, unless they always happen to have some defense). This leaves us with a 'new class' of Sofia, Hellion, Dust, Mercury, David/Prodigy, Laurie, and maybe a couple newish characters. They would comprise the bulk of the 'young students' of Xavier's, many of the rest having been turned into humans (some of whom might still stick around in a supporting capacity if their family won't accept them). I wouldn't add X-23 to the cast unless I absolutely had to. If I did, I'd probably cut Laurie, because there are probably too many girls on the cast. I'd like to keep the Stepford Cuckoos as powered, but not have them actually on the New X-Men team, so maybe there'd still be a couple mutant squads at the school. Or maybe just two, with NXM focusing on the main one and the others being supporting characters.
From mutants not currently in any casts:
Jubilee - Her powers aren't really all that unique, and she's one of those characters that could still be pretty cool even without powers.
Magma - Another character with a backstory too complicated to use much anyway - she's been part of a lost roman colony, then English and brainwashed to think she was, then Roman and brainwashed to think the was English and brainwashed. Just have her human.
Callisto - But, because her octopus arms are the result of someone else tampering with her body, this is one of the few things that does not get undone.
As you may notice, most of the casts of most books have lost some of their big names. (I deliberately excluded Astonishing, because I think that cast works pretty well as it is - however, I would work it into the story, say with something along the lines of 'everyone who was 'awakened' by Layla are automatically among the ones with powers, and make sure that only those who keep their powers are there when Wanda erases mutants. Everyone who wasn't gets a chance to lose their powers). I did this for a couple reasons. One, I think it's really cheap to do this massive world-changing thing with almost every mutant in the world losing their powers... but the X-Men lose, at last count, exactly one member who's been in the X-books regularly over the last few years. CHEAP. If you're going to do it, make it count, for everyone. Every mutant should lose people important to them.
So how do the X-Men team handle it? Some of the depowered X-Men will leave for normal lives, others will advise, but that leaves only one complete team and fragments of others. So, they do more heavy recruiting with some of the B or C list mutants, the New Mutants or Gen X graduates. Yes, give them some spotlight. Sure, they're not as popular, but they never will be if they're always standing in the shadows of the big guns and shoved out in favour of them. So Whedon's team is the public face of the X-Men - they want to keep it more or less unchanged, show a strong united front in the face of the drastic changes in the world. The other two teams handle other missions and work on getting newer members up to speed on what it is to be X-Men.
4) Creative team changes.
We'll just have to get rid of Milligan and Claremont on the main books. Milligan's just been bad and Claremont? Claremont's like that favorite uncle you had who always had a great joke. Except, he's gotten old and a little bit senile and so he mostly sticks to telling 3 old jokes you've heard a thousand times, every time you see him, and when he tries anything else, he rambles, gets confused, forgets the punchline, or ends up telling a completely different joke from the one he started with. You can respect him, love him, even laugh once in a while, but all in all it's probably just kinder to shoot him in the head. No, wait, that metaphor wasn't what I intended, on either side. What I mean is, it's time to let other people tell most of the jokes at the family reunion. Replace them with... I don't know, Pak maybe and someone else, I dunno, Vaughan for the sake of this column. New X-Men... I don't know, I'm starting to feel maybe it is a bit of a time for a change, but I would like to see what Weir & DeFillipis would have done with a dramatically reduced cast and more freedom to have the kids go out and interact with the world and such. Still, Yost and Kyle did okay on their first issue out, although I don't like having X-23.
Bachalo goes too.
5) Where Do We Go From Here?
The world has drastically changed. So how does it look in the aftermath. Well, part of it depends on the circumstances. I've already mentioned this in a number of places, but one of my beefs with Decimation is how inconsistently the 'depowerings' work. Most people seem to have their bodies completely reconstructed as though they were human - others for no apparently reason wind up deformed. Blob loses his fat, but not the skin, yet Beak gets a perfectly human face - he's not left with the skin over his face deformed. Iceman becomes human when he's completely ice, but Chamber returns to a body with a gaping hole in his chest, even though his mutation is that he IS the biokinetic energy, not the body it happens to be housed in (and, since he's already blown up and completely reconstructed his body before from what I've heard, his entire body is a mutant construction). I bet if Angel were depowered, (still no word on him) he'd lose his wings and his hollow bones, despite what havoc that should play with his size and such.
So, in my HoM world, we choose one or the other - either mutants get their bodies completely reshapen, or they do not - leaving us with a whole subpopulation of people who are technically not mutants, but still look like mutants. I lean towards reshapings, because it's easier, but there are some cool story ideas by not doing that.
In addition to the usual ratcheting up of hate, I think some people would probably realize that, with scarcity, mutants have become a much more valuable resource. Countries that previously had plenty of mutants now may only have one or two... and, afraid that their enemies are doing the same thing, would probably jump to draft them. Crime, too. When you don't have to worry that the police may have a better mutant on their side, having one of your own is a much more powerful weapon.
Among the ex-mutants, a significant portion are going to be trying to repower themselves through other means, like drugs like Mutant Growth Hormone - some might even be successful. Perhaps an ongoing plot might have an X-Men character who's been absent since before HoM show up, everyone's relieved they have powers, but they're actually taking drugs to keep them up.
X-Factor and some of the other books can tackle the issues involving ex-mutants out in the world, but we also have all the ex-mutants at Xavier's to deal with. Current books seem to have them going more isolationist, expelling all the humans for their own safety. I might actually want to see this go the other way - they open up the school to everyone. Mutants, ex-mutants, always humans, even aliens are welcome at Xavier's. They'd still suffer a big loss in population as parents take their now human children out of danger, but some human kids have nowhere to go. The school'd get accused of using the human kids as 'human shields' by some of the more rabid anti-mutants, and there'd be some resentment of ex-mutants for the ones still with powers, could be a lot of story fodder there. This might also be a little bit of a better reason to have the Sentinels stationed there. To ensure that Xavier's remains a safe haven (since they never cared about that before when the school was all mutants).
Now, it's still a little early to be judging all of Decimation, so who knows, maybe what they've got planned will turn out better. I just wanted to get my thoughts down before I forget them.
Let's start with two basic plans that Marvel went with that I'm going to stick to, and then go my own way with:
1) House of M is generally as described, with Wanda reshaping reality to one that gives the heroes what they want and at the same time making Magneto in charge.
2) At the end, Decimation drastically reduces the mutant population.
-
Okay, so we had House of M, which was an okay but not great story involving Wanda changing reality so that mutants rule the world. Mostly it was seemingly designed to lead into Decimation, where the mutant population is drastically reduced. Here, there were good initial ideas behind the whole thing, but it wasn't executed very well.
The biggest problem, off the top of my head, for House of M, they didn't really delve into the whole question of 'should we try to change things back' as much as they should have. Sure, it was wrong to change the world, but on the whole there was the argument that, 'on balance, the world is better as it was'. Humans were an underclass but weren't horribly mistreated like mutants were in the normal world. In some titles they were organizations trying to turn humans into mutants to 'elevate' them, but I didn't see any organized oppression aside from terrorist groups and isolated countries. Yet only a couple people even mentioned the idea of leaving things as they were. And here's the big one... MYSTIQUE was on the fricken heroes side on this, with no explanation. If anyone, I'd think she would have thought, 'Hey, this world is a hell of a lot better than the one where I'm a wanted fugitive with a death sentence hanging over me, and my people are being exterminated in many places.'. But no, once she's filled in on the fact that reality has been changed, she teams up with everyone else to reverse it. That's just pisspoor writing. It also had some pacing problems, but I'll leave that be, it's Bendis.
My other annoyance was the HoM tie ins were poorly planned, projecting wildly different views of HoM, sometimes (from what I've heard) with completely different characterizations, and none really tied into the main story. From what I understand we have a plot in the Spider-Man HoM that has him losing all his fame and such without ever knowing about his real life, and yet in the main HoM book he's just walking along minding his own business when he's filled in on what happened.
So, HoM, here's What I'd Do:
1) More focus on whether it's the right thing to do. If that means adding an issue or two, so be it. Ideally, have at least two groups of people who get 'awakened' to their memories of the old reality - those who want to change it, and those who want to keep things the way they are. This can not only make the basic HoM story a lot more interesting, it can also lead to cool story developments after HoM, if some of the people who wanted things to stay the same were heroes. They fought against their friends and lost, on what would surely be a contentious moral issue. Let's play that up. Have it happen realistically, and, if necessary, paint the House of M world as a little more positive place to live. Not perfect, mind you, but ambiguous.
2) More co-ordination with the House of M tie-ins. Either they should be completely separate from the House of M (taking place in another part of the world with characters not appearing in the main HoM story), or they should tie in heavily. If you have a mini where Doctor Doom plots to gain the upper hand on Magneto, don't have him show up at Mags' birthday celebration as though everything is fine and DO NOTHING. Have him try something in the main book (like maybe, if he learned the truth about Wanda, trying to seize her for his own ends) just as a key moment arises. Have him try something in his tie-in book and be destroyed and not in the final battle. Don't have him in both. Likewise, if Wolverine or Spider-Man is in the main House of M title from the very beginning, it's not a good idea to have a HoM tie in.
Also, I would have really shifted the New X-Men tie in around a lot. It just seemed a bit too hokey to make everyone overly evil. SHIELD members happily trying to kill their teammates for being in the wrong place. The theme for this whole House of M event, more than any other, should be "everybody thinks they're right", rather than anyone being outright villains in the scenario. If Laurie and her father have their own sinister agenda, it should be because they believe they're right. The heroes who fight to keep the world as it is, do so because they think it's right (or more right, anyway). Also I would have used the opportunity to bring Illyana back to the main world, but portrayed better than she was in HoM.
Other HoM tie-in changes I would have liked to see... The Uncanny crossover was pretty bad, but it's Claremont. I still would have liked to see something done with the idea of Nocturne as a daughter of the Scarlet Witch, and thus related to Magneto, rather than it just being an excuse to chase her and get into a fight.
I'd have liked to see at least one House of M title that was like a little anthology series of parts of the Marvel U we don't normally get to see, in the House of M. I mean, nobody would buy, say, Power Pack: House of M, but maybe a few pages in this anthology series would have been fun to see.
Decimation:
Okay, so you want to drastically reduce the mutant population. Fair enough, I could see that being a good idea. But don't do it by completely savaging the B-list characters and leaving the main ones untouched except for a token couple of characters.
1) Big mutant communities are no more. No more Mutant Town, no more Genosha, no weird Arctic Colony that should never have been there in the first place. That's a fair enough change, although Mutant Town has the potential for a lot of stories (one could still have it after the change, if mutants decide to gather in one place).
2) YES, there are still new mutants going to be popping up. Not all the time, use some restraint on it, but putting a complete moratorium on new mutants is a bad idea IMHO. One of the small joys in the X-universe is following a new mutant from their introduction to... well, where ever they wind up, storywise. Maybe they'll make it onto a team. Maybe they'llbe a cool supporting character. The rule of thumb for creating new mutants is that the story should be about them, and every mutant should be important: Don't do a story about a mutant community if only one mutant plays a part in the story and the rest are nameless mutant faces. But you can still do 'lone mutant' stories, or about a new batch of mutant villains. (Because as things stand currently with Marvel's policy, there's no room for new mutant villains, and that's a bad thing, considering how few good ones they've had)
3) The following mutants (off the top of my head) get depowered, from the core casts:
Xavier: Let him cope without being a mutant and still deciding to hold onto his dream for mutant human coexistance.
Alex: He loses his powers, while his brother keeps his. Will he still be an X-Man? Can he find a place for himself?
Gambit: His role on the team is more about being a master thief than about being a mutant anyway, and there could be good stories from him sticking around.
Iceman: Because you have to have one of the original batch go down.
Warren: He's already lost his wings once and had them replaced by technology. It might be interesting to see him attempt to try it on his own, although without Apocalypse interference.
Lorna: Never liked her. Yes, it's lame, but it's my WIDW. Go do your own if you want to keep her. :)
Psylocke: We have too many telepaths/telekinetics or whatever it is she is now, and her backstory's too convoluted. She should have just stayed dead, really.
Sage: She works fine as a really smart human, which is what she was for most of her early appearances. Plus this gets rid of her magic 'jump start' powers.
I'd almost suggest the seriously timeforbed characters like Bishop, Rachel, and Cable simply 'disappear'. They may be dead, maybe alive, but 'elsewhere', but for now, they're gone from the MU. I like some of them, so I can't definitively say that it's something I'd do, but I'd strongly consider it. It might even make a nifty side title - Cable, Bishop, Rachel, Nocturne, and a couple other characters get shunted to another world. I'd say get rid of Cable at least. I think Cable & Deadpool would work fine as just Deadpool. Or Deadpool could go along on the 'alternate timeline characters team book' seeing as how he's linked to Cable now. That might be fun, actually. Maybe call it X-Men: The Lost.
Out of New X-Men, the following:
Jay Guthrie, Kevin/Wither, Rockslide, Tag, Noriko, Josh/Elixir, most of the background mutants. Although it might be interesting to play with the idea that Josh keeps them and eventually learns he can restore mutancy with his powers. From faculty, maybe Karma. Her power always struck me as almost incidental to her character, and at the same time potentially way too powerful (possessing multiple people at once kinda auto-defeats most threats that could come to the kids, unless they always happen to have some defense). This leaves us with a 'new class' of Sofia, Hellion, Dust, Mercury, David/Prodigy, Laurie, and maybe a couple newish characters. They would comprise the bulk of the 'young students' of Xavier's, many of the rest having been turned into humans (some of whom might still stick around in a supporting capacity if their family won't accept them). I wouldn't add X-23 to the cast unless I absolutely had to. If I did, I'd probably cut Laurie, because there are probably too many girls on the cast. I'd like to keep the Stepford Cuckoos as powered, but not have them actually on the New X-Men team, so maybe there'd still be a couple mutant squads at the school. Or maybe just two, with NXM focusing on the main one and the others being supporting characters.
From mutants not currently in any casts:
Jubilee - Her powers aren't really all that unique, and she's one of those characters that could still be pretty cool even without powers.
Magma - Another character with a backstory too complicated to use much anyway - she's been part of a lost roman colony, then English and brainwashed to think she was, then Roman and brainwashed to think the was English and brainwashed. Just have her human.
Callisto - But, because her octopus arms are the result of someone else tampering with her body, this is one of the few things that does not get undone.
As you may notice, most of the casts of most books have lost some of their big names. (I deliberately excluded Astonishing, because I think that cast works pretty well as it is - however, I would work it into the story, say with something along the lines of 'everyone who was 'awakened' by Layla are automatically among the ones with powers, and make sure that only those who keep their powers are there when Wanda erases mutants. Everyone who wasn't gets a chance to lose their powers). I did this for a couple reasons. One, I think it's really cheap to do this massive world-changing thing with almost every mutant in the world losing their powers... but the X-Men lose, at last count, exactly one member who's been in the X-books regularly over the last few years. CHEAP. If you're going to do it, make it count, for everyone. Every mutant should lose people important to them.
So how do the X-Men team handle it? Some of the depowered X-Men will leave for normal lives, others will advise, but that leaves only one complete team and fragments of others. So, they do more heavy recruiting with some of the B or C list mutants, the New Mutants or Gen X graduates. Yes, give them some spotlight. Sure, they're not as popular, but they never will be if they're always standing in the shadows of the big guns and shoved out in favour of them. So Whedon's team is the public face of the X-Men - they want to keep it more or less unchanged, show a strong united front in the face of the drastic changes in the world. The other two teams handle other missions and work on getting newer members up to speed on what it is to be X-Men.
4) Creative team changes.
We'll just have to get rid of Milligan and Claremont on the main books. Milligan's just been bad and Claremont? Claremont's like that favorite uncle you had who always had a great joke. Except, he's gotten old and a little bit senile and so he mostly sticks to telling 3 old jokes you've heard a thousand times, every time you see him, and when he tries anything else, he rambles, gets confused, forgets the punchline, or ends up telling a completely different joke from the one he started with. You can respect him, love him, even laugh once in a while, but all in all it's probably just kinder to shoot him in the head. No, wait, that metaphor wasn't what I intended, on either side. What I mean is, it's time to let other people tell most of the jokes at the family reunion. Replace them with... I don't know, Pak maybe and someone else, I dunno, Vaughan for the sake of this column. New X-Men... I don't know, I'm starting to feel maybe it is a bit of a time for a change, but I would like to see what Weir & DeFillipis would have done with a dramatically reduced cast and more freedom to have the kids go out and interact with the world and such. Still, Yost and Kyle did okay on their first issue out, although I don't like having X-23.
Bachalo goes too.
5) Where Do We Go From Here?
The world has drastically changed. So how does it look in the aftermath. Well, part of it depends on the circumstances. I've already mentioned this in a number of places, but one of my beefs with Decimation is how inconsistently the 'depowerings' work. Most people seem to have their bodies completely reconstructed as though they were human - others for no apparently reason wind up deformed. Blob loses his fat, but not the skin, yet Beak gets a perfectly human face - he's not left with the skin over his face deformed. Iceman becomes human when he's completely ice, but Chamber returns to a body with a gaping hole in his chest, even though his mutation is that he IS the biokinetic energy, not the body it happens to be housed in (and, since he's already blown up and completely reconstructed his body before from what I've heard, his entire body is a mutant construction). I bet if Angel were depowered, (still no word on him) he'd lose his wings and his hollow bones, despite what havoc that should play with his size and such.
So, in my HoM world, we choose one or the other - either mutants get their bodies completely reshapen, or they do not - leaving us with a whole subpopulation of people who are technically not mutants, but still look like mutants. I lean towards reshapings, because it's easier, but there are some cool story ideas by not doing that.
In addition to the usual ratcheting up of hate, I think some people would probably realize that, with scarcity, mutants have become a much more valuable resource. Countries that previously had plenty of mutants now may only have one or two... and, afraid that their enemies are doing the same thing, would probably jump to draft them. Crime, too. When you don't have to worry that the police may have a better mutant on their side, having one of your own is a much more powerful weapon.
Among the ex-mutants, a significant portion are going to be trying to repower themselves through other means, like drugs like Mutant Growth Hormone - some might even be successful. Perhaps an ongoing plot might have an X-Men character who's been absent since before HoM show up, everyone's relieved they have powers, but they're actually taking drugs to keep them up.
X-Factor and some of the other books can tackle the issues involving ex-mutants out in the world, but we also have all the ex-mutants at Xavier's to deal with. Current books seem to have them going more isolationist, expelling all the humans for their own safety. I might actually want to see this go the other way - they open up the school to everyone. Mutants, ex-mutants, always humans, even aliens are welcome at Xavier's. They'd still suffer a big loss in population as parents take their now human children out of danger, but some human kids have nowhere to go. The school'd get accused of using the human kids as 'human shields' by some of the more rabid anti-mutants, and there'd be some resentment of ex-mutants for the ones still with powers, could be a lot of story fodder there. This might also be a little bit of a better reason to have the Sentinels stationed there. To ensure that Xavier's remains a safe haven (since they never cared about that before when the school was all mutants).
Now, it's still a little early to be judging all of Decimation, so who knows, maybe what they've got planned will turn out better. I just wanted to get my thoughts down before I forget them.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 04:50 pm (UTC)And you are right about Xavier, actually I am going to quote your 'metaphor' (not sure if it is a metaphor, but anyway...) :)
Oh, and to know a bit about other pieces of the HoM universe there was "Secrets of the House of M". No Power Pack, though.
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Date: 2005-11-11 05:12 pm (UTC)As to Secrets of the HoM - I thought that was along the lines of 'Secret Files of Nick Fury' - not actually story in any real sense, but things like profiles of prominent people, etc. There was actually story in it? I should try to track that down.
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Date: 2005-11-11 05:34 pm (UTC)There is no story in Secrets per se, it is a collection of brief (or not so brief) bios of characters. It mentions a number of them that are never seen in the books.