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zenosanalytic · 4 years

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HoXPoX Liveblog: Powers of X#5

Keeping it going with PoX5! As Always; The Link vuv

Continuing the HoXPoX readthrough with Powers of X#5! Cover's another Savage Land variant the character drawing isn't AS extreme as the last one, tho the women are still preternaturally thin and Jean's boobs have that unnaturally robust&high tacked-on look so common to comics :T

Opening X Quote: "they will think we are doing one thing, but the truth is we are doing something altogether different". DECEPTION!!! I'm wondering when Moira's gonna come back into this story given her disappearance from the middle books.

X0: The XMen, Dallas TX, Year 1. Xavier's talking to Forge aboout making the mind-copying upgrades to Cerebro. SUMMARY TECHNICAL DIALOGUE my favorite owo owo owo There's talking in a room filled with this cool Ocean hologram and I love it.

(also they're not using the awful color scheme of 80s&90s Forge, which I thank them for -____-)

Here's a question: is there any discourse out there abt how MUCH LIKE Forge Solid Snake looks? Cuz they look father and son :| :|

AAAUUUGH This Maniacal Xavier face has slain me! I will Share It uwu:

GAAAAAAH LOOK AT THIS MANIPULATIVE NERD!!! i love him uvu uvu uvu

Infopage on Cerebro 7.0 Most of it's just worldbuilding technical summary, but there's an interesting tidbit that Xavier has replaced his own "self" with a previous "copy" twice. Wonder if we'll learn about those instances :?

AHHH Also: Moira's in a No Place(basically Krakoa pocket-planes that are undetectable&impenetrable). Wonder what she's up to?

Cut to X1 Year 10, the Louvre. Mags and Xavier are confronting Frost over something infront of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, no time to go into the symbolism of that just now. The questionable motivation and involvement with the Cult of the Great Gods seems telling.

there are more basic lvls to it tho: Nike's in the background, Xavier looking at it, when he asks her to help them form a government for Krakoa; the implication, he's looking/considering their victory, is obvsl. It's above him as he explains his drug masterstroke to her.

There's an interesting thing here where Mags is positioned as the mid-point/referee/border btw Emma and Charles. When X mentions the nation of Krakoa, she turns to Mags as someone she trusts to be the "voice of reason" against concentrating mutants in one place(risking Genoa)

idk how common it's been leading up to this series, but I like how HoXPoX recognizes the recklessness danger Xavier's maximalist dedication to Mainstreaming sometimes puts mutants in.

to be clear XMen villains positions were often explicitly and cartoonishly villainous and self-serving(for instance Hellfire was long just cartoonish mutant supremacist aristos, much like Mags), but this reimagining along more preservationist lines allows it to be a real argument

Like: theyre positing a Frost for whom the Hellfire Club/Corp was a way to live unseen among humans, wielding power in a way that could carve some safety out for some mutants. I think that's a bit charitable given the clear class elements of Hellfire's role in the canon but still

"This is that day youve been waiting for/to make right what went wrong" they say, Nike behind Mags(he'd just told Frost abt their repop plans; signaling he'd convinced her to listen?)

!!This is interesting: She asks how it's going to be different than all the other times, Mags says "let us show you" and presents one of the Krakoa flowers... but it's in something which looks A LOT like the "Seer Self" of the elder from PoX4!!

Cut to Later, Krakoa XD She agrees to help. The negotiate terms. Xavier takes a VERY WEIRD adn formal supplicant posture that I dont know how to describe but it, again, reminiscent of dance, I'll show you:

They offer her control of the Krakoa drug trade&the legitimate face of their diplomacy in exchange for two governing seats and bring Shaw back into Hellfire to run covert ops, Frost's face is Priceless:

an infopage on the initial gov-structure of Krakoa, "the Quiet Council" it DOES NOT seem like a great system AT ALL; twelve person unelected council, half of the membership secret, Krakoa itself only gets one seat/vote though technically two in its "faction" with cypher.

Honestly this seems most like a cabinet without a head of state? Of the members we know, each is head of a particular department or major faction(X the Xmen, Mags the brotherhood, ect) Seems guaranteed to encourage factionalism, backroom conspiracism, and opacity

Cut to later that year, Xavier offering citizenship and safety on Krakoa, various cuts of "villains" hearing his offer telepathically(including a p cool redesign for OmegaRed and his allies), ending somewhere which looks like its underwater(Atlantis?).

Yup it's Namor(who I guess is a mutant now?? Wasnt aware of that). Namor rejects the offer, and questions Xavier's sincerity in belief in mutant(and X's own) superiority(as Namor pegs the reasoning behind Krakoa).

I know I keep saying this but the supremacist vibe of all this is disquieting. You can be right abt mutant persecution without ALSO being right that mutant life is "more valuable" than others, esp when "value" is just an utterly noxious moral standard to begin with.

Cut back to X3 Phalanx presents its terms. The elder is destroyed. The Librarian has Questions, asking Nimrod to extrapolate what's going on(Nimrod believes Phalanx has agreed) Nice joke here: "primordial Kirbons" for Jack Kirby. Paying him would have been better :T

The gist: Blackholes are a gigantic networked Machine-Brains, Phalanxes are created by this to hunt for societies worth adding to its intelligence, the Phalanx as agreed to incorporate them but needs energy to do this, it will eat the entire planet to power the transfer. Oops.

Another infopage of Society types, this time universe-spanning. Adding Titans(singularity intellects), Strongholds(allied titans fighting to consume others), and Dominions(allied strongholds which are effectively gods) All transcend time(interesting implications re Moira)

Another interesting bit: Dominions are noted as fearing Galactus and The Phoenix as possible threats. The Phoenix of course can use human-mutants as hosts.

Hmm, it ends with a Namor quote. Interesting...

That was a Good and Dense one ^v^ I'll have to think about it for a bit, but I'm getting the feeling that, basically, the Mutants are working on a way to achieve the same sort of "transcendence" as the machine-society path, but their own way, and mechsocs fear this(Phoenix).

Also I'm curious how the Celestials fit into all this. Mutants are the result of thier experimentation, so could it be that they are a sort of forerunner of a biological second option to the more common machine-ascendancy, which mechsocs wrok hard to prevent arising again?

The idea being that there are at least two paths to "transcendence"; one biological,communal, andindividual-preserving through pseudomagical "mutation"/self-directed evolution/cybernetics, and the more common machine-intelligence-consumption route.

#Hickman et al #X Men #Marvel #HoXPoX #Powers of X 5 #Powers of X #HoXPoX Liveblog #zA Liveblogs

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