{"id":6722,"date":"2021-05-26T23:04:51","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T22:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6722"},"modified":"2021-05-26T23:04:51","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T22:04:51","slug":"x-men-20-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6722","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #20 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 5 #20
\n“Lost Love”
\nby Jonathan Hickman, Francesco Mobili & Sunny Gho<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1:<\/strong> The face of a damaged Nimrod.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong> “The Oracle”<\/em><\/p>\n

This is Mystique’s underground home, which we last saw in issue #6. The floating mask with the energy effect, which we also saw in that issue, belongs to her late wife Destiny. As shown in that issue and Powers of X\u00a0<\/em>#6\u00a0(among others), Professor X and Magneto signed Mystique up for the Krakoan project on the promise that Destiny would be resurrected. But Destiny can’t be resurrected because of the rule against reviving precognitives: first, she would be able to detect Moira MacTaggert hiding on the island; and second, she would apparently see something pretty alarming about how things turned out. And so Professor X and Magneto have been stringing Mystique along.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Issue #6 included a flashback in which Destiny essentially predicted all this to Mystique. It ends with Destiny telling Mystique to bring her back – “And if you cannot… if they will not… then burn that place to the ground.”<\/p>\n

The floating mask appears to be simply a shrine, rather than something that allows Mystique to commune with Destiny’s spirit.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-6.<\/strong>\u00a0Mystique visits Forge.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mystique is asking for a devastating weapon, and we’re presumably meant to wonder at first whether this is intended for Krakoa. But we establish soon enough that she actually wants it to destroy the Orchis space station (from\u00a0House of X<\/em>), where the Nimrod AI is though to be on the verge of manifesting. This continues a recurring theme in Hickman’s stories of drawing out parallels between Krakoa and Orchis.<\/p>\n

Forge<\/strong>‘s argument for the moral acceptability of what he does boils down to saying that technology is inherently neutral, and it’s all about the people using it; weapons, he suggests, are no more inherently dangerous than any other technology. This is very much not the mindset that’s driving Professor X, Magneto and Moira; based on Moira’s knowledge from her previous lives, they apparently believe that all artificial intelligence is inherently dangerous and must be suppressed.<\/p>\n

Despite this, Forge identifies the “worst weapon I ever built” as “a gun that turned us into them” – i.e., the Neutralizer which temporarily removed Storm’s powers, as seen first in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #184. It’s worth noting that the Neutralizer wasn’t designed\u00a0specifically<\/em> to remove mutant powers – it was a reverse-engineered copy of Rom’s weapon, originally intended for use against the Dire Wraiths. So it is, ultimately, an illustration of the morality of the weapon depending upon who’s using it.<\/p>\n

Forge presumably asks Mystique for more details because his mutant power is intuitive invention; he’s not aware, at least consciously, of the thought processes involved. It makes sense that he would need a clearly defined goal.<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-8.<\/strong>\u00a0Mystique in the House of M.<\/em><\/p>\n

Professor X and Magneto explicitly promise that Destiny will be fast-tracked for resurrection if she succeeds in her mission, which is “preventing Nimrod from coming online”. It’s not clear what they would have done if she’d succeeded; the calculation may well have been that she’d get killed in the process and could be conveniently revived without memory of the promise.<\/p>\n

The secret gate to the Orchis Forge space station was planted by Mystique behind the scenes in\u00a0House of X\u00a0<\/em>#4, as shown in flashback in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #6.<\/p>\n

PAGE 9.<\/strong> Recap.<\/p>\n

PAGES 10-12.<\/strong>\u00a0Alia Gregor revives her husband Erasmus Mendel as Nimrod.<\/em><\/p>\n

The two characters watching from the balcony are Omega Sentinel (Karima Shapandar) and Orchis’ director Killian Devo.<\/p>\n

As in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #6, the parallels between the Orchis Forge and Krakoa are very obvious. Alia has created her own version of Krakoa’s resurrection, albeit with a technological body rather than a biological one. But the basic idea is the same – create a new body and restore the deceased from back-up. On top of that, Alia (like Mystique) is driven by an overriding desire to bring her spouse back to life, rather than showing any particular interest here in Orchis’ anti-mutant agenda. Presumably Orchis sees this whole exercise as having anti-mutant applications, or else they wouldn’t be funding it, but it’s certainly not at the forefront of Alia’s mind, and all the emphasis is on making her a parallel to Mystique.<\/p>\n

Hence Mystique’s reaction in the final panel of page 12. (That’s her with the bag.) The parallels can’t be lost on her. For added parallels, we even had a scene with the Krakoan Forge earlier in the issue.<\/p>\n

PAGES 13-18.<\/strong>\u00a0Mystique is exposed, and Nimrod stops the bomb.<\/em><\/p>\n

The technobabble here is on the heavy side. But the basic idea is clear enough: Nimrod can split into two bodies, one to pursue Mystique and one to deal with the bomb. He can contain the bomb, but that body gets destroyed in the process. And for convoluted reasons that boil down to plot convenience, if one of the bodies is destroyed too soon after his revival, the memories are lost. So Erasmus heroically sacrifices himself\u00a0again<\/em> to save his wife – just like he did in\u00a0House of X<\/em> #3, despite being a villain – and Alia loses him for good.<\/p>\n

As in\u00a0House of X<\/em>, there’s a very strong suggestion here that Professor X and Magneto are actually accelerating the very disaster that they claim to be trying to avert. It was the rise of Krakoa that prompted Orchis to accelerate their plans in\u00a0House of X<\/em>. It was the X-Men’s failed assault on the Orchis Forge that led to Alia accelerating her Nimrod research in order to bring back her husband. And if Mystique had left him alone, they’d have had a Nimrod with a human mind and apparently a degree of decency – instead, they’ve got the AI Nimrod that they always feared, whose first and defining memory is of a mutant assassination attempt. Everything they’ve done has been counter-productive.<\/p>\n

PAGES 19-20.<\/strong> Omega Sentinel and Karima Shapandar.<\/em><\/p>\n

Devo mentions some equivalent tragedy having befallen himself in the past; I don’t think we’ve heard about this before. (We’ve been told that Devo was blind at birth, so it can’t be to do with that.)<\/p>\n

Devo is correct that the gate was planted before he arrived on the station (in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #1).<\/p>\n

He clearly has a point that the Krakoans’ desperate attempts to get rid of Nimrod suggest that the fear and hatred has become mutual – but the obvious difference is that the Krakoans are specifically alarmed about Orchis and its activities, rather than humans in general. That said, the Krakoans have been developing an increasingly mutant-nationalist bent throughout the Hickman era, and are increasingly prone to talking about the humans as their inferiors.<\/p>\n

PAGES 21-22.<\/strong>\u00a0Mystique’s resurrection.<\/em><\/p>\n

She didn’t complete the mission, so Destiny doesn’t get revived. It has to be said that even if you accept that Xavier has a legitimate motivation for trying to stall on her resurrection, he’s being incredibly callous here.<\/p>\n

PAGE 23.<\/strong> Moira’s lair.<\/em><\/p>\n

The narration is Destiny’s prophecy from the flashback in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #6.<\/p>\n

Moira is reading from Destiny’s\u00a0Libris Veritorum<\/em>, the books of prophecy which she wrote after her powers emerged at age 13. She wrote one volume a month for thirteen months before stopping. The books were a major plot point in the early-2000s\u00a0X-Treme X-Men\u00a0<\/em>series, and are shown here as they were depicted in\u00a0X-Treme X-Men<\/em> #1, complete with the cover layout, the month, and the spelling of her name as “Irenie Adler”. Note that there ought to be 13 volumes, but the art only shows nine. It’s possible that the other four are obscured behind other books, of course.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.<\/strong> A trailer for this autumn’s “Inferno” storyline, named after the late-80s crossover, but apparently here referencing Destiny’s command to burn Krakoa to the ground. The Krakoan, obviously, just says INFERNO.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: TO THE STARS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN vol 5 #20 “Lost Love” by Jonathan Hickman, Francesco Mobili & Sunny Gho COVER \/ PAGE 1: The face of a damaged Nimrod. PAGE 2. “The Oracle” This is Mystique’s underground home, which we last saw in issue #6. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6724,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions\/6724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}