{"id":7439,"date":"2021-12-24T23:06:27","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T23:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7439"},"modified":"2021-12-24T23:06:27","modified_gmt":"2021-12-24T23:06:27","slug":"x-men-the-trial-of-magneto-5-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7439","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #5 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #5<\/strong>
\n“To Catch a Toad”<\/strong>
\nby Leah Williams, Lucas Werneck & Edgar Delgado<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Magneto and the Scarlet Witch dancing.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong> The Scarlet Witch names her murderer.<\/em><\/p>\n

This picks up directly from the end of the previous issue.<\/p>\n

“No matter how your magic may or may not have affected Krakoa today…”<\/strong> Northstar is referring to the kaiju attack over the last couple of issues, triggered by Wanda’s traumatic identity crisis.<\/p>\n

PAGE 3.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 4-8.<\/strong>\u00a0The Toad is summarily tried and exiled.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Quiet Council<\/strong> here consists of Professor X, Magneto, Mr Sinister, Exodus, Mystique, Kate Pryde, Emma Frost, Sebastian Shaw, Nightcrawler and Storm. This is before Destiny and Colossus join the Quiet Council in\u00a0Inferno<\/em> (which is obvious from the timeline, as this story takes place in the days immediately following the Hellfire Gala).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Toad<\/strong> is, at first sight, a wildly anticlimactic revelation as the killer. But there’s a twist, and we’ll get to that. We saw him before in issue #1, where he joined the other members of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in a toast to Wanda, and then went on a rather dramatic rant about how her death wasn’t right or fair. Broadly, Toad always had a something of a crush on Wanda, but that storyline never went anywhere.<\/p>\n

As we establish later, Wanda and Magneto actually had a plan to fake her murder so that the Krakoans would accept her rehabilitation (and also because she needed to die and be resurrected in order to carry out the magic). The implication seems to be that the Toad has been enlisted to take the fall, so his\u00a0motivation for being involved in this scheme is mainly his devotion to Magneto – exactly as he says as he’s being taken away. Magneto and Wanda, on the other hand, are being entirely insincere in this scene.<\/p>\n

“Wanda tore the Brotherhood apart!”<\/strong> Toad’s claim here – which he probably doesn’t mean anyway – is inaccurate. Wanda and Pietro left the Brotherhood after\u00a0X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #11, where the Stranger turned Mastermind to stone and abducted Magneto and the Toad. Basically, the team dissolved around them, and only then did they decide to swap sides and join the Avengers.<\/p>\n

“That seems crueler than capital punishment.”<\/strong> It’s not clear what the Avengers have been told about “exile”, but they certainly seem to have the general thrust of it. Wasp and Vision brush it aside on the grounds that “We have no right to dictate Krakoans’ approach to morality”, but\u00a0this is the sort of thing that \u00a0conservatives say to parody liberal moral relativism, and could be used to justify all manner of horrific human rights abuses.<\/p>\n

PAGE 9.<\/strong>\u00a0Magneto cries alone.<\/em><\/p>\n

You see, this whole scheme has been privately very stressful for him. It’s been… a trial. I think this would work better if it wasn’t so obviously bending over backwards to justify the series title.<\/p>\n

PAGE 10.<\/strong>\u00a0Flashback: Wanda and Magneto argue at the Hellfire Gala.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wanda is pitching her scheme, as explained more fully later in the issue.<\/p>\n

PAGE 11.<\/strong> “Data page.” The text explains that Doctor Strange once claimed that there’s no such thing as chaos magic, but he knows better now. This refers to a scene in\u00a0Avengers<\/em> #503 (from “Avengers Disassembled”) where Doctor Strange tells the Avengers that “chaos magic” doesn’t exist and that Wanda is just crazy. This page is trying to finally boot that into touch as part of its general attempt to close the door on everything that Brian Bendis did with Wanda. If this book has its way, we need never speak of it again.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-15.<\/strong>\u00a0The children of Xavier, Magneto and Moira perform a ritual.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wanda’s magic involves a ritual using the children of (apparently) the three most significant figures on Krakoa. She opts for Legion (the son of Professor X), Polaris (the biological daughter of Magneto) and Proteus (the son of Moira MacTaggert). As we find out later, the plan is to create back-ups of all mutants, even pre-Cerebro ones, on the astral plane, thus allowing\u00a0all<\/em> mutants to be resurrected, even those who died before Cerebro came online some time in the early Claremont years.<\/p>\n

Proteus is understandably confused by the suggestion that his mother is somehow significant to Krakoa, since he doesn’t know anything about her involvement in the project, and he still thinks she’s dead.\u00a0Wanda glosses over that – it’s not 100% clear whether she’s simply drawn to him by instinct, or whether she knows from Magneto about Moira’s involvement. Interestingly, she suggests that he has “access to the Astral Plane”, which may be another indication that his reality-warping powers are heavily involved in bringing back the actual souls of resurrected mutants.<\/p>\n

The real point of this scene, though, is to establish Wanda as Magneto’s daughter by virtue of their past relationship, so that she becomes the proper participant to represent him in the ritual. It’s another attempt to, if not reverse a past story, at least bury it under a mound of earth and make it ignorable.<\/p>\n

PAGES 16-18.<\/strong>\u00a0Flashback: Wanda persuades Magneto to get on side with her plan.<\/em><\/p>\n

This spells out the plot mechanics. Wanda wants to atone for M-Day by allowing all mutants from the past to be resurrected. She needed to be resurrected in order to be able to perform the spell at all. She needed Magneto’s help because nobody else would be willing to resurrect her (and indeed, he had to fight for it and eventually collude with Hope). And she needed to fake a murder so that people wouldn’t see it all as a scam. Magneto seems somewhat baffled and overwhelmed by the whole thing, and sort of dragged along in the wake by his love for Wanda. He then goes off and enlists the Toad to take the fall, which Wanda didn’t strictly ask him to do – but by the nature of her scheme, which called for him to arrange her resurrection, she surely can’t have intended him to have posed as the killer himself.<\/p>\n

PAGE 19.<\/strong>\u00a0Northstar learns that his adopted daughter will be resurrected.<\/em><\/p>\n

Joanne Beaubier<\/strong> was an abandoned HIV-positive infant that Northstar found in a dumpster and informally adopted in\u00a0Alpha Flight<\/em> vol 1 #106. She died in the same issue, which was meant to be the catalyst for him coming out. Although her death postdates the start of Cerebro backups, Wanda’s spell also apparently allows the resurrection of mutants who died in the past before their powers emerged.<\/p>\n

PAGES 20-21.<\/strong>\u00a0Thunderbird is resurrected.<\/em><\/p>\n

John, of course, died on his second mission with the X-Men, way back in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #95. He’s the iconic example of an X-Man who got killed, so this is a long-time traumatic event for the X-Men finally being reversed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Hope’s narration seems to be telling us that mutants who don’t want to go through the Crucible can now go through a literal portal to Wanda’s magical “Waiting Room” and simply join the resurrection queue that way. Presumably, if they do it this way, they don’t get to skip to the front.<\/p>\n

The dragon flying around at the end of the scene is presumably Evangeline Whedon, a supporting character from\u00a0X-Treme X-Men<\/em> who had the unlikely power to turn into a dragon when exposed to blood.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-23.<\/strong>\u00a0Wanda and Exodus tell their tale to the children.<\/em><\/p>\n

Exodus is fully on board with the new line on Wanda, apparently, and so his regular fireside chats with the young mutants have U-turned to a pro-Wanda line.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.<\/strong> “Data page.” This is Wanda’s sigil and the logo from her 2016 solo series. At the centre of the sigil is a shape which doubles as an “M” and an outline of her headdress.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: INFERNO.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #5 “To Catch a Toad” by Leah Williams, Lucas Werneck & Edgar Delgado COVER \/ PAGE 1. Magneto and the Scarlet Witch dancing. PAGE 2. The Scarlet Witch names her murderer. This picks up directly from […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439","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=7439"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7442,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions\/7442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}