[Dolemite]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I don't think the AoA was a particularly well written story but it was certainly an ambitious presentation of how dark things can get when an alternate timeline is actually allowed to play out. Days of Future Past showed how terribly wrong the future could be but it was still these same characters just after the hardship but AoA rewrote the past to show a terribly wrong present where many characters had completely different upbringings and might only be superficially familiar. I guess I'm saying I've always liked AoA because it was Marvel's first big dive into fleshing out an alternate reality for the X-Men to reside in, it was like one of the "what if?" stories was given more room to breathe.

What I do/don't like about these "What If? scenarios like AOA is that characters who would never normally die can be killed off. I like it because it's more realistic and unexpected and actually adds stakes to the proceedings, but I don't like it because it reminds me that they would never happen in the regular continuity...people either never die, or they die and are resurrected 4 months later ala "comic book death." It's meaningless.

And Marvel has made it even worse, now. I've peeked at some recent X-Men comics and apparently mutants now have their own island nation and can actually "back up" their brains and grow new bodies identical to their old ones, so any time someone is "killed" they can just be brought back to life instantly (I won't start the debate about how I think using backed-up memories means that the "reborn" person is actually a copy and not the original, but...). The point is that there are no stakes at all anymore.

I just read X-Men #20 and Nimrod the Uber-Sentinel (another old-school comeback!) shoots Mystique as she's escaping through a portal to Mutant Island (or whatever it's called), she dies, and one panel later she's popping out of the X-Men's rebirth device (or whatever it's called) with a new body and everything is fine. It's like oh, you were just killed, no big deal. Aggravating, since you know if this tech didn't exist the writers never would have killed off Mystique so casually like they did.

Again, no stakes. But I understand that these characters are commodities, and no one wants to get rid of anything that can make them money. Hence, "comic book death."