If you had to integrate the mutants into the MCU, how would you do it?

Great question!

There is a very common argument that says that the X-books never quite fit in well with the rest of the Marvel line, because in a world where lots of people have superpowers, why are mutants so uniquely threatening? Why is it that they are hated and feared while the Fantastic Four are America’s First Family and the Avengers might as well be the GI Joes?

I’ve never found that to be a problem – in part because there are plenty of other superheroes who also come in for the same treatment (see the Hulk or Spiderman vis-a-vis the Daily Bugle), but also because we have lots of examples in our world of inconsistent attitudes from the public.

My thinking has always gone like this: most Marvel supers have the one-off origin story that was de rigeur in the Golden Age of comics: Cap’s Super Soldier serum is lost, Iron Man is self-built, the Hulk is created in a gamma bomb test, there’s only one Mjolnir waiting around to be picked up by someone worthy. And for the public at large, this is at least somewhat comforting because there’s no reason why they’re special and you’re not, it’s a matter of chance, and who knows, maybe one day you’ll win the superpower lottery, and even if you don’t the people who did aren’t better than you.

But mutants break that comforting illusion: there’s an entire group of people out there who get superpowers because they’re born with it, which means that if you don’t have an active X-gene, you’re no longer “normal,” you’re a flatscan. Which means you’re anti-special, a negative result, you’re a muggle ‘arry. So I could see why there would be a special kind of resentment there. Which absolutely should also be the case with Inhumans and their special latent genes which means they get to come out of the chrysalis a beautiful shiny butterfly while you’re stuck as a caterpillar.

But I don’t think that’s enough to explain “anti-mutant prejudice.” And this is where I think history and politics come into it. In both the comics and the movies, governments in WWII plunged a bunch of money into superpowers and almost all of what they got back was eaten up by the war: Cap goes into the ice, Namor goes back to being a non-aligned power, the Human Torch is deactivated, and so on. And between then and now, governments try to rebuild their capacity and keep powers as a monopoly of the government: hence all of those failed attempts to recreate the Super Soldier serum, Weapon X, etc.

But mutants by their very nature arise outside fo the control of the national security state, and that scares the hell out of them. Your Alpha or Omega class mutants are essentially global superpowers, and can’t be controlled easily or at all. And I think the national security state would start to push that picking and choosing phenomenon: Tony Stark is ok because he’s a human and a military contractor, the Fantastic Four are ok because they come out of NASA, but the X-Men are dangerous rogue elements.

So actually, I think a rebooted X-Men would fit quite nicely into a post-Cap 3 MCU. Thanks to some really clumsy handling of the fallout from the Lagos incident, world governments who were already paranoid about superpowers acting independently start stoking public fear of “enhanced” individuals like Wanda Maximoff. Now all of the sudden, there’s an entire sub-species of “enhanced” individuals hiding in plain sight – are they in league with the rogue Avengers? HYDRA? The aliens? The Daily Bugle demands answers!

To me, the biggest problem is how you fit X-Men’s backstory into the history of the MCU. But I think this is solvable, because we have that nice 60s-70s period of covert superheroing where Ant-Man was active. So back in the 60s and 70s, governments start becoming aware of mutants, but they think there’s just a few individuals. So they keep mutant activity classified, Weapon X starts running quietly in the background, maybe some Sentinels get built during the Cold War “purely for contingency purposes.” And then in the present day, when it turns out that the mutant population has been expanding rapidly but from a really small base, and all of SHIELD’s secrets get leaked…

For most of the X-cast, time isn’t really a factor – either for the original team or the all-new folks or the new mutants or generation x or after, they can really come from any time; Wolverine should have been around for a long time, but his healing factor makes him immortal so that’s not a problem either. The two big problems are Magneto and Professor X. Magneto being a survivor pins him down to a generation that is now rapidly approaching triple digits, and Professor X really should be a peer of Magneto as opposed to significantly younger. So we’re going to need some sort of Bucky-like explanation for why they’ve been kept on ice and why they’ve come out of the ice.

In Death of X #4, Cyclops gets Elixer to change the Terrigen Mists into a form that’s not deadly to mutants, but he still clearly states that it’s harmless to Inhumans. So why is Medusa going ‘you have made enemies of us forever’? And then she has Black Bolt kill Cyclops. Doesn’t that clearly make her the bad guy? Is that what Marvel intended?

This is the crux of the problem, as I see it. There’s no logical connection between what Cyclops did in Death of X and how he’s viewed in Extraordinary X-Men – certainly I don’t see why any human or mutant would view him as anything this side of morally neutral.

I could see an argument that the Terrigen Mists are sacred to the Inhumans, so Cyclops’ actions are seen by Inhumans as religious desecration. But that doesn’t explain the reactions of humans and mutants, and even then it’s a bit of a stretch – the Inhumans have always been very secretive with their mists, and Black Bolt spreading them to the world made him a pariah for a bit.

I don’t know, it seems like there was a last minute course correction. I could see the “Cyclops as evil extremist” thing if his intervention had destroyed a cloud and say, badly damaged Madrid – this would fit in with his protect-mutants-first, ends-justify-means thing and explain how others might view him. But it feels like editorial got cold feet.

Why would an ex-First Sword of Braavos take on a gig as a weapon trainer for the daughter of a Westerosi Lord ? Isn’t it a great step down from his previous position ? What was he even doing in KL anyway ? When Westerosi nobility look for weapons instructors, they usually go for kngihts, not old bravos.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten this question, but I looked and couldn’t find a post where I’d answered it before, so I might as well.

Syrio took the job precisely because he’s the ex-First Sword. The old Sea Lord died, there was an election, and the new man wanted his own First Sword instead of Syrio, so Syrio needs to find a new job.

And the problem with being a bravo in Braavos is that there are a lot of bravos looking for work, so competition is fierce and underemployment is rampant (hence why so many bravos run protection rackets or resort to mugging or begging with menaces).

We don’t know whether the Sea Lord died of natural causes or whether Syrio left in disgrace because the Sea Lord died on his watch, but it could well have been the case either way that he found it difficult to find employment in the city, because it’s not the best branding.

Alternatively, one of the ways you get work as an ambitious bravo looking to make your name is to kill a bravo with an established name, like say Syrio Forel. Now, the First Sword doesn’t run, but Syrio Forel might have grown weary of killing hot-headed young men and decided to move to somewhere that wasn’t something he had to deal with on a regular basis.

As for why King’s Landing? It’s a big city near to Braavos that doesn’t have a culture of bravos, as most of the Free Cities do (remember, water dancers are from Braavos, but not all bravos are water dancers). And while the nobility might not hire him for their sons, King’s Landing has a thriving merchant community (and not a small number of foreign merchants) who might want their sons to learn the blade even if they’re unlikely to become knights.

Also….he could also be an actual dancing master. A lot of swordmasters taught dance as well – footwork, balance, timing, etc. are critical to fencing so a lot of the skills carry over, the training rooms are essentially identical so if custom flags in one area you make up the difference in the other.

In the Inhumans vs. Mutants conflict, do the Inhumans actually have any valid reason for what they’re doing (or rather, not doing), or is it just Marvel trying to drive the X-Men’s popularity down?

I don’t think it’s the latter, since they’re relaunching the x-line with X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue, Cable, Generation X, Jean Grey, Iceman, Weapon X, etc. The closest to that you could get is to say that it might have been the plan, back when Perlmutter had more influence, and then things changed when Disney restructured and Marvel and Fox made their TV deal. I think we’re far off from a Fantastic Four deal, let alone an X-Men/Avengers crossover deal, but recent signs have been quite encouraging.

As for the Inhumans, yeah, that’s a bit of a story problem. The writers created this zero-sum situation whereby the expansion of Inhumanity went hand-in-hand with the decline of mutantdom and the survival of mutandom meant the destruction of the sacred Terrigen Mists. Which is a nice dilemma, but you then have to have the characters do something about that instead of just wringing their hands about it, and that didn’t happen in Death of X.

RFTIT Tumblr Weekly Roundup

Hello everyone! I hope my American readers had a good Turkey Day and I congratulate my global readers for becoming comparatively more healthy than they were before. Politics of the Iron Islands Part II is done and will be up on Monday, but in the meantime, there’s some excellent Tumblrs for you all: How would the Iron Bank react to the Lannisters paying off the royal debt? Well. Timeline of…

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Dothraki are described as bow legged – what does that mean?

Anyone who rides horses for a significant period of time starts to walk bow-legged, i.e like the stereotypical cowboy.

What is the formal charge that an overlord would level at a vassal for not fulfilling his feudal obligations (Example – Late Walder Frey during Robert’s Rebellion)? Thank You – RSAFan

The name of the formal charge is actually….”felony.”

Indeed, if we consult legal dictionaries, we find that “felonia” was originally understood to mean “the act (or offense) by which a vassal forfeited his fee.”