Avengers vs. X-Men

From the moment that Brian Michael Bendis transitioned from writing gritty street-level heroes to headlining the major franchises of Marvel, Marvel has suffered from poor plotting regulated by poorly conceived crossovers. If you excluded the X-Men comics and the cosmic comics, every major crossover from Avengers Disassembled straight through to Avengers vs. X-Men was terrible, and the only real debate is which particular shade of terrible is the worst. While Civil War is undoubtedly the most poorly written, on just a technical level, Avengers vs. X-Men is just pure garbage on everything from theme to characterization to plotting to even basic knowledge of what's being written. It is the worst.

One of the core problems is that they tried to replicate Civil War's two sides formula. It didn't work in Civil War and it really didn't work in Avengers vs. X-Men. There's one inescapable fact to the crossover: Cyclops was right. So color me surprised when someone linked to an article he wrote attempting to argue that inescapable fact.

The only difference in this respect between Civil War and AvX is that while you could at least make the argument that, in a quote-unquote "real world" context Iron Man probably had a point (even if, in-story, we always still knew Cap was right all along), there really doesn't seem to me to be any reason whatsoever for pretending that Cyclops had any rational justification for his actions over the course of AvX #1-12. There's no real suspense here. In both practical and ideological terms, Cyclops wasn't just wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. 

Except he was right. Everything he believed was entirely correct. Everything he predicted was correct, and everything the Avengers feared would happen didn't. Had the Avengers done literally nothing the entire incident would have sorted itself out completely beneficially to everyone involved. The Phoenix Force would have been hosted by Hope Summers, and with the help of her four lights, would have restored all mutants. They had at least three time travelers, five former Phoenix Force hosts (both those numbers include the time traveler and former Phoenix Force host Rachel Grey), and Layla Miller to talk it over with. Cyclops even had the Phoenix Force literally tell him it loved him, once. Cyclops's assumptions were entirely inline with every past experience with the Phoenix Force, what every person who witnessed the Phoenix Force was saying, and what most of the time travelers believed.

 In that story the new Nova, Sam Alexander, witnesses the Phoenix destroying / consuming an entire planet - Terrax's planet, incidentally - while making a beeline for Earth. The new Nova reaches Earth at the beginning of AvX proper, carrying the warning that the Phoenix is loose, heading in the direction of Earth, and destroying planets left and right.

This is, incidentally, part of why AvX is so poorly written. That's not how the Phoenix Force has ever behaved before. When it was corrupted while mimicking Jean Grey it destroyed one planet. At the end of Grant Morrison's run it destroyed a timeline via time traveling telepathy making Cyclops choose differently at a specific moment. But it never just randomly destroyed (that's Galactus's role). But, it could. A pretty good story could be written where it goes berserk and starts destroying at random. However AvX being not a very good story offers no justification for it (just a hand wave towards literalism of "burning away").

Given that, it is more than reasonable to expect that the Phoenix coming to Earth does not bode well for the planet and its inhabitants. 

But, of course, the last time it showed up it saved the entire planet from a black hole. Again, it has to be justified.

So even though we as readers know the Phoenix is probably coming to Earth to do something related to M-Day and Hope Summers and all that jazz, the people in the story don't know this with anything resembling certainty.

Again, and this is important: Cyclops did know. The X-Men knew an entire mythology about the Phoenix Force and a chosen one and five lights. It was a central part of many stories preceding AvX. Now you can make the claim that billion-year-old alien robots are untrustworthy and how much credence to give mythology, but did know this with quite a lot of certainty.

With the Phoenix on the way to Earth, there was a not-zero chance that the Phoenix intended to destroy the Earth for whatever reason, or maybe even no reason at all. 

Why yes, but there is also a not-zero chance that the Scarlet Witch won't go crazy and commit genocide again. In fact, that's far more likely given that the Phoenix Force has considered Earth its home for a decade within the timeline of Marvel comics. And, this is not a minor point, the Phoenix Force declared that it was in love with Cyclops once. And the last time there was an incident with an out of control Phoenix (which involved a lot of convoluted backstory not particularly relevant) that love was what stopped it dead in its track.

If there is a not-zero chance that the Earth might be destroyed, it isn't just irresponsible to stand in the way of a solution to the problem, it's downright villainous.

It is actually the duty of heroes to do exactly that. The whole point of superheroes is that they do not follow expediency. They make the correct moral choices, even in the face of considerable risks. In the rather excellent Hulk vs. Thor animated movie there is an exchange that gets to the heart of this:

Thor: You would risk everything for the sake of one soul? 

Hela: As YOU yourself would do, Odin's son.

Superheroes routinely make the choice that saving the entire planet is not more important than saving a single life. Sometimes that choice is poorly handled, but more often than not it is why we consider them superheroes.

And what's more, it's not even as if you can make the argument that the Avengers were really trying to persecute the X-Men, put the surviving mutants in camps or Negative Zone prisons or whatever else the government did during the Civil War: all they wanted to do was take Hope as far away from Earth as possible in an attempt to forestall the not-zero chance of planet-wide extinction. 

...They did do that. After they invaded a sovereign nation, they rounded up all the mutants and put them in concentration camps, and forced them to wear those mutant control slave collars. Also, the Avengers plan was an assassination attempt on a teenage girl. Wolverine just got cold feet.

(It's also worth mentioning that later on, at the story's conclusion when Hope actually does receive the Phoenix force, she is only able to control the force and use it benignly because she's spent months being trained in K'un-L'un by Iron Fist, Spider-Man, and Captain America. This wasn't something Cylcops or even Cable did for her.) 

This just didn't happen. If you can find anything in that final issue that shows Hope controlling the Phoenix Force because of little bit of training she received from Iron Fist, I'll give you a cookie. This is just more bad writing on the part of the comic, it needed to sideline Hope for a bit and so sent her off for nebulous and ultimately useless training.

Magneto is the first character to utter the phrase "homo superior." 

This is a weird, but true point to make. However, Magneto gave no indication that he was coining the term. And the third issue of the series ends with the X-Men saying good bye to the reader over the following conclusion, "And when that does... the X-Men will be ready! Now, until the next issue, from Homo Superior to Homo Sapians, --farewell!" The actual comics themselves were always pretty clear that mutants were as much of a different species from humanity as the Atlantians, Inhumans, Deviants, and Eternals.

Professor X asserts that mutants are a part of humanity, and that their "extra" powers do not give them extra rights to exert their superiority over those who are not so gifted (or cursed).

I do not see how these things preclude each other. Unless you are operating on a very narrow definition of "humanity." Modern humans and neanderthals are different species, and yet few people would argue that neanderthals were not a part of humanity. This was a point explicitly made by Grant Morrison when he had Cassandra Nova argue about whether the neanderthals interbred with humans or were eliminated via warfare.

This isn't a minor quibble. The X-Men operate with a radical inclusivity. Their view of humanity is extremely broad. That's the entire reason for the existence of the "Danger" arc and everything that followed up on it. If inclusion in humanity is decided solely upon a genome, then Xavier did nothing wrong, and Danger is just a piece of technology that is broken. But no, the X-Men knew it was a sentient being with a right to self-determination and rehabilitation. A part of humanity.

Their mutations are completely random.

 Except they aren't. The Guthries, the St. Croixs, the Rasputins, the Frosts, all are families that produced huge batches of mutant children. And there has been rather consistently shown to be elements like sibling immunity to each other's powers, children having similar powers to their parents, or the St. Croixs all being able to merge with each other. While Marvel has offered several different explanations for the existence of mutants, the mutant genes are not random. They run in families and they interact in surprising ways with close relatives. While there is no hard and fast rule about it, it is hardly random.

This is why my least favorite X-Men stories have always been those stories that deal with the idea of a "mutant cure" as if it were some kind of terrible existential threat to mutantkind. 

 The cure storylines have been overdone over the years. But they are an existential threat to mutantkind. Going back to Genosha and the Genegeneer. He had, in fact, discovered a cure for mutants. He even found a way to take those mutants whose genes had made them deformed and give them whatever genes he wanted. He promptly used that technology to enslave every mutant on the island. The X-Men have a not subtle theme about liberty vs. slavery. A mutant cure is immediately abused. It's weaponized. It's an instrument of oppression. The concept of a mutant cure is not able to be separate from the giant purple robots governments build to commit genocide. While, in theory, a mutant cure could be benevolent, in reality the people controlling it would, inevitably and by design, the same ones authorizing the Sentinel program.

where Cyclops took the time to explain exactly why the mutant gene simply had to be restored

I'm not sure why he would have to explain it. It is generally agreed that genocide is a bad thing. It is right there in "geno" from Greek "genos" which is where we get the word "genes" from. In the most literal sense the Scarlet Witch committed genocide. And, whereas with those cures you could theoretically make a choice to remain a mutant or not, she made that choice for everyone. She violated people's bodily autonomy, in the process killing many people and disfiguring even more. And she wiped out a distinct group of people. The mutant gene simply had to be restored because otherwise genocide is both right and victorious.

Those people were led by Cyclops, and at no point during the course ofAvX does he ever actually explain why cursing Mudbug, Eye Boy, and Shark Girl to live terrible lives was a necessary sacrifice for the good of the "mutant race." 

Wow. Going back to this point, "here has been ever since Stan & Jack created the Mortimer Toynbee in 1963 - whose mutations resemble something more along the lines of a physical disability." It is very much a fact that deaf people do not consider themselves to have terrible lives. There's an entire deaf culture, and deaf academic studies. And, in that culture there's considerable discussion about medical intervention to correct for deafness. It's not treated as an overarching positive. The same is true for neuro-atypical people. Part of the whole theme of the X-Men is that they aren't cursed and they aren't going to lead terrible lives. If Beak and Angel can find love and happiness, then anyone can.

The fact is that this article is just wrong on every level. It's not hard to be wrong on certain points when dealing with such an atrociously written pile garbage. But the idea that Cyclops was anything less than right represents some level of delusion.