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.

Getting Your Kids Into Preschool... On TV

This past week two shows indulged in one of the most bizarre modern TV tropes, "I need to get my kid into a super-expensive, super-exclusive preschool." It's an LA thing that the other 300 million Americans have no concept of, outside of seeing it appear over and over on TV. TV executives fall into the weird category of rich-enough-to-spend-thousands-of-dollars-on-preschoool-but-not-rich-enough-to-guarantee-a-spot, and so the fraught drama of getting a kid into preschool keeps popping up endlessly because it keeps popping up in their lives.

Both Grandfathered and You're the Worst utilized this trope in starkly different ways, revealing why one of those sitcoms is among the best shows on TV and the other is, well, not.

Grandfathered embraced the trope in the most conventional sense possible. Due to implausible circumstances, main character Jimmy (John Stamos) has to take his granddaughter to a preschool open house. Yes, a preschool open house. Already the plot has gone off the rails in under two minutes. Unwilling to openly admit he's a grandfather, Jimmy lies and says Edie is his daughter. Naturally his son Gerald (Josh Peck) shows up and the kind of wacky shenanigans this plot always involves kicks in, Jimmy and Gerald have to pretend to be a gay couple because the super-exclusive preschool wants more gay families.

It's groan inducing. In fact, two straight people pretend to be a gay couple to get their child into preschool has been done at least twice in recent memory, Baby Daddy and Cougar Town. And Two and a Half Men just dedicated its entire final season to two straight men pretending to be a gay couple, so there's that. To the show's benefit it at least has someone point out that it is an episode about straight people trying to benefit from the advances of gay rights without going through the struggle and oppression. But really it just is an incredibly lazy version of terrible plot.

Normally in these plots some outside complication arises that eventually causes the charade to fall. In Grandfathered a single day of pretending to raise a child is so psychologically traumatizing to Jimmy, that he makes out with the very female admissions officer of the preschool who randomly shows up at his restaurant. And by pretending, I mean that some people came over and put up fake photographs, brought some toys over and did a little rudimentary baby proofing in his apartment. Everything falls apart in the interview because the admissions officer does her job instead of lying for the sake of someone she barely knows.

Meanwhile there is a subplot about Gerald's mother, Sara (Paget Brester), trying to convince the family that a normal daycare is good enough. She discovers that the daycare she used for Gerald is extremely dangerous and completely dilapidated.

In the end what the show chose to reveal about its characters in this episode is that Jimmy is so vain he compulsively lies, he cares more about even just the perception of his swinging single life than his granddaughter's well being, and that Sara was a bad mother. Obviously no one learns anything. The gravitational pull of that terrible idea for a plot dragged all the characters into the worst possible characterizations, with no reward for going there.

You're the Worst  normally starts out with characters the show labels as awful in its own title. That's part of its charm. But "LCD Soundsystem" breaks the format from the beginning of the episode. It introduces two characters, Lexi and Rob (Tara Summers and Justin Kirk), that have never existed in the show's universe before. The first act of the episode is just a little slice of their day, with only the most minimal acknowledgement that they exist within the neighborhood of You're the Worst's main characters Jimmy and Gretchen.

Lexi and Rob are presented as having very successfully negotiated the transition from wild 20s to adulthood (and parenthood) while never losing their innate coolness. They have everything that Gretchen wants from life without losing the aspects of her personality she most likes.

Almost immediately in the episode Lexi and Rob discover that they have one of those big preschool interviews coming up. Lexi bemoans that they've become a cliche which artfully foreshadows just how much of a cliche every aspect of their lives will be revealed to be as the episode unfolds. It's critically symbolic as the upcoming interview is the only naturally occurring motivation they have in the episode (Gretchen's intervention into their lives by taking their dog being decidedly unnatural). It keeps reinserting itself into the narrative in unexpected ways.

No matter how much Lexi might state resistance to the interview, she barrels forward with grim determination. The episode regularly undermines Lexi's statements with her actions. As just one example, she first dismisses Rob's concerns about pot smoking, but then forbids drinking that night, only to wind up drinking herself before the night is over. Lexi's mild hypocrisy throughout the episode underlines her statement 'To be a slave to an idea of coolness is why some of your friends never grow and in the end are actually less themselves, and counter intuitively live less authentic lives than the buyers-in.' It's exactly what Gretchen wants to hear. She already made a similar statement, almost word for word. But Lexi, who lives it, ultimately reveals the idea to be nothing more than a self-justifying platitude.

The preschool interview ultimately symbolizes all the unstated problems in the relationship. Lexi is buying in, and her cool-girl persona is nothing more than a superficial shell. She's driving their relationship to a normalcy where who they used to be is a cosmetic shell. Rob, meanwhile, is not buying in. He's just there out of inertia. There are all sorts of indicators showing Rob's dissatisfaction. He plays a Gameboy and discusses how fun it is. He is very eager to talk about how he and Lexi met by a quick hookup in a rock club bathroom. The fact that he cares much, much more about the missing dog than the preschool interview.

Rob's primary reaction to the interview is initially just not to care about it, and then to only care about how it will impact his life. Specifically he wants to smoke pot, and then later in the episode drink. And he utilizes it to comment on how Lexi has changed (she isn't smoking pot much anymore). It's small comment, but one that starts to crack open how they have changed and are starting to become incompatible. When Rob suggests postponing the interview, she looks at him as if he just asked her to murder someone before asking "why would we do that?" Rob doesn't care about the interview, he only cares about the dog he has had since before he met her. It's an intractable issue that only fails to become a full fight only because Gretchen shows up with the dog.

Gretchen and Jimmy spend some time at their house, where Gretchen gets an even closer look at everything she thinks she wants. She sees this perfect life as social conscious, cool, aging hipsters living an upper class life without all socially-oppressive bullshit such a life is supposed to entail. And then she is blindsided by the out poring Rob's own dissatisfaction. An out poring where one of his prime concerns is, "Lexi's always like, 'school, Harper's school' and it's like 'fine,' but on the other hand, I don't want to be having that conversation." As far as the episode is concerned, that's a concern that has materialized in the span of a day, and will be over after the interview. But it symbolizes everything wrong with their relationship. The perfect upper class lifestyle can't fix a rotten core. The failings of the American Dream can't be fixed by putting posters of indie rock bands on it. No matter how hard you can try to only buy-in to the hyper-specific aspects of American life that you think will make you the most happy, you can't keep the rest of it out. The ennui, the dissatisfaction, the depression keeps seeping in compelling you to buy-in to just one more aspect and it will vanish. In Gretchen's case that one more aspect was Rob and Lexi's life, in Lexi's case it was the preschool.

The use of that trope in You're the Worst was because it was so unrealistic and ridiculous. It's a couple whose main problem is an interview at preschool, that is to Gretchen. and by extension the audience, a perfect life. The kind of life she'd love to live for 90 years. But it becomes the metaphor for all the deep emotional problems within that relationship causing it to fail. And that's the primary difference between You're the Worst and Grandfathered. The former intentionally used the trope to reveal the real existential despair of its characters, the latter used it to accidentally reveal it's characters are awful people.