And he did it. Tim O'Neil beat me. I hate him.
The first part of his argument against Cyclops doesn't hold much water with me. Mostly because it ignores the second half of the story where the situation changes and, I think, the Avengers become a force for more ill than Cyclops. However, the second part of his argument is hard to ignore and I think it totally on the money. When discussing this issue, I rarely stopped and considered whether Cyclops was right or wrong to want to bring back mutants. I focused so much on the conflict within Avengers vs. X-Men that I didn't examine the rightness of his initial desire.
What's weird is that I've always bristled against the idea of mutants as a separate race, especially when that idea was argued by mutants. It seemed like the wrong approach to the issue. By declaring yourself a different race, it made all of the prejudice easier. Instead of being humans with different abilities or a medical anomoly, they become something other. It's easy to justify killing the other instead of victims of genetics. In one case, you're killing aliens; in the other, you're killing people with Down's syndrome. Why would any sane mutant encourage the former over the latter? And, yet, that's what Cyclops does. He becomes obsessed with this idea that mutants are separate from humanity and loses his way. Over in Ultimate X-Men, Brian Wood dealt with the issue of the mutant cure very much in the way that Tim mentions: all but 20 mutants take it. The rest are happy to be normal again and free of concentation camps and other prejudice. All that's left are misguided idealists like Kitty Pryde and the violent, mentally unbalanced who want to kill humans and pretend like they'll take over. It's kind of sad.
If anything, Cyclops should have been working to eliminate mutations, because there's a difference between being proud of yourself when there are no options and purposefully choosing to be a man who has to wear a protective visor all of the time for fear that deadly eyebeams will shoot from his eyes and destroy everything he looks at. Choosing to remain that guy is disturbing. He more than most should want to get rid of that whole X gene thing and go work private security or something. I understand Wolverine not wanting to take the cure, because he'd... die. But, why would you choose persecution and, possibly, physical disabilities all because of some notion that you're special despite everything in the world telling you that you're not, including yourself?
Cyclops should have wanted the Phoenix to arrive to eliminate the rest of mutantkind. Fuck evolution. Do what's practical and makes sense. Besides, why buy this whole 'mutants are the next step in evolution' thing? Seems like a strange way for humanity to evolve to me.
Cyclops was wrong before Avengers vs. X-Men even began.
In 30 minutes, I'll begin discussing Uncanny X-Force with Kaitlin Tremblay.
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