Why I'm Not Reading Generation Hope

[rallamajoop]

Stating up front this is going to be much less a review than a whole lot of frustrated venting coming out at the end of what is now a whole year of build up. I'm not in any way going to discourage dissent in the comments – in fact if anyone who is actually reading Generation Hope and/or enjoying her as a character, I would be very interested to hear why, as I'm actually much happier to hear 'the industry is producing works tailored to tastes which differ from yours, in ways you have perhaps not considered' than to be left with 'the industry just doesn't know what the fuck it's doing anymore', which is about where the whole matter is sitting in my head right now.

So, I'm not reading Generation Hope. This isn't much of an announcement; if the sales figures are to be believed, hardly anyone else is either. The only thing that makes my disinterest notable is that a year ago, back when I was writing my glowing and rather stunned review of Second Coming event, Generation Hope was one of the titles I was most looking forward to. See, what sold me on Second Coming was the fantastic sense of scale to the story. Tasked with the unenviable job of giving us a climax to two inimitable years of waiting for Cable to make it back from the future with a young mutant who we were assured had to be important because, if not, why would so many evil people want her dead? - it delivered one of the most cleverly thought out, edge-of-your-seat reads I've seen from Mavel in recent memory. It never got as far as answering the big questions about exactly what Hope represents, but it did finish with a tantalising hint in the form of five new 'lights' revealed on Cerebro's mutant GPS – the first to appear since M-Day, and certainly not coincidentally related to Hope's return. It was an inspired teaser for the next step for the X-Men line.

But in practice, Marvel had put me off the concept so fast and so thoroughly in the months following Second Coming that I never even got as far as reading issue one. That's a dizzying turnover rate for the enthusiasm.

If I had to explain what it was that put me off in one sentence, it would be this: they think Generation: Hope is a story about a bunch of mutant kids. That may be true in the loosest sense, but approaching the story from that angle carries the dangerous temptation to take the next step and treat them as ordinary mutant kids, in the same way that the New Mutants were ordinary mutant kids, or Gen X were, or the New New Mutants, or any mutant generation since the original X-Men back in the 60s, and the simple truth is that they're anything but. Generation Hope represent the first new children born to a a dying race that has known since M-Day that they were only killing time before extinction, and the way that should be shaping their experience since the moment of their awakening – the shear weight of what their very existence means for every single surviving mutant left on the planet – that just isn't coming through in their story at all.

For fuck's sake, it's not like that kind of impact is a difficult narrative detail to communicate. Where are the scenes of ordinary mutants sharing rumours about these so-called Five Lights? Why isn't anyone showing an interest in teasing out the explanation for how and why now and why them and most of all what has this got to do with Hope? Why on earth would leave Professor McCoy so disillusioned with Utopia that and all it represents that he's happy to disregard these five new mutants as 'not nearly enough to sustain a species' and bugger off without so much as stopping to take a blood sample? Why haven't we seen any of the X-Men's other scientists pouring through their family history and medical records to find out whether those mutant genes have spontaneously appeared or whether they were lurking in their bloodstreams all along? Where are the scenes of the Lights or their families saying but I can't be a mutant, everyone knows there aren't any more mutants! And above all, why on earth has this whole plotline been exiled away to a kids' team book, rather than taking place in the pages of one of the core X-Men books where it so clearly belongs?

Instead of tackling any of those important questions, the defining attribute of these new mutants that the writers emphasise is that their powers go haywire until the magical sparkly touch of Hope's hand instantly fixes them and makes them all BFF's for life. This whole concept is such a spectacularly bad idea I hardly know where to start. For a start, it smacks of an incredibly contrived excuse to keep Hope front and centre in the story even after early indications seemed to be that merely existing somewhere on the same time frame was all she had to do to start the Lights showing up. That lands us with a story where the same brand new character is both the source and the solution to the same problem, generally after a grand total of maybe five or six comic pages and hardly a word of exposition per Light, and when people were already calling her a Mary Sue long before this development, that should have been the last thing any competent writer would have saddled her with. Had there been unstable mutants showing up long before her return, for example, that would be a story, but for some reason we got this instead.

Finally, that instant-magical-BFF element provided them with a neat way of side-stepping any requirement for these new characters to actually meet, interact and make friends as characters. It's the platonic equivalent of having the hero save the heroine's life in their first scene together – with one, sparkly magical touch, any need to develop explain the mystery, introduce character or develop their relationships has been neatly shoved to the side.

Now, at this point, I know someone out there is already chomping at the bit to tell me that the instant-BFF factor is far more nuanced than I've made it out to be, since it's an ongoing plot point in Generation Hope that Hope is subconsiously psychically influencing people around her to like her, and that's starting to cause friction and people figure this out. Frankly, I am at a loss to explain how any part of that is a good idea to paste on to a relatively undeveloped character who's supposed to be sympathetic.

Let's take a minute to put this in context with a quick tally of Hope's powers and abilities established to date: she's the first mutant born since M-Day, and her birth created psychic feedback so massive it blew up Cerebro. The touch of her hand pulled Rogue out of a coma and exised the absorbed minds of an intergalactic alien death monster. She's trained with Cable until she's tough and skilled with weaponry. She has the power to both copy and instinctively control the abilities of any and all mutants standing close to her. She's connected to the Phoenix Force, if not the reincarnation of Jean Grey herself. Her mere existence has started new mutants appearing for the first time since M-Day, but those mutants are helpless to control their powers until they make contact with her in person. On top of all that, they thought it would be a good idea to give her the power to make everyone love her from the moment they meet? Oh, and also, she has an angsty past. (Obviously that last one is not a power, but when added to the fact the comic has yet to provide rhyme or reason explaining one of these miraculous abilities, even the most determined of us would be hard put to deny the Mary Sue title is starting to feel pretty well deserved.)

But getting back to the point, the real problem with the “Hope just has some instinctive power that makes people trust her, we'll get to the consequences later” explanation is that, yet again, it's being used as an excuse to side-step those points where someone should be asking the obvious questions, and that's even without getting into the severely ugly possibility that even Cable's faith in her was no more than the result of psychic manipulation all along.

There's one more possible justification I've seen thrown around a bit in defence of the approach Marvel is taking to this story, and that's that by downplaying the world-changing implications of the arc, they get to give their cast a bit of emotional downtime in the wake of Second Coming and avoid the risk that the big picture stuff will overshadow these new characters as characters in their own right. Taken at face value that sounds reasonable, but I'd still argue it's misguided. It's a poor writer who feels that the opportunity for character development is going to be actively stunted by the plot that's happening around it – about the only way an approach this simplistic makes any sense is if it's being spun off into a title for a younger audience (as Sarah Jane Adventures was from Doctor Who, for example), and the odds that Marvel would attract new readers by that method in this landscape would be dim at best. More to the point, I don't feel they have done a very good job of introducing these characters, or even that they've come up with any very compelling characters in the first place.

Here we come to my other major complaint about Generation Hope – they're all just a bit dull, aren't they?

I'm going to talk for a bit about Uncanny X-Men #526 and #527 for a bit, being two of the four issues that linked Second Coming to the first issue of Generation Hope, because these issues stand out as being the exact moment all that enthusiasm for the concept evaporated (and frankly, I only picked up #527 at all in the vague attempt to not be one of those people who critiques what she hasn't read). These are the issues introduce the first two of the Five Lights.

Although Cyclops does take the time to assure us just that “these new lights are everything”, the story doesn't do much support this. Excluding the cover, recap page, and a backup story linked to Children's Crusade (and Jesus Christ, if ever I wanted a good counter example of how to tackle serious, world-changing subject matter with a teenaged superteam while still keeping a sense of fun about the story, I could not have asked better, but I digress) there are 22 pages of story in this issue, but once you've subtracted out those reserved for us to spend some time watching Hope travel to Canada to find out who her birth mother was (which, in their defence, was a sequence I enjoyed), for Emma to have dinner with Tony Stark for some reason, and for two unrelated pages about Piotr and Kitty, Laurie, the new mutant, appears on only nine. Her entire role can be summarised as follows: her powers begin awaken in painful and distressing fashion, she freaks out and tries to throw herself off a roof while babbling about how she doesn't have time to be sick when she's a high achiever with exams coming up, but not before the X-Men arrive to send Hope jumping off after her, at which point Laurie turns blue, realises she can fly, and instantly realises that being a mutant is the best thing ever and Hope is her new best friend.

Through all this the X-Men remain disappointingly blasé. Angel and Iceman have nothing but snide remarks for a teenage girl facing a nervous breakdown right up to the moment when she is actively ready to throw herself off the roof, and no-one seems to think twice about the wisdom of letting a another mutant teenager – one with no experience in their century and all the interpersonal skills one develops growing up with an emotionally stunted foster father in a wasteland to her name – be the one to approach the new mutant. Hope herself demonstrates her fine grasp the gravity of all Laurie has just been through by saying, “Who's next?” End issue.

#527 follows much the same trend. Laurie gets just enough screentime to wax poetic about how she trusts Hope to fix everything, and the X-Men continue to demonstrate their complete and utter disinterest in how the fuck any of this works. The argument that, as X-Men, they go through shit this weird twice a week holds little water here. M-Day was quite literally like nothing they'd ever faced before, and to see them shrugging off the sight of their mutant messiah jumping off a roof right in front of them makes a mockery of their attitudes a mere issue earlier.

But even here – with the mood in pieces, the stakes in question and the new character introductions given all the weight of a paper clip, there might still have been hope (haha) for the new team if they'd been created as compelling characters. And this, my dear readers, is where Generation Hope lost me for good.

We'll start with Laurie. Her powers are flying, and being blue, which allows the artists an excuse to draw a teenage girl naked without breaking any rules hurhurhur her to shapeshift in ways that help her fly better, such as 'sprouting wings at high altitudes', where the air is too thin for wings to do anyone much good. To listen to the writer, creating a mutant who's only power is to fly – but to fly really fast and really well! – is a creative new take on the powers of one of the original X-Men, Angel, which presumably someone thought was a convincing way to spin the fact that flying is the power everyone else on the X-Men got as a side dish to something useful, like telekinesis, or power over magnetism or the weather, or to turn their entire body in to particles of dust, and so on. Even Angel himself has been variously granted healing blood or the ability to shoot razor darts out of his wings over the years in assorted attempts to make him slightly less rubbish. Flying is a great power, but on it's own it's not much of a fast track to superheroism.


There's really nothing that emphasises the mood of a serious scene like this
like a naked blue arse front and centre of the panel.

And if 'but she can fly really fast! ' wasn't sounding lame enough in it's own terms, it gets worse when you add the fact that the second member of the Five Lights we meet is a speedster. This isn't a terrible power for a superhero – DC's entire Flash family depends on it – but by the same logic it's very much been done by this point, and so many other characters get it as an add-on to a more badass power that on it's own it too looks more than a little lame. Speed of the Young Avengers, for example, is a mutant who has superspeed and the power to accelerate molecules in ways that allow him to move through solid matter or make things explode, and Surge of the New X-Men had superspeed as a bonus consequence whenever she built up large charges using her electricity powers – and that's without even looking further afield than members of other young superteams published by the same company within the last few years. Again, the writers try to spin this as creative by saying that really what he has isn't superspeed at all but time manipulation powers, but using time manipulation powers to simulate superspeed is so blatantly obvious that one gets no creativity points for making the connection. Tempo of the Mutant Liberation Front was using her time powers to speed up her team in the pages of X-Force back as early as the early nineties, and again in a recent AU sidestory just this year. (Also, she could fly. Seeing a pattern yet?) Meanwhile, across the pond at DC, the Flash has been able to use his superspeed to travel in time since the Silver Age.

The problem only gets worse when you hit the third member of the Five Lights, who's power is that he thinks he's a dog.



Oh alright, he 'understands the world through instinct', which apparently means he has roughly the vocabulary and charisma of Tarzan. Much time is spent assuring us that he's not stupid or animalistic, oh no, he's just largely uninterested in tackling complex concepts since his mutant powers awakened, once again side-stepping the real issue of how anyone writing for this dud is supposed to come up with ways to make this power useful without resorting to handwavey pseudo-science. Meanwhile, the 'real' powers he gets to supplement his learning disorder are all the usual vaguely defined animalistic ones: vaguely enhanced senses, speed, strength and healing, making him roughly the equivalent of Wolverine minus the rabid healing factor, adamantium claws and intellectual ability, or Beast minus the sixteen university degrees and (as he would put it) the ravishing good looks. It's hard to believe the writers have even tried to spin this as an inventive new spin on Doctor McCoy himself, since from anyone's perspective it ought to be patently obvious that to give a character with animalistic powers a largely animalistic personality is a big step back from the concept of Beast, which pairs the same with the brain of a genius. I'd also point out that in depriving their Beast-a-like of his brain and fur, they've robbed him of the feature that makes him recognisable and useful.

The fourth member, Idie, wins the prize for being the one character in Generation Hope who drew a power that sounds genuinely interesting and practical. She has heat and cold powers, which is actually halfway inspired, both because most superheros only get one or the other, and because she actually has to use both simultaneously. It seems her real ability isn't to generate or remove heat, it's to isolate and move it around with explosive results. This all becomes doubly ironic when you realise the only character who ever made me want to pick up the book is the first who's set to leave the team.

Meanwhile, our fifth and final Light is an Akira rip-off.


When I sent this panel to a friend to demonstrate how blatant the rip-off was, she thought
I was sending her a picture that was from Akira for comparison. True story.

Look, all I'm saying is, when the idea of an American remake of Akira is already drawing massive controversy – and when your heroine is already drawing accusations of Mary Sue-ism – opening her series with a trip to Japan where she heals Tetsuo of his destructive powers and brings him home to America to learn how to use his disturbing flesh-warping powers for good – that might not be the best way to generate positive fan reaction. That might not be the kind of thing you can safely pass off as 'a homage'. Just sayin'.

But none of that really holds a candle to the biggest problem with the characterisation in Generation Hope, which is with Hope herself, and I'm saying this as that same someone who really, desperately wanted to like her after Second Coming blew me away.

The problem as I see it is thus: throughout Hopes childhood, the writers took it on themselves to pile almost every imaginable kind of trauma on that girl, and now they don't want to deal with the consequences of the fact she should, by all logic, be a paranoid introvert with negligible social skills, minimal general knowledge that doesn't relate directly to survival, and umpteen varieties of PTSD.

Let's do another quick Hope tally, this time her life experiences. We can probably discount the violent death of her mother and the umpteen Marvel villains who tried to kill her at birth, as she was far too young to remember any of that . Hope's earliest memories are probably of the small, rural settlement somewhere in the distant future where she was raised by her adoptive mother Hope, and her adoptive father Cable, who was so insistent that he wasn't and never would be her real father that he refused to so much as give her a name until the day she witnessed the violent murder of her second mother right in front of her eyes, conveniently freeing up a name for reuse. (If you think you're detecting some slight bitterness over the handling of that sequence, you're probably right.) After the destruction of her home for the second time, Hope and Cable were cast out into the wasteland that was all that was left of the USA after Bishop, labouring under the belief that Hope was going to doom all mutants and anything that happened in an alternate future didn't count, took it upon himself to exterminate the human race on every other continent using a variety of stolen doomsday devices. Highlights of Hope's childhood would include meeting X-Force, the X-team with the highest violent kill-tally in history, and making friends with a boy called Emil, who would sacrifice himself in order to save her from the alien attack that had already killed everyone else aboard his spacecraft and quite probably a significant chunk of the entire surviving human race by that point. Hope would wake up from a stint in suspended animation two years later to discover her body had gone on aging without her input (impressively growing all the way from 11 to mid-late-teens in a mere two years), and finally spent an unspecified period with no company but Cable before telling him she was ready to go back. Later, in the pages of Second Coming, she would surprise him by admitting that in actually she wasn't nearly ready for the responsibility of being the Mutant Messiah, and had only told said otherwise because she was fed up living in a wasteland eating rat-on-a-stick for every meal.



Hope Summers, this is your life.

Now, it's fair to say that comic writers do love to pile on the angst, and there have certainly been times when granting a new creative team the license to handwave away the consequences a particularly gloomy period in some character's recent history was more or less essential to making that comic ever be fun again – such is the nature of the medium. Let's get one thing clear, I hated, loathed and despised those Cable issues I'm referencing. Most of them I only read out of what started as a hunt for material to parody and evolved into trainwreck syndrome, and the faster they can be forgotten, the better. However, in Hope's case, once you subtract out her gloomy childhood, you don't really have any defining character history left. Even if for convenience's sake you could justify glossing over the worst of the last twelve-odd years of relentless trauma that is Hope's history, you've still got the fact that her only experience with civilisation was a couple of years in one of those sparsely populating post-apocalyptic dystopias where the technology is a mix of uber-advanced and stone age and every authority figure is working for the big bad, that she hasn't interacted with a single human being besides Cable since the age of 11, and that she's been raised under a steady diet of justifiable paranoia. That shit leaves is going to leave its mark on how you deal with the world.

Despite all this, the worst culture shock I've seen her experience on is a brief spell of excitement over meeting her first bouncy bed, a little predictable discomfort about the whole Messiah thing, and perhaps a side-mention that she's not much interested in modern fashion. The writers otherwise seem determined to pass her off as a perfectly well balanced, emotionally stable teenaged girl.

So please understand where I'm coming from when I say fuck. That. Shit.

There is no way this girl would have the first idea what to say to a mutant teenager from the 21th Century babbling about SAT scores while trying to throw herself off a roof, and yet that's exactly what she does in Uncanny X-Men #526. There's no way in hell she'd have the socio-political background to lecture Professor X on how he apparently single-handedly screwed up mutant relations by using a weighted term like 'gifted' to describe a minority who'd been born different, and yet they've had her do that too. It's blatantly obvious that she's not even being treated as a character nearly so much as a blank slate for whatever soapboxing the writer might feel like projecting today. It's not for nothing that I'm personally suffering from this problem where a single comment from some random fan who's found some aspect of her current characterisation to enjoy is enough to set my teeth on edge.

I really, really wanted to give her the chance to develop into someone interesting.

No such luck. Marvel's determination to turn Generation Hope into yet another tale of a few ordinary mutant kids is far too strong.

Comments

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

*ouch* I don't dislike hope, and I don't dislike Generation Hope, but I can't stay any of the criticisms you make aren't deserved.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

It's probably mostly Bitter Ex-Fan Syndrome on my part, but the shear volume of missed opportunities to do something really cool (or at least logically consistent) with the concept seems like such a waste. :/

Oh well. At least I've got it all off my chest now, so hopefully I'll be able to stop turning it all over in my head all the time.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, can I take it from your comment that a) you're reading Generation Hope and b) they still haven't addressed any of the how-and-why stuff around the Five Lights? Because if not, I'm actually honestly curious about how they're explaining it, but if so, that's quite depressing.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

... not really, no. But most of the tie in issues for Fear Itself were pretty good (especially in contrast with the mediocre beginning).

[epiqabdr.livejournal.com]

The problem as I see it is thus: throughout Hopes childhood, the writers took it on themselves to pile almost every imaginable kind of trauma on that girl, and now they don't want to deal with the consequences of the fact she should, by all logic, be a paranoid introvert with negligible social skills, minimal general knowledge that doesn't relate directly to survival, and umpteen varieties of PTSD.

I don't know if this is too unorthodox for many people in superhero comic industry out there, but THIS seems like it would make Hope much more interesting character than what you described up there. I would buy every issue of hers if Hope has PTSD and all other influences that make people question if she really is the one. sadness:(

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

It's the nature of the medium, unfortunately. Piling drama on top of drama makes for an exciting read but showing characters dealing with trauma is depressing and dull, so we get masses of the former and hardly any of the latter.

Even so, this is a particularly egregious case and I'd absolutely agree that making Hope a little more damaged and dangerous would have made her infinitely more interesting as a character, not to mention giving some actual weight to the mutant messiah/antichrist question that's still dangling over her head.

Now I kinda want to write an AU where she gets raised entirely by Deadpool and ends up just as awesomely insane as he is. >D

[(Anonymous)]

It's the nature of the medium, unfortunately

And even more so the nature of the Mary-Sue, really...

:(

I think the problem is that some assume that in order to make a character sympathetic, all one needs to do is make that character suffer as much as possible ('The Girl Who' syndrome if you will), forgetting that angst and the hurt/comfort trope are not sufficient to get the reader's sympathy if the character remains a complete cipher.

Having survived a terrible childhood does not replace actual character development in my opinion; one needs to go to the trouble of explaining how one survived such experiences. For instance, the fact that Bruce Wayne's parents were killed in front of him when he was a kid is not - by itself - sufficient to explain how he became the Batman. One needs to further explain how he coped with the long-term consequences of that emotional trauma by training his body and his mind for years in order to be able to dedicate his life to saving innocents and stopping criminals etc.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that depends a bit on what kind of Mary Sue you're talking about. Angsty pasts are more usually associated with the teenage girl fanfic variety of Sue, which are more a case of the writer projecting their own ordinary NO-ONE UNDERSTANDS MEEEEE teen angst onto their fan character and ramping it up to 11 in the mistaken belief that a shitty past makes their character more special. What you're seeing there is an immature author indirectly trying to present themselves as having been horribly abused in attempt to generate sympathy.

What the comic book industry does is a little different - they pile disaster after disaster and trauma after trauma on to their characters because shock value generates sales, but since an issue of sending the character to psychological counseling is boring, we rarely see the consequences dealt with. There it's less about generating sympathy than it is about tension and excitement. So the motivations are a little different, though both cases certainly do suffer from the same problem of piling the angst so high it becomes very difficult to take the result seriously.

Having survived a terrible childhood does not replace actual character development in my opinion; one needs to go to the trouble of explaining how one survived such experiences.

Heck, at this rate I'd pretty much settle for the sight of Hope going 'huh?' at the concept of network television, having to have it explained to her where Canada is or how money works, and freaking out and judo-flipping someone who'd tapped her on the shoulder once in a while. Y'know, even just the basic stuff that demonstrates that she didn't grow up in a modern city and that there's no way in hell Cable could have prepared her for everything.

[epiqabdr.livejournal.com]

I do totally agree with depressing angst makes stuff too heavy, that's why I don't read Daredevil and stuff. But still! Angst can be super delicious if it were to be merged with good amount of exciting plots, like DP's Kelly runs or Astonishing x-men! But then again, I just have thing against normal-teenage-girl kind of plot from the start...lol

+I know you have a lot of project in your hand right now, but the thought of Hope and DP getting along always makes me so happy..so maybe a little ficlet of something/ pleaseeee? xD (mostly, I miss your DP writings)

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

The thing that really gets me about Hope is that even if they'd played down the PTSD element to keep things from getting too gloomy or depressing, they still could done something with culture shock and poorly developed social skills and turned her into a much more interesting character for it. Instead, they seem to have thrown everything out in the same basket and forced the poor girl into the cookie-cutter mold of Ordinary Mutant. It's such a goshdarned waste of good potential.

+I know you have a lot of project in your hand right now, but the thought of Hope and DP getting along always makes me so happy..so maybe a little ficlet of something/ pleaseeee? xD (mostly, I miss your DP writings)

I'll see if anything strikes me. Mostly, I have that HS AU to finish at the moment, which is way overdue for an update.

[inboots.livejournal.com]

Why isn't anyone showing an interest in teasing out the explanation for how and why now and why them and most of all what has this got to do with Hope? [...] And above all, why on earth has this whole plotline been exiled away to a kids' team book, rather than taking place in the pages of one of the core X-Men books where it so clearly belongs?

i *think* it's because they are trying to save some of those questions (or one of them, anyway, pretty sure they won't answer them all) for their planned 2012 event -

http://marvel.com/images/gallery/story/16887/images_from_nycc_2011_comics_news_wrap-up/image/893007

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/11/02/the-future-of-uncanny-x-men-has-a-little-phoenix-flair/

i think they wanted to set things up for maximum drama with schism first, then get to that.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

I can well believe that's the case, but that doesn't do anything to address the question of why isn't anyone showing an interest in the explanation, which is the key part of my criticism. There'd be nothing fundamentally wrong in showing the X-Men taking the reasonable steps to investigate the situation and drawing up a blank, with the real answers left for the 2012 event. It's the way everyone seems to be treating Gen Hope as though they're nothing out of the ordinary that brings this whole uncomfortable Stepford Wives vibe to the story.

i think they wanted to set things up for maximum drama with schism first, then get to that.

Given that Schism revolved around that scene with Oya and the issue of how the X-Men should be raising their kids, I also think it suffered from the lack of any sense that the appearance of those new mutants had changed anything in the status quo. Like, you know, our race has a future again and we need to decide what kind of future it's going to be! That's more of a side issue, though.

[inboots.livejournal.com]

but that doesn't do anything to address the question of why isn't anyone showing an interest in the explanation. (...) It's the way everyone seems to be treating Gen Hope as though they're nothing out of the ordinary that brings this whole uncomfortable Stepford Wives vibe to the story.

oh, totally. i agree with your post from start to finish. everything involving generation hope smacks of laziness. it reads like crappy filler to me, which is why i think they thought about the events (introduce hope, hope will be used in X future event like this and that), but not what they'd be doing to the character in between these events.

i think hope is less of a character and more of a gimmick.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

it reads like crappy filler to me, which is why i think they thought about the events (introduce hope, hope will be used in X future event like this and that), but not what they'd be doing to the character in between these events.

I'd agree, except that I'm not sure I'd even give them credit for having the big events planned out in advance. The whole M-Day saga has felt a lot like a long drawn out series of distractions while the overall direction of the line is being invented on a whatever-we-think-sounds-cool-today basis. If they actually had a proper explanation for what Hope is and a long term plan for her in mind when they first introduced her, they've certainly done their level best to avoid dropping a single concrete clue. 'Someone connected to the Phoenix Force' really doesn't count.

It sure does become a lot more obvious when they're between events though. By all accounts, the latest Cable series was little more than 24 issues of "Bishop tries to kill Hope and Cable, and Hope and Cable run away, on various backgrounds". And of course now that there's finally no immediate threats on her life, the degree to which the whole series is being treated as padding between the important stuff is becoming pretty self-evident.

I guess the real surprise is that the same team who still manage to grab me with the occasional well-executed event are the ones who seem to have no idea why their latest kid-team spin-off is struggling to pull in 20000 sales a month. I wouldn't be nearly this bitter about Gen Hope if they hadn't gotten me invested, and yet here we are.

[inboots.livejournal.com]

I'd agree, except that I'm not sure I'd even give them credit for having the big events planned out in advance.

maybe "planned" is a generous word. i believe that what they have is not so much totally planned out events, but to-do lists. then they write the events around these to-do lists, like house of m was written around the to-do list item of getting rid of morrison's mutant boom.

i think hope was brought in to tick-off two (maybe three) items. un-doom the mutant race after the purge (messiah complex and second coming) was the first one.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Sounds all too plausible to me, though I'd call it more of a to-tease list than a to-do list. The real convenience of Hope isn't that she fixes M-Day but that she represents a dangling carrot that might fix M-Day by some unspecified means sometime in the future if the fans keep reading long enough.

[sansele.livejournal.com]

I'm still reading through your post, but yep, the second I saw the Fifth Light I honestly thought it was Akira >:

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see how far the industry has come in terms of producing original, nuanced portrayals of characters from countries like Japan, rather than just grabbing a couple of anime references and an Engrish joke or two and taking the rest of the day off, isn't it? *sigh*

[bats_eye.livejournal.com]

There's no way in hell she'd have the socio-political background to lecture Professor X on how he apparently single-handedly screwed up mutant relations by using a weighted term like 'gifted' to describe a minority who'd been born different, and yet they've had her do that too.

I have to say, that works a lot better for me if we're meant to think she's just parroting Cable. Because I can entirely believe that when living in a wasteland eating rat-on-a-stick for every meal with only an orphaned child for company, Cable would hold lectures on political campaigning in between teaching her how to dress herself and fight off monsters. (One of the things I've always liked about him is he honestly believes that "you need to know the world before you can try to save it", it's been canon since practically his first appearance that he believes learning history and politics is just as vital as learning how to fight.)

To be fair, I've read literally none of these comics and I'm perfectly willing to believe you when you say they're awful but I think that's quite a charming character concept actually. That the only things she knows are either a) the complete basics, (how to eat, talk, make fire, defend herself) or b) advanced politics and strategy and all the in-between stuff like how to use computers, or talk to people or cook anything more complex than roasted rat is entirely alien to her.

Also I imagine a political education from Cable would be terrible because, as well meaning as he is, it would all be his opinions and what he thinks are important. So she'll know Cable's opinions on what the tax for timber exports should be but not who the actual president is. And, in any case, she'll have been taught that democracy is inefficient because it leads to people who aren't Cable the wrong people getting power.

I honestly don't understand why they don't want to tell that story, to be honest. And make it about Hope deciding what needs to be done about the new mutants. If we assume that she is basically following Cable's idea of what she should be doing but that his lessons aren't always applicable because he couldn't predict all her circumstances then she has to increasingly rely on her own gut and other people's advice. So it's about a girl who's spent all her life only hearing one opinion and only talking to one person (and a charismatic and overbearing one, at that) suddenly encountering a whole bunch of other influences and opinions and having to work out what her own view actually is and whether it's a betrayal of her dead father to disagree with him (because a) it's a nice extreme version of an actual human situation and b) it ties wonderfully into the ongoing schism plot which is about the x-men realising that they have different views from each other about what they should be doing and c) it sets her up as Cable's true successor as a free thinker and shows her earning the title of saviour he's burdened her with and d) leads automatically to bonding stories with the other new mutants which introduce them to the reader because you can tell the old x-23 raised as a weapon learning to be a person stuff and have her realise that to help them she has to be more affectionate than cable ever was with her or whatever).

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

I can entirely believe that when living in a wasteland eating rat-on-a-stick for every meal with only an orphaned child for company, Cable would hold lectures on political campaigning in between teaching her how to dress herself and fight off monsters.

Oh, I could believe that too. Trouble is, even the idea that she's parroting Cable doesn't help much with this particular instance, because Cable's far too much a big picture sort of guy to get hung up on something like the possible misuse of the word 'gifted'. In context, the gist of Hope's argument seems to be that maybe those murderous bigots who slaughtered hundreds of innocent people trying to kill her at birth wouldn't have hated mutants so much if Professor X hadn't told mutant kids they were 'special' when he opened his school back in the 60's. It's like, where do you even start with that kind of fractal stupidity?

but I think that's quite a charming character concept actually. That the only things she knows are either a) the complete basics, (how to eat, talk, make fire, defend herself) or b) advanced politics and strategy and all the in-between stuff like how to use computers, or talk to people or cook anything more complex than roasted rat is entirely alien to her.

See, that's pretty much exactly why I'm so disappointed in what they've done with Hope. They could have gone in so many more interesting directions with her if they'd only bothered.

Also I imagine a political education from Cable would be terrible because, as well meaning as he is, it would all be his opinions and what he thinks are important.

Actually, knowing Cable, I'd imagine it'd be half that, half philosophical parables and hypothetical questions for her to figure out for herself when she was ready to understand them. Add that to the fact it'd pretty much all be theory to her... well, unless they gave them a proper working time machine and let him and Hope go timehopping around to whatever time periods he thought would be the most educational for her, and I'm just saying, I would have read the hell out of that series...
...I forget what point I was trying to make at the start of that sentence, but I'm sure it wasn't nearly as interesting anyway.

And make it about Hope deciding what needs to be done about the new mutants.

It sounds like what they're actually doing is having Hope decide that training the Five Lights to be soldiers just like Cable trained her is her new life calling, but based more on the magical bond they share and vague ruminations about ~destiny~ than anything character-based.

RE: the rest of your whole last paragraph: God, THIS EXACTLY! There was so much potential to do cool things with a character with a background like Hope's. Cynical or not, the only reason I can think of why they'd pass up the chance to explore something like that is because it all makes her too complicated to function effectively as the convenient plot device she was created to be.

[bats_eye.livejournal.com]

Oh, I could believe that too. Trouble is, even the idea that she's parroting Cable doesn't help much with this particular instance, because Cable's far too much a big picture sort of guy to get hung up on something like the possible misuse of the word 'gifted'. In context, the gist of Hope's argument seems to be that maybe those murderous bigots who slaughtered hundreds of innocent people trying to kill her at birth wouldn't have hated mutants so much if Professor X hadn't told mutant kids they were 'special' when he opened his school back in the 60's. It's like, where do you even start with that kind of fractal stupidity?

... yeah that's not a great argument.

unless they gave them a proper working time machine and let him and Hope go timehopping around to whatever time periods he thought would be the most educational for her, and I'm just saying, I would have read the hell out of that series...

Oh my god, yes! Cable taking her to visit 13th century despots and then saying afterwards "see how easily I overthrew him by bribing the aristocracy to withdraw their support, this is why leaders need a security force which is loyal entirely to them and not to their position."

Or showing up at a battle and asking Hope which side they should fight for (he'd already be allied to one, of course but he'd want her to choose anyway).

God, THIS EXACTLY! There was so much potential to do cool things with a character with a background like Hope's.

I still kinda want a Deadpool and Hope series really. His relationship with Cable (slash aside) is exactly the kind of reluctant, wary, admiration that they should be trying to model Hope's views towards him on. And the pair of them trying to follow Cable's footsteps and continue his work just seems like a goldmine of interesting plots given how unsuitable they both should be to that task.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

... yeah that's not a great argument.

I think the most fascinating part is actually watching people try and make sense of it. There's been a lot of debate over at scans_daily between people who agree with her versus people who think she's full of shit versus people who think she maybe has a point but made it badly and is the last person who has any right to bring it up. I've even seen a couple of people citing it as evidence that the writers are deliberately trying to make her unsympathetic in lead up to having her finally punished for some of the other crap she's gotten away with lately. I think it all speaks to how hard it is to make sense of what direction the writers are even trying to go with her lately.

Oh my god, yes! Cable taking her to visit 13th century despots and then saying afterwards "see how easily I overthrew him by bribing the aristocracy to withdraw their support, this is why leaders need a security force which is loyal entirely to them and not to their position."

Or showing up at a battle and asking Hope which side they should fight for (he'd already be allied to one, of course but he'd want her to choose anyway).

=D Did I mention I would read the hell out of this series? Because I so would.

I still kinda want a Deadpool and Hope series really. His relationship with Cable (slash aside) is exactly the kind of reluctant, wary, admiration that they should be trying to model Hope's views towards him on. And the pair of them trying to follow Cable's footsteps and continue his work just seems like a goldmine of interesting plots given how unsuitable they both should be to that task.

I'm almost certain I remember reading an interview where they said we would be seeing Hope and Deadpool meet a while back, though I think it was an interview relating to that random Deadpool & Cable #27 which kinda made a mess out of trying to show Deadpool's reaction to Cable's death. It didn't sell very well however (and though I will never know for sure, I like to think this had something to do with other fans reading the preview pages and realising how bad it was going to be much the same way I did), and this may have killed any plans to do a #28 with Hope.

On principle, I like the idea of Deadpool and Hope meeting too, but from the way they've both been written lately I suspect I'd be happier without it. (Unless they got the Uncanny X-Force guy to write it that is - he writes a wonderful Deadpool, and he certainly couldn't do any worse with Hope than everyone else has been.)