#terrigen cloud

Don't get me wrong, I love seeing this angsty white boy suffer, but what an anticlimax. It's really funny to me that Marvel spent about a decade trying to villainise the dude and failed pretty miserably. Young Scott's misery worked at first for shocking acts like killing Xavier, less so by the time of Death of X. Indeed, it was an important plot point that Hank and Logan were incredibly biased if not straight up lying. The teen O5 bailed for a reason.

Amadeus Cho referring to him as 'young Hitler' was not just a miss but flat out ridiculous. Impossible to take seriously. Specifically arguing over 'evil' in warped hypothetical moral relativism. Nobody here blinks at that analogy either; highly educated and experienced supers just acting like idiots. The moral judgement stands, accepted by Scott himself, with the decision being whether they should condemn the teen based on his future self's actions. Maybe that's part of it. Scott Summers takes criticism quite seriously and generally listens to his friends. His guilt over killing Xavier especially meant he never really advocated for himself.

Obviously there's some subjectivity in play with that but I feel like the dude was vindicated for the shit people were actually mad about. Hope/Phoenix, the Terrigen Cloud, X-Force to a degree, trashing The Avengers, uh, rescuing mutants from SHIELD/cops, etc. Even the impetus for Schism - using children in battle - made sense only if you forget what genre it is and ignore the context. It almost feels like everyone else went crazy for a decade or so. Here's Storm on some 'not all mutants' shit, said while cowering in Limbo a few months before going to war with the Inhumans.

The Inhuman Terrigen Cloud is circling the Earth, making new Inhumans wherever it goes. The problem is that it kills mutants, as Jamie Madrox, Cyclops and Alchemy found out. Emma Frost already destroyed the other cloud, and the Inhumans were not happy. A truce was agreed to while Beast worked on a 'all things are possible with science' solution, but he's made zero progress and time is up.

The cloud is going to do some technobabble and render the planet uninhabitable for mutants. Beast has just realised they've got 2 weeks until that point but Iso, his Inhuman helper (and watcher,) has not.

Look at the big brain thinking big thoughts, familiar images of death and genocide, grief and trauma. Quite probably thoughts of past science failures too, like reversing M Day. He's been very confident up until this point, annoyingly so, but now he's terrified.

After visiting Scott's grave and having a complicated conversation with his headstone, Dr McCoy meets with the various Mutant factions to pitch his incredibly clever solution.

He really beats around the bush getting to the point, acknowledging everyone else's efforts with some disdain. Particularly Magneto, who doesn't give a fuck what he thinks. It's so bad that the School is in Limbo - the Hell dimension Ilyana unwillingly grew up in.

Beast finally gets to the point in his own verbose way, breaking down the what, why and when. Cloud, science mumbo jumbo, two weeks. The solution is coming, I promise.

Everyone starts yelling and pointing fingers, mostly at Hank. Magneto slams his fist on the table like Judge Judy - he will be heard.

Obviously, he refuses to accept his people being gassed to death. Yeah, they really went there. IvX is not subtle with the Holocaust and Hitler analogies. Drumroll please, the good doctor proposes his solution - ALL MUTANTS LEAVE THE PLANET FOREVER. What the fuck?

Almost everyone (except Rogue for some reason) is like 'you're a fucking idiot, let's just kick the shit out of them and destroy the cloud.' Beast is terrified of the Inhumans for some reason and thinks mutants have zero chance of beating them. Sure, there's a lot of them, but X-Men have been fighting pretty much everyone since forever. Mags and Storm could probably do it themselves if this event wasn't so ridiculous.

As is the case with many Marvel hero vs hero events, there's a failure to construct an impossible decision where both sides have equal merit. The Inhumans have known Terrigen fucks mutants up since just after M-Day, and they have access to other sources of it. Those factors are ignored for the sake of the plot, and Beast acts like a coward and a fool. If I was being generous I'd say he's traumatized but that's not made explicit. The X-Men end up knocking the Inhumans over quite easily too, as most of their firepower is contained within a handful of people. Anywayyyyy, a majority votes for war. Forge abstains and Rogue votes no for some reason.

That's that settled, except Beast isn't finished with ridiculous choices. Magneto proposes he use his access to Atillan and he agrees, except to snitch to the Inhumans. I guess he thinks this would force the mutants to evacuate, but it would just rob them of the element of surprise.