Do people actually care about the MCU giving a justification for ‘where vampires and mutants have been all this time?’
Whenever the conversation of Vampires/Blade and Mutants/X-Men come up in the MCU, I always hear some sort of variation of ‘the reason Marvel is taking their time is because they must come up with a reason for why mutants and Vampires haven’t been present up until now.’ For me, that feels like a huge example of overthinking and over complicating something that can easily be fixed by delivering an entertaining movie. Ultimately, all I want is a solid film, and if Marvel can deliver that, I can easily justify it as ‘the MCU is a vast universe, and we simply haven’t heard from any of the Vampires until now.’ Is this something that actually bothers people? Do MCU fans value in-universe logic so much to the point where they feel like there must be an explanation for why these things haven’t occurred until now?
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It's a story, just enjoy it and don't over analyze the basic rules of the story telling universe.
The Watsonian answer is that some Avengers operate in a way that won't necessarily benefit from armor. Cap, Black Widow, and Hawkeye are covert operators and greatly rely on stealth and their natural agility to work, although I guess you could argue that they would benefit from a Spider-Man-style suit. Then you have people like Scarlet Witch, Hulk, and Thor who are already powerhouses by nature and don't need the armor
Ultimately it won't matter, but that also never stops people from caring.
That was eventually explained though. In *Avengers: Endgame*, when the Avengers travel back to 2012, you see the Ancient One killing Chitauri from the shadows. They were helping, just discreetly.
There were hundreds of wizards in MoM. The Inhumans. The Eternals. Wakanda. Atlantis. The Iron Fist lineage and kingdom. About a billion alien species. The gods.
Adding mutants to the list is no big deal. Especially since Xavier's whole thing was lying low until there was no choice anymore.
kickstart, i wouldn't be on board with -- but accelerate, maybe?
The A-bomb activated a lot more mutants. The sudden influx of mutants is what prompts Charles to open his school. To protect and train them. SHIELD starts tracking them. SHIELD researchers note their appearance correlates to the beginning of the nuclear age. Magneto is recruiting them to his cause.
Then the Blip happened and suddenly there were many many more mutants and we get to the MCU films
it really comes down to the x-men generations and how old we want our casts to be for the MCU.
bc we can do Xavier is 40 and the Original Class of Cyclops & co are in their late teens/early 20s
or we can do the original x-men are in their 30s or 40s, and a new class of teens/early 20s like nightcrawler etc are learning from the x-men's leadership
or even, "the x-men have been around AWHILE and are middle-aged like the rest of the MCU. the new class are juniors and maybe a senior like Colossus is giving pep talks about what HE went through as a young mutant being trained by Cyclops.
edit to add: i think what i'd lean towards the most is A - having the x-men be younger as a whole so that the franchise can be set in place for the next 10-20 years, and B - hoping to avoid the majority of the MCU complications as much as possible. ie, maybe the stone destruction of infinity war sprinkles energy into activating mutants at the blip, which means that children of that era are more likely to become mutants, leading to people like Cyclops and Jean joining the X-Men in 2028, 5 years after the blip. this puts them at like, 10 or so during infinity war, say. this let's cyclops blast a hole in the wall in the orphanage where he was placed during the blip bc his parents were killed in a plane accident (bc of the blip) and it allows Jean to have her moment of connection with her dying friend after she's hit by a car (also bc of the blip).
let the first X-Men movie be about the O5 (plus Lorna - get her on the team immediately!) set it in 2028? 2029? 2030? whenever makes sense with Secret Fucking Wars making a mess of shit. goddamn i hate this movie already and it's not even out.
let them be Extremely rare. even marvel struggled to name more than 198 of them. ;)
if 1 in 20 000 people are albino then there are 400 000 people affected by albinism in the world. yet we don't see them in the MCU much...
really the only MAJOR questions people have are...
\- where has charles been? quietly building his school to train a couple handfuls of those he could.
\- where has magneto been? secretly hunting nazis and the couple of times he caused a commotion, the x-men protected people and silenced him -- but maybe this time he'll successfully make people aware of mutants.
\- where has wolverine been? drinking - and maybe hanging with the covert canadian team, Alpha Flight.
the german nightcrawler was a monster while the kenyan storm was a goddess...
people dont' really know mutants are mutants. "kitty, you're a mutant" "wowie-zowie!"
Doesn't matter so much, though, because unless Doomsday makes a billion dollars, we're likely looking at the tail end of the superhero craze.
For Doomsday, we're assuming all of the mutants are from a different universe/timeline, so it's easy to say that they have been around and relevant in their own universes. We didn't know about them because it's not our universe, so why would we?
Post Secret Wars, if they want to introduce mutants in the current timeline, one way to explain where they've been is that they've been in hiding *because* they were worried about bigotry. They know they're different, and they are scared to reveal themselves to the world. And maybe this universe learns about their existence because of the events of Doomsday/Secret Wars, so they are forced to expose themselves.
People have been talking about the "end of superhero movies" since at least the mid 90s.
Batman & Robin was said to have killed off superhero movies when it came out in 97 - then Sam Raimi's Spider-man & the first Xmen movie changed that a few years later.
Similar situation with Spider-man 3, released in 2007. But then the next year the Dark Knight & Ironman came out.
People are not tired of the genre. People are tired of poor quality movies.
Now a bunch of people with powers show up that makes them feel extra inadequate. Yeah bigotry is going to run rampant enough.
there are roughly 400 000 people with albinism, but how many do we see in the MCU?
say there are like 2000 known mutants maybe, and that there are possibly more. let people like The Blob just be seen as freaks. i can't imagine that a world with alien invasions wouldn't have young people developing mutant powers feeling like "maybe i'm an alien." "maybe i'm an asgardian." "maybe i'm a skrull, or kree." "maybe i'm a vampire or inhabited by an egyptian god..." "my powers are water based, maybe i'm an atlantean!"
make Xavier's a quiet private school like in first class or x-men97.
give us an x-men movie where Magneto has only tried two big stunts. one, an attack on an army base that the original x-men foiled, where xavier erased all memory of them having been there and it being "top secret footage" that revealed the ineptitude of the military that day. let the other be an attack on a nuclear submarine - the first and only attempt to wage a mutant war, again foiled by the x-men, but this time, the crew of the submarine were killed and official reports ahve no idea what happened to the disappearing submarine.
give us an alex jones type character. a j jonah jameson styled conspiracy theorist who believes this rise in mysterious freaks the world over has to do with the arrival of the avengers. perhaps have him coin the word mutant, and let the x-men shrug and say "maybe it's better than 'x for the x-tra power' eh, charles?"
perhaps charles' death is the reason "the cat is out of the bag" - because without cerebro, he can't tie up loose ends. perhaps SHIELD has a folder on Xavier's School, but the odd thing is that there are hundreds of pages of paperwork chronicling visits that all end in "nothing to report." maybe end the first x-men movie with a shield agent filing another bit of investigative paperwork with "nothing to report."
From Season One Episode Four "The Nexus Event"
Vampires, and especially mutants, have these amazing powers; but their *not* going to do anything about Thanos?? 🤦🏻♂️
It stretches credibility too much to just hand-wave their existence away in the face of such a massive threat.
Older mutants like Professor X, Magneto, and Wolverine are rare. There’s only a hanfdful of them and none with the resources to fight Thanos at that point.
And beyond that, most mutants don’t even have powers. They have deformities or even disabilities that would cast them out of society. It’s estimated that at most, only 10% of mutants have useful powers, and only a fraction of them have X-Men level powers.
Mutants are a bit different because they are supposed to be something Marvel Universe citizens know about and are extremely prejudice against. So I feel like that does need a bit of an explanation or it might have a “Somehow Palpatine returned” sort of feeling if they just come out of nowhere.
Why didn't people know about mutants before? Well the X-Men are created by a mutant telepath. He could just erase the knowledge from people's minds.
I'm sure the main idea is that mutants would try to stay hidden, and any mistakes or reveal to others would be covered up by Xavier and others. Xavier can erase minds, Magneto could destory evidence, could even create or use a character that can erase saved data.
One of the main themes of the X-Men is that these powers can be curse. Kids aren't gonna be ecstatic to learn they can turn into a Glob Herman type of mutant. Or knowing that if you were mutant and your powers activiated, you could kill everyone around you automatically.
Like in real life.
And if Xavier has been working with other organizations, like say, the Sorcerer Supreme, then he could *really* cover his tracks.
They could make it work pretty easily if they tried. They could also just transport the X-Men from somewhere else and plant them in the 616 just as mutants are evolving.
But agreed, that could be a very interesting story idea on why humans would distrust mutants. "you erased my mind before, what's to say you didn't erase something else?" Characters should be concerned with any telepath.
If they are accurately adapted in the MCU, they would be around Spider-Man’s age, so any notable X-Men characters were too young to even have powers for much of the timeline. And the further back in time you go, the less mutants their are. Professor X and Magneto were grown men when they met and both remarked how they hadn’t really met other mutants until that point.
So the reason they wouldn’t previously be around in the MCU is that they are too rare, and the developing generation of future X-Men & Brotherhood members hadn’t yet developed powers. The public’s bigotry towards them is something that would have to be developed or a response to rapidly emerging mutants.
Curious to see how that gets written in.
I'm a big World of Darkness/Anne Rice fan, and Marvel vampires have just never held a lot of appeal for me. I'd love to find something to change my mind. That stuff on Utopia with Selene was kinda cool, but I'd say way more general horror than vampires.
"Yes, I do care" to X-Men-anything.
Common sense says that things and people exist without having to point it out.
The MCU has shown various parts of the universe, quantum realm, multiverse etc.
Thinking only the heroes and categories of beings shown is all there is, is absurd.
Mutants kind of but not really. They don’t have to be in high volume and can also be secret but you also can’t just be like well over here there’s been a mutant team that’s 5 years active and you just never saw a movie with them. But the idea that the MCU would have to “explain where mutants have been all this time” is silly and kind of reminds me of the Stranger Things fandom asking about people left in a barn.
Mutants were mentioned in Ms. Marvel for the first time, so we know they are a thing in the MCU. Likely just keeping their heads low, like Peter Parker kept his real identity hidden. Namor in Wakanda Forever is also a mutant.
Most of them wouldn’t want to be superheroes, they just want to live normal lives.
I don’t think Xavier or the X-Men are in this universe but will probably form after Secret Wars where they try to find other mutants. Even in the X-Men universe, mutants aren’t exactly easy to find. We know they exist in Deadpool’s universe and we saw Captain Rambeau cross over into an X-Men universe in The Marvels. In Multiverse of Madness we saw Wanda come up against the Illuminati versions of them. But they don’t appear to exist in this specific one.
So, that’s the easy explanation. The bulk of them are keeping a low profile so they fit in. The X-Men doesn’t exist to take them in to give them a safe place to be themselves.
Hell almost all of us mask / perform and we don’t have powers, wouldn’t be any different from mutants considering they’re human and all. Especially after the Sokovia accords, what mutant would wanna show their face after that? And the way JJ Jameson talks about Spider-Man? I’d keep my head down too.
As for the fight against Thanos the Avengers were there to handle it. As for the fight in Endgame that was isolated in the middle of nowhere at a hidden Avengers compound. Strange and Wong brought people they already knew existed to join the fight. Though you could probably see it from a massive distance, who would actually go there? Especially after you’ve just come back from the snap, you’ve got other immediate problems to deal with.
Mutants would be a deal breaker though. It's impossible to have a story where mutants secretly existed with their very own school and no one noticed, and it's impossible to have a story where people hate mutants for being mutants while loving Hulk/Strange/Spiderman/Captain America.
Halfhazardly give me a throwaway line, I’m not asking for much but **yes I DO** want an explanation.
And god I wish marvel focused more on the realism, thunderbolts was great at that, I hope we get more stuff like it in the future.
Revealing that mutants have always existed but have been in hiding this entire time makes their message of not wanting to be in the shadows seem kind of counterintuitive when that’s what they have been doing this entire time.
X-men and the brotherhood both have the same goal of wanting to be accepted into society and not have to exist as outcasts so having it be revealed they were hiding from society this entire time kind of kills that message.
A big reason I don’t think the hiding story works is due to the fact magneto was a victim of the holocaust one of the worst events to happen in human history, he spent his youth having to hide from society and who he was because of something that was intrinsically part of him it seems a disservice to his character to have it be shown that in his adult life he’s been doing the exact same thing. Showing that he has continued to be forced into hiding, not revealing who he truly is because the world dislikes him for what he and causing others to also live in the same secrecy and fear just feels wrong for the character.
My old theory for how they would explain way way back was always that Professor X has hooked himself up to a souped up version of Cerebro that lets him alter everybody's perception and when he dies the veil falls and people go back to their hatred of mutants. Have a montage of people hanging with their friends and then one of them suddenly turned into a giant pink blob or starts growing wings all of a sudden.
I do think we're getting some of merging universe stuff after Secret Wars if there's no reboot.
Does Kevin Feige hate Phase 1&2 so much that he doesn't even write an ending of all of them?
Blade: you are welcome.
Mutants I get because fans want the historical tales like WWII but like Namor they can exist but in secrecy for whatever rationale reason like self hate, fear, slower evolution in this universe, or its rare & the powers that be keeps them classified.
IMO, the only two characters who need a "so where have they been all this time" justification are Magneto and Prof X, but that's only IF they currently exist in 616.
By the end of the movie you find out that Mr Sinister had been using a multi pronged plan for nearly 2 centuries. Affecting the water and food supply, various forms of radiation, and even setting up a number of mating pairs of people to get the world's genetics to the point that it would suddenly start producing a much larger number of mutants.
Just like there were Hydra bases tucked away all over the world when the Avengers were looking for Lokis scepter, so to are there bases that harbor mutants and perform experiments on them. This would be the reason for Xavier to want to form a team. Xavier is powerful enough to do many things but he couldn't singlehandedly go into a huge military base and free everyone so he needs a team -like the Avengers- that can work in tandem with each other's powers to be as effective as possible.
I know Magneto's history with the Holocaust feels sacrosanct to some people but as time goes on it becomes a harder and harder timeframe to justify. If Magneto is one of these long time prisoners that gets released (powers kept in check by those classic neck bands from various X-Men stories) I think that's good enough of an association to something Holocaust-like for his character motivation. He could also be the one experimented on the most or for the longest time, with the results of those experiments being used to help give Wanda and Pietro their powers (along with the mind stone) thereby making him their "father" in a way.
But the general audience has the attention span of a mayfly.
There were, we just didn't know what they were and just labeled them as "special", and probably hidden because we tend to lash out at things we dont understand.
But the existence of mutants and vampires shouldn't be a problem. So just do that, say Xavier is hiding the mutants and he hasn't made them teamup and wear spandex just yet.
Id argue the lack of storytelling quality is exactly why the mcu lost the publics attention.
Where were the Eternals? They were just there and didn’t intervene in human issues. Done move on
Where was the Ancient One? She was helping the battle from her own roof. Done, move on
Where were the Wakandans? They didn’t bother fighting someone else’s fight. Done, move on.
I really don’t think Marvel would spend that much time on this.