I'm getting pretty tired of reading what is essentially the same storyline over and over when it comes to X-Men comics. I'm a longtime X-Men fan and I absolutely love the characters -- and always will. I still read the comics because I still love the characters but the storylines are getting to be so insanely repetitive.

Another mutant genocide? Just another day in the office for the X-Men. Because we've seen it so much, the word "genocide" doesn't have the same weight that it definitely should. House of X, Genosha, the OG Mutant Massacre, Inhumans v. X-Men -- they're all fundamentally the same. I feel like the authors just pop in another "genocide" storyline when they don't know what else to write about. Other comics have interesting, heart-felt storylines that don't revolve around an entire population suddenly dying. I feel like that's not too much to ask for, right? Just some decent characterization instead of cheap gimmicks?

And don't even get me started on Jean's death. Why do they keep killing this woman? Hasn't she died enough at this point? Instead of making her a symbolic, overly righteous martyr, can we get back to making her a real person? She's a complex character, with both light and dark inside of her yet we haven't seen that characterization in YEARS. She's just there to act as this (in Emma's words) sacrificial cow to serve the writers' death-fueled desires. It's ridiculous and sad. She deserves more than this.

I will say, the art in this issue is beautiful and deserves kudos. That's mostly why I'm not giving it a worse rating. I really wouldn't recommend this comic or any other X-Men comics for the time being. Powers of X really reset things for the X-Men and it made me excited to read them again. But they've just changed the setting without changing the story. You can read any X-Men comic from the last ten years and it'll be pretty close to the stuff coming out today. I really hope that things change but I'm wary that they will. I guess we'll just have to see if Marvel can find some writers who are more creative and actually want to make something out of these characters. Until then, it'll just be bloodbath after bloodbath.

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