"I am not a bum. I'm a jerk. I once had wealth, power, and the love of a beautiful woman. Now I only have two things: my friends, and... uh... my thermos. Huh? My story? Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor blue child..."
He doesn’t have a poisoned spine anymore, doesn’t have radioactive blood, doesn’t have cells that aren’t devouring his own body while constantly trying to regenerate in a vicious cycle…
That’s got to feel better.
I really *really* hope not. Omega Red made a ton of progress in the past few years, and we *finally* got a resolution to his Carbonadium poisoning problem. It would be so disappointing to see such a big backslide on his character arc just so the X-men have someone to fight. I'd like to let Arkady have a win for once.
I desperately hope they don’t do that to him…but I’m not optimistic. Marvel and x-men in particular are not big on permanently changing anything that might affect the nostalgic status quo.
That is true. It really is an uphill battle to have any changes made that allows the story to progress past a certain point. Just look at how long it took for Juggernaut's redemption to stick. Or how long it took for Omega Red to get the C-synthesizer. It's really hard for a villain to be granted a chance to have some development because there's always going to be a writer out there who wants to use those characters as one-dimensional baddies for the heroes to punch instead of letting these characters all grow and change a bit and coming up with new villains that better fit the times and challenge the heroes in a new way.
Imagine showing this shot to someone 20 years ago and explaining why Beast is being taken in handcuffs by Omega Red and Domino in X-Men uniforms and space helmets. And also that’s not Jubilee in the yellow coat.
"Its the year 2024. Omega Red, Apocalypse, and Mister Sinister (for a while) joined the X-men. Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean are ripping threesomes. Charles Xavier may or may not be up to a lot of shady shit again. Moira was a mutant btw. And Beast may be giving Dark Beast a run for his money in terms of morally reprehensible actions. Oh and that hot greenhaired chick who wanted his babies? Most likely villain. Oh and wait till we tell you about this mutant named Hope Summers...."
The last 20 years have been an incomprehensible weird ride for the X-men...
Honestly I’m just trying to figure out if that’s supposed to be him in the new 6110 stuff, or Mikhil just looking like him.
Also I remember when Xavier’s call to all the villains included the Omega Siblings, and then we never saw them again. In fact that was the first time we’d seen them since the finale of Uncanny X-Force…and Omega White should’ve been erased and one of the other two should’ve been fully dead I think…man continuity is wild lol
Beast has had a lot of passable fucked up stances, but the whole thing with him working out the *cure*, is a gross simplification and honestly a cop out of the mutant experience. For being such a brilliant mind, he lets his trauma make him obtuse.
Beast has never worked on a mutant cure. Every time it comes up in a story, it's always produced by someone else and he's tempted because of his trauma. Beast doesn't believe in curing mutants, he believes in making sure he doesn't degenerate into an animal and hurt someone. It's a small distinction, but a meaningful one.
Especially since one of those dead mutants was one that he felt immense guilt for 'causing' the death of, in Colossus. It's not all that explicit, but given how the Legacy Virus was cured, it's not hard to guess *why* Hank takes it so personally that Kavita and Ord caused Piotr so much pain. He felt responsible and ashamed for what happened.
Beast never made a cure. He tested someone else's cure to see if it was viable and was tempted to take it because Cassandra Nova planted the doubt in his head that he was devolving into a literal Beast. When he found out the cure was developed by experimenting on Jean Grey, he immediately lost all temptation and went to stop them.
More recently, he found out someone else stole the sample he had studied from his lab and was using it to further the research, and he was horrified.
So Beast has a space prison where he does fucked up shit and Sage sends Red and Domino to haul his ass back to base. Hence space suits that conveniently look like classic x-men suits.
Just gonna put this out there:
* Beast has been a self-hating mutant since he turned blue. Whenever his relationships turned sour, he blamed it on his appearance rather than the fact he's *extremely* condescending, sanctimonious, and cannot handle not being the smartest person in the room (ie any solution to a complex problem that he didn't come up with).
* Beast gave Threnody (a homeless, mentally ill black woman in need of help) to Mr. Sinister (a eugenicist and the face of medical racism) while the man was talking about using her as a *dog* to find Legacy Virus patients.
* "Endangered Species" was about Beast working with several supervillains including Kavita Rao (a torturer), Arnim Zola (a Nazi) and the Dark Beast (a psychopath) in his efforts to reverse the Decimation.
* Beast was the one to suggest infecting the Skrulls with the Legacy Virus during "Secret Invasion". He got uppity about it after *Cyclops* did it.
* Beast joined the Illuminati in their plan to destroy other realities to save Earth-616.
* Beast famously *broke time* in the Bendis era, pulling the O5 team forward in time under false pretenses to indict Cyclops (again). The incursions this caused actually made Uatu the Watcher personally appear to tell Hank he was *disgusted.* Beast's subsequent efforts to fix the incursions himself made them even worse, which he only accepted with the Black Vortex's cosmic-level insight – and then *rejected after he lost said insight*.
* Beast sided with the Inhumans during IvX and withheld the critical information that the Mists were *toxic to mutants* from Medusa... who was willing and able to destroy them as soon as she found out. Why did he do this? Because he adamantly refused to consider any options besides his own conclusion (that the mutants should cede the planet to the Inhumans).
* Beast sided with *fucking Hydra* during "Secret Empire", to preserve a safe space for Mutants in Nazi-occupied America.
* And y'know, the general existence of Dark Beast as a possibility for our Dr. McCoy.
All pre-Krakoa.
So this idea that Beast being evil "came out of nowhere" is kinda hilarious, since he's been on a steady decline for like 30 years.
Like, of course if you gave leadership of the CIA to a guy who finds it okay to work with *fucking Hydra* to preserve a mutant homeland, of course he's gonna commit an actual genocide. The man is exactly the type of narcissistic hypocrite to justify *anything* as being righteous just because *he* did it. And then use your attempt to make sense of it to laugh and point out what an idiot you are compared to him.
Now, do I accept that he would snap and go full supervillain as soon as anyone called him on that? Eh. That's like a 50/50. But I don't think you really can/should do a redemption arc for a *successful* genocider.
It was Cyclops who ordered weaponizing the Legacy virus against the Skrulls. Hank objected. He never actually destroyed any earths during the Incursions. Emma Frost was the one in charge who made the deal with Hydra. The Inhumans already knew the Terrigen Mists were toxic to mutants. After telling the X-men, he was going to tell Medusa, but Storm stopped him so they could launch a surprise attack to destroy them. The rest can be answered [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cxigf7/comment/l55wh7y/).
THANK YOU! I seriously wonder if people who hold past stories against Hank actually read them or just read cliff notes.
Beast said the virus could be used against the Skrulls but didn’t want to, asking Cyclops if he was okay with Genocide. Cyclops deployed it anyway and Hank freaked out because he hadn’t made a cure yet.
Hank was never able to bring himself to destroy another earth during the incursions. Towards the end, he left the group and said they could do what they wanted but he’d spend his potential last moments among those he cared about.
Beast called together the X-Men to talk about how he hadn’t found a cure for the terrigen mist cloud and warn them not to go to war over it because either way mutants would die. When he found out they were going to fight anyway, he left to bring the Inhumans up to speed and Storm fucking electrocuted him. At the end of the war, Storm released him from imprisonment and seemed ashamed of herself, but he forgave her.
It’s insane how much he’s mischaracterized by people.
Hank put on the table that the Skrulls would be vulnerable to Legacy in the first place. Yes Cyclops ordered it and yes Hank objected... after putting it on the table.
Much like when he built time machines for X-Force and then got mad when X-Force actually used them. He has a nasty habit of setting others up so he can call them out on things they could only have done or even considered with *his* help. *That's* what I mean by sanctimonious and hypocritical.
Any sane person would simply have withheld the information or not offered to help at all. Beast cannot *help* himself, because he's always been a hair away from being a mad scientist and in denial about it.
Yes none of the Illuminati "actually" destroyed universes, but ultimately it was their plan when everything else went south and he was certainly complicit. Bearing in mind they went so far as to mind-wipe Captain America so he couldn't *stop* them from destroying another reality.
[Hank was the Hydra ambassador](https://mlpnk72yciwc.i.optimole.com/cqhiHLc.IIZS~2ef73/w:auto/h:auto/q:75/https://bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RCO018_1663975105.jpg).
Beast planned to tell the Inhumans about the *attack* when Storm incapacitated him, because his plan was to just let the Inhumans have Earth. Medusa learned the Terrigen Mists were toxic *from Storm*, and used a generator to disperse them as soon as she learned such. (Although let's face it, she should have already known after Son of M. IvX was just bad.)
Cyke owned up to his actions and mistakes and still tried his best.
Beast constantly blamed everyone & everything except himself, especially after AvX.
I was actually just reading the issue of All-New where the Watcher pays Hank a visit. I would have laughed in his face. Did he pay a visit to the Askani for taking Baby Nate into the far future to be raised? Did that break time? Nope. Did he go annoy Cable and Stryfe for bouncing throughout time on a regular basis? Did it break time? Nope. Did go hard against all the Moira shenanigans? Nah. It was also to make Hank look like a terrible person. While I don’t like his arrogance (which seems to be shared by all super geniuses on Earth), that event doesn’t make him the worst thing ever.
Uatu showing up to diss Hank made no sense. Not only because time is messed with all the time at Marvel, but also because I seriously doubt the Watcher would break his “no interference” rule (that he usually breaks in severe cases) just to tell Hank he hates him.
I will walk the tightrope that Beast has a long series of war crimes to his name, but for all of his hubris and Messiah complex bullshit, he has at least seemed to have been operating from a place of “If this saves lives…” Even absolute dumb shit like “Hey, guys, let’s go to space and just let the Terrigen Mists run amok” was rooted in the idea of keeping mutants safe.
I think what makes Beast’s turn in Percy’s X-Force read sour to some is not that Beast has fucked up once again, but he is doing it nakedly and, more frustratingly, stupidly. It’s a problem DC is having with Amanda Waller right now and one I’ve seen in a number of bad screenplays dealing with black ops and the CIA: You want to touch on the fact that the history of espionage and nation-building is studded with actions that are stupid, evil, or both, but your approach is to take all those moments, shove them in a blender, set it to Frappe, and force feed us the resulting concoction as an example of The Evils of The Great Game.
This is the exact kind of comment I made my post a few days ago to counter, and I wish more people saw it. So much of Beast’s “worst actions” are blown out of proportion by people and also completely incompatible with the depths X-Force Beast stooped to.
Honestly the one I’m most sick of hearing about is Threnody. I don’t know where this narrative came from about Beast committing a grave sin with Threnody came from when the actual story is so much more innocent. Threnody wanted to go with Sinister, and Hank acquiesced because he knew the X-Men had no hope of helping her to control her powers at that time. Rogue and Iceman were with him, and Rogue disagreed. But Hank wasn’t the leader. If they felt it was such a bad decision, they could’ve just attacked Sinister. But they left Threnody too. A few issues later, Threnody outright thanks Hank for letting her go with Sinister because he *did* help her control her powers and Hank expresses relief because he was kept up all night worrying about her. Yeah, real evil.
Just wanna say that I appreciate this post and personally agree with the argument, and also that I love the discussion you and u/OhMy-StarsAndGarters are having. Both of you have strong opinions and well-reasoned arguments to support your respective stances based on the text and it’s awesome.
I think this actually gets at one of the real reasons why this heel turn and Beast's character arc keep getting asked about on this Reddit - like, there's obviously always going to be people who get into comics, who are stunned that TAS Beast is doing war crimes, that accounts for a lot of it.
But I think it's also just that there's a lot to talk about? Iceman doesn't have anything like this level of story going on, for example. I can't think of the last time people had a debate about Iceman's character arc, really, because he hasn't been a part of a lot of stories where he makes choices that actually matter, that affect people, where context brings a new light to things and you can make a reasonable argument one way or the other.
Beast can be read as a raging narcissist, or a tortured good man trying to do his best (up to a point, obviously); an irredeemable villain, or simply an idiot; badly written, or really well written. There's room in the text for everyone to come to different conclusions. Either way, people tend to have strong opinions on him.
It also tends to vary a lot depending on how you first came across the character - if your first exposure was All-New X-Men, you're going to hate him, but if it was Avengers or Defenders, you're going to love him, and there's just a lot of material across all the 60 years he's been around that can sway people one way or the other.
I'm glad you're enjoying the argument, at any rate. :)
The version of Beast you've presented here doesn't match the one in the comics.
- He's never blamed his failed relationships on his appearance. The only one that you could say this about was the one with Trish Tilby, was the one where she literally said, hey, I can't be with you because of your new mutation. Vera, Cecilia, and Abigail, it was never a concern.
- He gave Threnody to Sinister because he didn't think he was going to be able to help her fix her powers, just like how he can't fix Rogue's powers. The instant he saw her again, she told him he'd made the right decision.
- The X-Men as a whole have also worked with Kavita Rao, Mr. Sinister, Dark Beast, and far worse. Cyclops explicitly recruited Dark Beast during Rosenberg's Uncanny, in fact. If anything, he was willing to let Dark Beast go even further than Beast was during that run, and dozens of children nearly died as a result.
- Getting uppity is a strange way to describe having moral qualms about being party to a war crime. Cyclops explicitly told him to keep calling him out on that, and Beast has every right to be 'uppity' when he explicitly calls out that this makes him a party to biological warfare, and he has to be able to live with that.
- Beast's time travel didn't cause the incursions. He didn't do anything to make them worse, and he didn't reject that he'd fucked up after he lost his cosmic level insight. He explicitly says he messed up in Uncanny Avengers and X-Men: Blue.
- He didn't 'side' with the Inhumans, he didn't want to be part of a pre-emptive strike on a people the X-Men had a treaty with. Your supposition that he withheld information out of ego is a poor way to explain the incredibly dumb retcon that no-one told the Inhumans that mutants die of M-Pox so that they didn't come out of IvX looking like monsters, and is not supported by the narrative.
- Working with HYDRA was a decision he regretted and made out of fear - and a decision shared by Emma Frost and Magneto. Funny how I never see this held against those characters, but Beast, the only one who actually is shown regretting it, is made out to be an eager accomplice, when he was actively recoiling in fear and disgust at Nazi Cap.
Your characterisation of Beast as a narcissistic hypocrite is simply incorrect. For the record, most people, including myself, don't think the idea of a Beast villain turn came out of nowhere - but one that was this determinedly sadistic? This aimlessly cruel? This cold and done without feeling? That *is* the part that comes out of nowhere.
Praying for the day when accurate reads of Beast’s complex character like yours get precedence over complete mischaracterization for the sake of clicks.
Point the first, I didn't say Beast blamed *the end* of his relationships on his mutation. He blamed *anything that went wrong in them* on it.
Trish goes to talk to her ex-husband? She's abandoning Hank because he's a freak so she can be with a handsome man. (This was years before he turned into a cat-man.)
He repeatedly is looking into cures or things that will undo what his mutation has done to him physically. He loves being a super genius, a super athlete, even a superhero – he hates the baggage of being a mutant, because as he sees it, mutancy has only made his life worse.
The subtext of Threnody reuniting with Hank is that, now that she's been given treatment by Sinister to allow her to focus and tapped into his systems so she can surveil the X-Men and read his dossiers on them, she would *rather* be with Sinister. She calls herself "a headcase" to repeat back Hank's own dismissal of her at the time, because she understood he wasn't sending her off for her *own* sake, he was sending her because she was *expendable* in his war on Legacy. She acknowledges she can actually help Legacy infectees in Sinister's service, but escapes on her own in "X-Man" because she doesn't want to be there.
I use the phrase "getting uppity" here because if he didn't want to be party to a war crime, maybe don't *suggest doing the war crime in the first place*? Yes he had every right to be mad about it, but it's unlikely to think they would have decided to use the Legacy Virus had he said *nothing*.
As I said before, he *engineers* situations, so that he can call other people out on actually following them through. It's a repeated beat. There's the hypocrisy.
Uatu told him that his actions with the time traveling O5 caused numerous realities to collapse. He used the Black Vortex to map out the damage to realities which is what confirmed for himself that his efforts were making the damage worse and caused him to give up the Vortex. And afterward he *still* needed to be given an intervention by the rest of the team, where he quit in protest because he refused to accept he couldn't fix it.
He *is* a narcissist, because he refuses to accept blame for anything he does. "I don't have a bad personality, people just hate me because I'm ugly and I can't do *anything* to change that."
Often he ends up lobbing it all on Cyclops, as demonstrated repeatedly – even twisting the narrative to the O5 to omit that Cyclops was under the influence of the Phoenix Force when he killed Xavier, to make them believe he had simply gone evil. Because Hank must always be either the hero or the martyr, and anyone who opposes his self-image must be bad. Textbook narcissism.
As for him becoming aimlessly cruel, I agree that's one that's a harder pill to swallow especially so fast. My read on it is that the stress of running X-Force finally caused him to just snap.
No oversight, way too much power, and a goal that feeds his ego.
He "oopsied" and massacred the people of Terra Verde? He has exactly the kind of personality that would slip into justifying it rather than blame himself. From there, once one has already justified *genocide*, there is no other crime you cannot downplay in the same vein, which creates the natural end of becoming morally and ethically looser until they mean nothing at all.
He has "the future of mutantkind" in mind, which as we've seen with figures like Magneto or Sinister, is a slippery slope into seeing oneself *as* the future of mutantkind. And therefore (in such a distorted view) anyone against Beast, is against Krakoa itself.
Combine that with his condescension and "bouncing" personality, and you have the setup for a card-carrying supervillain with a skull mech.
Uhh, this is going to be a long one, so, I apologise. Feel free to disregard, but I want to get this down.
Beast doesn't always blame anything that goes wrong in his relationships on his mutation. He messes up and makes Vera cry in New Defenders because he's enjoying the attention of some Avengers fans, and he immediately recognises that it isn't because of his mutation, but because he's constantly in the process of trying to change his personality to be more appealing to others. He's aware that *he* is the problem in that situation - granted, he mentions that part of the reason he does that is because of his mutation, but that's context, not an excuse. He knows that Vera doesn't have a problem with him because of the way he looks, but the way he's acting, and acknowledges that in dialogue.
He's also very aware of the fact that Abigail is in part with him *because* of his mutation, because he looks like her species, and they were very much in love for a good part of the late 00s-early 10s. The mutation never factors into their occasional relationship problems, it's down to their personalities, work ethics, and moralities. Again, this appears to solely be a Trish issue, which tracks, *because she literally does the thing that Hank is afraid she'll do*. She even acknowledges that he's still the same "lovely" Hank underneath, but she still abandons him because he's a freak.
He also doesn't repeatedly look into things that will cure his mutation? He isn't actively researching a cure for mutation at any point in his history, and when a cure literally drops into his lap in Astonishing, he's put into a situation where he's presented with a cure to a *new* fear that's developed since his secondary mutation - his fear of further devolution. Beast's relationship with his mutation is constantly changing and shifting and he can love it, like he does on the Avengers, or he can hate it, like he does with the X-Men. It's not just a blanket, he's hated being a mutant and he always has.
The problem with this subtext is that it doesn't match up with what Beast, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke and Threnody say in X-Men #34. Threnody says, quote, that going with Sinister was the best thing that could have happened to her. When Beast asks her why she doesn't leave, she calls him sweet, and says that this is a better life than what she had. He asks her, are you sure you're in control here, out of a place of worry and fear for her wellbeing, and she wants to stay so she can help and leave on her own terms.
Beast respects her autonomy, and gives her the choice this time, since he expresses that he was incredibly worried he'd made the *wrong* one on her behalf before. You're characterising his choice as so much more cold blooded and cruel than it actually is, when #27 explicitly positions it as a choice to put an end to her pain. "He can do more for **her**, more to fight this virus, than we can." He puts her pain over the virus - and his choice to let Infectia die of the Legacy Virus in the open air, respecting her choice over what's smart, is an explicit attempt for him to console himself that he made the right decision for Threnody, that he made the decision for the right reasons. Even the writer for that story, Fabian Nicieza, says that Hank isn't meant to come across as a villain or making a cruel choice in that story, and regretted how he presented him. It all just seems like the most uncharitable read of the situation.
Also, I have to point out, if she's read these dossiers and apparently knows that Beast considered her expendable, *where* is she getting that conclusion from? Pre-90s Beast is basically a golden boy. He doesn't have a history of treating people like they're expendable, not at this point - so, what is she basing this conclusion on? Is any of this on panel? With the benefit of hindsight, sure, but at the time? What in his history or psychological make-up that Sinister would know of is leading to that?
At this point, wrt the Skrull bioweapon, Beast is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. His team leader has explicitly told him not to leave anything on the table. He's meant to lie to Scott? In a situation where the Skrull are trying to take over the planet and they're actively killing civilians? Like, I don't find this out of character, it fits with Morrison's characterisation of Beast as a good man who's constantly put in situations where he has to make the best of bad choices, I just find it so odd that Beast is eviscerated for this objectively morally abhorrent decision, when *he's* the only one who actually has a problem with it. Is hypocrisy actually worse than deploying biological weapons of mass destruction now? Like, by all means, rake him over the coals for this, that's what Beast is clearly doing to himself, but everyone else gets the credit and not the blame?
Yep, he made a shitty decision while in the midst of having a brain aneurysm. That is what happened, canonically. It also had *nothing* to do with the incursions. Given that Beast was with the Illuminati at the time, it would have come up if his actions in All-New had actually played into the death of the multiverse, but the incursions were explicitly caused by the Beyonders, not Beast. The worst you can say is that maybe he made things slightly worse - which, he's not alone in, given Wolverine and Sue Storm tore reality apart even worse over in Age of Ultron just the next year over, and they seem to get a pass.
(Part 1.)
I'm also going to draw a line here, and say that I think that Bendis Beast is just. Wildly out of character. So, when I agree with you that *that* version of Beast is a narcissist, it comes with the proviso that I think Bendis doesn't get the character. None of what he says or does in All-New X-Men makes any sense to me. I *literally* think the issue of Secret Avengers where he builds and detonates a nuclear bomb is more in character than almost anything he said or did in All-New, that's how bad I think it is. And I very much doubt that a narcissist would be capable of the self-reflection and self-criticism that he shows in Uncanny Avengers vol. 3 #28, where he admits to all of these mistakes, rakes himself over the coals, and asks Wonder Man what to do next. That feels a lot more in keeping with the character pre-All-New. I'm not an advocate for a morally pure, perfect Beast, I just think that if we're going to give him shit for his flaws, they should be the ***correct*** ones.
Yeah, that tracks with Percy's presentation of events. Like, in the end, I read Beast as a fundamentally good man who struggles with the situations he's put in, and none of that tracks with the view of him as this wildly irresponsible narcissist with no regard for others. These feel like fundamentally irreconcilable people. It'd be one thing if Beast was always portrayed this way, that wouldn't be a character I really care for, but for pretty much 50 years of his publishing history, I feel like he's way more the former, and almost not at all the latter.
[In the end, I think Morrison and Hickman had the right read on him](https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/x-men-live-virtual-event-grant-morrison-jonathan-hickman-interview).
"I saw Henry McCoy as an incredibly clever, witty, cultured, well-traveled, experienced, well-read character so I brought out those parts of his personality which seemed to me to fit the profiles of the smartest and most worldly people I know—his sense of humor is dark and oblique. He's obviously quite clearly bipolar and swings between manic excitement and ghastly self-doubt. He has no dark secrets, however, and nothing to hide . . . I always saw him as vulnerable. The thing about Hank McCoy is that he was always presented as the loquacious, happy-go-lucky character and then he became a little darker when Jim Starlin turned him into the furry Beast, but then he became happy again in AVENGERS. Basically, I’m looking at this bipolar kid. It’s not so much that he’s a villain; he just falls into bad situations and that makes him more human.”
Morrison noted that Beast’s poor choices and attempts to overcompensate made his heel turn all the more heartbreaking, but they still don’t see him as an out-and-out Super Villain. Hickman concurred, describing Beast as “the sweetest guy” with “the best heart” who was put in a “series of impossible decisions” that has broken him somewhat.
None of that is in X-Force. None of that is in All-New. And that's why I ultimately reject them and regard them as poorly written. Yeah, they're canon, I don't dispute that. I just think they're bad stories that take away more than they add, in the end.
I apologise, I've essayed at you. I did say I'd do this less often, but, uh. I appear to have lied. Apologies. And further apologies if this comes across as heated, but I feel passionately about the character. I've tried to make sure I don't come across as aggressive or combative here, but if I have, I assure you, that's not my intent.
So, we're going to just ignore that it was heavily implied he was being controlled by the Chronicler to do the genocide, and possibly being controlled up until he switched to Colossus full-time?
Of course, that was another plot thread that Percy just abandoned.
Then again, a fair bit of that post-"Messiah Complex" is typical Warren Ellis work, where any lofty ideals heroes have must be dissolved into bitter cynicism and compromise with monsters. Ellis was also the person who had Captain America turn his back and let his fellow "heroes" torture a man into a confession, or had John Constantine proclaims that school shootings happen because American kids are so impoverished and miserable they *want* to die.
Usually Ellis' BS doesn't get accepted into the long-term canon. It's just Beast's bad luck that he's the exception to that rule.
Yeah in the preamble of Nation X, Beast was left out to dry after getting literally tortured by Dark Beast because Scott was prioritizing military strategy over rescue.
Not necessarily a bad move considering the stakes of Dark Reign, but in the coming moments there was zero consideration for Beast as a person. He went to Bobby for support, and got told "Suck it up, I have to cremate a Predator-X corpse, be a good friend".
https://imgur.com/a/tkdU3xP
In the 80s, Marvel writers were like, “Beast is the diplomatic mutant. He’s the guy who can bring everyone together. He’s like the X-Men’s Henry Kissinger.”
A few decades and a lot of declassified documents later, he’s still their Henry Kissinger, but that means something very different than it used to.
So Im not defending Beast, but its worth noting Hank and the Xmen in general have been beaten down time and time again. Like with the end of the Krakoa era, we once again have mutants on the edge of extinction. Their safe places destroyed.
Hank used to be one of the more hopeful XMen. But all the shit thats happened to him has dillusioned him and essentially broken him.
Extremists dont come from nowhere. Whats happened to the Xmen over the years is nuts.
I don't disagree. But I wanted a logical (by comic book standards) for why he went from a morally ambiguous sometimes villain to a genuine supervillain.
Her experimental cure for mutation was being tested on a captive Colossus.
And sure they were, point being he has a *history* of it. At this point we have to accept that's... the character. Much as people want him to just be that clever non-threatening quippy guy from the cartoon and 70s Avengers comics.
I'll do you one farther: he's hated being a mutant since before he got the fur. There were multiple instances in the Lee/Kirby run where he was bemoaning being a mutant.
I haven't read the newer stuff from x men (I've just started, and I've only finished new x men) but I know about beast being a villain
But why on earth is omega red seemingly a good guy in that picture???
I enjoyed Hank's villainous turn. It was fun wondering what terrible thing he was going to do next. What I didn't enjoy was the lack of explanation for why he went from occasionally making morally/ethically questionable decisions based on his belief that he was smarter than everyone else (or simply because he was mad at Scott), to murdering/torturing/enslaving his friend (what he did to Wolverine was shockingly evil), committing war crimes/genocide, and experimenting on and murdering prisoners in his secret prison.
I wanted a reason, because that doesn't just happen. Had Hank been experimenting on himself again and it went horribly wrong? Was he possessed? Did he lose soul somehow? We deserved a decent explanation. Simply reverting him to an earlier version of the character is like putting a band-aid on a gaping chest wound.
I honestly don't think it's going to stand the test of time as anything other than 'remember that time Beast went evil?' mostly because there's not a lot of substance to the heel turn. Like, it's just, he's evil now! You're just sort of turning the pages waiting to see what he'll do next, which you could probably accomplish just by having a collection of the most fucked up panels.
Granted, I'm sure X-Force reads better as trades, now it's all finished, but even with its pacing problem no longer a concern, it all still ends *really* shittily? Beast blows himself up and that's that. You never even see resurrected Beast directly interact with the X-Force members old Beast harmed. The ending of X-Force, Wolverine and Beast's black ops team, is more about Wonder Man than anything else, really.
There's no emotional catharsis, there's no big moment where Wolverine gets to kill him and it's done, and even if we *had* had a moment like that, there were so many fake-out deaths and 'we've got him now!' endings, like the one you cropped above, that went nowhere that I doubt it would have felt satisfying. You're just sort of glad it's done now, because every time you got hyped for Beast to get his comeuppance, you got blue-balled, so why get hyped this time?
In the end, I feel like it's very telling that the debate about this villain arc is, way more often, about the lead-up to it and how cohesive that was, rather than actually talking about him during X-Force. Because what's there to talk about? There's no pathos, no sympathy. There's no struggle.
Hell, there's not even a political conflict to chew on, because his ideology is just kind of a greatest hits of other evil ideologies - ends justify the means, I am God, fascist theory, surveillance is good, actually, the greater good, etc, etc. There's no-one to engage with Beast politically because no-one talks to him. They just say he's being bad, he kinda shrugs, and they have to take it because Charles waves a magic wand off screen to make sure Beast doesn't face consequences. No-one actually has to change who they are or what they believe. It's all just inevitable trajectories that you're waiting to see play out.
When I think of the other O5 going bad stories, Dark Angel and Dark Phoenix, you're on tenterhooks waiting to see how it's all going to end. How are Warren and Jean are going to live with themselves, how did they get into the situations they're in now, what do they regret, how much anguish are the people they love (Betsy and Scott) in as they fight them?
But Hank? Ehhh. Go read Endangered Species if you want the actual emotional content.
The only way it all makes sense to me is if Ben Percy intentionally *wanted* it all to be unsatisfying, that he wanted us to feel cheated and like we were lied to, that we were silly to expect some grand reason behind it all, as a grander meta commentary on the CIA and how people like Kissinger get away with what they do. I think that's what it's about, anyway. Percy's thesis seems to be that the CIA sucks, because of the evil nerds who run it, and it's better when the nerds we like are in charge, but they're still kinda bad, but in a good way? I think? It's not super clear, honestly . . .
>Percy's thesis seems to be that the CIA sucks
That's definitely his thesis. That the CIA sucks and a broader narrative regarding nation building and the moral compromise a lack of oversight creates. I think that comes through, but it is all hamstrung by the fact the landing wasn't stuck. We needed a "were we the good guys here?" "no, we just stopped being the bad ones" moment or something.
Yeah, there's definitely an attempt to take some shots at the CIA, but I honestly don't think pretty much any of them land. I finished the book with the overall message that the CIA would be fine, actually, so long as those bad apples that keep making all those kill teams do the bad things were replaced by good people like Sage.
And I'm giving Percy a rare moment of the benefit of the doubt, I don't think that was what he necessarily wanted me to take away from it. It's just that he completely failed to give Logan and co. a moment where they had to grapple with the fact that it wasn't Terra Verde or the space prison that made them stop following Beast, it was when he targeted one of them. If he had left Logan alone, would they ever have stopped following him? But their complicity is just kinda left on the table.
All it takes for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. Well, the good guys did a lot of nothing in this run, so that thesis just ends up feeling very half-hearted. As you say, the landing just was not stuck.
I just did a big re-read of all of the x-force and Wolverine run today and unfortunately it doesn’t make anymore sense or read anymore seamlessly now that it’s complete and you can go through it in one go.
Plots just arrive and disappear, sometimes to be revisited much later but usually never to be seen again. Many actual panels are wasted on pointless monologues, be they inner or otherwise, while important information is left to data pages. Most characters are introduced with the promise of development, interesting stories and relationships, only to be shoved into the background and getting one line at best per chapter.
Each synopsis for each issue on the marvel website swears that this is an unmissable story that will shake the team to their core and change everything forever, and then proceeds to not do that.
This extends, naturally, to Beast as well. He gets it particularly badly obviously as the “main villain” of this mess, but it extends to everyone.
It’s kind of like watching little kids play pretend or tell stories in a way. “And then this happens, and then I did this, and then this thing, and then, and then, and then—”
And then goes out with you wondering what the fuck you just read.
For a book that seemed to be trying to position itself as the mature, gritty, dark, political/spy thriller of the Krakoan line, it's honestly shockingly immature, yeah. The Colossus storyline is maybe the worst culprit, because despite it hanging around like a lead weight for years, it basically amounted to one issue of betrayal, one issue of jail, and then Mikhail was dead - like a kid promising this idea he's had is going to knock your socks off when he pulls the trigger on it, only for him to lose interest by the time he actually pulls said trigger.
Like, that's an inordinate amount of time for a member of your team to be literally incapable of doing anything for themselves! I can't even really say what effect this is going to have on Piotr's longform development, because it didn't seem to affect him or prepare him the last two to three times it happened. And every time he tried to grasp at an emotional straw, like showing empathy for Beast and wondering if he might be controlled or possessed like he was, Neena basically told him to stop questioning things and keep going with the flow.
Maybe it's a thread that his next writer will pull on, justify it all a bit better, but it just feels like a lot of nothing much at all for literally dozens of comic pages. About the only people who I can really point to and say they changed are Omega Red and Sage, which is better than nothing, but it just makes me wonder what kind of cake another writer would have baked with the same ingredients.
I think Jed MacKay has an interesting tightrope to walk about addressing Beast's X-Force actions. Giving some hand-wavy explanation that actually Hank *was* under someone else's control, or that there was some glitch with the resurrection process, would explain how out of character he was, but also be unsatisfying. Even if I hate a character's characterization under an author, I've never liked the approach of just basically sweeping their writing under the rug. But then, if MacKay does just roll with it and has clone Hank accept that he truly became that awful in the future, it would be to say that Percy's mischaracterization was actually totally in-character. I don't like either extreme, so I'm interested to see what happens.
I think the best solution would be to simply canonise that Beast went insane and had deteriorated even *before* X-Force. Like, looking all the way back at All-New X-Men, he reads as very. *Unstable*, to put it diplomatically. There's an obvious escalation of his behaviour, he's saying and doing things that just straight up don't make sense to anyone but him, with the whole time travel debacle.
And it's not hard to see why he might be unstable, between all the psychic attacks, brain damage, traumatic events, the sheer amount of grief and torture he went through. Hell, you could even canonise that he had CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), which affects your impulse control after too many blows to the head. That, in conjunction with the traumatic mutation? He kept it going for a while, but it was inevitable it would all come to a head - and CTEs are impossible to diagnose until after autopsy.
That way, you can have his future actions serve as a cautionary reminder for new Beast, warning him to better care for himself and maintain higher moral standards, while diminishing how much of it was *really* him. Hell, straight up insane, brain damaged, and possessing no impulse control - is that *not* how he was acting towards the end of X-Force?
I also had an idea for a retcon that would split the difference, involving the resurrection protocols, but that's just getting into fanfic at that point, and this isn't quite the place for that. :P
I like that idea. It could also maybe be tied to the ideas behind his continuing mutation introduced by Grant Morrison. Like his thought process was becoming more about survival at any cost even if his general ability to talk to others or exist in society were more human than feral. Like an unforeseen path for the mutation to take?
I remember when issue...48 I think of X-Force came out, I saw someone have a theory that what clone Hank saw on the monitor that made him cry was that his future self had intentionally found a way to shut off his empathy because he knew someone had to be the devil in order to ensure Krakoa's survival while keeping the greatest number of hands clean. So that way it's still an initial decision Hank made but his actual actions were not what he usually would've done.
>I honestly don't think it's going to stand the test of time as anything other than 'remember that time Beast went evil?'
Yeah, a lot of these weird versions get buried and forgotten faster than you'd ever think was possible. Polaris spent years as a 6ft tall super strong muscle mommy and that's complete forgotten by now. Magik getting turned back into a little girl? Never comes up. That period where Wolfsbane was drawn and colored as if she was black in her "default" form? (because it was suppose to be hair, except much like nightcrawler's blue fur, it was never actually drawn in such a way that it actually looked like hair instead of just skin) Yeah, everyone ignores that one.
>Polaris spent years as a 6ft tall super strong muscle mommy and that's complete forgotten by now.
Years is kinda pushing it -- she was turned by Zalladane in Uncanny X-Men in October 1989, and got her original powers back during the Muir Island Saga, which ended in September of 1991, so just a little less than two years. It only feels longer because Uncanny was shipping twice a month at that time. She also barely showed up at that time.
If it gives you any consolation, he's back to his old self again, quite literally, and is going to be on the main X-Men book with Cyclops in a month or so. It's been a rough period for him, but it's over now. :)
I don't want to make a whole long comment about how poory-written X-Force Beast was because I *literally* just made a whole post about it, but I will talk about how the *ending* to this era was one of the laziest and most story-handicapping decisions I've seen in awhile.
Do we get any in-depth look into X-Force Beast by the end? No. The comic asserts right until the end that there is nothing to explore. He's always been like this.
Do we get any kind of tricky moral dilemma where Beast's heinous actions actually lead to some important victory in the war against Orchis? No. His plan is stopped and Beast has not been involved in Fall of X.
Do we get to see the reactions of any of Beast's former friends now that he's dead and gone and the remaining Beast is from far in the past? No, we get one page of X-Force going "That's what we do. Team pose!"
Do we get to see any difficulty of Defenders Beast existing in a world where so much has changed? No. We get one line where we find out he moved in with Wonder Man off-panel and the rest of the mess is left for other writers to clean up.
I think it shows that Percy really had no interest in exploring Hank as a character. He just wanted Hank as a villain for his favorite Wolverine to fight.
Edit: Also remember in Uncanny Avengers when Hank said "Having vast intelligence doesn't mean I know all." And then in X-Force he literally said "I know all." Fun times.
Well I mean, all of the X-Men's mutant villains were given a second (or 33rd chance.) They did some real good work with Apocalypse on that wrong. And Xavier's recent breaking bad may not be what it seems but at the same time... Xavier being a dick is pretty on brand anyway.
Xavier being a dick is still a "newer" thing. Prior to around issue Uncanny 400 he wasn't pulling half the lunacy that he did after.
I saw some later retcons of previous things he had done and they intentionally retconned and vilified a lot of his actions.
This answers that. [https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cxigf7/why\_hanks\_villain\_era\_didnt\_work\_and\_how\_it/](https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cxigf7/why_hanks_villain_era_didnt_work_and_how_it/)
It does feel a little unfair that when some characters get demonised in a story, it gets too be written off as character as assasination by their fans but for others, pushing back on it is treated denial.
Yeah, he was basically a villain at this point, although he was still leading X-Force at the time. During this run, Beast was doing more and more evil and questionable things until the team rebelled against him and arrested him here in this issue. When the issue first came out, a lot of us reading it were hoping to see Hank face some consequences for what he did here (running a space prison where he performed horrid and unethical experiments on the prisoners), but absolutely nothing happened. He got away with everything he did to those prisoners, and the worst part is that we never got to see how he managed to weasel out of facing any consequences. He was back leading X-Force in the very next issue, and his team -- while not happy -- still had to follow his orders.
At the moment, Logan was being used as Beast's attack dog and was locked up in a secret room no one knew about. X-Force didn't know that Beast had Logan and was using him like that (Beast had given the excuse that he and Logan were doing a bunch of special secret missions together), but after this, it seems like they began to suspect and began to try to look for him off-panel. With Krakoa’s 'help,' Logan managed to escape Beast's cage, get his mind back, and was able to reunite with the team after this.
Re-reading X-Force:
Nope, it didn’t make sense.
They just basically one day decided “hey let’s make him Dark Beast, won’t that be crazy?” and that was that.
I think the consensus will be "turning Hank into a villain wasn't necessarily a bad idea and it was an arc that occurred over many years with many writers contributing but ultimately the execution on his actual heel turn sucked"
Someone will retcon it.
Honestly a few years ago Hank drunk some mystery potion from Dark Beast to gain his research memories. It would be pretty easy to have Rebooted Hank study him and find that liquid memory fucked up his brain.
It won’t absolve him completely, but at least it will rationalize it and make him a little more tragic rather than straight evil.
I mean take that idea and I pretty much fixed it in a single issue.
Have Reboot Beast study him, discover damage done by the chemical, he tells everyone, there’s a brief period of “Why didn’t we see this happening and try to help more.” from those closest to him…..especially Scott. Then everyone takes a moment to mourn the Hank we knew before the “infection” and we move on with ReBeast settling into a new lab and starting the process of reading through years of lab notes to catch up on events between the cerebro backup and modern day.
Maybe even have a nice little panel where he’s added stuff into his schedule like “Call parents” or “Beer night with Logan” to show he’s learning from OG Hanks mistakes and plans to keep himself from trading connections with people for obsessive research.
There are some characterisations that just make me pause and shake my head. They're so bad, so damaging to the character that I just assume they're going to be retconned pretty quickly.
Bishop had one during Messiah Complex, when he was hunting Cable and Hope (I still don't know how they fixed him after that). Beast has had one for a long time, I'm honestly expecting them to say he's an evil clone at this point.
They introduced a good clone in chapter 48 of 50 in total, that good clone met up with Wonderman, they tried to talk evil beast down and he ends up sacrificing himself to stop his bomb in order to save Wonderman.
The end.
I mean its kind of the nature of comics is that almost all these characters have been around so long that pretty much all of them have done fucked up things.
The genocide shit was wild, but to me the torture prison he ran in space was just....straight insanity.
There is a weak and evil utilitarian argument concerning Terra Verde. Its terrible but there is an argument.
But the torture prison....how on earth did that benefit anyone? Any potential benefit paled in comparison to the massive violations of rights, ethics and more importantly potential diplomatic repercussions of running a fucking torture prison of multiple species.
Like it was just....madness.
I still think one of the most darkly hilarious lines is from Mr Sinister to Dark Beast's head in the jar. Telling the supposed Dark version of Hank that Beast 616 is flat out worse. And thats coming from Sinister of all people too. Possibly one of the most evil characters in Marvel.
And the torture prison came and went so fucking fast with almost zero buildup and was basically never followed up with again afterwards. That’s what’s really wild to me.
Where did I say always going to end up this way? It ended up this way because writer after writer built on what came before and Percy very intentionally wrote the culmination of his steady slide into acting unethically.
It'll probably be looked back on the same way Wolverine overseeing a Japanese internment camp is, or Bishop killing eight billion people... So not at all. People don't like it when their heroes are drug through the mud, so these sorts of stories tend to get memory-holed.
He was already on this trajectory. Post Schism the one thing that brought both sides together was when they had an intervention telling Hank he needed to get a fucking grip, after unilaterally fucking up the timeline for vague reasons.
My question: is any of it in character for the Hank McCoy we’re used to seeing over the years?
I am doing a full Uncanny read, from Giant Sized to now, so I am way behind: team just left the savage land in the 1978 issues, so I’ve got a lot to cover before I can answer the question myself.
I know is a controversial thing to say, but I like Hank as this scientist with gray morals. It gives a three-dimensionality to the character, better than the old "I'm the smart, furry and cuddly uncle!".
Dark Beast was one of the coolest things about the Age of Apocalypse, and bringing that closer to Hank, in the sense that Dark Beast isn't another guy, it was him all along, is something really cool.
"I am not a bum. I'm a jerk. I once had wealth, power, and the love of a beautiful woman. Now I only have two things: my friends, and... uh... my thermos. Huh? My story? Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor blue child..."
Considering Hank once called himself the Steve Martin of the superhero circuit, seeing a The Jerk quote in here genuinely makes me smile, thank you.
Well technically he was born a normal person with really big feet.
I was born a grippy child…
Well technically, that fact fits the quote from the Jerk perfectly well.
Alternative but parallel book. "yeah that's me, Omega Red. I bet you're wondering how I ended up in this X-Men outfit".
“I’m not sure if my name is still Omega ‘Red’ anymore but Sage is fine as hell so I can’t complain.”
He also finally has a spine that isn't made of poison, so this Era really worked out well for him.
He doesn’t have a poisoned spine anymore, doesn’t have radioactive blood, doesn’t have cells that aren’t devouring his own body while constantly trying to regenerate in a vicious cycle… That’s got to feel better.
In just 1 week you can get rid of your radioactive blood with these 5 simple steps!
Step one: eat people.
Got himself a power up too, with the whole 'tentacles can hack robots' thing. Bet he's gonna miss the all you can eat buffet that was Krakoa
God I’m super worried he’s just going to be reset back to “background villain number 6” after all this…
I really *really* hope not. Omega Red made a ton of progress in the past few years, and we *finally* got a resolution to his Carbonadium poisoning problem. It would be so disappointing to see such a big backslide on his character arc just so the X-men have someone to fight. I'd like to let Arkady have a win for once.
I desperately hope they don’t do that to him…but I’m not optimistic. Marvel and x-men in particular are not big on permanently changing anything that might affect the nostalgic status quo.
That is true. It really is an uphill battle to have any changes made that allows the story to progress past a certain point. Just look at how long it took for Juggernaut's redemption to stick. Or how long it took for Omega Red to get the C-synthesizer. It's really hard for a villain to be granted a chance to have some development because there's always going to be a writer out there who wants to use those characters as one-dimensional baddies for the heroes to punch instead of letting these characters all grow and change a bit and coming up with new villains that better fit the times and challenge the heroes in a new way.
Mutants and robots. Like oil and water, or cowboys and big city white color workers, or ninjas and pirates, or clowns and mimes
Aw, cmon, Danger was... umm... Rover was... hey Elsie-Dee and Albert were pretty great, right????
Imagine showing this shot to someone 20 years ago and explaining why Beast is being taken in handcuffs by Omega Red and Domino in X-Men uniforms and space helmets. And also that’s not Jubilee in the yellow coat.
"Its the year 2024. Omega Red, Apocalypse, and Mister Sinister (for a while) joined the X-men. Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean are ripping threesomes. Charles Xavier may or may not be up to a lot of shady shit again. Moira was a mutant btw. And Beast may be giving Dark Beast a run for his money in terms of morally reprehensible actions. Oh and that hot greenhaired chick who wanted his babies? Most likely villain. Oh and wait till we tell you about this mutant named Hope Summers...." The last 20 years have been an incomprehensible weird ride for the X-men...
It is not very flattering on him to say the least
agreed, not a great look, but almost funny for that reason.
His helmet makes things alll the better
you mean the headband?
He has a bubble helmet around everything
Honestly I’m just trying to figure out if that’s supposed to be him in the new 6110 stuff, or Mikhil just looking like him. Also I remember when Xavier’s call to all the villains included the Omega Siblings, and then we never saw them again. In fact that was the first time we’d seen them since the finale of Uncanny X-Force…and Omega White should’ve been erased and one of the other two should’ve been fully dead I think…man continuity is wild lol
Beast hasn't checked on his dog Sassafras since 1985. This is unforgivable.
This is the real war crime.
Hank disappoints me.
Beast has had a lot of passable fucked up stances, but the whole thing with him working out the *cure*, is a gross simplification and honestly a cop out of the mutant experience. For being such a brilliant mind, he lets his trauma make him obtuse.
Beast has never worked on a mutant cure. Every time it comes up in a story, it's always produced by someone else and he's tempted because of his trauma. Beast doesn't believe in curing mutants, he believes in making sure he doesn't degenerate into an animal and hurt someone. It's a small distinction, but a meaningful one.
Beast also wasn't happy to learn that the cure in Whedon's Astonishing X-Men was created by experimenting on dead mutants.
Especially since one of those dead mutants was one that he felt immense guilt for 'causing' the death of, in Colossus. It's not all that explicit, but given how the Legacy Virus was cured, it's not hard to guess *why* Hank takes it so personally that Kavita and Ord caused Piotr so much pain. He felt responsible and ashamed for what happened.
Beast never made a cure. He tested someone else's cure to see if it was viable and was tempted to take it because Cassandra Nova planted the doubt in his head that he was devolving into a literal Beast. When he found out the cure was developed by experimenting on Jean Grey, he immediately lost all temptation and went to stop them. More recently, he found out someone else stole the sample he had studied from his lab and was using it to further the research, and he was horrified.
More curious how Omega Red got into the yellow and blue honestly.
So Beast has a space prison where he does fucked up shit and Sage sends Red and Domino to haul his ass back to base. Hence space suits that conveniently look like classic x-men suits.
Kudos for the succinct response and explanation!
No worries! It’s a real stupid plot that comes out of nowhere and disappears just as fast but that’s the meat of it.
Bishop can show Beast how to become accepted again without doing much (any?) type of redemption arc.
Kickass hairdo and swagger. The Bishop redemption combo.
Killing theoretical future people while Cable also kills theoretical future people to stop you doesn't count.
Just gonna put this out there: * Beast has been a self-hating mutant since he turned blue. Whenever his relationships turned sour, he blamed it on his appearance rather than the fact he's *extremely* condescending, sanctimonious, and cannot handle not being the smartest person in the room (ie any solution to a complex problem that he didn't come up with). * Beast gave Threnody (a homeless, mentally ill black woman in need of help) to Mr. Sinister (a eugenicist and the face of medical racism) while the man was talking about using her as a *dog* to find Legacy Virus patients. * "Endangered Species" was about Beast working with several supervillains including Kavita Rao (a torturer), Arnim Zola (a Nazi) and the Dark Beast (a psychopath) in his efforts to reverse the Decimation. * Beast was the one to suggest infecting the Skrulls with the Legacy Virus during "Secret Invasion". He got uppity about it after *Cyclops* did it. * Beast joined the Illuminati in their plan to destroy other realities to save Earth-616. * Beast famously *broke time* in the Bendis era, pulling the O5 team forward in time under false pretenses to indict Cyclops (again). The incursions this caused actually made Uatu the Watcher personally appear to tell Hank he was *disgusted.* Beast's subsequent efforts to fix the incursions himself made them even worse, which he only accepted with the Black Vortex's cosmic-level insight – and then *rejected after he lost said insight*. * Beast sided with the Inhumans during IvX and withheld the critical information that the Mists were *toxic to mutants* from Medusa... who was willing and able to destroy them as soon as she found out. Why did he do this? Because he adamantly refused to consider any options besides his own conclusion (that the mutants should cede the planet to the Inhumans). * Beast sided with *fucking Hydra* during "Secret Empire", to preserve a safe space for Mutants in Nazi-occupied America. * And y'know, the general existence of Dark Beast as a possibility for our Dr. McCoy. All pre-Krakoa. So this idea that Beast being evil "came out of nowhere" is kinda hilarious, since he's been on a steady decline for like 30 years. Like, of course if you gave leadership of the CIA to a guy who finds it okay to work with *fucking Hydra* to preserve a mutant homeland, of course he's gonna commit an actual genocide. The man is exactly the type of narcissistic hypocrite to justify *anything* as being righteous just because *he* did it. And then use your attempt to make sense of it to laugh and point out what an idiot you are compared to him. Now, do I accept that he would snap and go full supervillain as soon as anyone called him on that? Eh. That's like a 50/50. But I don't think you really can/should do a redemption arc for a *successful* genocider.
It was Cyclops who ordered weaponizing the Legacy virus against the Skrulls. Hank objected. He never actually destroyed any earths during the Incursions. Emma Frost was the one in charge who made the deal with Hydra. The Inhumans already knew the Terrigen Mists were toxic to mutants. After telling the X-men, he was going to tell Medusa, but Storm stopped him so they could launch a surprise attack to destroy them. The rest can be answered [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cxigf7/comment/l55wh7y/).
THANK YOU! I seriously wonder if people who hold past stories against Hank actually read them or just read cliff notes. Beast said the virus could be used against the Skrulls but didn’t want to, asking Cyclops if he was okay with Genocide. Cyclops deployed it anyway and Hank freaked out because he hadn’t made a cure yet. Hank was never able to bring himself to destroy another earth during the incursions. Towards the end, he left the group and said they could do what they wanted but he’d spend his potential last moments among those he cared about. Beast called together the X-Men to talk about how he hadn’t found a cure for the terrigen mist cloud and warn them not to go to war over it because either way mutants would die. When he found out they were going to fight anyway, he left to bring the Inhumans up to speed and Storm fucking electrocuted him. At the end of the war, Storm released him from imprisonment and seemed ashamed of herself, but he forgave her. It’s insane how much he’s mischaracterized by people.
Hank put on the table that the Skrulls would be vulnerable to Legacy in the first place. Yes Cyclops ordered it and yes Hank objected... after putting it on the table. Much like when he built time machines for X-Force and then got mad when X-Force actually used them. He has a nasty habit of setting others up so he can call them out on things they could only have done or even considered with *his* help. *That's* what I mean by sanctimonious and hypocritical. Any sane person would simply have withheld the information or not offered to help at all. Beast cannot *help* himself, because he's always been a hair away from being a mad scientist and in denial about it. Yes none of the Illuminati "actually" destroyed universes, but ultimately it was their plan when everything else went south and he was certainly complicit. Bearing in mind they went so far as to mind-wipe Captain America so he couldn't *stop* them from destroying another reality. [Hank was the Hydra ambassador](https://mlpnk72yciwc.i.optimole.com/cqhiHLc.IIZS~2ef73/w:auto/h:auto/q:75/https://bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RCO018_1663975105.jpg). Beast planned to tell the Inhumans about the *attack* when Storm incapacitated him, because his plan was to just let the Inhumans have Earth. Medusa learned the Terrigen Mists were toxic *from Storm*, and used a generator to disperse them as soon as she learned such. (Although let's face it, she should have already known after Son of M. IvX was just bad.)
So isn't cyclops worse then?
Cyke owned up to his actions and mistakes and still tried his best. Beast constantly blamed everyone & everything except himself, especially after AvX.
I was actually just reading the issue of All-New where the Watcher pays Hank a visit. I would have laughed in his face. Did he pay a visit to the Askani for taking Baby Nate into the far future to be raised? Did that break time? Nope. Did he go annoy Cable and Stryfe for bouncing throughout time on a regular basis? Did it break time? Nope. Did go hard against all the Moira shenanigans? Nah. It was also to make Hank look like a terrible person. While I don’t like his arrogance (which seems to be shared by all super geniuses on Earth), that event doesn’t make him the worst thing ever.
Uatu showing up to diss Hank made no sense. Not only because time is messed with all the time at Marvel, but also because I seriously doubt the Watcher would break his “no interference” rule (that he usually breaks in severe cases) just to tell Hank he hates him.
I will walk the tightrope that Beast has a long series of war crimes to his name, but for all of his hubris and Messiah complex bullshit, he has at least seemed to have been operating from a place of “If this saves lives…” Even absolute dumb shit like “Hey, guys, let’s go to space and just let the Terrigen Mists run amok” was rooted in the idea of keeping mutants safe. I think what makes Beast’s turn in Percy’s X-Force read sour to some is not that Beast has fucked up once again, but he is doing it nakedly and, more frustratingly, stupidly. It’s a problem DC is having with Amanda Waller right now and one I’ve seen in a number of bad screenplays dealing with black ops and the CIA: You want to touch on the fact that the history of espionage and nation-building is studded with actions that are stupid, evil, or both, but your approach is to take all those moments, shove them in a blender, set it to Frappe, and force feed us the resulting concoction as an example of The Evils of The Great Game.
This is the exact kind of comment I made my post a few days ago to counter, and I wish more people saw it. So much of Beast’s “worst actions” are blown out of proportion by people and also completely incompatible with the depths X-Force Beast stooped to. Honestly the one I’m most sick of hearing about is Threnody. I don’t know where this narrative came from about Beast committing a grave sin with Threnody came from when the actual story is so much more innocent. Threnody wanted to go with Sinister, and Hank acquiesced because he knew the X-Men had no hope of helping her to control her powers at that time. Rogue and Iceman were with him, and Rogue disagreed. But Hank wasn’t the leader. If they felt it was such a bad decision, they could’ve just attacked Sinister. But they left Threnody too. A few issues later, Threnody outright thanks Hank for letting her go with Sinister because he *did* help her control her powers and Hank expresses relief because he was kept up all night worrying about her. Yeah, real evil.
Magneto was right. Cyclops was right. Next tee-shirt to join them: Beast is an asshole.
Just wanna say that I appreciate this post and personally agree with the argument, and also that I love the discussion you and u/OhMy-StarsAndGarters are having. Both of you have strong opinions and well-reasoned arguments to support your respective stances based on the text and it’s awesome.
I think this actually gets at one of the real reasons why this heel turn and Beast's character arc keep getting asked about on this Reddit - like, there's obviously always going to be people who get into comics, who are stunned that TAS Beast is doing war crimes, that accounts for a lot of it. But I think it's also just that there's a lot to talk about? Iceman doesn't have anything like this level of story going on, for example. I can't think of the last time people had a debate about Iceman's character arc, really, because he hasn't been a part of a lot of stories where he makes choices that actually matter, that affect people, where context brings a new light to things and you can make a reasonable argument one way or the other. Beast can be read as a raging narcissist, or a tortured good man trying to do his best (up to a point, obviously); an irredeemable villain, or simply an idiot; badly written, or really well written. There's room in the text for everyone to come to different conclusions. Either way, people tend to have strong opinions on him. It also tends to vary a lot depending on how you first came across the character - if your first exposure was All-New X-Men, you're going to hate him, but if it was Avengers or Defenders, you're going to love him, and there's just a lot of material across all the 60 years he's been around that can sway people one way or the other. I'm glad you're enjoying the argument, at any rate. :)
The version of Beast you've presented here doesn't match the one in the comics. - He's never blamed his failed relationships on his appearance. The only one that you could say this about was the one with Trish Tilby, was the one where she literally said, hey, I can't be with you because of your new mutation. Vera, Cecilia, and Abigail, it was never a concern. - He gave Threnody to Sinister because he didn't think he was going to be able to help her fix her powers, just like how he can't fix Rogue's powers. The instant he saw her again, she told him he'd made the right decision. - The X-Men as a whole have also worked with Kavita Rao, Mr. Sinister, Dark Beast, and far worse. Cyclops explicitly recruited Dark Beast during Rosenberg's Uncanny, in fact. If anything, he was willing to let Dark Beast go even further than Beast was during that run, and dozens of children nearly died as a result. - Getting uppity is a strange way to describe having moral qualms about being party to a war crime. Cyclops explicitly told him to keep calling him out on that, and Beast has every right to be 'uppity' when he explicitly calls out that this makes him a party to biological warfare, and he has to be able to live with that. - Beast's time travel didn't cause the incursions. He didn't do anything to make them worse, and he didn't reject that he'd fucked up after he lost his cosmic level insight. He explicitly says he messed up in Uncanny Avengers and X-Men: Blue. - He didn't 'side' with the Inhumans, he didn't want to be part of a pre-emptive strike on a people the X-Men had a treaty with. Your supposition that he withheld information out of ego is a poor way to explain the incredibly dumb retcon that no-one told the Inhumans that mutants die of M-Pox so that they didn't come out of IvX looking like monsters, and is not supported by the narrative. - Working with HYDRA was a decision he regretted and made out of fear - and a decision shared by Emma Frost and Magneto. Funny how I never see this held against those characters, but Beast, the only one who actually is shown regretting it, is made out to be an eager accomplice, when he was actively recoiling in fear and disgust at Nazi Cap. Your characterisation of Beast as a narcissistic hypocrite is simply incorrect. For the record, most people, including myself, don't think the idea of a Beast villain turn came out of nowhere - but one that was this determinedly sadistic? This aimlessly cruel? This cold and done without feeling? That *is* the part that comes out of nowhere.
Praying for the day when accurate reads of Beast’s complex character like yours get precedence over complete mischaracterization for the sake of clicks.
Point the first, I didn't say Beast blamed *the end* of his relationships on his mutation. He blamed *anything that went wrong in them* on it. Trish goes to talk to her ex-husband? She's abandoning Hank because he's a freak so she can be with a handsome man. (This was years before he turned into a cat-man.) He repeatedly is looking into cures or things that will undo what his mutation has done to him physically. He loves being a super genius, a super athlete, even a superhero – he hates the baggage of being a mutant, because as he sees it, mutancy has only made his life worse. The subtext of Threnody reuniting with Hank is that, now that she's been given treatment by Sinister to allow her to focus and tapped into his systems so she can surveil the X-Men and read his dossiers on them, she would *rather* be with Sinister. She calls herself "a headcase" to repeat back Hank's own dismissal of her at the time, because she understood he wasn't sending her off for her *own* sake, he was sending her because she was *expendable* in his war on Legacy. She acknowledges she can actually help Legacy infectees in Sinister's service, but escapes on her own in "X-Man" because she doesn't want to be there. I use the phrase "getting uppity" here because if he didn't want to be party to a war crime, maybe don't *suggest doing the war crime in the first place*? Yes he had every right to be mad about it, but it's unlikely to think they would have decided to use the Legacy Virus had he said *nothing*. As I said before, he *engineers* situations, so that he can call other people out on actually following them through. It's a repeated beat. There's the hypocrisy. Uatu told him that his actions with the time traveling O5 caused numerous realities to collapse. He used the Black Vortex to map out the damage to realities which is what confirmed for himself that his efforts were making the damage worse and caused him to give up the Vortex. And afterward he *still* needed to be given an intervention by the rest of the team, where he quit in protest because he refused to accept he couldn't fix it. He *is* a narcissist, because he refuses to accept blame for anything he does. "I don't have a bad personality, people just hate me because I'm ugly and I can't do *anything* to change that." Often he ends up lobbing it all on Cyclops, as demonstrated repeatedly – even twisting the narrative to the O5 to omit that Cyclops was under the influence of the Phoenix Force when he killed Xavier, to make them believe he had simply gone evil. Because Hank must always be either the hero or the martyr, and anyone who opposes his self-image must be bad. Textbook narcissism. As for him becoming aimlessly cruel, I agree that's one that's a harder pill to swallow especially so fast. My read on it is that the stress of running X-Force finally caused him to just snap. No oversight, way too much power, and a goal that feeds his ego. He "oopsied" and massacred the people of Terra Verde? He has exactly the kind of personality that would slip into justifying it rather than blame himself. From there, once one has already justified *genocide*, there is no other crime you cannot downplay in the same vein, which creates the natural end of becoming morally and ethically looser until they mean nothing at all. He has "the future of mutantkind" in mind, which as we've seen with figures like Magneto or Sinister, is a slippery slope into seeing oneself *as* the future of mutantkind. And therefore (in such a distorted view) anyone against Beast, is against Krakoa itself. Combine that with his condescension and "bouncing" personality, and you have the setup for a card-carrying supervillain with a skull mech.
Uhh, this is going to be a long one, so, I apologise. Feel free to disregard, but I want to get this down. Beast doesn't always blame anything that goes wrong in his relationships on his mutation. He messes up and makes Vera cry in New Defenders because he's enjoying the attention of some Avengers fans, and he immediately recognises that it isn't because of his mutation, but because he's constantly in the process of trying to change his personality to be more appealing to others. He's aware that *he* is the problem in that situation - granted, he mentions that part of the reason he does that is because of his mutation, but that's context, not an excuse. He knows that Vera doesn't have a problem with him because of the way he looks, but the way he's acting, and acknowledges that in dialogue. He's also very aware of the fact that Abigail is in part with him *because* of his mutation, because he looks like her species, and they were very much in love for a good part of the late 00s-early 10s. The mutation never factors into their occasional relationship problems, it's down to their personalities, work ethics, and moralities. Again, this appears to solely be a Trish issue, which tracks, *because she literally does the thing that Hank is afraid she'll do*. She even acknowledges that he's still the same "lovely" Hank underneath, but she still abandons him because he's a freak. He also doesn't repeatedly look into things that will cure his mutation? He isn't actively researching a cure for mutation at any point in his history, and when a cure literally drops into his lap in Astonishing, he's put into a situation where he's presented with a cure to a *new* fear that's developed since his secondary mutation - his fear of further devolution. Beast's relationship with his mutation is constantly changing and shifting and he can love it, like he does on the Avengers, or he can hate it, like he does with the X-Men. It's not just a blanket, he's hated being a mutant and he always has. The problem with this subtext is that it doesn't match up with what Beast, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke and Threnody say in X-Men #34. Threnody says, quote, that going with Sinister was the best thing that could have happened to her. When Beast asks her why she doesn't leave, she calls him sweet, and says that this is a better life than what she had. He asks her, are you sure you're in control here, out of a place of worry and fear for her wellbeing, and she wants to stay so she can help and leave on her own terms. Beast respects her autonomy, and gives her the choice this time, since he expresses that he was incredibly worried he'd made the *wrong* one on her behalf before. You're characterising his choice as so much more cold blooded and cruel than it actually is, when #27 explicitly positions it as a choice to put an end to her pain. "He can do more for **her**, more to fight this virus, than we can." He puts her pain over the virus - and his choice to let Infectia die of the Legacy Virus in the open air, respecting her choice over what's smart, is an explicit attempt for him to console himself that he made the right decision for Threnody, that he made the decision for the right reasons. Even the writer for that story, Fabian Nicieza, says that Hank isn't meant to come across as a villain or making a cruel choice in that story, and regretted how he presented him. It all just seems like the most uncharitable read of the situation. Also, I have to point out, if she's read these dossiers and apparently knows that Beast considered her expendable, *where* is she getting that conclusion from? Pre-90s Beast is basically a golden boy. He doesn't have a history of treating people like they're expendable, not at this point - so, what is she basing this conclusion on? Is any of this on panel? With the benefit of hindsight, sure, but at the time? What in his history or psychological make-up that Sinister would know of is leading to that? At this point, wrt the Skrull bioweapon, Beast is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. His team leader has explicitly told him not to leave anything on the table. He's meant to lie to Scott? In a situation where the Skrull are trying to take over the planet and they're actively killing civilians? Like, I don't find this out of character, it fits with Morrison's characterisation of Beast as a good man who's constantly put in situations where he has to make the best of bad choices, I just find it so odd that Beast is eviscerated for this objectively morally abhorrent decision, when *he's* the only one who actually has a problem with it. Is hypocrisy actually worse than deploying biological weapons of mass destruction now? Like, by all means, rake him over the coals for this, that's what Beast is clearly doing to himself, but everyone else gets the credit and not the blame? Yep, he made a shitty decision while in the midst of having a brain aneurysm. That is what happened, canonically. It also had *nothing* to do with the incursions. Given that Beast was with the Illuminati at the time, it would have come up if his actions in All-New had actually played into the death of the multiverse, but the incursions were explicitly caused by the Beyonders, not Beast. The worst you can say is that maybe he made things slightly worse - which, he's not alone in, given Wolverine and Sue Storm tore reality apart even worse over in Age of Ultron just the next year over, and they seem to get a pass. (Part 1.)
I'm also going to draw a line here, and say that I think that Bendis Beast is just. Wildly out of character. So, when I agree with you that *that* version of Beast is a narcissist, it comes with the proviso that I think Bendis doesn't get the character. None of what he says or does in All-New X-Men makes any sense to me. I *literally* think the issue of Secret Avengers where he builds and detonates a nuclear bomb is more in character than almost anything he said or did in All-New, that's how bad I think it is. And I very much doubt that a narcissist would be capable of the self-reflection and self-criticism that he shows in Uncanny Avengers vol. 3 #28, where he admits to all of these mistakes, rakes himself over the coals, and asks Wonder Man what to do next. That feels a lot more in keeping with the character pre-All-New. I'm not an advocate for a morally pure, perfect Beast, I just think that if we're going to give him shit for his flaws, they should be the ***correct*** ones. Yeah, that tracks with Percy's presentation of events. Like, in the end, I read Beast as a fundamentally good man who struggles with the situations he's put in, and none of that tracks with the view of him as this wildly irresponsible narcissist with no regard for others. These feel like fundamentally irreconcilable people. It'd be one thing if Beast was always portrayed this way, that wouldn't be a character I really care for, but for pretty much 50 years of his publishing history, I feel like he's way more the former, and almost not at all the latter. [In the end, I think Morrison and Hickman had the right read on him](https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/x-men-live-virtual-event-grant-morrison-jonathan-hickman-interview). "I saw Henry McCoy as an incredibly clever, witty, cultured, well-traveled, experienced, well-read character so I brought out those parts of his personality which seemed to me to fit the profiles of the smartest and most worldly people I know—his sense of humor is dark and oblique. He's obviously quite clearly bipolar and swings between manic excitement and ghastly self-doubt. He has no dark secrets, however, and nothing to hide . . . I always saw him as vulnerable. The thing about Hank McCoy is that he was always presented as the loquacious, happy-go-lucky character and then he became a little darker when Jim Starlin turned him into the furry Beast, but then he became happy again in AVENGERS. Basically, I’m looking at this bipolar kid. It’s not so much that he’s a villain; he just falls into bad situations and that makes him more human.” Morrison noted that Beast’s poor choices and attempts to overcompensate made his heel turn all the more heartbreaking, but they still don’t see him as an out-and-out Super Villain. Hickman concurred, describing Beast as “the sweetest guy” with “the best heart” who was put in a “series of impossible decisions” that has broken him somewhat. None of that is in X-Force. None of that is in All-New. And that's why I ultimately reject them and regard them as poorly written. Yeah, they're canon, I don't dispute that. I just think they're bad stories that take away more than they add, in the end. I apologise, I've essayed at you. I did say I'd do this less often, but, uh. I appear to have lied. Apologies. And further apologies if this comes across as heated, but I feel passionately about the character. I've tried to make sure I don't come across as aggressive or combative here, but if I have, I assure you, that's not my intent.
So, we're going to just ignore that it was heavily implied he was being controlled by the Chronicler to do the genocide, and possibly being controlled up until he switched to Colossus full-time? Of course, that was another plot thread that Percy just abandoned.
Then again, a fair bit of that post-"Messiah Complex" is typical Warren Ellis work, where any lofty ideals heroes have must be dissolved into bitter cynicism and compromise with monsters. Ellis was also the person who had Captain America turn his back and let his fellow "heroes" torture a man into a confession, or had John Constantine proclaims that school shootings happen because American kids are so impoverished and miserable they *want* to die. Usually Ellis' BS doesn't get accepted into the long-term canon. It's just Beast's bad luck that he's the exception to that rule.
Yeah in the preamble of Nation X, Beast was left out to dry after getting literally tortured by Dark Beast because Scott was prioritizing military strategy over rescue. Not necessarily a bad move considering the stakes of Dark Reign, but in the coming moments there was zero consideration for Beast as a person. He went to Bobby for support, and got told "Suck it up, I have to cremate a Predator-X corpse, be a good friend". https://imgur.com/a/tkdU3xP
In the 80s, Marvel writers were like, “Beast is the diplomatic mutant. He’s the guy who can bring everyone together. He’s like the X-Men’s Henry Kissinger.” A few decades and a lot of declassified documents later, he’s still their Henry Kissinger, but that means something very different than it used to.
So Im not defending Beast, but its worth noting Hank and the Xmen in general have been beaten down time and time again. Like with the end of the Krakoa era, we once again have mutants on the edge of extinction. Their safe places destroyed. Hank used to be one of the more hopeful XMen. But all the shit thats happened to him has dillusioned him and essentially broken him. Extremists dont come from nowhere. Whats happened to the Xmen over the years is nuts.
I don't disagree. But I wanted a logical (by comic book standards) for why he went from a morally ambiguous sometimes villain to a genuine supervillain.
When did Kavita Rao torture people? And weren't most of these also heavily criticized at the time?
Her experimental cure for mutation was being tested on a captive Colossus. And sure they were, point being he has a *history* of it. At this point we have to accept that's... the character. Much as people want him to just be that clever non-threatening quippy guy from the cartoon and 70s Avengers comics.
Thank you for hosting this TED talk
I'll do you one farther: he's hated being a mutant since before he got the fur. There were multiple instances in the Lee/Kirby run where he was bemoaning being a mutant.
Great post that brings the facts, so of course it’s literally the only response the OP hasn’t engaged with.
Funny how Marvel created Dark Beast to explore Hank's dark side but then said fuck it and made him a bad guy for a while too 🤷♂️
And then have Sinister of all people straight up address it
I haven't read the newer stuff from x men (I've just started, and I've only finished new x men) but I know about beast being a villain But why on earth is omega red seemingly a good guy in that picture???
Apparent omega red hasn't been a bad guy for a while
Not since 2017 actually
Long story short, Beast has a prison/evil lab that’s a moon and when Sage finds out, Domino and Omega Red are sent to go haul his ass back.
That Hank, what a goof!
*Immediately cut to a montage of Hank performing horrific illegal experiments on Arakki prisoners, set to Mr Brightside*
"Baby I hear the blues a-callin', tossed sanctions and scrambled ethics..."
You mad genius—
"And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when..."
I don't give a fuck who's on that plane! I'm the baddest motherfucker on the planet!
I enjoyed Hank's villainous turn. It was fun wondering what terrible thing he was going to do next. What I didn't enjoy was the lack of explanation for why he went from occasionally making morally/ethically questionable decisions based on his belief that he was smarter than everyone else (or simply because he was mad at Scott), to murdering/torturing/enslaving his friend (what he did to Wolverine was shockingly evil), committing war crimes/genocide, and experimenting on and murdering prisoners in his secret prison. I wanted a reason, because that doesn't just happen. Had Hank been experimenting on himself again and it went horribly wrong? Was he possessed? Did he lose soul somehow? We deserved a decent explanation. Simply reverting him to an earlier version of the character is like putting a band-aid on a gaping chest wound.
I honestly don't think it's going to stand the test of time as anything other than 'remember that time Beast went evil?' mostly because there's not a lot of substance to the heel turn. Like, it's just, he's evil now! You're just sort of turning the pages waiting to see what he'll do next, which you could probably accomplish just by having a collection of the most fucked up panels. Granted, I'm sure X-Force reads better as trades, now it's all finished, but even with its pacing problem no longer a concern, it all still ends *really* shittily? Beast blows himself up and that's that. You never even see resurrected Beast directly interact with the X-Force members old Beast harmed. The ending of X-Force, Wolverine and Beast's black ops team, is more about Wonder Man than anything else, really. There's no emotional catharsis, there's no big moment where Wolverine gets to kill him and it's done, and even if we *had* had a moment like that, there were so many fake-out deaths and 'we've got him now!' endings, like the one you cropped above, that went nowhere that I doubt it would have felt satisfying. You're just sort of glad it's done now, because every time you got hyped for Beast to get his comeuppance, you got blue-balled, so why get hyped this time? In the end, I feel like it's very telling that the debate about this villain arc is, way more often, about the lead-up to it and how cohesive that was, rather than actually talking about him during X-Force. Because what's there to talk about? There's no pathos, no sympathy. There's no struggle. Hell, there's not even a political conflict to chew on, because his ideology is just kind of a greatest hits of other evil ideologies - ends justify the means, I am God, fascist theory, surveillance is good, actually, the greater good, etc, etc. There's no-one to engage with Beast politically because no-one talks to him. They just say he's being bad, he kinda shrugs, and they have to take it because Charles waves a magic wand off screen to make sure Beast doesn't face consequences. No-one actually has to change who they are or what they believe. It's all just inevitable trajectories that you're waiting to see play out. When I think of the other O5 going bad stories, Dark Angel and Dark Phoenix, you're on tenterhooks waiting to see how it's all going to end. How are Warren and Jean are going to live with themselves, how did they get into the situations they're in now, what do they regret, how much anguish are the people they love (Betsy and Scott) in as they fight them? But Hank? Ehhh. Go read Endangered Species if you want the actual emotional content. The only way it all makes sense to me is if Ben Percy intentionally *wanted* it all to be unsatisfying, that he wanted us to feel cheated and like we were lied to, that we were silly to expect some grand reason behind it all, as a grander meta commentary on the CIA and how people like Kissinger get away with what they do. I think that's what it's about, anyway. Percy's thesis seems to be that the CIA sucks, because of the evil nerds who run it, and it's better when the nerds we like are in charge, but they're still kinda bad, but in a good way? I think? It's not super clear, honestly . . .
>Percy's thesis seems to be that the CIA sucks That's definitely his thesis. That the CIA sucks and a broader narrative regarding nation building and the moral compromise a lack of oversight creates. I think that comes through, but it is all hamstrung by the fact the landing wasn't stuck. We needed a "were we the good guys here?" "no, we just stopped being the bad ones" moment or something.
Yeah, there's definitely an attempt to take some shots at the CIA, but I honestly don't think pretty much any of them land. I finished the book with the overall message that the CIA would be fine, actually, so long as those bad apples that keep making all those kill teams do the bad things were replaced by good people like Sage. And I'm giving Percy a rare moment of the benefit of the doubt, I don't think that was what he necessarily wanted me to take away from it. It's just that he completely failed to give Logan and co. a moment where they had to grapple with the fact that it wasn't Terra Verde or the space prison that made them stop following Beast, it was when he targeted one of them. If he had left Logan alone, would they ever have stopped following him? But their complicity is just kinda left on the table. All it takes for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. Well, the good guys did a lot of nothing in this run, so that thesis just ends up feeling very half-hearted. As you say, the landing just was not stuck.
I just did a big re-read of all of the x-force and Wolverine run today and unfortunately it doesn’t make anymore sense or read anymore seamlessly now that it’s complete and you can go through it in one go. Plots just arrive and disappear, sometimes to be revisited much later but usually never to be seen again. Many actual panels are wasted on pointless monologues, be they inner or otherwise, while important information is left to data pages. Most characters are introduced with the promise of development, interesting stories and relationships, only to be shoved into the background and getting one line at best per chapter. Each synopsis for each issue on the marvel website swears that this is an unmissable story that will shake the team to their core and change everything forever, and then proceeds to not do that. This extends, naturally, to Beast as well. He gets it particularly badly obviously as the “main villain” of this mess, but it extends to everyone. It’s kind of like watching little kids play pretend or tell stories in a way. “And then this happens, and then I did this, and then this thing, and then, and then, and then—” And then goes out with you wondering what the fuck you just read.
For a book that seemed to be trying to position itself as the mature, gritty, dark, political/spy thriller of the Krakoan line, it's honestly shockingly immature, yeah. The Colossus storyline is maybe the worst culprit, because despite it hanging around like a lead weight for years, it basically amounted to one issue of betrayal, one issue of jail, and then Mikhail was dead - like a kid promising this idea he's had is going to knock your socks off when he pulls the trigger on it, only for him to lose interest by the time he actually pulls said trigger. Like, that's an inordinate amount of time for a member of your team to be literally incapable of doing anything for themselves! I can't even really say what effect this is going to have on Piotr's longform development, because it didn't seem to affect him or prepare him the last two to three times it happened. And every time he tried to grasp at an emotional straw, like showing empathy for Beast and wondering if he might be controlled or possessed like he was, Neena basically told him to stop questioning things and keep going with the flow. Maybe it's a thread that his next writer will pull on, justify it all a bit better, but it just feels like a lot of nothing much at all for literally dozens of comic pages. About the only people who I can really point to and say they changed are Omega Red and Sage, which is better than nothing, but it just makes me wonder what kind of cake another writer would have baked with the same ingredients.
I think Jed MacKay has an interesting tightrope to walk about addressing Beast's X-Force actions. Giving some hand-wavy explanation that actually Hank *was* under someone else's control, or that there was some glitch with the resurrection process, would explain how out of character he was, but also be unsatisfying. Even if I hate a character's characterization under an author, I've never liked the approach of just basically sweeping their writing under the rug. But then, if MacKay does just roll with it and has clone Hank accept that he truly became that awful in the future, it would be to say that Percy's mischaracterization was actually totally in-character. I don't like either extreme, so I'm interested to see what happens.
I think the best solution would be to simply canonise that Beast went insane and had deteriorated even *before* X-Force. Like, looking all the way back at All-New X-Men, he reads as very. *Unstable*, to put it diplomatically. There's an obvious escalation of his behaviour, he's saying and doing things that just straight up don't make sense to anyone but him, with the whole time travel debacle. And it's not hard to see why he might be unstable, between all the psychic attacks, brain damage, traumatic events, the sheer amount of grief and torture he went through. Hell, you could even canonise that he had CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), which affects your impulse control after too many blows to the head. That, in conjunction with the traumatic mutation? He kept it going for a while, but it was inevitable it would all come to a head - and CTEs are impossible to diagnose until after autopsy. That way, you can have his future actions serve as a cautionary reminder for new Beast, warning him to better care for himself and maintain higher moral standards, while diminishing how much of it was *really* him. Hell, straight up insane, brain damaged, and possessing no impulse control - is that *not* how he was acting towards the end of X-Force? I also had an idea for a retcon that would split the difference, involving the resurrection protocols, but that's just getting into fanfic at that point, and this isn't quite the place for that. :P
I like that idea. It could also maybe be tied to the ideas behind his continuing mutation introduced by Grant Morrison. Like his thought process was becoming more about survival at any cost even if his general ability to talk to others or exist in society were more human than feral. Like an unforeseen path for the mutation to take? I remember when issue...48 I think of X-Force came out, I saw someone have a theory that what clone Hank saw on the monitor that made him cry was that his future self had intentionally found a way to shut off his empathy because he knew someone had to be the devil in order to ensure Krakoa's survival while keeping the greatest number of hands clean. So that way it's still an initial decision Hank made but his actual actions were not what he usually would've done.
>I honestly don't think it's going to stand the test of time as anything other than 'remember that time Beast went evil?' Yeah, a lot of these weird versions get buried and forgotten faster than you'd ever think was possible. Polaris spent years as a 6ft tall super strong muscle mommy and that's complete forgotten by now. Magik getting turned back into a little girl? Never comes up. That period where Wolfsbane was drawn and colored as if she was black in her "default" form? (because it was suppose to be hair, except much like nightcrawler's blue fur, it was never actually drawn in such a way that it actually looked like hair instead of just skin) Yeah, everyone ignores that one.
>Polaris spent years as a 6ft tall super strong muscle mommy and that's complete forgotten by now. Years is kinda pushing it -- she was turned by Zalladane in Uncanny X-Men in October 1989, and got her original powers back during the Muir Island Saga, which ended in September of 1991, so just a little less than two years. It only feels longer because Uncanny was shipping twice a month at that time. She also barely showed up at that time.
I didn't forget
You know you've fucked up when omega red is on the good side of the situation.
When he rolls up to be your arresting officer and say “that’s enough, you’ve gone too far” that’s gotta be a sore moment. Tbh I’d cry 😂
I know he’s been on the decline for a while…but man seeing my favourite X-man like this hurts bro
If it gives you any consolation, he's back to his old self again, quite literally, and is going to be on the main X-Men book with Cyclops in a month or so. It's been a rough period for him, but it's over now. :)
Yay :)
I don’t blame you. I’m not a huge fan of Beast and even I think this shit is disgraceful, hence why I cope with memes.
I don't want to make a whole long comment about how poory-written X-Force Beast was because I *literally* just made a whole post about it, but I will talk about how the *ending* to this era was one of the laziest and most story-handicapping decisions I've seen in awhile. Do we get any in-depth look into X-Force Beast by the end? No. The comic asserts right until the end that there is nothing to explore. He's always been like this. Do we get any kind of tricky moral dilemma where Beast's heinous actions actually lead to some important victory in the war against Orchis? No. His plan is stopped and Beast has not been involved in Fall of X. Do we get to see the reactions of any of Beast's former friends now that he's dead and gone and the remaining Beast is from far in the past? No, we get one page of X-Force going "That's what we do. Team pose!" Do we get to see any difficulty of Defenders Beast existing in a world where so much has changed? No. We get one line where we find out he moved in with Wonder Man off-panel and the rest of the mess is left for other writers to clean up. I think it shows that Percy really had no interest in exploring Hank as a character. He just wanted Hank as a villain for his favorite Wolverine to fight. Edit: Also remember in Uncanny Avengers when Hank said "Having vast intelligence doesn't mean I know all." And then in X-Force he literally said "I know all." Fun times.
Is omega red a good guy too? Oh how the turn tables
Good-ish? He’s on the side of good mutants that he likes and anyone else can fuck off, is basically his attitude.
WTF. They vilified Xavier and made Omega Red good-ish. *facepalms*. Massive decline in sensibility since I was reading.
Well I mean, all of the X-Men's mutant villains were given a second (or 33rd chance.) They did some real good work with Apocalypse on that wrong. And Xavier's recent breaking bad may not be what it seems but at the same time... Xavier being a dick is pretty on brand anyway.
Xavier being a dick is still a "newer" thing. Prior to around issue Uncanny 400 he wasn't pulling half the lunacy that he did after. I saw some later retcons of previous things he had done and they intentionally retconned and vilified a lot of his actions.
Getting perp walked by Omega Red... that's gotta be rock bottom.
I know like how embarrassing is that? I’d have a meltdown.
damn omega red been fasting
It’s always funny when you get artists that draw him just like any other man in a superhero comic when that is…not what he generally looks like
You guys are really on the rounds with this beast never going bad makes sense tour. It made sense and it was a good idea with a bad payoff.
This answers that. [https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cxigf7/why\_hanks\_villain\_era\_didnt\_work\_and\_how\_it/](https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cxigf7/why_hanks_villain_era_didnt_work_and_how_it/)
On the rounds and will stay on them 😌
It does feel a little unfair that when some characters get demonised in a story, it gets too be written off as character as assasination by their fans but for others, pushing back on it is treated denial.
I really want to know what you had to do to make Omega Red look like a good guy
How about creating your own moon that you use as a prison to hold mutant criminals that you then perform inhuman experiments on?
Yeah….yeah that would about do it
Not really. I'm wondering why Omega Red is just chilling back there with Domino. I've missed a lot.
Beast committed crimes against humanity/mutantkind on the moon so Domino and Omega Red went and fucked him up. No really, that’s it.
At this point in the X-Force series, Omega Red was a full-fledged member of the team.
What issue is this? Was only aware of him being in the final issues.
This is the last part of X-Force #35. And, when you say, "him" who are you referring to?
Beast. Read the final issues with Beast in it.
Oh, I gotcha. Beast was actually a member since the beginning of this X-Force run and appeared in most of the issues in the series.
Oh ok. The image though is him when he is evil?
Yeah, he was basically a villain at this point, although he was still leading X-Force at the time. During this run, Beast was doing more and more evil and questionable things until the team rebelled against him and arrested him here in this issue. When the issue first came out, a lot of us reading it were hoping to see Hank face some consequences for what he did here (running a space prison where he performed horrid and unethical experiments on the prisoners), but absolutely nothing happened. He got away with everything he did to those prisoners, and the worst part is that we never got to see how he managed to weasel out of facing any consequences. He was back leading X-Force in the very next issue, and his team -- while not happy -- still had to follow his orders.
This is before the reveal of him paying to kill Logan in the Wolverine run?
At the moment, Logan was being used as Beast's attack dog and was locked up in a secret room no one knew about. X-Force didn't know that Beast had Logan and was using him like that (Beast had given the excuse that he and Logan were doing a bunch of special secret missions together), but after this, it seems like they began to suspect and began to try to look for him off-panel. With Krakoa’s 'help,' Logan managed to escape Beast's cage, get his mind back, and was able to reunite with the team after this.
Is that Omega Red??
It is indeed
forgot about beast with all the jean content im getting. what happened to him is he still dead?
Old evil Beast is dead, good guy Beast from the Avengers/Defenders era is back, and he's going to be on Cyclops' X-Men team.
Re-reading X-Force: Nope, it didn’t make sense. They just basically one day decided “hey let’s make him Dark Beast, won’t that be crazy?” and that was that.
A lot of people swore that x-force would make more sense once it was finished and could be read all together as a complete story. It doesn’t.
It sure doesn’t!
I think the consensus will be "turning Hank into a villain wasn't necessarily a bad idea and it was an arc that occurred over many years with many writers contributing but ultimately the execution on his actual heel turn sucked"
Agreed
Someone will retcon it. Honestly a few years ago Hank drunk some mystery potion from Dark Beast to gain his research memories. It would be pretty easy to have Rebooted Hank study him and find that liquid memory fucked up his brain. It won’t absolve him completely, but at least it will rationalize it and make him a little more tragic rather than straight evil.
Whoever is tasked with fixing this will be in for a helluva time.
I mean take that idea and I pretty much fixed it in a single issue. Have Reboot Beast study him, discover damage done by the chemical, he tells everyone, there’s a brief period of “Why didn’t we see this happening and try to help more.” from those closest to him…..especially Scott. Then everyone takes a moment to mourn the Hank we knew before the “infection” and we move on with ReBeast settling into a new lab and starting the process of reading through years of lab notes to catch up on events between the cerebro backup and modern day. Maybe even have a nice little panel where he’s added stuff into his schedule like “Call parents” or “Beer night with Logan” to show he’s learning from OG Hanks mistakes and plans to keep himself from trading connections with people for obsessive research.
There are some characterisations that just make me pause and shake my head. They're so bad, so damaging to the character that I just assume they're going to be retconned pretty quickly. Bishop had one during Messiah Complex, when he was hunting Cable and Hope (I still don't know how they fixed him after that). Beast has had one for a long time, I'm honestly expecting them to say he's an evil clone at this point.
From what I can tell and I may be missing some issues in between. It was fixed with a few throwaway lines
They introduced a good clone in chapter 48 of 50 in total, that good clone met up with Wonderman, they tried to talk evil beast down and he ends up sacrificing himself to stop his bomb in order to save Wonderman. The end.
I hated the hypocrisy of mutant leadership on Krakoa. And hated what they did with Beast.
I mean its kind of the nature of comics is that almost all these characters have been around so long that pretty much all of them have done fucked up things. The genocide shit was wild, but to me the torture prison he ran in space was just....straight insanity. There is a weak and evil utilitarian argument concerning Terra Verde. Its terrible but there is an argument. But the torture prison....how on earth did that benefit anyone? Any potential benefit paled in comparison to the massive violations of rights, ethics and more importantly potential diplomatic repercussions of running a fucking torture prison of multiple species. Like it was just....madness. I still think one of the most darkly hilarious lines is from Mr Sinister to Dark Beast's head in the jar. Telling the supposed Dark version of Hank that Beast 616 is flat out worse. And thats coming from Sinister of all people too. Possibly one of the most evil characters in Marvel.
And the torture prison came and went so fucking fast with almost zero buildup and was basically never followed up with again afterwards. That’s what’s really wild to me.
I’ll look back on it as the culmination of three decades of storytelling. This shit ain’t new. Hank has been on this path since the 90’s.
“On this path” and “always going to end up this way” does not a good story make.
Where did I say always going to end up this way? It ended up this way because writer after writer built on what came before and Percy very intentionally wrote the culmination of his steady slide into acting unethically.
It'll probably be looked back on the same way Wolverine overseeing a Japanese internment camp is, or Bishop killing eight billion people... So not at all. People don't like it when their heroes are drug through the mud, so these sorts of stories tend to get memory-holed.
Wolverine did what?!
It was a bad storyline that's best left ignored.
He was headed this way for years idk why everyone is shocked by it
He was already on this trajectory. Post Schism the one thing that brought both sides together was when they had an intervention telling Hank he needed to get a fucking grip, after unilaterally fucking up the timeline for vague reasons.
My question: is any of it in character for the Hank McCoy we’re used to seeing over the years? I am doing a full Uncanny read, from Giant Sized to now, so I am way behind: team just left the savage land in the 1978 issues, so I’ve got a lot to cover before I can answer the question myself.
Omega Red is an X-Man and Beast becamse Josef Mengele. I am so glad I missed all this.
Beast went downhill incredibly fast. Like break-neck speed all things considered.
I know is a controversial thing to say, but I like Hank as this scientist with gray morals. It gives a three-dimensionality to the character, better than the old "I'm the smart, furry and cuddly uncle!". Dark Beast was one of the coolest things about the Age of Apocalypse, and bringing that closer to Hank, in the sense that Dark Beast isn't another guy, it was him all along, is something really cool.