House of X #2 Rewrites a Major X-Men Character & the History of the Series

It was promised that House of X would be an X-Men event that would have one of the most important scenes in the history of the franchise. With that kind of promise, it’s hard to imagine what the payoff could be, but issue #2 did drop a massive bombshell.

**Spoilers for House of X #2.**

The most important scene in the history of the X-Men. #HouseofX #PowersofX #MarvelComics pic.twitter.com/nsoNfACPpq

— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) May 24, 2019

We find out in House of X #2 that Moria MacTaggert, a character who has been a part of the X-Men franchise since Uncanny X-Men #96 (1975), is a mutant. She’s always been portrayed as a human character who is geneticist and expert in mutant affairs, but that has now been changed.

Moria is a mutant who possesses powers that allow her to start her life over from the beginning after her death, with a perfect memory of her other lives, meaning she can do different things and create different outcomes each time based on that knowledge. She’s Tom Cruise in The Edge of Tomorrow, and right now, she is on her tenth reincarnated life, having faked her death at the hands of Mystique. In addition to that, she can also somehow cloak her mutations from other mutants and forms of mutant detection.

When she and Charles Xavier were in Oxford together, she revealed all the knowledge she had collected over her multiple lifetimes to him, which means that he knew exactly what could happen to the X-Men years before he formed the team—and yet, he was still so freakin’ bad at it. Kudos, Charles. Kudos. However, it explains why, in this incarnation, Marvel’s mutants have a new status quo with Xavier forming a militant mutant nation on the living island Krakoa. He probably saw that human/mutant peace was never going to happen and decided to maybe not use teenagers as weapons/marketing.

I have enjoyed the House of X story so far, and a lot of my friends who have felt detached from the recent X-Men comics have been singing its praises to me. I think, with a series as old and beloved as X-Men, it’s hard to create the sort of event story that does enough to raise the stakes while crafting engaging storylines. Knowing that Xavier has been even more Chessmaster than usual is something I’ll be curious to follow in the comics. Also, when it comes to Moira and her weird powers, I think it’s interesting, although I’d love to hear more about the tedious nature of having a perfect memory of your life from womb to death—9 times!

Hopefully she doesn’t have to be with Joseph MacTaggert in every incarnation, because ugh, the optics of that would not be great at all.

What do you all think about this twist? Does it work for you? What do you think this new information will mean for the coming story?

(via CBR, image: Marvel Comics)

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