Is X-Men in need of a soft reboot?

It seems that in the last year the people behind the curtain have decided to start cleaning up the continuity mess that is X-Men after everything they've done with the series in the past decade. My question is, wouldn't it be easier for a soft reboot?

I mean, it can't be hard to try. They did it with Matthew Malloy, erasing him from existence in order to keep him from killing everyone around him. Wouldn't doing this more benevolently be a good way to instigate a soft reboot. With the past version of the original X-Men around, wouldn't it be an idea to reboot them upon sending them back through slight changes to history?

Seems like the kind of thing that would make things simpler for a while, but more complicated in long term.

@theinsufferable: I fear you might be right. If not for the writers deciding to get too hands-on with the time changes or time travel itself, but also editorials wanting to mess with what's already been put to bed later down the line. Still, I think it could POTENTIALLY be a good idea if done well.

Quoted for truth.

Retcons are...complicated. I don’t see any reason for a retcon in general personally unless there truly is no way around something. @theinsufferable puts it best.

Example: The Dark Phoenix retcon. The purpose of the ending to the Saga was for Jean to pay for her crimes, but they wanted to bring her back later. Not much you can do at that point in time to absolve death and responsibility, but they found a way by saying, “That’s not how it went. This is what really happened.” Even still, it brought the bag of worms of adding a new character to the X-Men lore all too complicated to simply explain away as, “Jean didn’t do it, it’s this cosmic bird thing from space!”. It had to take years to get where we are in terms of answers about the Phoenix.

The last problem to come out of soft reboots would be how sloppy they can be. Bendis use of plot devices to undo his work suggests as much. Like Ulysses being an inhuman with the power to foresee the future. Then, the turns out, “no, you are cosmic being in a mortal form”. It’s never a good idea to give writers an easy way out, because it will become a habit with no imagination applied.

The Xmen need a reboot, revamp, old stories reimagined and retold, something.

On the other hand, there was an opportunity to do that with the O5 but honestly they have become so terrible that I personally never want to see or hear about anything involving them again. However if there were really changes to the timeline based on them going back and possibly doing things differently even without memory of the their time spent in the future, because what's the odds of a person doing the exact same thing the exact same way every time? If things could be rebooted and stories told differently it may be something interesting

Pfft. Lets just leave it alone. I mean really, for as much as people are concerned with continuity it doesnt change the fact that the same people with bad ideas who screwed up the old books will be back to do it again if we relaunched it.

Today we are in a period of soft reboot. We have what is basically a very 90s team taking the helmet with new stories while resolving (or ignoring) alot of the issues from the new 10s that people didn't want effecting their books.

Consider what it would be like if we had to sit through a whole new Hellfire club, Apocalypse, sinister and brotherhood arc. It would accomplish nothing as people would be asking for alot of the the things that they loved pre reboot and the writers would almost universally agree that they wouldnt want to retell the old stories the same way.

Plus what most people forget is that most of their favorite X-Men stories took 2 years to tell and were all 5 years apart at minimum. So while your hype and excited for A writer to try to create a never before seen take on Magneto (which reboot or not is just as hard) your going to have to wait another 10 years just for them to get to something they could actually do differently like Operation zero tolerance. Otherwise your just asking for a reboot so that they can try to cram all the good stuff you remember from the comics into 20 issues of stories.

What the X-Men need is what their getting. A new lease on life, with the team looking as large and powerful as you would expect given that they have been picking up people and saving the world for 50 years. The confusing continuity in X-Men isnt nearly as bad as other comics, so we just ignore the complicated stuff and keep telling stories with the great characters and villains that we've gotten over the years and hope for writers that would rather tell great new stories then try to over complicated great old stories.

Please no. No reboot, soft or hard. I don't want reboots.

I say start over in a new universe lol.

Seriously though as much as I really would want that. I think at this point they just need to fix what's wrong trim the fat, simplify teams and get rid of the more convoluted characters,resurrect the right people and just move forward. Wipe some of the garbage out of existence

I don't see whats the problem with rebooting X-Men? It's a good idea in my opinion.

The X-men already have "soft reboots" every decade or so. I mean, important character developments and events that shook the team or individual characters to the core twenty years ago are sometimes rarely mentioned or forgotten.

did you mean retcon?

No

Please no reboots. it makes the previous stories unimportant and useless.

I'd say X-Men Gold, Blue and Red were already a soft reboot.

Secret Wars Battleworld was the last hard reboot of sorts.

I don't believe a reboot would be helpful. Extermination is trying to tie up loose ends (in the most laboured way possible, with the only thing more drawn out being Wolverine) which is doing its part to clean up continuity.

It does not help, however, that some characters are criminally over represented in team ups (X-23, Honeybadger, Storm, Jean Grey, and Emma Frost of all characters) to the point where annoying inconsistencies just continually crop up.

To fix it, they'd have to scale back which characters go where, have a more concrete basis for the character powers and personality, and keep the layers of character impacts known between the writers so they're well appraised. It's about making sure the characters are consistently changing in the right direction, instead of wildly different representations like we're seeing with Captain America, Ms Marvel, Captain Marvel, etc.

I even didn't like the idea that Apocalypse is no longer a mutant.

@darknessclad: They've kinda been doing it character by character. Xavier is in a younger body. Jean is back. Archangel is back in control of his Death persona. Jubilee isn't a vampire anymore. Psylocke's back in her original body. Wolverine's coming back. Cyclops is apparently coming back. Emma's back to being a villain (yay!)

I was really really REALLY hoping back in Uncanny Avengers when they were fighting the Apocalypse Twins and Wanda was going to port all mutants onto a spaceship that they'd take all mutants on an adventure in space to get away from everything else in the MU for a while, maybe have an arc where they try to settle on another planet giving us some awesome terraforming feats with Storm, Magma, Polaris, Iceman, Rictor and others...ultimately discovering there's no place like home. Was that just me?

Everything you've written here is SPOT ON. It drives me nuts that writers don't do their research.

@jhazzroucher: Wait, whut? When/where did this happen?

Nope. They just need to communicate better so things are more consistent.

yes please. It will be so much easier for me to catch up and know what the heck is happening and who the characters are.

Lol! I had no idea who Rachel Grey and Cable were one month ago. Every time a new comic issue releases I have to wiki the characters. With Uncanny coming up, I have to find out who Bishop is? And the guys with aviator glasses. It has not been easy.

There's no need of it.

I concur to your statement.

@thunderscream: No you weren't the only one. I felt that was some unexplored ground to be covered if the mutants had gone to space especially with that Apocalypse Twins story arc.

Even with the whole Secret Wars thing, I was hoping that mutants would be shunted off into their own universe.

@jhazzroucher: most of the stories and developments we've been getting for a while now are unimportant and useless

You are so right, most especially the O5

That's sort of my biggest problem with Marvel's writing. They have a nasty habit, at least in recent years, of making these potentially great choices, only to completely drop the ball and, in the end, settle for killing it off or making it never have happened, ignoring all the potential problems they cause with it. It seems like they are too scared to take risks.

As @pyrofn said above, it causes a lot of continuity problems, too. The Dark Phoenix Saga, the whole House of M retcon (including the Maximoffs not being Magneto's kids), literally everything with the Inhumans... Marvel just keeps throwing stuff at the wall and it is starting to feel desperate.

With the O5, it could have led to some super cool angles, and might have let them confront some of the large problems with many members of the X-Men and their actions (*cough* BEAST *cough*). But they basically just spent several years letting the O5 whine about their "terrible fates". For example, I would have loved for young Scott to stand by his older self's actions, but instead we got several series of him endlessly talking about it.

Incidentally, I feel that they will waste a similar opportunity with the returns of Jean, Wolverine, Xavier, and (probably) Cyclops.

"Confront our past failings as writers through an interesting and humble in-universe way? HA! We will just pretend none of it ever happened and completely gloss over all the out of character moments and illogical conflicts! Look, here's Xavier in a wheelchair again!"