I'll add this:

We have been dealing with 'Krakoa' and the 'Road-to-Krakoa' for a combined period of well over a decade. Krakoa was the plan in place back when Hickman was still writing Avengers. We got the Time-Displaced 05 from 'some plan that had been floating around the office'. It was Hickman's plan, with certain things built in, like the TD-05 having certain key differences from the OG-05 baked in from their arrival just waiting to be revealed, and other changes that would be made after their arrival. As the person in charge of implementing their arrival in the present and initially telling most of their stories, Bendis got to make decisions on some of that.

Example: Beast

We saw a somewhat near-future with Beast with a horned appearance and a far-future Beast with even more of a demonic form and wielding arcane power. So the TD-05 were never going back in time until TD-05 Beast started experimenting with magic and eventually developed a demonic alternate form. That allowed them in the current era to say Beast was acting evil at various points throughout his history, either by retconning in things that originally never happened or by re-contextualizing benign or good things into something evil.

The 'Road-to-Krakoa' was full of things like that. Changes to characters and continuity just randomly dropped into stories because they had to set up stories that wouldn't see print for years. At the same time they had to otherwise mostly spin their wheels for those years while waiting for Hickman to be free to return to Marvel to write the story they had spent those years setting up.

So you got a lot of wrongness that made no sense and stories that went nowhere, all while fans argued and fought over changes to characters and history while complaining that the stories were mostly retreads and directionless.

Then we finally get Krakoa and it's so fresh and exiting, but quickly politely asks that you must check you brain at the door. We had just went through a 'Schism' where the X-Men divided in part over refusing to follow Cyclops and his council of reformed villains, yet we were supposed to buy those same people would go to an island and be ruled over by Apocalypse, Sinister, Magneto, Shaw, Mystique..? The X-Men abandoning their long-held goal of peaceful coexistence for Mutant Separatism and cultism? It was preposterous! Theories of mass-mind control and it being an alternate reality abounded, among others. And there were even more massive changes to characters and histories.

A lot of fans that had had enough of changes to characters and histories in the 'Road-to-Krakoa' found 'Krakoa' to be a final breaking point, while fans that had bailed due to the stagnation in the 'Road-to-Krakoa' came roaring back to embrace the seeming forward momentum. Some fans saw what was wrong with Krakoa and figured it was wrong for a reason and waited for the reveal, while others thought the wrong was oh-so-right. This, at last, was progress!

And since sales were on-the-whole higher and interest was through the roof, Marvel decided they didn't want Hickman to bring things to his conclusion. First they had him start to drag things out and then they showed him the door and let an assortment of other writers, many of whom were already failing at executing Hickman's vision, to carry things on.

Meanwhile, where some fans had become pseudo-revolutionaries during the 'Revolution' era, fans now became pseudo-militants under 'Krakoa'. Hyper-identification with mutants and their struggles with Orchis had apparently led to desires to go out and plant bombs in Orchis facilities. But since Orchis didn't...actually...exist..., they channeled those thoughts and emotions into their posts on social media and became increasingly unhinged. They caused a lot of other fans to disengage rather than have to deal with them and turned even more fans against the current era after seeing the negative impact it was clearly having on a number of fans mental health.

And the fans who were waiting for answers to the wrongness got tired of waiting and reading stuff they didn't like hoping for an eventual payoff, so they started leaving. And the fans who came back for the forward momentum now found themselves reading some bizarre confluence of stagnation and wrong direction, so they started leaving, too. And even some of the militant fans driven crazy by 'Krakoa' were starting to realize that what they want isn't really compatible with who the X-Men actually are, and getting it was destroying the X-Men if not for themselves then for everybody else. If they weren't leaving they were at least starting to sober up to reality.

So now were are getting a rushed resolution to a mess of an era, 'Krakoa' and the 'Road-to-Krakoa' combined should have taken maybe five years and we are well over a decade combined and still not out of it yet. And Marvel is now crafting something to try and appeal to those who loved Krakoa, those who hated Krakoa, and those who started off loving Krakoa but came to hate it.

Good luck with that.

Someone shared this link on CBR and I thought everything said in it was so spot-on that I'm sharing it here.

Just going to tag some of the members that expressed the most interest in this over the years...

profezzorx cc008 whitecrown

[Note: All new content has been edited into the first post, with the preexisting content also revised and updated. For narrative purposes, the Dragon of the Moon segment that was to end this first of a planned series of Dragon Mythos threads will now instead start off part two(coming soon!).]

Recent events in the comics have brought renewed interest to the Dragon Mythos, companion to the Phoenix Mythos, and sent the chronicling of its story roaring back to life! Now with all preexisting material revised and a MASSIVE UPDATE that includes a TON of new material!

Learn:

• How the Dragon Mythos got its start as a fan theory in the 1970's!
• How Chris Claremont's plans to use the shadow-side of Kabbalah as an adversary for Jean/Phoenix and the X-Men came to cast a defining shadow across the nascent Dragon Mythos!
• How J. M. DeMatteis began to lay the foundation for the Dragon Mythos in the 1984 Iceman mini-series(and how it would lead to then-X-editor Louise Jones(Simonson) later adding her own significant contributions to the Mythos).
• What sits opposite the White Hot Room on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and Death, why Tiferet/Tiphereth is a 'White Hot' Room and what opposing 'Power' balances the Phoenix Force!
  
• How Kieron Gillen drew directly from the Zohar, the textual foundation of Kabbalah, to craft the scene with 'Apocalypse' in Immortal X-Men!
• Which Sefirot and Qliphoth are now revealed as established Marvel Comics Universe realms!
• Why Iceman had to actually be erased from existence to complete his journey into becoming the Dragon!
  

All that and much, much more!

2024 marks not only the fortieth anniversary of the historic 1984 Iceman mini-series that started Iceman's journey to becoming the Dragon on the printed page, but it is also literally the Chinese Year of the Dragon! All the pieces are in place for a story that is decades in the making!

In the recent final issues of Immortal X-Men, the White Hot Room saw fit to warn the mutants of a coming threat that is in some way akin to Satan! Are they ready!?

Are you?!

Prepare yourselves for the arrival of the ultimate supernatural threat, as two old friends with opposing destinies see their entwined fates... at last... collide!

Wow. This was crap.

I speculated in a review of an earlier issue that the only reason I could fathom for this series's existence was to provide the adult All-New Iceman a more dignified exit after his demise at the Hellfire Gala. They went all the way there, hit all the emotional beats, and then at the last second chickened out leaving this series entirely pointless. The run was mediocre to outright bad, the only really good thing was the art.

The only way Marvel even generates sales for Iceman's series anymore are variant covers. They front-load a series with variants(issue #1 had 3 covers, issue #2 had three, issue #3 had two, and by the end of the series, when they stop them and the comic has to sell by it's own merits:

www.comicbookrevolution.com/november-2023-2023-single-issue-comic-book-sales-rankings/

Astonishing Iceman #4, the first in this series without a variant, ranks way down at 127th. The previous issue, Astonishing Iceman #3, was down at 91st even WITH a variant.

I've read every solo Iceman outing the character has ever had, for four decades, and the last good solo Iceman issue was early on in Sina Grace's run. As bad as much of Grace's run was, that was the high-point for Iceman solo stories in several years.

The stories are bad, there is no point to them, and the sales are terrible. But rest assured, All-New Iceman will return...

I can't tell... is that a promise, or a threat?

I'll add this:

We have been dealing with 'Krakoa' and the 'Road-to-Krakoa' for a combined period of well over a decade. Krakoa was the plan in place back when Hickman was still writing Avengers. We got the Time-Displaced 05 from 'some plan that had been floating around the office'. It was Hickman's plan, with certain things built in, like the TD-05 having certain key differences from the OG-05 baked in from their arrival just waiting to be revealed, and other changes that would be made after their arrival. As the person in charge of implementing their arrival in the present and initially telling most of their stories, Bendis got to make decisions on some of that.

Example: Beast

We saw a somewhat near-future with Beast with a horned appearance and a far-future Beast with even more of a demonic form and wielding arcane power. So the TD-05 were never going back in time until TD-05 Beast started experimenting with magic and eventually developed a demonic alternate form. That allowed them in the current era to say Beast was acting evil at various points throughout his history, either by retconning in things that originally never happened or by re-contextualizing benign or good things into something evil.

The 'Road-to-Krakoa' was full of things like that. Changes to characters and continuity just randomly dropped into stories because they had to set up stories that wouldn't see print for years. At the same time they had to otherwise mostly spin their wheels for those years while waiting for Hickman to be free to return to Marvel to write the story they had spent those years setting up.

So you got a lot of wrongness that made no sense and stories that went nowhere, all while fans argued and fought over changes to characters and history while complaining that the stories were mostly retreads and directionless.

Then we finally get Krakoa and it's so fresh and exiting, but quickly politely asks that you must check you brain at the door. We had just went through a 'Schism' where the X-Men divided in part over refusing to follow Cyclops and his council of reformed villains, yet we were supposed to buy those same people would go to an island and be ruled over by Apocalypse, Sinister, Magneto, Shaw, Mystique..? The X-Men abandoning their long-held goal of peaceful coexistence for Mutant Separatism and cultism? It was preposterous! Theories of mass-mind control and it being an alternate reality abounded, among others. And there were even more massive changes to characters and histories.

A lot of fans that had had enough of changes to characters and histories in the 'Road-to-Krakoa' found 'Krakoa' to be a final breaking point, while fans that had bailed due to the stagnation in the 'Road-to-Krakoa' came roaring back to embrace the seeming forward momentum. Some fans saw what was wrong with Krakoa and figured it was wrong for a reason and waited for the reveal, while others thought the wrong was oh-so-right. This, at last, was progress!

And since sales were on-the-whole higher and interest was through the roof, Marvel decided they didn't want Hickman to bring things to his conclusion. First they had him start to drag things out and then they showed him the door and let an assortment of other writers, many of whom were already failing at executing Hickman's vision, to carry things on.

Meanwhile, where some fans had become pseudo-revolutionaries during the 'Revolution' era, fans now became pseudo-militants under 'Krakoa'. Hyper-identification with mutants and their struggles with Orchis had apparently led to desires to go out and plant bombs in Orchis facilities. But since Orchis didn't...actually...exist..., they channeled those thoughts and emotions into their posts on social media and became increasingly unhinged. They caused a lot of other fans to disengage rather than have to deal with them and turned even more fans against the current era after seeing the negative impact it was clearly having on a number of fans mental health.

And the fans who were waiting for answers to the wrongness got tired of waiting and reading stuff they didn't like hoping for an eventual payoff, so they started leaving. And the fans who came back for the forward momentum now found themselves reading some bizarre confluence of stagnation and wrong direction, so they started leaving, too. And even some of the militant fans driven crazy by 'Krakoa' were starting to realize that what they want isn't really compatible with who the X-Men actually are, and getting it was destroying the X-Men if not for themselves then for everybody else. If they weren't leaving they were at least starting to sober up to reality.

So now were are getting a rushed resolution to a mess of an era, 'Krakoa' and the 'Road-to-Krakoa' combined should have taken maybe five years and we are well over a decade combined and still not out of it yet. And Marvel is now crafting something to try and appeal to those who loved Krakoa, those who hated Krakoa, and those who started off loving Krakoa but came to hate it.

Good luck with that.

Someone shared this link on CBR and I thought everything said in it was so spot-on that I'm sharing it here.

Just going to tag some of the members that expressed the most interest in this over the years...

profezzorx cc008 whitecrown

[Note: All new content has been edited into the first post, with the preexisting content also revised and updated. For narrative purposes, the Dragon of the Moon segment that was to end this first of a planned series of Dragon Mythos threads will now instead start off part two(coming soon!).]

Recent events in the comics have brought renewed interest to the Dragon Mythos, companion to the Phoenix Mythos, and sent the chronicling of its story roaring back to life! Now with all preexisting material revised and a MASSIVE UPDATE that includes a TON of new material!

Learn:

• How the Dragon Mythos got its start as a fan theory in the 1970's!
• How Chris Claremont's plans to use the shadow-side of Kabbalah as an adversary for Jean/Phoenix and the X-Men came to cast a defining shadow across the nascent Dragon Mythos!
• How J. M. DeMatteis began to lay the foundation for the Dragon Mythos in the 1984 Iceman mini-series(and how it would lead to then-X-editor Louise Jones(Simonson) later adding her own significant contributions to the Mythos).
• What sits opposite the White Hot Room on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and Death, why Tiferet/Tiphereth is a 'White Hot' Room and what opposing 'Power' balances the Phoenix Force!
  
• How Kieron Gillen drew directly from the Zohar, the textual foundation of Kabbalah, to craft the scene with 'Apocalypse' in Immortal X-Men!
• Which Sefirot and Qliphoth are now revealed as established Marvel Comics Universe realms!
• Why Iceman had to actually be erased from existence to complete his journey into becoming the Dragon!
  

All that and much, much more!

2024 marks not only the fortieth anniversary of the historic 1984 Iceman mini-series that started Iceman's journey to becoming the Dragon on the printed page, but it is also literally the Chinese Year of the Dragon! All the pieces are in place for a story that is decades in the making!

In the recent final issues of Immortal X-Men, the White Hot Room saw fit to warn the mutants of a coming threat that is in some way akin to Satan! Are they ready!?

Are you?!

Prepare yourselves for the arrival of the ultimate supernatural threat, as two old friends with opposing destinies see their entwined fates... at last... collide!

Wow. This was crap.

I speculated in a review of an earlier issue that the only reason I could fathom for this series's existence was to provide the adult All-New Iceman a more dignified exit after his demise at the Hellfire Gala. They went all the way there, hit all the emotional beats, and then at the last second chickened out leaving this series entirely pointless. The run was mediocre to outright bad, the only really good thing was the art.

The only way Marvel even generates sales for Iceman's series anymore are variant covers. They front-load a series with variants(issue #1 had 3 covers, issue #2 had three, issue #3 had two, and by the end of the series, when they stop them and the comic has to sell by it's own merits:

www.comicbookrevolution.com/november-2023-2023-single-issue-comic-book-sales-rankings/

Astonishing Iceman #4, the first in this series without a variant, ranks way down at 127th. The previous issue, Astonishing Iceman #3, was down at 91st even WITH a variant.

I've read every solo Iceman outing the character has ever had, for four decades, and the last good solo Iceman issue was early on in Sina Grace's run. As bad as much of Grace's run was, that was the high-point for Iceman solo stories in several years.

The stories are bad, there is no point to them, and the sales are terrible. But rest assured, All-New Iceman will return...

I can't tell... is that a promise, or a threat?