Summary

• Jean Grey states a mutant paradise is one where the X-Men aren't needed anymore in X-Men #35.
• The story explores a world where Krakoa thrives without human bigotry, posing a potential end to the franchise.
• The metatextual conversation delves into how bigotry fuels X-Men stories, making a perfect world impossible.

Contains spoilers for X-Men (2021) #35/Uncanny X-Men #700!These days, it’s almost impossible to imagine the end of a big franchise, but one of the founding X-Men has presented an argument for how and why the franchise would end, and it’s a bittersweet one. In stories built on suffering and struggle, the only ending is to resolve that suffering. Endings are always bittersweet, but sometimes the best outcome is simply moving on.

In X-Men (2021) #35, Jean Grey states that the best future for mutantkind is one where the X-Men aren’t needed anymore.

X-Men (2021) #35 is alternatively numbered as Uncanny X-Men #700, returning to legacy numbering for this issue.

In the issue, the residents of Pacific Krakoa return from exile in they’re opposed by Apocalypse, who sees their pacifism as proof they need his leadership. Jean counters Apocalypse, explaining that the Krakoans have found their better world, one where his leadership, and X-Men, aren’t needed.

A Happy Ending for the X-Men is Still an Ending

What Jean is saying is what someone like Professor X would have argued in the past: in a perfect world, there’s no need for the X-Men. This is how, in such a world, the X-Men franchise would end. It’s not a world that anyone can live in, because bigotry can’t be excised without continual active effort, but it’s an ideal. The new Krakoans have reached their promised land and have found it plentiful. Perhaps one day the fallen human world will get close to this ideal, but it would mean the end of the X-Men.

The success of Pacific Krakoa, and Jean’s musings, also stands in contrast to the idea suggested by House of X/Powers of X, which kickstarted the Krakoan era. That story presented the idea that mutants always fail in every future. Krakoa stood in opposition to that idea, and writer Jonathan Hickman left it open whether the Krakoan experiment could work. Hickman’s version was designed not to work, with cracks in the foundation from the original sins of its founders. But X-Men #35 suggests that, with perfect circumstances, paradise is, in fact, achievable.

The Nature of the X-Men Franchise Means It Can Never End

This moment is also fascinating on a metatexual level. All storytelling is built on conflict, but the X-Men franchise in particular is built on conflict rooted in bigotry. Without anti-mutant sentiment, there’s little separating the X-Men from other superheroes, so X-Men stories need bigotry to survive. Metatextually, the X-Men will never win, because Marvel will never stop publishing X-Men stories. At its core, X-Men #35 is a metatextual conversation about the value of Krakoa, but one that struggles with the fact that, in an ongoing comic, a perfect Krakoa can’t be built.

What the Krakoan Era posits, however, is that said bigotry shouldn’t mean that the X-Men can never be happy. That something beautiful, and fragile, and necessarily messy like Krakoa can, and should, be built in opposition to hate, if only for a day. Pacific Krakoa is the dream of Krakoa made manifest, an almost religious ideal that, appropriately, lives on in the spiritual mutant birthplace. A world where the X-Men aren’t needed is, for a franchise built on bigotry, only a dream, but it’s not a dream if it’s real.