I almost decided to skip the Alpha Flight miniseries for Fall of X. A government-based super team that’s built on Canadian archetypes with a long history of being unwitting heels for the X-Men didn’t strike me as very compelling. Then I remembered that I read the entire ten issue run of Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Statix revival (which was a mistake), and at least the Alpha Flight series promised to feature Fang and the Beaubier twins, who have at least gotten some intriguing development in the Krakoa era, so I decided to go for it. I read the first issue, and I’m now marginally intrigued by the premise at least. The beginning setup that the human members of Alpha Flight decide to apparently go all in on mutant hunting and deportation is actually fun, primarily because it relies on the audience knowing that these characters have often made similarly poor choices. I could enjoy a series focused on a hero team whose antagonists are actually the good guys; the end of issue reveal that human Alpha Flight are just fronting in order to help Canadian mutants escape a hostile environment is legitimately good and a pleasant turn. I felt a sense of relief that these heroes are not as boneheaded as we might assume.
After I finished reading the week’s comics, I had to sit with the general vibe of Alpha Flight #1 and ponder how distinctly weird it is in concept for an X-book. My initial impulse to pass on it was influenced by some old, not fully rational bias against stories that center non-mutants within the X-Men universe. These heroes don’t represent what’s interesting about the mutant metaphor, so why are they getting a five issue series? At best, they’re imperfect allies with a lot of mistakes under their belt; at worst, they’re cops.
I realized that Alpha Flight, at least based on the promise of its first issue, is a story about the messiness that comes from trying in good faith to be an ally to marginalized groups. It’s uncomfortable work with very little in the way of personal reward. A lot of the time, what you do is insufficient but all that’s realistically possible. The human members of Alpha Flight are only helping mutants in secret while being the public face of Canada’s mutant deportation initiative. The reader’s reaction upon seeing the apparent reality is probably supposed to be something like disgust or exasperation that these heroes so obviously missed the mark. Why aren’t they openly rebelling against an unjust system? That would be the unequivocally moral response, but the issue’s ending stinger about the imminent ramping up of the much more dangerous but less publicized Box Sentinel program proposes that human Alpha Flight is doing necessary, ugly work. Hanging over all the proceedings is the understanding that this is a government team; its members are beholden to conflicting needs and interests that limit their ability to act as perfect allies. This is a frustrating thing in a superhero fantasy where you sometimes just want characters to act with the moral clarity that real life often fails to afford.
In the course of mulling over my surprise at finding Alpha Flight to be working with some interesting themes, I got to thinking about other examples of strained allyship in the pattern of the mutant metaphor, and I landed on the big one, Moira X. In the current comics, Moira has about the biggest heel turn a character can take, going all in on helping Orchis, the unholy alliance of humans and machine intelligence, exterminate mutants completely. Before that, she’d recently been a secret mutant, using a thousand years’ worth of knowledge about previous versions of the timeline to guide the decisions that led to the establishment of the latest mutant homeland, Krakoa. Before that, she was a human ally, someone with a complicated personal history with Charles Xavier who helped the mutant cause in her capacity as a world renowned geneticist because, well, she cared a lot about them. The arc is a weird one, but it demonstrates some fascinating parallels with how some people who begin in ally roles move to an adversarial position over time.
Moira’s history in the X-Men books through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s focuses on her staunch allyship with the cause of mutant rights. She’s a supporting character from very early in Chris Claremont’s run, and her key motivation for most of the three decades before she’s killed off is to help the mutants she knows because she sees that it’s the right thing to do. As Moira’s story develops we see that she does have a personal stake in the cause for a couple of reasons. She and Xavier had a previous romantic relationship that is now purely professional. Her son Kevin is a mutant with an unstable power that causes him to rapidly burn out his body and the bodies of others that he possesses in order to warp reality around him. Shortly after first appearing in the comics, she settles into a long term romance with the mutant Sean Cassidy. Her adopted daughter, Rahne Sinclair, is a young mutant girl escaping persecution by her fundamentalist religious community. Much like often happens with real life allies, Moira’s involvement begins largely because she sees that people she cares about are connected to a marginalized group. Over time these bonds strengthen Moira’s resolve to continue to support the mutant cause, leading to her eventually becoming infected with the Legacy virus, a manufactured disease that is only supposed to target mutants with Moira (at the time) being the only human to contract it.
During this initial period of Moira’s publication, she presents as a model ally. Her public support of Xavier’s vision of mutant rights is unwavering, and she never shies away from trying to do what is best for the cause. As a fictional character who exists with exceptional privilege (in addition to being a world renowned geneticist, Moira is also landed Scottish nobility), she always uses her power “correctly” within the context of the stories. Connor Goldsmith says in one of his episodes of Cerebro that Moira was a valuable character as a prominent example of positive allyship, especially as the focus of the line moved in the ’90s away from showing the X-Men interacting with human actors who were not purely antagonists and focusing almost exclusively on the intracommunity dramas of mutant versus mutant conflict. The vast majority of Claremont’s human ally characters disappeared from the books after the first time he left the line with Moira being the major exception. Eventually she was killed off too, and this thread about the role of allies who are adjacent to a marginalized community sort of disappeared from the X-books.
In House of X #2, we learn that much of Moira’s previous publication history is not as it seemed. Jonathan Hickman introduced the retcon here that Moira is not only a mutant, but a mutant with a very special power: upon dying, she resets the timeline to a moment when she is still in utero with all of her memories of her previous lives perfectly intact. The Moira we’ve known is actually the tenth iteration of the character, and she’s been operating in secret with the knowledge of her previous lives to try to guarantee mutant ascendancy into the future. Some things are lost with this retcon, specifically the removal of Moira’s status as a human ally who’s working with a minimal personal stake in the mutant cause. A lot of things are added in exchange, and overall it’s a good revision to the series’s history.
One wrinkle that Hickman introduces to Moira’s character is that the discovery of her powers is so traumatic that by her third life she’s determined that being a mutant is a curse, which leads to her beginning her work in genetics in order to cure human mutation. She succeeds, and Destiny, the preeminent precognitive mutant on Earth, decides to intervene. Trauma gets heaped on trauma, and Destiny coerces Moira into reversing direction on her lives’ purpose so that she must try to find a way to ensure mutants thrive. It makes for good drama and establishes that Moira, with all her knowledge, fears reprisal from Destiny if she ever strays from trying to help mutants. In the current timeline, when mutant resurrection is put on the table, Moira ferociously opposes Destiny being brought back from the dead. We learn the reason why in Hickman’s Inferno miniseries: Moira thinks there’s no way for mutants to succeed, so she’s just maneuvering until she can find a way around Destiny’s foresight. She never gave up on curing mutation, and Destiny knows it.
That reveal and the subsequent events in X Lives / X Deaths of Wolverine push Moira fully into villain territory where the ally mask drops and, freed of her mutant power, she goes all in with the machines. She’s been wreaking havoc as an enemy of Krakoa ever since.
This sequence of events has some interesting parallels with the way that some real life allies of marginalized communities fall away and embrace right wing grievance communities instead. It’s pretty well understood that the psychology of how people belonging to dominant social groups behave is built around rewarding conformant behavior from people who already belong to the group where the reward is acceptance and status of some sort. In these dominant groups, the punishment for nonconformity is expulsion because it’s a dominant group that has enough power concentrated within itself that it can afford to discard problematic members. White people and men come to mind as the most obvious groups that engage in this behavior, although there are others. Members of these groups who embrace allyship of marginalized communities often bring this behavior model with them, leading to friction as allies carry expectations that their support deserves reward within those marginalized communities. At its most benign, you get cookie begging behavior. More damaging versions of this phenomenon lead to allies trying to take a central role within the communities they’re aiming to help. These behavior patterns interact poorly with community models that rely on firm correction of problematic behaviors, which is where a lot of the fragility that allies exhibit in response to valid criticism comes from. It’s a difficult paradigm shift to make, and some allies, confronted with the lumps they have to take as part of rebuilding their expectations for how they should be treated, break from the project of being an ally at all, instead falling in with grievance communities that have no problem emphasizing how much more comfortable they are rejecting marginalized communities that they believe don’t want well-meaning allies anyway. It’s how J K Rowling, who was a moderately progressive person for most of her public life, has fallen into aggressive transphobia after failing to take correction from people who knew better what kind of harm she could cause with her platforming of ideas gleaned from Mumsnet.
Moira X follows a similar arc in the comics, although there are some key differences that complicate the comparison. The first and most obvious is that the catalyst for Moira’s heel turn is that she’s harassed by Destiny and Mystique repeatedly, and while Destiny has a certain Machiavellian view of the timeline, Mystique is just self-interested and mean. Their priority is and has always been making sure they can stay together rather than worrying about the success of mutantkind. The interactions among these women have never really been a model of ‘calling in’ someone who’s causing harm to a community so they can do better. The second complication is how Hickman’s retcon changes Moira’s motivations. Pre-House of X, Moira was a human ally invested in helping mutants because of her personal connections rather than because it would directly affect her. After House of X, she’s a self-loathing mutant who hid her identity and worked under duress until her harassers found out what she was up to and forced her to admit that she was never a true believer in the cause.
Despite the narrative wrinkles, the metatextual reading of Moira maps pretty cleanly onto a story of someone who starts out with good intentions to help a community, does the work without complaint for a time, gradually makes herself central to the community in a way that she shouldn’t (neither should Xavier and Magneto, but we’re not talking about them right now), then completely burns her connections to the community when she’s told that she’s gone wrong along the way. Yes, it’s all elevated by superhero melodrama, but her current status reflects a clear specter of how real world allyship can curdle.
Returning to Alpha Flight, I find myself wondering about the model that Ed Brisson seems to be using as the template for his story. Moira, in her reimagining by Hickman, is tragic on an operatic level, while the members of Alpha Flight, at least here, appear to be mostly the superhero equivalent of normal people who are doing their best with limited knowledge and resources. They feel like different points on a wide spectrum of what flawed allyship can look like, and I’m curious to see where their stories go in the future.
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