“Marvel Rivals” season 2 memorializes one of the best eras of “X-Men”
Long live Krakoa
The online game “Marvel Rivals” has been on a hot streak, rising steadily in popularity and player count since its December release.
With its season 2 update, which kicked off in April and continues through May, it’s now paying homage to a wonderful and recently departed era of X-Men storytelling – the Krakoan Age.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you may remember me discussing the various storylines spinning out of the founding of the mutant nation of Krakoa back in one of my first newsletters. It was a time when Marvel’s “X-Men” line of comics, placed in editorial limbo as a result with Marvel corporate feuding with Fox regarding the line’s movie rights, were reinvigorated with a bold new take on Marvel’s mutants. No longer the world’s underdogs, mutantkind had now banded together to create its own sovereign nation on the sentient island Krakoa, and pooled its people’s collective superhuman skills together in order to create a utopian society for their people. Now recognized as a world superpower, the mutants of Krakoa now grappled with how to best lead and protect the home it had created for itself.
From a storytelling standpoint, it was a simple but brilliant flipping of the script – what if, instead of the X-Men always being society’s “feared and hated” outcasts, they not only had a seat at the table of world power but were one of its leaders? Of course, the same anti-mutant xenophobes the X-Men had always dealt with now had Krakoa in their sights, but now those storylines had the flair of cloak and dagger espionage, as the mutants sought to defend their new homeland from antagonistic foreign operatives.
This is only scratching the surface of the great stories that came from the Krakoan Age – there were also stories about long-lost mutants stranded in other dimensions, the start of the “Hellfire Gala” balls which celebrated mutant culture, and the creation of mutant resurrection, ensuring that no more mutant lives would be lost to the cruelty of mankind’s worst impulses. But, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with Krakoa. Last year, it was announced that the mutant nation of Krakoa would end, and the characters would return to a more “classic” status quo. This was said to be because Marvel Studios was interested in focusing on the X-Men characters in the MCU in coming years, and thus wanted the comic characters back in more recognizable roles.
Even though the new ongoing books that came out of the “From the Ashes” event that signaled Krakoa’s end have all been reviewed pretty favorably, it’s still hard to say goodbye to such a unique and fascinating time in X-Men storytelling.
And NetEase, the developers of Marvel Rivals, apparently thought so, too.
The new season of the online shooter is themed entirely around Krakoa’s Hellfire Gala, including introducing Emma Frost, longtime supporting “X-Men” cast member and hostess of the gala, as a playable character. A new map, based on Krakoa, has also been added to the game and later this month another map from Krakoa will be added, based on Krakoa’s long-lost “sister island” of Arrako (whether this is before or after Arrako and all its inhabitants settled Mars is unclear – and yes, you can add mutants terraforming and establishing a Mars colony to the list of cool stuff that happened during the Krakoan Age).
Krakoa’s time in the comics may have come and gone, but at least in Rivals – for as long as NetEase keeps it online – we have a little time capsule of those lost glory days for Marvel’s mutants.