Comic Book / Sins of Sinister

Warning: Sins of Sinister is a direct sequel to events in Immortal X-Men #1-10 and other Krakoan Age X-Men stories, so Late Arrival Spoilers for those previous comics are unmarked on this page.

"I've been beaten by the X-Men so many times. But now? The X-Men are mine. The X-Men are me. Everything is Sinister, forever."

— Mister Sinister, Sins of Sinister #1

Sins of Sinister is a 2023 comic book event from Marvel Comics, a Bat Family Crossover between Legion of X, X-Men Red and Immortal X-Men, three titles within the X-Men franchise. It's written by Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing and Si Spurrier, with art by Paco Medina, Patch Zircher, and Alessandro Vitti.

Set in the shared Marvel Universe, Sins of Sinister is part of the wider Destiny of X arc, the third phase of the X-Men's long-running Krakoan Age saga.

Mister Sinister is one of the X-Men's old enemies, a murderous eugenicist who uses mutants as raw materials. When the mutant nation of Krakoa was founded, Sinister's database of mutant DNA made him a vital ally for the new nation, a necessary evil so that Krakoa could grant Resurrective Immortality to its citizens. His reward was a seat on the ruling Quiet Council.

He's never been trusted by Krakoa’s other leaders, though - and rightly so. Sinister's been trying to corrupt Krakoa's resurrection process since the very beginning, but so far without success. However, he's also started using the "Moira Engine", a system built around the time-twisting reincarnation powers of the mutant Moira MacTaggart, to map out possible futures and find a path where he wins, seizes control of Krakoa and remakes the whole world in his own image. At last, Sinister now thinks he's found a way to make the plan work. He might be right. He might also regret it.

Comics involved in Sins of Sinister

• Immortal X-Men #9-10 (Prelude)
• Sins of Sinister #1
• Immoral X-Men #1-3
• Nightcrawlers #1-3
• Storm & the Brotherhood of Mutants #1-3
• Sins of Sinister: Dominion #1

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Sins of Sinister provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: The crossover is titled "Sins of Sinister".
• Agony of the Feet: In Nightcrawlers #3, Banshee drives one of Wagnerine's severed Wolverine Claws through Magical Barefooter Mother Righteous's foot. It takes her focus off the injured Wagnerine, as Mother turns on Banshee instead — just as he had intended.
• All for Nothing:
  • Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2 puts Destiny in this situation. Destiny and Mystique stole Sinister's Moira Engine to preserve the timeline, because Destiny couldn't see any other timeline in which Mystique would live... but then Mystique made a Heel–Face Turn, joined the fight against the two interstellar empires and died anyway.
  • Sinister succeeds in attempting his apotheosis into a Dominion Intellect only to hit a literal wall and have his efforts usurped. He's horrified knowing he not only failed but also that now he can never succeed in any timeline, as Dominion Intellects transcend them.
• All Your Powers Combined: Each of Sinister's Chimera clones combines the powers of two or more superhumans.
  • The Nightkin are Chimeras who combine Nightcrawler's teleportation (and appearance) with another mutant. Wagnerine combines those genes with Wolverine, Wallcrawler with Spider-Man, Auntie Fortune with Domino, Lost-in-Shadow with Lost, the Chamber Nocturne with Chamber and Summernight with Cyclops.
  • Storm & The Brotherhood #1 sees Sinister destroy Mars, deploying an army of Madrox Chimeras with Havok's plasma blasts. Later on, the Brotherhood encounter Maggot-Marrow hybrids, capable of shooting off living bone-maggots that eat people.
  • Nightcrawlers #2 shows Sinister's first triple Chimera unleashed on Otherworld, a mix of Meggan, Maggott and Madrox. Combinations of Legion, Proteus and Polaris later become "system killers", able to destroy stars.
  • Immoral X-Men #2 introduces "L-Bombs", four-mutant Chimera that combine Firestar, Micromax, Harry Leland and Lila Cheney. They're so unstable that they have to be frozen in time until they're deployed, but can teleport across the universe to destroy whichever world they're aimed at. Leland increases mass, Firestar releases energy via nuclear fission and Micromax was a size-shifter. The combination can split planets.
  • In Immoral X-Men #2 Sinister directly states that five-mutant Chimera are the limit. Anything beyond that isn't even achievable as an unstable disposable weapon. Rasputin IV, combining Colossus, Kate Pryde, Laura Kinney, Quentin Quire, and Unus is said to be his finest creation.
• And I Must Scream:
  • After her death in Immoral X-Men #2, Hope is resurrected, but then cut up into pieces and distributed as living reliquaries for Exodus.
  • Red Diamond is completely shattered by Storm at the climax of Storm & The Brotherhood #3. Beast's comments immediately following this heavily implies that this didn't kill her, instead reducing her to a cloud of sentient diamond dust trapped in the vacuum of space forever. Luckily for her, the universe is reset shortly afterwards.
• Antagonist Title: Sinister finds himself demoted to a Big Bad Wannabe, and isn't a presence in Nightcrawlers or Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants, but he's unambiguously a villain and antagonist for Destiny of X as a whole.
• Any Last Words?: In Nightcrawlers #1, Doctor Stasis asks Wagnerine if she has any last words. The question becomes his own last words, as Wagnerine immediately stabs him in the head with her tail blade.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Five years into the future, Arakko (Mars) is shattered into rubble by one of Sinister's genetic Chimera, based on Professor Xavier's immensely powerful son Legion.
  • In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, Sinister activates a trap in the modified mutant gene that kills every mutant he's corrupted with it. Only three mutants survive: Ironfire, Wagnerine and her child. And at this point, very little non-mutant life in the galaxy remains. A data page puts the kill count of this "Psychic Inferno" at 8,662,221,825,176,190.
• Art Shift:
  • Sins of Sinister #1 has guest artists illustrating the montage of events during the first ten years.
  • Rather than having one artist for each series, the event emphasizes its Time Skip approach by using a different artist for each time period, but with that artist doing all three miniseries.
• Assimilation Plot: Sinister, to the surprise of no one, spiked the genetic samples used for the Resurrection Protocols with his own personality. However, Hope's presence in Krakoa's resurrection circuit ("the Five") unwittingly purged his tampering, so the plan failed - until Sinister murdered Hope and she was assimilated during her own resurrection. This allows him to covertly take over the Quiet Council, who graciously open resurrection to important human figures worldwide, allowing him to assimilate them, then later provide X-Gene implants to humans to assimilate civilians without resurrection. A variation, to his chagrin, in that the converts are not connected to him through a Hive Mind and thus not beholden to comply with his greater motivation.
• Ax-Crazy: Hope In Sin, the corrupted Hope Summers, is among the most vocally trigger happy and unhinged of the infected Quiet Council, taking sick glee in lobotomizing the living island Krakoa via Orbital Laser, being all for fighting a bloody interstellar war and by the 100 + era leading the charge of the Mutant Empire's galactic expansion while making liberal use of planet busting living weapons.
• The Bad Guy Wins: But not the one you'd think. Of all the Sinisters, it's Mother Righteous who comes out of the story ahead of the game. Her future self dies, but she sends a thousand years of secrets back to her library in the past. Her past self swiftly becomes a Villain with Good Publicity, the saviour of Krakoa, and the extremely powerful chimera Rasputin IV is now back in the present day as her ally. The last issue of the crossover ends with Storm thanking Mother Righteous — and by saying those words she's given Mother's magic a way to control her. Even worse, Storm phrases it as gratitude from every mutant on Krakoa, implying almost the entirety of mutantkind is now in the sorceress' power.
• Bad Future: The event is set at three different points in the future, and none of them sound pleasant. Kieron Gillen has described it as "hell for everyone", including Sinister.
  • Sins of Sinister #1 covers the first decade, with the Avengers infiltrated, the Fantastic Four killed and Sinister secretly released from his imprisonment in Krakoa's Pit.
  • By year 10, most mutants and a growing number of humans are tainted by Sinister's genetic tampering, with their minds infected by Sinister's personality. Pollutants from Sinister's lab complexes are poisoning North America. Most superheroes have been corrupted, exiled or killed. Arakko is shattered into asteroids, and Krakoa's Quiet Council is a corrupt tyranny.
  • By year 100, Earth's mutants have become a genocidal interstellar power, the Empire of the Red Diamond, that routinely destroys entire planets. Earth itself is polluted and abandoned to the genetic monsters left on its surface. The Shi'ar empire has fallen, Asgard and Otherworld have been laid to waste by Chimera attacks, Xandar's sun has been detonated and the remaining power blocs have unified into a desperate coalition that is directly threatened by the mutants.
  • By year 1000, the galaxy has become an impossibly gothic hellscape. The Quiet Council has shattered into multiple conflicting factions, most notable an Enemy Civil War between Emma Frost and Xavier. Horrors such as Magik wounding space-time or a Kenji Uedo clone eating most of the solar system are implied to be the norm. Mutants are undsiputably the rulers of the galaxy, with any resistance to their rule long since eradicated. Yet, somehow, hate and fear remain.
• Bat Family Crossover: It's a crossover between Immortal X-Men, X-Men Red and Legion of X, all of which are replaced by Bad Future miniseries for the duration of the event.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Sinister wanted others to see things his way so he can experiment at will, so he infects countless people on Earth with his genetic code. Unfortunately for him, he's a raging Narcissist with a God complex, so the other corrupted Krakoans become just as self-absorbed and egotistical as he is and begin to see him- and eventually, each other- as rivals to their own personal supremacy, showing Sinister that remaking the world in his own image just hurts him in the long run.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Wagnerine, a Chimera cloned from Wolverine and Nightcrawler, has both sets of powers. This also means she's got a retractable 'claw' hidden at the end of her prehensile tail. As she points out, enemies tend to focus on her Wolverine Claws and forget about that one. Sometimes fatally.
• Big Bad Wannabe:
  • Doctor Stasis clearly thinks that he's Sinister's archenemy and superior, imagining that he can ally with Orbis Stellaris and triumph. But in this timeline, his power base in Orchis has crumbled, humanity has been wholly subverted by the mutants and Stellaris is manipulating Stasis into a situation where the fourth Sinister clone, Mother Righteous, can murder him.
  • Sinister himself rapidly loses control of the situation. By Immoral X-Men #2, the corrupted mutants have decided that he's outlived his usefulness and he's forced to flee. By Sins of Sinister: Dominion he's briefly restored to power, making his bid for Dominion status and killing almost every mutant in the universe — only to fail again at the last moment.
• Big Good:
  • Subverted in the case of Emperor Dorrek, aka Hulkling, who never directly appears in the story. Hope in Sin comments that he was a major opponent in the war against the Mutant Empire, helping to form the Coalition that opposed them and trying to rally the interstellar powers to deal with the Sinister-corrupted mutants. The subversion is that he died at mutant hands with his efforts unfulfilled, as the Shi'ar sat out the earlier stages of the war and only got involved after it was already too late. Hope comments that if he were brought back to life in the 100+ era and could be shown maps of the galaxy, he'd likely start screaming and be very justified in saying "I Told You So" to the Shi'ar..
  • The closest person who can claim this role in the nightmare future of Sinister's making is Ororo/Storm, who continues to fight alongside the few remaining Arakki and her other allies for the hope of freedom, no matter how slim that hope gets. She even refuses to activate the Moira lab to restart the timeline, on the grounds that it would erase the current one — as that would violate her belief that all life, no matter how corrupted by Sinister's evil, deserves to exist.
• Big "NO!": In Immoral X-Men #1, Sinister creates another copy of himself — 'Ducky' — to use as a sounding board. At the end of their conversation he states that it's too dangerous to leave the clone alive, and triggers some sort of genetic kill switch. 'Ducky' is left screaming "No! No! No!" (presented in a much larger font size than normal dialogue) as his body melts into gory goo.
• Bittersweet Ending: Sinister, Mother Righteous and Orbis Stellaris all fail to ascend to Dominion (and Doctor Stasis is killed before he even gets a chance to try). Moira resets the Bad Future and finds a way to sabotage the Moira Engine when Sinister downloads the future data back in the present day, stopping him from cloning her and using it again. However, Moira used Mother Righteous's spell to achieve that - which also sends a thousand years of knowledge and secrets back to Mother's present-day library, as well as reviving the naive but heroic Rasputin IV in the main timeline. On the plus side, Rasputin knows all about Sinister's treachery, blocks his escape and hands him over to the Quiet Council, who sentence him to the Pit. But, fearing that they may still be infected by Sinister's DNA tampering, Xavier, Emma, Exodus and Hope also enter the pit until they can be checked and cured. And Mother Righteous is now hailed as the saviour of Krakoa, a Villain with Good Publicity, and has the very powerful Rasputin at her beck and call.
• Blatant Lies: As he's dragged off to the Pit again, Sinister tries pleading to Destiny for help. She does nothing, claiming afterwards Sinister was just trying to make her look suspicious. When asked what he meant, she just says she doesn't specifically know what he was talking about.
• Body Backup Drive: In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, Rasputin IV's mind and genetics are uploaded and sent back to the past, allowing the Moira Engine to clone her in the present day, downloading her +1000 mind into the clone.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: In Immoral X-Men #2, 100 years in the future, Exodus has tired of Hope's petulant, childish behavior. He abandons her in the middle of a battle against the Chitauri, leaving her to die when he's no longer close enough for her to copy his powers. It's implied he has the Quiet Council's backing for this but, on a personal level, he's simply decided that she's a disappointing messiah — her church would do better without her.
• Boom, Headshot!: In Dominion, Juggernaut, previously shot out into space by Krakoa a thousand years before, shows up at the right time to go through an undead Galactus's head.
• Brain in a Jar: Sinister's forces keep the cloned brains of mutant Fabian Cortez in life support jars. Cortez's powers boost the powers of others, so having a Cortez brain nearby boosts Sinister's forces. At one point someone connects a brain to a speech unit. It screams.
• Broken Pedestal: In Immoral X-Men #3, after 900 years of searching space alongside her mentor Sinister, Rasputin IV discovers that he's not The Atoner and has been pursuing his own Godhood Seeker goals all along. Understandably, she immediately tries to kill him.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • The Arakkii Magma Man Calderak is briefly seen fighting alongside Storm in Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1, his first appearance since he challenged her in S.W.O.R.D. (2020).
  • Death, first horseman and son of Apocalypse, is seen fighting alongside Storm and the Arakkii prior to the destruction of Arakko. He was trapped in the Otherworld realm of Sevalith at the end of X of Swords. Although he's been glimpsed there in a few stories, this is the first time he's returned since that event.
  • Rasputin, last seen in Powers of X, returns in the event. This version of Rasputin IV is Sinister's finest creation, created 100 years into the future — the first Chimera to combine five different mutants.
  • In Nightcrawlers #3, Juggernaut, who was fired into space at the very start of Sins of Sinister, makes a brief but important reappearance. As part of Destiny's Xanatos Gambit, his trajectory sends him hurtling into the World Farm, smashing the force field that's protected it for a thousand years.
• Call-Back:
  • When Sinister's greeting his corrupted clones in the Arbor Magna. Lucas Wernak's artwork intentionally duplicates Pepe Larraz's similar staging of Xavier doing the same thing back in House of X #1.
  • In X-Men Red Storm opted out of Krakoan resurrection and in Legion of X Nightcrawler was mysteriously mutated in a way that even Sinister couldn't reverse. As a consequence, Sinister's initial genetic tampering can't affect either of them.
  • In Destiny's spotlight issue of the Rotating Protagonist book Immortal X-Men, she's distraught that her precognitive powers can see no branch of the future where her wife Mystique survived. Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1 reveals that she stole Sinister's Moira Engine and she states that she stopped him hitting the Reset Button on the Bad Future purely because this is the only future where Mystique lives. Too bad that so many others have to die.
  • In the first issue of Immortal X-Men, the ancient mutant Selene warns the Quiet Council that without Apocalypse or another skilled magician, they are "vulnerable to anyone with a grimoire and a bad attitude". At the end of Sins of Sinister, Mother Righteous, empowered by the spell and secrets she sent back to her past self from a thousand years in the future, seems about to make this warning come true.
  • During the Claremont years, it was established Storm comes from a long line of witches, something that's generally not been utilized much since. Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2 has Storm embracing that heritage.
• Came Back Wrong: Everyone who's been revived by Krakoa's Resurrective Immortality since Sinister's attack on the Quiet Council (and the death of Hope) has been infected by Sinister as part of his Assimilation Plot.
• Cassandra Truth: As he's dragged off to the Pit again, Sinister — broken by the failure of his plans — tries warning everyone about the Dominion, but since it's Sinister no-one actually believes him.
• Clone Angst:
  • Played with when Mother Righteous suggests that Doctor Stasis is clinging to a narcissistic belief that he's the original Nathan Essex. Righteous knows and accepts that she isn't the original, and seems entirely comfortable with it. Stellaris's own views are less clear, but he and Righteous begin to refer to each other as 'brother' and 'sister'.
  • Subverted with Sinister himself, who already knows he's the latest in a series of Sinister clones. When he encounters Mother Righteous and she explains the four sets of clones of Essex he points out that his personality and focus on mutant powers are closest to the original Essex — and that Nathaniel Essex gained a Diamond-Sinister form from Apocalypse before the four clones were released. So, as Sinister sees it, all this changes is that he now has more competitors towards the same goal.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Storm's prearranged Trigger Phrase is "You make sure", referencing the Wham Line caption from X-Men Red's tie-in with the Judgment Day event.
  • The death of the Scarlet Witch is captioned "No more Wanda", referencing her "No more mutants" line from House of M.
  • In Kieron Gillen's run on Journey into Mystery, a point is made that no Demon Lord dares sit on the Empty Throne of Satan for fear that every other Demon Lord would attack one so bold. During Sins of Sinister #1, the portion detailing Sebastian Shaw's ascension to Demon Lord status shows a meeting of supernatural monsters gathered around the Empty Throne.
  • Thanos is seen tumbling through time with strange growths on his body, the state he was left in at the end of Kieron Gillen's run on Eternals (2021).
  • The pact between the Arakkii and the Eternals, made at the end of the Judgment Day event, is used to unleash the Omnicidal Maniac Uranos for one hour against his fellow Eternals.
  • After Doom's death, it's mentioned that one lone Doombot survived, now convinced it was the real Doom, something previously seen in Ultron Forever.
  • In Immortal X-Men #9's prelude to the event, Kate Pryde said that "even Emma on her worst day" wants to save the children. In Sins of Sinister #1, when the corrupted Quiet Council unexpectedly turn against Sinister's plan, Emma directly says that it's more important to protect the children.
  • In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2, Mystique's resistance movement is named "Freedom Force", the same name her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants team used when they rebranded to work for the US government.
  • At the climax of that same issue, Storm does a mild invocation of the Phoenix's spiel as she uses magic to move the World Farm, stealing it from within the Death Sphere.
  • The old Noh-Varr in +100 wears the same outfit he did in the different Bad Future seen in Royals, another series written by Al Ewing.
  • In Immortal X-Men #3, which is Destiny's One Day In The Limelight issue, she recalls how "she'd burned the universe for them [she and Raven] to be together". In this crossover, her wish is somewhat granted: she lets reality go to Hell in a handbasket and the universe become a hellhole to let Raven live, instead of using the way she had to revert everything.
• A Darker Me: While Sinister's corrupted versions of everyone are in on the scheming to conquer the world, they retain enough of their own preexisting motivations to disobey Sinister himself, rejecting his attempt to focus on scientific advancement, in lieu of pursuing what they wanted beforehand but more amorally.
• Death of Personality: Krakoa's mind is destroyed by Forge's orbital cannon, a False Flag Operation that's immediately blamed on Orchis.
• Demoted to Dragon: At the end of Immoral X-Men #1 and the 10+ Era in general, this is Sinister's fate. The corrupted mutants are no longer even pretending to be under his thumb, his attempt to retake control results in a Curb-Stomp Battle being dealt to him by the infected Emma Frost and he only barely manages to avoid execution by bribing the Quiet Council with his ability to create Chimera Super Soldiers which the mutants will desperately need to live through the interstellar war on the horizon..
• Desk Sweep of Rage: In Immoral X-Men #1, Sinister sits down with 'Ducky' to talk through his problems with a cup of tea and a piece of cake. Within seconds Sinister's lost his temper and the cake and tea go flying.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2, Orbis Stellaris abandons all hope of achieving Dominion and switches off his own life support after Storm steals the World Farm from within his Death Sphere and all of his research is lost.
  • In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, Sinister stops trying to defend himself from Ironfire or even to survive when he realizes all of his goals, up to and including becoming an artificial god, are for naught, openly telling Ironfire that "Nothing matters anymore," so he can kill as many Sinisters as he wants without it making a difference.
    "Kill her. Kill me. Kill yourself. Nothing matters anymore."
• Didn't See That Coming: At the end of Sins of Sinister #1, Sinister discovers his secret lab is gone, as is the 'Moira Engine' he planned to use as his Reset Button, trapping him in this corrupted future.
• Do Not Go Gentle: In Immoral X-Men #2, Hope In Sin is betrayed by Exodus and stranded without powers in the middle of a Chitauri horde. She grits her teeth and fights on — there's no way out, but she's not going to make it easy for them.
• Downer Ending: Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants ends with the last of the Arakkii falling to the Red Diamond's onslaught, with Sinister turning the battle to his advantage. The newly resurrected Storm dies destroying Emma Frost's Mistress Mold. Khora and the new Five are killed in the battle and Jon Ironfire is then betrayed and shot in the head by Sinister. Subverted when it turns out Ironfire survived. The plan is ultimately a success.
• Dragon Their Feet: By Dominion, Beast is the last man standing of Emma's court, and tries to become a Dragon Ascendant. His arrogance and stupidity means he doesn't, and instead gets his entire ship taken over by Professor X.
• Driven to Suicide: In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2, Orbis Stellaris gives up all hope of victory and switches off his own life support after Storm steals the World Farm and all of his research is lost.
• Dying as Yourself: In Nightcrawlers #1, Wallcrawler volunteers for a likely suicide mission, scouting the World Farm, as he can feel Sinister's presence growing at the back of his mind, eating away at his free will. The stolen lab complex on the World Farm has teleport shielding, so he dies instantly when he reappears there. This then becomes a tradition for Nightkin who feel their identity slipping away.
• Dyson Sphere: The Death Sphere is Orbis Stellaris's ultimate weapon, a mobile Dyson sphere built around the Progenitors' solar system 'World Farm'. It's also a Shout-Out to Star Wars' Death Star.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • After Storm and the Arakkii uncover the truth about the Quiet Council, Sinister sends a Chimera based on the immensely powerful mutant Legion into Arakko's core and telepathically goads him into unleashing his full Reality Warper power. Cue the planet being reduced to an asteroid field.
  • 100 years in the future, the unstable four-mutant Chimera known as L-Bombs become a standardised way of detonating planets. A mix of Firestar, Micromax and Leland delivers a huge nuclear fission effect; Lila Cheney's contribution gives them interstellar teleportation. They're extremely unstable one-shot weapons, but a psychic imprint of the destination will let them annihilate any planet that's not teleport shielded.
• Earth That Was: As a result of Sinister setting up genetics labs across Earth, with typical Victorian regard for the environment, within a few years Earth becomes a polluted hellhole. By the year 1000, Earth's been eaten by the Sinisterized Kenji Uedo.
• Enemy Civil War: By Year 1000, the corrupted Quiet Council has fragmented. Hope's dead, Sinister's a half-forgotten criminal on the run, clones of Exodus are waging their own religious wars against each other and, most notably, Emma Frost and Xavier are leading opposing sides in a galactic war.
• Enemy Mine: By Year 1000, Sinister must work with Moira of all people, who's somehow survived the centuries and stayed in hiding the entire time.
• "Eureka!" Moment: It's established that prior to Immortal X-Men, Sinister was at an impasse and couldn't figure out why his genetic tampering kept failing and getting purged with each resurrection. The breakthrough came after the events of Inferno (2021) and gaining access to Moira's DNA. With his Moira Engine, Sinister was able to pursue lines of inquiry and research he wouldn't have been to do without the timeline resets. This bore fruit, allowing Sinister to finally deduce Hope was the Spanner in the Works and to adjust his plans accordingly.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Played for black comedy during the 'Talk to the Duck' sequence in Immoral X-Men #1. Despite the Sinister-animal hybrids we've seen throughout Immortal X-Men, Essex would never clone a Sinister-Duck hybrid (let alone talk to a regular duck). Why? Because they're famously untrustworthy animals! All of which doubles as a Shout-Out to Alan Moore and March of the Sinister Ducks.
  • In Immoral X-Men #1 the infected Professor X displays disgust at Emma's post infection sadism. He justifies his actions in terms of Necessarily Evil (though Sinister's infection has pushed the limits of what he will condone much further than normal) but he doesn't particularly enjoy using his mental powers to make dissidents kill themselves, wishing they could be brought into the fold instead and making their ends quick when he kills them. Emma openly enjoys the chance to kill them and comments that she takes time to make her targets scream, which repulses the corrupted Xavier. As of Immoral X-Men #3 and the +1000 era, the schism between them has become a full Enemy Civil War between their interstellar empires - and whatever standards Xavier may have once had are long gone.
• Evil Gloating: Amusingly and literally invoked as the 7th and final Step of Sinister's 'Take Over the World' memo.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor:
  • The 'Moira Engine' in Sinister's secret lab is a Reset Button to change the past, using clones of the mutant Moira MacTaggart. He hid it under Muir Island, which was the location of Moira's own lab, mostly because he thinks that's funny, In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants Cable lampshades how in character for Sinister this is.
  • In Nightcrawlers #2 it's revealed the three part Chimera 'system killers' that were used to detonate Xandar's sun among others contain the powers of Legion, Proteus and Polaris, Sinister calls this product 'Heirburst Bombs' in a horrifying pun on the weaponization of the heirs to the three mutants who founded Krakoa in the first place.
  • Lampshaded in Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #3: Emma Sinister at one point irritably notes that the taint of Sinister that she receives appears to have given her a love of bad puns.
• Evil Is Sterile: Hope pushes the Sinisterized Quiet Council to go into space, but it becomes apparent after her murder that the imperialist mutants had no actual goal or ideas beyond brutal subjugation and have splintered into their separate factions by year 1000. All of them have been horribly stagnant with no actual progress made in that time period, merely clinging onto their territories in stalemate to prevent the others from going further than them.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: The crux of Hope's murder in the Immortal X-Men prelude. As long as Hope was alive and not resurrected, she was unwittingly shielding Krakoa and the Ressurection Protocols from Sinister's corruption. Once Sinister kills her and she's resurrected in a compromised clone body, it's basically game over for Krakoa and then from there the rest of the world.
• Evil Versus Evil: The Essex clones (Dr Stasis, Mother Righteous, Orbis Stellaris) are all some shade of villainous, with grand plans of their own. The non Sinister clones are also all fundamentally opposed to Mr Sinister and are working against his takeover of the Earth.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Discussed in regards to the Moira Engine; some want to use it to avert the Sinister corrupted universe, while others want to preserve whatever life untainted by Sinister's machinations still exists. The state of the universe is horrible but is that justification enough to subject everyone to oblivion? By the point it ends up being used, the matter is more or less moot since literally everyone except for four people in the whole galaxy, if not universe, is already dead anyway.
• Failed a Spot Check: Knowing Essex couldn't be trusted, Xavier and Magneto had Mutant scientists go over the Krakoan genetic data and catalog to ensure Sinister hadn't compromised anything. Unfortunately, Sinister is very good at what he does and successfully concealed his Chimera genetic programming from Krakoa's best minds.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Destiny warns Sinister in a pre-recorded message that she knows what he's ultimately aiming for, and he'll never succeed. Sinister just ignores her.
• False Flag Operation:
  • The corrupted Quiet Council members frame Orchis for an attack on Krakoa itself, uniting Earth's heroes to avenge the living island.
  • The Arakkii are tricked into aiding Krakoa's pre-emptive war against the Eternals when the corrupted rulers of Krakoa fake evidence to convince them that the Eternals are about to attack.
  • Captain America assassinates the President of the USA and the X-Men foil his attempted coup. Cap, like the X-Men, has already been corrupted by Sinister, who's improving the X-Men's reputation at the cost of other heroes.
  • Sinister's destruction of the planet Arakko is falsely blamed on the alien Skrulls. As they're shapeshifters who've copied superpowers for previous attacks on Earth, it's at least slightly plausible.
• Fantastic Nuke: The Exodus clones in +1000 are treated like sentient nukes. There are nonagression agreements to regulate "launching"^note Yes, that's the word they use. them, but when one world sends theirs its neighbors all respond in kind. The fight between the clones ends up destroying the entire solar system.
• First-Episode Twist: Sinister's tainted everyone resurrected by the Five since Hope's death - but they retain much of their original personalities and he discovers, the hard way, that they aren't under his control. Even worse, someone has discovered and stolen his lab — so he has no access to the Moira Engine and can't reset the timeline.
• Flawed Prototype: Why Rasputin IV? Rasputins I through III didn't quite work out.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Immoral X-Men #1, ten years in the future, Hope has become a cyborg and replaced one arm - seemingly just because she wanted to. Exodus, who has always viewed Hope as a mutant messiah, comments that her flesh is "precious" and the arm has not been discarded. In issue #2, it's revealed that Hope's dead flesh can still channel her powers to help enable the rest of the Five resurrect dead mutants. When her unpredictable behavior makes her a liability, Exodus orchestrates her death and has Hope's corpse retrieved and portioned up as reliquaries, enabling resurrection on an industrial scale.
  • When she's introduced and presented to the Quiet Council, Rasputin IV is described by Sinister as a formidably powerful-to-the-point-of-unstoppable warrior who has nevertheless been bred with genuine heroism, powerful charisma, and an innocent but completely genuine faith in the Krakoa project (no matter how corrupted it has by this point become), which is intended to make her the perfect icon for followers of Krakoa to rally around and follow. She's too self-absorbed to notice, but if she weren't Hope may have realised that this essentially makes Rasputin the perfect messiah figure — which in turn is a pretty big clue that the Quiet Council are secretly planning to murder Hope before they murder Sinister. For added irony points, it's Hope who says the quiet part out loud with regards to the fact that Sinister, in creating Rasputin, has outlived his usefulness to them.
  • In Nightcrawlers #3, Mother Righteous talks about using Wagnerine's child's soul as fuel for her spell. A grim description of how she'll burn away ends with "better her than me". In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, Moira uses the soul of a dying Mother Righteous to fuel the spell after all.
• For Science!: Sinister just wants to take over the world so he can do his scientific research uninhibited and with unlimited resources, as part of his wider Godhood Seeker plans. The moment when Sinister finds out that the corrupted Quiet Council want to pursue their own personal goals and ideals, having inherited Sinister's lack of ethics but not his obsession with genetic science, is when he decides to use the Moira Engine to abort the timeline and start over.
• Fusion Dance: At some point after Arakko's destruction, Xilo, whose body is a colony of insects and invertebrates, fused with the cyborg Cable, with Xilo's collective replacing the techno-organic elements of Cable's body.
• Future Badass:
  • Loolo, a small child during her appearances in X-Men: Red, has become a member of La Résistance.
  • Ororo, who was already pretty formidable as is, becomes even more powerful in old age thanks to learning how to use magic.
• Futureshadowing:
  • Jon Ironfire makes his debut in Sins of Sinister before his present-day self appears in X-Men Red (2022). The Bad Future setting allows the story to reveal that his biggest regret is a death he caused in the Genesis War, an event that X-Men Red and X-Men: Before the Fall lead into after Sins of Sinister ends.
  • Wallcrawler is a Chimera created from Nightcrawler and Spider-Man, and debuts several years into the Bad Future. After Sins of Sinister ends, Uncanny Spider-Man stars Nightcrawler, who's temporarily adopted the Spider-Man costume and identity.
• Genre Savvy: When the key members of the Quiet Council ask him for greater influence and leeway within Sinister's plans given their importance, Sinister immediately realises they're jockeying to stab him in the back and take over for their own ruthless purposes, since that's exactly what Sinister would be doing under the circumstances. It's the prompt he needs to reset the timeline with the Moira Engine and try again — but unfortunately, by this point someone has discovered and stolen his lab, which contains the Moira Engine.
• Godhood Seeker: It's revealed that Sinister's long-term aim is to ascend to Dominion status - becoming more than a god — before the existing Dominion intelligences consume humanity.
  Mister Sinister (journal entry): Transcend this stinking reality, become something significantly more profound than a god, outside time and space.
• Go Out with a Smile: The last shot in Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2 is Storm's body with a peaceful smile after sacrificing her life for a powerful spell.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: The child Wagnerine had in spite of Sinister creating the Nightkin to be sterile is born glowing gold, and bamfs in a puff of smoke the same color.
• Heel–Face Turn: In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2, after years of the Sinisters destroying the universe and her complicity in the timeline's continued existence, Mystique decides she can't just sit back and stay safely in a bunker with Destiny. Living forever that way feels meaningless to her and she thinks they should fight for something they believe in, trying to fix the universe they helped screw up.
• Heroic Willpower: Despite having spent a century as a mindless abomination, after being set free, Kurt's utter fury at Mother Righteous for perverting his ideology allows him to muster the strength to resist his transformation and speak, using all his effort to growl out the true meaning of the Spark as he attacks.
• History Repeats:
  • Back during Powers of X, Moira's private journals revealed that Krakoa had fallen in her previous life thanks to the betrayal of Sinister which include the destruction of Mars. Now, in her Tenth Life's timeline, that betrayal has come again (albeit under completely different circumstances this time around).
  • Back during Mike Carey's X-Men Legacy run, Sinister tried to infect Xavier with his genetic information in an effort to resurrect himself. When that failed he did it to Claudine Renko, creating the Miss Sinister entity. Here Sinister has done essentially the same thing to the entire Mutant race, but much like with Claudine the process does not go as Sinister hoped. Instead of creating an extension of himself, it simply warped the infected person's personality closer to Sinister's own, leaving them with their own agenda and identity separate from Sinister.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Sinister basically infected most of the X-Men with, well, himself, and is now realizing he can't control them and discovers someone stole his entire lab with all of his Moira clones, meaning he can't reset the timeline.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Sinister's cloned champion Rasputin IV is a naive hero who trusts her creator. In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, after losing her faith in Sinister, she transfers that trust to her new saviour Mother Righteous, not realising that she's just as villainous.
• Humongous Mecha: Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #3 introduces the Mistress Mold, Emma Frost's personal mecha. It's built to resemble Emma herself, who pilots it from within the red diamond on its forehead.
• Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance: As Sinister reveals in Immoral X-Men #2, five-mutant combinations are the absolute limit when creating genetic Chimera with combined powers, and nothing he can do will change that. Even with his four-mutant combinations, some are so unstable that they have to be frozen in time until they're unleashed for a Suicide Attack. Nine hundred years later, the Empire of the Red Diamond still is still relying on four-mutant Chimera, seemingly unable to repeat Sinister's success with Rasputin.
• Hypocrite: Moira tries calling Sinister out on his Moira Engine, in essence turning her into "a machine". Sinister tries shooting back that this is rich from a woman who's turned herself into a cyborg.
• I Know You Know I Know: In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1, Jon Ironfire's superhuman senses mean that he can recognise the shapeshifter Mystique regardless of her form. But Mystique, in turn, knows Ironfire can spot things others can't — and she's been faking some of those 'tells' so that she can fool him at least once, if she needs to.
• I'm Melting!: In Immoral X-Men #1, Sinister talks through his problems with a new Sinister clone, who he briefly dubs 'Ducky'. At the end of their conversation 'Ducky' asks what happens to him next — and Sinister melts him into messy goo via a genetic kill switch. Sinister knows himself too well to trust a clone.
• Immune to Mind Control: In Nightcrawlers #1 it's seen that Chimeras with Nightcrawler's DNA are able to resist the Sinister conditioning to a unique degree. There are limits, though — Wallcrawler, who's created from Nightcrawler and the non-mutant Spider-Man, opts for a suicide mission after feeling his Sinister personality reasserting itself. Ninety years later, in the time of Nightcrawlers #2, righteous suicide has become a tradition for anyone (e.g., Wagnerine's lover Summernight) who feels their conditioning is taking control again.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
  • In Nightcrawlers #3, a distraction allows Wagnerine to stab Mother Righteous In the Back with her tail blade, which goes deep enough to protrude from Mother's chest. She's Killed Mid-Sentence, still wearing a shocked expression.
  • In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, Jon Ironfire, who Sinister left for dead, announces his survival by putting a vicious-looking triangular blade-on-a-chain through Sinister's shoulder. It goes right the way through, and the blade shape means it doesn't easily pull out again, leaving him tethered to his attacker.
• Industrialized Evil:
  • After a century the Krakoan Empire has expanded the Resurrection Protocols into a full on Resurrection Industrial Complex. A streamlined facility where four of the Five work with cloned body parts of Hope around the clock to mass produce Krakoa's forces.
  • Exodus keeps entire stocks of clones in their eggs, constantly praying to him on loop, feeding on their collective faith to bloat himself up into a powerful giant.
• In the Back:
  • A year into the future, immediately after Krakoa's mind is destroyed by Forge's orbital cannon, Cypher is stabbed in the back by a corrupted Wolverine, Impaled with Extreme Prejudice while he's grieving for Krakoa.
  • In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2, Khora kills Destiny with a sword strike to the head from behind, halving her golden mask (and, presumably, her head). Storm believes it's essential that it's an instant kill and Destiny doesn't know it's coming, so that her precognition won't realise it's her own death she's seen, not the Moira Engine resetting the whole timeline.
  • In Nightcrawlers #3, a dying Banshee distracts Mother Righteous long enough for Wagnerine to impale her with a tail blade, which stabs deep into her back and protrudes from her chest.
• Irony:
  • The whole reason Mystique turned on Krakoa was because she wanted Destiny alive again. By the time of Storm and the Brotherhood #2, she left Destiny in part because she thought Irene was being too controlling.
  • On the flipside of the coin, Destiny only works to preserve the corrupted timeline because it's the best way to ensure that Mystique stays alive. Eventually, however, Mystique rebels against Destiny's over-protectiveness, goes out to fight for the universe, and dies anyway.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: To ensure a House of M scenario or reality warping shenanigans don't endanger his plan, Sinister explicitly and effectively nukes the Scarlet Witch 'just in case'.
• Lesser of Two Evils: Sinister exploits this twice at the climax when both Ironfire and Moira object to him sending information about the timeline back to himself when the Moira Engine is reset. He's bad — but the other powers in the cosmos are worse, and if they get their hands on the Moira Engine the universe will be locked in a neverending dystopia forever.
• Keystone Army: Immoral X-Men #1 reveals that Sinister built a failsafe into his genetic tampering and can kill all of the infected mutants by pressing a button. Unfortunately, the button is in his secret lab, which has been stolen.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Forge and Wolverine were both killed at some point in the first year. The details are never explained, but they've been resurrected and corrupted before the Quiet Council destroys Krakoa's mind. Dialogue implies that the same thing has happened to Beast.
  • Sinister's sentient pets, Cy-Cat and Professor Plod, die in his secret lab while he's trapped in the Pit. He clones replacements once he gets out.
  • Namor is murdered during an assignation with Emma Frost. This isn't revealed until Doctor Doom is unexpectedly killed by the resurrected and corrupted Namor.
  • In Nightcrawlers #2, Doctor Strange, Doctor Voodoo and Elsa Bloodstone are implied to be killed between panels, when Sinister's Chimera destroy the mystic Otherworld. We only see Strange's skull, though, not the bodies of the other two.
  • Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2 shows what seems to be the Last Stand of Freedom Force, with Mystique later reported dead. The same issue ends with Orbis Stellaris Driven to Suicide and switching off his life support, seemingly dying shortly after the end of the scene.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: By +1000, the many clones of Exodus have splintered into factions, with each clone ruling their own world. When two clones come into conflict, as happens in Immoral X-Men #3, the outcome is typically a Mutual Kill.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: It's not a major spoiler, but Juggernaut and Nimrod both appear in Sins of Sinister #1, suggesting that both survive the second arc of Legion of X. The final issue of the arc, which sees Nimrod confront the Legion, wasn't published until a week later.
• Living Ship: By Nightcrawlers #3, a thousand years into the future, Doctor Nemesis has become a fungal creature integrated with (or at least wrapped around) the Nightkin's ship. The ship now has a face.
• Long Game:
  • Mother Righteous and Orbis Stellaris are both Long-Lived, and both are prepared to spend centuries in their secret quest for Dominion.
  • As Immoral X-Men #3 reveals, Destiny's Xanatos Gambit is still running nine hundred years after her death, with Sinister guided to Moira, and then on to the Moira Engine, by a final recorded message.
• Love Makes You Evil: In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1, Destiny tells Orbis Stellaris that she stole the Moira Engine and stopped Sinister avoiding the Bad Future because this is the only future she can see where her wife Mystique lives.
• Many Spirits Inside of One: All the Spirits of Vengeance that left Earth once Krakoa Sinister began its takeover found Galactus centuries later. Drawn by his desire for vengeance against whatever poisoned the universe, they all merged with him and became the gestalt entity known as the Sin Eater.
• Meme Acknowledgement: A data file for Immoral X-Men #1 has Emma mention Sauron wanting to "turn people into dinosaurs". The Sinisterized X-Men responded by turning him into dogfood.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Back in Powers of X, Moira's private journals revealed that recruiting Sinister for the Krakoan initiative was not part of the plan. In fact, Xavier and Magneto had done so without her knowledge and against her advice (given that Sinister had betrayed her and Krakoa in her previous Life and brought it all crashing down). Moira chided such foolishness and arrogance and her concerns about Charles and Erik letting Sinister back onto the island in the new timeline are all finally realized here.
  • Inverted with Storm's decision to destroy her Cerebro backup as a diplomatic gesture to the Arakki back during X-Men Red. This ironically ends up protecting her from the compromised Resurrection Protocols, leaving one of the most powerful Omega-level Mutants still standing against Sinister.
• Noodle Incident: Storm & The Brotherhood #1 mentions a "Genesis War", apparently involving Arakko, where John Ironfire made something of a name for himself as a rebel without a cause.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: At the end of Storm & The Brotherhood #2, Storm refuses to use the Moira Engine because she feels as awful as the universe is, there's still hope. Then, after she dies, the universe proceeds to get so much, much worse. And it allows Mother Righteous to gain the information she needs to insinuate herself to the modern day Krakoa.
• Off with His Head!: In Sins of Sinister: Dominion, after yet another round of Sinister's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder in the +1000 era, Jon Ironfire decapitates him.
• Oh, Crap!: In Sins of Sinister #1, Sinister gets a shock ten years into the Bad Future. After losing a Quiet Council vote he suddenly realises the corrupted mutants have more agency than expected, and aren't under his control. That's annoying, but not a huge problem — it's his first attempt to map this timeline, and he'd planned to hit the Reset Button via his Moira Engine anyway. But then he discovers the Moira Engine has been stolen, and he's actually trapped in this broken future. And his expression at that moment is pure horror.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: None of Sinister's creations are worthy of wielding Thor's hammer Mjolnir, but it can still be moved by gravity manipulation, leaving it falling endlessly in a figure of eight.
• Only One Me Allowed Right Now: Hope describes how the Resurrection Industrial Complex is stymied by the fact that there can be no complete and autonomous duplicates of her, instead substituting with cloned body parts. She states it's a quirk shared with Jean, to her chagrin. It's why Rasputin V is spliced with Quentin's telepathic abilities instead of Jean's.
• Opening a Can of Clones: Sinister's Moira Engine is a living Reset Button, and it's clear from the start that the Bad Future will be wiped away. Several of the key characters living through it are also aware of this. However, it's also immediately subverted as Sinister's lost the Moira Engine and there's a real risk that one of his counterparts will achieve their Godhood Seeker aims before it resets, escaping the doomed timeline to become a Dominion entity, existing beyond time and space. In addition to that, as Nightcrawlers #3 reveals, Mother Righteous plans to send a thousand years of power and secrets back to her younger self. The future timeline will reset but, back in the present, Mother will become a much more significant threat if she succeeds.
• Opening Scroll: Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants features a text page with an opening scroll summarising the events since the previous issue, in the vein of Star Wars.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • As shown in Nightcrawlers #1, Mother Righteous and Orbis Stellaris don't like Doctor Stasis, the third of the four Essex variants. When the three first meet, Mother Righteous gets Wagnerine to stab him in the head, a murder which was apparently pre-arranged with Stellaris.
  • In Immoral X-Men #3 it's revealed that there are multiple clones of Exodus, they consider each other to be heretics, and they're fighting an endless, murderous religious war.
• Out-Gambitted: The finale becomes a pile-up of schemes between Sinister, Moira and Mother Righteous. Sinister loses quite decisively, with Moira destroying his Moira Engine, and Mother Righteous managing to send the knowledge of the future back to herself.
• Outliving One's Offspring: A variant, in Nightcrawlers #2. Wagnerine and Summernight's daughter vanishes in a flash of light, teleporting as soon as she's born. Her parents don't know where she went - into space, perhaps - but assume that she's dead. Either way, she's gone and it sends her father over the Despair Event Horizon. But The Reveal at the end is that she's alive — Mother Righteous stole her away.
• Planet Eater: After 1000+ years, a clone of Kenji Uedo has expanded into a giant mass of flesh feeding off Saturn and Jupiter in Earth's solar system.
• Plea of Personal Necessity: In Immoral X-Men #1, after his plan to reset Emma Frost fails, Mister Sinister buys his life by promising Emma that he can create five-mutant Chimera that will let Earth win a war with the Kree/Skrull empire. The offer is accepted.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • Nightcrawlers #3 reveals that Mother Righteous's magic virus, the "Ace of Hearts", will use a radiant soul untouched by Sinister's madness to guide it back through history. Wagnerine's infant daughter will be sacrificed to the task.
    Mother Righteous (internal monologue): 'Course, she'll burn to astral dust in a haze of screaming agony, but — eh. Better her than me.
  • Sinister's ultimate plan. After letting the Mutant population reach a suitable size, he uses a built-in killswitch in his genetic tampering that uses them as fuel for his ascendancy. By the time the timeline is reset, this "psychic inferno" killswitch murders 8,662,221,825,176,190 individuals, leaving only three alive (Moira VII, Jon Ironfire, and one more) in the entire galaxy.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • In Sins of Sinister #1, Ben Urich insists on genetically testing Jonah before he'll talk about the things he's discovered, just in case Jonah's been tainted by Sinister. Unfortunately, the test was a fake intended to flush out holdouts like Ben.
  • In Sins of Sinister #1, Storm and Lactuca have arranged a Trigger Phrase for psychic shielding in case the Quiet Council are compromised.
  • Immoral X-Men #1 reveals that not only is Emma Frost sleeping in her invulnerable diamond form (as seen in the previous Immortal X-Men series), but she has Master of Illusion Mastermind secretly watching over her, projecting an image of Emma asleep in her vulnerable human form.
• Prophecy Twist: Destiny sees the Brotherhood's forces launching an attack on Orbis Stellaris, Noh-Varr being told "now" and everything going dark, which she assumes is the timeline resetting. Actually, "now" is Ororo telling Khora to kill Destiny.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: At the start of Immoral X-Men #1, Nick Fury and his team are gathered in a skyscraper, planning rebellion. As they depart on their mission, Xavier telepathically persuades them to leave by the window, not the door, and they fall to their deaths.
• Pun:
  • Sinister calls his Chimera combining the children of Krakoa's founders Legion, Proteus and Polaris the Heirburst Bomb.
  • Emma Frost calls attention to the fact that she frequently cracks puns when she can, blaming it on Sinister, as she becomes a literal Headmistress of her empire by merging with the Mistress Mold's head in Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #3.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Juggernaut is mentally manipulated, miniaturised and used as a living bullet to kill Thanos. His trajectory continues into deep space; the corrupted Krakoans see no reason to rescue him. He returns in Nightcrawlers #3, after a thousand years of solitude and insanity, only to immediately hit the World Farm's force field as part of Destiny's Xanatos Gambit. Either he's killed by the impact or he's still out there afterwards, plunging through space.
  • Thor, and all of Asgard's other residents, are lost when Magik wields "a certain sword" (implied to be Surtur's Twilight Sword), devastates Asgard and severs all of its connections to Midgard. In Nightcrawlers #2, the Krakoans decide not to take chances and revisit Asgard almost a century later, killing those who'd survived.
• Reset Button: Sinister's 'Moira Engine', first introduced in Immortal X-Men, is a key part of the story. Moira MacTaggart's a mutant whose powers reset the timeline when she dies, creating a "Groundhog Day" Loop where only Moira remembers the previous version. Sinister has multiple clones of Moira in his lab, using them to map out the future and avoid branches that end badly for him. This also means he's entirely comfortable wrecking the world, as Sins of Sinister #1 shows — he'll gain lots of useful information from the Bad Future, upload it to a Moira clone, then kill her, at which point another version of Sinister, ten years ago, will be able to do better. At least that's the plan. As it turns out, his lab's been stolen — and he's now trapped in this broken world, just like everyone else.
• Resistance as Planned: More or less. As part of his plan, Sinister sets up 'dissenters' on the Quiet Council and 'anti-mutant' figures outside Krakoa (ex. Doctor Doom) to maintain the illusion that all is normal and without giving the takeover game away too early.
• The Reveal:
  • Krakoa's Resurrection Protocols were compromised since the start. Sinister's playing a Long Game to not only seize control of the island nation (and from there the planet), but to also prepare Earth (and himself, of course) for the future threat of the Dominion A.I.s.
  • Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1 reveals that Destiny is working with Orbis Stellaris and actively stopped Sinister fixing the timeline via his Moira Engine — because however horrible the Bad Future may be for others, it's the only future she can see where her wife Mystique survives.
• Sadist: The Sinister-corrupted Emma Frost is one to the point even other infected are uncomfortable with her behavior. It manifests as both a blatant love of making her victims suffer before they die and Evil Is Petty antics like making the chairs Quiet Council members sit in when she hosts a telepathic meeting as uncomfortable as possible.
• Say My Name: Hope In Sin preludes every assault on another planet by having the entire population of their empire shout her name over comms, copying Exodus' powers while doing so to boost herself into a One Woman Army.
• Sealed Good in a Can:
  • One year into the future, Earth's Eternals (who can't be permanently killed or corrupted due to their Resurrective Immortality) are defeated, sealed into stasis, and imprisoned in deep space. The only exception is Uranos, who was already imprisoned beneath the Earth for his crimes, and remains there.
  • Ten years into the future, the liberated Legion of the Night find a horribly mutated Doctor Nemesis and the original Nightcrawler, imprisoned in one of Sinister’s labs and long-forgotten by Mister Sinister himself. The Legion ignore them, but return to rescue them a hundred years into the future.
• Seen It All: When Rasputin IV announces that she came from a Bad Future to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, Kate Pryde immediately understands that "this is one of those".
• Serial Killings, Specific Target: The prelude issues of Immortal X-Men establish that Sinister's attack on the Quiet Council was the spree killing variant — Hope was the one '10/10' essential victim and the other deaths helped to obscure his plan (although killing the council's telepaths also helped the next stage of the plan). It's not until Sins of Sinister that his reasoning and Hope's nature as the Spanner in the Works are fully explained, though — her presence as one of the Five was undoing Sinister's genetic tampering with the mutants they resurrected.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: By the grim, miserable time of year 1000, Sinister has removed the campy, comedic aspects of his personality, noting that "pop culture references don't really work when there hasn't been pop culture for nearly a millennium".
• Shout-Out:
  • In Immoral X-Men #1, Sinister talks to a clone of himself as a variant on the "Talk to the duck" problem solving technique, noting that an actual Sinister Duck would be a step too far, as ducks are famously untrustworthy. March of the Sinister Ducks, which elaborates on that theme, was a single from The Sinister Ducks, a band including writer Alan Moore and Bauhaus's David J.
  • Storm & The Brotherhood #1 is about a team of seven freedom fighters waging a war against a vastly better armed and unethical opponent, so it's titled "Storm's Seven".
  • Immoral X-Men #2 is just filled with references to Star Trek. The Marauder is armed with Proteus torpedoes (as opposed to Star Trek's photon torpedoes), it travels at warp factor X and it's supposedly on a five-year mission. Hope even mentions that it's intended to find "new worlds, strange civilisations..." — although, unlike the Enterprise, once it finds them, it's supposed to facilitate their annihilation. The Quiet Council does not come in peace.
  • Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #2 homages Star Wars by way of A New Hope as Storm's raid against Orbis Stellaris and his Death Sphere plays out similarly to the Rebellion's assault on the Empire's Death Star. The Brotherhood's X-Fighters reference the Rebellion's X-Wings right down to their callsigns being based on various colors like the Rebellion's Red, Gold, and Blue Squadrons.
  • The +1000 era is influenced by the grim dark future of Warhammer 40,000. The title of Immoral X-Men #3 uses part of the game's tagline, "There is only war" — but with war crossed out and replaced by "me".
• Snipe Hunt: After Sinister tries to run for it, Emma sends the various X-Men out to scour the world, knowing full well where he was going to go and wanting the opportunity to kill him herself.
• Spanner in the Works: Hope has unknowingly blocked Sinister's plans ever since the dawn of Krakoa. Every resurrection via his stored DNA samples should have been tainted, but Hope's presence as part of the Five was somehow correcting the DNA again.
• Splash Panel: Sins of Sinister #1 presents its two Time Skip montages with ten splash pages, five for each sequence. Each shows one of the significant events, such as the devastation of Asgard, the murder of the Scarlet Witch or the death of the Fantastic Four.
• Star Killing: Sinister's "Heirburst" Chimera are genetic creations that combine the powers of Legion, Proteus and Polaris, the mutant children of Krakoa's three founders. They're "system killers", able to destroy stars.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: The Bad Future of Sins of Sinister kills many characters, at least until a Reset Button is pressed. But the death of Doctor Stasis, the Sinister variant aligned with Orchis, is more unexpected than most. In an event centred around the Sinisters, he's the one who doesn't have a key role — his counterparts Orbis Stellaris and Mother Righteous have Wagnerine stab him to death at the first opportunity.
• The Svengali: Mother Righteous reshapes the liberated Nightkin into a cult serving her, creating saints and martyrs from the fallen. Although she claims to continue the original Nightcrawler's faith in the Spark, it's clear that what she says to her followers isn't actually what she believes.
• Symbol Swearing: The usual cluster of random symbols are replaced by red diamonds to represent how those people talking have been infected by Sinister.
• Teleport Interdiction: Orbis Stellaris protects Sinister's stolen lab (and the Moira Engine it contains) with teleport shielding. It proves fatal for Wallcrawler when he tries to teleport in.
• Tempting Fate: At the end of Immoral X-Men issue #2, Sinister and Rasputin set off to try and find the Moira Engines, with Rasputin asking how long it should take. Sinister thinks it'll be "five years, at most." The preview page immediately following shows that the next issue takes place one thousand years later...
• Thrown Out the Airlock: In Immoral X-Men #3, 900 years into their mission, Rasputin IV discovers that her mentor Sinister has been lying to her all along. She's his finest creation, with a wide range of mutant powers — but she can't fly. So, as he can't beat her in a fight, Sinister simply opens the ships airlock and dumps her into space, then leaves in their ship. Rasputin's internal monologue notes that she may take days or weeks to die.
• Time Skip:
  • The initial Sins of Sinister one-shot begins in the present, skips to one year in the future (when Sinister is released from the Pit and Krakoa itself is subverted), then to five years in the future (and the confrontation with Arakko) before ending ten years ahead, at the point when Sinister's plans start to go awry.
  • As with Powers of X, the series which helped to launch the Krakoan Age, the bulk of Sins of Sinister is set at three different points in time — 10 years, 100 years and 1000 years in the future. Unlike Powers of X (which used Anachronic Order and several different futures) it's handling this as a time skip, with each miniseries advancing to a new time period for every issue.
• Title Drop: A downplayed example in Immoral X-Men #2, as Sinister frees Rasputin IV from the council's control, tells her a version of how he destroyed Krakoa, and begs her to save the universe from his sins.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • Subverted for Immoral X-Men, as the solicitations used modified art to conceal the red 'Sinister' diamond emblem on Emma Frost's forehead.
  • Marvel's initial press-release for X-Men: Before the Fall was released a week after Sins of Sinister started; Before the Fall will be published once Sins of Sinister ends. Covers and solicitations spoil some elements of the crossover's conclusion, confirming the survival of certain characters.
• Trigger Phrase: Lactuca and Storm set up "You make sure" as a trigger phrase when Storm visits the corrupted Quiet Council. It briefly connects Storm's mind to Lactuca's — which is linked to the universe itself — boosting her telepathic resistance and overwhelming any psychics trying to meddle with her mind.
• The Undead: Nightcrawlers #3 reveals that a thousand years into the future, Auntie Fortune is the last of the original Nightkin. She's mentioned to be undead and appears translucent at times, suggesting she might be a ghost, but it's never directly stated.
• Unskilled, but Strong: In Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #3, Storm (or, at least, a version of Storm) comes Back from the Dead. She has the original's powers and at least some of her knowledge, but not her memories or experience. This leads to a Mutual Kill when she faces Emma Frost's Humongous Mecha, the Mistress Mold. Storm has the power to destroy it, but not the skill to shield herself from the energies released.
• Villainous Breakdown: Sinister himself in Dominion. When he attempts to reach Dominion status, he fails because another Sinister has already done it, making him realise everything he has done was All for Nothing. When the timeline is restored and he is being sent to the pit, he has another breakdown in front of the council. This time saying his life doesn't matter and warning them that it's the other Sinisters they need to worry about.
  Mister Sinister: Don't do this. Please. It would be a huge mistake. [...] No, you don't understand. I'm not a threat. I'm not the one you need to be afraid of. It's the other Sinisters, not me. I'm nothing. I failed! One of them succeeds! There is a Sinister Dominion outside of time and space! A stain on existence! It is already there! They've already won! Oh god, it's too late! Irene! You have to stop them, Irene! It's down to you now! But it's already happened, so it's too late, and— You have to find a way! Please, Irene! On the same side, remember? I know you understand! Only you understand! Don't do this! I'm not even a crumb between the teeth of god! I am nothing! Nothing! Noth—
• Weaponised Teleportation: Auntie Fortune, the Legion of the Night's Domino / Nightcrawler Chimera, teleports her bullets to shoot foes at otherwise impossible angles.
• Wham Line: "I'm trapped." Sinister discovers his lab and the Moira engine are gone, leaving him stuck in the timeline.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: At the very end of the story, only three mutants survive Sinister's psychic kill switch. One is Jon Ironfire, who plays a major role in that issue. The other two are Wagnerine and her child, protected by a miracle. Perhaps they were eventually erased when Moira hit the Reset Button, but nothing more is shown of them after that initial survival.
• Xanatos Gambit: Immoral X-Men #3 reveals that despite Storm's careful plan to murder Destiny without her precognitive powers detecting it, Destiny had a back-up plan anyway — 900 years later, Sinister is guided to a hidden message Destiny had previously recorded, which will help him find the World Farm and the Moira Engine. And the stolen World Farm just happens to be in the right position for Juggernaut, who's been hurtling through space for an thousand years, to strike it and shatter its forcefield.
• X Must Not Win: How Sinister tries to bargain for his life in Dominion. As bad as him sending knowledge back to the present day would be, any of the remaining corrupted X-Men, Professor X in particular, would be far worse.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness
  • In Immoral X-Men #1, Sinister is nearly executed after unsuccessfully trying to regain control of the infected mutants. Emma directly tells him he's outlived his usefulness as she's choking him to death. Sinister barely avoids this by pointing out that he's the only one who can create more advanced Chimera mutant soldiers, which the mutants will need to triumph in the looming interstellar wars.
  • In Immoral X-Men #2, Sinister presents Rasputin IV, his first functional five-mutant Chimera, and states that five is the absolute limit. As soon as he's out of earshot, Hope points out that he's no longer needed and agrees his execution with the Quiet Council. And shortly afterwards Exodus, who seems to have the council's backing, points out that Hope is just as useful to them dead, as her petulant childishness is a liability, so betrays her on a battlefield.

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