YMMV / New X-Men

• Angst? What Angst?: Jean is surprisingly indifferent to Darkstar's death, coldly justifying the murder by stating that the victim had been infected by Weapon XII. This is rectified in the following issue, in which the X-Men organize a ceremony to honour the memory of the fallen heroine.
• Ass Pull:
  • While there are a few vague hints throughout the series that Xorn might be up to something shady (and might not be as kind and pacifistic as he seems), the plot twist that he's actually Magneto in disguise has essentially no foreshadowing whatsoever.
  • The twist that John Sublime (initially introduced as a creepy cult leader and self-help guru) is actually the human host of a 3 billion-year-old sentient microorganism, and that the Kick drug is actually said microorganism in aerosol form. Other than a few scenes hinting that Kick's side-effects are more serious than previously thought, neither revelation has any real foreshadowing or build-up, and both essentially come out of nowhere.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The final two arcs of Morrison's run are highly controversial due to having a poorly implemented twist about Xorn's identity, radically changing Magneto's personality and implying that humanity's prejudice towards mutants can be at least partially attributed to a sentient bacterium that induces irrational hatred upon infecting its host. As a result, some readers opt to outright skip this series, despite the preceding arcs being met with varying degrees of critical acclaim.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Negasonic Teenage Warhead only appears alive for a single page before getting killed by the Sentinels, but her bizarre name (which came from a Monster Magnet song) endeared her to many fans. She would eventually reappear as a minor antagonist in Joss Whedon's run and become a supporting character in Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2.
  • While she was subject to a myriad of factual errors and Values Dissonance, Dust has been getting some well-deserved love as one of Marvel's first Muslim superheroes, with some even hoping for her to one day team up with fellow Muslim Kamala Khan, which ultimately happened in Champions (2019), ending with Dust joining Kamala's team with Cyclops' blessing.
• Fan Nickname: "Xorneto" for the version of Magneto that appears in "Planet X", after a retcon established that it was actually Xorn in disguise.
• Fanon: According to Fantomex, the Weapon III project consisted of a series of experiments designed to transform regular animals into deadly bioweapons. Some fans believe that this would be a reference to WE 3, Grant Morrison's 2004 comic that follows a remarkably similar plot. Though the writer has neither confirmed or denied this theory, they have invited readers to entertain themselves with it.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Morrison has gone on record as saying they deliberately wrote "Here Comes Tomorrow" in such a way that readers could consider it the very last X-Men story if so inclined. Ironically, said arc was so polarizing some fans prefer to take this approach to their entire run itself.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • This run, and its spinoffs and satellite books like Academy X, are incredibly retroactively depressing. For all of Morrison's stories about how the future will be great and mutants are about to seize their rightful role as dominant species, the fact remains that pretty much the second they left, most of the changes they made were retconned, negated, or just ignored, sometimes to a catastrophic degree, simply because meddling editors felt that Morrison shook up the status quo too much.
  • Emma Frost's abuse of Cyclops is only ever treated as her instigating an affair. It hurts that at roughly the same time, Alias detailed a similar abuse of mind-control. Even years later with Jessica Jones (2015) emphasizing it, Emma Frost has still gotten away with it, and Cyclops still portrayed as in the wrong.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Angel Salvadore. Both Ethan Van Sciver and Frank Quitely drew her noticeably chunky around the middle without being overweight. Wolverine once quipped that he would've kicked her butt if it didn't wobble around so much.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Wolverine's fate at the end of the "Assault On Weapon Plus" arc. Because there's going to be doubt whether or not he survived the explosion?
• Narm:
  • Igor Kordey's fill-in work was extremely rushed due to deadlines, leading to characters looking comically off-model in otherwise serious or touching moments. For example, Wolverine's expression as he threatens Gladiator comes across as funny instead of menacing.
  • Ugly John noticing how deformed he looks compared to Logan and Scott becomes hysterical when the latter two are drawn with oversized noses and abnormally small eyes.
• Older Than They Think: Even though she may be riddled with Values Dissonance and Unintentionally Unsympathetic moments, Emma Frost was, at the time, considered a Breakout Character and a sort of symbol of Grant Morrison's run. Many fans thought it was great innovation, to have the White Queen graduating to an Anti-Hero member of the X-Men. Except, Emma as edgy heroine was already done one decade early in Generation X, and Cyclops being seduced by a edger, sexier telepathy and causing Jean Grey's jealousy *almost* happened in the early 90s, with Psylocke.
• Parody Sue: Fantomex, who is essentially a ridiculous amalgamation of pretty much every trope of overly perfect characters. Morrison also deconstructs such characters to an extent, with the revelation that Fantomex was built like this by Weapon Plus, who knew that it would be easier for the public to stomach the mass killing of mutants if it was done by a cool, likable superhero.
• The Scrappy: The main antagonist of "Here Comes Tomorrow" is a sentient colony of bacteria that instills fear and aggressiveness in its hosts, and is implied to be the reason why humanity's hatred towards mutants prevailed throughout the years. They are disliked not because of their villainous actions, but because the idea of mutants being an allegory for minorities is lost once it's established that prejudice is the symptom of a disease, not a product of free will. Additionally, fans generally agree that the very concept of the villain is surreal to the point of challenging the reader's Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
• Shocking Moments: The entire series was built on this - it started with Genosha (and its population of several million mutants) being wiped off the face of the Earth by Sentinels, and climaxed with Xorn revealing himself to be Magneto and attempting to go kill every human in New York as the team rushed to get back together and stop him.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Morrison's take on Magneto is a radical departure from previous portrayals, essentially being a mentally unbalanced psychopath who's driven even further off the deep end by abusing power-enhancing drugs. His downfall is ultimately caused by his own impulsiveness and lack of foresight, leading even his followers to turn against him when they recognize him as a deluded old crank. While Morrison wasn't entirely responsible for Magneto becoming a villain again (that happened a few years earlier), previous versions of the character had always portrayed his charisma and intelligence as two of his biggest redeeming qualities—leading many fans to dislike Morrison's version for lacking those traits.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • "The Proud People" from "Here Comes Tomorrow". "Hey, look: a whole team of badass superheroes from the future who we've never met before! Gee, I wonder what kind of awesome stuff they'll—" And...they're dead.
  • Barnell "Beak" Bohusk, and Xorn's entire "Special Class", to an extent. Beak was set up as a sympathetic and relatable Audience Surrogate going through the trials and tribulations of adolescence, with plenty of potential for drama and Character Development; as an ordinary teenager with a grotesque mutated physique but no superpowers, he showed the audience what life was like for the vast majority of mutants who don't become superheroes. The "Special Class", similarly, was a whole class of teenage misfits with no useful superpowers, who just spent their days trying to survive adolescence; put them all together, and you've got a great recipe for a Coming of Age Story. Beak spends almost the entire run getting debased and humiliated by everyone he encounters before accidentally impregnating a classmate who slept with him as a joke and then (literally) falling flat on his face the one time he gets a chance to do something heroic. The entire Special Class, meanwhile, is portrayed as a pack of one-note jerks and weirdos who ultimately join the villains without a second thought after Xorn turns out to be Magneto.
  • Following Magneto's demise, Toad decides to assemble his own version of the Brotherhood. In "Ambient Magnetic Fields", Quicksilver and Polaris are both shown to sympathize with the group, given that they are still grieving their father. When Magneto comes back as the main antagonist of "Planet X", Toad is the only one who shows up to assist him, leaving the fate of his fellow mutants unknown.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • "Here Comes Tomorrow" is a What If? story set hundreds of years in the future, and it involves the X-Men and their descendants having their final confrontation with their "ultimate enemy". With the X-Men's huge cast (including scads of immortals and time-travelers) and decades of lore to draw from, the possibilities are pretty extensive. Oddly, none of the X-Men appear other than the five core members and a handful of characters introduced in this very run, and the only one of their descendants who we meet is Tito Bohusk—the grandson of Beak. In the end, the story never really tells us anything about the X-Men's legacy, since it focuses on Sublime conquering most of the world and rendering their struggles meaningless. And its only real effect on the story is providing a justification for Scott and Emma getting together, which was controversial, to say the least.
  • Near the end of Planet X Magneto began to hear his façade Xorn speak to him. It could have been interesting to see Magneto confront a burgeoning split personality with one being a mutant terrorist while the other an idealistic pacifist.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Emma Frost seems to have been envisioned as a lovable antihero who overcomes her villainous past by finding love with Scott and proving herself as a hero. Thanks to some of her actions, though, some fans have a hard time buying that. She makes advances on Scott despite knowing that he's married, she tries to exploit his emotional issues by claiming to be a therapist, she uses a "therapy session" as a pretext to seduce him, and she openly mocks his deceased wife in front of her grave shortly after her death. ^note  Note that practicing therapy without a license is a very serious offense that can get a person arrested in most parts of the US. And even if Emma were actually a trained mental health professional, making sexual advances on a patient is the sort of offense that can get a therapist's license revoked.
• Values Dissonance:
  • One of the series' major criticisms, especially in The New '10s, is its general inaccuracies on the subjects of the Middle East and Islam. Several readers have also gone as far as to declare the run as Islamophobic in hindsight. Of course, the series was being written around the Turn of the Millennium, and we all know the world's general attitude towards Muslims during that time period...
  • The series (somewhat infamously) introduces a Chinese character to the main cast as the newest member of the X-Men, only to reveal that he's actually Magneto—a white guy—pretending to be Chinese. Considering modern attitudes about diversity and representation in pop culture (and modern attitudes about cultural appropriation), this plot twist probably would have been sharply criticized in a series written today. At the very least, Magneto's fake cover identity probably wouldn't have been written as Chinese.
  • The series is also infamous for beginning Cyclops and Emma Frost's Relationship Upgrade with Emma posing as a therapist to coerce him into having "psychic sex" with her, depicting these encounters in a manner that strongly suggests that Cyclops wasn't fully aware of what was happening at the time, and didn't consent to her sexual advances. While this isn't exactly portrayed as morally right (Jean thoroughly chews Emma out after she finds out about it), Emma is ultimately forgiven by the end of the story, and she and Cyclops remained an Official Couple for around a decade afterwards. Considering modern attitudes toward consent (and growing awareness of the fact that men can be victims of abuse just as easily as women), this most likely wouldn't fly in a comic book written today.
• Win Back the Crowd: One of the main goals of the series, as Morrison states in their outline for the run. After spending years as Marvel's most popular book (and one of the most lucrative superhero franchises on Earth), X-Men hit a bit of an Audience-Alienating Era in the late 90s as editors began enforcing Status Quo Is God a little too much and falling back on old cliches to avoid losing a successful formula. With New X-Men, Morrison sought to take advantage of the new interest sparked by the movie to bring the series to a wider audience while resurrecting the wild, experimental storytelling that made it popular in the first place. Though the run is polarizing amongst long-time fans, it revived dwindling interest in the X-mythos and saw a huge boost in sales.
• The Woobie:
  • Ugly John is a young Australian man whose only "power" is having a deformed face with four eyes and three mouths. In his debut, he is almost killed by a Sentinel, though Cyclops and Wolverine save him and promise to take him to the X-Mansion so he can have a dignified life free from prejudice. Unfortunately, the trio is forced to make a detour in order to investigate a strange phenomenon in South America, where the they are attacked by Cassandra Nova's wild sentinels. The machines shoot John in the knee and present him to Nova, who immolates him despite his desperate pleas. By the time the heroes arrive, John is in terrible agony, forcing Cyclops to sorrowfully euthanize him.
  • Almost nothing goes right for Beak — he was traumatized as a kid when his powers manifested, got teased by kids, was forced to beat Beast nearly to death against his will, decided to follow Xorn because he looked up to him, got the crap beaten out of him when he left, and finally got beaten again by Magneto during the assault in the "Planet X" arc. About the only good thing that comes out of this is a relationship with Angel.

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