Previous Post I think it ended reasonably well, but there were parts of it I could do without, like inserting the Kree and Kun-Lun/Iron Fist into a Phoenix story (I don't think that mention spoils much). And well, even before this story I was already sick to death with heroes vs heroes stories. That said, if two sets of heroes were going to fight each other over things, this made more sense than the past decade of events. Most X-Men fans, it seems, did not like the story. As an X-Event, it wasn't all that hot (and they were kind of the villains of the story, not that the Avengers didn't do some lousy things). Most Avengers fans, it seems, are more tolerant of it. As an Avengers Event, it was fairly good. Despite appearances (being moderator of this site's X-Board) I enjoyed it like an Avengers fan. It does a great deal of rescuing Scarlet Witch, as a character, who very much needed it, and as a fan of her, I appreciated it. TL;DR-- Better than Fear Itself and Siege, but could have been better.

I thought that it suffered from "too many cooks," and at a number of points in the main miniseries it's rather clear that the numerous writers weren't as well-coordinated as they should have been, especially since some major plot points seem to happen entirely off-panel and others (like the Iron Fist/Phoenix connection) go essentially nowhere.

Worst of all, the apparent (based on interviews and such) intention to show that it took Wanda and Hope *and* Spider-Man's training to get the Phoenix to do what was right was hopelessly garbled in the execution to the point that there's no real "The Avengers may have a point" idea in it for most readers.

BG, you've taken the opposite from it, and I also tend to think a lot of readers gloss over how poor a job Cyclops (well, Cyclops's script) does justifying his certainty that the thing that's destroyed intelligent life on like, a half-a-dozen planets on its way to Earth is really just coming here to help out. But a lot of the story seems to be the Avengers being militarized oafs and everyone choosing "let's fight" over "let's talk" whether that makes sense or not.

It's an alright story, the fights are generally good stuff, and the material for Magik and Spider-Man hits home with me. However,it also finished my lingering affection for Cyclops as a character, proved to me that Bendis is terrible at writing Captain America, and dug Wolverine even deeper into the nonsensical and arbitrary characterization that result when you shove the guy into as many starring roles as possible in as many books as possible. And nothing has ever made me like Hope, who has never managed to become anything more than a plot device with an irritatingly stock "angry teenager" personality tacked on as an afterthought.