New Phyrexia disturbed me - and not how it should have
This is going to be a VERY opinion-heavy post. Before I say anything, I want to make it abundantly clear that I am not condemning the entirety of the New Phyrexia arc, nor am I saying that the people who wrote these stories meant for them to be taken this way. This is just a post getting into why the New Phyrexia arc rubbed me the wrong way again and again, and why it's... kind of ruined my love for Magic, if I'm completely honest.
Also, yes, I understand that New Phyrexia was meant to horrify and unsettle people - but I feel like it unsettled me in ways that they kind of weren't going for. I expect horror to unsettle me and show me some fucked up shit, for lack of a better terminology - but I also was expecting, in the fantasy/scifi horror shit, I'd get some stuff that didn't feel like it hit so close to home.
More under the cut.
This is... absolutely the thing. There's ableism and transphobia all over the thing, and no one stepping up to admit this, and I'm sad.
There are good things about the story, and I do not think there is a Council of *Ists at Wizards, but the way they didn't even notice makes me feel vaguely ill.
Literally the other day I watched a Tucker Carlson clip where the man says people who modify their bodies (I'm assuming he means trans people, but I think it was intentional that it's broader than that) think of themselves as gods, and therefore can't hear that they're wrong.
And one of my favorite IPs throws... THIS into the cultural soup at THIS cultural moment.
Yikes.
I will say that I do find it very frustrating that, in the face of this backlash, the creators seem to just be doubling down and being baffled that people are having this reaction rather than examining why that is. Like we're the stupid ones for not just accepting Oh yeah, fantasy evil race of people, got it
It feels a lot like, at some point along the way, they realized they screwed up by showing Phyrexians as people and tried to backtrack, and in doing so, actually made it worse.
Fantasy/scifi stop reinventing fantasy racism/various other -isms challenge, please I am begging on my hands and knees
It's like they're pretending no one's pointed out how dumb Evil Race is at all.
When people got so into critiquing it that some years back Transformers fandom started lashing out at anyone who liked "Decepticons are built as warriors" because even that's too close to Evil Race-ing.
And yet here WotC is like Rip Van Winkle.
When the vast majority of us were not asking for Phyrexia not to be an antagonist, or not to be a scary one.
Just for there to be some variation.
I've brought this up before too, but... the other thing about it is how weirdly victim blaming it is. The vast majority of Phyrexians are infected nonconsensually and experience behavior changes due to phyresis. But all you can do with such a person is..
...kill them, because they're a monster now.
Again, if I'd never heard of victim blaming in my life maybe I'd be less baffled that WotC never noticed this implication.
But I have, and WotC is more "social justice" oriented than I personally am, and yet they still flubbed this one.
I'd be less confused if they were "anti-woke" types. It's the fact that on everything else they're not at all that confuses me here.
The only thing I've got is that there are probably no disabled people on the creative team. (I'd strongly suspect there are no trans people either, but one of the freelancers defending this take is trans, so... eeeeh.)
also the fact that they spent so long and so much building up the cult-like aspects, and then fucking dangled urabrask in front of us to show that there were people who disagreed and were trapped in Elesh's abusive cult, only to say "actually, they're Evil[tm] and so slaughtering them wholesale is fine" just sucks. How do you straight-faced say that people indoctrinated into a cult deserve to be killed without even giving them a chance and think this is the good and just decision. Also, after the near decade of debacles with D&D, you'd think WotC would learn that "ontologically evil race/culture" is just... something you shouldn't do?
does anyone else remember xantcha? from old phyrexia? It's been a while so I might not remember everything perfectly, but Xantcha was a phyrexian sleeper agent sent to infiltrate Dominaria who, of her own free will, chose to fight Phyrexia and work with Urza to stop Yawgmoth. She was critical to guiding the dragon engine and helping Urza recover from fighting, and sacrificed herself to give Urza the chance to stop Gix. I think she deserved better, but she was a truly heroic character, who was a Phyrexian from birth: she was created "evil" and chose to fight against that same evil.
Of course, Old and New Phyrexia are very different places. But they share so many themes and aesthetics and goals, despite how much has changed over the years. Xantcha was able to fight back because she had free will, and because she was a sleeper agent and thus exposed to the outside world. Even if we accept that Elesh Norn was using the oil to remove the free will from every single rank and file phyrexian in her circle, what about the other 4? Were the residents of the Great Furnace also under her control, and if so why do they still follow Urabrask? We are shown that the Planeswalkers retain some shard of who they used to be, and we know that the Praetors are able to act independently of Elesh Norn. So how does it work for the rest of the phyrexians? Are they mind controlled and unable to resist, or are they prisoners of their environment and have never been exposed to anything that would make them question New Phyrexia?
I was excited during the lead up to ONE, because I was expecting Urabrask and the Great Furnace to join the resistance in fighting back against Elesh Norn. I wanted it to show that Phyrexians were people, despite the horrors of their existence, and I expected some nuance between the Circles. Out of all of the five colors, Red most embodies the traits that would embrace free will: Freedom, Passion, Emotion, Impulsivity, etc. So where is the Xantcha of New Phyrexia? Why are we only told that Urabrask and Sheoldred are causing a distraction during ONE, but never shown? It was personally disappointing to have the narrative of the story articles of ONE focus on the Planeswalker strike team rather than the resistance or any sort of Phyrexians Uprising.
The point I knew that the story of New Phyrexia would never be what I wanted was with the Filigree Sylex. A superweapon powerful enough to destroy an entire plane, able to wipe the blight of New Phyrexia from the Multiverse once and for all. The only problem that stops the detonation of the Sylex is that Realmbtelaer has already dug its roots into other planes: the destruction of New Phyrexia means the destruction of them all. This is the only reason why the Sylex isn't detonated. If the strike team was just a bit faster, got there just a little bit earlier, before Realmbreaker was fully grown, then they would have detonated the Sylex and killed every single Phyrexian and Mirran without hesitation. The first solution to the Phyrexians was to genocide them using a superweapon, and this fate was avoided purely because of the collateral damage to the rest of the multiverse, not because of any consideration of the Phyrexians as people. According to Jace, it is better to wipe the Multiverse clean rather than allow for the blight of Phyrexia to spread.
Now, with the end of March of the Machine, and the death of Elesh Norn, her control over the oil is cut and all the invading armies of Phyrexians have "fallen unconscious" and been deactivated. But what comes next? Given everything, I'm not optimistic. If we are lucky, we will get to see Phyrexians be people, victims of a cult now adrift in a multiverse that hates them. There could be some incredibly interesting stories that could come out of the recovery of not only the many Planes touched by Phyrexia, but also of the Phyrexians themselves, who are now truly free for the first time.
However, this would require Phyrexians to be treated as people, which WOTC doesn't seem to want to do. Furthermore, if they do start to treat Phyrexians as people now, it only makes the genocidal implications of ONE even worse in retrospect. It would take a very careful and delicate touch to navigate the paradox they have built around themselves, and I don't have high expectations. I expect Phyrexians to be swept under the rug for a few sets, to give people a break, and for them to reappear as recurring villains every now and then. The remnants of the invading armies popping up here and there to cause more problems for the Gatewatch to fix.
Yep. "Some genocides are necessary" is really NOT where it looked like Phyrexia reborn would go ten years ago.
Magic is FAMOUS for "every faction or group has good aspects and bad ones." I think they thought subverting that would be fun for us because we never see it, but instead it was the opposite. It was a what the hell no one expected and no one wanted.
(Well, again, my theory is that they did. That they spend so much time writing "no one is actually a villain" that when they get to do a Bolas or a Phyrexia it's fun like eating the forbidden candy to them--but since we're not preoccupied with their usual worldbuilding all day every day, it falls flat when they don't earn it. And they kind of didn't with Bolas either for me, but that one I'm okay with--but HOO BOY did they not pull it off with Phyrexia here. The cancerous personality was NORN, not ALL THE OIL EVER.)
It's like that thing MaRo says about Planar Chaos now. "We thought bending the rules that far would be exciting, and for a few people it was, but mostly we ended up with an Oh God What we can't fix."
Same thing here. You bent the rules of how your own IP works for shock value, people noticed, and it was Not Good Times.
And yes to Xantcha. Good Phyrexians already canonically existed. (Though personally, I felt like the way they justified Xantcha was to say she was in a Phyrexian sense defective--she had individualistic leanings and ideas that the others notably didn't. Gix tells her there were so many thousand newts, "and only one like you."
Kind of like the thing where Drizzt was a good guy drow because, for a drow, he was neurodivergent. I don't love this--it's not that all neurotypicals deserve death but the one autistic person in $number deserves to live. That's... I mean yay disability rights, but uh... what the fuck? No.) This should not have been so hard.
yeah i pretty much agree with all of this, damn they did new phyrexia so dirty. tamiyo’s death scene feels almost comical with how blantantly horrible the ‘heroes’ actions are, the gatewatch’s plan in the ONE story is just genocide, and even if you ignore all the horrible themes and implications the MOM story is also just generally incoherent and full of holes. There’s the bullshit with norn’s remote-control oil, theres all the praetor deaths except norn being totally survivable, theres the sudden and utter incompetence of the entire gitaxian army during the finale, and worst of all the writers kinda just forgot that the oil is infectious, talking about giant pools of it after a battle and acting like that means a complete win for the defenders, and even more stupidly having the other elder dinosaurs eat compleated Etali and be totally fine somehow. The single most horrible thing imo tho is the fact that they made KARN, yknow, the pacifist, be the one who kills norn and by proxy sentences millions of sentient beings to death, if the oil theory is to be believed (which is difficult since it gets directly contradicted every 5 words)
tfw Karn, the robot who was himself created by an uncaring artificer to be a weapon and a tool, says with his entire chest that Phyrexians aren't people and makes an exception to his pacifism to kill them. And gets a tragic protagonist good guy treatment afterward!
Phyrexia (especially Elesh Norn) does this and worse. Genocide, dehumanization, violating bodily autonomy. But they are never valorized for it. At no point are we supposed to actually believe that Elesh Norn and her legions are in the right.
But it's fine, necessary even, when the heroes do it! Phyrexians aren't people apparently, after all.
Karn is built with Xantcha's heartstone.
Karn himself is Phyrexian tech.
I was really hoping there'd be a bit in his arc about him coming to terms with this, about him understanding that hating tyrannical praetors doing awful things (sometimes in his own name) is bad, but that self-hatred and directionless guilt don't solve the problem.
I was hoping that we'd see him, if not resolve that within himself, at least finally acknowledge that he's aware of it, that "I hate Phyrexians" means "I hate myself."
But no.
Of course not.
