The 198

What do people think about the whole 198 thing with Marvel comics? Was it a good idea to decrease the mutant population to such a small and official number or not? Personally I'm wondering what kind of stories their going to create with so few mutants.

On the positive side it makes sense that this would happen since to have all of those superpowered people might cause chaos. On the negative can mutant and human politics and tensions exist on the same scale. I mean who cares if there is only 198 mutants.

I think it was a good move by Marvel. The world had such a high population of mutants that the Marvel U felt a lot less like our own real world. Sure , there are no Super Heroes in the real world but Marvel's context has always been that it takes place in the real world. Unlike DC which takes place in fictional places (Metropolis, Gotham) Marvel took place in the real world (New York).
Before M-Day there were millions of mutants populating the Earth. But sine the conception of the X-Men back in the 60's mutants were shown to be rare. Having so few mutants really made them outcast which was the them of X-Men. Through the 90's Marvel quickly became a world of Mutants which was much different than our own real world. Genosha alone was populated 15 million mutants. In the early 2000's it was written that regular Humans could possibly be extinct in only a few generations.

Now that there only around 198 mutants, it is the mutants who are on the edge of extinction. Again the mutants are truly outcast that will only fit in at Xavier's school. It is back to basics and I think it way better than having a world populated with millions of mutants.

Of course, now they have so few mutants they can really apply pressure to them. They are so diminshed that they can't really be called a minority anymore. They are like a speck of dust in the desert.... But there are some great story opportunities.

Apocalypse's return was interesting. He comes back, sees his people reduced to a handful and then thinks its only fair to force the humans to equalise the numbers so his Darwinian philosophy can be fair. Then they made him begin questionning himself, whether he was going soft or not.

And I'm hoping that Magneto will come back soon, and the mutants will accept him as their leader (most of them already think his ideas were best. "MAGNETO WAS RIGHT")