The hype train to Marvel’s Inhumans hasn’t really taken off, a fact certainly not helped by the IMAX movie event, which debuted to a less-than-stellar response, resulting in a 0 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The characters' path to prominence in the eyes of the larger pop-culture landscape has been a rough one; the Inhumans were initially intended to star in a feature film, before abruptly being diverted last year to television.

There may be many reasons for this failure, but the big one is almost simple when you think about it, and it begins in 1998.

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Every long-running comic book character or team has that one story arc that forever casts a shadow over who they are. The X-Men had Chris Claremont and Len Wein's reinvention, Daredevil had Frank Miller, and so on. In 1998, Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee released a 12-issue miniseries about the Inhumans, telling a story that presented Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s assortment of alien weirdos as an allegory for eugenics, the science of improving a population via controlled breeding in order to ensure desirable characteristics become more common. For the Inhumans specifically, this ties to their origin. The Kree experimented on the homosapiens of long ago to give them desirable traits as unwilling troops of a superpowered army in the Kree Empire's eternal war against the shapeshifting Skrulls. It was only when the Kree learned, via a genetic prophecy, that the Inhumans would eventually overthrow them that the experimentation stopped. Kirby and Jenkins were both very much aware of the creepy undercurrent running through this -- they're basically a genetic cult.

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Considering how prevalent the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides were in the minds of the public at that time, it was seen as a big deal that a superhero comic was addressing such a topic. As a result, not only did Marvel Comics have a surprising hit on its hands, it also had one that could be viewed as topical. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a superhero comic being political. After all, the X-Men have served as political allegories for most of their existence, with mutants viewed as a stand-in for the marginalized -- minorities, LGBTQ, the disabled, and so on. Even now, in a time when people would like politics to stay out of their capes-and-cowl stories, Ms. Marvel or Batman's take on police brutality have proved to strike a chord with readers, while Benjamin Percy’s Green Arrow run has been tackling police brutality, big corporations and even the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s difficult to separate politics from characters who live in the a world much like ours, and who have to quite literally get with the times in order to remain relevant.

But the Inhumans are different because they’re tied directly to eugenics, something that's also a big tenet of the Nazi party. Not only that, the Royal Family also unashamedly makes slaves out of Inhumans who fail to successfully emerge from their Terrigen ritual, dubbed Alpha Primitives. It’s easy to view the Alpha Primitives as subhuman, given their general appearance and mannerisms. With that in mind, you might be surprised to hear that the Royal Family are intended to come off as good guys rather than villains that the X-Men or Fantastic Four would go up against.

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It’s easy to gloss over this fact when the Inhumans are treated as supporting players, such as Karnak hanging out with Daredevil, or Medusa and Crystal spending time with the Fantastic Four. But positioning them front and center in their own story brings all their problematic issues to light. Making the eugenics-based Inhumans into superheroes was already going to be a hard sell, but trying to pit them against the allegory for the marginalized made matters even worse. It was never going to fly for fans, toxic Terrigen cloud or no.

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Inhumans vs X-Men - Why They Were Never Gonna Win

Unfortunately for the Inhumans, their allegory is a stark contrast from the Children of the Atom, both in message and in lasting power. Eugenics was never popular to begin with for most of the world, but it’s aged even worse. An argument can be made that the Fantastic Four, X-Men, et al, don’t want to lose potential allies, or that Marvel doesn't want to take away what made them so different from their other properties, which is why no one really calls Black Bolt, Medusa, et al, out on it. That’s a fair argument to make, but it also ignores how Marvel tried for the better part of two years to bury that aspect of the characters in an attempt to present them to readers as the new mutants (no, not those New Mutants). Even Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which has spent the bulk of its run building up the Inhumans (and had no problem saying that Hydra were Nazis) had no real perspective on them.

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The Inhumans eugenics allegory was able to be ignored in the past, considering how they were generally relegated to the B or C squad of Marvel characters. But Marvel's attempt to raise them to stardom the past three years has not done the characters any favors. The views of the Royal Family have yet to really be challenged or critiqued by those writing the characters, with the storylines opting instead to severely downplay this aspect in favor of threats from other Inhuman tribes and the larger world. (Inhumans the show sounds like it makes efforts to make the eugenicist elements the focus of its main conflict, though without the S.H.I.E.L.D. cast there to critique the Royal Family, I fear it will come off feeling like a half-hearted effort.)

Adding in the NuHumans -- a whole new batch of recently transformed Inhumans from the general human population -- should have been a moment where the typically isolated Royal Family realizes that their traditional approach no longer works, they have to be more open and welcoming to the outside world. But while Uncanny and All-New Inhumans both talked the talk, they didn’t entirely walk the walk. Instead of using the X-Men to confront the core problems with the Inhumans head-on, Marvel pit them against each other in a fight Kirby’s aliens were never going to truly win. In fact, the only time that this was ever addressed in recent years was at the end of Inhumans v. X-Men, where Medusa simply abdicates her throne.

But by now, it’s almost too late. People love the Inhuman books where they’re paired off or in their own adventures, completely separate from the caste system that defines the Royal Family, like the Inhuman-series-in-name-only Ms. Marvel. But as a whole? Few fans really care about the overall group, to the point where social media virtually erupted in glee at watching the movie fail, while publicly hoping the show follows suit in tanking. Alas, even if the ABC series turns out to be not that bad, the damage has been done. Ironically, much like the Kree, whose experiments resulted in the Inhumans and Alpha Primitives' existence in the first place, Marvel didn't realize that genetics would be the thing that would ultimately bring its plans for the Inhumans down. It's simply written into their DNA.