WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Marauders #10 by Gerry Duggan, Stefano Caselli, Edgar Delgado, VC's Cory Petit and Tom Muller, on sale now.
Ever since setting up the island nation of Krakoa, the X-Men have become increasingly less concerned with the views of the rest of the world. And on Emma Frost's most recent mission in Marauders #10, the White Queen reveals that this even extends to former ideas of morality, which may have held the team back in the past.
While they ultimately spare the lives of the soldiers they confront aboard a Russian ship, the Marauders -- specifically Emma Frost -- crosses a major moral line by using her telepathy to not just erase memories, but to completely rewrite the minds of their enemies.
What Does Emma Do?
After learning the full extent of the mutant-power dampening technology that's been developed by a coalition of Krakoa-resisting nations, Storm and the White Queen assemble the Marauders for a surgical attack on a handheld prototype of the weapon. The attack is swift and brutal, with the Russian ship completely unprepared for the mutants. Iceman and Storm create an iceberg in the ocean to stop them and even use their powers to trap the ship completely in ice.
Meanwhile, Emma and Pyro make their way through the base, with Emma using her powers to turn the soldiers against one another. Forge accompanies the group for the mission, having designed the original mutant-dampening device and swiftly finding his old co-worker Daniels -- who's been captured by the Russians and forced to construct the weapon for them. Calisto even makes a surprise appearance on the mission, finding the captain before he can take the ship down around them.
While the X-Men still follow the laws of Krakoa and don't kill the humans, Emma has an even colder punishment for them.
Emma and the Cuckoos capture the soldiers and bring them aboard their own ship. Once in their custody, the telepaths use their powers to erase all memories the soldiers have from the previous month. The telepaths also use their powers to permanently tweak the minds and personalities of the men, making it so that even the thought of cruelty being carried out not just any minority -- not just mutants -- will make them physically sick. This makes them more accepting, against their will. The men are then returned to Russia to live out their lives in new forms, while their ship is destroyed by the Marauders.
It's certainly a net positive that there are fewer hateful people in the Marvel Universe, and that Emma didn't actually kill anyone. However, this is still a frightening show of power from the White Queen. Wiping the soldiers' minds and manipulating them is a decidedly tricky moral line to walk, and it comes dangerously close to outright brainwashing. For a character who's been a villain as often as she's been a hero, the moral implications of this action are even more troubling and speak to a potential moral rot at Krakoa's core.
A similar mind-wiping idea used by certain members of the Justice League during the events of Identity Crisis, which led to such a conflict between the heroes that the Justice League fell apart at the seams. The line crossed in Marauders gets even more ambiguous when it's revealed Daniels will not be allowed to leave mutant territory and return to his old life out of fear that his knowledge of the mutant-dampening technology could be used against the mutants again. Emma even uses her powers on him to ensure that he won't remember the secrets of that technology.
It appears that even the X-Men's human allies aren't immune to the whims of mutantkind if they decide something is paramount to the safety of Krakoa. With many of the other superheroes and some supervillains like Doctor Doom already fearing that the X-Men can't be strictly considered heroes anymore, the revelation of what Emma has been doing could turn out to be the final straw for the other heroes of the Marvel Universe and finally pit them against the X-Men.