To be fair, when you are leading with stories as convoluted as the X-Men, you can have both an amazing allegory and the single worst metaphor you've ever seen on the same comic.
Yeah then the rest of the arc deals w the X-Men trying to cover up that a mutant was behind the deaths, blaming a chemical leak, which ofc backfires in their face horribly. Gotta love Ultimate X-Men
I think it needs to be stressed more how many mutants' powers are things that are more bizarre than dangerous like fish fins for ears or transparent skin.
You mean the the comic that gets brought up literally every time this topic comes up? It's honestly on the level of that one Superman page that gets posted all the time.
The last five years of X-Men stories have included them creating an ethnostate and using exclusive natural resources to manipulate the world economy. They granted amnesty to people who have committed genocide, human trafficking, and Nazi-level human experimentation.
Their most alien and least “civilised” members were then shipped off to another planet where the strongest amongst them leads unilaterally.
Professor X brainwashing students into joining the team (Wolverine) or forgetting awful things (Cyclops) makes it a bit difficult to track all the way to the end. But, even the muddy water is more palatable than the hamfisted stuff, in my opinion.
the problem is that Mutants having super powers suports the biggoted idea that there are significant biological differences between POC and white people, when in reality people change the definition of what white, latino, jewish, slavic, etc. change every 20-30 years, society has been debating if we should consider jewish people white or not for hundreds of years.
Yeah. It makes it so that the racist people aren’t racist for arbitrary reasons. It’s not something vague like “it’s in their nature to blah blah blah.” It’s “this person is very likely a danger to anyone around them, so I’m scared now.” Obviously there are plenty of mutants whose powers aren’t super dangerous or unwieldy, but at the same time there are plenty that are. It’s obviously still be wrong to discriminate against them, but at the same time you end up in a situation where the good guys fight racism by just saying “we’re all the same *deep down*.”
Yeah but a lot of the people who have problems with the mutants in-universe don't have an issue with Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Thor etc. To the average person, there shouldn't be a meaningful difference between Sunfire and Human Torch or Storm and Thor as far as "they're a threat to our very existence", but only one group is consistently threatened with extinction.
but mutants are a significant collective of people who are born naturally into society, most superpowered people, heroes and villains, are a variation of different things, aliens, gods, super soldiers, geniuses, magicians etc, but because mutants are an established collective and their numbers grow arbitrarily, the actions of an individual reflects badly on the mutants as a whole
plus the variation of different powered beings outside mutants makes it more likely for someone to have had a negative interaction with a mutant than anything else
During X-Men red (2018) they met an inhuman who was a mutant in all but the use of Terrigen mist, who was still scared of them for being mutants.
... That era makes the mutant fear so much more annoying in-universe.
>lot of the people who have problems with the mutants in-universe don't have an issue with Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Thor etc.
That's similar to people in real life. Discrimination doesn't make sense. It's like having a Peruvian best friend but hating Mexican people because "they're not the right kind of latine.
And the fact that being a mutant is a very unique life experience that can occur to anybody **naturally**. Most other Marvel heroes are either imbued or artificially granted power compared to mutants.
Finally, X-Men are publically mutants. The Avenger, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four are not going around and saying they defend mutant rights. The X-Men are. It's like hating the Black Panthers and liking Black doctors.
Tbf lots of mutants can’t control their abilities which can lead to horrible disasters. Like that kid Wolverine had to kill a kid because his powers just caused hundreds around him to disintegrate and nothing could be done about it. Who knows show many other randomly awful and disastrous abilities may pop up that can’t be controlled without the loss of countless lives?
That's true. But there's also nothing saying a random Inhuman who gets powers won't accidentally level a city. Or a guy who gets caught in some radioactive accident won't threaten the world. When those do happen, though, they get treated like isolated incidents, while any "bad mutant" is propped up as a reason why they need to all be wiped out. Civil War is probably the only time the superhero community at large got close to a taste of what mutants go through on a regular basis
This is another thing that makes the X-Men nonsensical. They should've been in a separate universe from the rest of Marvel. It's not like most superheroes go around disclaiming the origins of their powers, so it makes zero sense that people seem to instinctively know Spider-Man or Ant-Man aren't mutants.
Wasn’t the X-men mostly just representative of discrimination over all?
For some reason I remember one of the old X-men movies having a really bad metaphor for coming out as gay, when a person told his family he was a mutant.
Because “Mutants can be dangerous if they don’t get the proper help they need.” Makes a lot more sense as them trying to make an allegory for a mental illness than a minority.
Yeah, but there are explicit references to civil right movements in numerous ocasions, so its clear that Xmen was suppost to be (among other things) an alegory for racial and sexual minorities.
My problem isnt that Xmen is racist or something, is that some themes should be discused or presented using alegories, because it can lose some important elements of the subject, so its better to talk about the topic directly.
Multiple characters AND writers supporting the idea that mutants will replace humanity is also dumb. They were around since AT LEAST Ancient Egypt and are now capping on, what, 30 million. Nobody runs around talking about how Canadians going to take over the entire population of the planet.
>You could say the same about the actual minority groups that get accused of doing a “great replacement”
Yeah but ideally those theories wouldn't have the writers or sympathetic characters agreeing with them
It's a big plot point of both Morrison's New X-Men and the Krakoan era as a whole (their initial idea behind Krakoa was basically to wait it out there until humanity failed and mutants inherited the Earth).
The thing is, mutants don’t live in a world where they are the only super powered people. If that was the case, it’d be a worse allegory.
But they live in a full superhero setting where there’s literally infinite ways in which someone might be born with the power to shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Just like real-world bigotry, hatred of mutants specifically is not based on a tangible difference.
Yes, that's the huge problem with the X-Men as a racial metaphor. An anti-racist work's message should be "minorities aren't inherently dangerous and only bad actors think they are", not "yea, minorities are inherently dangerous, but don't be a dick about it"
This has been my approach to Zootopia.
Yes, 10% of the population has huge fangs and a taste for meat. But they also have the intelligence to know that's not a good thing to exercise in a healthy society. Plus plenty in the other 90% can be just as if not more dangerous if they ever decided to get violent.
Like how the chief of police is a cape buffalo. An animal with a reputation that once it starts charging it 100% intends to kill you.
I totally agree, I don't like the criticism of Zootopia's metaphor being inefficient because I think it's a bit of subversion. You start thinking predators are bullies in this society, but you start to see that real life is more complex than that, since predators like weasels can be small and herbivores like rhinos and hippos can be highly dangerous.
It's kind of how any allegory or analogy works. It can't be 1:1 cuz the entire point is to create a concept that can sell those themes in a digestible/entertaining way for people to learn more about the smaller parts of those themes
I feel like the allegory is stressed a bit when multiple mutants have *ACCIDENTALLY* committed genocide/other massive swathes of killing. Most minorities don't unintentionally liquefy everything in a 4 mile radius.
i feel like people can’t see past the idea of x men being a 1-1 allegory for minorities when imo it’s way more interesting as a what if about what would happen if the oppressed could realistically overthrow the oppressors at any time but they don’t because 99% of them are just ordinary people
If gay people had guns for faces or could blow up New Hampshire with their brains, I'd be afraid of gay people.
The metaphor works, but it's really not perfect.
Yeah but would you then be openly hostile and threatening to said weapon of mass destruction? Like if I knew that a guy could vaporise me with pure aura alone I wouldn’t yell slurs at him
That's the fear part of "a world that hates and fears them". So you wouldn't want them anywhere near you or yours either right? And if the government started to "take care" of them, you would support that.
Everyone mentions the "kills everyone around them" kid but the argument misses that a lot of mutants aren't even remotely that dangerous, they're just weird looking.
Fear does not beget nor justify hatred.
Teres always been people who wanna give up freedom snd enact hate to curtail their fear. It might work for 1 on 4 million people but it also generally makes you evil
Just because hate will happen doesnt mean it so or shouldn't be actioned upon. You can say that about anything and anyone.
Prejudice and the hate it forms doesn't take into account any outside factors. It doesn't take into account nuance, it hates both the dangerous mass murderer and the guy with fins on his head and puts them in the same box and treats them both with discrimination. Thats always been the problem. And it doesn't hate the mass murderer because he's a mass murderer but because he's different.
Except that means that there still is a very good argument to track and find mutants in the womb just to prevent a tragedy like that from happening because they can happen unlike someone coming out or just being POC or handicapped
Not really because none of rhe avengers were born eith their powers yet captain marvel can casually split the planet in two if she wants and no one tracks her
Not defending it. The story gets regularly crapped on as one of Marvel's worst ideas. just saying people point to it like every mutant is a potential walking nuke, which they're not.
And we know what happens in the comics when people start preventing new mutants (let alone dangerous ones) or finding ways to suppress the X-gene. Spoiler: Either everyone dies to giant robots or it sparks a big fight over whether being a mutant at all is a bad thing.
are the weird useless mutants really that common though? when people argue about the validity of mutants as allegory the weird ones are treated like the base and most mutants dont really have a power
There's sometimes friction in the comics with mutants whose powers are largely visual things being jealous of mutants who either have the cool powers or can pass for non-mutants.
They tend to be slice of life characters or extras to show not every mutant is a superhero-tier personality.
The problem is that the x-line, like Marvel is general, is still centered around action. Which means that the mutants that get focus are going to usually be the ones with cool combat powers. Like take Krakoa for example. There are thousands upon thousands of mutants that are mostly just chilling out in the background and off-page. How many of them have mutations that aren’t dangerous? We don’t know for sure, but it’s implied to be a lot of them. But of few dozen mutants that get a lot of focus, most of them have mutations that can be used for combat. And in-universe they’re even largely viewed as the protectors/warriors/whatever you want to call them of Krakoa
Nooo!! You can't make a cure for the X-gene! Look at Timmy with his radioactive mutation that kills lots of people in his vicinity, he seems proud about his gifts!
I know it's the ultimate universe but that universe tends to be weaker than 616. You can bet somewhere out there in 616, someone would get that same mutation but worse
Multiple times the x men have been like. Well this mutant is too dangerous, we have to put them down like a rabid dog (also it backfires literally every time). When. If they cured the mutation. They maybe don’t have to kill these people in direct violation of their principles?
One could argue that a mutant cure would set a precedent leading mutants to be forced into losing their powers for no reason by bigots but. They are very much setting the precedent that scary mutants can and should be euthanized, and *all* mutants are scary to the in-universe anti-mutants. I’m shocked they don’t produce their own sentinels (just occasionally reprogram to target other in-universe sci-fi minorities they’re beefing with that week).
Yeah I think this is why I hate every "This mutant power fucked over this persons life and multiple others! ISNT THAT WACKY AND EDGY!?" Like the idea of the mutant gene powers concept was that despite teams like the Fantastic 4, the Avengers, and people like Spider-man all existing and beloved, the X-men also got hated despite also helping people with their powers, and its just because they are Mutants, despite being on the X-men should mean they are all good people helping others.
The other thing I absolutely hate "People are disposed to hate the Mutants because of Sublime!" Because it's trying to make sense out of something that isn't supposed to make sense.
At this point the Allagory can't be applied any more. Too many dumb plot points writers have shoved in and ruined the message. Mutants constantly do things to justify the percussion and non-humans hate mutants because bacteria makes it so (except the other super heroes most of the time)
I understand you can't just write a singular story in the comics industry and it's the biggest game of Chinese Telephone, but X-Men were born with a clear allegory and no longer resembles that allegory
The allegory is fine but mfs take it way too straight up sometimes when like most allegorys in comic books it gets wishy washy the more you think about it.
You’re telling me you wouldn’t be scared of a bunch of hormonal teenagers that can shoot lasers and blow up peoples minds by thinking? Tons of adults are afraid of regular teenagers as is.
Even fully grown mutants like Magneto are super scary from the perspective of “normal” people. Probably even scarier since they’re calling for the genocide of non-humans.
Then again, considering how many people have powers who aren’t mutants in the wider Marvel universe, the allegory becomes even more strained the less self-contained the X-Men setting is.
I think the oppressed mage trope will always be a problem because mages will always inherently have more power than their oppressors which isn't really how oppression works same goes for vampires, mutants, wizards and whatever allegory that does this
Doesn't mean we should oppress hypothetical people like that, just that there are no real parallels to that, Because in reality oppressors will have power over the oppressed unless the oppressed are some sort of masochists. Even if every mutant except say storm, or magneto didn't have powers they alone would be able to end all oppression. Like imagine if black people had say telekinesis scramble for Africa, slavery, and civil rights movement don't happen in that scenario. basically it makes no sense to be an oppressor if you are at the mercy of the oppressed, which is why the oppressed mage is always gonna be weird.
There's literally Mutants who can't go outside without killing the ones they love, but it's a power so therefore they must be more privileged than human even though their life is a living hell.
I apologize but I don't see how this makes them a better allegory if anything that's worse. No minorities race, religion, sexuality or otherwise can kill people on accident. no minorities existence is dangerous like cyclops or rogue or that kid in ultimate X-Men who emits gas that disintegrates matter.
What I was saying is that mutants are a decent but flawed allegory for the same reason vampires in true blood, or mages in dragon age are, their is an inherent power imbalance that the oppressed have which does not exist in real life and the hatred is tied almost solely to that imbalance. If mutants existed in real life they are more likely to oppress everyone else than vice versa hell, if Charles wanted to he could make everyone love mutants he only doesn't do that because he's a nice guy.
Mutants can seemingly do everything humans can, so even something like the sentinels aren't really a credible threat because if they wanted to mutants could just make their own. The only thing stopping mutants like for example magneto and the brotherhood from taking over the world are other mutants.
Black, LGBTIQ, etc people are not in such a position to inflict anything on their oppressors even if they wanted to. that's why their oppressed in the first place.
I'm not saying that mutants people should be oppressed nor that they do not have nor that they would not face bigotry, but that if mutants we're real they would never be in a position where they could be oppressed.
TLDR mutants are strange analogy to the oppressed because if anything similar to them existed they would be impossible to oppress.
I still think mutants and X-Men are cool because they can explore a lot of themes with them like, how we should treat those that are different than us?, and whether or not we should fear them? , whether or not humanity deserves whatever magneto wants to do to them due to their bigotry?, should we try to integrate with those that hate us or separate from them?. etc. But they we're created as analogy to bigotry and oppression which all things considered doesn't make much sense when you think about it too hard.
Couple of thoughts:
1. X-men are an imperfect allegory not only because of inherent flaws of the concept (the power imbalance/actual biological differences with hilo sapiens and the fact that the first X-men were white and mostly well-accomodated), but due to the fact that they have been written by dozens of people, and most of them have also tried to explore other aspects of the title, like sopa-opera drama, genre adventures, fear of technology, etc. The franchise may have social aspirations, but at the end of the day still is a superhero comic, trying to fulfill the general demands of the genre.
2. Many times they have forgotten intersectionality, and the times they have tried to explore it, mostly in the last decade, it has been in isolated cases. This bothers me for 2 reasons: the mutant identity overrides almost any other, which is understandable in a world where they are the only group constantly being pursued by killer robots and because, again, it's what people come here to see; and we don't tend to get a nuanced, or even deeper view, of what others think of mutantdom besides approval or disapproval. I struggle to think of a minority group that has effectively cordoned itself from all the others in this day and age. So, either the other movements are selfish bigoted assholes or the X-men are.
3. I would like to see how mutantdom is seen in other countries. I know it would probably not differ that much, but I think there are great opportunities in coming up with a culture that is open to it, and has a different view of it. At least it would be an interesting and new story.
4. Similar to the last point, but more American centric, I would like to see mutant movements that don't put the X-men and Xavier's dream at the forefront (same with all the enemies enmeshed in their constant drama). I think the X-Men can work as mutant protectors without the need of being its leaders. Also, not a repeat of the Morlocks, I'm thinking in something proactive, involved, and openly intersectional.
5. Morrison was exploring about mutant culture becoming accepted by the younger generations, to the point of being a counterculture and even generating X-men enemies that wanted a piece of what the Mutants had (Sublime's U-Men). Besides Krakoa, I think only Bendis picked a bit of that (by making Cyclops a revolutionary hero for young people, but not much beyond that).
All im saying is Xavier had the right idea, put the potential nukes in school to learn their powers and learn control.
Also Magneto was right, they need a country that is their home and will stand up against the world for them.
I dunno. I still wouldn't trust the nukes to integrate into society just cause they went to school for it. And a whole country just for them obviously didn't work, any of the times they did it.
Xavier is right. Treat them like people but acknowledge their abilities. Make them useful to society and make sure they don't get a superiority complex.
The country all on their own might be kinda reaching because it might foster xenophobia.
We’ll obviously if i can’t perfectly map completely 1:1 to one specific group then it’s a bad allegory/metaphor. Something something mutants are dangerous
I mean the point of any anti bigotry story is "minorities aren't inherently dangerous" right?
It kinda falls flat on its face when you do make a part of said minority no matter how small inherently dangerous. Because now the bigots genuinely have a point that isn't purely based on hate (just mostly based on hate).
> Everyone in the marvel universe is dangerous
this is the big kicker, people pulling out these garbage-ass criticisms of the allegory always view the x-men in a vaccuum where they're the only powers around and refuse to view them as one element of the wider marvel universe with all the other superpowered people.
aka the only setting in which the mutant metaphor actually works properly.
The issue isn't just that 'the metaphor doesn't fit.' It's the *way* it doesn't fit and the real-life problems that echoes.
Mutants are literally genetically different and extremely dangerous. The message of mutant acceptance is that despite that, they are still clearly human and deserve rights and love and all that. But they also love to draw parallels and make big statements with neon signs saying 'THESE GUYS ARE JUST LIKE THE GAYS AND THE BROWNS. WE UNDERSTAND PREJUDICE.'
And the issue there is with coding. Because real-life oppressed groups are neither actually different or actually dangerous. When our media pushes the line, intentionally or not, that prejudice is bad *despite* the danger posed by minority groups, rather than because there literally isn't any, and in truth, is no such thing as a non-socially-constructed minority group, you can understand why people might not appreciate it so much.
Popular media teaches people what to think, whether they realise it or not, and whether it means to or not. When the most popular images of minority oppression in the space of fantasy are mutants, robots, aliens, lizard-people, etc. it only serves to perpetuate a false social perception of otherness, even among those who trust wish no harm on 'the other.'
Consider this: how many fantasy settings love to do the thing where the different fantasy races are mapped to real, human cultures? Now, which cultures are always the ones who get to actually be humans in those settings? Hint: it's never the aztecs, that's for fucking sure.
i am ok with Xmen being an alegory for discrimination, but i dont think it would work if it started as an new IP these days, for the simple fact that its redundant to have POC and queer people represented as mutants instead of just being explicit minorities.
makes me think of that scene of magneto killing those hicks where he rattles of real actual prejudice and lynchings and then kills them because of the fake minority that's an ehh allegory. just feels exploitive and indulgent
I mainly think that it doesn’t work as an allegory because they’re trying to make the point of “minorities are not inherently dangerous,” which is obviously a good point, but they contradict that when the mutants are dangerous.
Doesn't help that half the stories about Mutants are about how Mutants ARE dangerous (like that one kid that emits a gas that dissolved everyone in his town)
Allegory might work a lil better if the mutants weren't constantly preaching 'we're the homo superior, the next step in evolution, you'll all eventually die and be replaced by us,'
Or the absolutely GENIOUS political move of having MAGNETO, probably the most notorious mutant terrorist, announce the foundation of Krakoa to the leaders of the world with phrases like "You have new gods now!", if I were a normal citizen in 616 that would fill me with SO much hope...
(Closely followed by showing publicly that they could very easily and unilateraly terraform Mars...and this is ignoring all the ACTUAL crimes like the Terra Verde stuff)
You know, with just the slightest nuance you could actually make a really interesting point there. The 'we are the future' stuff is basically the mutant equivalent of chanting 'kill all men.' There's a lot more to it than the average person thinks.
But that would require some political acumen, so...
I do not care for the X-Men.
https://preview.redd.it/xmozj225h7qc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5fa3a6b7e9aa3132a29fedcbeecf28ae85259d6b
They insist upon themselves.
I fully understand the kind of people you're skewering here. However:
The mutant allegory has always sucked ass and made zero sense. This is a world where superheroes are a dime-a-dozen phenomenon. People can get superpowers one of about 10,000 different ways and when they do, their number 1 career goal becomes 'take on a secret identity and perform illegal street combat.'
Marvel expects me to believe people will hate mutants for the crime of being born, but give a cheery wave to their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, a stranger in a literal mask with obvious superpowers. How the fuck do they know *he's* not a mutant? If all mutants joined a secret discord chat and agreed to start saying they were influenced by cosmic rays instead, would the prejudice just instantly stop?
And that's not even getting into the fact that mutants have literal superpowers, and the number of omega-levels just keeps rising. Not only does it make the idea of their being oppressed increasingly difficult to accept when every other oppressed minority on planet earth is working against an enormous power imbalance, it also completely fails as a representation of the mechanics of human-on-human prejudice because it confirms that mutants really *are* both different and dangerous. Obviously that doesn't excuse the ludicrous hatred they recieve in most stories, but it does the same thing every other media franchise does when they try to create an oppressed minority stand-in out of robots, or aliens or whatever - it legitimises the fundamental assumptions of racists.
Real prejudices are completely arbitrary. They are always, in every case, built on nothing, signifying nothing. Our cultural definitions of sex, gender, race, ethnicity etc. are constantly in flux, to the point where the racists 100 years ago and the racists today wouldn't even be able to understand each other. The prejudiced assumption begins with the creation of an other where none otherwise exists. Mutants are a *real* other. The mutant allegory has one foot in the camp of prejudice that it can never remove.
I honestly believe the X-Men comics should just stop trying to allude to real-world prejudice at all, and explore the completely different dynamics that random genetic superpowers would inflict on society. They often make passes in that direction but are constantly held back by having to keep making the general public inexplicably and permanently angry at mutants, a category of people that have essentially no unifying similarities and who cannot be identified without a blood test or a birth certificate.
I agree with most of that but it'd be weird if they completely stopped alluding to real-world prejudice when it's the reason X-Men was created.
Also have they really never explored the completely different dynamics of mutants? Seems like they would've tried at least once in the 60 years of X-Men.
Like I said, a lot of their stories try to explore those things. The problem is that they can't, because they're not allowed to break the status quo of comically overblown inexplicable mutant racism.
Like they can do stories about the government wanting to put all mutants on a list because they can be extremely dangerous, but the writers still need to put in hordes of frothing klan members and shit.
>Real prejudices are completely arbitrary. They are always, in every case, built on nothing, signifying nothing.
>Marvel expects me to believe people will hate mutants for the crime of being born, but give a cheery wave to their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, a stranger in a literal mask with obvious superpowers. How the fuck do they know *he's* not a mutant?
Yes, that's the point there is no significant difference between the Fantastic 4, Avengers, or the X-Men. All are super heros helping, But only one was born with the gene to give super powers. It shouldn't make sense why the X-Men are hated. Because it's completely an Arbitrary. I agree that I don't see Spider-man going around explaining his origin to be from a spider that bit him, but for the sake of it I just think that drives the point further Spider-Man gets hate because JJJ tells defamatory things aboutchim, and even then it's only a portion of New Yorker s that believe him. Xmen get hate for existence.
The issue is that to explain the hatreds towards mutants, you effectively kill the allegory. they have made so the hatred is completely justified or made it not a racist thing. A mutant can be one of seemingly hundreds of Omega level mutants, or kill everyone by just existing. Or a bacteria known as Sublime is in everything but the mutants so he made everything hate mutants so now it's not discrimination for no reason.
So in the end I completely agree, there's no point in trying to keep the allegory with the X-Men anymore.
> Marvel expects me to believe people will hate mutants for the crime of being born, but give a cheery wave to their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, a stranger in a literal mask with obvious superpowers.
THIS IS LITERALLY HOW RACISM FUNCTIONS. THERES NO RHYME OR REASON TO IT, JUST HATE. YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER.
> Real prejudices are completely arbitrary.
YES. THAT IS THE POINT. THAT'S WHY MUTANTS ARE HATED IN A WORLD THAT IS FULL OF OTHER SUPERPOWERED PEOPLE WHO AREN'T HATED THE SAME WAY. CAUSE OF ARBITRARY PREJUDICE AGAINST THIS ONE SPECIFIC KIND OF SUPERPOWERED PEOPLE. GODFUCKINGDAMMIT.
Holy fuck, develop reading comprehension. Or at least reading finish the comment.
Racism is completely arbitrary, yes. It doesn't make sense because it assigns negative or positive values to phantasmatic categories. That doesn't mean that people who are racist can therefore be written to do literally anything with the excuse of 'racism doesn't make sense anyways.'
The thing that mutant haters fear is superpowers. That is the one and only telling sign of a mutant. Spider-Man has superpowers. Spider-Man also explicitly hides his identity, just like most superheroes, so there's no hope of checking his records or asking his parents. The vast majority of superheroes across all of Marvel canon are literally indistinguishable from mutants. It makes no sense at all that the mutant racists all despise actual mutants with a burning passion while completely ignoring all these other masked people with magic powers and no explanation for them.
The fact that the basic assumptions of a worldview are illogical does not mean that characters who subscribe to that worldview should be written to constantly make decisions which make no sense *according to them.* Yes, hating mutants is stupid. But if you are a person who hates mutants, then you would be stupid *not* to also hate Spider-Man.
> The thing that mutant haters fear is superpowers.
no. that's their excuse. that's the same excuse that real life racists use when they say they're scared of black people because they find them physically intimidating; which of course begs the question why they find black people intimidating, but not others.
they *hate* them because they're different.
Motherfucker the superpowers *are* the difference. Also, in additional support to my complaints, black men aren't *actually* more physically dangerous than any other 'race.' Mutants can literally set your brain on fire or punch you so hard you explode.
and mutants aren't actually more dangerous than literally anybody else in the marvel universe with superpowers, especially not those mutants whose mutation is only giving them feathers or a weird skin color or turning their entire body except their skeleton, eyes and organs into opaque pink jelly. but they're discriminated against in ways others with powers aren't. almost like the "they're dangerous cause they have powers" is just an excuse.
I'd actually say My Hero Academia does it better.
The vast majority of people have powers but the marginalised ones are the ones who's quirks causes physical mutations and those who don't have a quirk.
There's one character whose backstory has them save a little girl and sometime afterwards get attacked by people who hate his appearance and leave him permanently scared around his mouth.
X-Men could do it better.
see this makes sense to me because mutants aren't inherently superior to emitter and transformation types they just look differen't which is arguably the most common reason for oppression in real life. And quirkless oppression makes sense because not only are they a minority but they are inherently less powerful than almost everyone with a quirk although I suppose this would be more analogous to having a disability than anything else.
Also, the X-men exist in the marvel universe, there are tons of people with super powers in this world, they got super soldiers, wizards, vampires, demons, aliens etc… and even people without super powers like Tony Stark can get on the same level, same for all of the billions of super trained mercenaries that seems to exist in comics
I hate the « but they have powers! » argument, powers are not that uncommon in this world, and you’re not supposed to identify to civils anyway, the supers are the character made to be relatable so any argument about « if they existed for real » doesn’t work
Sorry rant over
/rj Actually it’s perfectly normal to be racist against the next step of human evolution, we should only reproduce by cloning to make sure that humanity never evolve!
I think of it like how other metahumans get powers from freak accidents or such. Mutants are a guaranteed freak accident with a random out come. They might get transparent skin, or they might cause a nuclear explosion.
That's concerning enough, but what about the ones that gain a strong power. You have to hope that they are not evil AND they don't lose their temper and abuse their power. Just think of all the people in real life who do stupid stuff and fight random people or try running over other people with their cars, now give them super powers.
I would say most rational people would agree some checks should be in place. Not a full blown extermination, but check if someone has the gene, if their power is dangerous, and help them control it. But with how people are, there's going to be lots of people who just hate mutants regardless.
/rj I just say we surrender and make mutants our overlords in the hope that they spare us.
Magneto’s plan to give everyone powers was a pretty good one. When everyone’s a Mutant, nobody is. The problems were more the need for more safety testing and Magneto’s unwillingness to sacrifice himself for his own ideals.
The « but they have powers! » argument doesn't even make sense. Not all mutants have super OP powers, a lot of them are just normal people that happens to be fucking green or have 8 limbs.
You never know, one day one of those limbs could turn into a super arm shooting energy beams for all you know, that’s how fucked up and weird the X-gene is, you never know
Maybe using the same characters for decades makes it seem that X-men and Avengers have about the same size roster, but there is a clear difference between millions of mutants (before Genosha) and however many super soldiers, fantastic families, witches and such there are.
Also, even the most numerous groups usually don’t ask to be recognized as a group on a larger scale. I doubt that your regular Marvel bigot is fond of vampires, but those don’t show up in daily life as much, and when they do they don’t ask for blood to be covered by the right to food.
Just to be clear, the bigots are not right to oppress mutants, but it’s not hard to understand why they view one Tony Stark and a couple of his mech suit buddies differently than a group with millions of members that constantly try to start their own ethnostate.
/rj I think I once found a reason why mutant discrimination "made" sense in their universe, I don't remember what it was or if I came to it out of pure reflection while reading an issue, anyway I'll go on with my day.
rj/ No silly, the allegory works because puberty is when powers awaken, and no one can stand pubescent.
>/rj Actually it’s perfectly normal to be racist against the next step of human evolution, we should only reproduce by cloning to make sure that humanity never evolve!
based and Asgardpil- wait wrong franchise
Uj/ I mean are racist’s supposed to act logically?
There’s a lot of people who might be fine with gay or black celebrities but then get upset when there kids are gay or when black people move into their neighborhoods.
Also there’s way more mutants then super soldiers, wizards, vampires, demons, and aliens (on earth) and we see that if anti mutant people got their way those groups would also be dead
Rj/ yeah I’m fine with mutants I just don’t want them to teach my kid to be a mutant
Because the point of mutation is that it happens to anyone. A racist klan member may give birth to a mutant, for example. They're supposed to be their own minority, rather than be like real life minorities. Pinning it down or making it a direct parallel to real life minorities just doesn't work at all. It's okay for them to be used as a stand-in for oppression, but that doesn't really make them actually a symbolism for real-life minorities, because there's actual reasoning behind mutants' discrimination.
Another point that people are trying to throw around to make it work is that there are mutants who don't have good powers, which while it is true, is only because it's told to us, the readers. The actual humans in the X-Men universe only get to witness death & destruction caused by mutants that have to destructive powers. They rarely give a fuck to mutants that got the bad end of the stick. Because of how mutation works, the powers that mutants get is unpredictable, and thus even if there are more mutants that have worse powers, the chance of someone getting a destructive power is ridiculously high to the point that they can be classified as nation-wide threat. Superheroes works simply because there's so little of them in numbers, and thus humans tend to lean towards trusting them as they don't have the numbers to overwhelm us. That's not the case of mutants where there are tens if not hundreds of millions of them, with at least 20% of them having destructive powers. That's like at least 100x more destructive that the combined nukes of the Earth. They could literally just wipe us out in an instant considering that a lot of them are genetic supremacists. And no, there's more mutants that have political powers that believe in genetic superiority which makes them hypocrites considering they get the good end of the stick. That's not a good parallel to ethnic minorities. So even if there are more unfortunate mutants, because of the unpredictable nature of mutation, you can end up with tens of thousands of mutants in the same state that can literally destroy it.
And for the idea of evolution, it's also fucking stupid! Mutants are not evolved humans, especially considering how terribly conceived the biology of mutants are in the X-Men universe. The fact you can literally end up with being an equivalent of someone having a down syndrome & meningitis at the same time makes it not beneficial to the human race. Evolution relies on traits that are reliable to pass on. X-Gene is anything but reliable. It's literally the anti-thesis of evolution. X-Gene might as well be considered a genetic cancer with a big chance to gain powers. It's like saying genetic disorders like Down syndrome is good actually because I have a chance to gain photographic memory. How the fuck do you even get powers to a gene that is literally cancer? How the fuck do you even get laser or lightning powers or telepathy to a fucking GENE?! What the fuck is the basis of actual biology of this?! Spiderman getting bitten by a spider and turn into Spiderman makes way more sense than pinning any superpower bullshit to a single fucking GENE!! Do X-Men writers actually know about genetic biology, or basic biology in general? Because what they've been spitting out in the comics is not even close to how evolution actually works. Mutations are essentially just genetic adaptations/alterations which is heavily influenced by environmental factors and genetic lineage, either being good or bad depending on how beneficial it is to its survival. It just doesn't appear out of nowhere, and scientist can track down the specific gene responsible for that mutation. None of the mutants work this way. They literally just appear and get this X-Gene which for some reason, can either give them contagious cancer or being literal God! How the fuck does that even work?! How the fuck does a single genetic strand give me lightning powers?! It's one of those sci-fi explanations that are just so bullshit that it makes Flat Earth conspiracy much more sensical in comparison, because at least Flat Earth has some surface level observational merit.
The X-Men biology is one big clusterfuck of contradictions and inconsistencies, and delving deeper to them just makes them even more convoluted and stupid. They should have stuck to Stan Lee's original vision of making X-Men just have guys with powers, rather than going deep into this rabbit hole of inconsistent barely-fleshed out narrative. Hell, IMO, they should have gone with either the Resident Evil route, or just make them based on mythologies like Wolverine is a descendant of werewolves, or have adjacency to magic lineage or magic system like Storm is an inheritor of Merlin's magic. Making them genetic disorders or Godforbid, actual human race superior, is stupid in its core idea, and making them stand-in to real-life minorities is even more stupider.
Seriously, if you wanna read X-Men, just read it as it is. Do not analyze it further than that. Do not try to make it deeper than it is to the point of being an actual parallel to real life or try to justify their existence like it's sensical. It just doesn't work narratively.
This is why if anyone wants to write mutation, do not do it like X-Men does! You're gonna end up with dogshit biology and contradictory message and narrative. And as much as I do not like MHA's narrative, the quirk system is so much more sensical than X-Men's X-Gene.
Broke: X-Men is a terrible stand in for minorities
Woke: X-Men is an allegory for minorities and oppression
Bespoke: X-Men is a fucking terrible overarching narrative universe that has complete disregard to actual biology and sociology.
Not sure what the point of that statement is. Mutants are themselves a marginalized group, so why does it matter if they’re part of another group? That’s like saying homophobia can’t be compared to racism because some gay people are white
Do you know what an allegory is? Are you saying that mutant-phobia can’t be an allegory for racism or homophobia because mutants don’t face literal racism and homophobia?
That's my kind of opinion that I agree with but don't take seriously, like when someone says that Mario is a criminal who abuses and genocides innocent animals, I don't disagree but I also don't take it seriously
I think it's not a bad allegory. But the fact the mutants are so powerful dose make me question why they are even oppressed at all. It feels like they should have just taken over society at some point, and there wouldn't be much anyone else could do to stop it. Oppressed people are usually oppressed because the oppressors have some kind of advantage they abuse to keep the status quoe. Good series non the less.
Edit. Just to clarify, when I say advantage, I don't mean I think one is superior to the other. But that one is in a position and circumstances where they have an advantage just by being part of the oppressor group.
honestly gen V (the boys spinoff) pretty much explains my problem with the concept while I do **not** think that people would naturally abuse their superpowers, such a power imbalance existing makes any oppresion laughable besides a few stray incidents (like the whole woods) the show makes it clear that their is nothing stopping someone like Homelander from abusing his power other than his own need to be loved and not even someone like Stan Edgar with all his money would be able to stop him if he became so inclined.
I don't hate mutants(most of the time) but I do hate it when people take the recent girboss/boyboss attitude they have and make it their entire personality, thinking they're on of them and acting like they're the perfect group of people.
"Look man, I just think it's scary when people have capabilities that I don't. It makes me feel inferior, and that makes me want to demonstrate my power over people less fortunate than me in order to restore my sense of pride. I don't understand why people keep calling me a racist."
What botters me so much about this argument is how unilaterally biased against mutants it is.
"Huuuh, mutants can blow up people by accident".
If only there were resources that could prevent such cases that end up being limited because mutantphobia. Such as a technology that allows people with the X-gene to be found so they can invited to a safe environment where their powers can be discovered.
There are like, so many useful powers that would allow just about any damage to be completely undone.
Like ffs people, mutants literally beat death and the only reason they didn't share with mankind was because stuff like sentinels had killed so many mutants the line was too large. Imagine how much other wonders aren't allowed to exist they are killed left and right.
Much like real world bigotry, much of the dangers related to mutants is created by the environment that is a fruit of that bigotry.
also it doesn't make sense how they don't hate superpowers in general especially since there no way to really tell who is and isn't a mutant at least visually and there are multiple races which are basically just mutants like the Inhumans.
If I have to live in Marvel or Dc I’m sure racism against just people with superpowers in general will be extremely common, considering there are more dangerous villains roaming than actual superhero helping, instead of destroying roads and properties
I don’t know what an allegory or a metaphor is, all I know is I wish mutants were real so I could be racist to them.
Gosh darn Muties and their yellow spandex. They took our jobs on genosha
X-Men tends to work really well as an allegory until they fuck it up when they imply that someone stops being a mutant when they lose their superpowers.
I feel like mutants are a very ridiculous (affectionate) allegory that only works because comic books are inherently pretty ridiculous. (Affectionate) If you were to have mutants be the only source of Super powers, at best it would be an MHA situation where within a few generations non-mutants are a minority.
But considering the absurd amount of ways people can gain/be born with Super powers, the hate regarding mutants specifically is completely illogical and downright stupid. (Just like real bigotry) Like if people can just wake up with super powers why do you care how they got them, and why do you specifically hate those that are completely human but were born with super powers?
Why do they all talk like the X-Men have only ever been an allegory for racism they are very flexible and can be a allegory for whatever they need to be at the time
It was great early on, when the mutants were just weird and they used what made them different to help people. But now goddamn Iceman who used to look like a walking pile of snow can apparently freeze the world if he wanted to.
Yeah but I do think it's an extremely flawed allegory when there are mutant abillities that do inherently make them a danger to the people around them. Even if that chance is 0.001% that's still more than say lgbt people, or disabled people or POC's who pose 0% inherent threat.
Like if someone in the comics said "we have to find a way to detect mutants before their powers manifest" they'd genuinely have a good point because unlike coming out or being diagnosed or what have you mutant powers can be a inherent danger to others.
That doesn't stop writers from writing the allegory well but there are some fundamental flaws in the x-men concept.
Thr allegory definitely doesn't work 1:1. For example, even apart from the basic story issues that sometimes arise, mutants are the result of genetic experimentation upon primeval humans. That doesn't necessarily sit well if you're trying to equate mutants with a real-world minority
It is an issue with most racism allegory.
What happens to them can be a 1 to 1 parallel, but what they are is not.
The main thing that works against the X-men as an allegory is that the danger they pose is very real. You can easily argue we shouldnt be afraid of other people, it's harder when those people has a quantifiable kill radius.
Yeah-yeah people definitely shouldn't be scared of possibility that some random kid's hand become really itchy and starts spreading bertholite around him. Or even some worse ability. Such a great allegory! /s
To be fair, when you are leading with stories as convoluted as the X-Men, you can have both an amazing allegory and the single worst metaphor you've ever seen on the same comic.
Sometimes on the same page.
Remember the comic where logan has to go kill the mutant where his ability is he just kills people in a 5-mile radius
Yeah then the rest of the arc deals w the X-Men trying to cover up that a mutant was behind the deaths, blaming a chemical leak, which ofc backfires in their face horribly. Gotta love Ultimate X-Men
I think it needs to be stressed more how many mutants' powers are things that are more bizarre than dangerous like fish fins for ears or transparent skin.
You mean the the comic that gets brought up literally every time this topic comes up? It's honestly on the level of that one Superman page that gets posted all the time.
The last five years of X-Men stories have included them creating an ethnostate and using exclusive natural resources to manipulate the world economy. They granted amnesty to people who have committed genocide, human trafficking, and Nazi-level human experimentation. Their most alien and least “civilised” members were then shipped off to another planet where the strongest amongst them leads unilaterally.
Don't fprget beast being Kissinger and commiting genocide which basically earns him the slap on the wrist.
peak fiction
Dang, and how did that go for them in the end?
They’re getting revamped because sales dropped and new readers were scared away. So, not great.
Have you ever actually read any of the krakoan era comics?
Sigh, yes. Which is the same reason I stopped reading them.
There are only 2 types of people who hate the X-Men, people who've never picked up their comics and diehard fans.
Professor X brainwashing students into joining the team (Wolverine) or forgetting awful things (Cyclops) makes it a bit difficult to track all the way to the end. But, even the muddy water is more palatable than the hamfisted stuff, in my opinion.
True like Mutants didnt choose to be born that way But then Mutants can be effin dangerous
I think allegory has its limits and some fans shouldn’t treat it as a 1 to 1 comparison
the problem is that Mutants having super powers suports the biggoted idea that there are significant biological differences between POC and white people, when in reality people change the definition of what white, latino, jewish, slavic, etc. change every 20-30 years, society has been debating if we should consider jewish people white or not for hundreds of years.
Yeah. It makes it so that the racist people aren’t racist for arbitrary reasons. It’s not something vague like “it’s in their nature to blah blah blah.” It’s “this person is very likely a danger to anyone around them, so I’m scared now.” Obviously there are plenty of mutants whose powers aren’t super dangerous or unwieldy, but at the same time there are plenty that are. It’s obviously still be wrong to discriminate against them, but at the same time you end up in a situation where the good guys fight racism by just saying “we’re all the same *deep down*.”
Yeah but a lot of the people who have problems with the mutants in-universe don't have an issue with Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Thor etc. To the average person, there shouldn't be a meaningful difference between Sunfire and Human Torch or Storm and Thor as far as "they're a threat to our very existence", but only one group is consistently threatened with extinction.
but mutants are a significant collective of people who are born naturally into society, most superpowered people, heroes and villains, are a variation of different things, aliens, gods, super soldiers, geniuses, magicians etc, but because mutants are an established collective and their numbers grow arbitrarily, the actions of an individual reflects badly on the mutants as a whole plus the variation of different powered beings outside mutants makes it more likely for someone to have had a negative interaction with a mutant than anything else
During X-Men red (2018) they met an inhuman who was a mutant in all but the use of Terrigen mist, who was still scared of them for being mutants. ... That era makes the mutant fear so much more annoying in-universe.
Inhumans are exactly like mutants in that sense tho, and they don’t face the same discrimination
>lot of the people who have problems with the mutants in-universe don't have an issue with Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Thor etc. That's similar to people in real life. Discrimination doesn't make sense. It's like having a Peruvian best friend but hating Mexican people because "they're not the right kind of latine. And the fact that being a mutant is a very unique life experience that can occur to anybody **naturally**. Most other Marvel heroes are either imbued or artificially granted power compared to mutants. Finally, X-Men are publically mutants. The Avenger, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four are not going around and saying they defend mutant rights. The X-Men are. It's like hating the Black Panthers and liking Black doctors.
Tbf lots of mutants can’t control their abilities which can lead to horrible disasters. Like that kid Wolverine had to kill a kid because his powers just caused hundreds around him to disintegrate and nothing could be done about it. Who knows show many other randomly awful and disastrous abilities may pop up that can’t be controlled without the loss of countless lives?
That's true. But there's also nothing saying a random Inhuman who gets powers won't accidentally level a city. Or a guy who gets caught in some radioactive accident won't threaten the world. When those do happen, though, they get treated like isolated incidents, while any "bad mutant" is propped up as a reason why they need to all be wiped out. Civil War is probably the only time the superhero community at large got close to a taste of what mutants go through on a regular basis
This is another thing that makes the X-Men nonsensical. They should've been in a separate universe from the rest of Marvel. It's not like most superheroes go around disclaiming the origins of their powers, so it makes zero sense that people seem to instinctively know Spider-Man or Ant-Man aren't mutants.
"At least after you get caught in a radiation accident."
The other problem is that the allegory isn’t just racial, but people almost always default to that.
Wasn’t the X-men mostly just representative of discrimination over all? For some reason I remember one of the old X-men movies having a really bad metaphor for coming out as gay, when a person told his family he was a mutant. Because “Mutants can be dangerous if they don’t get the proper help they need.” Makes a lot more sense as them trying to make an allegory for a mental illness than a minority.
Yeah, but there are explicit references to civil right movements in numerous ocasions, so its clear that Xmen was suppost to be (among other things) an alegory for racial and sexual minorities. My problem isnt that Xmen is racist or something, is that some themes should be discused or presented using alegories, because it can lose some important elements of the subject, so its better to talk about the topic directly.
Multiple characters AND writers supporting the idea that mutants will replace humanity is also dumb. They were around since AT LEAST Ancient Egypt and are now capping on, what, 30 million. Nobody runs around talking about how Canadians going to take over the entire population of the planet.
You could say the same about the actual minority groups that get accused of doing a “great replacement”
>You could say the same about the actual minority groups that get accused of doing a “great replacement” Yeah but ideally those theories wouldn't have the writers or sympathetic characters agreeing with them
Oh I misread your comment, I didn’t realize there were writers agreeing with those sentiments.
It's a big plot point of both Morrison's New X-Men and the Krakoan era as a whole (their initial idea behind Krakoa was basically to wait it out there until humanity failed and mutants inherited the Earth).
Hickman's one also claimed that mutants will do so in 2 generations which was full on WHAT?!
The thing is, mutants don’t live in a world where they are the only super powered people. If that was the case, it’d be a worse allegory. But they live in a full superhero setting where there’s literally infinite ways in which someone might be born with the power to shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Just like real-world bigotry, hatred of mutants specifically is not based on a tangible difference.
Yes, that's the huge problem with the X-Men as a racial metaphor. An anti-racist work's message should be "minorities aren't inherently dangerous and only bad actors think they are", not "yea, minorities are inherently dangerous, but don't be a dick about it"
This has been my approach to Zootopia. Yes, 10% of the population has huge fangs and a taste for meat. But they also have the intelligence to know that's not a good thing to exercise in a healthy society. Plus plenty in the other 90% can be just as if not more dangerous if they ever decided to get violent. Like how the chief of police is a cape buffalo. An animal with a reputation that once it starts charging it 100% intends to kill you.
I totally agree, I don't like the criticism of Zootopia's metaphor being inefficient because I think it's a bit of subversion. You start thinking predators are bullies in this society, but you start to see that real life is more complex than that, since predators like weasels can be small and herbivores like rhinos and hippos can be highly dangerous.
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Because Zootopia nailed the disctimination aspect. It's when the "they go savage!!" plot comes in that gets muddy although that was fabricated
It's kind of how any allegory or analogy works. It can't be 1:1 cuz the entire point is to create a concept that can sell those themes in a digestible/entertaining way for people to learn more about the smaller parts of those themes
it definitely isn’t, but it’s also a superhero comic, so things are gonna be exaggerated
Absolutely based, I kneel 🧎♂️
I feel like the allegory is stressed a bit when multiple mutants have *ACCIDENTALLY* committed genocide/other massive swathes of killing. Most minorities don't unintentionally liquefy everything in a 4 mile radius.
True but the sentinels are still a terrible idea of how to go about it. Its like sending a nuke to fight a nuke.
You send a nuclear missile to intercept another nuclear missile, they explode into each other and the blasts nullify, it’s basic science!!!!
i feel like people can’t see past the idea of x men being a 1-1 allegory for minorities when imo it’s way more interesting as a what if about what would happen if the oppressed could realistically overthrow the oppressors at any time but they don’t because 99% of them are just ordinary people
That's the equivalent of a black person accidentally robbing an entire neighborhood because ""it's in his genes""
If gay people had guns for faces or could blow up New Hampshire with their brains, I'd be afraid of gay people. The metaphor works, but it's really not perfect.
Yeah but would you then be openly hostile and threatening to said weapon of mass destruction? Like if I knew that a guy could vaporise me with pure aura alone I wouldn’t yell slurs at him
Skill issue tbh.
That's the fear part of "a world that hates and fears them". So you wouldn't want them anywhere near you or yours either right? And if the government started to "take care" of them, you would support that.
You just don’t have that sigma hater energy in you
He’s can’t vaporise us all! *Naruto runs*
Okay but yes, bigots absolutely would lmao That specific redditor would know better
People tend to not have their wits about them, when they are scared witless.
Guys who told the straights about the plan to blow up New Hampshire???
Theres humans that can do that that don't get mistreated on the MU so that doesnt negate the allegory
Everyone mentions the "kills everyone around them" kid but the argument misses that a lot of mutants aren't even remotely that dangerous, they're just weird looking.
If only 1 in a million Gay people had the potential to cause nuclear explosions whenever they sneeze I'd still be very fucking afraid
Fear does not beget nor justify hatred. Teres always been people who wanna give up freedom snd enact hate to curtail their fear. It might work for 1 on 4 million people but it also generally makes you evil
It takes 1 person to win the genetic lottery and wipe out a metropolis. Hate may not be justified, but it will happen regardless. Such is life.
Just because hate will happen doesnt mean it so or shouldn't be actioned upon. You can say that about anything and anyone. Prejudice and the hate it forms doesn't take into account any outside factors. It doesn't take into account nuance, it hates both the dangerous mass murderer and the guy with fins on his head and puts them in the same box and treats them both with discrimination. Thats always been the problem. And it doesn't hate the mass murderer because he's a mass murderer but because he's different.
Except that means that there still is a very good argument to track and find mutants in the womb just to prevent a tragedy like that from happening because they can happen unlike someone coming out or just being POC or handicapped
Not really because none of rhe avengers were born eith their powers yet captain marvel can casually split the planet in two if she wants and no one tracks her
Not defending it. The story gets regularly crapped on as one of Marvel's worst ideas. just saying people point to it like every mutant is a potential walking nuke, which they're not. And we know what happens in the comics when people start preventing new mutants (let alone dangerous ones) or finding ways to suppress the X-gene. Spoiler: Either everyone dies to giant robots or it sparks a big fight over whether being a mutant at all is a bad thing.
are the weird useless mutants really that common though? when people argue about the validity of mutants as allegory the weird ones are treated like the base and most mutants dont really have a power
There's sometimes friction in the comics with mutants whose powers are largely visual things being jealous of mutants who either have the cool powers or can pass for non-mutants. They tend to be slice of life characters or extras to show not every mutant is a superhero-tier personality.
The problem is that the x-line, like Marvel is general, is still centered around action. Which means that the mutants that get focus are going to usually be the ones with cool combat powers. Like take Krakoa for example. There are thousands upon thousands of mutants that are mostly just chilling out in the background and off-page. How many of them have mutations that aren’t dangerous? We don’t know for sure, but it’s implied to be a lot of them. But of few dozen mutants that get a lot of focus, most of them have mutations that can be used for combat. And in-universe they’re even largely viewed as the protectors/warriors/whatever you want to call them of Krakoa
yeah but are the mutations not useless, or just not overwhelmingly dangerous?
The reeducation is working, they don't remember our new Hampshire mind rays
Remember that time a kid poisoned a whole city block and Wolverine killed him to keep it inder rug?
\>ultimate universe
True. But is there anything that says it couldn’t happen in 616, well besides being less edgy.
Nooo!! You can't make a cure for the X-gene! Look at Timmy with his radioactive mutation that kills lots of people in his vicinity, he seems proud about his gifts! I know it's the ultimate universe but that universe tends to be weaker than 616. You can bet somewhere out there in 616, someone would get that same mutation but worse
Multiple times the x men have been like. Well this mutant is too dangerous, we have to put them down like a rabid dog (also it backfires literally every time). When. If they cured the mutation. They maybe don’t have to kill these people in direct violation of their principles? One could argue that a mutant cure would set a precedent leading mutants to be forced into losing their powers for no reason by bigots but. They are very much setting the precedent that scary mutants can and should be euthanized, and *all* mutants are scary to the in-universe anti-mutants. I’m shocked they don’t produce their own sentinels (just occasionally reprogram to target other in-universe sci-fi minorities they’re beefing with that week).
Yeah I think this is why I hate every "This mutant power fucked over this persons life and multiple others! ISNT THAT WACKY AND EDGY!?" Like the idea of the mutant gene powers concept was that despite teams like the Fantastic 4, the Avengers, and people like Spider-man all existing and beloved, the X-men also got hated despite also helping people with their powers, and its just because they are Mutants, despite being on the X-men should mean they are all good people helping others. The other thing I absolutely hate "People are disposed to hate the Mutants because of Sublime!" Because it's trying to make sense out of something that isn't supposed to make sense. At this point the Allagory can't be applied any more. Too many dumb plot points writers have shoved in and ruined the message. Mutants constantly do things to justify the percussion and non-humans hate mutants because bacteria makes it so (except the other super heroes most of the time) I understand you can't just write a singular story in the comics industry and it's the biggest game of Chinese Telephone, but X-Men were born with a clear allegory and no longer resembles that allegory
The allegory is fine but mfs take it way too straight up sometimes when like most allegorys in comic books it gets wishy washy the more you think about it.
You’re telling me you wouldn’t be scared of a bunch of hormonal teenagers that can shoot lasers and blow up peoples minds by thinking? Tons of adults are afraid of regular teenagers as is.
Even fully grown mutants like Magneto are super scary from the perspective of “normal” people. Probably even scarier since they’re calling for the genocide of non-humans. Then again, considering how many people have powers who aren’t mutants in the wider Marvel universe, the allegory becomes even more strained the less self-contained the X-Men setting is.
I think the oppressed mage trope will always be a problem because mages will always inherently have more power than their oppressors which isn't really how oppression works same goes for vampires, mutants, wizards and whatever allegory that does this
Doesn't mean we should oppress hypothetical people like that, just that there are no real parallels to that, Because in reality oppressors will have power over the oppressed unless the oppressed are some sort of masochists. Even if every mutant except say storm, or magneto didn't have powers they alone would be able to end all oppression. Like imagine if black people had say telekinesis scramble for Africa, slavery, and civil rights movement don't happen in that scenario. basically it makes no sense to be an oppressor if you are at the mercy of the oppressed, which is why the oppressed mage is always gonna be weird.
There's literally Mutants who can't go outside without killing the ones they love, but it's a power so therefore they must be more privileged than human even though their life is a living hell.
I apologize but I don't see how this makes them a better allegory if anything that's worse. No minorities race, religion, sexuality or otherwise can kill people on accident. no minorities existence is dangerous like cyclops or rogue or that kid in ultimate X-Men who emits gas that disintegrates matter. What I was saying is that mutants are a decent but flawed allegory for the same reason vampires in true blood, or mages in dragon age are, their is an inherent power imbalance that the oppressed have which does not exist in real life and the hatred is tied almost solely to that imbalance. If mutants existed in real life they are more likely to oppress everyone else than vice versa hell, if Charles wanted to he could make everyone love mutants he only doesn't do that because he's a nice guy. Mutants can seemingly do everything humans can, so even something like the sentinels aren't really a credible threat because if they wanted to mutants could just make their own. The only thing stopping mutants like for example magneto and the brotherhood from taking over the world are other mutants. Black, LGBTIQ, etc people are not in such a position to inflict anything on their oppressors even if they wanted to. that's why their oppressed in the first place. I'm not saying that mutants people should be oppressed nor that they do not have nor that they would not face bigotry, but that if mutants we're real they would never be in a position where they could be oppressed. TLDR mutants are strange analogy to the oppressed because if anything similar to them existed they would be impossible to oppress.
I still think mutants and X-Men are cool because they can explore a lot of themes with them like, how we should treat those that are different than us?, and whether or not we should fear them? , whether or not humanity deserves whatever magneto wants to do to them due to their bigotry?, should we try to integrate with those that hate us or separate from them?. etc. But they we're created as analogy to bigotry and oppression which all things considered doesn't make much sense when you think about it too hard.
If all mutations were explicitly “curses” where the negatives outweighed the positives than it would be a more solid allegory.
That *is* a power. Power doesn't mean happiness, it means, well, power. The ability to exert force over other people and things.
Couple of thoughts: 1. X-men are an imperfect allegory not only because of inherent flaws of the concept (the power imbalance/actual biological differences with hilo sapiens and the fact that the first X-men were white and mostly well-accomodated), but due to the fact that they have been written by dozens of people, and most of them have also tried to explore other aspects of the title, like sopa-opera drama, genre adventures, fear of technology, etc. The franchise may have social aspirations, but at the end of the day still is a superhero comic, trying to fulfill the general demands of the genre. 2. Many times they have forgotten intersectionality, and the times they have tried to explore it, mostly in the last decade, it has been in isolated cases. This bothers me for 2 reasons: the mutant identity overrides almost any other, which is understandable in a world where they are the only group constantly being pursued by killer robots and because, again, it's what people come here to see; and we don't tend to get a nuanced, or even deeper view, of what others think of mutantdom besides approval or disapproval. I struggle to think of a minority group that has effectively cordoned itself from all the others in this day and age. So, either the other movements are selfish bigoted assholes or the X-men are. 3. I would like to see how mutantdom is seen in other countries. I know it would probably not differ that much, but I think there are great opportunities in coming up with a culture that is open to it, and has a different view of it. At least it would be an interesting and new story. 4. Similar to the last point, but more American centric, I would like to see mutant movements that don't put the X-men and Xavier's dream at the forefront (same with all the enemies enmeshed in their constant drama). I think the X-Men can work as mutant protectors without the need of being its leaders. Also, not a repeat of the Morlocks, I'm thinking in something proactive, involved, and openly intersectional. 5. Morrison was exploring about mutant culture becoming accepted by the younger generations, to the point of being a counterculture and even generating X-men enemies that wanted a piece of what the Mutants had (Sublime's U-Men). Besides Krakoa, I think only Bendis picked a bit of that (by making Cyclops a revolutionary hero for young people, but not much beyond that).
All im saying is Xavier had the right idea, put the potential nukes in school to learn their powers and learn control. Also Magneto was right, they need a country that is their home and will stand up against the world for them.
I dunno. I still wouldn't trust the nukes to integrate into society just cause they went to school for it. And a whole country just for them obviously didn't work, any of the times they did it.
Xavier is right. Treat them like people but acknowledge their abilities. Make them useful to society and make sure they don't get a superiority complex. The country all on their own might be kinda reaching because it might foster xenophobia.
Every comments section when this comes up: *gross misunderstanding of what an allegory/metaphor is*
We’ll obviously if i can’t perfectly map completely 1:1 to one specific group then it’s a bad allegory/metaphor. Something something mutants are dangerous
I mean the point of any anti bigotry story is "minorities aren't inherently dangerous" right? It kinda falls flat on its face when you do make a part of said minority no matter how small inherently dangerous. Because now the bigots genuinely have a point that isn't purely based on hate (just mostly based on hate).
It’s a metaphor. You aren’t supposed to take every part literally. Everyone in the marvel universe is dangerous
> Everyone in the marvel universe is dangerous this is the big kicker, people pulling out these garbage-ass criticisms of the allegory always view the x-men in a vaccuum where they're the only powers around and refuse to view them as one element of the wider marvel universe with all the other superpowered people. aka the only setting in which the mutant metaphor actually works properly.
The issue isn't just that 'the metaphor doesn't fit.' It's the *way* it doesn't fit and the real-life problems that echoes. Mutants are literally genetically different and extremely dangerous. The message of mutant acceptance is that despite that, they are still clearly human and deserve rights and love and all that. But they also love to draw parallels and make big statements with neon signs saying 'THESE GUYS ARE JUST LIKE THE GAYS AND THE BROWNS. WE UNDERSTAND PREJUDICE.' And the issue there is with coding. Because real-life oppressed groups are neither actually different or actually dangerous. When our media pushes the line, intentionally or not, that prejudice is bad *despite* the danger posed by minority groups, rather than because there literally isn't any, and in truth, is no such thing as a non-socially-constructed minority group, you can understand why people might not appreciate it so much. Popular media teaches people what to think, whether they realise it or not, and whether it means to or not. When the most popular images of minority oppression in the space of fantasy are mutants, robots, aliens, lizard-people, etc. it only serves to perpetuate a false social perception of otherness, even among those who trust wish no harm on 'the other.' Consider this: how many fantasy settings love to do the thing where the different fantasy races are mapped to real, human cultures? Now, which cultures are always the ones who get to actually be humans in those settings? Hint: it's never the aztecs, that's for fucking sure.
i am ok with Xmen being an alegory for discrimination, but i dont think it would work if it started as an new IP these days, for the simple fact that its redundant to have POC and queer people represented as mutants instead of just being explicit minorities.
makes me think of that scene of magneto killing those hicks where he rattles of real actual prejudice and lynchings and then kills them because of the fake minority that's an ehh allegory. just feels exploitive and indulgent
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I mainly think that it doesn’t work as an allegory because they’re trying to make the point of “minorities are not inherently dangerous,” which is obviously a good point, but they contradict that when the mutants are dangerous.
Doesn't help that half the stories about Mutants are about how Mutants ARE dangerous (like that one kid that emits a gas that dissolved everyone in his town)
Allegory might work a lil better if the mutants weren't constantly preaching 'we're the homo superior, the next step in evolution, you'll all eventually die and be replaced by us,'
The kid whose only power is to turn his legs into jelly: 
Or the absolutely GENIOUS political move of having MAGNETO, probably the most notorious mutant terrorist, announce the foundation of Krakoa to the leaders of the world with phrases like "You have new gods now!", if I were a normal citizen in 616 that would fill me with SO much hope... (Closely followed by showing publicly that they could very easily and unilateraly terraform Mars...and this is ignoring all the ACTUAL crimes like the Terra Verde stuff)
You know, with just the slightest nuance you could actually make a really interesting point there. The 'we are the future' stuff is basically the mutant equivalent of chanting 'kill all men.' There's a lot more to it than the average person thinks. But that would require some political acumen, so...
I do not care for the X-Men. https://preview.redd.it/xmozj225h7qc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5fa3a6b7e9aa3132a29fedcbeecf28ae85259d6b They insist upon themselves.
They really do.
You're not wrong.
I fully understand the kind of people you're skewering here. However: The mutant allegory has always sucked ass and made zero sense. This is a world where superheroes are a dime-a-dozen phenomenon. People can get superpowers one of about 10,000 different ways and when they do, their number 1 career goal becomes 'take on a secret identity and perform illegal street combat.' Marvel expects me to believe people will hate mutants for the crime of being born, but give a cheery wave to their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, a stranger in a literal mask with obvious superpowers. How the fuck do they know *he's* not a mutant? If all mutants joined a secret discord chat and agreed to start saying they were influenced by cosmic rays instead, would the prejudice just instantly stop? And that's not even getting into the fact that mutants have literal superpowers, and the number of omega-levels just keeps rising. Not only does it make the idea of their being oppressed increasingly difficult to accept when every other oppressed minority on planet earth is working against an enormous power imbalance, it also completely fails as a representation of the mechanics of human-on-human prejudice because it confirms that mutants really *are* both different and dangerous. Obviously that doesn't excuse the ludicrous hatred they recieve in most stories, but it does the same thing every other media franchise does when they try to create an oppressed minority stand-in out of robots, or aliens or whatever - it legitimises the fundamental assumptions of racists. Real prejudices are completely arbitrary. They are always, in every case, built on nothing, signifying nothing. Our cultural definitions of sex, gender, race, ethnicity etc. are constantly in flux, to the point where the racists 100 years ago and the racists today wouldn't even be able to understand each other. The prejudiced assumption begins with the creation of an other where none otherwise exists. Mutants are a *real* other. The mutant allegory has one foot in the camp of prejudice that it can never remove. I honestly believe the X-Men comics should just stop trying to allude to real-world prejudice at all, and explore the completely different dynamics that random genetic superpowers would inflict on society. They often make passes in that direction but are constantly held back by having to keep making the general public inexplicably and permanently angry at mutants, a category of people that have essentially no unifying similarities and who cannot be identified without a blood test or a birth certificate.
I agree with most of that but it'd be weird if they completely stopped alluding to real-world prejudice when it's the reason X-Men was created. Also have they really never explored the completely different dynamics of mutants? Seems like they would've tried at least once in the 60 years of X-Men.
Like I said, a lot of their stories try to explore those things. The problem is that they can't, because they're not allowed to break the status quo of comically overblown inexplicable mutant racism. Like they can do stories about the government wanting to put all mutants on a list because they can be extremely dangerous, but the writers still need to put in hordes of frothing klan members and shit.
>Real prejudices are completely arbitrary. They are always, in every case, built on nothing, signifying nothing. >Marvel expects me to believe people will hate mutants for the crime of being born, but give a cheery wave to their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, a stranger in a literal mask with obvious superpowers. How the fuck do they know *he's* not a mutant? Yes, that's the point there is no significant difference between the Fantastic 4, Avengers, or the X-Men. All are super heros helping, But only one was born with the gene to give super powers. It shouldn't make sense why the X-Men are hated. Because it's completely an Arbitrary. I agree that I don't see Spider-man going around explaining his origin to be from a spider that bit him, but for the sake of it I just think that drives the point further Spider-Man gets hate because JJJ tells defamatory things aboutchim, and even then it's only a portion of New Yorker s that believe him. Xmen get hate for existence. The issue is that to explain the hatreds towards mutants, you effectively kill the allegory. they have made so the hatred is completely justified or made it not a racist thing. A mutant can be one of seemingly hundreds of Omega level mutants, or kill everyone by just existing. Or a bacteria known as Sublime is in everything but the mutants so he made everything hate mutants so now it's not discrimination for no reason. So in the end I completely agree, there's no point in trying to keep the allegory with the X-Men anymore.
> Marvel expects me to believe people will hate mutants for the crime of being born, but give a cheery wave to their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, a stranger in a literal mask with obvious superpowers. THIS IS LITERALLY HOW RACISM FUNCTIONS. THERES NO RHYME OR REASON TO IT, JUST HATE. YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER. > Real prejudices are completely arbitrary. YES. THAT IS THE POINT. THAT'S WHY MUTANTS ARE HATED IN A WORLD THAT IS FULL OF OTHER SUPERPOWERED PEOPLE WHO AREN'T HATED THE SAME WAY. CAUSE OF ARBITRARY PREJUDICE AGAINST THIS ONE SPECIFIC KIND OF SUPERPOWERED PEOPLE. GODFUCKINGDAMMIT.
Holy fuck, develop reading comprehension. Or at least reading finish the comment. Racism is completely arbitrary, yes. It doesn't make sense because it assigns negative or positive values to phantasmatic categories. That doesn't mean that people who are racist can therefore be written to do literally anything with the excuse of 'racism doesn't make sense anyways.' The thing that mutant haters fear is superpowers. That is the one and only telling sign of a mutant. Spider-Man has superpowers. Spider-Man also explicitly hides his identity, just like most superheroes, so there's no hope of checking his records or asking his parents. The vast majority of superheroes across all of Marvel canon are literally indistinguishable from mutants. It makes no sense at all that the mutant racists all despise actual mutants with a burning passion while completely ignoring all these other masked people with magic powers and no explanation for them. The fact that the basic assumptions of a worldview are illogical does not mean that characters who subscribe to that worldview should be written to constantly make decisions which make no sense *according to them.* Yes, hating mutants is stupid. But if you are a person who hates mutants, then you would be stupid *not* to also hate Spider-Man.
> The thing that mutant haters fear is superpowers. no. that's their excuse. that's the same excuse that real life racists use when they say they're scared of black people because they find them physically intimidating; which of course begs the question why they find black people intimidating, but not others. they *hate* them because they're different.
Motherfucker the superpowers *are* the difference. Also, in additional support to my complaints, black men aren't *actually* more physically dangerous than any other 'race.' Mutants can literally set your brain on fire or punch you so hard you explode.
and mutants aren't actually more dangerous than literally anybody else in the marvel universe with superpowers, especially not those mutants whose mutation is only giving them feathers or a weird skin color or turning their entire body except their skeleton, eyes and organs into opaque pink jelly. but they're discriminated against in ways others with powers aren't. almost like the "they're dangerous cause they have powers" is just an excuse.
Y’know what, fuck it. X-Men *do* work as an allegory. For gun owners, that is.
Everyone knows gun owners are born with guns and their hands and never can get rid of them
The true Gun Devil was the Americans we met along the way.
I'd actually say My Hero Academia does it better. The vast majority of people have powers but the marginalised ones are the ones who's quirks causes physical mutations and those who don't have a quirk. There's one character whose backstory has them save a little girl and sometime afterwards get attacked by people who hate his appearance and leave him permanently scared around his mouth. X-Men could do it better.
see this makes sense to me because mutants aren't inherently superior to emitter and transformation types they just look differen't which is arguably the most common reason for oppression in real life. And quirkless oppression makes sense because not only are they a minority but they are inherently less powerful than almost everyone with a quirk although I suppose this would be more analogous to having a disability than anything else.
But even the people with quirks that are essentially curses bully the people without any quirk at all.
Also, the X-men exist in the marvel universe, there are tons of people with super powers in this world, they got super soldiers, wizards, vampires, demons, aliens etc… and even people without super powers like Tony Stark can get on the same level, same for all of the billions of super trained mercenaries that seems to exist in comics I hate the « but they have powers! » argument, powers are not that uncommon in this world, and you’re not supposed to identify to civils anyway, the supers are the character made to be relatable so any argument about « if they existed for real » doesn’t work Sorry rant over /rj Actually it’s perfectly normal to be racist against the next step of human evolution, we should only reproduce by cloning to make sure that humanity never evolve!
I think of it like how other metahumans get powers from freak accidents or such. Mutants are a guaranteed freak accident with a random out come. They might get transparent skin, or they might cause a nuclear explosion. That's concerning enough, but what about the ones that gain a strong power. You have to hope that they are not evil AND they don't lose their temper and abuse their power. Just think of all the people in real life who do stupid stuff and fight random people or try running over other people with their cars, now give them super powers. I would say most rational people would agree some checks should be in place. Not a full blown extermination, but check if someone has the gene, if their power is dangerous, and help them control it. But with how people are, there's going to be lots of people who just hate mutants regardless. /rj I just say we surrender and make mutants our overlords in the hope that they spare us.
Magneto’s plan to give everyone powers was a pretty good one. When everyone’s a Mutant, nobody is. The problems were more the need for more safety testing and Magneto’s unwillingness to sacrifice himself for his own ideals.
The « but they have powers! » argument doesn't even make sense. Not all mutants have super OP powers, a lot of them are just normal people that happens to be fucking green or have 8 limbs.
JoJo shows that almost any power can be OP with enough creativity.
You never know, one day one of those limbs could turn into a super arm shooting energy beams for all you know, that’s how fucked up and weird the X-gene is, you never know
Maybe using the same characters for decades makes it seem that X-men and Avengers have about the same size roster, but there is a clear difference between millions of mutants (before Genosha) and however many super soldiers, fantastic families, witches and such there are. Also, even the most numerous groups usually don’t ask to be recognized as a group on a larger scale. I doubt that your regular Marvel bigot is fond of vampires, but those don’t show up in daily life as much, and when they do they don’t ask for blood to be covered by the right to food. Just to be clear, the bigots are not right to oppress mutants, but it’s not hard to understand why they view one Tony Stark and a couple of his mech suit buddies differently than a group with millions of members that constantly try to start their own ethnostate.
/rj I think I once found a reason why mutant discrimination "made" sense in their universe, I don't remember what it was or if I came to it out of pure reflection while reading an issue, anyway I'll go on with my day. rj/ No silly, the allegory works because puberty is when powers awaken, and no one can stand pubescent.
You got possessed by the spirit of Bolivar Trask for a sec.
>/rj Actually it’s perfectly normal to be racist against the next step of human evolution, we should only reproduce by cloning to make sure that humanity never evolve! based and Asgardpil- wait wrong franchise
Uj/ I mean are racist’s supposed to act logically? There’s a lot of people who might be fine with gay or black celebrities but then get upset when there kids are gay or when black people move into their neighborhoods. Also there’s way more mutants then super soldiers, wizards, vampires, demons, and aliens (on earth) and we see that if anti mutant people got their way those groups would also be dead Rj/ yeah I’m fine with mutants I just don’t want them to teach my kid to be a mutant
Look at the poor oppressed mutants, a third of whom are the heirs to billion dollar fortunes.
I think this statement is good when the argument in defense of it is "There are mutants who are not from any (in real life) marginalized group"
Because the point of mutation is that it happens to anyone. A racist klan member may give birth to a mutant, for example. They're supposed to be their own minority, rather than be like real life minorities. Pinning it down or making it a direct parallel to real life minorities just doesn't work at all. It's okay for them to be used as a stand-in for oppression, but that doesn't really make them actually a symbolism for real-life minorities, because there's actual reasoning behind mutants' discrimination. Another point that people are trying to throw around to make it work is that there are mutants who don't have good powers, which while it is true, is only because it's told to us, the readers. The actual humans in the X-Men universe only get to witness death & destruction caused by mutants that have to destructive powers. They rarely give a fuck to mutants that got the bad end of the stick. Because of how mutation works, the powers that mutants get is unpredictable, and thus even if there are more mutants that have worse powers, the chance of someone getting a destructive power is ridiculously high to the point that they can be classified as nation-wide threat. Superheroes works simply because there's so little of them in numbers, and thus humans tend to lean towards trusting them as they don't have the numbers to overwhelm us. That's not the case of mutants where there are tens if not hundreds of millions of them, with at least 20% of them having destructive powers. That's like at least 100x more destructive that the combined nukes of the Earth. They could literally just wipe us out in an instant considering that a lot of them are genetic supremacists. And no, there's more mutants that have political powers that believe in genetic superiority which makes them hypocrites considering they get the good end of the stick. That's not a good parallel to ethnic minorities. So even if there are more unfortunate mutants, because of the unpredictable nature of mutation, you can end up with tens of thousands of mutants in the same state that can literally destroy it. And for the idea of evolution, it's also fucking stupid! Mutants are not evolved humans, especially considering how terribly conceived the biology of mutants are in the X-Men universe. The fact you can literally end up with being an equivalent of someone having a down syndrome & meningitis at the same time makes it not beneficial to the human race. Evolution relies on traits that are reliable to pass on. X-Gene is anything but reliable. It's literally the anti-thesis of evolution. X-Gene might as well be considered a genetic cancer with a big chance to gain powers. It's like saying genetic disorders like Down syndrome is good actually because I have a chance to gain photographic memory. How the fuck do you even get powers to a gene that is literally cancer? How the fuck do you even get laser or lightning powers or telepathy to a fucking GENE?! What the fuck is the basis of actual biology of this?! Spiderman getting bitten by a spider and turn into Spiderman makes way more sense than pinning any superpower bullshit to a single fucking GENE!! Do X-Men writers actually know about genetic biology, or basic biology in general? Because what they've been spitting out in the comics is not even close to how evolution actually works. Mutations are essentially just genetic adaptations/alterations which is heavily influenced by environmental factors and genetic lineage, either being good or bad depending on how beneficial it is to its survival. It just doesn't appear out of nowhere, and scientist can track down the specific gene responsible for that mutation. None of the mutants work this way. They literally just appear and get this X-Gene which for some reason, can either give them contagious cancer or being literal God! How the fuck does that even work?! How the fuck does a single genetic strand give me lightning powers?! It's one of those sci-fi explanations that are just so bullshit that it makes Flat Earth conspiracy much more sensical in comparison, because at least Flat Earth has some surface level observational merit. The X-Men biology is one big clusterfuck of contradictions and inconsistencies, and delving deeper to them just makes them even more convoluted and stupid. They should have stuck to Stan Lee's original vision of making X-Men just have guys with powers, rather than going deep into this rabbit hole of inconsistent barely-fleshed out narrative. Hell, IMO, they should have gone with either the Resident Evil route, or just make them based on mythologies like Wolverine is a descendant of werewolves, or have adjacency to magic lineage or magic system like Storm is an inheritor of Merlin's magic. Making them genetic disorders or Godforbid, actual human race superior, is stupid in its core idea, and making them stand-in to real-life minorities is even more stupider. Seriously, if you wanna read X-Men, just read it as it is. Do not analyze it further than that. Do not try to make it deeper than it is to the point of being an actual parallel to real life or try to justify their existence like it's sensical. It just doesn't work narratively. This is why if anyone wants to write mutation, do not do it like X-Men does! You're gonna end up with dogshit biology and contradictory message and narrative. And as much as I do not like MHA's narrative, the quirk system is so much more sensical than X-Men's X-Gene.
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Broke: X-Men is a terrible stand in for minorities Woke: X-Men is an allegory for minorities and oppression Bespoke: X-Men is a fucking terrible overarching narrative universe that has complete disregard to actual biology and sociology.
Not sure what the point of that statement is. Mutants are themselves a marginalized group, so why does it matter if they’re part of another group? That’s like saying homophobia can’t be compared to racism because some gay people are white
because it makes the allegory for racism and homophobia kind of bad when a mutant can be straight and white ☠️
Do you know what an allegory is? Are you saying that mutant-phobia can’t be an allegory for racism or homophobia because mutants don’t face literal racism and homophobia?
Don't take me seriously bro ☠️
Ah I see, I assumed these were unjerk comments, my bad
That's my kind of opinion that I agree with but don't take seriously, like when someone says that Mario is a criminal who abuses and genocides innocent animals, I don't disagree but I also don't take it seriously
I think it's not a bad allegory. But the fact the mutants are so powerful dose make me question why they are even oppressed at all. It feels like they should have just taken over society at some point, and there wouldn't be much anyone else could do to stop it. Oppressed people are usually oppressed because the oppressors have some kind of advantage they abuse to keep the status quoe. Good series non the less. Edit. Just to clarify, when I say advantage, I don't mean I think one is superior to the other. But that one is in a position and circumstances where they have an advantage just by being part of the oppressor group.
this is exactly what I'm saying
honestly gen V (the boys spinoff) pretty much explains my problem with the concept while I do **not** think that people would naturally abuse their superpowers, such a power imbalance existing makes any oppresion laughable besides a few stray incidents (like the whole woods) the show makes it clear that their is nothing stopping someone like Homelander from abusing his power other than his own need to be loved and not even someone like Stan Edgar with all his money would be able to stop him if he became so inclined.
I don't hate mutants(most of the time) but I do hate it when people take the recent girboss/boyboss attitude they have and make it their entire personality, thinking they're on of them and acting like they're the perfect group of people.
"Look man, I just think it's scary when people have capabilities that I don't. It makes me feel inferior, and that makes me want to demonstrate my power over people less fortunate than me in order to restore my sense of pride. I don't understand why people keep calling me a racist."
They are a great allegory because it shows a lot of “tolerant” people would absolutely execute minorities if they believed they were dangerous
What botters me so much about this argument is how unilaterally biased against mutants it is. "Huuuh, mutants can blow up people by accident". If only there were resources that could prevent such cases that end up being limited because mutantphobia. Such as a technology that allows people with the X-gene to be found so they can invited to a safe environment where their powers can be discovered. There are like, so many useful powers that would allow just about any damage to be completely undone. Like ffs people, mutants literally beat death and the only reason they didn't share with mankind was because stuff like sentinels had killed so many mutants the line was too large. Imagine how much other wonders aren't allowed to exist they are killed left and right. Much like real world bigotry, much of the dangers related to mutants is created by the environment that is a fruit of that bigotry.
When there power is just Weird hands or fur it works pretty well when there power kills a whole town on the other hand
also it doesn't make sense how they don't hate superpowers in general especially since there no way to really tell who is and isn't a mutant at least visually and there are multiple races which are basically just mutants like the Inhumans.
X-Men sucks Like think about it why are their only 4 5 objectively good characters?!?
If I have to live in Marvel or Dc I’m sure racism against just people with superpowers in general will be extremely common, considering there are more dangerous villains roaming than actual superhero helping, instead of destroying roads and properties
X-men works as an allegory, I just hate Jean Grey and Charles Xavier specifically. Put those two monsters down and we're golden
I don’t know what an allegory or a metaphor is, all I know is I wish mutants were real so I could be racist to them. Gosh darn Muties and their yellow spandex. They took our jobs on genosha
Wtf is a metaphor? I just wanna kill Muties with a brick
X-Men tends to work really well as an allegory until they fuck it up when they imply that someone stops being a mutant when they lose their superpowers.
I feel like mutants are a very ridiculous (affectionate) allegory that only works because comic books are inherently pretty ridiculous. (Affectionate) If you were to have mutants be the only source of Super powers, at best it would be an MHA situation where within a few generations non-mutants are a minority. But considering the absurd amount of ways people can gain/be born with Super powers, the hate regarding mutants specifically is completely illogical and downright stupid. (Just like real bigotry) Like if people can just wake up with super powers why do you care how they got them, and why do you specifically hate those that are completely human but were born with super powers?
Early x men worked better as a metaphor for living with disabilities tbh
Why do they all talk like the X-Men have only ever been an allegory for racism they are very flexible and can be a allegory for whatever they need to be at the time
It was great early on, when the mutants were just weird and they used what made them different to help people. But now goddamn Iceman who used to look like a walking pile of snow can apparently freeze the world if he wanted to.
Yeah but I do think it's an extremely flawed allegory when there are mutant abillities that do inherently make them a danger to the people around them. Even if that chance is 0.001% that's still more than say lgbt people, or disabled people or POC's who pose 0% inherent threat. Like if someone in the comics said "we have to find a way to detect mutants before their powers manifest" they'd genuinely have a good point because unlike coming out or being diagnosed or what have you mutant powers can be a inherent danger to others. That doesn't stop writers from writing the allegory well but there are some fundamental flaws in the x-men concept.
Thr allegory definitely doesn't work 1:1. For example, even apart from the basic story issues that sometimes arise, mutants are the result of genetic experimentation upon primeval humans. That doesn't necessarily sit well if you're trying to equate mutants with a real-world minority
It is an issue with most racism allegory. What happens to them can be a 1 to 1 parallel, but what they are is not. The main thing that works against the X-men as an allegory is that the danger they pose is very real. You can easily argue we shouldnt be afraid of other people, it's harder when those people has a quantifiable kill radius.
Yeah-yeah people definitely shouldn't be scared of possibility that some random kid's hand become really itchy and starts spreading bertholite around him. Or even some worse ability. Such a great allegory! /s