X-Men In General

In the Book of Stryfe, there was a very interesting line I always liked that arguably shows Stryfe is smarter than everyone.

"Humans fear replacement by mutants but they miss that these will be their own children and such replacement is the most natural thing in the world."

Well, we circle back to the central metaphor. If mutants are black people or gay people or whatever, then mutants "replacing" humans is at best revenge and at worst an apocalypse. If mutants are transhuman heroes, then as he says it's only natural.

Tbh I was never comfortable with the metaphor. Without careful balance it can go to a simplified revenge power fantasy. "Oh yeah? Take that, homophobe! *lasers off the head of a father of four, who doesn't really understand pronouns*". As Charles said in Immortal, mutants *are* dangerous. Also see Duggan's current dreck.

Edited by raykoda16 on May 5th 2024 at 6:50:47 AM

It was never a good metaphor. You got good stories out of it, but they were good in spite of it. There's a level of applicability, but hating someone because they shoot laserbeams or ooze acid isn't the same as hating them because they're black or gay. If someone knew their neighbor could blow up their house with a sneeze they'd have second thoughts.

Yep, well said and exactly my thoughts. Trying to play the mutants up as a literal metaphor for real life groups is doomed to fail. Treating them as what they are - a fictional subspecies in a transhumanist story - avoids all that.

That's such a good line from Stryfe. For a character with so much baggage attached to him, he's a pretty fun character with a lot of interesting qualities when writers remember them.

re: the E-Gene: it should be noted that the X-Men are actually horrified to discover that the "mutants are destined to replace normies" rhetoric of many of their enemies has real scientific basis, and Beast spends most of Morrison's run trying to research a fix for it.

This is also why he goes mad in the Bad Future arc. Since Scott quits, it falls to Hank to lead the team and run the school and cure the genetic anomaly... so he snaps from the stress and starts huffing the same mind control drug that maddened Quentin, Esme, and Xorn-Magneto. Cue Armageddon.

Edited by HamburgerTime on May 5th 2024 at 9:37:56 AM

Of course with the massive acclaim 97 is getting especially for showing how bigotry acts, it shows that the metaphor still works.

Just needs good writing to figure out the tight line on just right with the symbolism.

Yeah, the themes of bigotry and the metaphor can work, and work very well, as 97 shows. It just, as you say, needs good writing that remembers not to make the metaphor too literal and obvious.

Not really.

Like, barring a civilization shattering cataclysm, it's likely that whatever racial/ethnic group you identify with won't exist in a few centuries' time. Not because of any sort of genocide, but simply because, between increasing globalization and decreasing stigma against interracial relationships, the human population will be racially mixed enough that no one will fit our modern racial categories.

And many science-fiction writers have speculated about a future where Everyone Is Bi, which no one really sees as an extermination of other sexualities, just an expression of how tastes can change over time.

Edited by RavenWilder on May 5th 2024 at 9:00:45 AM

You're right in that way, but I'm more talking about a race war. If whatever oppressed population rises up to kill their masters, and it gets ugly. Gay people was probably the wrong choice. Also there'll totally still be lots of ethnic minorities in the future. Multiculturalism as a virture is still very much a new world proposition.

Everyone being bi in the future? Whew, that one's above my paygrade.

Edited by raykoda16 on May 5th 2024 at 10:00:10 AM

Those are also pretty weak metaphors. Well, our ideas about race changing is realistic, as it has already happened more than once. Physical features won't just go away because interracial marriage though, if that is what one is basing race on(which most do now, admittedly). Dominant traits push down the recessive, but then the recessive pop up in another generation or two. Oh, that trait, that's more common among people of/from "blah"! Are you "blah"? Race is a social construct, not a biological one. We can't actually see someone's body cavities, let alone genes with our naked eye. We just see superficial details and make assumptions. Our understanding of "race" works of off outdated hardware.

Sexuality is a biological thing, so it's taste akin to "sweet" "bitter", "savory" or "bile", and not a taste to acquire in the sense people might acquire a taste of tuna but not for battery acid. It's also not a hereditary thing, or a (purely)psychological thing. Kind of like preference for grapefruit is a biological thing but not a hereditary thing. How everyone becomes bisexual would be a mystery to current science. We still haven't figured out this whole sexuality thing, but we're getting away from "conversion" at least.

I get it though. Race and sexuality are things that undeniably exist. One we made up and muddied with ethnicity, but is part of our societies nonetheless, the other we do not fully understand, with rarities like asexuals who don't experience sexual attraction at all but still have working sex drives and organs that do become aroused, and abrosexuals, whose sexual attraction involuntarily shifts back and forth. These don't change how high anyone jumps, how well one tolerate temperature extremes, how immune systems handle infections. There's applicability in X-Men, somewhere, but a direct allegory doesn't work. It can't always be applicable to everything all at once either.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on May 5th 2024 at 12:21:51 PM

In the end I feel like the fans embracing the "Mutants will replace baseline humans entirely" angle (despite the comics themselves consistently saying that actually happening would be bad for both) is another thing that's down to my single biggest issue with Marvel as a setting - the writers have gone too far in making the ordinary folks into complete pieces of shit. Why shouldn't they be wiped out and replaced, given that it's canonically established that they regularly watch snuff films, rat their own children out to the Space Robot Gestapo, and so forth?

It's the "original draft of Zootopia" problem, really.

Yeah, that's something I've noted before too. Like, the audience should want the characters to help and improve the world, but they won't feel that way if editorial obliterates everything back to square one the instant it gets too far out of their personal comfort zone.

Tbf, do we really want an Xavier who would actually sell out baseline humanity to the Sentinels instead of just faking it?

ideally no, but since they tend to be jerks to the point of propelling snuff films to the top of You Tube...

the answer is still no unless you are very misanthropic or have a very rosy transhumanist view on the Sentinels

In regards to the whole "mutants actually are dangerous" complaint people have with the metaphor, here's what I would say: Some people from any group are going to be dangerous. There are dangerous Black people. There are dangerous Muslims. There 'are'' dangerous gay people. Yeah yeah, they're not Master of Magnetism dangerous, but they're still dangerous.

But they're a tiny fraction of the community.

I still remember, years ago, some pundit talking about how he was getting on a plane and he saw a Muslim man on the flight, and he got nervous. And people tried to argue he was justified, because there had been instances of Muslims hijacking planes. But it wasn't justified, because there's no real reason to believe that any given Muslim is a terrorist.

For a long time, it was considered reasonable to ban gay men from donating blood because they were at an increased risk for AIDS. Even as blood screening improved, it's only in recent years that those restrictions have been getting lifted. It was only last year that the US removed the deferral period for men who have sex with men.

The whole point of the anti-trans movement is based on a belief that men are inherently dangerous, based entirely on their biology. Women are entirely justified in their concerns over the potential of men being predators, but they take it to an extreme, with a belief that men are biologically inclined to be predatory, and they use that to justify discrimination towards trans people (mostly trans women, but trans men often get treated as potential menaces because of their use of testosterone).

Magneto is an outlier. The vast majority of mutants aren't inherently dangerous. But the danger he poses is used as a justification to treat all mutants as dangerous.

Is the metaphor perfect? No, of course not, that's why it's a metaphor. Metaphors generally aren't meant to be perfect, direct 1-to-1 comparisons. Because at that point, why even bother with a metaphor any more? But the mutant metaphor isn't really as bad as people want to believe it is.

The flaw in the analogy is that a minority person turning out to be dangerous doesn't really have anything to do with them being a minority.

A mutant being a mutant can be dangerous specifically because they are a mutant. I'm not even talking Magneto. The case I think of first is Scott Summers. Destructive eyebeams that don't turn off? Yikes.

Yeah. Most mutants aren't that dangerous, but the ones that matter — the ones in all the X-Books, the ones that get put front and center, the ones we have reason to care about — are. If there were more X-Men that weren't so dangerous, it wouldn't be such an issue.

Edited by kkhohoho on May 6th 2024 at 8:18:43 AM

minorities cant warp reality if they have a breakdown. even discounting scarlet witch both legion and nate grey did it too.

Exactly, are mutants people (regardless of their status of homo sapiens) deserving of the same rights and protections as everyone else? Absolutely. Should you be checking to see if they might accidentally turn into a living bomb and kill everyone within five miles? Yeah, probably.

Now, the Marvel Universe complicates this because literally anyone can turn into a living bomb just by getting sneezed on by cosmic forces, but you can't generally test for that, or take precautions around it. I genuinely don't know the right solution, but it can't just be 'oh, well, we don't know what powers he develops, guess we just have to shrug and hope they don't kill everyone!'

I feel like this is a thing (finding ways to properly check for mutant powers so they aren't dangerous to themselves or others) that would happen if people stopped building death robots.

Hell, Charles was trying to do that: help mutants control their abilities so they wouldn't hurt themselves. But he's off the rails now, and mutants have been fighting for their lives for so long there's no time for anyone to figure out any better long term methods for ensuring a mutant doesn't nuke themselves by accident.

Once again, maybe less death robots and more stuff to help people, but then we'd be somewhere else besides Marvel.

Frankly, I think a problem with all this that you flag up is the tendency of bad writers flanderize and strawman both sides of this equation for the sake of cheap drama. The idea of registering mutants is always catastrophized into just being step one of mutant extermination. The idea of some mutants having dangerous or harmful powers is escalated into shit like the bit in Ultimate X-Men where a mutant kid with the power of KILLING EVERYTHING AROUND HIM WITH A DEATH FIELD HE CAN'T TURN OFF AND WHICH ACTIVATES WITHOUT WARNING. Anyone who criticizes the idea of mutants and their whole "replacing humanity" stuff is instantly identified as a bigot who wants to commit genocide, yet at the same time anyone who follows Xavier's dream is shat upon and has all their progress destroyed anytime they get too far for the editors' taste.

There's no sense of restraint. It's the worst kind of expression of Serial Escalation; there exists a subset of writers so diametrically opposed to either letting both sides have a point or maintaining the status quo that they create a situation where it seems like nobody can have a measured opinion. The characters and fans alike can't have calm discussion about mutants and their role in society or culture because everything gets escalated into the flatscans wanting to exterminate mutants. Note that the good X-Men writers are the ones who generally don't do this kind of bullshit and lean into the Grey-and-Gray Morality.

Edited by immortaleditor on May 6th 2024 at 12:45:54 PM

A hundred bucks on Ewing on Storm. Brevoort's description of her as an A-lister is exactly what he's been pushing for for so long. Plus Venom (I think) is wrapping up this year or next. Who else could it be?

That was literally the mutant power of an unfortunate kid in the first Ultimate X-Men run. Even worse, he wasn't exactly a bomb — he was spreading something in the air that was causing everything organic around him in a several mile radius, including people, to burn up and die. The terrified kid accidentally killed his family, his girlfriend, and his entire hometown before he realized he was the cause. He then fled to a cave on the outskirts of the town.

The whole sad story culminated with Wolverine tracking him down — Wolverine being able to survive due to his Healing Factor — to kill him because his very existence would have led to anti-mutant sentiment sky rocketing. He gave the kid his first and last beer, and gently explained why he was there and why he had to do it.

The story ended with Wolverine walking out of the cave with an expression full of regret.

Edited by M84 on May 6th 2024 at 10:36:41 PM