Depends on the writer. Not being white myself I've always seen the very obvious flaws for it to be a stand in for racism. But I also hate the current Krakoa and Kirby more sci-fi approach to it. The Claremont balance between the two is the best way to make the allegory work.
I mean, as long as the allegory stays a meta narrative device/reference point then sure.
Are you asking whether it makes narrative sense for mutans to be hated and discriminated against or whether racial allegories make good narrative?
But mutants are discriminated against because many of them are legitimately dangerous to people’s health and lives. It’s complete bullshit to write that off as “petty/no reason”.
A person with darker skin isn’t inherently dangerous, a fricker with laser beam eyes is.
Every person around you is potentially dangerous to your health and life. Anyone with a car can run you over, crash into your house, kill your loved one. A crackhead with a sharp bit of wood can permanently cripple you or kill you.
Cyclops may be able to shoot lasers out of his eyes, but one bullet to the chest and he goes down same as anyone else.
actually it was stated that Cyclops can potentially destroy the planet by just looking down and shooting, he can kill everybody at any moment, he's more dangerous than every nuke combined
4 months ago
Anonymous
>b-but that’s literally the same thing as crashing a car or having a knife!
4 months ago
Anonymous
Comic writers trying to overexplain and powerlevel wank their favorite characters in ways that never come up again until someone else needs to wank about how one character could beat another. Still doesn't change the fact that anyone with a gun could end Cyclops with one bullet and that him being a mutant is no more reason to fear and hate him than it is to hate anyone else who could make a pipe bomb, let alone any of the hundreds of thousands of other superpowered entities, magic users, aliens, etc that also exist in Marvel and seemingly don't deserve hate for the same reasons mutants do.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Oh I'm not denying that mutant exclusive in Marvel universe does not make sense due to mutates, inhumans, magic users and deviants all having their exact same powers and being able to reproduce just like them. I'm just saying that comparing it to real life hatred does not hold on.
4 months ago
Anonymous
The difference is in the nature of Cyclop's optic blasts versus a gun. If I tape a gun to my head it will only fire if it is loaded, chambered, the safety is off, and the trigger is pulled; it will not fire if someone bumps me and my glasses slip. In addition the bullet will follow a linear, ballistic arc until it hits something or loses enough momentum to fall, which, while dangerous, is very limited in the scale of harm it can do. If you bump Cyclops and his glasses slip, he will immediately emit a wall of force in an expanding cone that can reach double digit, if not more, yards wide capable of disintegrating a building. An uncontrolled optic blast isn't comparable to a gun, it's comparable to a pretty massive bomb.
When it come to race and sexual identities, I can see the allegory working
Not so much gender though
What is the trans equivalent for the X men?
A human who wants to be a mutant?
A mutant who wants to be human?
Well there is an actual transgender X-man character now.
But there are non cismutants out there called Mutates, Mimic, Deadpool, X-23 and her clones, Typhoid Mary might be one or she might be an actual mutant, a bunch of characters from the Savage Land and Cloak and Dagger. These are characters whose X-gene activation didn't happen naturally but as a result of outside factors
The X-Men, because they're more evolved, tend to accept these characters as mutants without question except for Deadpool who they dislike personally.
There are also characters who use MGH mutant growth hormone to give themselves temporary powers, mostly generic mooks to act as fodder for fight scenes, the deepest story told with this was a group of humans turned themselves into the O5 X-Men in an attempt to get famous, but a smarter writer could use this as a drag parallel.
So the mechanism and idea exists in universe but no one had told that story.
The Trans equivalent in X-Men are the U-Men. They're villains.
Probably something like a mutant who pretends to be human, but then comes out as "their true self" and then "transition" to being an out and proud mutant full time, including taking on an X-men type name.
Didn't they do that too? Have the X-Men pretend like their codenames were their "truenames" and that calling them by their human names was some kind of microaggression?
Literally a major scene in X2.
4 months ago
Anonymous
It does come off as rather incongruous when they try to say people fear them unfairly and then also have crazy power level bullshit.
4 months ago
Anonymous
That's the whole problem with a racism metaphor were the oppressed have super power, hard to control and random super powers at that. It's totally justified to be afraid of that
4 months ago
Anonymous
taken in context, that could just be power wanking for "rightclops"
4 months ago
Anonymous
>if his glasses come off
if his glasses come of he can literally shut his fricking eyes. you should be asking why cyclops' eyelids are so OP
4 months ago
Anonymous
You're sort of missing the point. CYCLOPS himself can do a lot of things. This isn't specifically about Cyclops. But any number of mutants with powers LIKE Cyclops but without the backing of Xavier are going to do a lot of damage before anyone even picks up on that they exist. It only takes one kid with crazy powers to go wild and by the time anyone even knows to step in thousands could die. It is simply not possible to predict and contain the X-gene. Not everyone is gonna get the training he had. Not everyone is going to access to ruby quartz, which cannot be cheap btw, to contain their beams (Assuming they have beams and not some other power.) This is actually my biggest beef with what Scott did with that Phoenix shit and jump starting global mutation. He cannot protect the world from the damage mutants will cause and he cannot take responsibility for all the lives he changed.
4 months ago
Anonymous
The argument was that mutants should be feared and hated because they pose a threat to everyone around them all the time, which implies that the ability to do unexpected harm is a reason to unconditionally fear other people, who can also do life-ending harm to you without warning. If that fear is a justifiable reason to hate mutants, it's a reason to hate and fear everybody. Which is to say that the assertion that you might bump into a guy and he's actually a mutant with the power to explode with the force of an atomic bomb if bumped is so clownish and hyperbolic that it's no fricking basis for the kind of story they've been hamfistedly forcing through with X-Men for decades.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Then why do people want to ban guns?
4 months ago
Anonymous
Because they are gullible and have convinced themselves that they can make it somehow more illegal to kill people.
Plus it seems like overwhelming majority of mutants are evil, only a small few become X-Men and fight bad guys.
And the whole mutant power emerging scenario always seems to end up being some kid blowing up a house or mall somewhere. So most people in small towns across thew world have only seen one mutant in their lives, and it was a 13 year old blowing shit up.
You know it's not even the amount that are evil. It's that so few want to actually make a good example. You look at the Fantastic Four's Thing and he's a hero and idol of millions because he very publicly helps others. And as a result people love him. (Cept those palookas over on Yancy st.) But mutants? If they do help anyone it's with put upon resignation. They don't want to better the world. They want to keep a lid on things. They want to squander their powers while patting themselves on back. Even in public conferences they'll insist they're the future, basically agreeing with Magneto.
>they'll insist they're the future
wasn't there a moment a few years ago where Dr Doom or some other villain made a salient counter point to this that if this was true, then there would be far more futures where mutants came out on top, but nearly every future that has interacted with the present either had mutants either going extinct and humans coming out on top or still right where they were in the present?
It's the big problem with Moira X while written by Hickman. She's written to be this oracle because Hickman wants her to be a combo of a Bene Gesserit and Harry August for his Dune/Miracleman fanfic.
Yet, the very structure of the Marvel universe proves her wrong. Cable doesn't come from a timeline where mutants lost. He came one where Apocalypse won. Kang never shows up in her conversations etc, despite the fact that these should be major conversation pieces in a saga focused around creating a better future.
Even Gillen in the first story he wrote for Krakoa summed it up. Moira was a crappy source of information and was more useful as a "save point" than she was a source of information.
But again, it's the problem with Hickman premises. He starts off with this big idea and doesn't get "Oh, wait this doesn't work in the universe that I'm writing".
While we're at it mind if I bring up he completely invented a new powerset and abilities for Destiny?
4 months ago
Anonymous
Oh yeah. Destiny's character in HOXPOX was to be the constant thorn in Moira's side... despite the fact Destiny's powers explictly didn't work like that, neither did any precog in Marvel for that matter. Like the whole point of Days of Future Past, Cable, Bishop etc that even within the boundaries of X-Men's mythos, the future is never set and ever changing.
Yet, Hickman has it going on Dune rules because again, he wants to write Dune.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Not only that, but Destiny's powers are indicated to now work across timelines, which would make them even more useless than they were before.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, the literal original powers of Destiny was "I can see future(s) and I manipulate events to be akin to the future that I want". However, as Days of Future Past pointed out, there was a limit to her powers, because she thought she saw a great future for mutants assassinating Kelly whereas Future Kitty came from a future where that screwed everything up.
Meanwhile Hickman tries to do her as "I can see across all times and see the Golden Path" because this was a LOSH pitch, and Destiny was probably going to be Dream Girl or something, who could see the oncoming waves of retcons that would hit the franchise.
You know it's not even the amount that are evil. It's that so few want to actually make a good example. You look at the Fantastic Four's Thing and he's a hero and idol of millions because he very publicly helps others. And as a result people love him. (Cept those palookas over on Yancy st.) But mutants? If they do help anyone it's with put upon resignation. They don't want to better the world. They want to keep a lid on things. They want to squander their powers while patting themselves on back. Even in public conferences they'll insist they're the future, basically agreeing with Magneto.
I think it is more along the lines of for every hero, you have ten villains. The X-Men are the good guy group but there are about 5 or 6 main evil mutant groups, and a lot of evil mutant individuals. So from a numbers perspective, majority of mutants are evil and want to conquer the world. The X-Men are just the outliers that are different.
If mutants were classified by power, like animal breeds, in terms of danger they represent to society at large, I'd like to see it. You have people like Storm and Iceman, Omega level, which is understandable. Forces of nature.
But then you have people like fricking Jean Grey and Emma Frost who, even before the Phoenix, are capable of pervasive, insidious manipulation and control. Jean especially. >SAY NO TO MUTANTS! >THEY WILL TURN YOUR SON GAY!
That being said, I'd like to see a villain group attempt something about them trying to do what humans did with wolves, to mutants. Cull out the undesirable powers and traits. Kind of like the X-gene suppression in Logan, but not to that extent.
Not render mutants extinct... but make the transition from human to mutant less chaotic and dangerous. It would fit in with human intentions being good but debatably flawed as man tries to play God.
Also frick Jean Grey with a Juggernaut fist. Bendis ruined her in two realities, the c**t.
On their own yes, not side by side with the rest of the marvel characters.
It get worse when neither people in real life nor people in the Marvel universe can tell what is a mutant and what ins't
like how they thought Beyonder was a mutant at first or found out Franklin Richard wans't one after years, how how a scientist after a few studies reached to the conclusion that Wolverine wans't a mutant or Quicksilver who was a very important mutant himself not being a mutant, you can't tell what is a mutant by looks, you can't tell what is a mutant by powers, DNA and other tests are constantly shown as useless by being wrong half of the time. X-men is a really poorly writen story
>It get worse when neither people in real life nor people in the Marvel universe can tell what is a mutant and what ins't
You can tell because they keep loudly telling you, and most of them wear costumes with Xs all over them.
Mutants know they're mutants because Xavier or Magneto (or someone working for one of them) inevitably shows up to tell them they're mutants and try to recruit them.
Everyone else knows they're mutants because they keep telling everyone they're mutants
>kill people with out control powers >destroy entire city blocks in meaningless brawls with rival mutant factions >endanger all life on Earth just for chance to impose mutancy onto normie humans who might have otherwise had happy normal lives >fight to protect mass-murdering terrorists from facing "human justice" >Keep crying "You just hate us because we're mutants"
All of those stems back to decades of writers contributing all sorts of plot twists, marketing/branding changes, retcons, reintroducing legacy lore, trying to get around the comics association, "soft" reboots, etc. It's all become continuity spaghetti that continues to pile up today.
It's dumb as frick for every possible conceivable reason.
The existence of open carry makes the idea of humans being afraid of mutants because their powers are dangerous obsolete, like this is America people literally walk around with guns holstered on their belts.
The gay metaphors are dumb as frick too like being gay is lame and having super powers is cool like no parent would be ashamed their kid could fly it's like Toy Story or Cars it literally doesn't work when you think about it for more than a second.
>The existence of open carry makes the idea of humans being afraid of mutants because their powers are dangerous obsolete, like this is America people literally walk around with guns holstered on their belts.
Unless you're in a blue state. Which banned open carry because blacks started to carry rifles and shotguns around. And California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment to keep the colored folk from having guns at all.
>If you think that people who are blasting laser beams out of their eyes, who can read and control your mind or give you cancer by looking at you are dangerous you’re a bigoted chud and it’s the exact same thing as hating someone for the color of their skin >oh and it’s also something about gay people I guess but quiet now, Magneto is once again murdering hundreds of people in one of his terrorist attacks
It still doesn’t work. Either you’re equating minorities with some hideous slimy frogman or a girl whose “superpower” is having four ears that fart, which is simply insulting because you’re insinuating minorities are disgusting, or you still have legitimately dangerous characters and it doesn’t matter if the guy calls a tsunami on people by accident or intentionally, he’s still fricking dangerous and kills people.
If mutants were real, everyone would want them locked up or killed and for a very good reason. Would you risk having some fricker like Xavier or some bulletproof pyromaniac or invisible rapist walking around? Or someone who can turn you into ash if his glasses break or if he gets angry?
Combining a clunky civil rights/gay rights allegory on top of a puberty allegory, while having characters openly say shit like "we're supposed to be the next step in human evolution" just makes the whole message so muddled that it shouldn't even be written. It's not saying anything. It's vaguely imitating the gestures of stories that try to say something about civil rights, but has no idea what the frick any of it means.
This is correct, X-Men peaked in the early 90's with the cartoon series. Bright colors and slightly dark concepts that didn't need to be thought out. The X men shouldn't represent a minority or ideology but at best hormonal teenagers who think old people are wrong about everything.
Because it was never supposed to be that. Mutants were created because Stan didn't want to come up with new backstories so he gave them a common origin.
The fact that the X-Men were students and that their powers manifested around puberty was on purpose and it worked for resonating well with younger audiences in a very, very symbolic way. That idea of trying to navigate the world, figuring out where you belong, clashing with a society run by older, more ignorant people. It's not great, mind, but it works for simple capeshit comics as long as they don't get too full of themselves... which is exactly what happened and how we are now dealing with racial supremacist ethnostate x-men who worship themselves as Gods.
It didn't really work to be fair, the X-men only really turned huge when it turned into the stupid mess of contradictory half baked ideas that make no sense but are great to clickbait like being an allegory of every single thing that ever existed
The allegory works for simple stories. Once they made it load-bearing, then you get into situations where the audience goes "Well, that's not how majority-minority relations or gay stuff REALLY works."
Once the audience gets a sense that the X-Men aren't playing by the rules of their own metaphor, then the metaphor feels like a cheat.
This is a good point. It reminds me of God Loves, Man Kills; I recently read that story while working through the Claremont years and it dawned on me that it was a small island of direct social commentary surrounded by fun story arcs that basically had little directly to do with the usual Mutant hand-wringing. I think it's fine to dip into the allegory once-in-a-while via tongue-in-cheek stuff like the Sentinels, but I think the characters would be more fun and likable (an important quality for heroic protagonists in a superhero comic book) if they spent as much or more time fighting Sauron in the Savage Lands, or going to Murderworld, etc.
Any time it goes longer than an issue or two I can't shake the feeling that "the allegory" doesn't even make sense, and everyone asks the same questions as to why other heroes don't face the same treatment and it's a futile, roundabout shitfest of arguing and bringing in contemporary politics. It chokes all of the fun out of comics and out of the characters and I don't understand why Marvel is so addicted editorially to making their recognizable big-name characters act like dickheads instead of having them do marketable and heroic shit that would probably sell a few books. The whole Marvel universe seems like a terrible place where everyone can barely tolerate each other (and that's the heroes), I can get that outside so why would I want to read about it?
Yeah. Claremont himself only used it a few times in X-Men and it was only in the 90s that they ramped up the whole "Mutants=Gays" with shit like the Legacy Virus.
The big problem is that you also get writers like Morrison, Hickman etc who think that they can "outsmart it" and dedicate whole chunks of their work to trying to be clever about the whole thing, with Morrison seeming to realise about halfway through with Riot how dumb it was to make the X-Men about the metaphor, with Quire and Xorneto's arcs basically being on these empty buttholes who spout bullshit about as "master race" but have no idea what the frick they're actually talking about.
Hickman's run was based around "breaking it" by turning the X-Men into a discount Miracleman/Dune story and unlike Morrison, he didn't realise halfway through that his ideas were idiotic and instead tried to keep doubling down.
>I think it's fine to dip into the allegory once-in-a-while via tongue-in-cheek stuff like the Sentinels
It's always worth remembering that the first Sentinels story is a 3 issue story. A few pages of anti-mutant panic in the first part leads to the creation of the Sentinels, but as soon as they're activated they break their programming and try to take over the world, while the X-Men fight alongside the army to stop them. The bulk of the story wasn't about race, oppression or persecution, it was a stock science fiction plot about man's creations turning against him, and the later Silver Age Sentinels stories followed a similar template. Then in the 80s most Sentinel stories involved Sentinels that were built by the Hellfire Club. I don't know why modern Marvel pretend the X-Men spent their whole lives being constantly hunted by Government-run Sentinel death squads, like if the first arc of Ultimate X-Men went on forever.
Yeah. Claremont himself only used it a few times in X-Men and it was only in the 90s that they ramped up the whole "Mutants=Gays" with shit like the Legacy Virus.
The big problem is that you also get writers like Morrison, Hickman etc who think that they can "outsmart it" and dedicate whole chunks of their work to trying to be clever about the whole thing, with Morrison seeming to realise about halfway through with Riot how dumb it was to make the X-Men about the metaphor, with Quire and Xorneto's arcs basically being on these empty buttholes who spout bullshit about as "master race" but have no idea what the frick they're actually talking about.
Hickman's run was based around "breaking it" by turning the X-Men into a discount Miracleman/Dune story and unlike Morrison, he didn't realise halfway through that his ideas were idiotic and instead tried to keep doubling down.
>it was only in the 90s that they ramped up the whole "Mutants=Gays" with shit like the Legacy Virus.
The 90s books were definitely adding gay tropes into the black and israeli oppression tropes that the 80s books had already been doing, with the Legacy Virus as an AIDS allegory that didn't really work because there was no possible way to protect yourself from being infected, and things like Iceman's dad disapproving of him being a mutant. People willfully misread the allegory to feed their theories about Bobby being gay, but it was just him getting these moments because few of the X-Men of the time had parents who were alive to disapprove of them.
>Morrison seeming to realise about halfway through with Riot how dumb it was to make the X-Men about the metaphor
I don't know that he did realize, his Magneto story came afterwards and is all about how far he's moved the narrative and evolved the metaphor that mutant villains like Magneto didn't have a place anymore.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Morrison's run is, in many ways, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even beyond the "how do, fellow youth of today," found in his pitch, he really failed to grasp social and group dynamics. If anything a burgeoning mutant subculture and identity would reinforce a position like Magneto's.
Sublime was the worst part of Morrison's run, so I don't blame em.
The irksome part of the stuff that writers want to follow with Morrison is Quire.
Quire is unironically one of the best deconstructions of X-Men power fantasies, where his whole thing is that despite being this uber powerful mutant he's still a weak chinned nerd who spouts all this anti-establishment bullshit he's read in magazines but is essentially just a loser who to be viewed as smart and the girls he crushes on to look at him with something other than pure disgust.
He was the punchline of Superduperman, that a creep with a lot of power is still a creep.
Then along came writers like Aaron, Percy etc who went "Oh my god, a guy who spew anti-establishment bullshit, misunderstood and uber powerful? He's literally me!" and turned Quire into the fantasy he was meant to mock.
Quire was a massive misfire on Morrison's part. Everything about him is set up as a joke and he appears so briefly that there is zero actual connection to anything except the one part that Morrison focused on - his radicalization. It's the only thing interesting about him and the only thing done with effort so of course people are going to latch onto it. And it doesn't really help that he's a deconstruction of a power fantasy because in a book filled with power fantasies the only rational response from the reader to the author saying that you'd actually be a posing loser that everyone hates is to tell them to frick off with that bullshit. Morrison even does the deconstruction twice through Beak. You're no going to be one of the powerful, beautiful people, you're going to be an ugly little freak who gets their shit stomped in for trying to play hero. And also Fantomex for the hat trick. While I don't like Quire, not under anyone's pen, I'd take Quire played straight and sincerely over Grant's tsk-tsk'ing.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Beak was pretty Rad in Exiles
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Morrison's run is, in many ways, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even beyond the "how do, fellow youth of today," found in his pitch, he really failed to grasp social and group dynamics.
Despite literally opening his run with a history lesson about early humans replacing and wiping out the Neanderthals, Morrison finishes his run by blaming Sublime as the reason people hate mutants. It's like he's suddenly forgotten he's spent the entire run having mutants constantly talking about how they are the future and are going to replace humans, or someone told him to get with the program and get back to the official narrative that racism, prejudice and fear of the other are all completely irrational and make no sense, even when they have super powers and are open in their intent to replace you, so here's a parasitic supervillain mind controlling normies into hating mutants.
>If anything a burgeoning mutant subculture and identity would reinforce a position like Magneto's.
Whether it's self-inserting X-gays who literally think they're mutants, or any given racial group, there's always a lot of people who absolutely want the isolationist ethnostate for us and only us, but also the worryingly vocal groups who really want the race war so long as their side gets to win.
>Quire was a massive misfire on Morrison's part. Everything about him is set up as a joke and he appears so briefly that there is zero actual connection to anything except the one part that Morrison focused on - his radicalization.
Wasn't the final step in his radicalization just learning he was adopted? He kept talking like he'd rejected Xavier's teachings and had some new and interesting ideology, but he's just a super-powered school shooter lashing out at everyone. Which is the point, but somehow later writers bought into his delusions of having anything of value to say.
In small doses sure. It comes across as people feeling like outsiders when they just want to be accepted and fit in. In large doses it comes off as perpetual whining and constant use of the victim card.
>we're supposed to be the next step in human evolution!
See this is why nobody likes mutants. Even Ignoring the laughable misunderstand of that's not how evolution works it's very much a "super villain" ideology and is a self declared imposition of personal worth and announcement that you're not the same species you want to live alongside with. Evolution means you had something that gave you an edge in your environment and thus didn't die long enough to frick. And given how many mutations are detrimental either by nature of their power or how they make you a big threat, they can just as easily be considered DEvolutions if they present a disadvantage.
>we're the next step of human evolution
Motherfricker, the people with your condition don't even qualify, most of them have utterly inconsequential mutations like having purple skin or an ear on their ass to being able to shoot lasers from their eyes, or worse, ending up like Beak. That's not a next step, that's a clambering attempt just to keep yourself upright.
Remember when it was revealed that all mutants were just the result of some aliens fricking around with monkey genes millions of years ago, or some shit?
No, because they're lead by a brain-rapist who keeps fricking with people's brains. The world would never be able to live with knowing psychics walk around because all it takes is one psychic terrorist for the world to end in a nuclear holocaust.
It doesn't help that mutants want to be free to abuse their powers on top that. Telepaths aren't held to accountability or privacy, many of the mutants we see rather openly flaunt their powers.
Didn't they have a way to demutate people with the X-gene or whatever it's called?
And wasn't there some weird virus that makes everyone hate mutants? Someone mentioned that it was something in Grant Morrison's run.
And to answer your question, no it doesn't work. Magneto is a man with a machinegun who is constantly gunning down people. No shit you should be afraid of him.
>Didn't they have a way to demutate people with the X-gene or whatever it's called?
There have been several cures through the years and the X-men always reactive in the most extreme possible way. NOOOOO CHAINSAW HANDS JOHNNY CAN'T BE CURED! HOW DARE HE WANT TO LIVE A NORMAL LIFE! HE'S NOT WORTHY OF BEING AN X-MAN LIKE US!! AS SOON AS I'M DONE GETTING BLOWN BY PSYCHIC PORN STARS IM GONNA SHUT THEM DOWN!!
>And wasn't there some weird virus that makes everyone hate mutants? Someone mentioned that it was something in Grant Morrison's run.
You're either talking about the Legacy Virus which was a 90s thing and more of a not very subtle AIDs allegory or the sentient bacteria Sublime who is infecting people to be racist and one of the dumbest things ever written.
>Sublime >As mutantkind proved immune to Sublime, it was hinted that the very hatred and fear of mutants was caused by Sublime itself. But the bacteria took more direct actions in order to ensure that mutant population would be held in check, if not exterminated, in order to keep it from becoming the dominant species of the planet.
So all the mutant genocides isn't just Mutants being a failed species but getting eternally BTFO'D by Just Some Guy. How is this an allegory on anything but "Darwin wins in the end"?
>And wasn't there some weird virus that makes everyone hate mutants? Someone mentioned that it was something in Grant Morrison's run.
You're either talking about the Legacy Virus which was a 90s thing and more of a not very subtle AIDs allegory or the sentient bacteria Sublime who is infecting people to be racist and one of the dumbest things ever written.
feels like Legacy Virus served literally no purpose other than to make Beast take the L for spending years doing research and trying to cure it with nothing to show for it
Why does mutants even need to be an allegory to racism when there are people with mutations that suffer prejudice in real life? That's fricking dumb, it's a fricking dumb idea that made X-men a really dumb comic.
Just like Marvel retconning the meaning of the world mutant to no longer mean a literal mutant but some kind of subspecies or something that biologically makes no sense even though the early comics straight up say they are literal mutants and Magneto wanted to use radiation to create more mutants.
Probably something like a mutant who pretends to be human, but then comes out as "their true self" and then "transition" to being an out and proud mutant full time, including taking on an X-men type name.
Didn't they do that too? Have the X-Men pretend like their codenames were their "truenames" and that calling them by their human names was some kind of microaggression?
God that's so cheesy, and also feels like it clashes with the typical superhero trope of having to balance the Persona and who you are as a person.
Not letting Joe Schmo be entirely sublimated by Super Eon the Sestortrix.
Or whatever his superhero name is.
Not exactly, the current era has them going extra nuts by calling bouts of sense as "human," usually said with a tone of derision and disgust, because they're above such considerations.
On the flipside, there was that whole kerfuffle with Havok preferring to be identified by who he was rather than just as a mutant got a lot of idpol whackjobs super upset.
Well there is an actual transgender X-man character now.
But there are non cismutants out there called Mutates, Mimic, Deadpool, X-23 and her clones, Typhoid Mary might be one or she might be an actual mutant, a bunch of characters from the Savage Land and Cloak and Dagger. These are characters whose X-gene activation didn't happen naturally but as a result of outside factors
The X-Men, because they're more evolved, tend to accept these characters as mutants without question except for Deadpool who they dislike personally.
There are also characters who use MGH mutant growth hormone to give themselves temporary powers, mostly generic mooks to act as fodder for fight scenes, the deepest story told with this was a group of humans turned themselves into the O5 X-Men in an attempt to get famous, but a smarter writer could use this as a drag parallel.
So the mechanism and idea exists in universe but no one had told that story.
Feilong of Orchis was born to loving mutant parents, but resented not having powers. He lied about parents being abusive and resents mutants for colonizing Mars.
Didn't they have a way to demutate people with the X-gene or whatever it's called?
And wasn't there some weird virus that makes everyone hate mutants? Someone mentioned that it was something in Grant Morrison's run.
And to answer your question, no it doesn't work. Magneto is a man with a machinegun who is constantly gunning down people. No shit you should be afraid of him.
There have been several cures, but none of them permanently depower or were part of a sinister agenda.
Sublime makes most humans hate mutants according to Morrison.
he forgot the part were every time they try to do anything, immediately become a cult and decide to take over the world because humans don't deserve it and thus their laws don't apply to them, etc. I mean I would be so fricking happy if they put all the mutants in a fricking spaceship and threw them into their own planet, but I bet they would find a way to keep coming back to earth to show how great they are and how humans should worship them.
You know, the more I think about it, the more this image makes sense. I'd also like to point out that is it really ALL OF HUMANITY hunting mutants or just a small group.
Bringing it up again, Symbiotes are being hunted in the current Venom run. And all due to just ONE POLITICIAN. Just who is pushing all the anti-mutant legislation anyway?
And yet there's a whole military force out to get them. All due to the influence of just one guy. Sure, they want to turn them into weapons but the point still stands. Only one guy and you have enough resources to take down a small country.
So pray tell, what butthole politician is pushing all the anti-mutant legislation? It sure as shit ain't all of them or they would have never lasted this long.
>Did the X-men do anything about Sublime during the Orgy island era or was that plotpoint just memoryholed?
NOPE! The X-men know full well that there's a sentient hunk of mold making everyone act stupid and they would still rather seethe about humans.
4 months ago
Anonymous
So...Why did they even invent the Orochis? Why not just use the pre-established villain who is responsible for all the "bigotry" and "hatred"?
Rhetorical question, they forgot about it or never knew.
To be fair, the writers who followed Morrisson never bothered with Sublime, as far as I know.
and Orchis is just a group of random people possessed/brainwashed by the Sentinels to convince the goverments to build more robots
So...Why did they even invent the Orochis? Why not just use the pre-established villain who is responsible for all the "bigotry" and "hatred"?
Rhetorical question, they forgot about it or never knew.
Orchis came about because mutants actually WON in one timeline and saved the universe. The Dominion sent Omega Sentinel back to the present to destroy Krakoa, kill all organic life and prevent the mutants from winning.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>To be fair, the writers who followed Morrisson never bothered with Sublime, as far as I know.
To be fair that's sort of the point. Sublime is the key to all their issues. They deal with him they can go back to living normal lives were the worst they get is the occasional stink eye.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Sublime was the worst part of Morrison's run, so I don't blame em.
The irksome part of the stuff that writers want to follow with Morrison is Quire.
Quire is unironically one of the best deconstructions of X-Men power fantasies, where his whole thing is that despite being this uber powerful mutant he's still a weak chinned nerd who spouts all this anti-establishment bullshit he's read in magazines but is essentially just a loser who to be viewed as smart and the girls he crushes on to look at him with something other than pure disgust.
He was the punchline of Superduperman, that a creep with a lot of power is still a creep.
Then along came writers like Aaron, Percy etc who went "Oh my god, a guy who spew anti-establishment bullshit, misunderstood and uber powerful? He's literally me!" and turned Quire into the fantasy he was meant to mock.
You know, the more I think about it, the more this image makes sense. I'd also like to point out that is it really ALL OF HUMANITY hunting mutants or just a small group.
Bringing it up again, Symbiotes are being hunted in the current Venom run. And all due to just ONE POLITICIAN. Just who is pushing all the anti-mutant legislation anyway?
And yet there's a whole military force out to get them. All due to the influence of just one guy. Sure, they want to turn them into weapons but the point still stands. Only one guy and you have enough resources to take down a small country.
So pray tell, what butthole politician is pushing all the anti-mutant legislation? It sure as shit ain't all of them or they would have never lasted this long.
The frick didn't Eddie go around murdering the rest of the symbiotes when he had Toxin? That would make Venom, Carnage, Scorn, and... idk if Toxin is still alive. Now that I think about it, Scorn shouldn't even exist, symbiotes are supposed to only have one fricking kid iirc.
Off the top of my head, the current run has:
King in Black Eddie Brock who doesn't need a symbiote.
Dillan Brock who has the Venom Symbiote.
Sleeper who is mindjacking its host, Hank Hensley, due to writing frick up. One they freely admit so we just nod and accept it.
Bren Waters who has the Toxin Symbiote.
Normie Osborn who has Red Goblin Symbiote.
Black Widow who has a symbiote now and is just called "Widow".
Flash Thompson who is Anti-Venom.
And they recently brought back Carnage in his own series.
So yeah, eight symbiotes active and they got a government douchebag hunting them with a small army.
It's become too mixed bloated and sensational to really work well anymore. Mutants aren't just a vague other but more several very specific others that don't necessarily work in relation with one another, Mutant heroes have their hands too messy to represent the virtue of their allegory, Mutant history too twisted and convoluted to reference real life minorities, like I understand that allegories don't need to be a 1:1 nor sympathetic characters perfect paragons but....X-men can be real pieces of shit.
there's at least two mutants capable of rewriting reality itself entirely, not counting whoever is currently using the phoenix force
Mutants should either be worshipped as gods or have already erased anyone that doesn't.
it can't work as an allegory for anything as long as powers on that scale exist. It's not possible to write a coherent story as long as things like that exist.
Cape comics want to have cool universal powers that can change the universe but constantly come up with contrived reasons as to why a status quo suspiciously similar to our own must be preserved at all cost because it somehow is worth protecting (it's not).
>there's at least two mutants capable of rewriting reality itself entirely
Afair there are 4 in the 616(mainstream) universe: David Haller, Mad Jim Jaspers, James Braddock and Clyde Wyncham
Franklin Richards and Wanda used to be but who knows when they will be retconned into mutants again, Beyonder turned himself into one at some point as well.
>Franklin Richards and Wanda used to be but who knows when they will be retconned into mutants again
Anon, take a long hard look at what mutants were to Marvel when those characters were created, and look at what mutants are now. Neither of these characters was ever meant to be part of some poorly-written minority metaphor, it was just an excuse for why they had powers. Just leave them as they are, and have the X-Men franchise leave them alone, they don't belong there.
>Beyonder turned himself into one at some point as well.
Bendis tried to retcon the Beyonder's origin as "a mutant Inhuman", everyone else ignored this, the Beyonder has had at least three more different origins since then.
>mutants were conceived as an allegory for israeli persecution >then it was changed to racism >then it was changed to homophobia >now it's a nebulous persecution allegory that can be a stand-in for basically anything
The fact that mutants are interpreted so liberally makes me think they were never a good allegory to begin with.
Mutants where never meant to be any ONE thing, or if they were it something a bit broader. Mutants represent the OTHER. The outcasts. The loners. The strange the weird the different. Anyone who ever felt like nobody understood them. Anyone who ever felt like their ideas and views didn't mesh with anyone around them. It's as much a matter of youthful revolution as it is a racial allegory. It's as much a racial allegory as it is a matter of sexual discovery. It's a means to explore who and what we are and all the whos and whats there are.
That's moronic. >Uhh they're supposed to represent ALL minorities! They're totally the exact same! Which is why we're going to hamfist in some high school essay tier allegories whatever latest winner of the opression olympics are!
You're missing the point a bit. I actually agree that it's been over played and over done to an insufferable degree. But the point was that ANYONE should be able to get something out of the book because the allegory is broad and vague and more importantly, just subtext.
no, YOU are moronic, because the x-men actually does bring up different forms of oppression. shadowcat says the n word, dani moonstar is regarded as mentally ill by xavier, cannonball is working class, wolfsbane was in an abusive relationship with her evangelical parents, karma had ptsd from being a refugee from the vietnam war, morlocks are lumpenproletariat while hellfire club is the evil of the ruling class not identifying with mutant but identifying with economic class
That all sounds very poetic, but in practice it just means the X-Men have no real depth, they can't just be everything and anything at once. Like other anons said, it works in simple superhero stories as a bit of flavor, but the whole thing falls apart if you make it the main draw and try to explore it in detail.
The various others don't experience prejudice the same way. For instance, mutant powers manifesting at puberty works great for the sexual discovery allegory, but it's pretty tacky if you think of it as race. Nobody discovers they're black at 13.
Yeah, sure, and every single one of those things you listed is accompanied by having supernatural powers, so you’re using power as an allegory for powerlessness. Right, everyone is moronic but you.
>genetic mutation and evolution is supernatural >jam pack it all in to one comic, not years of hundreds if not thousands of comics with different characters and scenarios and exposition
That all sounds very poetic, but in practice it just means the X-Men have no real depth, they can't just be everything and anything at once. Like other anons said, it works in simple superhero stories as a bit of flavor, but the whole thing falls apart if you make it the main draw and try to explore it in detail.
The various others don't experience prejudice the same way. For instance, mutant powers manifesting at puberty works great for the sexual discovery allegory, but it's pretty tacky if you think of it as race. Nobody discovers they're black at 13.
I don't disagree. And I didn't mean it to be especially poetic. I'd argue the X-men certainly have depth but it's out of character and history not specific allegory. Let me try to put it different, as I may not be conveying myself like I intended. The X-men have two principles.
1. The whole fighting for a world that fears and hates them is effectively their "With great power" shtick. It's only meant to give them a reason to be good guys and go fight bad guys with the vague hope that the world will eventually accept them.
2. Being different means anyone who's felt different can grok on. It's not really meant to be anything especially complex or deep. Just some typical marvel every man business. Sort of like how people latched on to Peter Parker because he was for all intents a normal dude who didn't fit in.
I think that Carey had the right way forward for all of it in the 21st Century when minorities could actually show up. Rather than link it to a particular minority group, turn the metaphor into a story about change.
All of his stuff, Children of the Vault etc, is very much based in the simple sci-fi idea in the first Sentinel story. That change is ultimately inevitable and what must be decided is what that change will actually look like.
I mean on a more personal scale, you can mix it with the "outsider" narrative that discussed, but I would also say highlight that its goddamn sci-fi stuff.
I would say highlight similarities between RL shit but also highlight that it's not a 1:1.
Also, just ditch the Hickman shit of Krakoa, because holy frick that was the dumbest status quo that the X-Men have had, because Hickman thought he was being a big brained worldbuilder and it just came off as "What /misc/ thinks minorities are" (which makes sense as Hickman is a conspiracy nut)
CotV stuff pisses me off because they're presented as this ontological evil race that must be destroyed when they're basically Magneto's ideology applied by a different group.
To be fair, the writers who followed Morrisson never bothered with Sublime, as far as I know.
[...]
[...]
Orchis came about because mutants actually WON in one timeline and saved the universe. The Dominion sent Omega Sentinel back to the present to destroy Krakoa, kill all organic life and prevent the mutants from winning.
Has anyone ever point out that this just creates an alt-timeline and won't actually change that specific future?
1) I don't give a frick what retcon they try to spin, Mutants are not evolution or the next stage of human evolution. They're genetic experiments that bred
2) The guy is conveniently leaving out the parts where they tried to bribe everyone on the planet to basically it over, then bribed the galactic community with a bullshit metal after taking over Mars.
3) The victim complex falls apart when every mutant future becomes a dystopian nightmare, and every example of a mutant stepping out of line is met with "oh, you're just racist"
The Sentinel Program is validated with each passing day.
You don't even have to go that far. Everything is the next step of evolution, mutants don't breed true nor do they breed to type, evolution is based on reproductive success so an X-gene is already at a disadvantage to evolutionary pressure because it overwhelmingly kicks in when a mutant reaches the start of sexual reproductive capability and is more likely to have zero effect or be an active detriment to reproductive success, and evolution is reactive without regard to anything other than reproductive success. From an evolutionary standpoint a woman whose mutation gave her an 80 IQ that pops out 6 kids is more successful than a woman who can control electricity that has 2 kids.
>Has anyone ever point out that this just creates an alt-timeline and won't actually change that specific future?
Marvel doesn't have fixed rules on how time travel works. What you're talking about is something Mark Gruenwald tried to enforce as a rule back in the 80s and early 90s, books he wasn't editing weren't forced to comply back then, and nobody's played along with it since he died. Time travel works however the current writer says it works, and you just have to accept that.
Oh Morrison absolutely did. Riot is literally a story about how it doesn't matter if you're this uber powerful mutant, you aren't suddenly better or more enlightened. Morrison's metaphor rips quite a lot off Ellis' Counter X stuff, where Ellis literally has a bunch of mutants go "We want something different from what Xavier/Magneto want" and going into the fact that there are all different agendas/wants.
>CotV stuff pisses me off because they're presented as this ontological evil race that must be destroyed when they're basically Magneto's ideology applied by a different group.
Welcome to Hickman's X-Men, where everything was boiled down to "Us vs Them", with no room so self-reflection.
What pisses me off the most is that in Carey's run, despite being around for a little while, Carey highlights that the COTV are capable of change and adaptation, with one of them even becoming an ally to the X-Men. Hell, on Carey Omega Sentinel became one of my favourite characters under Carey's pen and she was screwed too because Hickman wanted his "race war" story.
What irks me the most that I know exactly what the finale of Hickman's X-Men run looked like. After going into an entire run of how the X-Men are doing Us vs Them, with genes replacing ideaology, Hickman's finale would be about how actually it's really bad to think like that and here's a new way forward... despite the fact that prior to him, the X-Men weren't teaming up with fricking Apocalypse and Sinister because they were mutants.
>Welcome to Hickman's X-Men, where everything was boiled down to "Us vs Them", with no room so self-reflection.
At the risk of segue:
That is modern politics.
4 months ago
Anonymous
That's not a segue that's the exact issue.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Maybe, but the discussion here is the comics themselves, not the politics and current social attitudes leading to the circumstances that created them.
In a couple ways, it's interesting to see art reflect society, but in another it's a little concerning to see that this is the amount of polarization present in discourse.
[...]
Modern?
[...]
The problem if Hickman was intending that is it's a moral we've all heard before by pretty much every single X-Men writer, and none of them had to torch the franchise and characters or warp the entire MU to say it. Also yeah, it's deeply fricked that one of the X-Men, and a major victim of the Sentinels in her own right, got completely bodyjacked by an outside intellect and no one gives a shit.
While bipartisan attitudes have existed for a long time, the degree to which we're divided along party lines here in the united states is one that hasn't been seen for some time. Jimmy Carter said in a 2016 interview that he felt we were at an "all time low" as far as division in politics, excepting only before the Civil War. The only thing I disagree with was in that same interview he felt we were, "bound to get better." In point of fact he also said something similar in 2012.
Indeed after Obama was re-elected president, several states were threatening secession.
Again this is all a bit of a segue, but since then things have become very divided in the United States. The next coming election does not look good for changing that for the better. Things are probably going to get worse before they get better I'm afraid.
4 months ago
Anonymous
That's not a segue that's the exact issue.
Modern?
Oh Morrison absolutely did. Riot is literally a story about how it doesn't matter if you're this uber powerful mutant, you aren't suddenly better or more enlightened. Morrison's metaphor rips quite a lot off Ellis' Counter X stuff, where Ellis literally has a bunch of mutants go "We want something different from what Xavier/Magneto want" and going into the fact that there are all different agendas/wants.
>CotV stuff pisses me off because they're presented as this ontological evil race that must be destroyed when they're basically Magneto's ideology applied by a different group.
Welcome to Hickman's X-Men, where everything was boiled down to "Us vs Them", with no room so self-reflection.
What pisses me off the most is that in Carey's run, despite being around for a little while, Carey highlights that the COTV are capable of change and adaptation, with one of them even becoming an ally to the X-Men. Hell, on Carey Omega Sentinel became one of my favourite characters under Carey's pen and she was screwed too because Hickman wanted his "race war" story.
What irks me the most that I know exactly what the finale of Hickman's X-Men run looked like. After going into an entire run of how the X-Men are doing Us vs Them, with genes replacing ideaology, Hickman's finale would be about how actually it's really bad to think like that and here's a new way forward... despite the fact that prior to him, the X-Men weren't teaming up with fricking Apocalypse and Sinister because they were mutants.
The problem if Hickman was intending that is it's a moral we've all heard before by pretty much every single X-Men writer, and none of them had to torch the franchise and characters or warp the entire MU to say it. Also yeah, it's deeply fricked that one of the X-Men, and a major victim of the Sentinels in her own right, got completely bodyjacked by an outside intellect and no one gives a shit.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>The problem if Hickman was intending that is it's a moral we've all heard before by pretty much every single X-Men writer, and none of them had to torch the franchise and characters or warp the entire MU to say it.
Welcome to Hickman. Seriously, that's what he does. He warps franchises and characters to tell this grand epics that amount to sweet burger all.
His Avengers run ends with Captain America and Iron Man being crushed by a Hellicarrier screaming how much they hate each other as the world burns around them, with Doom being the multiverse's saviour because he's "Just so good"
>Also yeah, it's deeply fricked that one of the X-Men, and a major victim of the Sentinels in her own right, got completely bodyjacked by an outside intellect and no one gives a shit.
Oh yeah, its fricked.
The most fricked up shit is that Hickman doesn't even explain how and why it happens. Prior to this, Karima explictly had all her sentinel parts ripped out off her and was living life as a normal person/ally of the X-Men. Then he goes "Actually she was always evil!" in Inferno.
It's like him turning Moira into a mutant who was manipulating everything behind the scenes. Hickman's whole thing was erasing any sort characters/mythos where the X-Men proved that lines were not divided by genes, but rather by ideaology so he could get his race war bullshit.
4 months ago
Anonymous
His Fantastic Four was decent. He at least got it right that Reed does care more abut his family than anything else.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>49 attributes
anon this could apply to many different comics besides avengers and x-men
4 months ago
Anonymous
That's not a segue that's the exact issue.
Call me idealistic, but that's bullshit and a cop out that Hickman would probably use for "I am so smart".
Morrison's run is, in many ways, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even beyond the "how do, fellow youth of today," found in his pitch, he really failed to grasp social and group dynamics. If anything a burgeoning mutant subculture and identity would reinforce a position like Magneto's.
[...]
Quire was a massive misfire on Morrison's part. Everything about him is set up as a joke and he appears so briefly that there is zero actual connection to anything except the one part that Morrison focused on - his radicalization. It's the only thing interesting about him and the only thing done with effort so of course people are going to latch onto it. And it doesn't really help that he's a deconstruction of a power fantasy because in a book filled with power fantasies the only rational response from the reader to the author saying that you'd actually be a posing loser that everyone hates is to tell them to frick off with that bullshit. Morrison even does the deconstruction twice through Beak. You're no going to be one of the powerful, beautiful people, you're going to be an ugly little freak who gets their shit stomped in for trying to play hero. And also Fantomex for the hat trick. While I don't like Quire, not under anyone's pen, I'd take Quire played straight and sincerely over Grant's tsk-tsk'ing.
Oh yeah, Morrison was trying to follow up on Ellis' Counter X stuff and the reason Ellis worked is that he was interacting (and fricking) younger people. That being said, I do still enjoy it.
Honestly, I love Morrison Quire, for the reason that you dislike him.
Morrison doesn't just go "Oh, he's dumb because I say so". Riot spends the whole arc systematically showing that Quire is a fricking dork with delusions of grandeur.
I love the fact that there is nothing to him, his tragic backstory is literally being told by his parents "You're adopted", and his radicalization is because he wants to be seen as important/special and laid. The whole point of radical Quire is that he's spouting off dumb shit and he has nothing to back it up. He can't even comprehend/consider the most basic challenges to his bullshit because he's just spouting shit he's read out of magazines. Much as I hate Morrison Magneto, I like the punchline to Riot is Quire being killed by his hero pretending to give him enlightenment.
I sorta think that Beak works, because he's the Anti-Quire. You're absolutely right, he gets his shit stomped etc but at the same time, he shows more genuine compassion/ability to grow then Quire ever did, with the whole last bit of Morrison's run hinting that Beak became a great hero. Hell, despite the fact he's ugly as sin, he still finds friendship and love, which contrasts Quire's posse which is held together by barely held contempt for others and drugs.
In fact, I think Exiles did the better than Morrison with the Hyperion arc showing that Beak may not have had the body of a supermodel X-Man, but he had the spirit of a real hero
The whole thing of Riot was as much as it was the Omega Gang fricking things up, it was a community of freaks finding friendship and that rebellion doesn't have to be this cool/badass thing.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Beak's just a really nice guy.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Morrison's run is, in many ways, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even beyond the "how do, fellow youth of today," found in his pitch, he really failed to grasp social and group dynamics.
Despite literally opening his run with a history lesson about early humans replacing and wiping out the Neanderthals, Morrison finishes his run by blaming Sublime as the reason people hate mutants. It's like he's suddenly forgotten he's spent the entire run having mutants constantly talking about how they are the future and are going to replace humans, or someone told him to get with the program and get back to the official narrative that racism, prejudice and fear of the other are all completely irrational and make no sense, even when they have super powers and are open in their intent to replace you, so here's a parasitic supervillain mind controlling normies into hating mutants.
>If anything a burgeoning mutant subculture and identity would reinforce a position like Magneto's.
Whether it's self-inserting X-gays who literally think they're mutants, or any given racial group, there's always a lot of people who absolutely want the isolationist ethnostate for us and only us, but also the worryingly vocal groups who really want the race war so long as their side gets to win.
>Quire was a massive misfire on Morrison's part. Everything about him is set up as a joke and he appears so briefly that there is zero actual connection to anything except the one part that Morrison focused on - his radicalization.
Wasn't the final step in his radicalization just learning he was adopted? He kept talking like he'd rejected Xavier's teachings and had some new and interesting ideology, but he's just a super-powered school shooter lashing out at everyone. Which is the point, but somehow later writers bought into his delusions of having anything of value to say.
>his tragic backstory is literally being told by his parents "You're adopted",
That's the kind of shit that completely demolishes your worldview, how you see yourself, and how you relate to the world. Imagine having your perception of self get a giant gaping whole punched through it while completely lacking any sort of support network at a time where you're emotionally and psychologically fragile and trying to figure out yourself. That's not a joke or a deconstruction, that's a fricking tragedy. And if Morrison thinks it's bullshit then it's rich coming from a man who used a 6 year long stint on Batman to b***h about his parents getting divorced when he was a teen.
4 months ago
Anonymous
I mean.. yeah, it sucks, but again, a lot of people go through worse shit and don't end up climbing a clocktower and shooting someone. Which was sorta the whole point of the Special Class within Riot. They were a bunch of freaks who had all had it rough, and yet despite all that they weren't trying to start race riots, hurt people for the hell of it or be edgy twats.
Hell, the whole thing of Quire is that he's always been an edgy butthole and all the adopted stuff did was pour gasoline onto the fire that was already burning, with Quire ignoring any sort of help to indulge in his desire to be "cool/special".
>mutants were conceived as an allegory for israeli persecution
This is your brain on identity politics, a train of thought where Lee and Kirby were both israeli so everything they wrote just HAD to be about israeli persecution in general and the Nazis/the Holocaust in particular because what else could israeli guys possibly write about?
Even with Lee on record that he came up with mutants as a way to avoid writing origin stories, even with no real mutant persecution narrative in those comics, their treatment instead veering from liked to disliked as much as most other 60s heroes, and even with no possible way to even pretend 60s Magneto is fighting for anything but his own desire to conquer the world, people still want to force the 80s/Claremont X-Men narrative onto the 60s comics.
Actual 60s Marvel under guys like Lee and Kirby just routinely used the word "Holocaust" on covers to describe the epic scale of this month's random superhero fight, they weren't precious about muh oppression at all. Also, the first X-Men vs Avengers clash plays out as a generation clash between teens and adults rather than any kind of racial thing.
Anon, that's something Claremont came up with in the 1980s. 1960s Magneto didn't have any origin story, he was just an evil megalomaniac who wanted to conquer the world, and absolutely did not care about "his people" except as henchmen.
If only Lee and Kirby had bothered to give him an origin and show him unmasked, a lot of mistakes could have been prevented.
Anon, everybody can agree that Claremont take on the X-men and moden X-men as a whole is a fricking dumb mess, it makes no sense, it's poorly writen.
However you must admit that it is fricking cool, it's garbage but it is fun garbage, like how Star Wars and Warhammer40k, those series are fricking dumb but they are fun, meanwhile Star Trek is fricking dumb but it's boring as well.
Mutants turning into a israeli allegory was an extremely clever marketing gimmick, it made them feel edgy and deep as a franchise, now the X-men are slowly losing popularity because everything else is not as cool, comparing them to sexuality or religion just feels ridiculous
Any metaphor about racism or prejudice where the oppressed are super powered or have some sort of potential abilities that endanger themselves or others around them in ways beyond human automatically fails because it gives justification to racism and fear and hate for the oppressed.
The X-men thing works in some individual stories, most of them already done in the 80 and maybe 90s, but overall no. That's the main appeal of the franchise though so you just have to run with it no matter how flawed, just ignore that the racists are right and that even the heroes run a segregationist school/sex island.
In doses. As a general metaphor for everyone who feels in some way isolated from the rest of society, it does. As a call for human empathy and understanding of our fellow man, it does. Done as literally and as taken to absurd limits as it has in the comics, fuuuuuuuuuck no.
>we could conquer the world
No, no you fricking couldn't how the frick are you going to defeat the Avengers? They have literal gods on their team, also how are you going to beat Mr Fantastic? Or the Inhumans?
>villains helping
The villains of the world all teaming up and conquering the world has happened more than once in Marvel what-ifs and looking back it never makes any sense. The vast majority of the b-tier thieves with some fancy gimmick tech or trick that wouldn't actually save them from actual military retaliation, not to mention when governments have shit like the Sentinels that only conveniently deployed in X-Men comics, and that's assuming all these 2-bit villains are cool with going from theft and assault to straight up nuking parts of the world.
Not to mention the big villains like Dr. Doom and Magneto have way too much of an ego to work that flawlessly together.
The whole thing just reads as cheap plot set-ups with no real thought put into them, and especially egregious examples like Old Man Logan's background come to mind as much as I enjoyed the story when I read it.
The only villain I can see running the world and making it better is Dr. Doom (especially if he finally just has sex with Reed already). Purple man could rule the world, but it'll be Hell.
Why the frick people think Dr Doom would make anything better, he's a moron, he's a 2 dimensional le evil king with le evil wizard powers, his country is nothing but poor farmers.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Morons that don't like thinking for themselves or value any degree of freedom for themselves or others are drawn towards strongmen that would dictate every facet of their life.
Not really especially in the Krakoa era. While other heroes habe begrudgingly works with Supervillians, the X-Men can't stop sucking the dick of their villians because if muh X-Gene. >Racial Allegory
Doesn't work. It would be like watching Barracuda rape and kill Jessica Jones in front of Luke Cage but every black character from Black Panther (T'challa & Shuri), Blade, Storm, Misty Knight, Prodigy, etc came out the woodwork to defend him and say whitey got him down and Cage is an Uncle Tom for not letting it happen sooner. >Real Allegory
It works partially as a israeli/Israel allegory but only as shitpost of them. You can have your Menachim Magnetos, Epsteiny Weinstein Frosts/Wyngardes/Dakens, two-face Bibi/Likudnik "Not a real israelitetant unless you agree with me" Kitty Prydes, and your Ben-Gvir Exodus & Apocalypse types mucking about because they prattle on wih the chosen people & unironic replacement theory tribalism hoping that only a handful of israelites IRL have an ounce of self-awareness to call out the above schmucks and not fall for the Zionist Pilpul Pill. Even Krakoa as an Island needed to feed off the life force of mutants so they trick the gullible ones to come over and be passive food for their "utopia" while keeping them in the dark for the illusion of protection just like the few israelites who see through Netanyahu bullshit know Israel is leading to under his control. >TL;DR
"Mutantdom" is just a tribalist version of pic related.
The zionism doesnt really work once you realise aside from some buildings at the very beginning of Krakoa mutants didnt push any humans out of their homelands. Probably cause the writers would realise that even normies could put 2 and 2 together if that was the case.
They did frick over Terra Verde to keep their drug hedgemony, re-enforce Shi'ar slavery with Xandra for their space bullshit, and even allowed Madelyne Pryor to unlessh demons in New York because muh women stick together & post partum depression via Magik & Jean. They tried some weird fricky takeovers of Otherworod and Apocalypse tried to steal all the msgic in the world for Krakoa but they buried those actions as it was too blatantly Zionist to horde resources and ruin the world ehile cryimg victim because "we're better than you" and will replace you.
1) I don't give a frick what retcon they try to spin, Mutants are not evolution or the next stage of human evolution. They're genetic experiments that bred
2) The guy is conveniently leaving out the parts where they tried to bribe everyone on the planet to basically it over, then bribed the galactic community with a bullshit metal after taking over Mars.
3) The victim complex falls apart when every mutant future becomes a dystopian nightmare, and every example of a mutant stepping out of line is met with "oh, you're just racist"
The Sentinel Program is validated with each passing day.
if you make it about paternalistic celestials, that's just bullshit intelligent design and it literally makes x-men about "god's chosen" and ethnic supremacy unless you also add the warning parable about social darwinism and why apocalypse is an evil villain
Claremont was really the only one who had the handle on it. You can even see it in stuff like The Muir Island Saga where the shadow king was playing up everyone's fear of the unknown and racial hostility but it was ultimately still a story about the shadow king trying to enslave people.
No. Racism isn’t rational because we’re all just human, no humans is inherently more dangerous, we all have access to the same weapons (well, at least us Americans do).
With mutants literally any one of them could end up being able to blow up universes by accident. The fear of mutants is completely rational.
I think this was asked here in the last few months.
The thing is that without the good mutants the bad ones would destroy the world. So you do need to be in good terms with the good mutants who actually didn't do anything bad.
They also save the world from non mutant threats like aliens (eg the brood) and stuff like that without them humanity would be vulnarable.
Then again in a shared marvel universe the whole x-men story is less good since there are superheroes who are as strong as mutants but they aren't hated, instead they are actually loved, like the avengers. Also with the avengers you could argue that even the hero mutants aren't that important.
Anyways the argument is still the same in a shared universe, the good mutants are needed and are a good part of society and not all mutants are bad. The allegory works op.
>>Then again in a shared marvel universe the whole x-men story is less good since there are superheroes who are as strong as mutants but they aren't hated, instead they are actually loved, like the avengers. Also with the avengers you could argue that even the hero mutants aren't that important.
This has always been part of the X-men's problem though. The Avengers and Fantastic Four are all very public figures. They do press conferences, help with clean up and generally give a good impression while working alongside the public. The X-men don't do that. Well now and again they have. I miss Gubment X-factor. But there was generally a lot of time where Nick Fury would call in the X-men to give them first crack at Magneto or on how to resolve a current mutant issue. And this went will into the 90s. Then shit got out of hand and the X-men made the world their enemy.
>The thing is that without the good mutants the bad ones would destroy the world.
The Avengers have stopped Magneto before, other superhero individuals and teams have dealt with mutant villains, too. The X-Men aren't unique in stopping mutant threats, one of the issues with them is that they don't tell anyone anything of the threats that they've encountered, so you get shit like Captain America not knowing who the frick Mister Sinister is until Rogue told him personally. Not only that, the primary issue for a couple of decades that they've stood shoulder to shoulder with supervillains like Magneto, so as far as anyone else is concerned, they're compromised and can't be trusted to even deal with him anymore the next time he has a ape out and tries to enslave humanity or destroy the world, or whatever the frick he wanted to do.
And it's not even the usual villain hero team up for the greater good shit either. Like the F4 have teamed up with Doom a lot of times but they don't usually have him over for dinner and try to defend his other shit.
And it's not even the usual villain hero team up for the greater good shit either. Like the F4 have teamed up with Doom a lot of times but they don't usually have him over for dinner and try to defend his other shit.
I mean yeah they did make magneto go from villian to hero then back to villian which is weird, but that is more because of the writers.
Yeah as I said the shared universe messes with the whole x-men story. The good mutants are still useful and didn't do anything bad in general though. They also fight non mutant threats.
One could argue that dr strange, the fantastic four or other powerful heroes could solo any superhuman threat and that there are no need for any other superheroes, but I think the shared.universe can be fun.
So what argument you make for the no need of the x-men can be said for the avengers or any other hero too.
So the main answer is that good mutants protect humanity from non mutant theats also and are good for humanity. The shared universe is a problem for all comic books.
the shared universe is fine. You just need to have the X-men more willing to cooperate. The Avengers and F4 are happy to vouch for them. Generally. J Jonah Jameson is famously PRO mutant. If the X-men stayed to clean up, sent the other super teams some emails about the villains they face and stopped calling themselves the same thing villains call themselves everything falls into place. The worst you get is some silliness about the Avengers not fighting Sentinels but that's easily written off the same way the X-men not fighting Ultron is.
>the shared universe is fine. You just need to have the X-men more willing to cooperate.
And X-Men writers to stop using other heroes as bad guys or establishment stooges in their books, and stop weaponizing the shared universe against those heroes by having the X-Men shrieking at them to not being there to save the X-Men from the most recent tragedy to befall them, even though they'd never tolerate the Avengers or any other team having a constant presence in their home anyway.
>The worst you get is some silliness about the Avengers not fighting Sentinels but that's easily written off the same way the X-men not fighting Ultron is.
And by not pretending the X-Men are constantly being hunted by Sentinels. Reminder that it was the Avengers who finally defeated the second version of the Sentinels back in the Silver Age.
AvX and stuff like that are part of stories to make them exciting. Conflicts even among heroes are needed to have good stories. But yeah okay, it might be just silly writing though.
>stopped calling themselves the same thing villains call themselves everything falls into place.
What do they call themselves? Mutant? They are mutants.
>What do they call themselves? Mutant? They are mutants.
Mutants is fine, even if it's not accurate. It's the whole "homosexual Superior" bullshit that people say the X-men need to stop calling themselves by, especially cause it's not even accurate nor even the pinnacle of human evolution as it's meant to imply
4 months ago
Anonymous
4 months ago
Anonymous
>homosexual Superior >Superior" "Your replacements" "The next step in evolution
Yeah those are weird
4 months ago
Anonymous
Captain America has also been referenced as the "next step in human evolution" or the "pinnacle of human development" throughout his history. It's still junk science because that's not how evolution works in either case, but one franchise has made it the official stance of the nominal heroes, and all the Naziesque implications that come with it, while the other has the titular character outright reject or feel uncomfortable being put on a pedestal like that, and absolutely abhors Nazis, it's schizo as hell.
4 months ago
Anonymous
True, but I never really thought about these references so hard. I always just thought that they say it because it sounds scientific in the case of homosexual superior or just cool in the case of captain america. It shows how strong he is.
But yeah in real life it would sound really weird.
4 months ago
Anonymous
It is, but its more about how each property ran with the premise, one pushing the idea of a superior race being kept down and denied their birthright by mud men and untermensch while the other constantly blares a "Frick Nazis, we should strive towards a better future together despite our differences," coming from the same company no less.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Captain America has also been referenced as the "next step in human evolution"
and Adam Warlock and the Eternals, Marvel is always repeating the same bullshit over and over and over, their worldbuilding is garbage
>What do they call themselves?
"Superior" "Your replacements" "The next step in evolution"
>Mutant? They are mutants.
Originally they were called mutants because they were meant to have been mutated by radiation. Today they're not "mutants" in any real world sense of the word, if that Marauders story about them existing before humans is true they may as well be aliens who just call themselves "the mutants".
4 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, the old origin was they were the result of nuclear age and just all the shit we've been pumping into the air. Children of the Atom. Remember that whole bag? Wasn't just a cool arcade game. The hilarious part is you can't be a mutant and a separate species. Mutant by it's very classification means you have to be part of the species you're mutating out of.
>what did they mean by this event? >Hero vs Hero events have been Marvel's business model since Civil War and it usually worked >It also pits different fanbases against each other online which helps build attention and interest for the events >Making fans angry has also been Marvel's business model for years, and they kept telling themselves it worked
They meant all of this more than they meant anything about the allegory at all. They rushed to doing a hero vs hero event with the Inhumans without taking the time to build up their fanbase first, and put them against a group with a huge fanbase that already had a persecution complex, and deliberately set out to make that fanbase mad.
No. 90% of the Xmen are pretty normal looking people. Kinda dumb for Cyclops to be preaching about prejudice and then not do anything for the society of sewer people who are frog monsters or made of goo. At the same time why do normal citizens of the marvel universe hate mutants, but love Spiderman or Luke cage who are practically indistinguishable?
>At the same time why do normal citizens of the marvel universe hate mutants, but love Spiderman
Because Spider-man spends most of the time swinging around saving people from muggers and rapists instead of telling the world that he's their future and blowing up buildings. Heroes like him and the Avengers are seen as aberrations. Victims of particular circumstances. Mutants basically go around telling the world that ever third person in your grocery lane might have a death touch.
Not really, but I guess it depends on writer. Since mutant isnt really a culture or really have anything shared in specific characteristics, it doesnt quite work for racism since its about the interplay of those things. If your similarity is just that you are notably different from the average person, you arent really a "race" properly meant with a focal point.
Might as well as be an allegory for people who are remarkably different from the human mean in any which way. That is to say an exceptionally ugly, smart, dumb, strong, rich, and poor coming together as an identity somehow simply because they are all "outliers" of some kind.
No. It's stupid as hell. One can argue that the humans are right to be scared. You have a mutant who can manipulate reality to killing a bunch of people with eye beams, or mind rape. One knows for a fact that someone one this board will end up asking the following:
>How come the Fantastic Four or Spider-man aren't ostracized like the mutants?
They were ostracized, but the difference the mutants and the Fantastic Four/Spider-Man is one actively works with community and taking responsibility for their actions, while another has an attitude that sums up, "Nah, it'll be fine."
this implies that mutants, or the X-Men specifically, were unwilling participants in this unspecified "fight", which is untrue
>they kill our children in the streets
Cassandra Nova, a mutant, killed 16 million mutants in the streets of Genosha using her wild sentinel; this is the most mutants any person ever has killed (Scarlet Witch depowered about a million of which a few thousand probably died)
>islands
The island of Genosha had a human population of 1 million; they were never heard from again after Magneto took over Genosha. The island itself was destroyed by Cassandra Nova (Charles Xavier's twin sister) and not by humans. Scott actually knows this as he was personally responsible for stopping Cassandra Nova's scheme.
After moving to Utopia, an island named after a fictional and fully unattainable state of perfect society, these highschool dropouts assumed they would be a real country; but they sent no ambassadors to any other country (would have been difficult since there were only supposedly 198 mutants left at the time, which is only 3 more than the number of countries right now), invited no countries to open embassies, grew nothing, manufactured nothing, exported nothing, and existed within US territorial waters (within the 3 mile limit) in the gulf of the Farallones.
Then they went to the UN in New York (where you're not allowed to bring weapons in) and made a point of how they'd brought weapons in (themselves) and could/would kill everyone if they weren't taken seriously.
(threatening every nation on earth is not what real countries do if they don't want to be invaded or isolated by sanctions; you don't choose to set up your country in someone else's territory without a good historical reason for doing so, and you sure as shit don't inflame tensions with that larger neighbor from day one)
>Avengers
The X-Men's weird island cult was trying to sacrifice a child to the space bird god in order to gain its powers and restore the mutant population. When they did gain its powers (as the Phoenix 5) they didn't restore the mutant population.
>next step in human evolution
this is laughably stupid and could only come from a highschool dropout who thinks he works as a teacher in his cult compound; it's Jim Jones tier bullshit
>we're everything they're not
they're heroes
>a shadow of our former selves
this is tautologically repeating the previous statement; the x-men are no longer heroes; any "fight" they were willing to participate in alongside the heroes they are no longer willing to participate in
Not really because it's a race allegory and the mutants are actually heroic sometimes instead of just being useless human refuse. If the idea is that it's supposed to get you to think about you shouldn't be prejudiced against others for what they're born with it does an extremely awful job at it because you're just reminded that subhumans with literal superpowers is a nightmare scenario.
>making the earth better is gambling >sustainable energy for everyone is gambling
frick the avengers, if they really thought there was a time table before phoenix lost it, they would have offered to help and get whatever peace on earth job done as soon as possible before the inevitable happens, THEN handle the emergency after everything was fixed
The entire conflict was stupid to begin with, and in a series where both sides were written more competently in-character, Captain America and Iron Man would have gotten the X-men immediately on the phone once the Phoenix showed up to get their help and Cyclops would have actually tried to explained his plan and logic behind it however asinine it was. But even then, if you aren't looking at the story from a meta perspective it's still a real hell of an ask for readers to side with the X-men over the Avengers for the sheer fact one side has concrete evidence that trying to deal with the power of the Phoenix Force is a terrible idea (i.e. it just blew up at least one if not several planets in its mad rush to get back to Earth and is not in a talking mood) vs the X-men's plan being to essentially sacrifice the girl they literally called the Hope for the mutants and just vaguely hope that the Phoenix Force aka editorial is in a more jolly mood than usual. Everything afterwards is just the X-men investing in bystander syndrome while the 'Phoenix Five' living out their power fantasies (and decidedly intentionally delaying reviving the x-gene in favor of getting petty revenge) while the Avengers flail around in doomsday mode since a quartet of deranged morons with the power of gods sticking crab legs onto whales for laughs, fusing the tectonic plates together, and summoning the forces of hell to drain the life force out of caped crusaders is...well, kind of on the same level as other supervillains they usually face.
...Still never should have been a comic in the first place, but frick me on how people can side with the X-men beyond brand loyalty considering both sides were written as belligerent morons but at least one was trying to stop the planet from being blown up.
(Granted, the fact that Rachel was sitting there and they didn't bother asking for her help containing the Phoenix is a massive point against the writing as well.)
Comics are pretty bad at addressing civilian casualties but frick, X-Men comics really are the worst of the worst when it comes to this. The Phoenix destroys several planets and Scott's reaction is essentially "Meh, who cares". Magneto's worldwide EMP blast that would realistically millions of people never gets brought up but we're still going to crone endlessly about what happened with Genosha (but not the part of Magneto trying to get rid of the nonmutant population) and "No More Mutants". Xorn putting a bunch of New York's populace into ovens gets nary a mention while you get little to no mention of any civilian injuries or casualties if a mutant reveals themselves to have a destructive power. At least Jean felt guilt for destroying a planet.
Back when mutants were less OP, yeah. Spider-Man or Thor were supposed to be able to solo OG5. Superpowers weren't that hard to get in MU. Morrison also introduced useless mutations as a case for majority. Such a thing would balance things out?
And that they are few mutants capable of doing more damage? Works as allegory for members of minorities with wealth and influence exceeding regular people.
The problem is that we are only following stand ins for the rich minorities. It is like trying to combat real life bigotry towards Muslims/Blacks/Jews/etc while solely focusing on its aristocracy. And yeah, such stories can have influential characters trying to do something about the situation of the rest of their group, but not as the sole focus.
>The problem is that we are only following stand ins for the rich minorities. It is like trying to combat real life bigotry towards Muslims/Blacks/Jews/etc while solely focusing on its aristocracy. And yeah, such stories can have influential characters trying to do something about the situation of the rest of their group, but not as the sole focus.
I have to agree with this, X-Men stories feel like following a small community of hot people who do nothing but argue dramatically and frick in their mansion.
Well that used to be the charm didn't it? A soap opera that was also a fantasy adventure story. It's the genre shift into political thriller that made it start to suck.
>allegory
Absolutely not, and it's a complete joke every time they try. Now, "applicability" as good old Tolkien might say, is a different matter. A good X-Man story can absolutely have something to say on subjects like the idea of persecuted minorities and the tense dynamic of trying to integrate while not losing one's sense of self versus violent, separatist revolution. But as an actual analog for any real group of people of any kind it's an abject and complete failure.
It only worked when Mutants were the only ones with super powers. When you look at the combined Marvel universe it makes very little sense when there are a gorillion other super powered fricks out there who, at times, are way more powerful and way more harmful than any X-Man is. Some of those aren't even human yet they get celebrated on Earth anyways.
Marvel needed to stop with the allegory and move on to other shit for Mutants a long time ago, but they seem to think that they still need to be viewed and treated like Blackfolk during colonial America
The massive elephant in the room that X-writers never address is that there ISN'T a gorillion other superpowered fricks out there. There are only a couple thousand Inhumans even after the fart cloud with maybe another thousand or two superhumans worldwide.
>openly call themselves "next step in human evolution", showing to be racial supremacists >sperg out at any cure, pretending their world-ending powers are just their "identity", even when there's a lot of mutants whose powers make their own life unbearable even without considering the prejudice aspect >any group of mutants immediately becomes a huge threat by accumulated power
honestly making them allegory to anything was a very stupid idea from the very beginning
It literally doesn't make sense. why are the super hero's who gain their superpowers later on in life any different than the mutants born with it, in the eyes of the public.
both are dangerous superpowers, there is literally zero reason for the people to love spiderman, but hate wolverine. So no it's just a cop-out to make some shitty minority allegory that holds no water.
>there is literally zero reason for the people to love spiderman, but hate wolverine
Actually, that one has a very obvious reason. Spider-Man can be an butthole, but he doesn't stab people in drunken or berserker rampages and then shrug it off like Wolverine does. He has public image problems, but he recognizes it's mostly his fault and not just the world out to get him unlike Logan who acts like the world being wary of him is everyone else's fault but his own.
If you want, that's kind of the crux of why the public loves superheroes but remains ambivalent to negative on the X-men in general. However stupid you feel the Avengers or FF can be, they're public figures who can't just treat the world as their playground. The Avengers repeatedly have to play the news cycle and deal with public optics, and Reed Richards admitted he turned the Fantastic Four into celebrities to at least give his family a shot at a decent life rather than be feared and scorned as freaks. The X-men generally hid away all their actions and most of their motives beyond "We'll protect you from the bad mutants, so don't question it further", which kept them and the students' privacy safe to let them live normalish lives outside of the spandex, but it means people can and will attribute anything to them, including the possibility that they're not heroes and they're just biding their time until they decide to take us over.
Even then, people don't really think of mutants and mutates in terms of when they got their powers, they think of it in terms of public saviors using their powers for good vs dudes that are talking of taking over humanity with their crazy super powers. That's why groups like the X-men confused the hell out of Marvel citizens for a while, it's like standing in two different pools at the same time while demanding to be treated like a normal dude.
>there is literally zero reason for the people to love spiderman, but hate wolverine
Are you kidding me? One is practically a self-flagellating mess if anyone dies or gets seriously hurt under his watch, and the other has a rep as a violent moron that stabs people in bar fights and is unapologetic about how much of a violent moron he is, mutant status aside, you picked a very poor example.
A lot of people hate The Hulk and loved Nightcrawler, though. The military would literally hound the jolly green giant day and night cause he wrecks every place he goes with his inhuman strength, while Nightcrawler would get the Beatles treatment since the UK didn't originally have an issue with mutants and he was on a public superhero team. Again, that's a poor example cause marvel citizens didn't give a damn about their origins, just with what they actually do.
Depends on the writer. Not being white myself I've always seen the very obvious flaws for it to be a stand in for racism. But I also hate the current Krakoa and Kirby more sci-fi approach to it. The Claremont balance between the two is the best way to make the allegory work.
I mean, as long as the allegory stays a meta narrative device/reference point then sure.
Are you asking whether it makes narrative sense for mutans to be hated and discriminated against or whether racial allegories make good narrative?
I’m asking does it work as a allegory for real world discrimination
Yes, because there will always be people who discriminate for no/petty reasons.
But mutants are discriminated against because many of them are legitimately dangerous to people’s health and lives. It’s complete bullshit to write that off as “petty/no reason”.
A person with darker skin isn’t inherently dangerous, a fricker with laser beam eyes is.
Every person around you is potentially dangerous to your health and life. Anyone with a car can run you over, crash into your house, kill your loved one. A crackhead with a sharp bit of wood can permanently cripple you or kill you.
Cyclops may be able to shoot lasers out of his eyes, but one bullet to the chest and he goes down same as anyone else.
Fricking midwit. Capeshit writers must thank god people like you exist.
You've made no point and now all you can do is lash out.
actually it was stated that Cyclops can potentially destroy the planet by just looking down and shooting, he can kill everybody at any moment, he's more dangerous than every nuke combined
>b-but that’s literally the same thing as crashing a car or having a knife!
Comic writers trying to overexplain and powerlevel wank their favorite characters in ways that never come up again until someone else needs to wank about how one character could beat another. Still doesn't change the fact that anyone with a gun could end Cyclops with one bullet and that him being a mutant is no more reason to fear and hate him than it is to hate anyone else who could make a pipe bomb, let alone any of the hundreds of thousands of other superpowered entities, magic users, aliens, etc that also exist in Marvel and seemingly don't deserve hate for the same reasons mutants do.
Oh I'm not denying that mutant exclusive in Marvel universe does not make sense due to mutates, inhumans, magic users and deviants all having their exact same powers and being able to reproduce just like them. I'm just saying that comparing it to real life hatred does not hold on.
The difference is in the nature of Cyclop's optic blasts versus a gun. If I tape a gun to my head it will only fire if it is loaded, chambered, the safety is off, and the trigger is pulled; it will not fire if someone bumps me and my glasses slip. In addition the bullet will follow a linear, ballistic arc until it hits something or loses enough momentum to fall, which, while dangerous, is very limited in the scale of harm it can do. If you bump Cyclops and his glasses slip, he will immediately emit a wall of force in an expanding cone that can reach double digit, if not more, yards wide capable of disintegrating a building. An uncontrolled optic blast isn't comparable to a gun, it's comparable to a pretty massive bomb.
The Trans equivalent in X-Men are the U-Men. They're villains.
Literally a major scene in X2.
It does come off as rather incongruous when they try to say people fear them unfairly and then also have crazy power level bullshit.
That's the whole problem with a racism metaphor were the oppressed have super power, hard to control and random super powers at that. It's totally justified to be afraid of that
taken in context, that could just be power wanking for "rightclops"
>if his glasses come off
if his glasses come of he can literally shut his fricking eyes. you should be asking why cyclops' eyelids are so OP
You're sort of missing the point. CYCLOPS himself can do a lot of things. This isn't specifically about Cyclops. But any number of mutants with powers LIKE Cyclops but without the backing of Xavier are going to do a lot of damage before anyone even picks up on that they exist. It only takes one kid with crazy powers to go wild and by the time anyone even knows to step in thousands could die. It is simply not possible to predict and contain the X-gene. Not everyone is gonna get the training he had. Not everyone is going to access to ruby quartz, which cannot be cheap btw, to contain their beams (Assuming they have beams and not some other power.) This is actually my biggest beef with what Scott did with that Phoenix shit and jump starting global mutation. He cannot protect the world from the damage mutants will cause and he cannot take responsibility for all the lives he changed.
The argument was that mutants should be feared and hated because they pose a threat to everyone around them all the time, which implies that the ability to do unexpected harm is a reason to unconditionally fear other people, who can also do life-ending harm to you without warning. If that fear is a justifiable reason to hate mutants, it's a reason to hate and fear everybody. Which is to say that the assertion that you might bump into a guy and he's actually a mutant with the power to explode with the force of an atomic bomb if bumped is so clownish and hyperbolic that it's no fricking basis for the kind of story they've been hamfistedly forcing through with X-Men for decades.
Then why do people want to ban guns?
Because they are gullible and have convinced themselves that they can make it somehow more illegal to kill people.
It becomes tiresome when all they do is whine.
The mutant allegory falls apart when you realize you have an actual reason to fear mutants considering how much power they have.
Plus it seems like overwhelming majority of mutants are evil, only a small few become X-Men and fight bad guys.
And the whole mutant power emerging scenario always seems to end up being some kid blowing up a house or mall somewhere. So most people in small towns across thew world have only seen one mutant in their lives, and it was a 13 year old blowing shit up.
You know it's not even the amount that are evil. It's that so few want to actually make a good example. You look at the Fantastic Four's Thing and he's a hero and idol of millions because he very publicly helps others. And as a result people love him. (Cept those palookas over on Yancy st.) But mutants? If they do help anyone it's with put upon resignation. They don't want to better the world. They want to keep a lid on things. They want to squander their powers while patting themselves on back. Even in public conferences they'll insist they're the future, basically agreeing with Magneto.
>they'll insist they're the future
wasn't there a moment a few years ago where Dr Doom or some other villain made a salient counter point to this that if this was true, then there would be far more futures where mutants came out on top, but nearly every future that has interacted with the present either had mutants either going extinct and humans coming out on top or still right where they were in the present?
It's the big problem with Moira X while written by Hickman. She's written to be this oracle because Hickman wants her to be a combo of a Bene Gesserit and Harry August for his Dune/Miracleman fanfic.
Yet, the very structure of the Marvel universe proves her wrong. Cable doesn't come from a timeline where mutants lost. He came one where Apocalypse won. Kang never shows up in her conversations etc, despite the fact that these should be major conversation pieces in a saga focused around creating a better future.
Even Gillen in the first story he wrote for Krakoa summed it up. Moira was a crappy source of information and was more useful as a "save point" than she was a source of information.
But again, it's the problem with Hickman premises. He starts off with this big idea and doesn't get "Oh, wait this doesn't work in the universe that I'm writing".
While we're at it mind if I bring up he completely invented a new powerset and abilities for Destiny?
Oh yeah. Destiny's character in HOXPOX was to be the constant thorn in Moira's side... despite the fact Destiny's powers explictly didn't work like that, neither did any precog in Marvel for that matter. Like the whole point of Days of Future Past, Cable, Bishop etc that even within the boundaries of X-Men's mythos, the future is never set and ever changing.
Yet, Hickman has it going on Dune rules because again, he wants to write Dune.
Not only that, but Destiny's powers are indicated to now work across timelines, which would make them even more useless than they were before.
Yeah, the literal original powers of Destiny was "I can see future(s) and I manipulate events to be akin to the future that I want". However, as Days of Future Past pointed out, there was a limit to her powers, because she thought she saw a great future for mutants assassinating Kelly whereas Future Kitty came from a future where that screwed everything up.
Meanwhile Hickman tries to do her as "I can see across all times and see the Golden Path" because this was a LOSH pitch, and Destiny was probably going to be Dream Girl or something, who could see the oncoming waves of retcons that would hit the franchise.
I think it is more along the lines of for every hero, you have ten villains. The X-Men are the good guy group but there are about 5 or 6 main evil mutant groups, and a lot of evil mutant individuals. So from a numbers perspective, majority of mutants are evil and want to conquer the world. The X-Men are just the outliers that are different.
Especially when you consider that this was mankind's first real encounter with mutants. I'd be a bit wary of them too.
Magnetism does not work like that.
If mutants were classified by power, like animal breeds, in terms of danger they represent to society at large, I'd like to see it. You have people like Storm and Iceman, Omega level, which is understandable. Forces of nature.
But then you have people like fricking Jean Grey and Emma Frost who, even before the Phoenix, are capable of pervasive, insidious manipulation and control. Jean especially.
>SAY NO TO MUTANTS!
>THEY WILL TURN YOUR SON GAY!
That being said, I'd like to see a villain group attempt something about them trying to do what humans did with wolves, to mutants. Cull out the undesirable powers and traits. Kind of like the X-gene suppression in Logan, but not to that extent.
Not render mutants extinct... but make the transition from human to mutant less chaotic and dangerous. It would fit in with human intentions being good but debatably flawed as man tries to play God.
Also frick Jean Grey with a Juggernaut fist. Bendis ruined her in two realities, the c**t.
No it doesn't, specially not in a setting with mutates, inhumans, half aliens, robots, the big foot etc etc
It get worse when neither people in real life nor people in the Marvel universe can tell what is a mutant and what ins't
like how they thought Beyonder was a mutant at first or found out Franklin Richard wans't one after years, how how a scientist after a few studies reached to the conclusion that Wolverine wans't a mutant or Quicksilver who was a very important mutant himself not being a mutant, you can't tell what is a mutant by looks, you can't tell what is a mutant by powers, DNA and other tests are constantly shown as useless by being wrong half of the time. X-men is a really poorly writen story
>It get worse when neither people in real life nor people in the Marvel universe can tell what is a mutant and what ins't
You can tell because they keep loudly telling you, and most of them wear costumes with Xs all over them.
but how can THEY tell in the first place
Mutants know they're mutants because Xavier or Magneto (or someone working for one of them) inevitably shows up to tell them they're mutants and try to recruit them.
Everyone else knows they're mutants because they keep telling everyone they're mutants
>kill people with out control powers
>destroy entire city blocks in meaningless brawls with rival mutant factions
>endanger all life on Earth just for chance to impose mutancy onto normie humans who might have otherwise had happy normal lives
>fight to protect mass-murdering terrorists from facing "human justice"
>Keep crying "You just hate us because we're mutants"
Oh yeah. We just know.
All of those stems back to decades of writers contributing all sorts of plot twists, marketing/branding changes, retcons, reintroducing legacy lore, trying to get around the comics association, "soft" reboots, etc. It's all become continuity spaghetti that continues to pile up today.
On their own yes, not side by side with the rest of the marvel characters.
It's dumb as frick for every possible conceivable reason.
The existence of open carry makes the idea of humans being afraid of mutants because their powers are dangerous obsolete, like this is America people literally walk around with guns holstered on their belts.
The gay metaphors are dumb as frick too like being gay is lame and having super powers is cool like no parent would be ashamed their kid could fly it's like Toy Story or Cars it literally doesn't work when you think about it for more than a second.
>The existence of open carry makes the idea of humans being afraid of mutants because their powers are dangerous obsolete, like this is America people literally walk around with guns holstered on their belts.
Unless you're in a blue state. Which banned open carry because blacks started to carry rifles and shotguns around. And California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment to keep the colored folk from having guns at all.
>If you think that people who are blasting laser beams out of their eyes, who can read and control your mind or give you cancer by looking at you are dangerous you’re a bigoted chud and it’s the exact same thing as hating someone for the color of their skin
>oh and it’s also something about gay people I guess but quiet now, Magneto is once again murdering hundreds of people in one of his terrorist attacks
What about the mutants with shitty and/or unintentionally harmful powers?
It still doesn’t work. Either you’re equating minorities with some hideous slimy frogman or a girl whose “superpower” is having four ears that fart, which is simply insulting because you’re insinuating minorities are disgusting, or you still have legitimately dangerous characters and it doesn’t matter if the guy calls a tsunami on people by accident or intentionally, he’s still fricking dangerous and kills people.
If mutants were real, everyone would want them locked up or killed and for a very good reason. Would you risk having some fricker like Xavier or some bulletproof pyromaniac or invisible rapist walking around? Or someone who can turn you into ash if his glasses break or if he gets angry?
They need the cure asap, I don't care what the supermodels say.
>if you try to cure the guy who’s a walking pipe bomb you’re a racist bigot because the literal demi-god said being a mutant was cool
Combining a clunky civil rights/gay rights allegory on top of a puberty allegory, while having characters openly say shit like "we're supposed to be the next step in human evolution" just makes the whole message so muddled that it shouldn't even be written. It's not saying anything. It's vaguely imitating the gestures of stories that try to say something about civil rights, but has no idea what the frick any of it means.
Capeshit in a nutshell. Moving beyond children’s stories about costumed cowboys beating up evil gorilla scientists was a mistake.
This is correct, X-Men peaked in the early 90's with the cartoon series. Bright colors and slightly dark concepts that didn't need to be thought out. The X men shouldn't represent a minority or ideology but at best hormonal teenagers who think old people are wrong about everything.
Because it was never supposed to be that. Mutants were created because Stan didn't want to come up with new backstories so he gave them a common origin.
The fact that the X-Men were students and that their powers manifested around puberty was on purpose and it worked for resonating well with younger audiences in a very, very symbolic way. That idea of trying to navigate the world, figuring out where you belong, clashing with a society run by older, more ignorant people. It's not great, mind, but it works for simple capeshit comics as long as they don't get too full of themselves... which is exactly what happened and how we are now dealing with racial supremacist ethnostate x-men who worship themselves as Gods.
It didn't really work to be fair, the X-men only really turned huge when it turned into the stupid mess of contradictory half baked ideas that make no sense but are great to clickbait like being an allegory of every single thing that ever existed
>the X-men only really turned huge when it turned into clickbait
That old 1980s clickbait.
The allegory works for simple stories. Once they made it load-bearing, then you get into situations where the audience goes "Well, that's not how majority-minority relations or gay stuff REALLY works."
Once the audience gets a sense that the X-Men aren't playing by the rules of their own metaphor, then the metaphor feels like a cheat.
Instead the real world adapted the victimization of the X-Men, strange.
They should of just made Wolverine, Sabertooth and Nightcrawler characters from Spiderman.
This is a good point. It reminds me of God Loves, Man Kills; I recently read that story while working through the Claremont years and it dawned on me that it was a small island of direct social commentary surrounded by fun story arcs that basically had little directly to do with the usual Mutant hand-wringing. I think it's fine to dip into the allegory once-in-a-while via tongue-in-cheek stuff like the Sentinels, but I think the characters would be more fun and likable (an important quality for heroic protagonists in a superhero comic book) if they spent as much or more time fighting Sauron in the Savage Lands, or going to Murderworld, etc.
Any time it goes longer than an issue or two I can't shake the feeling that "the allegory" doesn't even make sense, and everyone asks the same questions as to why other heroes don't face the same treatment and it's a futile, roundabout shitfest of arguing and bringing in contemporary politics. It chokes all of the fun out of comics and out of the characters and I don't understand why Marvel is so addicted editorially to making their recognizable big-name characters act like dickheads instead of having them do marketable and heroic shit that would probably sell a few books. The whole Marvel universe seems like a terrible place where everyone can barely tolerate each other (and that's the heroes), I can get that outside so why would I want to read about it?
Yeah. Claremont himself only used it a few times in X-Men and it was only in the 90s that they ramped up the whole "Mutants=Gays" with shit like the Legacy Virus.
The big problem is that you also get writers like Morrison, Hickman etc who think that they can "outsmart it" and dedicate whole chunks of their work to trying to be clever about the whole thing, with Morrison seeming to realise about halfway through with Riot how dumb it was to make the X-Men about the metaphor, with Quire and Xorneto's arcs basically being on these empty buttholes who spout bullshit about as "master race" but have no idea what the frick they're actually talking about.
Hickman's run was based around "breaking it" by turning the X-Men into a discount Miracleman/Dune story and unlike Morrison, he didn't realise halfway through that his ideas were idiotic and instead tried to keep doubling down.
>I think it's fine to dip into the allegory once-in-a-while via tongue-in-cheek stuff like the Sentinels
It's always worth remembering that the first Sentinels story is a 3 issue story. A few pages of anti-mutant panic in the first part leads to the creation of the Sentinels, but as soon as they're activated they break their programming and try to take over the world, while the X-Men fight alongside the army to stop them. The bulk of the story wasn't about race, oppression or persecution, it was a stock science fiction plot about man's creations turning against him, and the later Silver Age Sentinels stories followed a similar template. Then in the 80s most Sentinel stories involved Sentinels that were built by the Hellfire Club. I don't know why modern Marvel pretend the X-Men spent their whole lives being constantly hunted by Government-run Sentinel death squads, like if the first arc of Ultimate X-Men went on forever.
>it was only in the 90s that they ramped up the whole "Mutants=Gays" with shit like the Legacy Virus.
The 90s books were definitely adding gay tropes into the black and israeli oppression tropes that the 80s books had already been doing, with the Legacy Virus as an AIDS allegory that didn't really work because there was no possible way to protect yourself from being infected, and things like Iceman's dad disapproving of him being a mutant. People willfully misread the allegory to feed their theories about Bobby being gay, but it was just him getting these moments because few of the X-Men of the time had parents who were alive to disapprove of them.
>Morrison seeming to realise about halfway through with Riot how dumb it was to make the X-Men about the metaphor
I don't know that he did realize, his Magneto story came afterwards and is all about how far he's moved the narrative and evolved the metaphor that mutant villains like Magneto didn't have a place anymore.
Morrison's run is, in many ways, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even beyond the "how do, fellow youth of today," found in his pitch, he really failed to grasp social and group dynamics. If anything a burgeoning mutant subculture and identity would reinforce a position like Magneto's.
Quire was a massive misfire on Morrison's part. Everything about him is set up as a joke and he appears so briefly that there is zero actual connection to anything except the one part that Morrison focused on - his radicalization. It's the only thing interesting about him and the only thing done with effort so of course people are going to latch onto it. And it doesn't really help that he's a deconstruction of a power fantasy because in a book filled with power fantasies the only rational response from the reader to the author saying that you'd actually be a posing loser that everyone hates is to tell them to frick off with that bullshit. Morrison even does the deconstruction twice through Beak. You're no going to be one of the powerful, beautiful people, you're going to be an ugly little freak who gets their shit stomped in for trying to play hero. And also Fantomex for the hat trick. While I don't like Quire, not under anyone's pen, I'd take Quire played straight and sincerely over Grant's tsk-tsk'ing.
Beak was pretty Rad in Exiles
>Morrison's run is, in many ways, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even beyond the "how do, fellow youth of today," found in his pitch, he really failed to grasp social and group dynamics.
Despite literally opening his run with a history lesson about early humans replacing and wiping out the Neanderthals, Morrison finishes his run by blaming Sublime as the reason people hate mutants. It's like he's suddenly forgotten he's spent the entire run having mutants constantly talking about how they are the future and are going to replace humans, or someone told him to get with the program and get back to the official narrative that racism, prejudice and fear of the other are all completely irrational and make no sense, even when they have super powers and are open in their intent to replace you, so here's a parasitic supervillain mind controlling normies into hating mutants.
>If anything a burgeoning mutant subculture and identity would reinforce a position like Magneto's.
Whether it's self-inserting X-gays who literally think they're mutants, or any given racial group, there's always a lot of people who absolutely want the isolationist ethnostate for us and only us, but also the worryingly vocal groups who really want the race war so long as their side gets to win.
>Quire was a massive misfire on Morrison's part. Everything about him is set up as a joke and he appears so briefly that there is zero actual connection to anything except the one part that Morrison focused on - his radicalization.
Wasn't the final step in his radicalization just learning he was adopted? He kept talking like he'd rejected Xavier's teachings and had some new and interesting ideology, but he's just a super-powered school shooter lashing out at everyone. Which is the point, but somehow later writers bought into his delusions of having anything of value to say.
They being hated along with super-powered people in the 6160 Ultimate is going to make more sense than the 616 counterpart.
1 second on the internet will tell you racism and homophobia are alive and well.
Silence, Black person homosexual.
In small doses sure. It comes across as people feeling like outsiders when they just want to be accepted and fit in. In large doses it comes off as perpetual whining and constant use of the victim card.
>we're supposed to be the next step in human evolution!
See this is why nobody likes mutants. Even Ignoring the laughable misunderstand of that's not how evolution works it's very much a "super villain" ideology and is a self declared imposition of personal worth and announcement that you're not the same species you want to live alongside with. Evolution means you had something that gave you an edge in your environment and thus didn't die long enough to frick. And given how many mutations are detrimental either by nature of their power or how they make you a big threat, they can just as easily be considered DEvolutions if they present a disadvantage.
>we're the next step of human evolution
Motherfricker, the people with your condition don't even qualify, most of them have utterly inconsequential mutations like having purple skin or an ear on their ass to being able to shoot lasers from their eyes, or worse, ending up like Beak. That's not a next step, that's a clambering attempt just to keep yourself upright.
I think the astounding part is that they try to say all mutants are the same race despite how radically different their mutations really are.
Remember when it was revealed that all mutants were just the result of some aliens fricking around with monkey genes millions of years ago, or some shit?
Or in Ultimate where they were a result of secret government experiments?
No, because they're lead by a brain-rapist who keeps fricking with people's brains. The world would never be able to live with knowing psychics walk around because all it takes is one psychic terrorist for the world to end in a nuclear holocaust.
It doesn't help that mutants want to be free to abuse their powers on top that. Telepaths aren't held to accountability or privacy, many of the mutants we see rather openly flaunt their powers.
I would love if someone were to call a "good" telepath a brain-rapist to their face, and see how quickly they prove them right.
Didn't they have a way to demutate people with the X-gene or whatever it's called?
And wasn't there some weird virus that makes everyone hate mutants? Someone mentioned that it was something in Grant Morrison's run.
And to answer your question, no it doesn't work. Magneto is a man with a machinegun who is constantly gunning down people. No shit you should be afraid of him.
>Didn't they have a way to demutate people with the X-gene or whatever it's called?
There have been several cures through the years and the X-men always reactive in the most extreme possible way. NOOOOO CHAINSAW HANDS JOHNNY CAN'T BE CURED! HOW DARE HE WANT TO LIVE A NORMAL LIFE! HE'S NOT WORTHY OF BEING AN X-MAN LIKE US!! AS SOON AS I'M DONE GETTING BLOWN BY PSYCHIC PORN STARS IM GONNA SHUT THEM DOWN!!
>And wasn't there some weird virus that makes everyone hate mutants? Someone mentioned that it was something in Grant Morrison's run.
You're either talking about the Legacy Virus which was a 90s thing and more of a not very subtle AIDs allegory or the sentient bacteria Sublime who is infecting people to be racist and one of the dumbest things ever written.
>Sublime
>As mutantkind proved immune to Sublime, it was hinted that the very hatred and fear of mutants was caused by Sublime itself. But the bacteria took more direct actions in order to ensure that mutant population would be held in check, if not exterminated, in order to keep it from becoming the dominant species of the planet.
So all the mutant genocides isn't just Mutants being a failed species but getting eternally BTFO'D by Just Some Guy. How is this an allegory on anything but "Darwin wins in the end"?
feels like Legacy Virus served literally no purpose other than to make Beast take the L for spending years doing research and trying to cure it with nothing to show for it
I understand the intent and I don't disagree with it. But most understand that average people don't want morality anvils dropped on their head.
Like we know, racism is bad. We don't need it drilled deep in because some cops can't keep their gun in their holsters.
yeah but young people and/or kids DO need morality anvils dropped.
When it come to race and sexual identities, I can see the allegory working
Not so much gender though
What is the trans equivalent for the X men?
A human who wants to be a mutant?
A mutant who wants to be human?
Why does mutants even need to be an allegory to racism when there are people with mutations that suffer prejudice in real life? That's fricking dumb, it's a fricking dumb idea that made X-men a really dumb comic.
Just like Marvel retconning the meaning of the world mutant to no longer mean a literal mutant but some kind of subspecies or something that biologically makes no sense even though the early comics straight up say they are literal mutants and Magneto wanted to use radiation to create more mutants.
Probably something like a mutant who pretends to be human, but then comes out as "their true self" and then "transition" to being an out and proud mutant full time, including taking on an X-men type name.
Didn't they do that too? Have the X-Men pretend like their codenames were their "truenames" and that calling them by their human names was some kind of microaggression?
God that's so cheesy, and also feels like it clashes with the typical superhero trope of having to balance the Persona and who you are as a person.
Not letting Joe Schmo be entirely sublimated by Super Eon the Sestortrix.
Or whatever his superhero name is.
Not exactly, the current era has them going extra nuts by calling bouts of sense as "human," usually said with a tone of derision and disgust, because they're above such considerations.
On the flipside, there was that whole kerfuffle with Havok preferring to be identified by who he was rather than just as a mutant got a lot of idpol whackjobs super upset.
Fricking Muggas
Same type of freaks who want to be defined by their sexuality, because they lack a personality.
Well there is an actual transgender X-man character now.
But there are non cismutants out there called Mutates, Mimic, Deadpool, X-23 and her clones, Typhoid Mary might be one or she might be an actual mutant, a bunch of characters from the Savage Land and Cloak and Dagger. These are characters whose X-gene activation didn't happen naturally but as a result of outside factors
The X-Men, because they're more evolved, tend to accept these characters as mutants without question except for Deadpool who they dislike personally.
There are also characters who use MGH mutant growth hormone to give themselves temporary powers, mostly generic mooks to act as fodder for fight scenes, the deepest story told with this was a group of humans turned themselves into the O5 X-Men in an attempt to get famous, but a smarter writer could use this as a drag parallel.
So the mechanism and idea exists in universe but no one had told that story.
Feilong of Orchis was born to loving mutant parents, but resented not having powers. He lied about parents being abusive and resents mutants for colonizing Mars.
There have been several cures, but none of them permanently depower or were part of a sinister agenda.
Sublime makes most humans hate mutants according to Morrison.
>or were part of a sinister agenda.
Which is fair enough to stop, but you don't have to throw out the cure just because it's origins were sinister.
>What is the trans equivalent for the X men?
Ex-Men
he forgot the part were every time they try to do anything, immediately become a cult and decide to take over the world because humans don't deserve it and thus their laws don't apply to them, etc. I mean I would be so fricking happy if they put all the mutants in a fricking spaceship and threw them into their own planet, but I bet they would find a way to keep coming back to earth to show how great they are and how humans should worship them.
You know, the more I think about it, the more this image makes sense. I'd also like to point out that is it really ALL OF HUMANITY hunting mutants or just a small group.
Bringing it up again, Symbiotes are being hunted in the current Venom run. And all due to just ONE POLITICIAN. Just who is pushing all the anti-mutant legislation anyway?
>Symbiotes are being hunted in the current Venom run
But there's only like SIX of them?
And yet there's a whole military force out to get them. All due to the influence of just one guy. Sure, they want to turn them into weapons but the point still stands. Only one guy and you have enough resources to take down a small country.
So pray tell, what butthole politician is pushing all the anti-mutant legislation? It sure as shit ain't all of them or they would have never lasted this long.
In the past,it was Senator Kelly. Currently Orchis has subverted and manipulated governments worldwide to carry out mutant genocide.
So, of the being still currently active, it's the sentient bacteria, Sublime, and sentient AI i.e. the Orochis.
Did the X-men do anything about Sublime during the Orgy island era or was that plotpoint just memoryholed?
>Did the X-men do anything about Sublime during the Orgy island era or was that plotpoint just memoryholed?
NOPE! The X-men know full well that there's a sentient hunk of mold making everyone act stupid and they would still rather seethe about humans.
So...Why did they even invent the Orochis? Why not just use the pre-established villain who is responsible for all the "bigotry" and "hatred"?
Rhetorical question, they forgot about it or never knew.
To be fair, the writers who followed Morrisson never bothered with Sublime, as far as I know.
Orchis came about because mutants actually WON in one timeline and saved the universe. The Dominion sent Omega Sentinel back to the present to destroy Krakoa, kill all organic life and prevent the mutants from winning.
>To be fair, the writers who followed Morrisson never bothered with Sublime, as far as I know.
To be fair that's sort of the point. Sublime is the key to all their issues. They deal with him they can go back to living normal lives were the worst they get is the occasional stink eye.
Sublime was the worst part of Morrison's run, so I don't blame em.
The irksome part of the stuff that writers want to follow with Morrison is Quire.
Quire is unironically one of the best deconstructions of X-Men power fantasies, where his whole thing is that despite being this uber powerful mutant he's still a weak chinned nerd who spouts all this anti-establishment bullshit he's read in magazines but is essentially just a loser who to be viewed as smart and the girls he crushes on to look at him with something other than pure disgust.
He was the punchline of Superduperman, that a creep with a lot of power is still a creep.
Then along came writers like Aaron, Percy etc who went "Oh my god, a guy who spew anti-establishment bullshit, misunderstood and uber powerful? He's literally me!" and turned Quire into the fantasy he was meant to mock.
and Orchis is just a group of random people possessed/brainwashed by the Sentinels to convince the goverments to build more robots
>there's only like SIX
The frick didn't Eddie go around murdering the rest of the symbiotes when he had Toxin? That would make Venom, Carnage, Scorn, and... idk if Toxin is still alive. Now that I think about it, Scorn shouldn't even exist, symbiotes are supposed to only have one fricking kid iirc.
Off the top of my head, the current run has:
King in Black Eddie Brock who doesn't need a symbiote.
Dillan Brock who has the Venom Symbiote.
Sleeper who is mindjacking its host, Hank Hensley, due to writing frick up. One they freely admit so we just nod and accept it.
Bren Waters who has the Toxin Symbiote.
Normie Osborn who has Red Goblin Symbiote.
Black Widow who has a symbiote now and is just called "Widow".
Flash Thompson who is Anti-Venom.
And they recently brought back Carnage in his own series.
So yeah, eight symbiotes active and they got a government douchebag hunting them with a small army.
I am so, so glad I checked out after Remender's Agent Venom. Everything after that has been utter garbage.
I miss us
reminds me of when nightcrawler came back and beast hugged him too hard
It's become too mixed bloated and sensational to really work well anymore. Mutants aren't just a vague other but more several very specific others that don't necessarily work in relation with one another, Mutant heroes have their hands too messy to represent the virtue of their allegory, Mutant history too twisted and convoluted to reference real life minorities, like I understand that allegories don't need to be a 1:1 nor sympathetic characters perfect paragons but....X-men can be real pieces of shit.
there's at least two mutants capable of rewriting reality itself entirely, not counting whoever is currently using the phoenix force
Mutants should either be worshipped as gods or have already erased anyone that doesn't.
it can't work as an allegory for anything as long as powers on that scale exist. It's not possible to write a coherent story as long as things like that exist.
Cape comics want to have cool universal powers that can change the universe but constantly come up with contrived reasons as to why a status quo suspiciously similar to our own must be preserved at all cost because it somehow is worth protecting (it's not).
>there's at least two mutants capable of rewriting reality itself entirely
Afair there are 4 in the 616(mainstream) universe: David Haller, Mad Jim Jaspers, James Braddock and Clyde Wyncham
Franklin Richards and Wanda used to be but who knows when they will be retconned into mutants again, Beyonder turned himself into one at some point as well.
Is Matthew Malloy a reality warper?
I can't wait for marvel to retcon Ugly John into a mini living tribunal
>Franklin Richards and Wanda used to be but who knows when they will be retconned into mutants again
Anon, take a long hard look at what mutants were to Marvel when those characters were created, and look at what mutants are now. Neither of these characters was ever meant to be part of some poorly-written minority metaphor, it was just an excuse for why they had powers. Just leave them as they are, and have the X-Men franchise leave them alone, they don't belong there.
>Beyonder turned himself into one at some point as well.
Bendis tried to retcon the Beyonder's origin as "a mutant Inhuman", everyone else ignored this, the Beyonder has had at least three more different origins since then.
Technically Moira can do it too, she just has to do it the long way...
>mutants were conceived as an allegory for israeli persecution
>then it was changed to racism
>then it was changed to homophobia
>now it's a nebulous persecution allegory that can be a stand-in for basically anything
The fact that mutants are interpreted so liberally makes me think they were never a good allegory to begin with.
before the israeli persecution and zionism it was literal mutants based on Doom Patrol
Doom Patrol aren't mutants, how it could it be based on that. It's was just a lazy origin idea turned into a less lazy idea later on.
Mutants where never meant to be any ONE thing, or if they were it something a bit broader. Mutants represent the OTHER. The outcasts. The loners. The strange the weird the different. Anyone who ever felt like nobody understood them. Anyone who ever felt like their ideas and views didn't mesh with anyone around them. It's as much a matter of youthful revolution as it is a racial allegory. It's as much a racial allegory as it is a matter of sexual discovery. It's a means to explore who and what we are and all the whos and whats there are.
>Mutants where never meant to be any ONE thing
Mutants were meant to be a plot device because Lee didn't want to write 50 different origin stories.
That's moronic.
>Uhh they're supposed to represent ALL minorities! They're totally the exact same! Which is why we're going to hamfist in some high school essay tier allegories whatever latest winner of the opression olympics are!
You're missing the point a bit. I actually agree that it's been over played and over done to an insufferable degree. But the point was that ANYONE should be able to get something out of the book because the allegory is broad and vague and more importantly, just subtext.
no, YOU are moronic, because the x-men actually does bring up different forms of oppression. shadowcat says the n word, dani moonstar is regarded as mentally ill by xavier, cannonball is working class, wolfsbane was in an abusive relationship with her evangelical parents, karma had ptsd from being a refugee from the vietnam war, morlocks are lumpenproletariat while hellfire club is the evil of the ruling class not identifying with mutant but identifying with economic class
>x-men have no depth
those are certainly words
Yeah, sure, and every single one of those things you listed is accompanied by having supernatural powers, so you’re using power as an allegory for powerlessness. Right, everyone is moronic but you.
>genetic mutation and evolution is supernatural
>jam pack it all in to one comic, not years of hundreds if not thousands of comics with different characters and scenarios and exposition
i rest my case
That all sounds very poetic, but in practice it just means the X-Men have no real depth, they can't just be everything and anything at once. Like other anons said, it works in simple superhero stories as a bit of flavor, but the whole thing falls apart if you make it the main draw and try to explore it in detail.
The various others don't experience prejudice the same way. For instance, mutant powers manifesting at puberty works great for the sexual discovery allegory, but it's pretty tacky if you think of it as race. Nobody discovers they're black at 13.
I don't disagree. And I didn't mean it to be especially poetic. I'd argue the X-men certainly have depth but it's out of character and history not specific allegory. Let me try to put it different, as I may not be conveying myself like I intended. The X-men have two principles.
1. The whole fighting for a world that fears and hates them is effectively their "With great power" shtick. It's only meant to give them a reason to be good guys and go fight bad guys with the vague hope that the world will eventually accept them.
2. Being different means anyone who's felt different can grok on. It's not really meant to be anything especially complex or deep. Just some typical marvel every man business. Sort of like how people latched on to Peter Parker because he was for all intents a normal dude who didn't fit in.
It's moronic for "sexual discovery" too. Some teenage girl waking up and deciding she's a dyke isn't going to blow up a fricking city block.
And yet people against them act like that's what they are about to do. So it actually works that way.
I think that Carey had the right way forward for all of it in the 21st Century when minorities could actually show up. Rather than link it to a particular minority group, turn the metaphor into a story about change.
All of his stuff, Children of the Vault etc, is very much based in the simple sci-fi idea in the first Sentinel story. That change is ultimately inevitable and what must be decided is what that change will actually look like.
I mean on a more personal scale, you can mix it with the "outsider" narrative that discussed, but I would also say highlight that its goddamn sci-fi stuff.
I would say highlight similarities between RL shit but also highlight that it's not a 1:1.
Also, just ditch the Hickman shit of Krakoa, because holy frick that was the dumbest status quo that the X-Men have had, because Hickman thought he was being a big brained worldbuilder and it just came off as "What /misc/ thinks minorities are" (which makes sense as Hickman is a conspiracy nut)
CotV stuff pisses me off because they're presented as this ontological evil race that must be destroyed when they're basically Magneto's ideology applied by a different group.
Has anyone ever point out that this just creates an alt-timeline and won't actually change that specific future?
You don't even have to go that far. Everything is the next step of evolution, mutants don't breed true nor do they breed to type, evolution is based on reproductive success so an X-gene is already at a disadvantage to evolutionary pressure because it overwhelmingly kicks in when a mutant reaches the start of sexual reproductive capability and is more likely to have zero effect or be an active detriment to reproductive success, and evolution is reactive without regard to anything other than reproductive success. From an evolutionary standpoint a woman whose mutation gave her an 80 IQ that pops out 6 kids is more successful than a woman who can control electricity that has 2 kids.
>Has anyone ever point out that this just creates an alt-timeline and won't actually change that specific future?
Marvel doesn't have fixed rules on how time travel works. What you're talking about is something Mark Gruenwald tried to enforce as a rule back in the 80s and early 90s, books he wasn't editing weren't forced to comply back then, and nobody's played along with it since he died. Time travel works however the current writer says it works, and you just have to accept that.
Oh Morrison absolutely did. Riot is literally a story about how it doesn't matter if you're this uber powerful mutant, you aren't suddenly better or more enlightened. Morrison's metaphor rips quite a lot off Ellis' Counter X stuff, where Ellis literally has a bunch of mutants go "We want something different from what Xavier/Magneto want" and going into the fact that there are all different agendas/wants.
>CotV stuff pisses me off because they're presented as this ontological evil race that must be destroyed when they're basically Magneto's ideology applied by a different group.
Welcome to Hickman's X-Men, where everything was boiled down to "Us vs Them", with no room so self-reflection.
What pisses me off the most is that in Carey's run, despite being around for a little while, Carey highlights that the COTV are capable of change and adaptation, with one of them even becoming an ally to the X-Men. Hell, on Carey Omega Sentinel became one of my favourite characters under Carey's pen and she was screwed too because Hickman wanted his "race war" story.
What irks me the most that I know exactly what the finale of Hickman's X-Men run looked like. After going into an entire run of how the X-Men are doing Us vs Them, with genes replacing ideaology, Hickman's finale would be about how actually it's really bad to think like that and here's a new way forward... despite the fact that prior to him, the X-Men weren't teaming up with fricking Apocalypse and Sinister because they were mutants.
>Welcome to Hickman's X-Men, where everything was boiled down to "Us vs Them", with no room so self-reflection.
At the risk of segue:
That is modern politics.
That's not a segue that's the exact issue.
Maybe, but the discussion here is the comics themselves, not the politics and current social attitudes leading to the circumstances that created them.
In a couple ways, it's interesting to see art reflect society, but in another it's a little concerning to see that this is the amount of polarization present in discourse.
While bipartisan attitudes have existed for a long time, the degree to which we're divided along party lines here in the united states is one that hasn't been seen for some time. Jimmy Carter said in a 2016 interview that he felt we were at an "all time low" as far as division in politics, excepting only before the Civil War. The only thing I disagree with was in that same interview he felt we were, "bound to get better." In point of fact he also said something similar in 2012.
Indeed after Obama was re-elected president, several states were threatening secession.
Again this is all a bit of a segue, but since then things have become very divided in the United States. The next coming election does not look good for changing that for the better. Things are probably going to get worse before they get better I'm afraid.
Modern?
The problem if Hickman was intending that is it's a moral we've all heard before by pretty much every single X-Men writer, and none of them had to torch the franchise and characters or warp the entire MU to say it. Also yeah, it's deeply fricked that one of the X-Men, and a major victim of the Sentinels in her own right, got completely bodyjacked by an outside intellect and no one gives a shit.
>The problem if Hickman was intending that is it's a moral we've all heard before by pretty much every single X-Men writer, and none of them had to torch the franchise and characters or warp the entire MU to say it.
Welcome to Hickman. Seriously, that's what he does. He warps franchises and characters to tell this grand epics that amount to sweet burger all.
His Avengers run ends with Captain America and Iron Man being crushed by a Hellicarrier screaming how much they hate each other as the world burns around them, with Doom being the multiverse's saviour because he's "Just so good"
>Also yeah, it's deeply fricked that one of the X-Men, and a major victim of the Sentinels in her own right, got completely bodyjacked by an outside intellect and no one gives a shit.
Oh yeah, its fricked.
The most fricked up shit is that Hickman doesn't even explain how and why it happens. Prior to this, Karima explictly had all her sentinel parts ripped out off her and was living life as a normal person/ally of the X-Men. Then he goes "Actually she was always evil!" in Inferno.
It's like him turning Moira into a mutant who was manipulating everything behind the scenes. Hickman's whole thing was erasing any sort characters/mythos where the X-Men proved that lines were not divided by genes, but rather by ideaology so he could get his race war bullshit.
His Fantastic Four was decent. He at least got it right that Reed does care more abut his family than anything else.
>49 attributes
anon this could apply to many different comics besides avengers and x-men
Call me idealistic, but that's bullshit and a cop out that Hickman would probably use for "I am so smart".
Oh yeah, Morrison was trying to follow up on Ellis' Counter X stuff and the reason Ellis worked is that he was interacting (and fricking) younger people. That being said, I do still enjoy it.
Honestly, I love Morrison Quire, for the reason that you dislike him.
Morrison doesn't just go "Oh, he's dumb because I say so". Riot spends the whole arc systematically showing that Quire is a fricking dork with delusions of grandeur.
I love the fact that there is nothing to him, his tragic backstory is literally being told by his parents "You're adopted", and his radicalization is because he wants to be seen as important/special and laid. The whole point of radical Quire is that he's spouting off dumb shit and he has nothing to back it up. He can't even comprehend/consider the most basic challenges to his bullshit because he's just spouting shit he's read out of magazines. Much as I hate Morrison Magneto, I like the punchline to Riot is Quire being killed by his hero pretending to give him enlightenment.
I sorta think that Beak works, because he's the Anti-Quire. You're absolutely right, he gets his shit stomped etc but at the same time, he shows more genuine compassion/ability to grow then Quire ever did, with the whole last bit of Morrison's run hinting that Beak became a great hero. Hell, despite the fact he's ugly as sin, he still finds friendship and love, which contrasts Quire's posse which is held together by barely held contempt for others and drugs.
In fact, I think Exiles did the better than Morrison with the Hyperion arc showing that Beak may not have had the body of a supermodel X-Man, but he had the spirit of a real hero
The whole thing of Riot was as much as it was the Omega Gang fricking things up, it was a community of freaks finding friendship and that rebellion doesn't have to be this cool/badass thing.
Beak's just a really nice guy.
>his tragic backstory is literally being told by his parents "You're adopted",
That's the kind of shit that completely demolishes your worldview, how you see yourself, and how you relate to the world. Imagine having your perception of self get a giant gaping whole punched through it while completely lacking any sort of support network at a time where you're emotionally and psychologically fragile and trying to figure out yourself. That's not a joke or a deconstruction, that's a fricking tragedy. And if Morrison thinks it's bullshit then it's rich coming from a man who used a 6 year long stint on Batman to b***h about his parents getting divorced when he was a teen.
I mean.. yeah, it sucks, but again, a lot of people go through worse shit and don't end up climbing a clocktower and shooting someone. Which was sorta the whole point of the Special Class within Riot. They were a bunch of freaks who had all had it rough, and yet despite all that they weren't trying to start race riots, hurt people for the hell of it or be edgy twats.
Hell, the whole thing of Quire is that he's always been an edgy butthole and all the adopted stuff did was pour gasoline onto the fire that was already burning, with Quire ignoring any sort of help to indulge in his desire to be "cool/special".
>mutants were conceived as an allegory for israeli persecution
This is your brain on identity politics, a train of thought where Lee and Kirby were both israeli so everything they wrote just HAD to be about israeli persecution in general and the Nazis/the Holocaust in particular because what else could israeli guys possibly write about?
Even with Lee on record that he came up with mutants as a way to avoid writing origin stories, even with no real mutant persecution narrative in those comics, their treatment instead veering from liked to disliked as much as most other 60s heroes, and even with no possible way to even pretend 60s Magneto is fighting for anything but his own desire to conquer the world, people still want to force the 80s/Claremont X-Men narrative onto the 60s comics.
Actual 60s Marvel under guys like Lee and Kirby just routinely used the word "Holocaust" on covers to describe the epic scale of this month's random superhero fight, they weren't precious about muh oppression at all. Also, the first X-Men vs Avengers clash plays out as a generation clash between teens and adults rather than any kind of racial thing.
Wasn’t magneto a literal israelite who survived the holocaust?
Anon, that's something Claremont came up with in the 1980s. 1960s Magneto didn't have any origin story, he was just an evil megalomaniac who wanted to conquer the world, and absolutely did not care about "his people" except as henchmen.
If only Lee and Kirby had bothered to give him an origin and show him unmasked, a lot of mistakes could have been prevented.
Who the frick reads 60+ years old comics.
Claremont was kino and magneto is better that way.
Anon, everybody can agree that Claremont take on the X-men and moden X-men as a whole is a fricking dumb mess, it makes no sense, it's poorly writen.
However you must admit that it is fricking cool, it's garbage but it is fun garbage, like how Star Wars and Warhammer40k, those series are fricking dumb but they are fun, meanwhile Star Trek is fricking dumb but it's boring as well.
Mutants turning into a israeli allegory was an extremely clever marketing gimmick, it made them feel edgy and deep as a franchise, now the X-men are slowly losing popularity because everything else is not as cool, comparing them to sexuality or religion just feels ridiculous
Any metaphor about racism or prejudice where the oppressed are super powered or have some sort of potential abilities that endanger themselves or others around them in ways beyond human automatically fails because it gives justification to racism and fear and hate for the oppressed.
The X-men thing works in some individual stories, most of them already done in the 80 and maybe 90s, but overall no. That's the main appeal of the franchise though so you just have to run with it no matter how flawed, just ignore that the racists are right and that even the heroes run a segregationist school/sex island.
In doses. As a general metaphor for everyone who feels in some way isolated from the rest of society, it does. As a call for human empathy and understanding of our fellow man, it does. Done as literally and as taken to absurd limits as it has in the comics, fuuuuuuuuuck no.
>we could conquer the world
No, no you fricking couldn't how the frick are you going to defeat the Avengers? They have literal gods on their team, also how are you going to beat Mr Fantastic? Or the Inhumans?
Phoenix shit probably, all the villains helping, Inhumans already got washed. Being immortal now also helps a lot.
>villains helping
The villains of the world all teaming up and conquering the world has happened more than once in Marvel what-ifs and looking back it never makes any sense. The vast majority of the b-tier thieves with some fancy gimmick tech or trick that wouldn't actually save them from actual military retaliation, not to mention when governments have shit like the Sentinels that only conveniently deployed in X-Men comics, and that's assuming all these 2-bit villains are cool with going from theft and assault to straight up nuking parts of the world.
Not to mention the big villains like Dr. Doom and Magneto have way too much of an ego to work that flawlessly together.
The whole thing just reads as cheap plot set-ups with no real thought put into them, and especially egregious examples like Old Man Logan's background come to mind as much as I enjoyed the story when I read it.
The only villain I can see running the world and making it better is Dr. Doom (especially if he finally just has sex with Reed already). Purple man could rule the world, but it'll be Hell.
Why the frick people think Dr Doom would make anything better, he's a moron, he's a 2 dimensional le evil king with le evil wizard powers, his country is nothing but poor farmers.
Morons that don't like thinking for themselves or value any degree of freedom for themselves or others are drawn towards strongmen that would dictate every facet of their life.
mutants are more than capable of taking shit over and shadowcat can literally just phase an object in to hulk's brainstem. avengers would get shit on.
Not really especially in the Krakoa era. While other heroes habe begrudgingly works with Supervillians, the X-Men can't stop sucking the dick of their villians because if muh X-Gene.
>Racial Allegory
Doesn't work. It would be like watching Barracuda rape and kill Jessica Jones in front of Luke Cage but every black character from Black Panther (T'challa & Shuri), Blade, Storm, Misty Knight, Prodigy, etc came out the woodwork to defend him and say whitey got him down and Cage is an Uncle Tom for not letting it happen sooner.
>Real Allegory
It works partially as a israeli/Israel allegory but only as shitpost of them. You can have your Menachim Magnetos, Epsteiny Weinstein Frosts/Wyngardes/Dakens, two-face Bibi/Likudnik "Not a real israelitetant unless you agree with me" Kitty Prydes, and your Ben-Gvir Exodus & Apocalypse types mucking about because they prattle on wih the chosen people & unironic replacement theory tribalism hoping that only a handful of israelites IRL have an ounce of self-awareness to call out the above schmucks and not fall for the Zionist Pilpul Pill. Even Krakoa as an Island needed to feed off the life force of mutants so they trick the gullible ones to come over and be passive food for their "utopia" while keeping them in the dark for the illusion of protection just like the few israelites who see through Netanyahu bullshit know Israel is leading to under his control.
>TL;DR
"Mutantdom" is just a tribalist version of pic related.
>word soup
Glad we agree modern X-Men is just a bunch of buzzwords and discount Zionism.
The zionism doesnt really work once you realise aside from some buildings at the very beginning of Krakoa mutants didnt push any humans out of their homelands. Probably cause the writers would realise that even normies could put 2 and 2 together if that was the case.
They did frick over Terra Verde to keep their drug hedgemony, re-enforce Shi'ar slavery with Xandra for their space bullshit, and even allowed Madelyne Pryor to unlessh demons in New York because muh women stick together & post partum depression via Magik & Jean. They tried some weird fricky takeovers of Otherworod and Apocalypse tried to steal all the msgic in the world for Krakoa but they buried those actions as it was too blatantly Zionist to horde resources and ruin the world ehile cryimg victim because "we're better than you" and will replace you.
1) I don't give a frick what retcon they try to spin, Mutants are not evolution or the next stage of human evolution. They're genetic experiments that bred
2) The guy is conveniently leaving out the parts where they tried to bribe everyone on the planet to basically it over, then bribed the galactic community with a bullshit metal after taking over Mars.
3) The victim complex falls apart when every mutant future becomes a dystopian nightmare, and every example of a mutant stepping out of line is met with "oh, you're just racist"
The Sentinel Program is validated with each passing day.
>genetic experiments that bred
if you make it about paternalistic celestials, that's just bullshit intelligent design and it literally makes x-men about "god's chosen" and ethnic supremacy unless you also add the warning parable about social darwinism and why apocalypse is an evil villain
Claremont was really the only one who had the handle on it. You can even see it in stuff like The Muir Island Saga where the shadow king was playing up everyone's fear of the unknown and racial hostility but it was ultimately still a story about the shadow king trying to enslave people.
What exactly is "The mutant allegory"?
science fiction parable warning against social darwinism
No. Racism isn’t rational because we’re all just human, no humans is inherently more dangerous, we all have access to the same weapons (well, at least us Americans do).
With mutants literally any one of them could end up being able to blow up universes by accident. The fear of mutants is completely rational.
>I am so oppressed claimed the millionaire with his own private island and personal PR team
I think this was asked here in the last few months.
The thing is that without the good mutants the bad ones would destroy the world. So you do need to be in good terms with the good mutants who actually didn't do anything bad.
They also save the world from non mutant threats like aliens (eg the brood) and stuff like that without them humanity would be vulnarable.
Then again in a shared marvel universe the whole x-men story is less good since there are superheroes who are as strong as mutants but they aren't hated, instead they are actually loved, like the avengers. Also with the avengers you could argue that even the hero mutants aren't that important.
Anyways the argument is still the same in a shared universe, the good mutants are needed and are a good part of society and not all mutants are bad. The allegory works op.
>>Then again in a shared marvel universe the whole x-men story is less good since there are superheroes who are as strong as mutants but they aren't hated, instead they are actually loved, like the avengers. Also with the avengers you could argue that even the hero mutants aren't that important.
This has always been part of the X-men's problem though. The Avengers and Fantastic Four are all very public figures. They do press conferences, help with clean up and generally give a good impression while working alongside the public. The X-men don't do that. Well now and again they have. I miss Gubment X-factor. But there was generally a lot of time where Nick Fury would call in the X-men to give them first crack at Magneto or on how to resolve a current mutant issue. And this went will into the 90s. Then shit got out of hand and the X-men made the world their enemy.
Yeah, but this is a problem with all shared comic book universes it is even more of a problem in dc comics. It still kinda works with x-men though.
Superman could clean up gotham in a night.
>The thing is that without the good mutants the bad ones would destroy the world.
The Avengers have stopped Magneto before, other superhero individuals and teams have dealt with mutant villains, too. The X-Men aren't unique in stopping mutant threats, one of the issues with them is that they don't tell anyone anything of the threats that they've encountered, so you get shit like Captain America not knowing who the frick Mister Sinister is until Rogue told him personally. Not only that, the primary issue for a couple of decades that they've stood shoulder to shoulder with supervillains like Magneto, so as far as anyone else is concerned, they're compromised and can't be trusted to even deal with him anymore the next time he has a ape out and tries to enslave humanity or destroy the world, or whatever the frick he wanted to do.
And it's not even the usual villain hero team up for the greater good shit either. Like the F4 have teamed up with Doom a lot of times but they don't usually have him over for dinner and try to defend his other shit.
I mean yeah they did make magneto go from villian to hero then back to villian which is weird, but that is more because of the writers.
Yeah as I said the shared universe messes with the whole x-men story. The good mutants are still useful and didn't do anything bad in general though. They also fight non mutant threats.
One could argue that dr strange, the fantastic four or other powerful heroes could solo any superhuman threat and that there are no need for any other superheroes, but I think the shared.universe can be fun.
So what argument you make for the no need of the x-men can be said for the avengers or any other hero too.
So the main answer is that good mutants protect humanity from non mutant theats also and are good for humanity. The shared universe is a problem for all comic books.
the shared universe is fine. You just need to have the X-men more willing to cooperate. The Avengers and F4 are happy to vouch for them. Generally. J Jonah Jameson is famously PRO mutant. If the X-men stayed to clean up, sent the other super teams some emails about the villains they face and stopped calling themselves the same thing villains call themselves everything falls into place. The worst you get is some silliness about the Avengers not fighting Sentinels but that's easily written off the same way the X-men not fighting Ultron is.
>the shared universe is fine. You just need to have the X-men more willing to cooperate.
And X-Men writers to stop using other heroes as bad guys or establishment stooges in their books, and stop weaponizing the shared universe against those heroes by having the X-Men shrieking at them to not being there to save the X-Men from the most recent tragedy to befall them, even though they'd never tolerate the Avengers or any other team having a constant presence in their home anyway.
>The worst you get is some silliness about the Avengers not fighting Sentinels but that's easily written off the same way the X-men not fighting Ultron is.
And by not pretending the X-Men are constantly being hunted by Sentinels. Reminder that it was the Avengers who finally defeated the second version of the Sentinels back in the Silver Age.
AvX and stuff like that are part of stories to make them exciting. Conflicts even among heroes are needed to have good stories. But yeah okay, it might be just silly writing though.
>stopped calling themselves the same thing villains call themselves everything falls into place.
What do they call themselves? Mutant? They are mutants.
read the old Avengers vs X-men and see a good story
Okay, I didn't knew their is an old one
>What do they call themselves? Mutant? They are mutants.
Mutants is fine, even if it's not accurate. It's the whole "homosexual Superior" bullshit that people say the X-men need to stop calling themselves by, especially cause it's not even accurate nor even the pinnacle of human evolution as it's meant to imply
>homosexual Superior
>Superior" "Your replacements" "The next step in evolution
Yeah those are weird
Captain America has also been referenced as the "next step in human evolution" or the "pinnacle of human development" throughout his history. It's still junk science because that's not how evolution works in either case, but one franchise has made it the official stance of the nominal heroes, and all the Naziesque implications that come with it, while the other has the titular character outright reject or feel uncomfortable being put on a pedestal like that, and absolutely abhors Nazis, it's schizo as hell.
True, but I never really thought about these references so hard. I always just thought that they say it because it sounds scientific in the case of homosexual superior or just cool in the case of captain america. It shows how strong he is.
But yeah in real life it would sound really weird.
It is, but its more about how each property ran with the premise, one pushing the idea of a superior race being kept down and denied their birthright by mud men and untermensch while the other constantly blares a "Frick Nazis, we should strive towards a better future together despite our differences," coming from the same company no less.
>Captain America has also been referenced as the "next step in human evolution"
and Adam Warlock and the Eternals, Marvel is always repeating the same bullshit over and over and over, their worldbuilding is garbage
>What do they call themselves?
"Superior" "Your replacements" "The next step in evolution"
>Mutant? They are mutants.
Originally they were called mutants because they were meant to have been mutated by radiation. Today they're not "mutants" in any real world sense of the word, if that Marauders story about them existing before humans is true they may as well be aliens who just call themselves "the mutants".
Yeah, the old origin was they were the result of nuclear age and just all the shit we've been pumping into the air. Children of the Atom. Remember that whole bag? Wasn't just a cool arcade game. The hilarious part is you can't be a mutant and a separate species. Mutant by it's very classification means you have to be part of the species you're mutating out of.
Never did.
>The mutant allegory
what did they mean by this event?
>what did they mean by this event?
>Hero vs Hero events have been Marvel's business model since Civil War and it usually worked
>It also pits different fanbases against each other online which helps build attention and interest for the events
>Making fans angry has also been Marvel's business model for years, and they kept telling themselves it worked
They meant all of this more than they meant anything about the allegory at all. They rushed to doing a hero vs hero event with the Inhumans without taking the time to build up their fanbase first, and put them against a group with a huge fanbase that already had a persecution complex, and deliberately set out to make that fanbase mad.
No, there is no one at Marvel whom I would trust to write an analogous story without tying it to weird Twitter nonsense.
No. 90% of the Xmen are pretty normal looking people. Kinda dumb for Cyclops to be preaching about prejudice and then not do anything for the society of sewer people who are frog monsters or made of goo. At the same time why do normal citizens of the marvel universe hate mutants, but love Spiderman or Luke cage who are practically indistinguishable?
>At the same time why do normal citizens of the marvel universe hate mutants, but love Spiderman
Because Spider-man spends most of the time swinging around saving people from muggers and rapists instead of telling the world that he's their future and blowing up buildings. Heroes like him and the Avengers are seen as aberrations. Victims of particular circumstances. Mutants basically go around telling the world that ever third person in your grocery lane might have a death touch.
Not really, but I guess it depends on writer. Since mutant isnt really a culture or really have anything shared in specific characteristics, it doesnt quite work for racism since its about the interplay of those things. If your similarity is just that you are notably different from the average person, you arent really a "race" properly meant with a focal point.
Might as well as be an allegory for people who are remarkably different from the human mean in any which way. That is to say an exceptionally ugly, smart, dumb, strong, rich, and poor coming together as an identity somehow simply because they are all "outliers" of some kind.
Not when the mutants act like buttholes
No. It's stupid as hell. One can argue that the humans are right to be scared. You have a mutant who can manipulate reality to killing a bunch of people with eye beams, or mind rape. One knows for a fact that someone one this board will end up asking the following:
>How come the Fantastic Four or Spider-man aren't ostracized like the mutants?
They were ostracized, but the difference the mutants and the Fantastic Four/Spider-Man is one actively works with community and taking responsibility for their actions, while another has an attitude that sums up, "Nah, it'll be fine."
>we fought for them
this implies that mutants, or the X-Men specifically, were unwilling participants in this unspecified "fight", which is untrue
>they kill our children in the streets
Cassandra Nova, a mutant, killed 16 million mutants in the streets of Genosha using her wild sentinel; this is the most mutants any person ever has killed (Scarlet Witch depowered about a million of which a few thousand probably died)
>islands
The island of Genosha had a human population of 1 million; they were never heard from again after Magneto took over Genosha. The island itself was destroyed by Cassandra Nova (Charles Xavier's twin sister) and not by humans. Scott actually knows this as he was personally responsible for stopping Cassandra Nova's scheme.
After moving to Utopia, an island named after a fictional and fully unattainable state of perfect society, these highschool dropouts assumed they would be a real country; but they sent no ambassadors to any other country (would have been difficult since there were only supposedly 198 mutants left at the time, which is only 3 more than the number of countries right now), invited no countries to open embassies, grew nothing, manufactured nothing, exported nothing, and existed within US territorial waters (within the 3 mile limit) in the gulf of the Farallones.
Then they went to the UN in New York (where you're not allowed to bring weapons in) and made a point of how they'd brought weapons in (themselves) and could/would kill everyone if they weren't taken seriously.
(threatening every nation on earth is not what real countries do if they don't want to be invaded or isolated by sanctions; you don't choose to set up your country in someone else's territory without a good historical reason for doing so, and you sure as shit don't inflame tensions with that larger neighbor from day one)
>Avengers
The X-Men's weird island cult was trying to sacrifice a child to the space bird god in order to gain its powers and restore the mutant population. When they did gain its powers (as the Phoenix 5) they didn't restore the mutant population.
>next step in human evolution
this is laughably stupid and could only come from a highschool dropout who thinks he works as a teacher in his cult compound; it's Jim Jones tier bullshit
>we're everything they're not
they're heroes
>a shadow of our former selves
this is tautologically repeating the previous statement; the x-men are no longer heroes; any "fight" they were willing to participate in alongside the heroes they are no longer willing to participate in
Not really because it's a race allegory and the mutants are actually heroic sometimes instead of just being useless human refuse. If the idea is that it's supposed to get you to think about you shouldn't be prejudiced against others for what they're born with it does an extremely awful job at it because you're just reminded that subhumans with literal superpowers is a nightmare scenario.
The avengers only attacked them because the x men were gambling with the very existence of life on earth with their moronic phoenix plan.
>making the earth better is gambling
>sustainable energy for everyone is gambling
frick the avengers, if they really thought there was a time table before phoenix lost it, they would have offered to help and get whatever peace on earth job done as soon as possible before the inevitable happens, THEN handle the emergency after everything was fixed
The entire conflict was stupid to begin with, and in a series where both sides were written more competently in-character, Captain America and Iron Man would have gotten the X-men immediately on the phone once the Phoenix showed up to get their help and Cyclops would have actually tried to explained his plan and logic behind it however asinine it was. But even then, if you aren't looking at the story from a meta perspective it's still a real hell of an ask for readers to side with the X-men over the Avengers for the sheer fact one side has concrete evidence that trying to deal with the power of the Phoenix Force is a terrible idea (i.e. it just blew up at least one if not several planets in its mad rush to get back to Earth and is not in a talking mood) vs the X-men's plan being to essentially sacrifice the girl they literally called the Hope for the mutants and just vaguely hope that the Phoenix Force aka editorial is in a more jolly mood than usual. Everything afterwards is just the X-men investing in bystander syndrome while the 'Phoenix Five' living out their power fantasies (and decidedly intentionally delaying reviving the x-gene in favor of getting petty revenge) while the Avengers flail around in doomsday mode since a quartet of deranged morons with the power of gods sticking crab legs onto whales for laughs, fusing the tectonic plates together, and summoning the forces of hell to drain the life force out of caped crusaders is...well, kind of on the same level as other supervillains they usually face.
...Still never should have been a comic in the first place, but frick me on how people can side with the X-men beyond brand loyalty considering both sides were written as belligerent morons but at least one was trying to stop the planet from being blown up.
(Granted, the fact that Rachel was sitting there and they didn't bother asking for her help containing the Phoenix is a massive point against the writing as well.)
Comics are pretty bad at addressing civilian casualties but frick, X-Men comics really are the worst of the worst when it comes to this. The Phoenix destroys several planets and Scott's reaction is essentially "Meh, who cares". Magneto's worldwide EMP blast that would realistically millions of people never gets brought up but we're still going to crone endlessly about what happened with Genosha (but not the part of Magneto trying to get rid of the nonmutant population) and "No More Mutants". Xorn putting a bunch of New York's populace into ovens gets nary a mention while you get little to no mention of any civilian injuries or casualties if a mutant reveals themselves to have a destructive power. At least Jean felt guilt for destroying a planet.
No. Minorities can’t shoot lasers from their eyes or nuke entire towns.
George Floyd rioting kind of proves you wrong there, chief.
The media covered up the Megaton Event and the laser eye thing was never proven.
Back when mutants were less OP, yeah. Spider-Man or Thor were supposed to be able to solo OG5. Superpowers weren't that hard to get in MU. Morrison also introduced useless mutations as a case for majority. Such a thing would balance things out?
And that they are few mutants capable of doing more damage? Works as allegory for members of minorities with wealth and influence exceeding regular people.
The problem is that we are only following stand ins for the rich minorities. It is like trying to combat real life bigotry towards Muslims/Blacks/Jews/etc while solely focusing on its aristocracy. And yeah, such stories can have influential characters trying to do something about the situation of the rest of their group, but not as the sole focus.
>The problem is that we are only following stand ins for the rich minorities. It is like trying to combat real life bigotry towards Muslims/Blacks/Jews/etc while solely focusing on its aristocracy. And yeah, such stories can have influential characters trying to do something about the situation of the rest of their group, but not as the sole focus.
I have to agree with this, X-Men stories feel like following a small community of hot people who do nothing but argue dramatically and frick in their mansion.
Well that used to be the charm didn't it? A soap opera that was also a fantasy adventure story. It's the genre shift into political thriller that made it start to suck.
>allegory
Absolutely not, and it's a complete joke every time they try. Now, "applicability" as good old Tolkien might say, is a different matter. A good X-Man story can absolutely have something to say on subjects like the idea of persecuted minorities and the tense dynamic of trying to integrate while not losing one's sense of self versus violent, separatist revolution. But as an actual analog for any real group of people of any kind it's an abject and complete failure.
It only worked when Mutants were the only ones with super powers. When you look at the combined Marvel universe it makes very little sense when there are a gorillion other super powered fricks out there who, at times, are way more powerful and way more harmful than any X-Man is. Some of those aren't even human yet they get celebrated on Earth anyways.
Marvel needed to stop with the allegory and move on to other shit for Mutants a long time ago, but they seem to think that they still need to be viewed and treated like Blackfolk during colonial America
Why is the shared universe thing so popular with comic book readers, despite having such an obviously noxious influence on story quality?
The massive elephant in the room that X-writers never address is that there ISN'T a gorillion other superpowered fricks out there. There are only a couple thousand Inhumans even after the fart cloud with maybe another thousand or two superhumans worldwide.
>openly call themselves "next step in human evolution", showing to be racial supremacists
>sperg out at any cure, pretending their world-ending powers are just their "identity", even when there's a lot of mutants whose powers make their own life unbearable even without considering the prejudice aspect
>any group of mutants immediately becomes a huge threat by accumulated power
honestly making them allegory to anything was a very stupid idea from the very beginning
It literally doesn't make sense. why are the super hero's who gain their superpowers later on in life any different than the mutants born with it, in the eyes of the public.
both are dangerous superpowers, there is literally zero reason for the people to love spiderman, but hate wolverine. So no it's just a cop-out to make some shitty minority allegory that holds no water.
>there is literally zero reason for the people to love spiderman, but hate wolverine
Actually, that one has a very obvious reason. Spider-Man can be an butthole, but he doesn't stab people in drunken or berserker rampages and then shrug it off like Wolverine does. He has public image problems, but he recognizes it's mostly his fault and not just the world out to get him unlike Logan who acts like the world being wary of him is everyone else's fault but his own.
I was just randomly picking a non-mutant super hero vs a mutant superhero as an example but I guess yeah in that case it makes sense.
If you want, that's kind of the crux of why the public loves superheroes but remains ambivalent to negative on the X-men in general. However stupid you feel the Avengers or FF can be, they're public figures who can't just treat the world as their playground. The Avengers repeatedly have to play the news cycle and deal with public optics, and Reed Richards admitted he turned the Fantastic Four into celebrities to at least give his family a shot at a decent life rather than be feared and scorned as freaks. The X-men generally hid away all their actions and most of their motives beyond "We'll protect you from the bad mutants, so don't question it further", which kept them and the students' privacy safe to let them live normalish lives outside of the spandex, but it means people can and will attribute anything to them, including the possibility that they're not heroes and they're just biding their time until they decide to take us over.
Even then, people don't really think of mutants and mutates in terms of when they got their powers, they think of it in terms of public saviors using their powers for good vs dudes that are talking of taking over humanity with their crazy super powers. That's why groups like the X-men confused the hell out of Marvel citizens for a while, it's like standing in two different pools at the same time while demanding to be treated like a normal dude.
>there is literally zero reason for the people to love spiderman, but hate wolverine
Are you kidding me? One is practically a self-flagellating mess if anyone dies or gets seriously hurt under his watch, and the other has a rep as a violent moron that stabs people in bar fights and is unapologetic about how much of a violent moron he is, mutant status aside, you picked a very poor example.
ok how about Hulk vs Nightcrawler
A lot of people hate The Hulk and loved Nightcrawler, though. The military would literally hound the jolly green giant day and night cause he wrecks every place he goes with his inhuman strength, while Nightcrawler would get the Beatles treatment since the UK didn't originally have an issue with mutants and he was on a public superhero team. Again, that's a poor example cause marvel citizens didn't give a damn about their origins, just with what they actually do.
No it doesn't, but it's so hamfisted and shallow that it can loop right back around to being hilarious.
No and it can't work without massively reducing the power of almost every mutant and isolating the X-Men universe from every other marvel story.