People hate and fear black people or gay people out of ignorance and stupidity. People fear mutants because they cap rip out all the iron in someone’s body. They have the power of a million mass shooters in one hand.
Some of them have the power of of a million mass shooters. Some of them have the power of a very long neck. Seriously, there an X-man with the codename Longneck because he has a very long neck. He’s never once helped the team in the field, because he’s completely powerless unless he wants to look over toilet stall walls while pooping.
He does have longer arms to match his neck, but that’s it. I guess he can easily get stuff off a high shelf…
And pointedly he cannot blend in as a normal human, so his introduction to the team was them saving him from a lynch mob.
I’m imagining the mob standing around the guy scratching their heads, with the noose pulled all the way up to the branch.
“Joe… I think we need a higher branch…”
I am pretty sure that racism existed before Reagan became president.
I dunno, sometimes I see somebody acting monstrously and wish an alien abomination would have him for lunch.
I think poison Ivy is the best example of the “yeah I can’t pretend this is the villain anymore”
Magneto is the manifestation of the saying, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” You could probably reasonably say:
Professor X : Magneto :: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. : Malcom X
Professor X and the X-Men were all for mutant equality, but they always favored peaceful acceptance. Conversely, Magneto recognized that large portions of society would never accept mutants. It also bears mentioning that Magneto carried some “racist” (for lack of a better word) tendencies towards non-mutants. In his view, non-mutants are lesser beings.
I love MLK but if I had been around in the days of civil rights, I would definitely have been a Malcom x guy
It’s kind of hard to argue that non-mutants aren’t lesser beings when mutants literally have powers that no normal human could ever hope to have, powers that can even defy the basic laws of physics.
Well not all mutants. We always focus on the “cool” ones but there were a ton of mutants that were hopelessly disfigured and with powers that amount to anyone holding a bat
Or with powers that uh…
Aren’t good for anyone near and including them.
Do you consider people with learning disabilities lesser than human? I think that is the point they are trying to make. Just because they did not evolve does not mean they are better. Better athletes and performers are revered because they do things normal people cannot, but it doesn’t make them more human.
While I see your point, and I’m not at all painting you with this brush, I think that reasoning could also be used to argue that, e.g., autistic people are lesser beings. I know it’s a different universe, but look at Superman: Unquestionably a superior being, but like Professor X, he never put himself on that pedestal. Magneto’s insistence that non-mutants are and maybe should be subservient pretty much requires conflict, and starts folks down a path towards subjugation, enslavement, and ultimately elimination. Note: not extinction. Elimination requires action, while extinction, allowing for mitigating circumstances, does not.
Add to all of this that it’s pretty easy to understand, and even relate to the origins of how Magnet and Professor X see non-mutants, and X-Men is a pretty great story/universe. They’re both similarly flawed, but in very different ways.
Magneto’s insistence that non-mutants are and maybe should be subservient
Magneto is a prime example of “might makes right”, which is why he’s a villain. Non-mutants are beneath him: he has no compassion for them, no regard for their ideas, their voice, their opinion.
I’m not well versed in his history in the comics or whether there even is a canonical backstory, but from the Marvel perspective …… he’s a sympathetic villain, because he has a good point. While it’s not a single coherent backstory, we can see his development over time at the treatment he faced, and can have sympathy for humanity driving him to it.
I guess the issue here is about how you are defining ‘superior.’ If the argument is that mutants are in some way morally or ethically superior to non-mutants, absolutely not. And that is the source of a lot of the conflict in the comics. But in terms of what they can actually achieve in life, when you can do something like Magento does, you’ve got an inherent superiority.
Now I admit that you can’t make that claim for all mutants. Not even all X-Men. I would not say that Cyclops’ mutant power makes him an inherently superior human in terms of power because it severely limits him in many other ways and, if he wasn’t on a team that regularly needed his power, would find life pretty difficult.
So I guess you can’t argue that all mutants are superior, but many of the ones we see could basically rule all of humanity if they were allowed to get away with it.
Even Cyclops is inherently superior, from looking at capability. So you really think any human, any police force even, can stand against him?
Yes. Take him by surprise and he’s as easy to kill as anyone else, and he has no powers that make him more aware than an average human.
Under the same conditions, any regular human could kill Magneto, Storm, Mystique, even Professor X.
You’d have problems with someone indestructible like Colossus or with healing powers like Wolverine or Deadpool. I don’t know what mutants have special awareness, like Spiderman, but they’d be harder to sneak up on. While Professor X could, my understanding is he typically doesn’t pay attention to random people’s thoughts
While Professor X could, my understanding is he typically doesn’t pay attention to random people’s thoughts
I think and argument could be made that his powers would work the same way the “normal” senses would. You wouldn’t necessarily wake up when there’s normal stimuli, but if there was a loud noise or a bright flash, you might wake up. Similarly, a would-be-assassin might have thoughts which would be alarming to the Professor, even unconsciously, while sleeping.
The point is made at least in the “X-Men: Days of Future Past” movie, where the McAvoy portrayed young professor keeps suppressing his powers with Hank’s drug in order to silence the voices in his head — and to be able to walk.
My point being that I think that much like with hearing, our brains learn to ignore stimuli, rather than not actually hear it. The brain filters. So his power is rather a completely new sense, instead of something he directs at people and then gets access to. It’s sort of always there, like noise, you just have to focus on the right sound.
Professor X would probably pick up on a person nearby who’s intending to harm him, but I think you’re right about the other three. Wolverine has healing powers AND special awareness, so he’d be especially hard to take out.
I mean they did have the Morlocks so it wasn’t like every mutation was a cool superhero ability
The X-men type mutants had powers that seemed to defy the known laws of physics. But, they showed pretty often that most mutants had more drawbacks than benefits.
What made Magneto a villain was that he decided that mutants were the next evolutionary step, and that humans were therefore obsolete. It wasn’t even like predicting that mutants were superior and that as a result eventually humans would fade away. It was that he decided that one “race” was superior and therefore was justified in ruling over the inferior race. Which, you know, is pretty dark for a holocaust survivor.
And yet extremely accurate to current Israeli policy
See also: Harley Quinn & Poison Ivy respectively.
Carnage redemption arc when?
