![[Ultra common event] Highly up voted buffoonery on reddit](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/6109f0ea-ff12-4c14-a0c1-02ae7e8d1b48.jpeg){kind=link}
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/5d2896db-d144-456b-9708-34ec104514f7.jpeg
Consider the choice idiocies.
Racism is justified BECAUSE THOSE ARE ACTUALLY DIFFERENT RACES
This applies to other problems such as the death penalty
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/5d2896db-d144-456b-9708-34ec104514f7.jpeg
Consider the choice idiocies.
Racism is justified BECAUSE THOSE ARE ACTUALLY DIFFERENT RACES
This applies to other problems such as the death penalty
So this guy would gladly sell out the X-Men to the sentinels because they’re different
Well kinda yeah, any real functional society would and probably should take pretty serious measures to limit living super-weapons.
They’re not ‘different’ in the way that different humans are different, they’re potentially an existential threat to society.
Kind of an odd thing to say in a community of revolution enjoyers
‘Society’ as in human life itself.
It’s not like AES countries don’t ban personal WMDs.
the mutants having massively destructive individual powers does somewhat undermine the coherence of whatever allegory you want to use them for. You could make all the mutations benign but then you probably stop being a superhero comic.
This is mainly because the writers forgot that the majority of mutants weren’t supposed to be able to serve as walking artillery
Most were just supposed to be kinda weird looking
But you know, gotta make guys to sell toys
Mutants live in a world where non-mutants also have superpowers. I don’t know if this is a commentary on how bigotry makes no fucking sense.
They try to square this circle constantly and it never really works out
Like, Marvel once tried the angle of
Nobody is scared of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four because they have PR teams, but mutants don't so they're fair gameBut the Avengers have had mutants on their team multiple times and THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE THING is that people are kind of scared of him which just reinforces his self-loathing!
most of the good mutant rights kinda stories (that i’ve heard of anyway) aren’t during the big crossover events so in an additional bit of incoherence they often aren’t actually considering that at all in the plot.
It’s something I realized when I thought how nobody thinks Spiderman is some mutant with spider powers even though he lives in a universe where mutants exists with comparable powers to Spiderman or how the newspaper editor dude (I forget his name) doesn’t once call him a mutant even though the easiest way to turn the public against Spiderman would be to tap into the mutantphobia that’s rampant within the Marvel universe.
Being a mutant is a “floating signifier”. The X-men are fictional so you can use them to tell a story about whatever you want, racism, being gay or trans. But it only makes sense in the context of the moment of the story, just like all superhero comics don’t make sense with timelines, and characters appearing in crossovers when it’s impossible etc
But for a really long time mutants have also been a stand in for being Jewish with Asteroid M/Genosha/Utopia/Krakoa/whatever being Israel. With some writers who are zionists thinking this is cool and good, and others who are more Israel-critical (or at least as much as Marvel writer is allowed to be) writing stories about why this is a bad thing.
The pro-Israel writer suggesting that Matt-with-two-extra-arms has to go and live in the mutant nation because he’s inherently in danger by being a mutant, but the Israel-skeptic writer suggesting the fact that the mutant nation is always threatening to destroy mankind or at the least has a tense relationship with the rest of the world, actually makes things more dangerous for Matt-with-two-extra-arms.
Josie Rietmann and Becca Petunia who are both trans women, Jewish and anti-Zionist talk about this in their podcast “Beyond Tomorrow”
i’m more familiar with genosha from the 90s cartoon where it was a slave rebellion, but i can see how shitbags could do a zionism with the concept
In the comics the Israel thing was more overt. But in a what if all the stuff we made up and mythologized about Israel was actually true. Like freed from genuine oppression while under constant threat of genocide, actually egalitarian and multicultural etc.
I know very little about x-men, but I have seen examples people bring up of x-men that have very benign (and even self harming) powers.
Not to mention that it makes even less sense to discriminate against people with superpowers. Imagine if the stone wall rioters had an omega level mutant on their side. Countries would be lining up with offers to mutants with powerful abilities.