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[QUOTE=tuck frump;4675827]On the contrary, mutant powers work perfectly as an allegory. Mutants blow up city blocks and take over countries? So do muslims. Black and brown people are invading tradionally white coutnries and will replace their inhabitants. Jews control the world. Gays are ruining the sanctity of marriage and traditional family values and will lead your children to hell. None of it is true but every oppressed minority is perceived as a threat and demonized by their oppressors. Their mutant power is that they will change society by doing nothing but existing.[/QUOTE]
Mutants aren't just perceived as a threat, their powers actually are dangerous to everybody around them and the comics have always gone out of their way to show us that humans are entirely justified in fearing them. Beyond that, we've also seen that mutant society has a pretty rigid internal hierarchy, where the "pretty" mutants with potent power sets lord over the ugly and deformed ones, and this is often played for laughs rather than for the extremely troubling eugenicist implications it actually carries.
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[QUOTE=PwrdOn;4675902]Mutants aren't just perceived as a threat, their powers actually are dangerous to everybody around them and the comics have always gone out of their way to show us that humans are entirely justified in fearing them.[/QUOTE]
Eh yeah I guess in fearing Mutants....not being proactive about getting rid of them.
[QUOTE=PwrdOn;4675902]
We've also seen that mutant society has a pretty rigid internal hierarchy, where the "pretty" mutants with potent power sets lord over the ugly and deformed ones, and this is often played for laughs rather than for the extremely troubling eugenicist implications it actually carries.[/QUOTE]
I mean that's how a lotta media portrays minorites... People who might live in low diversity area whose Only interaction with certain people is through TV/net form totally warped views
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Even the most lethal of mutants has a body count negligible compared to humans. The obsession with mutants perceived threat level is disingenuous at best.
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[QUOTE=tuck frump;4675950]Even the most lethal of mutants has a body count negligible compared to humans. The obsession with mutants perceived threat level is disingenuous at best.[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure body count matters if you live closely to a very lethal mutant. Even if it is not the case, you don't want to be included in the statistics. That the threat is considered as hypothetic or real depends of your exposition and experience: it's not necessarily rational in a way or another. Or in other words: you can underestimate or overestimate the danger.
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[QUOTE=tuck frump;4675950]Even the most lethal of mutants has a body count negligible compared to humans. The obsession with mutants perceived threat level is disingenuous at best.[/QUOTE]
On a one-to-one scale? Not really. And that's what the average person cares about.
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[QUOTE=BroHomo;4675941]Eh yeah I guess in fearing Mutants....not being proactive about getting rid of them.
I mean that's how a lotta media portrays minorites... People who might live in low diversity area whose Only interaction with certain people is through TV/net form totally warped views[/QUOTE]
Yeah but the mutants are the heroes of the story, and we're supposed to be getting their viewpoint here, yet how they are portrayed still tends to match a lot of the worst stereotypes we have of minorities which is hardly empowering. The reason of course is that pretty much all of the writers are white and are just portraying what they think a struggle against oppression might look like, but because they don't have much first hand experience with that a lot of their biases and preconceptions end up creeping into the story.
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[QUOTE=tuck frump;4675827]On the contrary, mutant powers work perfectly as an allegory. Mutants blow up city blocks and take over countries? So do muslims. Black and brown people are invading tradionally white coutnries and will replace their inhabitants. Jews control the world. Gays are ruining the sanctity of marriage and traditional family values and will lead your children to hell. None of it is true but every oppressed minority is perceived as a threat and demonized by their oppressors. Their mutant power is that they will change society by doing nothing but existing.[/QUOTE]
Wars that can be caused by any other group, humanity is responsible for many genocides but even then, palés in comparisson with the idea of living with superpeople.
The inmigration problem and the infamous "white genocide" has been proven false.
Once again, there is a reasonable fear in living in a world where you only need a mutant to blow up half of the country, humans with the ability of reading minds, control the elements ect...
We dont know how we would react.
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[QUOTE=Lapsus;4676270]Wars that can be caused by any other group, humanity is responsible for many genocides but even then, palés in comparisson with the idea of living with superpeople.
The inmigration problem and the infamous "white genocide" has been proven false.
Once again, there is a reasonable fear in living in a world where you only need a mutant to blow up half of the country, humans with the ability of reading minds, control the elements ect...
We dont know how we would react.[/QUOTE]
We don't know how the MU would react either because it has never happened there. I guess Magneto War is the biggest mutant attack on the planet and it was negligible since it's never brought up in the mids of alien invasions and superhero civil wars. Almost as if the "mutant threat" was artifically inflated by sapiens to justify oppression. Now what does that remind me of....
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[QUOTE=LordUltimus;4675691]I remember a scene where a Black Power member calls Kitty "mutie" and she responds by calling him the n-word.[/QUOTE]
Obvious stand-in for a black guy calling someone a fag, or any number of charming “your **** don’t stink” permutations.
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I think of Professor X in 'Logan' who has a brain disease that pretty much puts everyone in his immediate vicinity in mortal danger without him even him even trying to. There's no comparison at all to an actual black people minding their business. It's blatantly dishonest to try and compare them.
Real minorities don't have powerful superpowers that legitimately make them a threat to security the way an ordinary mutant minding their business can. It's why trying to use mutants as a direct metaphor for real life minorities doesn't work.
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[QUOTE=The Kid;4676327]I think of Professor X in 'Logan' who has a brain disease that pretty much puts everyone in his immediate vicinity in mortal danger without him even him even trying to. There's no comparison at all to an actual black people minding their business. It's blatantly dishonest to try and compare them.
Real minorities don't have powerful superpowers that legitimately make them a threat to security the way an ordinary mutant minding their business can. It's why trying to use mutants as a direct metaphor for real life minorities doesn't work.[/QUOTE]
Autistics have magic number powers like Dustin Hoffman, except when they don’t.
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[QUOTE=Revolutionary_Jack;4675625]Kieron Gillen said once that the X-Men work best as a metaphor for being an outsider and being marginalized but they collapse as soon as you try to apply any one real life parallel to it. I think that's succinct.
In different times the X-Men stand in for different stuff:
-- In Claremont's run, X-Men was a romantic expression of being persecuted and marginalized and a stand-in for the oppressed. Whether it's racism, homophobia, sexism and so on and so forth. You had Genosha, a mutant apartheid state, and Claremont said that Israeli politics and so on was an influence.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I can totally understand how some may feel that attempts at having mutant experiences reflect real life experiences just doesn't work, despite the best efforts from many writers.
In fact, I'm reminded of when Claremont wrote Uncanny X-Men #388 (January, 2001), in which it's suggested that if Kelly was centering his scapegoating campaign around regular black, Asian, or Jewish people, most folks would rebel against him, which makes it more bizarre considering how there are, indeed, black, Asian, and Jewish mutants.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/jp94iTv.png[/img]
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Saying the actions of a few justify sanctioning the many is textbook discrimination. Not all mutants are dangerous and carrying the Xgene doesn't systematically make one dangerous. Yet that's the justification given for mutant oppression. Again, I can't put my finger on where I heard that...
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I kind of thought that the extinction eras did not make sense for a minority but after Krakoa was established I can understand that mutants are close parallels to Jewish people right now. Both emerged from genocide to build their own nation-state that is very controversial albeit for different reasons. Israel is controversial mainly due to its treatment of Palestinians. Krakoa is controversial over the fear that it will treat the entire human race as Israel does to Palestinians.
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[QUOTE=tuck frump;4675950]Even the most lethal of mutants has a body count negligible compared to humans. The obsession with mutants perceived threat level is disingenuous at best.[/QUOTE]
Except not really? Like at all? That only makes sense if you go by the entirety of human history. Individual mutants have had higher body counts than entire wars. Comparing the lives lost because of wars and massacres to the lives lost because of even individual mutants and saying they're the same thing actually IS disingenuous.
