The Cure...

[sungila]

Leech and Rogue, absolutely!
Beast's self experimentation, yes!
Hope, perhaps...

Mutant or not, most of 'us' are our own X-aminers...but what's being tested and what's to achieve?

In many ways Xavier's credo and Sinister's too are 'cures' for a made illness...the sense of wounds and infection...the inward bend of the barb and blame.

But these characters are not cures. These powers and empowerments are at root highly altruistic and in that way deeply personal inter-social manifestations of a people...of an us that is in contrast and conflict to the us and them and the me who is not the I said to be me.

God Loves Man Kills gets to the heart of it...and in that way...in the sense of genocide, acculturation and assimilation...the concept of 'sick' and 'corrupted'...hmmm, remember the issue of Uncanny where Mesmero makes circus freaks out of the ANAD X-Men...that issue...

I don't know if I like the 'cure' concept but it's very much a part of our society today. Even if it's not explicitly enforced or spoken to, it is there in the patriarchy, here in the world of commodity, gain, possession and profit...here in the law stated and street block imposed - from there on the other side, over the fence, in the keep off the grass in the 'not in my backyard' compounds of what's deemed healthy and well and suited to say, to themselves, from aisle to aisle inside the castles of the kingdom...what the subjects should be, where they should be, and by what means they should address themselves.

[Maestro 216]

Never because it always gets used as a way to "save" mutants and never gets treated with a moral question if it is the right idea. Hell the terrible Last Stand made the cure a choice over forcing it on all mutants.

[Agent Z]

I'm reading Peter David's 2006 X-Factor run. One of the villains is a man named Josef Huber. His power is copying the powers of every single mutant in existence. The problem? He can't turn it off. The powers are always on and he needs to take special medication to control his out of control telepathy which can read the mind of every single person on the planet. M-Day was actually a boon to this guy because less mutants meant less powers to mess up his body.

Is anyone going to tell me this guy would be wrong for taking the cure?

[Lady Midnight]

There's gentle, whose powers are supposed to kill him at an early age.

And if my kid started morphing into an elephant or a fish, I'd have that reversed.

[Alan2099]

I think the idea of a cure works, if you set aside the race metaphor and look at it from a disability metaphor.

A person that gets the cure and has to wear a collar isn't that different from a person that has to wear prosthetic legs to get around, or maybe they have to take daily injections much like people who take insulin injections. If there is a cure I don't think it should be as easily as "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. You're cured!"

These people were transformed against their will and now with medical help they can continue to live productive lives.

[Gripstir]

Capitalism means there is an avenue for everything to exist regardless of morality as long as there is an avenue for profit. I mean take the roomba vacuum. That spawn of hell pet scarer should burn in hell where it came from

[Sutekh]

One annoying feature about the whole drama is that the mutants have access to Forge, who could, if he wanted to, crap out in an afternoon a retrovirus that alters the X-gene's expression and allows a mutant with a sucky mutation to have a much better one. Perhaps it would only allow 'another roll of the dice' and the new mutation will be random. Perhaps it's even better and you can choose from a series of injections that grant you the mutation of various mutants who have volunteered to make their particular expression of the X-gene available to others. (Some, like Franklin Richards, might not be sanguine about sharing their special sauce. Others might like the idea of there being dozens of people with their mutation, and be happy to help mutants with less fortunate mutations.)

And that's just Forge.

I'm sure there are other *many* options. Karma's siblings, Leong and Nga, back in the Wildways, were foreshadowed to have a power like this in the future as well, to reshape mutants and their expression of power. And Apocalypse has demonstrated the ability (through Celestial technology, I assume) to modify another mutant's expression of their power.

There are indeed mutants whose powers / mutations suck, and would logically want a cure, but that's only because the mutant race hasn't bothered *at all* coming up with alternatives for those mutants other than 'suck it up, buttercup, us pretty / rich mutants who won the genetic lottery don't have time for your whining, go live with the Morlocks, or be caged up like Proteus because you're too dangerous to get to have a childhood...'

[Grunty]

I think the idea of a cure works, if you set aside the race metaphor and look at it from a disability metaphor.

A person that gets the cure and has to wear a collar isn't that different from a person that has to wear prosthetic legs to get around, or maybe they have to take daily injections much like people who take insulin injections. If there is a cure I don't think it should be as easily as "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. You're cured!"

These people were transformed against their will and now with medical help they can continue to live productive lives.

In the Mr. and Mrs. X series Rogue even got a nice looking little bracelette that supressed her powers, showing that there is not even need for such devices to look like big slave collars.

One could also draw comparision to people who take antidepressant, which can make their lifes more bearable but also comes with the risk of various side effects, including losing part of their creativity.

Without the ethnicity metaphor, the story of a mutant cure could even be treated like the drug in the movie Awakening. Showing mutants with negative powers experiecing a new life without them, but ultimately having to see the cure failing as their bodies start to reject it.

If the "cures" would only work temporary, either with the mutants building up an immunity the longer they take them, or if they have to take them regulary, they could actualy be a stable part of X-men stories, without directly endangering mutants as an ethnicity in general.