How should X-Men reflect the bigotry of modern times?

[JKtheMac]

wouldn't the allusion you're referring to be an example of anti bigotry Every individual regardless of race, culture, wealth, sexuality, body function, etc reduced to Data and personalized ads?

I see a whole lot of polarisation created by social media, which includes a great deal of bigotry.

[ARkadelphia]

I see a whole lot of polarisation created by social media, which includes a great deal of bigotry.

Social media does not cause polarisation; it shines a light on it

[BroHomo]

At the same time, the culture among straight cis white people (generally men) seems to be one of expecting to be in on everything. That if something isn't shared, that's somehow a personal insult (I say this as a straight cis white man myself). Like being "owed" the full story even when the person who can give it isn't comfortable because it's too personal.

There's so much meaning in things that are taken for granted and presumed to not mean anything. Rosa Farrell from FF4 used to be mostly viewed as a "useless damsel in distress." It wasn't until people started to understand various things that happened "in the gaps" (out of direct view) with her that they began to understand how great she really was and is. So much of story is what's not said, or what could've been said instead but wasn't, and it's too easy for people to ignore that and focus only on what's said.

From my extremely limited World view but i noticed an entitlement aura surrounding some of my friends .... my fraternity brothers or regular buddies would irk me so hard when id bring them to s party or friends house and they'd just walk around like they own the place. Id tell them "dude don't go in people's rooms stay with the main party" 9 times outta 10 they'll look offended face and say "Im just looking" and id be like "Dudd you can't go anywhere you want" I've had a few bersee anf at a paryn but i had to comnent cause i literally just had to tell Brandon he couldn't go in Gloria's room.. the doors closed and hr6s never met her. and he gave me the im just looking spiel the recent Captain Marvel uproar reminds me exactly of Brandon's act

That's interesting. Because others were talking to me implying that like 95% of the world hates them, reasoning that it's more so the case now compared to the 1960s-1980s.

what would make them say that?

I see a whole lot of polarisation created by social media, which includes a great deal of bigotry.

Yeeeahh not sure if I'm 100% on that i guess I can't be sure but There's 1 or 2 of my friends that allows soc med to inflame their bigotry but tbh they're not the mist tolerant people in the first place. Soc med isn't teaching people to be bigoted sassholes you learn that at home. it is getting them organized which i think just makes it easier to identify and avoid them lol

[CoCoBandz]

From my extremely limited World view but i noticed an entitlement aura surrounding some of my friends .... my fraternity brothers or regular buddies would irk me so hard when id bring them to s party or friends house and they'd just walk around like they own the place. Id tell them "dude don't go in people's rooms stay with the main party" 9 times outta 10 they'll look offended face and say "Im just looking" and id be like "Dudd you can't go anywhere you want" I've had a few bersee anf at a paryn but i had to comnent cause i literally just had to tell Brandon he couldn't go in Gloria's room.. the doors closed and hr6s never met her. and he gave me the im just looking spiel the recent Captain Marvel uproar reminds me exactly of Brandon's act


what would make them say that?

Yeeeahh not sure if I'm 100% on that i guess I can't be sure but There's 1 or 2 of my friends that allows soc med to inflame their bigotry but tbh they're not the mist tolerant people in the first place. Soc med isn't teaching people to be bigoted sassholes you learn that at home. it is getting them organized which i think just makes it easier to identify and avoid them lol

I've been around those types you speak of.

Have had to cut someone like that off before.

[JKtheMac]

Yeeeahh not sure if I'm 100% on that i guess I can't be sure but There's 1 or 2 of my friends that allows soc med to inflame their bigotry but tbh they're not the mist tolerant people in the first place. Soc med isn't teaching people to be bigoted sassholes you learn that at home. it is getting them organized which i think just makes it easier to identify and avoid them lol

Not teaching. Categorising, feeding, manipulating and grouping together. And why? So we can receive targeted advertising.

I would imagine everyone has had one or two views that drifted outside of the established mores of those around them at some point. Usually they would be moderated by those around them. Social media links you deliberately to people that share your views, or even have more radical but similar views. That’s what it’s designed to do. Link people together. It gives extremism of any stripe positive feedback from like minded people.

As a moderate I have watched it happen to my country, the entire nation polarised over a single issue. This time deliberately manipulated to sell an ideology. Not being on social media it was challenging to see everyone I knew, family and friends alike, suddenly polarised. Every one of them swearing blind that their views were their own, and not influenced by the screens they so religiously plugged into each morning.

Don’t just take my view in a prosperous country. Go ask anyone in Trinidad and Tobago, where an electorate were manipulated. This is one of the hot button topics of our era. How do we ensure free and fair elections in the social media age.

I believe that’s what we are seeing in Krakoa. A manipulated group. Polarising opinion.

[JKtheMac]

Social media does not cause polarisation; it shines a light on it

You can’t have polarisation in a normally grouped, unstressed society without the ability for people to find each other and communicate. Yes we saw extremism in the past. This isn’t that. This is a cosy, almost invisible form of polarisation.

The thirties and forties was an era of desperate people living in extreme situations. People polarised around the idea of communism and by reaction to that fascism. They were seen as ways to get out of those desperate situations. Today we don’t see desperation like that. Certainly not in my country anyway, clearly there are desperate places and desperate people, but in an affluent western nation within a system designed with counterbalances and checks, for radicalism to emerge is not something we have ever seen before. So what has caused that?

For the longest time people said is was disaffection or fatigue, that it was some kind of cycle perhaps, but slowly we are beginning to notice how our means of communication are changing how we think and how we act.

Whether you agree with that thesis or not, it is fertile ground for speculative fiction. The kind of material China Miéville thrives on for example. Perhaps the kind of idea that Hickman is touching on.

[Electricmastro]

what would make them say that?

I think they feel the mutant hate was ramped up and emphasized on so much to the point that they feel it was impossible for mutants to live decent, comfortable lives, as if minorities are forever doomed to suffer in pain with no hope of achieving even the smallest amount of progress, and that the good that exists is way too insignificant compared to the ugliness of the world due to the too many awful things that have happened in it.

Krakoa and how the mutants respond to the outside world and vice versa may change that up quite a bit though.

[Domino_Dare-Doll]

In any event, at the risk of sounding like I have too many pairs of rose-colored glasses and/or being accused of denying the world's problems, I'll say that I miss when comics like Secret Wars showed more that, despite all the disagreements, shortcomings, and antagonism involved in the humans/mutates' relation with the mutants/X-Men, they're still able to reasonably communicate and cooperate towards a greater good.

I don't know, some may call it unrealistic, overly-optimistic, or just a flat out joke, and perhaps it can indeed be worded better, but if you ask me, I don't think there's anything wrong with finding and embracing at least a little bit of that hopeful light even in the middle of that destructive darkness, having one's heart in the right place while actively working towards a solution, even if there isn't one close in sight. It just feels more... nuanced and human that way.

Honestly, I feel like this is the sane approach.

Like yes, we should never become complacent in the face of progress; there'll probably never, ever be a point where we can say 'enough' because...well, we're human. We'll find something. But that doesn't mean that we can't learn from our mistakes and make it better for future generations; you need that hope, that incentive to keep going. That's why it's so important to celebrate even the tiniest steps of progress, like a baby learning to walk; if you keep snarling at them because they didn't get far enough fast enough, how on earth are they supposed to even want to approach you?

[BroHomo]

like a baby learning to walk; if you keep snarling at them because they didn't get far enough fast enough, how on earth are they supposed to even want to approach you?

Ha Damn I like this

[Michael Watkins]

M Day is when it all went wrong. that's when humanity showed its true colors.

[Electricmastro]

Honestly, I feel like this is the sane approach.

Like yes, we should never become complacent in the face of progress; there'll probably never, ever be a point where we can say 'enough' because...well, we're human. We'll find something. But that doesn't mean that we can't learn from our mistakes and make it better for future generations; you need that hope, that incentive to keep going. That's why it's so important to celebrate even the tiniest steps of progress, like a baby learning to walk; if you keep snarling at them because they didn't get far enough fast enough, how on earth are they supposed to even want to approach you?

Yeah, I think it's realistic enough to say that progress doesn't happen in one big step up the ladder. It happens with many little steps. And in going up the ladder, the person may stumble, fall, and smack hard on the ground, maybe 100 times, maybe more than that, but that, along with the deeply flawed and foolish bad people that exist past and present, shouldn't stop the good-intentioned people from continually trying, and if they need to use hope to continue to do so, then I'm pretty sure I don't see a problem there.

People are allowed to get cynical and have the opinion that those with hope are being overly-optimistic and unrealistic, sure, and but if someone comes along and is cynical and pessimistic to the point they'll say there has been too much injustice and always will be, so people should just stop wasting their time and give up, then I hope that person has prepared for any responses that come their way, because suffice to say, quite a number of people don't want to be quitters. If everyone else actually wanted to be a quitter gives in to injustice, then that's when I think injustice will win and make it all the worse for future generations, and I somehow get the impression that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were feeling hopeful enough when they were creating the X-Men, regardless of all the injustice that ever happened in the world or ever would.

[Huntsman Spider]

M Day is when it all went wrong. that's when humanity showed its true colors.

Exactly. Before M-Day, mutants numbered in the millions and were posited to be the dominant population of sapient life on Earth within at least a few generations from now. Then M-Day reversed things so dramatically, with mutants barely numbering in the hundreds then, and humanity decided that now that they had the upper hand and mutants weren't going to inherit the Earth after all, they could just "finish the job." Cue the Purifiers and their supporters and fellow travelers in the government.

[H-E-D]

Presumably the books need to have more humans telling the X-Men they're being too sensitive and should stop being snowflakes.

[Electricmastro]

M Day is when it all went wrong. that's when humanity showed its true colors.

Exactly. Before M-Day, mutants numbered in the millions and were posited to be the dominant population of sapient life on Earth within at least a few generations from now. Then M-Day reversed things so dramatically, with mutants barely numbering in the hundreds then, and humanity decided that now that they had the upper hand and mutants weren't going to inherit the Earth after all, they could just "finish the job." Cue the Purifiers and their supporters and fellow travelers in the government.

I suppose in that case, Brian Michael Bendis and the other writers involved with Decimation were more regressive than progressive in terms of how they handled the mutant/human relations. That might sound like I'm ignoring reality too much and am giving the writers too much flak, but I don't know, there's just something about it that seems to have constructed with an unhealthy kind of cynicism that seems to restrict more and more what kind of stories can be told with the X-Men.

I think it's like having two big dinosaurs being cautiously (if not, dangerously) uncertain about each other, and then waving a magic pen that turns one of them into a flea, which allows the one that's still a dinosaur to have an easier time crushing the other. The dino wasn't really hesitant to show its true colors, but simply decides it's a better time than any to act out on caution, irresponsibly handled caution, towards a flea that's still perceived as a threat, and said flea lives out its day to day foreseeable existence under a heavier amount of anxiety, fear, and hopelessness under threat by the ever so uncomfortably present big dino waiting to easily squish it.

Unless Marvel was prepared to permanently end the X-Men series as a whole, then I think one could at least somewhat figure out the results from that incident. I've also heard things along the lines of the comic writers doing things like that in response to the then-running X-Men films at Fox, as a way to "1-up" them or something, but I'm not sure how true that is.

[Huntsman Spider]

Presumably the books need to have more humans telling the X-Men they're being too sensitive and should stop being snowflakes.

Uncanny Avengers came close with Wasp making a jibe about the X-Men and their drama, or something like that, though I could be misconstruing something there.

I suppose in that case, Brian Michael Bendis and the other writers involved with Decimation were more regressive than progressive in terms of how they handled the mutant/human relations. That might sound like I'm ignoring reality too much and am giving the writers too much flak, but I don't know, there's just something about it that seems to have constructed with an unhealthy kind of cynicism that seems to restrict more and more what kind of stories can be told with the X-Men.

I think it's like having two big dinosaurs being cautiously (if not, dangerously) uncertain about each other, and then waving a magic pen that turns one of them into a flea, which allows the one that's still a dinosaur to have an easier time crushing the other. The dino wasn't really hesitant to show its true colors, but simply decides it's a better time than any to act out on caution towards a flea that's still perceived as a threat, and said flea lives out its day to day foreseeable existence under a heavier amount of anxiety, fear, and hopelessness under threat by the ever so uncomfortably present big dino waiting to easily squish it.

Unless Marvel was prepared to permanently end of the X-Men series as a whole, then I think one could at least somewhat figure out the results from that incident. I've also heard things along the lines of the comic writers doing things like that in response to the then-running X-Men films at Fox, as a way to "1-up" them or something, but I'm not sure how true that is.

Interesting points you raise there.