Originally Posted by
BobbysWorld
Its cool if you want to play stupid, its not me it makes look dumb, so like, get down with your obtuse self I guess? Weird flex, but hey.
Extinction events and genocide are very real as well, but there is no real world equivalent to the Dark Phoenix's actions on a scale deliberately meant to be portrayed as cosmic and bigger than just a single planet. The destruction of that solar system isn't a random event that was pulled out of a hat for no reason even if you've chosen to disregard its context within a deliberately scripted narrative because it doesn't serve your false equivalency. That event was written into the narrative in large part to bring about the ultimate conflict with the Shi'ar, as well as referred back to in Phoenix stories since then. In order to establish the Phoenix as a threat bigger than any one world and make the X-Men each face a hero's dilemma as they struggled with whether they even had the right to defend Phoenix from the Shi'ar based on their feelings for her when the Shi'ar pointed out the threat the Phoenix posed all throughout the galaxy.
Its completely disingenuous to treat a story that was deliberately crafted with nonreal elements in order TO distance it from the only possible comparisons that could be made to the real world.....as though its an actual stand-in for such superficially similar atrocities. Earth's past extinction events or genocides are either the result of extreme events that while called acts of god, don't actually involve a figure that can be literally put on trial for that crime as was again fundamental to the overall Dark Phoenix Saga...or else they're the result of human hatred, bigotry, and oppression on a scale that requires cooperation and multiple aggressors, even if they're united by a single leader. The Dark Phoenix Saga was very deliberately written to not be a story about those things. The destruction Dark Phoenix caused was not an allegory for human bigotry against other cultures, and once again you're reaching to make an equivalency that isn't there, at the cost of treating real world atrocities as having any weight or mattering outside of this need you feel to render everything abstract and this just an idle intellectual argument that you can feel you've won.
That's the part that I'm annoyed about, but I'll make this my last post and go because I said what I said and my points stand. I don't actually expect I can stop you from having fun playing Devil's Advocate on a subject that you clearly don't care about either way. I just think its ugly, here's why, and that's as deep as it goes. So to recap one last time for posterity and pettiness, (look I said I'd be done after this, not that I don't still think you and this merry-go-round of BS aren't annoying)....Mastermind's predatory actions and choices are reflective of real world behavior even if he used telepathy to do it, and real life contains plenty of people who act like him. Things don't need to align perfectly for the connection between character and real world behavior to be apparent to anyone not pretending to miss the point in order to call that hashtag winning. Readers who have known people like Mastermind or been preyed on by someone like that are often informed in their view of/towards him by their feelings about events in the real world. In turn, how Mastermind is viewed and treated in story and by other fans in discussion of that story, informs how some readers engage with those stories or those discussions with other readers.
That's literally all that's happening here. This is a discussion where how Mastermind is regarded came up, in which you chose to take a stance divorcing his in story actions from the real world contexts twined with those for some readers for whom such things are NOT abstract. From there, you attempted to claim that trying to regard him as a rapist for his deliberately scripted as predatory behavior, requires also regarding Jean as a genocidal mass murderer for the actions of an ambiguously connected cosmic figure deliberately scripted to be on a scale IMPOSSIBLE to fully relate to the real world or the demise of real civilizations. I in turn said no, that's stupid, its not you being clever and insightful dismissing others for seeing real world parallels with the one character's behavior via drawing a parallel nobody else is actually trying to draw because nobody else actually sees the Jean/genocidal parallel as adding anything to the discussion OR reflective of the real world or comparable events. We're not actually missing the disingenuous connections you keep trying to make happen, we're saying stop fucking trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen.
You only DREW the Dark Phoenix connection INTO this conversation to point out how ridiculous you feel it is to treat Mastermind's actions as rape. That whole line of thought STARTED with you presenting it as absurd, in building on what you viewed as absurdity regarding Mastermind. YOU don't even buy that the Dark Phoenix is reflective of real world genocides, you just keep doubling down in order to try and present it as the inevitable end conclusion of my argument with Mastermind. Except lol. Its not. Don't try and sell me on what I must actually be saying about Dark Phoenix given what else I'm saying. I'm actually very clear on what I see happening in this thread, thanks. You can play this game all you want but your refusal to acknowledge what I'm saying is the difference between Mastermind and Dark Phoenix, when I explicitly say that I'm just not saying about the Phoenix what you're trying to cast me as saying by way of the parallel you keep trying to attribute to me specifically cuz you know it doesn't make sense, which is also the reason its not something I'm saying in the first place....
ahslkhlfkah. Like omg, is this actually how you think you win arguments? Does this actually work for you ever? How ridiculous. So nah, what people are saying about Mastermind is just not the same as saying that same thing about Dark Phoenix, and I'm not claiming it is. You can keep trying to insist its the same or at least that's what I'm actually saying via my argument, but hard disagree. I know what point I made here, and its actually totes cool with me if you don't get it or want to keep pretending you can't see it. Guess that means you win? LOL. I think? Idk, whatever works for you.
(LOL and for the record, that whole 'why blame me a reader who has no control over editorial' bit is always cute but uh. What? None of us have any control whatsoever whether Emma Frost apologizes to Firestar, but that doesn't stop us from having opinions on whether she should, shouldn't, technically has, or hasn't, so like let's not with the whole 'everything is Marvel's fault' the second you don't like how your own opinions start making you look. And I don't like how Marvel handles a lot of this. Obviously. I have my criticisms of them and their treatment of all this, I made that in part here, I've made it elsewhere, I'm sure I'll make it again in the future. Its not mutually exclusive of my criticism of the way you yourself as a reader chose to handle your part of this conversation. I don't blame you for anything other than the part where I said I think its a bit ugly to treat others' acknowledging Mastermind's actions as a depiction of rape as though its absurd to treat it that way because 'well technically.' I didn't like that, I said why, and that's that. Not totally sure why you think that part is something I should blame Marvel for, or where you felt I was blaming you personally for Marvel's....decisions on how they write Mastermind? Oh well.)
But yeah. The End! I'm done now, this was supes fun, we should totally never do it again, byeeeeeee.