Immortal X-Men #10 - Recap/Spoilers. Wow.

[gonnagiveittoya]

What are you basing this on? I can't recall depowering ever being viewed as akin to murder, UNLESS depowering that mutant led directly to their death, like someone like Hydro who drowned on M-Day when he lost his ability to breathe underwater without warning.

They've called it genocide on several occasions so it'd have to be basically murder to do it

[BobbysWorld]

They've called it genocide on several occasions so it'd have to be basically murder to do it

Okay, that feels like a pretty bad faith interpretation. That to me doesn't suggest anyone's talking about how depowering an individual mutant is tantamount to murdering one, its saying that eradicating mutants as a species, turning mutants into humans en masse and eliminating even the potential for the X-gene in future generations, would effectively destroy the mutant race.

You're taking a very specific angle designed to invalidate the concept of cultural/racial eradication by reframing that act or attempt at erasure as though it implies individual murders when that is not what discussion of wiping out the mutant genome is actually about or trying to say.

[sunofdarkchild]

They've called it genocide on several occasions so it'd have to be basically murder to do it

Not necessarily. The case of China and the Uyghurs is a pretty 'good' example. The mass forced sterilizations don't necessarily have to include the killing of the people being sterilized, nor do the stealing of children so they never have any attachment to their parents' culture. But those acts are still considered a genocide because they directly reduce an ethnic groups population and seek to ensure there will not be any future generations of this group. That's exactly what M-Day did.

[Grunty]

The probleme with this debate is that we are talking about purely fictional people defined by the shared posession of a singular fantastic gene, which grants laws of physics breaking super powers that have no comparison to anything in the real world.

The more in depth one goes into the whole idea that the X-gene can somehow define this group of people as being comparable to real world ethnicities, cultures, societies, people of different sexual orientations and identities, or even species, the more it becomes problematic to draw direct lines.

Like take a random person from say Spain and tell me what would happen to them if the real world equivalent of the "No More Mutant" spell would be cast on them?

After all being "spanish" generaly assumes a shared number of traits which can define them culturaly, socialy and ethnicaly. All the things some seem to see represented in the "mutant narrative/metaphore" too.

But again what would happen if Wanda would have said "No more Spainard?"

Would their skin color turn brighter or darker? Would they stop speaking spanish? Would they lose their nationality? Would they lose their culture? Would they lose their sexual identity? Would they lose their religion?

What of these are comparable to the removale of the X-gene that turns super powered people into *gasp* normal people who still live and are fully functional like we people in the real world are?

The mutant metaphor is a functional, yet entirely shallow one, which breaks appart the moment one looks at it too much with thought, which is why the X-men comics have suffered from writers putting too much emphasis on it ever since House of M.

[BobbysWorld]

At a certain point 'this isn't the real world' becomes a cop-out though. The mutant metaphor is NOT all-encompassing or a perfect fit, nor should it be. But that's literally what makes it a METAPHOR instead of just....a depiction of actual real world racism or discrimination. Yes, there are bad faith actors on both sides, people who try and treat racism against a fictional marginalization as literally the same as a real world instance, but that doesn't mean its not equally a problem when people act like stories about a fictional marginalized group are just incapable of saying ANYTHING worthwhile about discrimination or concepts like cultural/racial genocide.

Fiction has never been a direct mirror of reality, and there are degrees of variance to be sure, but that has never meant that fiction has no weight or meaning, and people constantly attempting to devalue even the POSSIBILITY of saying something about the real world or the human condition via fiction on the basis 'this is just fiction, these elements do not exist in the real world' feels like a constant distraction from the fact that like. Yes. We know this. But that doesn't mean that non-real world elements can't be used to tell a story with real-world implications or corollaries.

[kevinism]

Rogue does it to have sex.