Magneto is the manifestation of the saying, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” You could probably reasonably say:
Professor X : Magneto :: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. : Malcom X
Professor X and the X-Men were all for mutant equality, but they always favored peaceful acceptance. Conversely, Magneto recognized that large portions of society would never accept mutants. It also bears mentioning that Magneto carried some “racist” (for lack of a better word) tendencies towards non-mutants. In his view, non-mutants are lesser beings.
It’s kind of hard to argue that non-mutants aren’t lesser beings when mutants literally have powers that no normal human could ever hope to have, powers that can even defy the basic laws of physics.
Well not all mutants. We always focus on the “cool” ones but there were a ton of mutants that were hopelessly disfigured and with powers that amount to anyone holding a bat
Or with powers that uh…
Aren’t good for anyone near and including them.
While I see your point, and I’m not at all painting you with this brush, I think that reasoning could also be used to argue that, e.g., autistic people are lesser beings. I know it’s a different universe, but look at Superman: Unquestionably a superior being, but like Professor X, he never put himself on that pedestal. Magneto’s insistence that non-mutants are and maybe should be subservient pretty much requires conflict, and starts folks down a path towards subjugation, enslavement, and ultimately elimination. Note: not extinction. Elimination requires action, while extinction, allowing for mitigating circumstances, does not.
Add to all of this that it’s pretty easy to understand, and even relate to the origins of how Magnet and Professor X see non-mutants, and X-Men is a pretty great story/universe. They’re both similarly flawed, but in very different ways.
I guess the issue here is about how you are defining ‘superior.’ If the argument is that mutants are in some way morally or ethically superior to non-mutants, absolutely not. And that is the source of a lot of the conflict in the comics. But in terms of what they can actually achieve in life, when you can do something like Magento does, you’ve got an inherent superiority.
Now I admit that you can’t make that claim for all mutants. Not even all X-Men. I would not say that Cyclops’ mutant power makes him an inherently superior human in terms of power because it severely limits him in many other ways and, if he wasn’t on a team that regularly needed his power, would find life pretty difficult.
So I guess you can’t argue that all mutants are superior, but many of the ones we see could basically rule all of humanity if they were allowed to get away with it.
Even Cyclops is inherently superior, from looking at capability. So you really think any human, any police force even, can stand against him?
Yes. Take him by surprise and he’s as easy to kill as anyone else, and he has no powers that make him more aware than an average human.
Under the same conditions, any regular human could kill Magneto, Storm, Mystique, even Professor X.
You’d have problems with someone indestructible like Colossus or with healing powers like Wolverine or Deadpool. I don’t know what mutants have special awareness, like Spiderman, but they’d be harder to sneak up on. While Professor X could, my understanding is he typically doesn’t pay attention to random people’s thoughts
Professor X would probably pick up on a person nearby who’s intending to harm him, but I think you’re right about the other three. Wolverine has healing powers AND special awareness, so he’d be especially hard to take out.
While Professor X could, my understanding is he typically doesn’t pay attention to random people’s thoughts
I think and argument could be made that his powers would work the same way the “normal” senses would. You wouldn’t necessarily wake up when there’s normal stimuli, but if there was a loud noise or a bright flash, you might wake up. Similarly, a would-be-assassin might have thoughts which would be alarming to the Professor, even unconsciously, while sleeping.
The point is made at least in the “X-Men: Days of Future Past” movie, where the McAvoy portrayed young professor keeps suppressing his powers with Hank’s drug in order to silence the voices in his head — and to be able to walk.
My point being that I think that much like with hearing, our brains learn to ignore stimuli, rather than not actually hear it. The brain filters. So his power is rather a completely new sense, instead of something he directs at people and then gets access to. It’s sort of always there, like noise, you just have to focus on the right sound.
Magneto’s insistence that non-mutants are and maybe should be subservient
Magneto is a prime example of “might makes right”, which is why he’s a villain. Non-mutants are beneath him: he has no compassion for them, no regard for their ideas, their voice, their opinion.
I’m not well versed in his history in the comics or whether there even is a canonical backstory, but from the Marvel perspective …… he’s a sympathetic villain, because he has a good point. While it’s not a single coherent backstory, we can see his development over time at the treatment he faced, and can have sympathy for humanity driving him to it.
I think it’s not power which makes someone more or lesser than. Magneto is very powerful, but he’s not really that good of a person. I know way better disabled people than him, so…
Do you consider people with learning disabilities lesser than human? I think that is the point they are trying to make. Just because they did not evolve does not mean they are better. Better athletes and performers are revered because they do things normal people cannot, but it doesn’t make them more human.
In-universe, there are plenty of normal humans with those kinds of powers
really? but wouldn’t the fact that they have those powers make them mutants by default? I’m not well versed in the x-men universe.
I’m not well versed either but mutants have the X gene while powered humans in general wouldn’t. Remember it’s marvel so there’s Spiderman, ironman, Hawkeye for examples of heros stronger than your average human who don’t have the X gene. Interestingly enough mutants are always seen as lesser while non mutant heros are usually celebrated (unless it’s one of the grim dark comics).
ah okay, i didn’t realize that marvel and x-men shared a universe, i thought marvel and x-men were mutually exclusive
Yea they all belong together and have plenty of comics where they interact, funnily enough it’s real world BS that kept them separate for the longest. Iirc fox owned the right to use xmen in media while a couple other companies owned the rights of various other heroes and mutants and marvel stuff.
It’s all sorta consolidated now with Disney and Sony has been playing niceish with Spiderman for a couple years now too.
Mutants are humans that are born that way, all the others are made in one way or another. Pretty much all Marvel superheroes that don’t originate from X-Men are not mutants.
Mutants specifically have to carry the x-gene; some super powered humans have been born with powers but don’t have the x-gene, so they aren’t considered mutants.
Mutants, even the X-Men, can be a bit anal, and even racist, about that kind of thing.
There is no “X-Men universe” really, there’s just the Marvel universe / multiverse.
The X-Men regularly interact with Spider Man, Thor, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Captain America, Luke Cage, etc. Those guys are humans who got their powers from a method other than mutation.
A method other than the X-gene. Spider-Man, Daredevil, Cap, and Luke Cage are all mutated humans. Possibly Thor, too, depending on whether you’re going with the god or sufficiently advanced alien/precursor/whatever origin.
I don’t think Captain Marvel has a genetic basis though.
What makes you think they’re mutated? There’s a hint of mutation in the Spider Man origin story, as it’s a radioactive spider, and radiation is associated with mutation. But, the rest of them get their powers in non-mutation-related ways.
They’ve been occasionally been referred to as “mutates”, as opposite to “natural” x-gene carrying mutants.
Also if their powers (or some form of power) can be inherited by their children (or clones), there’s probably been some genetic change.
This is definitely the case for Spider-Man (so many clones! 😩) or the Hulk (though that could be radiation poisoning), and might be the case for the Fantastic Four (though it depends on the writer, and one of their children is a mutant, not a mutate, and radiation poisoning is also a possibility in their case).
Among many other things, like the Clone Saga clones having his powers, a Sentinel straight up scans Peter Parker and mistakes him for a mutant because his DNA has literal spider genes in it now. That’s just Spidey canon.
Same with Super-soldier Serum that gave Rogers his power, it was a genetic modification and, eventually, the same is true of Weapon VI aka Luke Cage (Weapons Plus being a descendant program, he received a modified version of the Serum)
In Marvel comics there’s generally a distinction between “mutants” and “mutates.” A mutant got their powers from birth, typically from the X-gene, a mutate had something happen to them, but that’s not a real scientific distinction. They’ve all been mutated. It’s just in-universe discrimination and is often specifically portrayed as such. Like all discrimination, the distinction is quite often arbitrary and unjustified.
mutants in the marvelverse involes those born into one due to the X gene. people who had gained powers through a mutation are seperately called mutates, which dont face discrimination like mutants do. mutate examples are spiderman, thr hulks, fantastic four.
basically mutants are being discriminated because of their x gene and not their powers ironically.
Which is surprisingly subtle on the part of the general public
but wouldn’t the fact that they have those powers make them mutants by default?
Setting aside the Hulk-style “I got super strength instead of terminal cancer” heroes, a bunch are just Batman retreads. Super-Ninjas, Super-Geniuses, Super-Rich Guys. Marvel has a rich cast of people who are either amped up professional athletes or people with enough money to buy super-herodom.
The X-men type mutants had powers that seemed to defy the known laws of physics. But, they showed pretty often that most mutants had more drawbacks than benefits.
What made Magneto a villain was that he decided that mutants were the next evolutionary step, and that humans were therefore obsolete. It wasn’t even like predicting that mutants were superior and that as a result eventually humans would fade away. It was that he decided that one “race” was superior and therefore was justified in ruling over the inferior race. Which, you know, is pretty dark for a holocaust survivor.
And yet extremely accurate to current Israeli policy
But mutants are humans, and by the “rules” of their universe, mutants are born from non-mutant parents as well.
I’m not sure that parentage matters. When you have powers that defy reality, you have an undeniable superiority. What you seem to be saying, and what I would agree with, is that you can’t really argue that mutants are an ethnic group because they don’t all share a genetic bloodline back to the first mutant.
But I think it’s really hard to claim that someone with the ability to manipulate any and all metal in any way they want does not have an inherent superiority over all non-mutants.
Physical superiority sure but they can still be in the ethical gutter.
I mean they did have the Morlocks so it wasn’t like every mutation was a cool superhero ability
I love MLK but if I had been around in the days of civil rights, I would definitely have been a Malcom x guy
Good news, you’re still in the days of civil rights.
I think poison Ivy is the best example of the “yeah I can’t pretend this is the villain anymore”
Fuck Batman
Mt.freeze just wanted to save his wife but the bills made him turn to crime.
He should have cooked meth.
Dr. Ice.
Guy robbed banks with non-lethal force, definitely less harm than peddling drugs
Common misconception. Freeze guns are less lethal ammunition. Very few people have been successfully unfrozen and it causes brain damage.
It’s how Beth-prime and Summer-prime died.
Doesn’t he turn people into frozen zombies?
Engaging in a consensual transaction is more harmful than taking other people’s money without their permission?
Cool story dude, but nope, incorrect.
I rather liked the Elseworlds depiction of him, just because
spoiler
the sympathetic backstory being a complete fabrication because he was utterly batshit insane
was a nice change-up from the way he’d traditionally been depicted.
Your edit gave me a chuckle
The world needs more of those, glad I could help
Lol then the women in the fridge is not sick!
Harley thought that too and defrosted her. Turns out she was sick.
See also: Harley Quinn & Poison Ivy respectively.
Ivy sure, given what’s happening with our climate I would agree.
Harley is just a straight psycho.
Depends on what version of Harley you’re talking about. The original one from Batman: the Animated Series showed that she actually did have morals, she was just totally in the sway of the Joker. Batman was able to convince her to help him more than once by appealing to her good side.
Harley in the self-titled Harley Quinn cartoon definitely has a good side, but she’s also a psycho. It’s complicated. Unlike her love for Ivy.
Other versions, they definitely lean in on the “Joker except a woman” angle.
She’s an anti-hero more often than not now, fighting villains bigger than her. From the New 52 when she started going solo and turned on Joker (or he turned on her really), to Injustice where she was a major player in the resistance, to the DCEU where she turned against ARGUS to stop Starro which wasn’t even her mission. Even in the Suicide Squad game which is part of the Arkham universe and doesn’t include any kind of redemption arc for her she’s still only killing the Justice League when they’re being controlled by Brainiac, who is probably second only to Darkseid as far as villains go. Under duress sure, but she’s doing it.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Harley Quinn is in Folie à Deux, I think she’s going to be the more psycho one that pushes Arthur to further lows. It’ll be great
I really don’t know what to expect and I’m glad about that. The first film was absolutely nothing like I expected it to be, which is one of the things that was so great about it.
My only worry is that the original, to me, was such a perfect film in terms of capturing and paying tribute to the Scorsese films of the 1970s and 1980s that I don’t know that either going away from that or leaning harder into it will set the proper tone. I’m looking forward to finding out though.
Joker was essentially a remake of The King of Comedy with DC characters shoved in.
It worked because The King of Comedy is a great film, and especially because of Joaquin Phoenix’s masterful performance.
I have no idea what Folie à Deux will be based on (New York New York, maybe…?), but it looks like it’ll be quite a different film from Joker (a tragic romance musical, it seems) while probably at the same time trying to touch similar themes… which would make hitting the right spot (again) quite more difficult than even for the first film…
Personally I don’t have much hope and expect it will end up being a disappointment (and even if it ends up being as good as the first one it might be a box office flop due to the original audience not being into romantic musicals), but I’d love to be proven wrong.
I wouldn’t say just a remake of The King of Comedy. I’d say that was the main film that it centered around, but there was a lot of other Scorsese of that era in there. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, etc.
I could see Folie á Deux moving forward to the next era of Scorsese films like New York, New York, but I hope not because that would be less interesting to me. I think it would be neat to use the sequel to explore a different, but similar, director like Sam Fuller
Todd Phillips is not exactly an amazing filmmaker. Joker was his first film that I would say was elevated above the mundane.
Oh, I thought it was a retread of Death to Smoochy
That’s the point; Harley ≈ Venom, Ivy ≈ Magneto.
Though, frankly, I don’t see a relationship between Magneto and Venom working out. Too much of an age difference.
Just re-read the original comment and you’re right. That is what PDFuego meant. My bad.
Magneto was meant to be a stand in for Malcom X…
Malcom X’s only crime was that white people were afraid of him. Meaning he did nothing wrong.
So Magneto can’t be a villain unless you have him gripping the villain ball pretty hard.
The problem with Magento as a character is that he’s portrayed as Malcolm X in his rhetoric, but as Dr. Strangelove in his technique. The number of times Magneto has tried to engage in Uno-Reverse Genocide - reprogramming Sentinels, reverse engineering killer viruses, rebounding mind control, redirecting asteroids and bombs aimed at his friends back towards civilian non-mutant areas, reversing the magic ray that strips you of your mutant abilities so that it gives them to you instead - makes him deeply unsympathetic simply because this shit never actually works and typically turns him the poster child for “Why All Mutants Must Be Exterminated!” rhetoric works on the non-mutant population.
Say what you will about Malcolm X, but he never tried to brainwash the LAPD into killing all the white people.
I think if Magneto was written in the present age, he would have been written without the mustache twirling aspect. It has become much more popular to portray both antagonists and protagonists with more depth and grey areas. For that matter, we saw it in some of the recent X-Men movies.
I think if Magneto was written in the present age, he would have been written without the mustache twirling aspect
Depends on who writes him. The modern Marvel Cinematic Universe has more than its fair share of mustache twirlers.
For that matter, we saw it in some of the recent X-Men movies.
Eh. I don’t think they ever topped the original. Ian McCallen was in peak form.
Ian McCallen
Sorry to be pedantic, but a great man deserves it; it’s Sir Ian McKellen
Depends on who writes him. The modern Marvel Cinematic Universe has more than its fair share of mustache twirlers.
Sure, I’m talking general trends.
- Black Panther’s Killmonger: Saw injustice against Black people and how Wakanda was doing little to stop it.
- Thanos: Motive changed from trying to impress Death (the Marvel entity) to watching his home planet of Titan starve to death from overpopulation, leading to killing half of life.
- Scarlet Witch: Mom misses her husband/kids!
- He-Who-Remains: Sure he kept a timeline devouring monster at the end of time, but it’s for the greater good!
I’ll spot you Scarlet Witch, who is more the victim of her own despair than a sincere villain. But Killmonger’s regicide and subsequent civil war never seem to do more than satisfy his own ego. Thanos is even worse. I almost prefer the incel-esque literally horny for death motivations over the dime-store eugenics.
I’ll spot you that they’re more well-spoken. They sound sophisticated in their delivery, rather than like some cackling madman a la Skeletor or Ming the Merciless. But then you stop to think about what they’re actually doing, and its just tying damsels to the railroad tracks on a grander scale.
I almost prefer the incel-esque literally horny for death motivations over the dime-store eugenics.
That’s a great sentence.
Fair enough
I’m wondering whether Magneto ever did something analagous to a hajj like Malcolm X did. It radically altered his views. I would imagine if Magneto did this there would be some deus ex machina to set him back to genocide.
He got brain swapped with Professor X back in the 90s, giving birth to Evil Xavier (Onslaught) and Good Guy Magneto.
I get the sentiment. But literally every single creator has come out and said he wasn’t based on Malcolm X.
Magneto was meant to be a stand in for Malcom X…
While the X-Men were an allegory of the civil rights movement from the get go, I’m quite certain at the time Magneto was just intended as a villain.
I mean… his terrorist group was called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, and some of the members were definitely of the moustache twirling puppy kicking kind, including Magneto himself, at first…
It was the 60s. That doesn’t surprise me.
Yeah, mainstream comic book villains didn’t start getting more nuanced until the seventies and especially the eighties, possibly as a consequence of the comics code, which included “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal”, and didn’t allow “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior” until 1971 (and which also hilariously led to zombies being called “zuvembies” in Marvel during the seventies, as that simple change was apparently enough to make them kosher), which publishers didn’t start mostly ignoring untill the mid eighties (though most didn’t officially fully abandon it until the noughties or early twenty-tens).
Can someone help me out with this? Not a super hero guy. Why is magneto good now?
So magneto has actually fought for mutant rights from the beginning. And every time he gets ahead the xmen win and mutant rights don’t really move forward. The xmen literally fight for the status quo. The status quo is bad for mutants, but they want to keep it for some reason. An analogy I’ve heard a lot is that professor x is the mlk to Magneto’s Malcolm x. The difference is that mlk didn’t bank roll a CIA black ops style team to constantly beat up Malcolm x whenever he started getting a leg up.
People are fed up. They’re more open to extreme actions. That’s why people are more sympathetic to Magneto
The xmen literally fight for the status quo. The status quo is bad for mutants, but they want to keep it for some reason.
Not quite. Professor X believes that humans will eventually overcome their inherit racism and would be able to live with mutants in peace. He also believes any act of violence from the mutants will push this ideal future further and further (he also does not agree on hurting humans indiscriminately because not all humans are rabid racists)
Whether Professor X is enlightened or just naive, well that’s another story
deleted by creator
(he also does not agree on hurting
humansfascists indiscriminately because not allhumansfascists are rabid racists)This is where your rebuttal faltered. Not everyone out there is a fascist
Magneto wanted to push, hurt, kill everyone regardless of their stance towards mutants
Ironically, thinking everyone “else” deserves punishment is one of the hallmarks of fascists
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Hurting humans indiscriminately would translate to hurting white people indiscriminately, not fascists. That’s the flaw in your reasoning.
IMO a better comparison would be Professor X is the same as the core democratic party and Magneto is the progressive wing.
“Fought for mutant rights” is a stretch. At the start he was a 2-dimensional villain fighting for mutants to rule over humans.
Direct quote: “The moment is at hand! All my months of preparation and planning shall pay off! The Human Race no longer deserves dominion over the planet Earth! The Day of the Mutants is upon us! The first phase of my plan shall be to show my power… to make homo sapiens bow to homo superior!” His plan involves invading a military base and taking control of “The mightiest rocket of all”.
As for the status quo, the emergence of mutants changed the status quo. What Xavier is generally fighting for is that mutants have the same rights as normal humans. Magneto is fighting for mutants to dominate over humans. And, certain powerful interest in the government are fighting to either cage or exterminate mutants. The early years of the X-men comics are fights on one side against Magneto trying to do something with his group of super-powered mutants (literally called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants), and on the other side fighting against powerful forces in the (human) government who see mutants as a threat and want to stop them before they get too powerful. Plus a bunch of fights against aliens, dimensional-hopping baddies, dinosaur-human hybrids from Antarctica, you know, the usual.
Eventually, Magneto is seemingly satisfied with mutants having their own country where they get to set their own laws and live separately from humans (backed up by the threat of force from the most powerful mutants), whereas Xavier wants humanity and mutants to live together in peace and harmony.
All it takes is one mutant to fuck up the trust built with humans. Professor X is on ketamine
Put simply, given the state and direction of the world the lofty, idealistic goals of Professor Xavier of peaceful coexistence and mutual trust have come to seem quaint and naive in a world of division, exploitation, inequality, discrimination, and hate. Magneto, by contrast, has always advocated the use of force and exercise of power, not in the interest of “bwahaha, I’m a bad guy!” evil, but in the interest of enacting vigilante justice and/or almost anarchic self-determination outside the system when the system fails.
So in 2024, your sympathy towards Magneto is inversely tied to your faith in the system to deliver fair and just outcomes. The more your faith in that has slipped, the closer you get to the position that Magneto is right.
Thank you for the response. I am jaded so I’m with Magneto 100%
To play devil’s advocate: the guy did name his terrorist group “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants” (emphasis mine)…
(I think it’s later been retconned as an attempt at irony, but if so the general public and some of the members clearly didn’t get it.)
In all seriousness, I buy the irony thing, and also don’t think Magneto would particularly care what the public thought, and as for the members, well, not all of them had super intelligence.
Depending on the story magneto ranges from Hitler 2.0 to anti-hero. The better stories tend to be him as an anti-hero. It generally boils down to Xavier believing people are good and they will chose the right option if you set a good example. Magneto believes people are bastards and you have to force them into the right decision.
Magneto’s whole shtick is that he survived the holocaust. This made him a radical against discrimination. So when he sees the mutant minority starting to get the same treatment as Jews in Germany (dehumanizing propaganda, lists and “yellow stars”) he’s like “not this time” and decides to start fighting before things get concentration camp bad.
Professor X believes that regular humans and mutants can reach an understanding despite all the propaganda to the contrary. But if mutants on one side (magneto)attack then due to the powers only other mutants are really effective, both for stopping them and for showing that it’s “not all mutants”.
This is a fantastic explanation. Thank you!
He just wanted freedom from subjugation for the mutants. Having survived the Holocaust, he had strong feelings about the government deciding they weren’t people with equal protections.
He was akin to the Malcolm X to Charles’s King.
I’m not super into comics so someone let me know if I’m off base here but…
Ok so the X men are stand ins for marginalized people. Their primary conflict is that they are demonized by society, even though they are a boon for society. Charles and Magneto attempt to solve this in different ways. Charles via working within the system, and appealing to saving their haters to prove they are good and restraining what makes them different. And Magneto is heavily militant in his defense of mutants against any who would harm them, and is big in not hiding who you are.
Now Magneto is villain coded so don’t take what the post said without a grain of salt. He does bad things. But these days he usually is given a sympathetic reason. And due to how comics and stories are told Charles Xavier will never succeed in his quest to prove mutants are not to be feared. (Especially when you have some kids who’s power is they turn into a literal nuclear bomb that will go off at any time for any reason… poor kid)
But this ties in with the rise in right wing authoritarian hate mobs
Based off of what you’ve said I’ll take Magneto on my side! Covid showed us reasoning doesn’t work lol
I’ll take a shot but I’m not a die hard X-Men guy. If someone has a little more precision please correct me.
Basically magnetos driving idea is that people (and their governments) are out to get mutants and won’t ever change, so it’s up to him to lead mutants to fight back. Basically if they want respect and fair treatment, they have to take it for themselves. He tries many times in many ways to pull down the establishment by, for example, attempting to convert all people to mutants.
The premise of the post is basically that, since Reagan, social support is diminishing and power and wealth are concentrating in such a way in the upper class. Ergo, taking an… uh… active approach in advocating for ourselves is looking increasingly like a good idea.
In my opinion,
Magneto being a victim / survivor of Anti-Semitism , has made him have
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a severe black-and-white justice complex.
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a severe inferiority complex.
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a do-or-die / either friend-or-foe complex.
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a guilt for being powerless to save himself or his parents.
All these things are a complex brew in the psyche of any human being.
It made Prof.X seem somewhat naive or Magneto too brash/risky.
The balance of things either Prof.X or Magneto depending on the scenario plays out. Neither of the results or methods are satisfactory or acceptable but it is a quandary.
No one can predict at the moment of action/in-action where is the correct path.
That is what it means to live your life. Regrets or no-regrets no one can say but you.
Your lived-experience IS NOT a solution for the entire planet or universe. DO NOT apply your solution on others.
Let them live their life.
And that is sometimes very very hard to let-go or adopt.
This is my opinion. You may or may not agree with me. Im good.
That seems about right, except for the inferiority complex.
Magneto has always had a superority complex the size of a continent, and it leaks, making him see not only himself but all mutants as superior… to the point that in Marvel continuity he seems to have been the one to coin the term “homo superior” to refer to mutants as opposed to homo sapiens, or at least he was the first one to use it in the books, in the very first X-Men issue, in the second panel in which he ever appeared (in the real world the term was coined by Olaf Stapledon).
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You’re getting a lot of answers that are more sympathetic to Magneto than he deserves.
I’d argue that Magneto has a slightly better argument on diagnosing the problem (that humans and mutants can’t peacefully coexist) than Professor X (that humans and mutants must find a way to peacefully coexist).
But the logical diagnosis of “the humans will genocide the mutants of we let them” doesn’t make Magneto the good guy when he prescribes a solution for that problem. The history of the character oscillates between trying to create segregated societies where mutants are separate and not accountable to the human world, or outright subjugation or genocide of the humans.
Maybe peaceful coexistence isn’t possible. But is it better to continually strive for that ideal, or is it better to reject humanity entirely and create strict segregation (or destruction) of the other side?
Because most superhero writers are assholes who never think of the bigger implications of the world they write.
Magneto is basically a racist. He thinks non-mutants are inferior and should be exterminated. How is he fucking right?
No he does not, especially if you’re going with 90s Magneto. It’s the whole reason Fabian Cortez tried to murder him.
He is however a zionist and wants mutants to have their own homeland separate from baseline humans.
He is however a zionist and wants mutants to have their own homeland separate from baseline humans.
Magneto is more akin to Nelson Mandela than Ben Gurion, at least with respect to Genosha. He came in as a kind of terrorist-liberator and, after a revolutionary insurrection overthrew the apartheid regime, established it as a BRICS style unaligned state.
But then, because Western Writing, he launched a Hitler-esque plan for world conquest that got the mutant population eradicated as a result. The island has been repeatedly rebooted as this ostensibly safe haven for mutants, but typically becomes a giant death trap where the population is wiped out over and over again.
The moral of Magneto tends to be “Stop being radical, you’re just going to get everyone killed”. Strangely enough, this never seems to apply to the various secret societies and state agencies running around with the giant killer robots that are primarily responsible for these genocides.
I get the sense that Magneto inherited good-guy status just because using him as a rhetorical and physical punching bag has worn thin after 60 years.
especially if you’re going with 90s Magneto
Nearly all my X-Men knowledge comes from the 90’s animated series and a few of the comics. He literally tries to wipe out humans and/or make everyone a mutant at least twice. He even acknowledges this in the new X-Men 97 series as he tries to atone for it and live up to Xavier’s expectations.
Because humanity is a plague
Magneto has repeatedly had turns of being extermonationist against regular humans, and even when he isn’t he’s still often portrayed as mutant nationalist, modelling his vision for Genosha off of Israel, which he has repeatedly stated his support of in a very “You lived through the logical conclusion of that shit personally, how are you THIS determined to still get it wrong‽”
Poison Ivy has turns of being an eco-fascist, and her more just being an anti-social eco-anti-hero now is often billed as being a direct result of her treatment at Arkham when before she wanted to actually kill everything but plants. Not even all humans, all everything that isn’t either a plant or a plant symbiote, and while that would be am incredible spec-evo project, it would also make her the single most genocidal psychopath in earth’s history assuming lichens don’t achieve sapience to start making a contest of it.
For just wanting to save his wife, Mr. Freeze sure has a lot of arrests on his record involving trying to plunge gotham into a new ice age, which, just look at Extra History’s series on the little ice age to get an idea of just how horrible doing that on purpose to a society is.
Stop whitewashing terrible people who just happen to even tangentially look like a cause you agree with.
That’s how we get Joker being seen as justified because one too many people feel personally attacked for cat calling women to smile more and …motherfucker I think I just figured out why the incels latched onto him so hard.
Yes but from the very beginning, Eddie Brock’s Venom would protect who they (their chosen pronouns) considered innocent. They would use extreme measures to do it though like killing a mugger. So from the start, he always tried to do good.
I would definitely put Deadpool in this category though. Deadpool was first introduced by taking out the X-men. A couple of miniseries of him going up against the Juggernaut, people asked more from him. The “merc with the mouth”, which seemed like a villain rip off of Spider-man, turned to a psycho then to a good guy through a change of heart. His character changes with each new series.
Carnage redemption arc when?
When Carnage brutally murders a bunch of billionaires.
You joke but the people who try to act like Ivy has always been good and not just a recovered formerly genocidal mental patient would ABSOLUTELY start jerking off Carnage over a killing spree around the ultrawealthy.
Reagan is popular to blame but this suggests it started before him.
What the fuck happen in 1971?
Conservative grievance over the Civil Rights Act.
Although that could be said of every year since 1964.
Tl;dr boomers came of age and voted to change things and held onto that power ever since
boomers came of age and voted to change things
Was that what happened during the Freedom Rides of MLK era? Or at the 1968 Democratic Convention? Or the 1987 MOVE bombing? Or during the 80s/90s War on Crime and Drugs?
I seem to remember a bunch of Boomers coming of age, getting arrested, beaten up, and shot, and then states making a historic effort to disenfranchise them in record numbers in order to control who actually gets selected to run the bureaucracy of the state.
Might be a tinsy bit of selection bias in the “Boomers ruined everything” narrative, as a bunch of Boomers were removed from the election process long before they had any kind of control over things.
I didn’t say boomers ruined everything, you’re right that the young civil rights advocates in the 60s were also boomers, but the 70s is when they grabbed political control and never let go.
Sure it wasn’t all bad, but they wanted to change the system and did, and we are still dealing with the consequences today.
70s is when they grabbed political control and never let go
The 70s is when Boomers took the electoral majority. But the people actually in control - the Nixons and Rehnquists and Gettys and Waltons - were significantly older.
It’s the chicken. In 1971 they began putting an addictive chemical in chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smart arse!
People hate and fear black people or gay people out of ignorance and stupidity. People fear mutants because they cap rip out all the iron in someone’s body. They have the power of a million mass shooters in one hand.
Some of them have the power of of a million mass shooters. Some of them have the power of a very long neck. Seriously, there an X-man with the codename Longneck because he has a very long neck. He’s never once helped the team in the field, because he’s completely powerless unless he wants to look over toilet stall walls while pooping.
He does have longer arms to match his neck, but that’s it. I guess he can easily get stuff off a high shelf…
And pointedly he cannot blend in as a normal human, so his introduction to the team was them saving him from a lynch mob.
Yeah, but that that does not mean we can ignore the fact some can just level a city if they are in a bad mood. My point is that xmen is a pretty shit allegory.
I’m imagining the mob standing around the guy scratching their heads, with the noose pulled all the way up to the branch.
I dunno, sometimes I see somebody acting monstrously and wish an alien abomination would have him for lunch.
I am pretty sure that racism existed before Reagan became president.
Theres a longer version of this post somewhere where they had a funny discourse in tge tags.
If we were funny we could try to become the funny discourse.
If we were funny
Clearly this was never in the cards
Um, what would a funny person say. Something like “Eh, what’s up doctor?” or “She’s the one who said that!”
Bowzinger.
I don’t remember the tags.
That is the thing that was said by her!
Can someone explain this like I’m five?
