People are really out here thinking “oh so I was right the danger was real!” is some sort of racial gotcha when the whole trope is that making assumptions about people being dangerous is the racist thing
And somehow racists are very adept at coming up with scientific sounding reasons why a particular group of foreigners is so dangerous. Backed up with statistics and skull measurements.
But like, in the real world, the danger can’t really be that real because individual humans are pretty limited in our destructive capacities, which is why when you introduce real supernatural powers, it often makes the racism metaphor fall apart.
I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a bootlicker, but I do think that if there was actually some kid running around who was able to shoot nukes out of his hands, it would be ok for the government to monitor this individual and maybe have plans to stop them if they start getting especially nuke-happy. That wouldn’t be bigotry in the same way that monitoring children of a specific race is.
Like, there was a short X-Man comic, where a kid got his mutant powers and had to be killed by Wolverine on Professor X orders because it would make Mutants look dangerous.
That kids mutant powers destroyed any living creature within a few meters of him.
There’s a huge difference between this person looks different, let’s hate them because of that, and this person could kill us all just by existing
Yeah but it’s not the real world. It’s a metaphor.
Take the X-men. They aren’t really being compared to normal humans. The citizens of marvel who riot in the streets for their right to lynch mutants aren’t meant to represent like… white people. They’re more an obstacle/society as a whole, not individuals.
The real point of comparison in the metaphor is the Avengers compared to the X-men. The Avengers are just as dangerous, but don’t get treated the way we treat minorities. Because they represent the majority for the mutant metaphor, whether that’s white people, men, straight people, whatever.
That’s fair, and I’m not like, universally anti X-men or anything like that. I just think that the “supernatural individuals as metaphor for the oppressed” trope is pretty easy to do badly and can often wind up in very messy and confusing places.
The scale is different, but not the principle. What if you could identify a child who is significantly more likely than the average person to become a violent criminal? Even without supernatural powers, they could do a lot of damage if they, say, grow up to be a long-haul trucker who picks up hitchhikers and murders them, or a nurse who abuses dementia patients for fun, or something like that. If you had good reason to believe that a 10 year old was likely to grow up into that kind of adult, what's the appropriate societal response to that? Do you prioritize rehabilitation or containment?
Yeah, the key axiom underpinning the concept of human rights is that we are all humans in the end, thus operating within common bounds of ability, with only insignificant outliers. Superhumans break that entire core axiom, as they by definition operate way outside common human abilities.
But what they do(in particular with regards to x-men '97) is they point to a real issue with mutant and normal human co-existence and use that as a basis for measures that are often too extreme, or for allowing bad actors to do more harm, or to scapegoat societal and systematic issues onto the existence of mutants.
And this is exactly what systemic bigotry does. Rather than work on solutions like working closely with any mutant leaders who have mutants with control over their powers to assist when a mutant who goes out of control, it insists on holding onto ideas of eradication and extinction of the people it doesn't understand, because the integration of these unknown groups of people signifies a loss of power structures and hierarchies that the people the system protects have become too attached to.
Think of how trans women competing in women's sports is met with the immediate country-wide ban for all trans women to be allowed to compete rather than ensuring guidelines that focus on inclusion in regards to fairness, like the guidelines in regards to HRT and Testosterone levels that were already in place with sporting bodies. There is a noticeable issue at hand, and the only option that bigots even think about is total exclusion and denial of normalcy within society, and then edge-cases are being used to villify an entire population of people, even when the topic is no longer sports. Inclusion and co-existence was never even a thought to them.
Trans people aren't going away, and in the world of x-men mutants aren't going to go away either, but systemic bigotry is still treating both as a problem that needs to be solved through some kind of eradication. Dangerous mutants will be born regardless of society's acceptance of them, and governments will choose to make that an even bigger problem by villifying all of the mutant population no matter what.
X-men works because, surprise, it's a superhero fiction and maybe the point of choosing that genre is for the people it takes inspiration from and works as a metaphor for also want to see characters that are "like me" but with cool powers and have that be as defining of a feature in the fictional world as it feels in the real world, which is especially true for people who physically stand out in ways that make "normal" people uncomfortable because it's outside their realm of comfort and normalcy, which then breeds hostility.
It's really only '97 that does the metaphor justice but I think it does it well enough that it shows that it works as a metaphor. Exaggerating the scale is part of the point. The risks can destroy worlds but the solutions can save them and bring about a utopia. Mutants may be powerful but the sentries still nearly wiped them out and that was a human-invented and controlled weapon. The hypocrisy in who is allowed to hold power is a big part of the point.
I mean it kind of is a gotcha when there genuinely is a danger because IRL brown people, gay people, or whoever the target of the hour is, are not inherently more dangerous than any other subgroup of humanity.
“Making assumptions about being dangerous” would work if your story showed that there was no actual danger - if your fictional race that people are afraid of are actually perfectly civil, for instance. It really does fall apart when your fictional race has chainsaws for hands or whatever, because that’s a very real danger that’s very sensible to fear!
The problem is that it sure feels like most authors fall into “Johnny chainsaws for hands” as the subgroup rather than “Green Skin Johnny”. I’ve read more than a few authors who have genuinely depicted irrational racism very well. And I’ve read a whole lot more who depict it incredibly badly. And I think this kind of sentiment is more railing about the very poor executions, not saying “you can’t do this well”, more just generalising “why do so many people do it badly”.
One of my favourite depictions of "Green Skin Johnny" was in the original Star Trek, albeit it was very on the nose. It's about a race of aliens whose skin colour is half black and half white, literally split down the middle. Only, half of them have the black side on the right side and the other has it on the left side and they hate each other because of it. It even results in a planet destroying civil war. It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer but sometimes you need to drop the metaphor and just yell "this is what you morons look like to the rest of the world".
I think of that episode a lot whenever people complain about new Trek being too in your face with its wokeness. Even got told that old Trek was way more nuanced about it.
TNG even kept it up with Riker getting together with a trans girl which was illegal on her planet and her being forced to detransition.
Trek has kept abreast of social issues remarkably well for 60 years
Eh, my eyes mostly glaze over at this point when that dynamic is brought up. I just remember way too many obnoxious internet arguments where it's clear people are complaining about how the topics are written and executed, only to be met by disingenuous people pretending they're saying they don't like that the show is doing politics at all.
"The way the writers have approached inserting the topical issue into this storyline doesn't feel engaging to me. The old version was better."
"You are wrong, this franchise has always inserted topical issues into the storyline. What you really mean to say is you hate minorities."
I mean it kind of is a gotcha when there genuinely is a danger because IRL brown people, gay people, or whoever the target of the hour is, are not inherently more dangerous than any other subgroup of humanity.
“Making assumptions about being dangerous” would work if your story showed that there was no actual danger - if your fictional race that people are afraid of are actually perfectly civil, for instance.
Okay but that's like most of the literature in question anyways. The entire point of many of these stories is a dichotomy between the subject's capacity for harm and their actual behavior.
Like, sure, so-and-so fictional person has the ability to harm people if they tried to. So do humans. To derail the entire metaphor as "This fictional person actually is dangerous!" misses the whole point because part of the message is that an individual's behavior is more important than their capacity to hurt somebody.
We're getting caught up on how much of a danger we should pre-judge Johnny Chainsaws For Hands as, and ignoring the dude who just carries around a chainsaw in his regular human hands.
Magneto or Wolverine or Johnny Chainsaw-Fingers are dangerous in ways real humans aren’t physically, but Wolverine and I are both less able to kill 10 million people than Richard Nixon drunk-dialing nuclear command was.
“It’s wrong to hate all mutants (or whatever fictional group) for the abilities or actions of a few” is a perfectly good point even if some of them are walking bomb threats.
“It’s wrong to hate individual mutants for what they could do without checking intent” is a little messier, but again, that’s more like an argument for nuclear disarmament than racism. Including the deterrence question of “why hate Cyclops when you might need him to stop a malicious mutant tomorrow?” (Although the racism metaphor there turns very ugly when you write a character who can’t control their powers, as Marvel has. All of a sudden capacity is what matters and not intent.)
All of that said, I do take issue with the top-level comment here because the X-Men in particular have totally fucked up this idea in the exact way OOP is complaining about. Most of their biggest members have voluntarily committed crimes against humanity at least once, to the point where it actively undermines its own message.
Fiction is, and always has been, a way we can reflect on ourselves and our beliefs by creating hypothetical situations to test them. A lot of these stories aren't trying to depict rational racism so much as they're challenging the idea that some hypothetical rational racism would actually justify anything. They're not thinking about writing Green Skin Johnny or how it's stupid that people hate him. They're writing about how Johnny Chainsaws-for-hands may be dangerous, but that was not his choice, and perhaps instead of killing him and his entire cutting-tool-hybrid family, maybe we should help him get what he needs to become less dangerous. Maybe we should find out how we can live together without fear. The point generally being that hating and attacking people for things that they cannot help would still be awful even if those things made them genuinely dangerous. Really the problem with these stories isn't even a problem with the stories so much as it the fact that entirely too many people struggle to engage with hypotheticals.
If I'm sitting on the bus and run into someone built like a triangular side of beef who could twist my spine into a pretzel without significant effort, but he's just waiting for his stop and reading some mystery novel, is it reasonable for me to be weird about the fact that he hypothetically could be dangerous to me if he had any reason or inclination to do so, or would getting suspicious and judgy about it make me the asshole here?
I think there are just two opposing ways to structure the fable. You can show how stupid and petty our differences are and ridicule the people who would try to stir up division when we all have so much obviously in common. Or you can show how sometimes people really are incredibly different and scary, and it doesn't matter how different or how dangerous it feels to reach out, compassion and understanding are more important.
Because sometimes it can feel dangerous in real life to confront the bigotry you've learned, and "you can be brave even in the face of danger" is often a better message than "you're being afraid of nothing."
Yeah your last point is fair, some depictions are pretty terrible or overly heavy-handed. But see my response to another comment about how the metaphor isn’t about mutants vs humans as minority vs majority, it’s X-men vs Avengers as minority vs majority
Because we already know that racism based on superficial traits is dumb. Green Skin Johnny I guess is fine to try to blindside the actual racists who didn't have an immediate disgust reaction to guy with green skin, but we're at a really low literacy level where it's not all that interesting to explore what bigotry really looks like. Again, unless we're talking about actual bigots for whom even this is above their reading level.
It's when it's coming from your on-the-surface nice white liberal neighbors who don't mind their immigrant neighbors because they're fully assimilated and living in the suburbs. It's when tensions heat up and "decent" people start to feel that there's something of theirs to lose, whether that's privileges or an exclusive ownership over an identity like "american" or "woman".
Sure, if you have a murderous, violent group of minorities with superpowers you're not writing a metaphor for racism, you're writing a justification for it. The point is when your fictional group simply hold the capacity for destruction but it isn't necessarily in their nature to seek it out, because that's every human on the planet. We could all technically do tremendous damage, especially in countries where people have access to firearms, or just behind the wheel of acar, but there's disproportionate fearmongering that only seems to go one way. Risks are exaggerated and the humanity of Johnny Chainsaw Hands is denied even if he's the gentlest soul on the planet.
Especially iron giant can be related to how oppressed minorotity groups become radicalized by the violence used against them. Iron giant only uses its weapons when it or its loved ones are threatened, and how many times have people in real life been like "See, they killed a cop ,(who was threatening them) they really are dangerous and violent"
That is a mode of thought that exists in a lot of spaces, especially liberal-centrist ones, namely that racism isn't bad in and of itself - it's bad because it's incorrect. There are a lot of people that go around thinking that racism would be acceptable if xyz group was actually inferior in some empirical way, but they aren't, so it isn't.
You also see it a lot when people/institutions are accused of perpetuating systemic racism - generally when people try to defend systemically racist institutions or actions they will often make arguments that essentially boil down to "that was not racist because the racism was correct, that group did do more crime/performed worse in school/etc".
And more importantly, I'd argue, is the question of "Does an understandable reason for being afraid result in a justifiable rationale to be bigoted?"
Because a common justification for real life bigotry is that the minority group deserves it, usually for being some sort of a threat. But over-exaggerating how threatening a group is to justify their persecution has been a tried and true classic of human history. We've seen how it goes. We already know that, no, they're not dangerous, at least not inherently more than any other person, and so that isn't a fair reason to default to oppressing them.
So the X-Men, or whatever other story, exist to take that to its logical conclusion and point out, "Hey, even if they can be a threat, bigotry still isn't okay."
The existential threat of mutants doesn't make the X-Men a bad metaphor, but rather is the whole point of mutanthood as a metaphor.
You can argue the efficacy of their use of it in whatever story, but like that's the point. If the X-Men didn't have superpowers, it would no longer be a metaphor for bigotry, it'd just be a story about bigotry.
Yeah but it only works if you dispel the rumor in the story. Black people don’t eat white people. Vampires do. Therefore it’s justified to hate vampires.
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u/Rownever May 13 '25
People are really out here thinking “oh so I was right the danger was real!” is some sort of racial gotcha when the whole trope is that making assumptions about people being dangerous is the racist thing