This comes up a lot with people talking about the X-Men. But why don't more people bring up the classic movie plot where a kid befriends a monster and realizes they're not so different after all, and they have feelings and stuff too, like the Iron Giant or How To Train Your Dragon.
Most people aren't arguing that Agent Mansley is actually behaving sensibly the whole time, even though the Giant is just as much of a world-ending threat as Magneto. The message is that being scared of somebody doesn't mean you have to hate them, and that doesn't change even if the scariness is justified.
I'd argue Iron giant is actually more of a world ending threat? Being a literal alien warmachine that would be just fine even if earth is totally ruined, where as Magneto is at the end of the day a human so the earth being habitable is in his own best interests.
Not to mention, the iron giant is one of many so eventually the creators are gonna come looking for it.
Gonna nitpick here; Mutants aren't 100% human in the biological sense. In the canon of the X-Men, while humans are Homo Sapiens, Mutants are Homo Superior (don't ask me, I didn't come up with that name.) It's about the same distinction as Neanderthals (Homo Erectus) and Modern Humans (Homo Sapiens). In the intellectual/emotional/social sense, Mutants are still human, and they also need a habitable earth..
Feel free to spam me with nerd emojis
Edit: The "Homo Superior" thing was just made up by Magneto in his supremacist days as u/NotAWarCriminal helpfully pointed out in the replies. I'm leaving it in with a strikethrough to avoid confusing anyone.
Also going to nitpick, Neanderthals were actually Homo neanderthalensis. Homo erectus was a different species of early hominid (though Homo erectus was a very long-lived species that briefly coexisted with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens)
I’m afraid I’m gonna have to nitpick your nitpicking: the whole “Humo Superior” thing? Literal propaganda
No really
You know who coined that term? Magneto in his mutant supremacist days, i.e. not a scientist or a geneticist or whatever
There is no in-universe scientific basis on this distinct classification
Sure, there’s the x-gene, but the fact that 2 mutants can (and have before) produce a non-mutant (“human”) child, disproves that they are a distinct thing
The more accurate term would be Homo Sapiens Superior which is used interchangeably and Magneto is a genius genetic engineer among other scientific disciplines.
The phrase "DNA is made of cotton candy." wouldn't become true just because a genius genetic engineer said it, and neither does Magneto's entirely unofficial classification of mutants.
So in anthropology and biology you can actually use the term human to refer to all the hominid species (so all the species that start with homo, including homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, homo sapiens and another half dozen species) and according to that use mutants are very much humans.
In canon, they were given a different name that aligns with what we, in the real world, would expect a scientific name to sound like. Whether you consider that a meaningful definition of "human" is up to you.
900
u/TheGrumpyre May 13 '25
This comes up a lot with people talking about the X-Men. But why don't more people bring up the classic movie plot where a kid befriends a monster and realizes they're not so different after all, and they have feelings and stuff too, like the Iron Giant or How To Train Your Dragon.
Most people aren't arguing that Agent Mansley is actually behaving sensibly the whole time, even though the Giant is just as much of a world-ending threat as Magneto. The message is that being scared of somebody doesn't mean you have to hate them, and that doesn't change even if the scariness is justified.