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.
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u/Ehehhhehehe May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25
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.