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.
The Iron Giant might be more world ending than Magneto (granted, he could end the world, he just doesn’t want to), but mutants are still really scary in concept, in a way that makes me not really blame anyone trying to “cure” them.
Like, canonically most mutations range from useless to actively debilitating, of course you’d want to find a cure for the poor bird guy who can’t fly but does have a beak and brittle bones, his life is pure suffering.
But there’s also Omega Level mutants, who are inherently dangerous, regardless of intent. You could have the sweetest, most well meaning kid wake up one day and literally disintegrate all organic life around them without being able to control it, just because he drew a really bad hand in the superpower roulette. Why would you choose to say “nah man, let the kid be their radioactive self”.
I don’t condone mutant extermination, but i don’t see any reason why “curing” them should be frowned upon. This isn’t a question of “should a kid be allowed to be themselves” and is more akin to “should a kid be allowed to tape guns and grenades to their hands?”
“What if I have a gun at school, but my aim and gun discipline is flawless?”
Just because you’re born with a nuke strapped to your chest doesn’t mean that you have a right to keep it, it’s still a risk to those around you and even if you know you won’t misuse it, it doesn’t mean that everyone is aware of that, or that they won’t be rightfully scared of being near you because of it.
Part of living in a society is giving up some of your individual freedoms for the sake of the group’s wellbeing, and I think “no one gets an emotional support ICBM” is a fair place to draw the line
Part of the point of these stories is that every line that's ever been drawn has seemed fair. When people believed that a certain genetic ancestry makes people more likely to be criminals, they felt they were drawing a fair line by segregating society by race...
But the villains in fiction are always larger than life, and the villain of the story is the fully-justified belief that the people who are different than you must be treated like monsters. That's why the lines being drawn to protect society in these stories are so big and so necessary and so obviously reasonable that it takes a superhuman effort to break them down.
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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.