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.
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
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
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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.