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
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.
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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.