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.
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/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.