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Pound the Table | An X-Men Self-Insert

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Firehawk242 said:
There's also the fact that while mutants do seem to always have mutant children, most mutants have non-mutant parents. It doesn't really parallel Israel at all when you get into the details, because mutants are meant to be an allegory for LGBTQ+, not religious minorities. They just don't function the same way.
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I mean, honestly regardless of what was intended to be the original metaphor (I think it actually was a racial metaphor when the X-Men were first conceived), it all kinda falls apart if you look at it too closely anyway. No matter which minority you're using mutants as a metaphor for, that minority is persecuted for reasons that are just blatantly bad, not on account of a bunch of them being a walking extinction event. Meanwhile mutants are definitely at least partly persecuted because nobody can quite forget that Magneto can break Earth's magnetic field or that Jean Grey can make all the world's leaders have a stroke simultaneously, that Storm could terraform the entire planet if she wanted or that Scarlet Witch could have another mental break and crack reality in half again.

(Yes I know Wanda's status as a mutant is complicated, but I guarantee you the average Marvel civilian doesn't know about any of that.)

Point being, mutants can only serve as a metaphor to a certain point, because unlike IRL minorities, there's actually a good reason to at least be wary of mutants. If all mutants were like Beak, you could probably make the metaphor go farther, but as long as mutants keep being born with the ability to crack the planet in half, the metaphor just can't work. Because there's pretty legitimate reason to hate and fear the people who can collectively shrug off anything short of a nuclear bomb, shapeshift undetectably to infiltrate and destroy any organization, fuck with your mind and your self on a level you just can't fight back against, and/or casually kill you from the other side of the planet, and who have demonstrated that they will do that if they feel the need.

EDIT: Which isn't to say that I condone hating and fearing mutants, just that it's hard to argue with "they are literally an existential threat to all of humanity" when objectively, they kinda are an existential threat to all of humanity.
 
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Pinklestia said:
I would find it hilarious if they told Magneto to fuck off since he did nothing to free them despite having magnetic powers..And they also told the X-Men to take their "lost child" and leave.
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I was re-reading Magnus Rex (the comic where Magnus takes over Genosha) and there actually was a faction of mutants with a leader who explicitly criticizes Magneto for not doing anything to help them when they were enslaved, claims that Magneto will be a tyrananical ruler, and calls for rule by a native Genoshan. He is presented as a dangerous fanatic (literally named Zealot) but doesn't do anything particularly immoral and is brutally murdered by Magneto in a blatant power-grab.

Magneto is presented as coming to power through the threat of force rather than public acclamation or liberation of the oppressed mutants. He doesn't seem to have any popular mandate or interest in providing the mutant citizens of Genosha with a say in their government. This is something that seems to have fallen out of the general understanding of Genosha as the reminiscence on Magneto's rule is of him as a benevolent leader rather than a foreign conqueror who ruled as a brutal tyrant.

It was an unpleasant reminder that the more nuanced take on Magneto as a civil rights leader driven to violence by trauma and the unrelenting attacks of bigots is a relatively recent phenomon. He was originally presented as an unequivocal villain who had the ideology of an fascist tyrant and used the need to "protect mutants" as a justification for his crimes. This included some especially disgusting treatment of his children who were exploited as pawns and subject to casual abuse.
 
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Firehawk242 said:
There's also the fact that while mutants do seem to always have mutant children
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Nope. For instance, Graydon Creed was one of the major people in mutant hate, and his biological parents were Mystique and Sabretooth.

Two nonmutants can have mutant children, and two mutants can have nonmutant children. The idea that they're two separate species is beyond bullshit.
 
Hestia&theCourt said:
EDIT: Which isn't to say that I condone hating and fearing mutants, just that it's hard to argue with "they are literally an existential threat to all of humanity" when objectively, they kinda are an existential threat to all of humanity.
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And bigoted people IRL often think they have a good reason. They're wrong of course, but it's not entirely useless as a rhetorical exercise to think through "how do we as a society assure everyone's basic dignity even in spite of such concerns, rather than having to 100% refute them all first"
 
Random832 said:
And bigoted people IRL often think they have a good reason. They're wrong of course, but it's not entirely useless as a rhetorical exercise to think through "how do we as a society assure everyone's basic dignity even in spite of such concerns, rather than having to 100% refute them all first"
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The thing is, a lot of real-life bigots do perceive minorities as existential threats. Not on the same scale as "all the power to reshape Earth's tectonic plates in the hands of a moody teenager" or whatever, but you don't have to go far to see nonsense about Jews having space lasers or trans people causing society to collapse or what-have-you. But that is, objectively, nonsense IRL: the facts are not on their side at all, leaving them purely in the realm of propaganda and hatemongering. Their rhetoric is empty, with no way to actually put facts behind that rhetoric, and while that doesn't bother hardcore bigots one bit, it does make it easier to convince undecided moderates that yeah, okay, obviously the bigots are spewing bullshit, because they are spewing bullshit. The space lasers don't exist, immigrants aren't stealing jobs, queer people aren't grooming children, and you can use these undeniable facts to support your arguments about why bigotry is bad and founded on incorrect worldviews.

The problem is, then, that any setting where the metaphor is "these people are an existential threat and that's why people are bigoted against them" implicitly cedes ground to the bigots by indicating that yeah, there is a good factual reason to hate and fear mutants/minorities, there is cause to persecute them and register them and push them out, because they are a threat to everyone around them. The metaphor fundamentally does not work unless you implicitly assume that the bigoted talking point of how X minority acktually totally poses an existential threat to "normal people" is, in fact, not complete balderdash. The metaphor breaks down at that specific point, because you cannot simultaneously argue that the bigotry against mutants is fundamentally wrong and has no actual reasoning behind it and that the bigots just need someone to hate and fear, while also showing that yeah, this mutant is legitimately capable of wiping the Tri-State Area clean of human life over the course of a lazy afternoon. Or, well, I guess you technically can, but it weakens the argument significantly.

So in short, I'd argue that the metaphor is largely useless here, because you can't use the metaphor without having to reckon with the fact that the details of the setting actually play into that specific bigoted argument by accident. Marvel mutants can only be used as a metaphor so far before you start running into that particular problem over and over again.

EDIT: Or, I guess to make this point more concise, it doesn't actually help fight bigotry to compose your anti-bigotry arguments based on the idea that bigots are actually right about something.
 
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The problem with the argument "but this minority is dangerous" is that usually the people agitating against said minority are the most dangerous thing around, often carrying or desiring to carry weapons and committing or desiring to commit violence, usually against said minority.

They may or may not be fascists, but so much of what they say is still a projection of what they themselves desire to have and do.

And this is even true in comic books. Marvel humans may reject being mutants, but they would love to have that scale of power to harm mutants.
 
Don't forget that most of the mutants (notably the X-Men or even Brotherhood) look like supermodels with superpowers.

Although, there are other unfortunate mutants who didn't hit the jackpot and end up looking monstrous.
 
The allegory's breaking down breaks down itself when you note that like, there's what, four-five major strains of genetic fuckery in Marvel? You have the Mutant/Deviant/Eternal triad that was pulled on a bunch of races by the same assholes and created those groups, you then get Gamma Mutate genes that gatcha Spider-Man and The Hulk, and so on, but Mutants are the existential threat.

The point is, it's not 1 to 1. Also, 30 years of a story about folks like Beak wouldn't work. I mean, maybe if they were as strong as Tag, yeah.
 
Is an official Marvel fact that the mayority of Mutants; before Marvel decided to kill or depower 99,8% of them, are either harmless, have a mutation that fucks them over or are not more dangerous that a guy with a gun.

Even Toad is in the Top 10% of most dangerous Mutants and that's BEFORE he took a level in badass. Why? While Toad themed he is basically a Captain America. The problem is that before he took a level in badass he was an idiot and expend most of his time being sycophant to magneto instead of training in how to use his powers.
 
Pinklestia said:
Is an official Marvel fact that the mayority of Mutants; before Marvel decided to kill or depower 99,8% of them, are either harmless, have a mutation that fucks them over or are not more dangerous that a guy with a gun.

Even Toad is in the Top 10% of most dangerous Mutants and that's BEFORE he took a level in badass. Why? While Toad themed he is basically a Captain America. The problem is that before he took a level in badass he was an idiot and expend most of his time being sycophant to magneto instead of training in how to use his powers.
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If you go back to Noa explaining to Peter how blank lenses are a dead giveaway that someone might be a mutant, she mentions how perfect or better than perfect eyesight is one of the single most common mutant "powers" or side-effects.

In this story, the amount of people who don't know they're mutants is at a quarter to a third of the mutant population. Simple stuff like above average hearing or reflexes, being able to see slightly into the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums, having slightly accelerated muscle growth or a very minor healing factor… there's a lot of those, and people just don't have cause to even KNOW.

If you want the internal stats I'm working with?

29% of mutants don't know they're mutants, and wouldn't know without a perfectly accurate test.

53% of mutants are very obviously mutants, as they're capable of something that average humans aren't, or they look visibly different from the standard human phenotype, but they're really not dangerous. Noa falls into this category.

15% of mutants have a power that is actively dangerous, but they aren't a threat when not using it. Most X-Men fall under this category. Examples include Quicksilver, Beast, Magneto, Xavier, and Iceman.

3% of mutants have powers that are actively a threat without some kind of conscious restraint or self-control. The ur-examples here are Scott Summers (red quartz), Rogue (physical contact), Jean Grey (I shouldn't have to explain…), Wanda (duh), but this category also includes many, many, many, many, MANY members of the X-Men and other groups.

On top of all the other categories, anywhere between 12% and 30% of mutants have a "power" that is actively deleterious to their well-being, whether physical, mental, or emotional; note that this percentage CROSSES OVER WITH ALL THE OTHERS. Examples include Beak, Rogue, Scott Summers, Marrow, and an OC that will appear several arcs down the line, though he'll be largely offscreen. You can call him Gillie.

(And yes, Scott will protest being in that last category, but…)
 
October Daye said:
above average hearing or reflexes, being able to see slightly into the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums, having slightly accelerated muscle growth or a very minor healing factor… there's a lot of those, and people just don't have cause to even KNOW.
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If you had increased the percentage of this, it would make the mutants so much more interesting. Like if the percentage of mutants who have this are more like 97% and the remaining 3% are all of the other types combined, it would mean that mutants have already been replacing non-mutants but nobody even knows because the mutations are so banal. It would just be kind of hilarious but also ironic if mutants already made up over 50% of the population but nobody could even tell.
 
October Daye said:
29% of mutants don't know they're mutants, and wouldn't know without a perfectly accurate test.

53% of mutants are very obviously mutants, as they're capable of something that average humans aren't, or they look visibly different from the standard human phenotype, but they're really not dangerous. Noa falls into this category.

15% of mutants have a power that is actively dangerous, but they aren't a threat when not using it. Most X-Men fall under this category. Examples include Quicksilver, Beast, Magneto, Xavier, and Iceman.

3% of mutants have powers that are actively a threat without some kind of conscious restraint or self-control. The ur-examples here are Scott Summers (red quartz), Rogue (physical contact), Jean Grey (I shouldn't have to explain…), Wanda (duh), but this category also includes many, many, many, many, MANY members of the X-Men and other groups.
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To put some Lies Damn Lies And Statistics on it: just excluding that "invisible" 29% (which will never be counted in-universe) makes the "actively dangerous without restraint" category rise to 4.2%, and the broader "dangerous" to 25.4% of observable mutants.

"One in four" is a hell of a number to hand to the racist talking heads, considering most of the time they focus on "one in the entire state" or "one, hypothetically".
 
fishsicles said:
To put some Lies Damn Lies And Statistics on it: just excluding that "invisible" 29% (which will never be counted in-universe) makes the "actively dangerous without restraint" category rise to 4.2%, and the broader "dangerous" to 25.4% of observable mutants.

"One in four" is a hell of a number to hand to the racist talking heads, considering most of the time they focus on "one in the entire state" or "one, hypothetically".
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Correct. Which is why Noa is so god damn careful to not equate mutants with LGBTQIA+, or religious minorities, ethnic/racial minorities, or any of the like.

They're similar in ways, yes. They go through a lot of the same things, yes.

But there is a clear difference in their lived experiences.

All this being said, I left out one key statistic.

The "flatscan to mutant ratio", as it were.
 
I would also be curious, based on the mention of "perfectly accurate test", what the false positive/false negative rate on stuff like the Mark 1 Sentinels would be? Because something that Marvel conveniently forgets whenever the Sentinels rock up is that there would be false positives and false negatives - and nothing provides worse press than "Sentinel murders innocent bystander(s) after falsely detecting them as mutants". Although that could potentially be spun as "they clearly must have been mutants, and just hiding it" by those committed to anti-mutant ideology, there's also the possibility that, if the Sentinels are relying solely on that test, that they could also have a false negative on a known mutant - which would likely be even worse for the Sentinel program, considering it would raise doubts about the false positive rate, and also compromise its "utility" as a way to detect and counter known mutants.
 
Zummers said:
I may be misremembering things, but isn't Scott's inability to turn his blasts off due to brain damage or something unrelated to the actual power?
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marcoasalazarm said:
Brain damage he got when he was a kid from being tossed out of an airplane by his father Christopher right as the plane was being abducted by aliens and the dude did the "sacrificial Papa Wolf" to Scott and his brother (only one chute).
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More recently, it was revealed that a not-insignificant percentage of Summers' issues with his powers are due to mental blocks, being on some level terrified of said power, and over-reliance on ruby-quartz. Screwing around with the Phoenix Force (amongst other things) has not helped.
 
It would make for a far more interesting "Days of Futures Past" timeline where the Sentinels have a few false positive scans on clear nonmutant figures. Sentinels attacking the Avengers because Captain America and Thor scan positive because they're clearly not pure human for example. I'm not sure any of the Canon Dark Timelines ever addressed exactly how the non Mutant Heroes and Villains involved themselves in the Mutant/Human wars. At least not beyond "they're gone too".
 
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How's the Sentinels even detecting Mutants anyway? The scanning technology must be real amazing if it can detect a specific gene at range. They're clearly not taking blood samples prior, and they're also not foilable by some sort of anti-scanning suit to deflect rays or whatnot.
 
Geas said:
More recently, it was revealed that a not-insignificant percentage of Summers' issues with his powers are due to mental blocks, being on some level terrified of said power, and over-reliance on ruby-quartz. Screwing around with the Phoenix Force (amongst other things) has not helped.
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Well…. How's that for "living under a rock"?

NexysDhyArchen said:
It would make for a far more interesting "Days of Futures Past" timeline where the Sentinels have a few false positive scans on clear nonmutant figures. Sentinels attacking the Avengers because Captain America and Thor scan positive because they're clearly not pure human for example. I'm not sure any of the Canon Dark Timelines ever addressed exactly how the non Mutant Heroes and Villains involved themselves in the Mutant/Human wars. At least not beyond "they're gone too".
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Anaja said:
I know I've seen Parker scanned. The result was not mutant, but outside the genetic norm.
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I have seen one or two stories (admittedly I can't recall the specific issues - I can swear that one was in an "Incredible Hulk" annual, rather recent, by which I mean sometime in the last 20 years) where it's quite unsubtly implied that the people who signed off on the mutant genocide laws just went "oh, what the hell, let's just kill them all… yeah, even Captain America. Yeah, even Hawkeye. Yeah, even if they live in other countries and sending Sentinels means an act of war. ALL."
 
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