I mean, even those are political at times. There’s a famous segment from an old episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood where Mr. Rogers washed the feet of his black mailman. That was intended as a pro-civil rights message; Fred Rogers wanted to communicate to the kids watching that nobody is superior to anybody else and we should all serve each other.
Politics is a natural part of art, because art is about communicating our perspectives and politics are born from perspectives. Asking art to not be political is asking art to not communicate, which is basically asking art to not be art.
my god the first episode was literally about right wing fascists in government opposing civil rights while trying to put people on a registry and deploying sentinels to capture them and bring them to a slave island.
X men is literally about people who’s different in their own ways and how they can accept the world and themselves to be their best while being discriminated. Woke AF.
X-Men was always woke. I don’t care that word has been co-opted by conservatives. I do care when conservatives try to edit history and remove meaning from media to make it more palatable to their increasingly fascist audiences.
I’m just saying, the primary antagonist of the X-Men franchise was magneto. This is a man who will stop at nothing to either make all people into mutants, whether they want it or not, or destroy them for not being mutants.
On the human side, magneto was mostly fighting against people who would otherwise not care about him being a mutant, other than the fact that he’s trying to kill them for not being a mutant.
Professor X is the staple of the show that defines it: where he fights in the Senate and other government institutions to have them respect the rights of mutants as people (which they are), and fights against magneto trying to kill everyone and take over, and on top of that, he gets flack from the Trump supporters anti mutant folks for being a mutant. The professor is fighting on all fronts to stop the prejudice and have all people, regardless of their mutant status, seen as equals, in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
If you can’t see the correlation to pretty much every civil liberty movement ever, from the women’s rights movements and the black suffrage movement, and the whole slavery thing… As well as more modern movements for gay rights and LGBTQ+ rights, etc… The list is long…
Well, if someone can’t put that together then, IMO, they’re blind. At the most basic, here are people who are quantifiably different, persecuted on all sides, fighting for the right to exist.
How blind do you have to be to not see the very obvious correlations?
It doesn’t matter if you’re blind or not if you’re not going to bother to look. Most people simply don’t assess their media for underlying messages. They see Professor X as the good guy and Magneto as a bad guy, and don’t think any more about them. They don’t ask how or why they can be identified as the protagonist/antagonist, they just identify the general alignment and that’s it.
I think that’s it really. These people didn’t understand the metaphors at play as children, and lack the capacity to reflect on what they enjoyed as children and realize that they grew up to be the villains.
And, of course, there are plenty of bad faith actors who never watched or read X-Men in the first place and/or don’t care about the messages it tries to convey, and just want something to be outraged about for attention.
magneto was also the son of holocaust victims and was largely synonymous to malcolm x whereas professor x was synonymous with martin luther king jr, in terms of views.
He wasn’t the son of Holocaust survivors, he was a Holocaust survivor himself. The comics back in the 60s even made him be a late bloomer so his magnetic powers could manifest in his captivity; most mutants get their powers during puberty, but his didn’t show up until his 30s. The 2000s movies, of course, just had his powers manifest at the normal time, since they could manage that.
I’m sure the MCU version will have to adjust that somewhat, since the timelines no longer quite match (unless they make him immortal or something).
I saw someone complaining that the old X-men show was at least subtle and not in your face about how it approached social issues.
This was in response to a clip from the old X-men show of a bunch of anti-mutant brownshirts in armbands getting mad that a filthy mutant was touching a human woman.
I think it’s safe to say that person was not arguing in good faith.
I’m usually fine giving the benefit of the doubt, but this comment was in direct response to a scene from the show that was absolutely blatant, so they had to wilfully ignore that.
You think thoese people have that? This is the issue they lack this. Most can’t even understand the nuances in the language they freaking speak all day long.
Which fuckin' god? The one that (if you believe in) sent the ten plagues? And the flood? And burned two major cities? And that's just in the book where he's supposedly the good guy?
I think you misunderstand… God Loves, Man Kills is the title of an X-Men story from the 80s which centers on the X-Men fighting against a church that preaches anti-mutant bigotry.
Yeah, of course, which is why this is all so baffling. Or would be, if anyone still expected the Culture Warriors™ to have a single clue what they’re talking about.
Also, in the comics, Mystique has been in a lesbian relationship with Destiny since the 80s, and Chris Claremont even planned at one point to have it revealed that Mystique had shapeshifted into a man and fathered Nightcrawler, with Destiny being his mom. That got nixed by the higher ups, but IIRC, the comics actually went back to that idea and made it canon recently.
If you think about it, if you could change your body at will like Mystique or Morph, the only thing stopping you of having all sorts of fun would be your own biases.
I do wonder how a pregnancy would work, tho. Could be an interesting plot point if getting pregnant limited the power
Since the fetus is still a part of her at that point, can she just reform it at will like the rest of her? Could she spontaneously make a baby that’s ready to be born? Disturbing implications…
I saw that was a thing now, that Mystique and Destiny are now canonically Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, respectively. That’s the kind of awesome weird shit that makes me want to get back into comics.
I can see people bopping along to music and ignoring the non-chorus lyrics but x-men, the half century old segregation allegory with enough content to occupy a small library… that is a hard sell. It feels insincere.
They like the version of the '60s civil rights movement they constructed in their head. Their conception of old X-Men can fit into that.
Notice that conservatives complaining about “wokeness” always point to superficial attributes. A woman protagonist in a superhero movie, a half second lesbian kiss, or a black actor for a traditionally white character. They don’t point to media that has even slightly deeper ties to leftist thought, such as Andor or The Expanse. If they do at all, it’ll be for only those superficial attributes. They don’t even recognize it for what it is.
My guess is they see “superheroes in tights, with dashes of relatable problems”, instead of allegories and people who fight so those who are like them, and those aren’t, can coexist.
X-Men and many other marvel properties are made by ((((((((((((them)))))))) so why do they give a shit? Shouldn’t they be hating on it due do being anti Semites?
Who’s anti-semite and why do i feel it’s because due to the Palestinians flags? In a place Where jews, former genocided people are themselves commiting genocide ?
I think they’re talking about the anti-“woke” chuds being antisemitic in this context. Which, they are; a lot of these fuckers believe trash like the Great Replacement Theory and even manage to tie in queerphobia into it (LGBTQ+ acceptance is a Jew plot to stop white people from breeding, don’t you know).
I really hope it’s whose he’s referring to. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen people saying that being against Palestinians genocide is antisemitic.
Stan Lee even said himself that he created the X-Men as a statement about bigotry and how everyone, no matter how different than you, has good in them. It’s straight up an anti-discrimination metaphor. It doesn’t get much more woke than that.
I couldn’t have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or zapped with gamma rays, and it occurred to me that if I just said that they were mutants, it would make it easy. Then it occurred to me that instead of them just being heroes that everybody admired, what if I made other people fear and suspect and actually hate them because they were different? I loved that idea; it not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the Civil Rights Movement in the country at that time
Aren’t Professor X and Magneto modeled Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X? Kinda of a sloppy analog if it’s true, but still progressive for the time.
I mean, make they could have had Magento with the one with X in her name if he was modeled on Malcolm X. I said it was sloppy. I didn’t say it was wrong.
Magento just preyed on disenfranchisement mutants with charisma. Malcolm X had more going on than that.
A lot of problems I may have have more to do with it being a cape comicbook story. Any character arc that Magento has would be reset eventually.
I don’t like to use the word “woke” because it’s become a conservative buzzword that has no real meaning anymore besides “something I don’t like”.
I grew up reading X-Men in the 80s and 90s, I watched the X-Men animated series when it came out and have watched it again in the last few years. Yes it is very progressive and liberal. That was the entire reason X-Men comics were created in the first place way back in 1963. It was originally meant to be a commentary on racism in America but has branched out to cover all sorts of liberal topics over the years
Anyone who tries to put some kind of right wing spin on the X-Men is either trolling you or is legitimately delusional
I love X-Men comics as a queer person. I feel like their one of the few comic teams that cared about its characters being queer and not just as an afterthought.
I haven’t kept up with the comics as much these days, but I’ve seen that they’re doing a lot more LGBT stuff lately. Looks like some of them are pretty good stories too, maybe I’ll pick it back up!
I got back into comics when Hickman “soft-booted” the X-Men with Krakoa. Now they are on the “Fall of X” storyline, post Krakoa. It is indeed a exciting and great time. I’m enjoying it.
There are a lot of LGBT characters and I feel they are treating them like real people or real mutants anyway instead of just it as an after thought. Most teams or books have at least one LGBT identifying individual on it, but most are in relationships, so they dive into that. I am a straight white man though so I probably have blind spots somewhere.
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