I remember in the House of M arc he had to hide the fact that he wasn’t a mutant.
Indeed, he helped enforce the act and arrested a couple mutants, but at the time he was using Captain America’s name and costume.
I don’t know if it’s still current terminology ('cause comic book stuff changes as lot) but at least for a while there was a distinction between “mutants” - born as such, with the “X” gene - and “mutates”, which were non-mutants without X genes that were altered at some point, such as Spiderman and the Fantastic Four.
It seems pretty small to me, but apparently for awhile that was the difference between being reviled or being a hero.
Heck, it occurred to me during the first or second X-Men movie that if Storm can instantly create and direct tornadoes, could she manipulate naturally-occurring hurricanes? Even if she couldn’t simply dissipate a Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Maria, could she “nudge” them out to sea and either prevent landfall entirely or direct it to less-populated areas? Even if she could mitigate only 1% of total hurricane damage, that’ll quickly pass the $1 billion mark after just a few seasons.
I think you are supposed to start thinking that after the Age of Ultron. That’s the whole point (& the set up to the final conflict and Civil War). They are dangerous. There’s a very good argument that they should be subject to some kind of oversight. There isn’t always clarity that their involvement in a situation makes things better - it’s very much something that should be considered.
But that’s not the subject of the thread.
To the subject - if you had been raised in an environment where there was a general anti-mutant environment - at seeing your brother could freeze things, you might think “What else can he do that he isn’t telling me?” or “Can he control it? Or might he kill us all in his sleep?” If, like many siblings, the two of you fought a lot, you might freak out at being suddenly so outgunned in any conflict between you. Depending on your personality, that could cause a lot of resentment and a lot of bitterness.
You grossly underestimate bigots.
But a gun is something I choose to buy, I don’t choose to become a mutant.
Perhaps a better near-real-world analogy would be “Your 23-and-Me profile came back, and it turns out you have genetic markers that match those of known serial killers. Therefore we’re going to ask you to install this tracking app, and if someone in your area gets reported missing, please make sure to make yourself available for a quick visit.”
It’s definitely an interesting dilemma.
Some of us can tell the difference between an object and a human being. And feel that the human beings deserve rights and objects don’t.
You’re giving human rationality too much credit. If Storm mitigated 99% of the total hurricane damage, she’s still condemned for it. People wouldn’t care about how bad the hurricane would have theoretically been if she hadn’t intervened. They would just say “Storm messed with the weather. And my flower garden was ruined by the heavy rain she caused. I’m suing.”
I didn’t read the comics much, so I missed that point.
This makes me believes there are preppers/survivalists in the Marvel universe preparing for the next major superhuman conflict/event. Have they ever depicted something like this in the comics?
That was brilliant, and I wish I’d thought of it back when I was always discussing some aspect of the Marvel vs DC universes.
But back when we were kids, we were reading comics and watching movies just for the pure joy of it all. And if an ice-mutant and a cosmic hothead and a kid bitten by a spider were swinging around the “real” New York City together, that was fine with us.
Probably the same way Greek kids were playing around with their myths.
“Ok, so if Poseidon’s fighting Ares…”
“Whoa, hold on. The King of the Sea just wades into the middle of the Trojan War? 'Cause that’s where Ares is, dude.”
“Wait, Posey talks to fish. What good is that going to do against the frickin’ God of War?”
“What about Hephaestus?”
“You’re always asking that, Santos, okay, what about Hephaestus?”
“Well, see, he’s the god of blacksmi…”
“Yeah, and he’s ugly. Ug. Leee. That’s like his big power, Santos…”
(if that is your real name…)
It was a gimmick and at a certain age, way after comics for me, I realized that the x-men were no different from the other costumed faces and that the marvel world pictured an incredible obsession, not with whether you were super powered and dangerous, but whether you had been born like that. Who would know whether you were born with it or were bitten by a radioactive can opener? Who would care?
Iron Man would.
Not that the average person has any way to tell if a powered individual is a mutant or not, but an “altered human” is a one-off – there’s no race of spider-men or human torches coming. However, there’s a segment of mutants who claim that they are Homo superior, and that they represent the next step in human evolution. And, by extension, some mutants of a more evil bent feel that this means that Homo sapiens must die out, so that the world can be ruled by mutants. That’s certainly enough of an incentive for normal people to be afraid of mutants.
IIRC, Dennis Miller once joked about how George Hamilton eventually got darker than Michael Jackson — and yet, we’d all presumably grant that racists don’t actually care how light or dark a guy’s skin is, right?
The people who own the guns are the one being registered in many places and they go to prison, not the guns.
Actually, the Harry Potter books explicitly say wizards choose to hide so they don’t get stuck trying to magically fix everyone else’s problems, not because they’re scared of normal people persecuting them. They don’t want to be worshipped and take on the responsibility for everyone else that would entail.
The Harry Potter books have many sense and logic issues, but that isn’t really one of them.
Actually… Reed + Susan Richards’ son Franklin was born a powerful mutant. His sister, Valeria, would have been were it not for comics shenanigans. Presumably, any child of Johnny’s would also be a mutant. There’s been several future timeline Spider-Man series where his daughter inherits his spidey powers, and is a mutant. So it is kinda implied that there is a race of spider-men and human torches coming: mutants.
I stopped reading it before it got to that point but when I could see the trend.
But even if the mutants are a race, they’re still one-offs. If Iceman and Shadowcat had a kid (purely hypothetical; I don’t know if they’ve ever been a couple), that kid would probably be a mutant, but their powers would probably not be related to cold or to phasing. And if a mutant decided not to join any of the Homo superior movements, they could just say that they were struck by lightning or exposed to weird chemicals or something, and escape persecution. And really, why wouldn’t they all?