Is this the same “adored” Spider-Man who was the subject of an endless stream of “Threat or Menace?” Daily Bugle screeds? 
That said, mutants are easier targets for fear and hatred because of perceived “threats” (Your kid could be a mutant! Mutants could replace normal humans someday!) that don’t apply to other one-off superpowered individuals.
Well, if you live in the “less-populated area” that got hit because of Storm’s intervention, you’d probably be pretty pissed.
And then they screw over the salvage company guys just trying to make an honest living in a super-powered world.
Iceman and Shadowcat have dated. And then Bobby was retconned into having always been secretly gay but overcompensating, or something, so he and Kitty had a rather awkward conversation about their dating history.
Anyway, mutant heredity seems to be that powers often inherit, but not always. Jean Grey’s (alternate timeline) kids seem to inherit her telepathy/telekinesis, and not Scott’s optic blasts. But Ruby Summers inherited the optic blasts. And Nocturne inherited Nightcrawler’s + Scarlet Witch’s mutations, sort-of. And Polaris was retconned into being Magneto’s daughter and inheriting his powers, whilst Wanda + Pietro were retconned into not being his children explaining why they don’t have his powers. I’m sure there’s other examples of mutant powers being inheritable that I’m forgetting.
And also there’ve been related groups of mutants – the Summers brothers various with “energy blaster” powers. And there’s the angelic-mutants-like-Warren and demonic-mutants-like-Kurt that’re probably best forgotten as bad retcon jobs. On the other hand, there’s the Guthrie kids who’re all mutants with different powers.
So, basically, mutant powers seem to be mostly inheritable, except when they’re not. And I think retcons push continuity more in the direction of them being inheritable than in them being completely random.
This is a cogent point.
OK but it means you have to finesse it a little, and rely on the kindness of readers to ignore the fact that Dr Doom, Red Skull and every other clown says the same thing (I will rule your world forever by super powers that are reproducible or renewable. Nyah Nyah!), and ostensibly and practically, means it, yet there is no public outcry of hatred.
Doom, for example, is pretty much feared and hated by everyone, so don’t assume that there’s no “public outcry of hatred.”
Also, there’s a difference between, “I will rule you all!” and “I will kill you all!”
Well my point is that no one was willing to condemn him as a “generic” threat to humanity. (A fear of his children) And he was indistinguishable from a mutant. The anti-mutant bigotry was a good moral aspect to the x-men story but it doesn’t hold up well in a universe with other super powers.
I don’t understand the point about ruling and killing. I didn’t choose my word to exclude the other meaning. I don’t think anyone, in the marvel universe or the readers made that distinction too severely. It’s in the category of “not good.” Who was doing which of these things?
I think some people are making the mistake of thinking of everything that we find “weird” in comics would be weird to the people actually in the comics. We’re approaching this thinking of mutants, and wizards, and space aliens, and all this other stuff as being in one big box marked, “comic book stuff” that’s added to the “normal” world. But people actually living in this setting wouldn’t consider it that way. There’s no particular reason why they’d think of a wizard, a mutant, and a guy in power armor as all being part of the same root issue, no more than we think of, say, instability in the Middle East as part of the same issue as street crime in the US. There’s absolutely no reason anti-mutant hysteria would touch Dr. Doom. “Some people are wizards,” is an established thing in the Marvel universe. It’s a fact of life for the people who live there, and always has been.
The fear and hatred of mutants makes sense to me, and I think that guns are a good analogy.
Imagine for a moment that your teenage friend/child/whatever suddenly started carrying around loaded weapons.
But, of course, since carrying a weapon is a choice, imagine that he magically had to somehow (I realize this is a stretch). He couldn’t stop it.
How would you feel about that? The fact that he can’t not carry around guns doesn’t make it any less frightening that he has the power to kill everyone around at his fingertips. All the time.
Sure, there’d be an initial infatuation with the power, but power like that is scary. On an individual visceral level. And it’s extra scary with a teenager, not known for strong impulse control.
Sure, mutants who have non-killy powers are less frightening but those are a small minority in the world of the comic books. I can easily imagine them getting painted with the same brush of fear. And as someone pointed out, even positive powers are still frightening due to their power. Power corrupts, and can be easily misused.
I think you need some small amount verisimilitude in any drama even comics or else you don’t have a drama. The problem is inconsistency: The mutants are not any different from the wizards, or the bite victims. The social message is very much diluted.
How is Dr Doom not a functional mutant? How would anyone know to exclude him or not “touch” him with this concern?
It is a good description of bigotry but it leaves me feeling a little insulted as a human being. The bigots in the books are much stupider than even human bigots.
The ending of ROBOCOP, though.
My personal favorite of comeuppance scenes in a superhero movie is when Clark Kent returns to the diner in Superman II and beats up the guy who bullied earlier in the movie when he didn’t have powers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLilfvSdw4Y
“I’ve been working out”
Black people are just like white people, but racial prejudice is still a thing that happens in the real world.
Actually, I’d go so far as to say that having mutant exist in their own, separate world fatally undercuts the prejudice metaphor. In a world with only normal humans and mutants, it makes a lot of sense to treat the people who can shoot lasers out of their eyes, or read minds, or derail trains with a gesture, differently from everyone else. That’s still prejudice, but it’s rational prejudice.
If you have a world with mutants, and aliens, and gods, and science accidents, but only mutants are targeted for special treatment, you have something a lot closer to real world prejudice, where one group of people is treated differently for arbitrary and culturally biased reasons, and not because they actually present a unique threat to society. There’s no rational reason to treat Wolverine any differently than Spider-Man, but the whole point is that prejudice isn’t rational.
This is exactly my point. You’re approaching this from the “all of this weird stuff is the same because it doesn’t exist in the real world” perspective, but that’s not how people in the Marvel universe see things. Magic is a real thing that people know exists, and isn’t terribly uncommon. It’s existed throughout human history. Merlin was a real dude in the Marvel universe. He’s a known historical fact there. People know magic is a thing, and they know that it’s different from being a mutant, because they exist in a culture where these things are common knowledge.
Specifically, people know Dr. Doom isn’t a mutant because he’s a public figure. He’s the ruler of a small but politically significant country, and makes no effort to disguise his identity or history. (The mask isn’t for anonymity, but because of his horrific facial scars.) Anyone in the Marvel universe who reads a newspaper or watches their version of CNN probably knows who Dr. Doom is, and has a rough idea about what his deal is and where he came from.
Hell, canonically, Marvel Comics exists inside of the Marvel universe, and publishes mostly the same books, except they’re technically “true crime” comics because they’re relaying actual events. People in the Marvel universe know who Dr. Doom is the same way people in the real world know who he is: they read the comics.
I… didn’t give a description of bigotry? At least, not in the post you were replying to. But thanks anyway.
One thing I’ve seen some writers do - Grant Morrison comes to mind - is postulate that the vast majority of mutants actually don’t have useful powers. They just look weird and gross. I think this helps the metaphor a lot - people aren’t reacting to them because of their powers, which a lot of non-mutants have, but because they look like monsters.
No, sorry, I meant the Marvel depiction of bigotry.
Why do the marvel universe citizens hate mutants but not others? Is it depicted in any way? I think it could be a good story arc to get this issue out and told. I can’t consider the Marvel universe as a special magic one that convenently allows powers and denies them based the need to keep making sense. Marvel comics are set in NYC. I read them and not DC, which were based on fictional towns. That was the whole Marvel mode. I’m one of the readers too. It didn’t make any sense to me.
SHs, SVs, and mutants, they are all running the same game. Magic being allowed doesn’t change that does it? Is the bigotry “They were born that way and I can’t abide that”?
I’m no expert but I think Doom was quite loved by his subjects in Latveria.
Ah, gotcha.
Again, because prejudice isn’t rational. Why was so much of America’s history marked by white people’s hatred of black people? Black people don’t have superpowers. They’re exactly like white people in every significant way. Why were they the target of so much racism?
Because prejudice isn’t rational.
Yes, repeatedly, and at length. I mean, you literally have an organization called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants,” who explicitly tell people that they intend to wipe out humanity, specifically because they’re mutant
You lost me there.
They aren’t running the same game, is the point. Magic and mutants and aliens are all distinct things in the Marvel universe, and the people in the Marvel universe understand that these are distinct things, because they’re standard features of the world in which they grew up.
Imagine an alien watching a movie about Nazis, with no context for who they are or why they’re the bad guys, and he assumes it’s because they’re running around using guns on everyone. “Guns make you a bad person on Earth,” he concludes - but then he watches a John Wayne movie, where the guy running around with a gun is a good guy. “This doesn’t make any sense! Why would they hate one group of people with guns, but revere this other person with a gun?”
That’s the mistake you’re making. You’re assuming that it’s the superpowers that make people hate mutants. It’s not. It’s prejudice - and like real-world prejudice, it’s not rational.
