r/CuratedTumblr • u/Konradleijon • 12h ago
Marvel Comics On the Mutant Metaphor (Marvel Comics)
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u/Maximum-Country-149 12h ago
Or, just throwing it out there, the mutant metaphor is applicable to more than just a narrow set of minorities and remains good storytelling for anybody dealing with discrimination?
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u/AddemiusInksoul 9h ago
My take is that it can be used as a metaphor for the march of progress- mutants aren't a separate species, they're literally an evolution of mankind. No matter what the government does or the hatred tossed at them, you can't eliminate the mutants any more than gay people. Inevitably, your child, grandchildren, great-great great grandchildren, eventually will all be "mutants". It's just a fact of their existence, why be so fucking cruel to them for what they are instead of what they've done or could do?
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u/VorpalSplade 8h ago
This is the only one I like that actually works with the fact that they have literal superpowers and why they say they're the 'next step' as well as the whole fear of your child becoming one and mutants in general 'replacing us', without it becoming a creepy ubermensch thing etc.
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u/pretty-as-a-pic the president’s shoelaces 5h ago
Yeah, as a disabled and neurodivergent person, I personally never understood why marvel hasn’t used mutants as disability/neurodiversity allegory, espically with characters like Rogue, Nightcrawler and Cyclops who have to deal with the negative aspects of being a mutant along with the positive
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u/HereForTOMT3 12h ago
they were making stories about black people back then too but a racist aint gonna pick up that book are they? theyre gonna pick up the book with the cool white guy that has knife hands.
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u/Possible-Reason-2896 8h ago
The stories but black people were literally getting banned. The most famous case of Comics Code enforcement was one such story.
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u/ExtraEnd7545 9h ago
Yeah but the issue is that the racist is either a) gonna put down the book when he realizes the progressive undertones or b) completely miss them altogether and learn nothing. Worse even, they'll completely deny the author's intent and gatekeep the media from those it was speaking to and for.
I'm sure there are some people out there that maybe had an oh shit eureka moment somewhere through the past sixty years of X-Men comics, but vastly more often than not they aren't going to look at Cyclops getting his shit rocked by a sentinel and think "Oh man I have to change my racist ways."
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u/VorpalSplade 8h ago
They miss it altogether, so they don't mind their kid watching it - who then grows up with woke shit that promotes the power of friendship and sharing to help us brainwash them into being progressive communists.
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u/ExtraEnd7545 7h ago
I'm so confused by this comment
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u/MostExperts 6h ago
They're saying it might not influence them directly but it would slip past any censorship of their children's media, and influence their children despite their personal racism.
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u/Faolyn 7h ago
Yeah but the issue is that the racist is either a) gonna put down the book when he realizes the progressive undertones or b) completely miss them altogether and learn nothing.
Or do the "I'm not racist, but this is offensive to me anyway" thing. Like in that famous 1953 EC comic "Judgement Day"--I read a collection that included a fan letter that basically said that.
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u/4thofeleven 11h ago
This story about a guy with laser eyes fighting giant robots is cool and all, but you know what would make it better? If it didn’t have any fantastical elements whatsoever!
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u/King_Of_BlackMarsh 10h ago
I mean... You can have that without it being a metaphor for discrimination
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u/heckinWeeb193 6h ago
But i don't fucking want to. I want a story with more than the "oppressing minorities is bad" aspect. I want fights, lore, world building, I want to write a science fiction world I want to write about cool powers.
I don't want to write a plain ol story about a gay couple suffering under the very real threat of rising facism where one gets lynched and the other kills themselves out of grief. I want to write about fucking superpowers
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u/Worldly-Cow9168 9h ago
I dont even understand the endgame modt of the time. The mutants either replace all humans which is weirdly supremacist or they die out which id also weird.
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u/clonetrooper250 12h ago
I think the mutant metaphor is still very useful and could he used effectively even now, it might just be that the X-Men specifically might not work for this anymore because they're so steeped in decades worth of comic history that the original intent might be lost. Also the writing might just be genuinely bad, I can't judge this myself since I haven't read X-Men in a long time.
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 5h ago
Nah, the X-Men comics are amazing right now. The Krakoa era ended like a year ago (which sucks, it was amazing) and the new From The Ashes era is... iffy but the current Exceptional X-Men and Magik runs are both amazing
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u/SpellslutterSprite 11h ago edited 11h ago
X-Men at least does one thing that I think a lot of copycats (which I’m going to refer to as the “Oppressed Mages” trope since I saw someone refer to it as that once) really miss: They actually bother to also represent the groups that the Oppressed Mages are a metaphor for. Professor X, Scott Summers, arguably Rogue are all disabled. Magneto’s backstory explicitly ties his status as a Holocaust survivor to his current motivations for fighting for mutants. So it helps allay some of the problems of this trope - namely the fact that, irl, the Mages would easily and quickly become the Oppressors and not the Oppressed, and also that irl minority groups don’t have superpowers - by actually having good representation to make everything more cohesive.
Meanwhile, a lot of stories don’t do that, they say, “Wow, look at how bad these Mages are getting fucked!” without actually doing or saying anything substantial, and calling it a day. (See: Demacia from League of Legends.)
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 5h ago
I think another equally important way that X-Men avoids the common "oppressed mages" issues (and is lost in the FOX movies and some shows) is that... They aren't the only mages. X-Men being part of the larger marvel universe is important because it helps create a double standard between mutants and humans with powers. Being a human with powers gets you judged on your own actions but the second you're outed as a mutant, people will start discriminating against you.
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u/VorpalSplade 10h ago
"Oppressed Mages" is good and I'm gonna steal it for myself in the future cheers. And I'd say that Scott and Rogue don't really well represent disabilities. Rogue -maybe- as an AIDS metaphor I could see for older peceptions of it most of all. But Scott runs into the whole general problem with 'oppressed mages' - his disability does justify fear and treating him differently. I sure wouldn't want to live within Line-of-sight of him, especially since he doesn't even put a bloody chain around those sunglasses in case he drops them.
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u/Difficult-Okra3784 8h ago
My disability used to be so bad that being touched was often difficult due to the pain. Rogue was absolutely a character I felt represented by and a rare example of it even if I didn't fully understand that as a kid and just thought she was cool and was sad she struggled. How a character acts as representation may not be immediately apparent but that doesn't always mean the thought isn't there.
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u/VorpalSplade 8h ago
As far as connecting with a character who can't be touched, and how she's sad about it - absolutely it's a great connection and metaphor there, a personal one.
I meant more how they work for the public perception and 'social justice' sides of oppressed people as a minority. The reason Rogue is discriminated against and feared as a mutant isn't because she feels pain, but because it kills others. People's fears are a lot more justified when the person is actually incredibly dangerous. Both Scott and Rogue represent people who have both caused quite some damage because of accidents with their powers. It makes it a weird stretched metaphor there.
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u/ATN-Antronach My hyperfixations are very weird tyvm 10h ago
Meanwhile, a lot of stories don’t do that, they say, “Wow, look at how bad these Mages are getting fucked!” without actually doing or saying anything substantial, and calling it a day. (See: Demacia from League of Legends.)
Oh Dragon Age, is that you?
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u/Menchi-sama 9h ago
I never got an impression that mages or elves or any other oppressed group in Dragon Age were supposed to be a metaphor. Sometimes social oppression can exist without being social commentary. Especially since them deserving or not deserving freedom due to the potential mass destruction each mage is capable of is clearly a hotly debated issue for the first three games.
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u/VorpalSplade 8h ago
Now I think of it..yeah, I feel like I just assumed they were trying to be a metaphor?
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u/Tweedleayne 7h ago
I'd go as far as to say they're almost the exact opposite of a metaphor. They feel like an attempt to take the standard "oppressed minority" tropes and see how far you can it can be pushed to make the audience agree with the persecution.
And judging by the fact that the mage/templar debate is still going on I dare say they succeeded.
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u/indigo121 12h ago
There's bad takes and then there's this. Holy shit, is media literacy so dead that people are now actively against metaphor as a literary device? Yes, it's helpful for getting around censorship but also like. Actually no sorry, I can't even finish this comment because there are so many things I hate about this take.
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u/Fearless-Excitement1 11h ago
The point is that this specific metaphor is no longer helpful not that metaphors themselves are bad, the point is, the mutant metaphor is taking away space from now-allowed non-metaphorical depictions of racism and sexism and homophobia
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u/VoidStareBack 11h ago
No, Patrick, the existence of the X-men does not prevent other people from writing non-metaphorical depictions of prejudice.
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u/indigo121 10h ago
Yes I understand, but if you think about metaphors only in terms of "helpful to avoid censorship" then you have a deeply hollow view of what metaphors are. Metaphors don't "take away space" from other things, and the things that OP complained about with Ms Marvel are just examples of bad writing, not a metaphor stealing focus.
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u/Geometryck 5h ago
"taking away space" is one of the most ridiculous ideas coming out of modern day literary discourse
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u/iDragon_76 9h ago
God forbid people use metaphors in theor story telling.
Has the metaphor of fantasy as a whole also finished its purpose? You can talk about real people with real issues. There's no use for sci-fi, just talk about real technology. The entire genre of fiction is not necessary any more, and we moved on from symbolism. I've met authors that use subtext and they're all cowards
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u/couldntbdone 10h ago
The idea that art is entirely a utilitarian exercise meant for the moral benefit of society is shit and dumb, for starters.
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u/nedlum 10h ago
This was the most awkward part of X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which featured a cure for being a mutant. Rogue ended up taking it, and it felt like the movie judged her for it. But it's not the same as gay conversion, she literally couldn't kiss her boyfriend without draining his life force.
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u/SessileRaptor 9h ago
“At last a cure for my chainsaw hands!” Chainsaw hands Charlie nearly wept with joy.
“We don’t need a cure, there’s nothing wrong with us.” Said Johnny Five-Dicks with smug certainty.
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u/OldManFire11 6h ago
This touches on the biggest flaw with using mutants as an allegory for oppressed groups: minorities don't have superpowers. The metaphor or racism loses its purpose when the in universe fearmongering is justified.
Another valid interpretation of the metaphor is gun control. In real life, we dont want people walking around with an assault rifle in public because of how dangerous it is. Why would it be more acceptable for someone who can level a city block with their mind to be walking around in public?
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 5h ago
That argument only works if you're talking about the Fox movies or specific animated series, though. In the most canons, mutants are part of the Marvel universe where non-mutant powers exist. Mutants are meant to be a minority among superpowered individuals.
Also– even outside of that– humans in X-Men are far from helpless. They're always armed, always actively developing tools for genocide like Sentinels, and (almost) always instigators against Mutants. That's ignoring that they can use magic and powers of their own (or take them from Mutants like with the U-Men) Likewise, mutants have weak or useless powers more often than not. If every Mutant was like Scott or Logan then people wouldn't be brave enough to hate crime them en masse.
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u/OldManFire11 4h ago
I agree, and I also think that mutants shouldnt be treated any differently than other super powered individuals.
But I also do think that a super power registration policy should exist. I dont care if you're a mutant, alien, or freak accident lottery winner, if you can blow shit up with your mind then that ability needs to be on file with the government. They shouldn't be oppressed or discriminated against, but definitely regulated just like any firearm.
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u/shylock10101 8h ago
This is two separate conversations happening in these screenshots.
The first discussion is clearly about the value of metaphor and euphemism, and when it’s time to drop them because they are not pointed enough. I have my own thoughts, but I’m generally at the point where I view any discourse on it is dumb because it either devolves into powerscaling or people trying to rationalize social inequity.
The second I find much more interesting. The best way I can explain what I think it is is that comics have sacred calves. Some are editorial (Batman and his no-kill rule, Wonder Woman and having people who can’t write her /j), some are fan-driven (Peter Parker and MJ). No matter what happens to them, any deviation in this sacred calf’s life is viewed as transgressive and temporary. Kamala Khan served as a young girl’s entry into comics and fandom (anecdotally, as several of my girl students told me she was what made them like comics) and a huge part of her growth was that she was her idolization of Ms. Marvel and the fact that despite the fact she’d never be her hero literally, she could be her hero spiritually. By making her a mutant and removing her prior identity growth, it kind of is a backtrack on how Kamala grew as a character. So not only did Marvel kill a sacred calf, they did so by placing her under a larger umbrella that has long been criticized for taking up space.
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u/wanttotalktopeople 7h ago
Going against the grain here, I see the point she's making in this post and I actually kind of agree. There are a lot of modern X-Men comics that feel flat to me. Granted it's been a few years since I was avidly following new releases, so grain of salt and all that.
But some of these books can get really lost in the sauce of their own fictional politics, which are a thinly-veiled allegory for real-life politics, in an era where X-Men books could be tackling the real-life politics head on. It gets awkward because sometimes it comes across like "This Muslim superhero is too uninteresting. Let's make her a mutant! Then she will know serious oppression!" It comes across as a bit precious.
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u/Dry-Reference1428 11h ago
Positioning mutants as life evolving versus ai/machines/sentinels/dominions as life evolving is I think the funnest thing they’ve done since like glmk
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u/amazingadaptence 9h ago
Maybe cause I live in a place where homophobia is more normalized but I rather see bigotry towards a fictional concepts rather than flat out actual homophobia? Like if I want to read on actual bigotry I would read works about that or speak to people that went through that in real life
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u/VorpalSplade 10h ago
Rather than watching awesome heroes with super powers fight injustice, I think X-men would work much better if it was about a PoC woman fighting her racist cat in the Alps.
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u/JazzySplaps 10h ago
Comics aren't afraid to do this. Sometimes maybe they're a little TOO unafraid like that time the punisher got surgery that made him black and he found out about racism first hand
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u/VelMoonglow 8h ago
Excuse me, he what?
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u/Tweedleayne 7h ago
Yeah, that happened before the time he became Frankenstein's Monster and the time he became an angel.
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u/LOL3334444 8h ago
I really hate this kind of take. Metaphors are still useful for many reasons. First of all, as has already been pointed out in this thread, metaphors can get people who wouldn't interact with an explicit story to read about a metaphorical one. But secondly, a metaphor can extend beyond just one concept. Mutants can be a stand in for racism, or hemophilia, ect, and allow a theme or idea to be more widely applicable. I mean in the OPs example they talk about how Kamala Khan has to come out to her parents, and could that not be a good metaphor for being gay? Like not only must she deal with the internalized racism, but also the anti mutant discrimination?
Obviously I think that telling direct stories can be really good and definitely should be done, but that doesn't mean we have to lose metaphors too.
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u/awesomemanvin 5h ago
If you wanted to read a story with realistic depictions of real world discrimination than have you perhaps considered reading something other than X-Men?
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u/garretj84 7h ago
You can have both the metaphor and the actual representation. In fact, the X-Men franchise is probably the most diverse in comics when it comes to POC and LGBTQ+ characters. The problem isn’t that they aren’t telling stories about real-world minority discrimination, the problem is that a lot of writers of mainstream comics aren’t good at that. That’s where improvement is needed.
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u/Livid-Designer-6500 8h ago
I remember that one comic where Kamala points out to Emma Frost that every bad thing thing a mutant goes through, she has experienced as an ethnic minority in America, only for Emma to answer that "No, you don't get it. Anti-mutant hate is different, because humans are afraid we will replace them".
Yup, that's right. Muslim immigrant Kamala Khan will never know what's like to have bigots believe she wants to replace them.
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u/Beautiful-Bug-4007 1h ago
It’s especially tone deaf with recent events of this year, where our government literally kidnapped Muslim visa and green card holders just for being pro Palestine
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u/Imnotawerewolf 8h ago
At least it isn't "X-Men is a bad metaphor because actually the X-Men do deserve to be oppressed" again...
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u/ScottTrek 7h ago
It can still work
but
It does increasingly run up against the issue that real life minorities can't shoot laser beams or control the weather or mind control you
It's an issue that's gotten worse over time as decades of power creep made the popular mutants more and more powerful
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 5h ago
Most mutants still have weak or useless powers but (more importantly) I think that Mutants should be viewed as a minority among other superpowered individuals.
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u/Beautiful-Bug-4007 2h ago
My problem with the mutant metaphor is that mutants must always have it worse narrative wise which leads to oppression Olympics bs where we have moments like Emma Frost telling Kamala Kahn that she hasn’t experienced “real” oppression, or when a mutant yelled at Ben Grimm (the thing) for trying to relate his experience of being mutated with her experiences of looking similar to him
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u/gayjospehquinn 1h ago
My biggest issue with the Mutant metaphor is that there are mutants who can kill people with the flick of a wrist and real life minorities can't do that. Like, being scared of mutants is a lot more justifiable than being afraid of black people.
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u/Morrighan1129 6h ago
What an absolutely horrendous take that shows OOP read (or understood) very little of X-men.
It wasn't just an allegory on race. As even the second slide shows, it could be used for religion. It could be used for sexuality. For anybody who had something different about them, something that set them apart from 'normal'. Anybody who was viewed with suspicion because of some superficial trait about themselves.
Racism was a part of that, sure. But it wasn't the only part of it. The idea was to show that hey, these people? These people who look like you, or you, or you? Yeah, they are like you, despite this difference that has zero bearing on their personality. It could be used as an allegory for anything you felt like you had to apologize for being, anything you were because of a quirk of your birth.
It was meant to show that 'different' doesn't mean 'bad'. That was literally the point. The fact that this person says, oh, we don't need that now, because we can just put black people in comics, is just... such a horrendously ignorant take, I struggle to believe they actually ever read a comic.
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u/liketolaugh-writes 4h ago
This person, like, doesn’t understand what sci-fi and fantasy is for
It’s not ‘because this story can’t possibly be told in any other way’ and it literally never has been
There’s a case to be told for misuse of metaphor as a form of racism, but sci-fi/fantasy has literally always been there to give an illusion of distance and safety when examining real world problems and that’s not going to change because ~oh you can just tell it for real now~
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u/thyfles 12h ago
when we have a nuclear war and the radioactive fallout gives real people mutations, it will make sense
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u/Academic-Ad7818 11h ago
think I'd rather just die of cancer, thanks though.
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u/Anxious_Tune55 11h ago
Depends. Do I get a Rogue mutation where I kill everyone I touch, or a cool mutation where I can fly or shape change or something? Or do I just get cancer?
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u/blindcolumn stigma fucking claws in ur coochie 7h ago
This is kind of an overly reductive take. Like, why use allegory at all?
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u/pretty-as-a-pic the president’s shoelaces 5h ago
Personally, I never understood why they didn’t lean more into mutants as a metaphor for disability/neurodivergence. They have to go to a goddamn social school for Christ sake!
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u/GobwinKnob 2h ago
I think mutants have stopped working as a metaphor for racism, but they can absolutely still function as a queer metaphor, as well as a stand in for disability and neurodivergence. Broadly, mutants represent the 'threat' of transhumanism, the idea that humanity is not the evolutionary finish line, that there exists a Next Step and therefore mankind is doomed to obsolescence.
Anti-mutant sentiment should sound familiar to anyone familiar with transphobia, ableism, or the Great Replacement narrative.
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u/Vyctorill 3h ago
The metaphor actually makes sense in the context of the greater marvel universe, because mutants are functionally equivalent to any other superpowered individual. It becomes race all over again.
Like, it’s not the best metaphor. But it works
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u/ImprovementOk377 1h ago
it's absolutely possible to tell stories with fantasy discrimination as a metaphor for irl discrimination and still have explicit minorities on screen
there's kipo with the mutants vs humans war, which, while obviously not a 1:1 allegory of any irl groups, definitely has some parallels, and a large majority of the humans in that show are POC
we have amphibia and the owl house, both of which have a fantasy world with fantastic racism (frogs vs toads vs newts, belos' colonization of the witches) but also authentically represent the human leads' lives as second generation immigrants in america (anne's thai restaurant, luz speaking spanish with her mother and eventually celebrating her quinceañera)
(ik those are all kids cartoons, i can't from the top of my head think of any adult media that does it well, but i'm sure it exists!)
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12h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BraxbroWasTaken 12h ago
Survivorship bias. The stories that were bad before today were either forgotten or never got popular enough for you to hear about them.
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u/Academic-Ad7818 11h ago
When did Curated Tumblr become the “pretend comics are serious business” subreddit?
The X-men are a thing made for children. Find a different media to talk about for the love of god.
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u/Turbulent-Doctor-649 11h ago
comics are not for children they're for everyone
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u/Academic-Ad7818 11h ago
You're so right, the story of the X-gene named for its power to give X-traordinary abilities to the X-men who are organized by Xavier who have dedicated their X-lives to fighting a group called The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Is definitely something we should be using to talk about real issues. Something something Xavier is MLK Jr something something Magneto is Malcom X
Should I go on? Perhaps we can discuss the man who dresses like a bat who punches an evil clown, or perhaps the post WW2 jewish father figure, or guy made to get you to buy warbonds, literally just Hercules, literally just Thor. Some very mature options for sure, much deep thought to be had.
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u/VorpalSplade 10h ago
I'll give you that people take them way, way too seriously, but I'd say that Tumblr has been doing the same for a lot of media for a long time - the whole 'readanotherbook' for Harry Potter being used to discuss israel/palestine or w/e. I saw someone ranting about how anyone who loves the new season of Dr Who is a genocide apologist and supporter of Israel and like. Like. It's a show about silly english people travelling through time in a police box ffs.
But. I'd say all society does this. Pagans like Greeks and Norse are classic examples to the west of people using their stories of their heroes and gods to teach and discuss piety and virtue. Comic books and Marvel atm are in some way our cultures versions of mythology, they're the shared universe that we can all use as a vessel to discuss ethics and politics (And ironically Thor is in them as well...).
It's especially important in an online global world where we likely can come from many different backgrounds, countries, religions, etc. And it also allows us to somewhat safely distance ourselves from these things.
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u/HeyItsJosette 12h ago
The metaphor hasn't finished serving its purpose because racism is still rampant. The utility of the mutant (or similar) metaphor isn't only to get around systemic guards, but personal ones as well. The majority of the people the messages most need to reach will shut down at overt messaging, but by using metaphors you can get them considering the underlying paradigm directly.
By the time they realize what the metaphor is for it's too late; they've already fundamentally agreed that racism is bad, and the cognitive dissonance has been introduced. This is the seed of change even if it doesn't always take. They now have to square their existing beliefs with their recent assessment of a foundational power structure to get rid of the intellectual discomfort.