Why Are Mutants The Prime Enemy?

So I post on a forum that, for the most part, really hates mutants as depicted in the comics. They think it's all a giant strawman and poorly-written. Having seen the various cartoons and films before I read some of the comics, it was hard to adjust to the "this all takes place in the same universe" mindset. But once you do, I can kind of see the criticism of these posters I mentioned. Unlike X-Men Evolution or the film trilogy, mutants are not alone with normal human beings on the Earth. There are god knows how many other superpowered beings who are publicly known on Marvel Earth. It is not just "Us vs. Them" or "Haves vs. Have-nots" which is a timeless story anyone can understand. It's more like this one group of superpeople gets persecuted relentlessly while this other group just kinda gets left alone.

Why is that?

Bad writing. There really isn't much of an explanation for it when you get right down to it. People have tried everything from the fact that mutants randomly manifest their powers rather than getting them by accident, but in the end, it's still a stretch. There really isn't a good reason why everyone hates mutants, but tolerates the FF or The Avengers.

Heck consider this—there have been numerous characters who hate mutants for vaguely defined religious reasons. Yet nobody pickets the Avengers who claim to have an actual god on their team?

Outside of the universe there's also the problem of mutants being stand-ins for African-Americans, the LGBT community etc—while the majority of them are white and straight.

Well, most other superpowered beings residing on Earth are exceptions, random incidents and accidents of sorts caused by incredible coincidences in the course of human evolution. There's not much of a concern they might ever replace 'us'. But mutants are more than that, in a way. They are a consistently more powerful actual breed of superhumans constantly multiplying and growing more numerous day by day, and the next evolutionary step likely to render mankind as we know it obsolete and eventually extinct.

So there's that.

And to be fair, public opinion has targeted superheroes in general more than once, both in Marvel and DC. Some of them, like Spider-Man, rather constantly.

edited 12th Jun '16 8:23:22 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

Considering the alarming frequency at which these accidents occur in the MU, I'd say humanity has as much to worry about from them as they do Mutants.

Not to the same extent as the X-Men. Every story these days is about Mutants being hated and on the verge of exticntion. Even Spider-Man has had long periods of his life were he was mostly liked by the public with the exception of Jameson.

I have to agree that anti-mutant sentiment has become a bit of a forced issue, maybe even always was. Stan Lee has claimed that genetic mutations were just the easy way to avoid contrived origin stories for everyone, rather than a direct attempt at allegory or anything similar.

If I were to pick valid in-universe reasons, I'd go for mutations being sudden and without a visible explanation. Growing four extra arms after a lab accident is one thing - there's some token form of cause and effect at work. But the same happening while you're zoning out on the couch pretty much triggers every instinctive aversion regarding how human biology is supposed to function. It's like the reverse of seeing a guy with only one arm while knowing he had an accident, versus him being born that way. That kind of response may have worked to stifle faulty genes in our primeval past, but I don't think there's that much logic to it nowadays, unless we're really talking about potential supernatural power incontinence.

Beyond that, there's the fact that supremacists on both sides use the mutants' shared origin to further their agendas. Though I have to say the anti-mutant side has a bit more of a point there, considering how unstable some abilities are. The same reason is why a mutant utopia as envisioned by Magneto would fall apart - there will still be the division between mutants who can move trucks with a thought, and those who merely have quills for hair or whatnot.

Reminds me of that one Ultimate story where a boy unintentionally killed his entire hometown with his newly manifested mutant power. S.H.I.E.L.D. and Professor X had Wolverine (whose healing factor gave him some immunity to the death aura) covertly kill him (which the kid, borderline suicidal at that point, didn't really object to) because the hope for peaceful coexistence would have essentially been irrevocably crushed if word ever got out that a previously completely normal everyday teenager woke up one random morning as a mutant that wiped out hundreds (thousands?) of people in less than a day without even meaning to.

The best explanation I've heard was in Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's Marvels, where it's put forward that the enhanced humans, like Spider-Man or Captain America, who've had stuff done to them that gave them super-powers, are still considered, and consider themselves, human. The mutants are seen as replacements for humans, and the feeling is that mutants want humans to leave the stage so that they can inherit the Earth. The narrator of Marvels said something like "Captain America represents what's best in humanity. The mutants are here to replace us."

That's still not a great explanation (though it does pretty well encapsulate the hair-splitting that goes on in a lot of racist ideology) but it's the only one I've heard that makes even a little sense, given number of super-humans presents in the Marvel Universe.

The simplest explanation would be that most people in the Marvel Universe are prejudiced against all superhumans. However, people who get superpowers from freak accidents or human experiments or otherworldly DNA? They almost all live in New York City. So you could just say that New Yorkers have a pretty liberal attitude towards the whole superhuman thing, so for most superheroes the prejudice never comes up. But mutants, who are usually depicted as being spread across the globe, have to face it a lot more.

That's still not a great explanation (though it does pretty well encapsulate the hair-splitting that goes on in a lot of racist ideology) but it's the only one I've heard that makes even a little sense

Racism is all about not making sense, so I see no real problem with that.

One explanation I've heard and don't get is that mutants constantly have people like Magneto and Apocalypse trying to proclaim mutant superiourity over humans, and that this doesn't help the whole mutant conflict one bit. Okay, but why doesn't this ever seem to effect none-mutant super heroes whenever someone like Doctor Doom or Red Skull tries one of their evil plots?

edited 13th Jun '16 2:29:42 PM by marston

Dr. Doom kinda appeals more to the 'foreigners' prejudice of the masses and Red Skull appeals more to the, well, 'Nazis are evil' universal truth. Skull doesn't even have any superpowers unless he's holding a Cosmic Cube anyway, so it's not like he can be a good representative figure for the superpowered community one way or another.

Even so, I imagine Doom would be more divisive than most villains. He's still a world leader who keeps being accepted in the UN, and some might see a good thing in the utopia he rules over ignoring its most dystopic traits.

edited 13th Jun '16 2:32:25 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

This is a question that I've always asked, and glad someone else noticed it. The average citizen is no more going to care about the difference between mutant and other superhuman or alien or whatever than the average citizen cares about the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Of course, in a real world humanity would be knocked back into the stone age or extinct after the first few invasions from outer space or other dimensions.

The problem with mutants is that they're super-powered. Even if you argue that a bunch don't, it's hard to compare them to minority if we don't have, say, the gay gene sometimes giving people laser vision or being Semitic having a chance of being able to form into solid steel. There's a difference between "I dislike this race because I am suspicious they may be dangerous" and "I dislike this race because they have the potential to easily kill me." The fact they're dumb about isn't very realistic, considering actual racists are smart enough not to bully superpowerful people like some of the anti-mutants do(for instance, the KKK would call you retarded for trying to get them to lynch Obama)

The KKK doesn't have real power or supertech, however. Opposing mutants is as easy as getting enough robots or other things.

Only if you're a government agent with an agenda. Not the same for regular humans. To deal a heavy blow against Mutants requires a lot of training, resources and money that the average joe doesn't have.

It doesn't help said robots spend most of their panel time out of alternate futures getting the bolts kicked out of them.

It's just a metaphor.

In-series, mutants are scarier because anybody could be them. All the other superheroes had to have stuff happen to them, even the new not!Mutant Inhumans had to be exposed to magic gas.

The Klan did build a death ray once.

But that's far and away from Sentinel tech. We're not at "BEHOLD MECHA-DAVID DUKE!!" yet.

As I noted in my first post, one of the problems too is that the X-Men early on were entirely white. They added one black member later on, but for a long time, she was the only one. Which makes the comparisons in-universe to the Civil Rights movement, etc, deeply, deeply uncomfortable, as a bunch of white people claim ownership over being discriminated. The time that Kitty Pryde called out a black friend for being anti-mutant by bringing the n-word into the discussion was really bad and reading it sort of killed any tolerance I have for the great mutant debate.

One thing worth noting is the way various characters are handled now are different than they were in the past. There was more actual segregation between the different offices, which is why the X-Men comics were so insular. The "metaphor" made more sense because they were constantly crossing over with the Avengers and Fantastic Four.

But yeah, I actually do agree, I have always been a proponent that Mutants being a stand in for bigotry was pretty dumb. I mean, maybe if they all had mutated appearances or powers that kind of sucked like Cyclops and Rogue.

I'd say they probably work better as a metaphor for persecuted people as a general concept. Treating them as a metaphor for a specific persecuted group is always going to fall apart.

The only persecuted group I've heard them compared to is homosexuals. But yes, I don't think they had any specific "discriminated against minority" in mind.

Also Ambar, you do of course realize that the biggest bane of comics is their longevity. Times change, writers change. I don't think it's fair to write off the whole concept because of what one writer did when dozens of writers have been on the many X-Books.

Nikkolas, don't lecture me on how writers change. I've been reading comics for a very long time.

The incident◊ I described happened in what's otherwise a pretty well-regarded story, namely "God Loves, Man Kills," which X2 is largely based on. And when your best stories are including scenes that stupid, it may be time to accept there's a problem with the basic premise.

You're working on the assumption that there's needs to be good reason to discriminate against a group of people. That's why the discrimination is so much more poignant, because at the end of the day they're not any different from all the heroes that they idealize. The reason that it's stupid in story is because it actually is fucking stupid, that's the entire point.

edited 15th Jun '16 6:11:59 PM by SilentlyHonest

Except it kind of not stupid to hate mutants. The X-Men can really be asses at some point and they possess powers that ordinary people do not.