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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
So I don't really read many comics, but how does the marvel universe reconcile openly celebrating heroes who have supernatural powers with the whole racial tension allegory that goes on in the X-Men.
It's why they always made more sense to me as seperate worlds than part of the same one.
I know the idea could be that that's the point. Racism is arbitrary. But isn't racism normally driven by features you can see? Blacks look different to whites and so on. There's not really much of a visual distinction between a superhero the public loves, and a mutant.
Kaze ni Nare!I mean, it's pretty much the same reason why racism happens, even though it's silly and arbitrary. Why hate black people and not Italians?
Spider-Man: Far From Home will be running at 129 minutes or 2 hours and 9 minutes.
Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Jun 25th 2019 at 3:55:31 PM
I recall Ultimate Spider-Man played with that once by having Miles Morales’s dad complaining about mutants after seeing the Human Torch fly by, while Miles tries unsuccessfully to point out the Human Torch isn’t a mutant.
Or one could interpret the disparity as similar as similar to racists who’d watch Samuel L. Jackson in anything but still call 911 about black neighbors in the park.
Actually, I know this sounds bad, but I honestly never thought the Sentinels HAD to be a bad idea. Like, programming them for genocide is real bad, but having super cops who are capable of countering a mutant's specific powers never sounded that bad to me. Unless there's something else about the sentinels I'm forgetting.
Batman has countermeasures for every super he knows. Nick Fury does too.
Kaze ni Nare!Mariah and Fisk are more or less the same character except one is a white man and the other is a black woman, which is where their thematic allegiances get more interesting. Both have the exact same arc of being split between saving their city (via their philantropist façades) and oppressing it (via their mob ties), and both end up realizing they cannot be saviors and thus must be oppressors. Both also have rather explosive temper problems and both their downfalls into true crime come from one such outburst of anger (Fisk killing Owsley, Mariah killing Cornell).
Their difference, one that could be interesting to explore, is that Fisk wanted to save his city by gentrifying it (i.e kicking all the poor minorities out) which is directly at odds with Mariah's stated goal of "keeping Harlem black" as she puts it in season 2.
I do think they'd make a very interesting duo if they had teamed up. Something like Mariah and Fisk trying to merge their criminal empires (or Hell, maybe a Mob War).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."![]()
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The difference between those is that Batman and Nick Fury use their own (good) judgment on when to counteract mutant powers. Sentinels don't — their entire programming is "kill all mutants." And a robotic police force actually has been explored in comics, very recently, in fact: the Americops. They basically turned "police brutality" up to eleven. In general, making supercops without good judgment or morals is a bad idea.
Edited by alliterator on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:07:36 AM
Personally, if the Sentinels ever show up in the MCU I hope they take cues from the Evolution cartoon and make them actual threats by themselves rather than GiantMooks who can only win through Zerg Rush (which makes no bloody sense).
No need to make them as overpowered as the ones in the Fox Films, but a giant killer robot should always elicit at least a small "oh shit!".
Something so perfectly logical and reasonable has no place in the world of comics.
Edited by HailMuffins on Jun 25th 2019 at 5:12:44 AM
Considering Sentinels tendency to just enslave all of humanity, it's a really bad idea. period.
It's not just about the poor mutants: we've had people from the future come back and say stop making fucking Sentinels and they still keep doing it.
Maybe if they weren't mutants, people would listen more...or just shoot the mutie lover.
...probably that second one actually.
One Strip! One Strip!The Marvel universe usually has some sort of "anti-mutant contingency" but that tends to be the stomping grounds of SHIELD. Sentinels are, as G Ninja put it, "super-cops". With all the trigger-happy tendency to shoot minorities that term implies.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."There’s a phenomenon known as “turn-key tyranny”, which I think was pretty well demonstrated in The Winter Soldier. Like Sentinels, Nick Fury intends to use Project Insight only for legitimate threats. But even if he has the best of intentions, very little stands in the way of him getting ejected from leadership and someone else more ruthless taking Insight’s reins. And that means a lot of power capable of being misused.
It’s the same with the Sentinels. While the metaphor is muddied by the comics inflating the X-men’s powers to unreasonable levels, the general gist is that a mild Sentinel force has too much capacity to be misused. Fair today may not mean much when they have the ability for genocide tomorrow.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:17:04 AM
1) Bigotry isn't logical
2) Even the Marvel Comic citizenry can turn on the non-mutant heroes in a drop of a hat and side with Norman Osborne. They're that fucking petty.
I do think it gets a bit muddled when you see just how powerful mutants can be.
Like that one Ultimate X Men issue about the kid who's power causes his entire town to burst into flames without him even noticing. If any human could just arbitrarily have that kind of power, then SOMETHING needs to be in place. It's not the same as your garden variety racism. No black person has the power to destroy a town overnight throught he sheer power of their blackness.
Kaze ni Nare!To be fair, it took Civil War to do that.
Cause The New Warriors fucked up badly on that front.
One Strip! One Strip!Logan: Maybe.
(silence)
Logan: Finish your beer.
Boy: Just do it.
(the final shot of the book is Logan leaving the cave; the expression on his face says it all)
Edited by alliterator on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:24:56 AM
But that's the thing. I can understand why the government wouldn't want to leave everything to an independent party like Xavier and his followers. Hell, it was a coverup in that issue. Wolverine was sent to kill him and make sure NO ONE knew a mutant had been involved. Because it would harm relations too much. That just seems shady and reliant on blind trust that the X-men will ALWAYS be made up of good people.
The only problem I have with the anti-Sentinel position is that the same could be said of any form of power, including the Mutants themselves. Just as the individual operating these hypothetical peacekeeping Sentinels could die and be replaced with a genocidal tyrant who uses them for evil, Professor X could be ousted and replaced with full-mutant-supremacy-mode Magneto or some similar analogue.
Power can always be misused, but the problem is the only thing that keeps it in check is other power, so you're pretty much screwed no matter which side you take.
Edited by Anomalocaris20 on Jun 25th 2019 at 4:33:03 AM
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!Big overwhelming powers are more exciting for a story about fighting Apocalypse or the Shi'ar, but small mundane powers work better for stories examining bigotry. It’s an awkward fit to flip from “this Phoenix Force could destroy the planet” in the same story with “this office workplace isn’t accessible to centauroid people”.

I could actually see an Elektra show with the same actress — she was a good actress, just burdened with mediocre material. And her character was never confirmed as deceased, either (and considering Matt survived, it's probable she did, too). Move her to a new location, say Las Vegas, and bam, she's set.