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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
I say just have Magneto spend a majority of the intervening years on ice. It's already established that Hydra had the capability back in the WW 2 era, and it's not difficult to imagine a situation where they managed to luck their way into freezing him...then never got the courage to unfreeze him until decades after the fact.
Every time this topic comes up I point out that HYDRA are both Nazi-affiliated and had advanced-enough cryo-preservation technology to keep Bucky the same age into the present day. It's really easy to say they put the Master of Magnet on ice until they could study/replicate his power.
And nobody listens.
Falrinn's got the same idea it seems, at least.
Edited by Anomalocaris20 on Jul 22nd 2021 at 9:26:33 AM
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!They could always just not do Magneto's origin.
Like, the whole point of mutants is that you don't have to give each superpowered character their own origin story. You can just have Magneto show up and be a character without needing to delve into his past.
Of course, ideally, I'd hope they'd hold off on introducing Magneto for a long, long while. Same goes for the whole Fox Films Quartet (Magneto, Xavier, Wolverine, and Mystique, though I'll make an exception in the latter's case if she's used to introduce Rogue).
The thing I've always wondered about Magneto is: why didn't the holocaust make him more empathetic towards other humans? Like, it wasn't just him who got tortured by the nazis. All those other non-mutants did too.
Is this a "He got the message that non-mutants just kill each other and are inherently destructive" sort of thing?
Edited by GNinja on Jul 23rd 2021 at 7:58:23 PM
Kaze ni Nare!He saw the absolute depths of cruelty and evil that humanity was capable of and swore that he would never allow himself or his people to be in that situation again. Yeah, the holocaust targeted other groups besides the Jewish people, but it's very likely that at Magneto's particular camp, where he was confronted with the most mind-bending trauma a child can possibly endure, he only interacted with other Jewish people.
Once Magneto was in a position of/a being with power, and he saw the same hateful reaction towards mutants, aka his other people, he decided "Oh no, we're not having this shit" and resolved to not let the same fate befall mutantkind, under any circumstances, by any means necessary.
EDIT: and so much of Magneto's character, the who and the why of it, is tied pretty explicitly to World War 2 and the holocaust and being a Jewish person that if you're going to change any of that stuff about him, you might as well just make a different character.
Edited by SonOfSharknado on Jul 23rd 2021 at 4:25:15 AM
My various fanfics.Being Jewish is very much an integral part of Magneto's identity. Sometimes being a mutant supremacist is the forefront of his character, depending on how villainously he's being written, but it's not an either-or thing. He is not either Jewish or a mutant he is a Jewish Mutant.
It's why a lot of people got upset with the Krakoa era having Erik go "We're making a new society here, we have to abandon our old rules, our old religions" because he would literally never say that.
My various fanfics.Like Ultimate Magneto was without the Holocaust backstory and there he’s a just a plain psychopathic supremacist.
There are ways to tie Magneto to the Holocaust backstory without going through the loops of justifying his age. Like, as I've said before, he could be the son of two Holocaust survivors and they fear that his powers would subjugate him to the torment they endured. And Magneto, having grown up with the stories, would still have enough emotional hatred towards his oppressors, Holocaust deniers, and of course, Nazis.
I mean, trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, and can manifest in different forms. Magneto doesn't need his full comic backstory anymore than Tony Stark needs the Vietnam War for his backstory. He just needs enough beats of his thematic story to be recontextualized in a modern setting. No different from Black Widow being raised in a post-USSR world or Bruce Banner getting gamma radiation from a lab instead of an atomic blast or Peter Parker being bitten by a genetically-modified spider or Nick Fury fighting a modern HYDRA rather than the Nazi-rooted one in WWII.
Honestly, we spend more time trying to justify Magneto's age rather than thinking of how the Holocaust affects us to this very day and how it would shape Magneto's perception about the world.
Edited by Shadao on Jul 23rd 2021 at 2:12:24 AM
The actual experience of being a victim of one of, if not the most depraved act inflicted by humans against other humans is bound to warp even the kindest soul. Credit to the Fox Men films, for all their endless bungles, they got that.
“My dear, I have been marked once, and I assure you, no needle will ever touch this skin again.”
That changes a man in a way that is powerful and instantly recognizable. The thing is that while there are other genocides and acts of human cruelty that could offer a similar effect, like a sort of “Human Depravity Olympics”, no act of horror is as ubiquitous in history.
Magneto's villain philosophy works if you view it as him seeing the Holocaust and he replying with "Never again, not to me and my ilk", skipping right past the "Never again, not to anybody".
Which leads to some horrible outcomes like Magneto thinking genocides are okay as long as they're preventing a genocide against the demographics he cares about, but that's what makes him a villain. Sometimes you can stretch it and have Magneto believe that genocides are just kind of envitable, people are just gonna genocide each other, so he'd rather his people be the ones commiting genocide rather than ones suffering it.
I'm not fond of Magneto being written that way. I prefer Magneto as being someone who abhors all genocide and instead he targets politicians and agents he deems to have the potential to abide genocide. The first and third Fox-Men films probably have my favourite take of him, where he's going to extreme lengths, not out of revenge, but because he does genuinely think he's protecting the world from it's own flaws.
As much as ai love First Class, writing Magneto as someone sinpu out for revenge feels a little shallow.
My hope for Magneto, if they ever do adapt him into the MCU, is they introduce him as an Anti-Villain who has a Heel–Face Turn early on (late in his first film or early in his second film) and stays a hero for the remainder of his time in the MCU.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!One issue I have with certain portrayals of Magneto is taking him too far in the direction of villainy to the point where he's meant to be as bad as his oppressors in Germany. First Class did that in the worst way by having Erik downright agree with Sebastian Shaw's ideology (and again, Shaw was literally a Nazi in that movie), his only exception was that Shaw hurt him personally. The whole "If you do X, you'll be just like them" cliche is one I despise, and doing that with a character who's a Holocaust survivor is...blech.

Magneto's backstory as a survivor of the holocaust is practically set in stone,at this point it doesn't how many years have passed since the end of World War 2 his backstory is always going to remain the same
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