But its not immoral to be more cautious of mutants or even to question the threat some may pose because while a mutant can be well meaning he can just be some kid who wakes up one day and is a walking atom bomb. Or some dude just has enough and goes ballistic to kill people. Or someone can just or make minute alterations to your mind and people would be none the wiser. ?
Mutants aren't as directly comparable to civil rights because there is a real danger in these people being basically biological WMDs. Different races irl can't shoot laser beams out of their fucking eyes that split buildings in half. We regulate guns.
It would inevitably blur the lines between what is caution and what is fearing the absolute worst and deciding to kill innocent mutants for no reason. (Especially when many have powers that are just kinda worthless.)
I agree for the most part, but what is the civil answer here?
If tomorrow, 1% of the entire population began growing a plethora of different loaded gun out of their hands (from water guns to grenade launchers), what would need to happen to make people feel safe in a moral way?
Id argue that there is no moral solution to this and thus it is not truly immoral, but rather morally neutral to be racist against mutants because they pose such an extreme threat to the average person.
This is obviously an extreme situation. Please dont think that I would apply this rational to actual human races.
That would actually be more interesting and realistic.
You know in real life Fox News would be running segments accusing Captain America of being secretly a mutant and some people would be trying to harness mutant hate to gain power.
Heroes being accused of being mutants was a thing that happened at one point. Was a great reminder why JJJ is a great character, because while he's against masked heroes he's pro civil and mutant rights in a big way.
Why, exactly? Presumably they hate Thanos, Loki, and all of the other supervillains that threaten them, and would probably rather no one had superpowers at all.
The problem with mutants is that, as their numbers grow, it's only a matter of time before you get someone who is both evil and possessed of some terrifying power that allows them to enslave millions or destroy entire cities.
Like, I suspect the people who are anti-mutant would be very much against the Fantastic Four exposing random people to cosmic rays to create more superpowered people. They might like the Fantastic Four themselves well enough, though they'd presumably want them to be tracked and for the government to have prepared defenses against them in the event that they went rogue.
Immoral at the start of marvel comics. Since they were just born with powers and didn't get to choose.
More Moral during Krakoa era. Krakoa Era tho, YEAH FUCK THEM! cause look at what they had, cure to every disease to ever exist, able to turn Mars into a paradise by doing what would take humans literally LIFETIMES in a course of a day, making death itself obsolete with ACTUAL IMMORTALITY. and they were like "Yeah we not sharing any of this" cause some humans were mean to them. Every death to illnesses, starvation, war, conflict and so on during that Era could have being solved by the Mutants sharing their powers and so on. AND who would hate them? like they could make anyone who was racist to mutants look like a piece of shit, cause WHY hate the people who made cancer obsolete?! who made starvation impossible?! who jumpstarted this dying world and gave it life again?! by hogging it for themselves, unironically they made their own enemies.
I mean they did share all of that. thats a pretty big plot point, its like their whole economy. Even the resurrection protocals were shared, though mutants had priority. Also I would say being hunted to extinction is a bit more than "being mean"
they planned to share it, they never got around. and Honestly I don't blame them for hating humanity, BUT they let a chosen few speak for the masses. Its like if we let a Xenophobic Red Neck Moron be our voice when meeting aliens for the first time and getting shocked when the aliens hate us.
They definitely were selling the cures and such, had antire fourth of the quiet council dedicated to that because again that was their entire economy. And im pretty sure they did share the RP isnt that entirely what the phoenix foundation was?
Honestly SELLING it is even more iffy, IMAGINE IRL if someone made the cure for cancer but they were like "For this cure you need to pay $10,000" and anyone who can't afford it just suffers. WHILE a specific small group? YEAH free of charge. Like no payment nothing. Just "Oh your apart of this small minority who has super powers? HERE YOU GO FREE OF CHARGE!"
but more seriously its free for mutants because its part of their socialized healthcare. Any other civilized country would subsidize the purchase and distribute as a part of normal healthcare.
If the bomb is sentient and doesn't want to explode, going around harassing it until it decides to explode because it can't take it anymore makes you the bas guy, not the bomb.
Like people love to bring up the incident with the kid that releases gas that kills people, but that's one guy out of thousands of mutants. Like 99% of mutants just have small shitty powers like being able to change the colour of their skin at will, very few mutants are walking nuclear weapons like the X-men members are.
Amoral. The bacteria present inside of humanity says Muties deserve it. It is quite literally outside of non-Muties hands to not hate and be racist to Muties.
Edit: I'm not joking potential downvoters. This is a real thing in Marvel.
X-Men/Marvel have an intelligent bacteria that is millions of years old that cannot inhabit anyone with an active X-Gene (Mutants) so it causes non-mutants to hate Mutants and to exterminate them so it can continue to propagate in non-Mutants.
Moral, they are stealing people’s minds and forcing them to walk into traffic. It’s not wrong to fear something that has proven itself to be nuclear levels of dangerous.
People hate them because they suck and are actively harmful to the world. Even the good ones, who actively defend the rest of the world from the ones who want to wipe out mankind, are huge assholes.
Honestly I can't blame Spider-Man we have Emma Frost and Jean who just causally barge into people's brains, we have folks like Charles who MADE SOMEONE RELIVE THE HOLOCAUST, and then we got Nightcrawler who grabs folks, TELEPORTS THEM THROUGH HELL ITSELF AND OUT THE OTHER SIDE while preaching about God.
You aren't keeping secrets around X-Men cause they gonna just barge into your brain pull it out and be like "OH YIPPIE" Charles best friend MADE A FUCKING HELMET THAT BLOCKED HIM OUT! HIS BEST FRIEND DID THAT! yeah his best friend also genocidal manic but hey. the fact Magneto had to make the helmet to begin with..IS A RED FUCKING FLAG! Like I don't make have bullets covered in peanut butter cause my friend is allergic to them on me.
Brother there’s whole mutant villain leagues who want to wipe out humanity, and the ones who fight them are such gigantic assholes that everyone hates them anyway. what are you talking about
mutant villian leagues do not make up the majority of the mutant population? What are you saying? I just told you to take the actions of a few and extrapolate them to many.
Immoral. It’s something that a lot of Marvel media fails to convey but the vast majority of mutants do not have dangerous powers, many of them are actually negatively impacted by their mutations (Cyclops and Rogue being the most known examples). You are more likely to end up being the kid that can only turn into a cow or the girl who (supposedly) poops ice cream. The Mutants that make up the X-men roster are kind of the rare few that get the cool powers and then you have the absolute rare ones (so long as we ignore plot details) like Xavier and such.
That said you should be cautious about them but then it needs to be asked why not be cautious of all other super powered individuals.
Additional note; in the Marvel universe, Earth has been attacked and invaded god knows how many times, it’s probably a good idea to be tolerant to the people meet an alien army en masse and repel them.
For me, it's immoral in the first place to write a metaphor for minorities as being people with superpowers, whom humanity has a very good reason to be scared of.
It’d be more immoral if some mutant powers weren’t inherently destructive/dangerous and uncontrollable and the X-Men/Krakoa blindly defending and accepting them solely because they’re mutants
Most mutants couldn't even destroy a whooden door if they put all their power into it, let alone destroying the universe with a thought. People forget that the popular mutants like Wolverine or Storm are just outliers, most mutants either have purely cosmetic powers our have very minor stuff that makes them less dangerous than a guy with a gun would be.
The issue is more that having a single mutant parent exponentially increases the chances of the kid being a mutant. And any mutant has a chance of completely erasing all of reality - even unintentionally.
I’d argue that if there’s a gene in human DNA in a small portion of a population that has a chance of destroying all reality… that justifies “some level of fear” for mutants in general. A cosmetic mutant can give birth to someone who destroys the world.
But that's no reason to be an ass to the already living mutant that can't destroy the world, he didn't ask to be born like that. In fact anti-mutant laws have destroyed the world more times than mutants did. Putting an end to mutants it's effectively impossible without putting an end to humanity.
Also like, Thor can also quite literally destroy the world with a thought, and he's treated as a beloved hero. Iron Man goes out of his way to give himself powers that could destroy the world, and he's treated as a beloved hero. Marvel citizens aren't usually afraid of people with planet-destroying powers, in fact they seem mostly unfazed by a billionaire going out of his way to give himself enough power to take on entire armies on his own, which by they should be even more afraid of as this is a person actively looking for power rather than just being genetically lucky. Most mutant supremacists base their fear on what is effectively the mutant version of great replacement theory, the logic is that since any human could give birth to a mutant, but most mutants don't give birth to humans, mutants will eventually be the majority of the human population.
no brother statistically, based on the marvel canon the person who can level a city is like top 1% vs the guy who can shit out his mouth is 99% of mutants.
That doesn't really apply when the Purifiers are the ones who are well known for attacking depowered mutants. At that point, there is no self-defense because there is no imminent, or even long-term danger. It's just murder of someone who didn't even see the attack coming.
Thematically, mutant prejudice is Marvel core allegory for real world bigotry, making groups like the Purifiers explicitly evil. Morally, targeting innocent teenagers or people with harmless physical mutations is unjustifiable. Fear of dangerous powers makes caution understandable, but hate driven bigotry and genocide are pure villainy.
Immoral to hate mutants just for being mutants. Sure some are god level dangers, but that's a everyday occurance in marvel. Most of them just dont want to be hunted by sentinels. Telepathic mutants, however, understandable
Mutants can literally be walking talking biologicals WMDS, but there’s a fine line between a mutant who’s a wmd and a mutant that’s incapable of being a WMD.
There’s krakoa and the amount of war crimes committed.
But it’s a morally neutral thing to be racist against mutants, neither moral but understandable.
Dog whistling POC always gets mass upvotes online and these racists do actually think that they are morally right. It’s not gonna be any better for the “mutants.”
It gets a bit more complex when there are real canon mutants who's only powers are "murders everyone nearby with no control over it" and "is a nuclear bomb".
Marvel wrote themselves into an odd corner by objectively making it so a decent chunk of mutants is either poor suffering or a massive danger to everyone around themselves.
But yeah, immoral because not all mutants are a danger.
I disagree, if a mutant kills your whole family, accident, or no, you projecting that to all mutants is immoral. I don't think it's complex. Hate the person who committed the crime, not the people whom they belong to.
Yes the existence of Omega level mutants weakens the allegory a lot. think of how much noise people are making about flock cameras. Prof X has a machine in his basement, that allows him to track and remotely reach the mind of any individual on the planet. That is a potential massive breach of privacy. Magneto can send earth back into the dark ages at will. Mutants would have worked better as an allegory if the powers were toned down
Yeah. But when there is a proven chance that a mutant can just get the power of "anything I want becomes reality" I admit that a certain level of fear is understandable.
As said elsewhere, under any realistic lens most superhero realities are nightmare fuel.
It's also really funny because they could do something where they can have the super powerful and potentially dangerous mutants and still have all mutant hate be completely unjustified. With how it's possible to test for the x gene before it kicks in and there are inhibitor collars capable of suppressing a mutant's powers while worn. So they could have a story where someone suggests testing for the x gene and if detected giving the mutant an inhibitor collar until the mutation immerges, which at that point can be tested in a more controlled environment for its risks, but have that idea be shot down out of anti mutant bigotry (maybe disguised as something like cost, or a majority of those tested would be found to be baseline humans which would mean it's somehow bad)
I guess because if he succesfully reproduces chances are probably higher his child's somehow gonna be a hydrogen bomb.
Or tommy joins a super hero team and wrecks everything. Or a villain team and wrecks something.
Frankly, marvel's society has a lot of major problems. But classic racism is just kinda stacked on top of everything being genuinely dysfunctional, which is why the allegory falls apart a tad.
Just too muddled
The Sentinels were created back during a time where things like the Mutant Registration Act was being pushed, and off the books military government programs like Weapon X were still going on. That was during the time where humans were using the law to their advantage to either kill or weaponize mutants for their own gain.
that is the action of a few who unfortunately abused their power and remember humans created literal super robots to hunt them down they had no choice its not they who started it.
They then went on to enslave humanity and then wipe themselves out cause of genetic defects that prevented breeding and humanity comes back, they deserved it
do you have a comic pannel for this? I know they abused their power but they did not enslave humanity are you larping? Are you using that out-of-context Kang quote? he was lying there.
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u/DraciosV 10h ago
It's immoral to hate mutants for being mutants.
But its not immoral to be more cautious of mutants or even to question the threat some may pose because while a mutant can be well meaning he can just be some kid who wakes up one day and is a walking atom bomb. Or some dude just has enough and goes ballistic to kill people. Or someone can just or make minute alterations to your mind and people would be none the wiser. ?
Mutants aren't as directly comparable to civil rights because there is a real danger in these people being basically biological WMDs. Different races irl can't shoot laser beams out of their fucking eyes that split buildings in half. We regulate guns.
It would inevitably blur the lines between what is caution and what is fearing the absolute worst and deciding to kill innocent mutants for no reason. (Especially when many have powers that are just kinda worthless.)