Magneto has repeatedly had turns of being extermonationist against regular humans, and even when he isn’t he’s still often portrayed as mutant nationalist, modelling his vision for Genosha off of Israel, which he has repeatedly stated his support of in a very “You lived through the logical conclusion of that shit personally, how are you THIS determined to still get it wrong‽”
Poison Ivy has turns of being an eco-fascist, and her more just being an anti-social eco-anti-hero now is often billed as being a direct result of her treatment at Arkham when before she wanted to actually kill everything but plants. Not even all humans, all everything that isn’t either a plant or a plant symbiote, and while that would be am incredible spec-evo project, it would also make her the single most genocidal psychopath in earth’s history assuming lichens don’t achieve sapience to start making a contest of it.
For just wanting to save his wife, Mr. Freeze sure has a lot of arrests on his record involving trying to plunge gotham into a new ice age, which, just look at Extra History’s series on the little ice age to get an idea of just how horrible doing that on purpose to a society is.
Stop whitewashing terrible people who just happen to even tangentially look like a cause you agree with.
That’s how we get Joker being seen as justified because one too many people feel personally attacked for cat calling women to smile more and …motherfucker I think I just figured out why the incels latched onto him so hard.
People hate and fear black people or gay people out of ignorance and stupidity. People fear mutants because they cap rip out all the iron in someone’s body. They have the power of a million mass shooters in one hand.
Some of them have the power of of a million mass shooters. Some of them have the power of a very long neck. Seriously, there an X-man with the codename Longneck because he has a very long neck. He’s never once helped the team in the field, because he’s completely powerless unless he wants to look over toilet stall walls while pooping.
He does have longer arms to match his neck, but that’s it. I guess he can easily get stuff off a high shelf…
And pointedly he cannot blend in as a normal human, so his introduction to the team was them saving him from a lynch mob.
I am pretty sure that racism existed before Reagan became president.
Magneto was meant to be a stand in for Malcom X…
Malcom X’s only crime was that white people were afraid of him. Meaning he did nothing wrong.
So Magneto can’t be a villain unless you have him gripping the villain ball pretty hard.
Magneto was meant to be a stand in for Malcom X…
While the X-Men were an allegory of the civil rights movement from the get go, I’m quite certain at the time Magneto was just intended as a villain.
I mean… his terrorist group was called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, and some of the members were definitely of the moustache twirling puppy kicking kind, including Magneto himself, at first…
Yeah, mainstream comic book villains didn’t start getting more nuanced until the seventies and especially the eighties, possibly as a consequence of the comics code, which included “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal”, and didn’t allow “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior” until 1971 (and which also hilariously led to zombies being called “zuvembies” in Marvel during the seventies, as that simple change was apparently enough to make them kosher), which publishers didn’t start mostly ignoring untill the mid eighties (though most didn’t officially fully abandon it until the noughties or early twenty-tens).
The problem with Magento as a character is that he’s portrayed as Malcolm X in his rhetoric, but as Dr. Strangelove in his technique. The number of times Magneto has tried to engage in Uno-Reverse Genocide - reprogramming Sentinels, reverse engineering killer viruses, rebounding mind control, redirecting asteroids and bombs aimed at his friends back towards civilian non-mutant areas, reversing the magic ray that strips you of your mutant abilities so that it gives them to you instead - makes him deeply unsympathetic simply because this shit never actually works and typically turns him the poster child for “Why All Mutants Must Be Exterminated!” rhetoric works on the non-mutant population.
Say what you will about Malcolm X, but he never tried to brainwash the LAPD into killing all the white people.
I’m wondering whether Magneto ever did something analagous to a hajj like Malcolm X did. It radically altered his views. I would imagine if Magneto did this there would be some deus ex machina to set him back to genocide.
I think if Magneto was written in the present age, he would have been written without the mustache twirling aspect. It has become much more popular to portray both antagonists and protagonists with more depth and grey areas. For that matter, we saw it in some of the recent X-Men movies.
I think if Magneto was written in the present age, he would have been written without the mustache twirling aspect
Depends on who writes him. The modern Marvel Cinematic Universe has more than its fair share of mustache twirlers.
For that matter, we saw it in some of the recent X-Men movies.
Eh. I don’t think they ever topped the original. Ian McCallen was in peak form.
Magneto is basically a racist. He thinks non-mutants are inferior and should be exterminated. How is he fucking right?
No he does not, especially if you’re going with 90s Magneto. It’s the whole reason Fabian Cortez tried to murder him.
He is however a zionist and wants mutants to have their own homeland separate from baseline humans.
especially if you’re going with 90s Magneto
Nearly all my X-Men knowledge comes from the 90’s animated series and a few of the comics. He literally tries to wipe out humans and/or make everyone a mutant at least twice. He even acknowledges this in the new X-Men 97 series as he tries to atone for it and live up to Xavier’s expectations.
He is however a zionist and wants mutants to have their own homeland separate from baseline humans.
Magneto is more akin to Nelson Mandela than Ben Gurion, at least with respect to Genosha. He came in as a kind of terrorist-liberator and, after a revolutionary insurrection overthrew the apartheid regime, established it as a BRICS style unaligned state.
But then, because Western Writing, he launched a Hitler-esque plan for world conquest that got the mutant population eradicated as a result. The island has been repeatedly rebooted as this ostensibly safe haven for mutants, but typically becomes a giant death trap where the population is wiped out over and over again.
The moral of Magneto tends to be “Stop being radical, you’re just going to get everyone killed”. Strangely enough, this never seems to apply to the various secret societies and state agencies running around with the giant killer robots that are primarily responsible for these genocides.
I get the sense that Magneto inherited good-guy status just because using him as a rhetorical and physical punching bag has worn thin after 60 years.
