“YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING POISONED WATER FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH…”

[fpb]

By now, all my friends, as well as a very large number of people who will never be my friends, know that I have a kind of gift for online brawls and battles. I once made carlanime laugh by remarking that there was something unnatural about having a great big online brawl without me. That was a joke; in point of fact I am not particularly happy about this

Comments

[expectare]

What if you had a brawl and nobody came? I'm afraid I can't give you an argument because I don't really like X-men. I really liked the third movie, which everyone who genuinely likes the X-men said was worst. Anyway, I thought that it was the BAD X-men thought that? Magneto, not the wheel chair guy...

[fpb]

You have to be familiar with the set-up of the series, which, as you yourself admit, you barely are. The premises are as I described them (and I have read Uncanny X-men since the first issue): mutants good, mutation good, any attempt whatever to even register super-powered mutants, let alone control them, not only bad but the premise to the death camps. Anyway, if you hate the X-men for any reason, it means that you are not susceptible to this particular poison.

[mindstalk]

Your old essays seemed initially compelling, but Wright's reply to the second was a sobering antidote. Your analysis works, but it can as easily be inverted, with mutants as the Jews/blacks, X and Magneto as MLK and Malcolm X, etc. The pseudoscience about "next step in human evolution" and the Kree/Skrull stuff may fit your theory better: the deeper the analysis, the more noxious it seems... but I suspect most analysis is never that deep, including on the part of the ever-changing stable of writers

[fpb]

Thanks for reminding me of serfdom in the Middle Ages - it points to another point in which the civilization of the eighteenth century had greatly degenerated from its ancestors. In the Roman Empire, slavery had been the norm; in its later years, it had effectively been extended to the whole class of cultivators by the reforms of Diocletian. However, by the twelfth century slavery had been reformed out of existence in Europe. Serfs were not slaves: they were tenants with obligatory, fixed dues to be paid to their landlord - dues which over the course of time were monetized and turned into pure rents. Medieval European society had no slaves. However, the concept was reintroduced in 1436, when the Portuguese, trading on the coast of West Africa, received a supposedly temporary permission from the Pope to trade in human beings. With the discovery of America in 1492, the trade in African slaves ballooned, while at the same time the rising autocracies of continental Europe, especially France and Russia, drove down the status of serfs

[fpb]

As for the mutants as Jews/Blacks, I already answered that. The defining characteristic of Marvel mutants is their role as genetic saviours. To imagine that either Blacks or Jews or, for that matter, Catholics, could be seen as the genetic future of the race, is to commit the most ludicrous absurdity in the history of analysis. We are talking about an entirely different idea. In fact, the use of Jews as types for the "persecuted" mutants is, to me, deeply offensive.

[mindstalk]

Hmm, fair point, and I'm not an expert in mutantology. OTOH, I'd wonder if the "defining characteristic" really is a role as genetic saviors, or if you're reacting to one theme in an incoherent mess. I'd have said the defining characteristic is simply being mutant, different, and sometimes powered. Aren't the majority of mutants relative wusses? (Then there's Wild Cards, with an explicit division between aces -- powers -- and jokers -- ugly mutations -- sometimes coincident.) But the stories get told about the superpowered ones, not the one who looks like Nightcrawler but doesn't have any cool power.

I'm relevantly Jewish; the analogy isn't obviously offensive to me.

[affablestranger]

A while back I decided to be silent to most folks about my view of the X-Men, especially the movies, because I was almost invariably met with disbelief, a few times with (close to) indignation.

Again, you have explained my point of view better than I could have.

[fpb]

You imply that this sort of thing can be found elsewhere than in Marvel comics. Out of scholarly interest (I am not out to start witch-hunts, but culture history is my subject), could you give some examples?

[thefish30]

I've read very little X-Men since the early 90s, so I've missed some of your reference points. But you make a good argument. I always felt that mutant-hatred was more of a conscious parallel to 'gay-bashing'. Which I suppose does tie in with your theory insofar as homosexuality is a rising star in our age and though 'un-evolving' in itself, is part of the Progressive divorce of sex from reproduction highlighted in johncwright's recent post on the Pope in Africa.