“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

[baduin]

Do you remember our discussion about the subconscious racial-based thinking in Kirby's work? (Of course, I proposed it and you opposed

[8bitbard]

I'm only familiar with X-Men through the tv cartoon and the movies, which I don't think pushed these themes as hard - I don't remember them suggesting that mutants are superior (though there might have been some of that in the third movie; I've tried to block that one out of my mind since it was awful in just about every way), though the "ordinary humans hate mutants" stuff was definitely present. I have to say that after reading this I have no desire to bother with the comics. Do they really refer to mutants as "homo superior"? That's pretty damn blatant.

IMO the movie Idiocracy is another example of Nazi-esque tendencies in pop culture. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ The premise of the movie is that "the wrong people" are reproducing too much, which will eventually result in a dystopia. What's especially disturbing is that I've come across this attitude not a few times in person, often among people who quite vocally declare themselves anti-bigotry.

[starshipcat]

Probably because the "wrong people' in this case don't belong to any one particular stereotyping group in the traditional sense, but are scattered through all races, ethnicities, classes, etc. Clueless people are found in every group of human beings. So it's easy to say that we're not being bigoted, we're judging on actual individual character flaws. Not to mention that cluelessness is often passed memetically rather than genetically -- clueless parents who can't or won't parent properly instead leave their kids to be raised by their peers, virtually guaranteeing that their kids will grow up even more clueless because peers simply cannot provide the wisdom that comes from adult life experience. (Not to mention that people who might raise a child badly at one stage of their lives may well develop into excellent parents with the maturity a few more years provides

[stigandnasty919]

I suspect the reason you get few comments on pieces like this is that Livejournal is designed for instant responses. An essay like this deserves a more considered answer.

Its the sort of thing I liked to mull over in my old APA days. Hmmm, now there is an idea, there must be a way to put together an electronic APA, articles like this published on a monthly or bi-monthly basis with responses in the next issue? Long, considered responses instead of immediate answers? I'd like to see more of you writing on comics.

I'd like some examples from the comic to look at to see where you are coming from. The morality in the X-men has been discussed ever since the "snickt" incident way back in the Claremont/Byrne days. Now it is even more questionable with good guys forming murder squads and bad guys leading the good guys.

I have other objections to the titles, why, for instance, is it that all x-women have to wear fetish gear... They must be freezing all the time.

[fpb]

That, unfortunately, is hardly restricted to X-women alone - even disregarding Wonder Woman, you can go at least as far back as when Dave Cockrum was commissioned to put all the Legion of Super-Heroes girls in bikinis and hip boots.