X-Men: Gold #16 (Preview)

No, I don't support a Muslim ban, because Muslims are just people...no more dangerous than anybody else. That guy who shot up Vegas and killed all those people wasn't a Muslim. Just a bad guy with a LOT of guns and Ammo. And since you can't get rid of bad people, the push is to either restrict access to guns and ammo or get rid of them entirely. Increasing numbers of countries have already made guns illegal...as just too dangerous to allow ordinary citizens to own, like bombs and tanks and nukes already are.

America would likely already have banned guns if not for the Second Amendment. I live in a rural, farm-country area, hardly a liberal bastion, and there are locals writing letters to our local newspaper calling for a repeal of both the first and second amendments...The first because it allows hateful speech which is becoming considered equivalent to violence, and the second because guns can be used as a tool of violence and are therefore too dangerous for people to have. That's all coming from the Left, not the Right.

The difference is many/most of the mutants we have seen have the guns, bombs, tanks, and nukes built right into their bodies. How do you keep a world safe from a population of walking weapons, some weapons of mass destruction? How can you have a truly 'safe space', increasingly the gold standard being set for our REAL world...one totally free from any inappropriate thoughts or ideas, actions and all violence and danger...and still have mutants in it? The Marvel universe is supposed to reflect our world, but it isn't reflecting that.

How can the world be turned into a 'safe-space', free from all the consequences of violent speech and actions, with organic weapons just walking around? If you can no longer trust anyone with a gun, or even a bottle of liquid on an airplane, how could we trust anyone with the power of a Magneto or even a Cyclops? We couldn't. The Left would ban or exterminate the mutants if the Right didn't, maybe for different reasons, but it would still happen. Get rid of all the mutant-guns. Real-world, mutants would have NO political allies, they would be pariahs and outcasts from every sector of society.

We have seen plenty of mutants who can kill hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, even billions of people with just a single thought, even an unintentional thought. In the Marvel universe, if a mutant manifested his/her powers and accidentally killed all life on Earth, some hero would just time-travel and fix everything, or we'd find out it was all just an alternate reality to begin with.

Real-world, EVERYONE one Earth would just be dead, and no one would be undoing it, humanity would just be OVER.

That's why the mutant metaphor doesn't work. Even a 'good' mutant could just be mind-controlled by a 'bad' one into killing EVERYONE. The world would be a violent, blood-filled chaotic mess...one giant super-powered war zone. And not just mutants, ANYONE with powers beyond a certain level would be too dangerous to run around lose. The nightly news would be several hours long just to cover all the rampant daily death and destruction. And then, one day, no more people.

The is no safety in that.

Back to the comics.

Until the X-Men stop treating the fear of mutants, hell, anyone with powers, as something just coming from some irrational bigotry, they are not going to make any headway. The TV Show 'The Gifted' is actually doing a MUCH better job of showing that than the comics currently are. Xavier understood that fear of mutants wasn't just some irrational bigotry, that's why he created the X-Men, to fight the very REAL danger of evil mutants and train those who couldn't safely control their powers in how to do so, hopefully before they hurt somebody, even unintentionally.

Fearing bad or evil people with powers, however they got them, is rational and sensible...not irrational bigotry.

Fearing ordinary people with powers, however they got them, who can't or don't know how to control them...is also rational and sensible, not irrational bigotry.

Coming to hate something that causes you to live in a state of fear is normal. And again rational and sensible...not irrational bigotry.

The X-Men need to understand that again, Xavier understood it when he first founded the team. They need to get away from trying to treat mutants exactly the same as a real-world minority, because they are NOT. There are similarities, yes, but there are also PROFOUND differences, things that make all the difference in the world.

You know, I think you may have missed my point.

To the people who support the Muslim ban, all Muslims are potential terrorists. To them, every Muslim could be a walking suicide bomber. Every black man could be a violent thug. Every Latino could be a criminal. Every gay man could have AIDS. Every trans woman could be a sexual abuser. The basis of their hate is to take a few examples of a group and to assume that every person belonging to that group could potentially be the same, and so the entire group has to be treated as though they're potential dangers.

The mutant metaphor is imperfect, yes. Again, welcome to metaphor. Metaphor is not meant to be perfect. In the case of the mutant metaphor, it's hampered by a combination of genre necessities and straight-up goddamn cluelessness from creators and editors. The comics should make clear that the X-Men and the Brotherhood and the Acolytes and, I don't know, the MLF (I miss them) - they're 1% of the mutant population. Not even. They're a percent of a percent. That's what the Morrison era in the early 2000s established. For every mutant who could collapse a building, there's ten thousand who can't topple much more than a Jenga tower.

I saw a tweet the other day about the X-Men needing to be written by people whose understanding of institutionalized oppression came from something other than reading X-Men comics. And yeah, that's the problem with the franchise. It's got this cartoonish idea of oppression.

The franchise doesn't need to admit that anti-mutant bigots have a point. It needs to make clear that 99.9% of the victims of anti-mutant policies are going to be people with completely banal powers. People who are no threat at all. Same as, in the real world, the Muslim ban isn't stopping terrorists, it's killing refugees. Trans-phobic laws don't protect kids, they hurt trans people (including trans kids!).

Every single bigot in history could explain why the people they wanted to oppress were inherently dangerous. They would use similar arguments to the ones people use about mutants.

So screw justifying the bigots. Show us the true victims of their hate, instead. Show us the hooved woman who lost custody of her kid for being a mutant. Show us the scaled guy who can't get work because of his skin. Show us a mutant felon who gets harsher sentencing than a mutated human for the same crime. Show us the protests when a kids' show introduces a mutant character. Show us mutant teens committing suicide at a higher rate than the national average because of the anti-mutant hysteria. Show us the human cost of the bigotry, rather than trying to goddamn humanize the bigots. Bigots do not need to be humanized. At this time, when frigging Nazis are marching in the streets, we do not need to show bigots as being goddamn right.

And the solution to this problem is to show more non-dangerous mutants. Like the early 2000s did. That's the era that made clear that the metaphor does work when you have creators who put some real thought into it. That's when you get mutants with harmless powers. You get mutant culture, mutant fashion and music You get people engaging in the cultural appropriation of mutants. You get mutants as part of the larger culture, like when a pop star dated Chamber as a publicity stunt.

The problem with the metaphor isn't that mutants are dangerous, the problem is creators adhering too strictly to genre conventions and not putting any actual thought into the metaphor.

The books need to address utterly mundane forms of oppression, rather than just always going back to the same damn killer robot well. The killer robots are boring and miss most of the reality of belonging to an oppressed group.

Remember that issue of New Mutants where a mutant who's "in the closet" kills himself because he thinks his secret's been found out? That's the shit we need to see. That kid's power was to create holograms. That's it. He made pretty sculptures. Nothing dangerous or intimidating. Just art. And the fear and hatred of mutants was too much and he killed himself to escape it. That's part of the metaphor, right there.

Also, whether you like the metaphor or not, there's no going back on it. It's established. It's part of the franchise's core. It honestly makes no difference if some people think it doesn't work, because there is no removing the minority metaphor from the X-Men. So the goal, instead, should be to push for the metaphor to be presented better.

Was that kid with the murder-field in the main continuity or the Ultimate continuity? I honestly can't remember.

But yeah, I'd be inclined to just not have stories like that one told any more. They're a distraction from the metaphor. It was a good story, well-told, but it doesn't fit the allegory, and the X-Men franchise should be making an effort to improve how it handles the allegory.

Fewer stories about kids with dangerous powers they can't control. More stories about kids with lame powers who get bullied.

Bring back District X. Make it a book with a heavy focus on utterly mundane realities of being part of a marginalized community, both bad and good.