I just don't get people who say X-Men wasn't "woke" until recently. It never even tried very hard to hide the metaphors...
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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I'm just saying, the primary antagonist of the X-Men franchise was magneto. This is a man who will stop at nothing to either make all people into mutants, whether they want it or not, or destroy them for not being mutants.
On the human side, magneto was mostly fighting against people who would otherwise not care about him being a mutant, other than the fact that he's trying to kill them for not being a mutant.
Professor X is the staple of the show that defines it: where he fights in the Senate and other government institutions to have them respect the rights of mutants as people (which they are), and fights against magneto trying to kill everyone and take over, and on top of that, he gets flack from the ~~Trump supporters~~ anti mutant folks for being a mutant. The professor is fighting on all fronts to stop the prejudice and have all people, regardless of their mutant status, seen as equals, in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
If you can't see the correlation to pretty much every civil liberty movement ever, from the women's rights movements and the black suffrage movement, and the whole slavery thing... As well as more modern movements for gay rights and LGBTQ+ rights, etc.... The list is long....
Well, if someone can't put that together then, IMO, they're blind. At the most basic, here are people who are quantifiably different, persecuted on all sides, fighting for the right to exist.
How blind do you have to be to not see the very obvious correlations?
"The river tells no lies. Though, standing on the shore, the dishonest man still hears them."
Most/many choose not to see it. It conflicts with their worldview and cannot see it any other way without outside interference.
magneto was also the son of holocaust victims and was largely synonymous to malcolm x whereas professor x was synonymous with martin luther king jr, in terms of views.
He wasn't the son of Holocaust survivors, he was a Holocaust survivor himself. The comics back in the 60s even made him be a late bloomer so his magnetic powers could manifest in his captivity; most mutants get their powers during puberty, but his didn't show up until his 30s. The 2000s movies, of course, just had his powers manifest at the normal time, since they could manage that.
I'm sure the MCU version will have to adjust that somewhat, since the timelines no longer quite match (unless they make him immortal or something).
thank you - it's been a while and i couldn't remember exactly.
It doesn't matter if you're blind or not if you're not going to bother to look. Most people simply don't assess their media for underlying messages. They see Professor X as the good guy and Magneto as a bad guy, and don't think any more about them. They don't ask how or why they can be identified as the protagonist/antagonist, they just identify the general alignment and that's it.
I think that's it really. These people didn't understand the metaphors at play as children, and lack the capacity to reflect on what they enjoyed as children and realize that they grew up to be the villains.
And, of course, there are plenty of bad faith actors who never watched or read X-Men in the first place and/or don't care about the messages it tries to convey, and just want something to be outraged about for attention.
why can't they make a damned 'good' movie franchise with that!?
They did manage a few good movies out of it. The first two X-Men movies were pretty good, as was First Class.
I was hoping it would get better or continue to grow, I thought the casting was near perfect too.