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.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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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.
Fair enough
Say what you will about Malcolm X, but he never tried to brainwash the LAPD into killing all the white people.
That was Malcolm's first mistake, his second was dying.
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I get the sentiment. But literally every single creator has come out and said he wasn't based on Malcolm X.
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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.
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.
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Because humanity is a plague
Can someone explain this like I'm five?
Reagan is popular to blame but this suggests it started before him.
It's the chicken. In 1971 they began putting an addictive chemical in chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smart arse!
What the fuck happen in 1971?
Tl;dr boomers came of age and voted to change things and held onto that power ever since
boomers came of age and voted to change things
Was that what happened during the Freedom Rides of MLK era? Or at the 1968 Democratic Convention? Or the 1987 MOVE bombing? Or during the 80s/90s War on Crime and Drugs?
I seem to remember a bunch of Boomers coming of age, getting arrested, beaten up, and shot, and then states making a historic effort to disenfranchise them in record numbers in order to control who actually gets selected to run the bureaucracy of the state.
Might be a tinsy bit of selection bias in the "Boomers ruined everything" narrative, as a bunch of Boomers were removed from the election process long before they had any kind of control over things.
I didn't say boomers ruined everything, you're right that the young civil rights advocates in the 60s were also boomers, but the 70s is when they grabbed political control and never let go.
Sure it wasn't all bad, but they wanted to change the system and did, and we are still dealing with the consequences today.
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Theres a longer version of this post somewhere where they had a funny discourse in tge tags.
I dunno, sometimes I see somebody acting monstrously and wish an alien abomination would have him for lunch.