How ya doing?
The following is an answer I wrote to a question on quora.com:
It’s necessary to remember that in Marvel media, mutants are symbolic of an oppressed minority. They are, in their very tagline, hated and feared by the world. Whether they serve as an analog for racial or sexual identity dividing lines, or even more general senses of anything that disturbs a large group of people due to ignorance and cultural bias, the seemingly arbitrary nonsense of loving and cheering on some and hating others who seem so alike is a purposeful and meaningful commentary on the lines we draw in our own culture on the daily.
How come rock and roll music could find its way into some homes more easily when there was a white man holding the guitar? Why is a film with little to no female lead roles just a film, but one with mostly female lead roles immediately controversial?
For OP’s examples, Thor has faced his critics here and there, but his entire existence is one tied up in tradition. He’s a being based in mythology and norse culture. Even if there are probably many folks who don’t see him as definitively the same Thor from legend, he’s a character who fits squarely into a pre-existing space in the narrative of human culture, especially white culture and tradition.
Similarly, Iron Man is a legacy, both as the heir to the Stark name and as a symbol of American industry and ingenuity. He’s the american dream. He’s the chosen son of the industrial revolution, the military industrial complex, the self-made maverick genius who can protect the weak, fight the monsters, save the world, and do it all while looking attractive, strong, clean-cut, sexy, stylish, and just dangerous enough to be cool in every decade. Our place in the modern mythology for him is the desire to be him, be with him, and maybe someday grab a piece of that pie for ourselves or our children. He’s the guy with the money and the power to do whatever he wants and yet (for the most part) he spends it on being a good guy, uncorrupted, and unregulated. Pulls himself up by his own gold-titanium-alloy bootstraps and stays relatively heroic about it.
Say, we read a new document discovered expanding upon the work of Shakespeare—there is already hundreds of years worth of cultural room set aside in our collective consciousness into which this article can fit.
We go to see a movie directed by Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep because not only has those three’s own body of work proven it’ll probably be a good film, but we can draw a semi-sensible straight line through the entire history of American film right to where those artists fit in our culture. “Feel good” is such because we know what to expect and it provides. Even the moments when they make us cry, it’s okay because we feel a level of safety in those emotions out of familiarity.
When non-mutant lives are saved by mutant heroes, it’s a mutant hero that saved their life. When Iron Man saves a life, it’s Iron Man who did it.
More often than not, if Magneto or the Brotherhood or the Marauders hurt people or destroy something, they don’t just represent themselves, they represent the “mutant menace”. This is a theme which comes up throughout the X-Men’s history.
It’s much more intricate than all this, but it comes down to us as a culture having made room for heroes of invention or mythology or even science-gone-wrong.
The idea of a genetic mutation, however?
If you’re born with what’s labeled a defect and that defect makes you unappealing to look at by a large part of the population, you can be the nicest person in the world, and still all some folks will see is what’s “wrong” with you.
We find out you’re not white or that you’re a female or that you’re gay or not cisgendered, and suddenly the list of all the wonderful things you’ve done we had held in our hands turns into just a piece of paper we don’t have room for in the files of our acceptance. Anything good done for you is suddenly only because of your different-ness, and anything good you’ve done is always under suspicion and probably in spite of your different-ness.
Until we have a way to over-simplify and categorize and stereotype a person into a way we’re comfortable with, they’re a potential danger. After that, it can take a lot more work on their part to, if ever, find a way to be stereotyped positively rather than negatively.
[Extraordinary X-Men Vol. 1, Issue 2, 2015 - Young Jean Grey’s date doesn’t end as well as she’d hoped after she rescues a homeless inhuman being attacked by a gang of “concerned citizens”]
What the X-Men stories often do so well is help us empathize with those who are different from us by using an uncanny group of heroes to get us thinking about those who are hated and feared in our own society.
Professor Xavier set up the X-Men not just to protect other mutants or even other minority groups in trouble, but to protect anyone in need, including the world that continually finds ways to hate and fear them. The best X-Men stories remind us that this is a very hard choice to make, loving and protecting those who want us hurt or marginalized or just out of their world entirely. The best writers don’t condemn mutants for wanting to live normal lives or for wanting to just stay safe when the world is against them, and they don’t let guys like Iron Man or Captain America get away with doing nothing to help mutants when the cards were all against them.
It’s not always supposed to be a super-blatant issue that the X-Men are treated differently than say, the Fantastic Four are when walking around Times Square. Sometimes it feels like they exist in completely different worlds (or literally so as in the cinematic universes). But the disconnect between treatment is something which has grown both organically and at times very purposefully from Marvel as an important mirror into our own cultural disconnect.
Yes, it does seem “weird that inside a comic the same human that loves Thor could also be hating Storm or love Tony Stark and be scared of Forge.”
It also seems weird in our own culture that the same news which labels a white adult mass murderer a poor victim of circumstance with a sad backstory can label a black little kid shot down by the cops a scary thug who asked for it.
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Hope you've been able to have a nice long weekend (even if it wasn't much of a long weekend for you). When we remember those who died in war, please don't forgot all those who have died because those in power chose to seek war instead of seeking peace. The best memorials are those which don't lead to the need for more.
Let's learn from the past and honor the dead by living for peace.
-Odist
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