Am a traveler who has come across two universes. In one, these beings called metahumans are not only accepted but praised and admired. While in the other, they have powered beings they call mutants, but these are hunted and feared. I don’t understand—both are the same, some good, some bad, yet they are treated vastly different.
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Mutants are a genetically separate species. Metahumans are accidents/chance and powers aren’t necessarily transferable to children
Superman. Superman has done enormous amounts of outreach to help foster goodwill and working relationships between humans and metas. So much so that in basically every alternate universe that doesn’t have a Superman, they resemble Marvel’s universes more than they do DC’s, from JLA: The Nail to Flashpoint.
Mutants are feared more due to a perceived “invisible” threat. Mutants are literally born sometimes with great powers, but it is not always obvious at first. There is a deliberate propaganda campaign to make the public afraid of mutants.
Metahumans or mutates are not as feared because their powers more often than not come from accidents often of their own making. There is a sense that those powers tend to be earned. That is used to make people less fearful because it is not seen as just random chance.
The fear of mutants is fueled by the idea that they will eventually replace humans. Metahumans aren’t define as a species as mutants are.
That’s the point: racism is stupid and doesn’t stand up to reasonable scrutiny.
people in Marvel fear mutants more than mutates for the following reasons
a) Far more of them. Mutates are rare. Mutants number in the millions
b) mutants can come from anywhere. 2 normal humans have a kid and wam, their kids a mutant. Mutates generally take some well defined and obvious accident or experiment to be created (with some exceptions like Squirrel Girl)
c) Mutant powrers often appear during puberty so they are thus in the hands of people who genreally speaking are going through an emotionally unstable part of their life
d) the replacement thery, expanding upon point A. no one in Marvel is afraid one day too many Captain America’s will be walking around making them redundant. BUT mutants, once they increase in number, will actually change the world. what happens when 50% of the world has super powers and the other doesnt? what about when it’s 25/75? or 10/90? (MHA covers some of this)
E) plenty of mutates are hated in Marvel, people look at the Fantastic Four too much, but plenty of times Hulk and other Gamma mutates are hated, and Spider-Man is called a menance every other week.
if you are comparing powers in general for Marvel vs DC, DC just had some shining examples of power showcase heroism to the world, and thus people had a more favorable reaction to powers
there also are no x-gene mutants, so the meta community is quite small
they save the world from aliens on a regular basis
most of the main popular meta-humans aren’t ugly. how many monsterous looking Heros are there? Metamorpho? Martian Manhunter purposely keeps a humanoid form (though he’s an alien, not a meta)
My guess is that in many instances, a mutant can develop their abilities in sometimes violent ways. Rogue nearly kills a boy just from a kiss. I would imagine that unpredictability would factor greatly into human fears. The uncertainty that a kid sitting next to you might randomly explode or accidentally blow me away with eye beams would scare anybody.
Mutant hate is pretty much manufactured by in-universs discourse, from outside the mutant community – like trask, iiirc, but very much from inside too.
I mean, people do hate them for real, but the reason they hate them is because there is a growing discourse thst both magneto and the x-men keep preaching that the mutants will eventually overtake the humans and be the dominant species.
The veracity of this is debatable at best, but the problem is that both sides believe in it and talk about it relatively often, scaring eveyone else. They don’t even call themselves humans anymore!
It doesn’t help that at least half of the advocates for the cause are/were big time supervillains (read: terrorists)
Imagine all the hate that muslims got after 9/11. Now imagine if the general muslim opinion was that the terrorists went overboard, yes, but their message was actually right
DC’s metahumans simply don’t have a situation like that at all. None of the super powered villains are advocating for the case that they are superior to normal humans. And the heroes are very much pro-human, with most still considering themselves just as much human as anyone else.
In short: The mutants most prominent figure is magneto the (sometimes ex) super terrorist. The metahumans most prominent figure is superman, the alien who everyone agrees is a honorary human based on how much of a cool guy he is.
Of course people hate mutants. Marvel citizens already hate eveyone, mind you, the mutants just get it worse
Kind of a meta (pun not intended) explanation, but metahumans actually represent what humanity as a whole would have been in the DC universe if not for aliens tampering with their genetics in the far distant past (as revealed in Grant Morrison’s JLA run).
In contrast, mutants are the next step in human evolution and would be far along in outright replacing baseline humans if not for assorted genocidal events.
One represents the potential of humanity if it had not been denied them, the other is feared as what would eventually supplant them. Outside of in-universe explainations, metahumans generally have not been used as metaphors for the feared “other” as often as mutants have and the Marvel universe has historically been more cynical in tone than DC.
Because clumsy analogies for minorities are clumsy.
Where it falls apart is mutants do give humanity reasons to fear them. Last I checked, a transgender individual isn’t pulling planes out of the sky on a whim.
I wouldn’t say Metas are not feared because there’s entire branches of Government dedicated to counteri them.
It’s just that Metahumans are more of a freak occurrence while Mutants are a whole demographic.
Normal people can become meta humans.
They can’t become mutants.
Because DC has Superman and generally, DC civilians aren’t as brain-dead as Marvel ones. Marvel civilians are notoriously ungrateful, just look at how they treat Spider-Man, despite everything he’s done for them . Someone like Magneto wouldn’t even be a villain in the DC Universe. Same with the Sentinels no way the Justice League would ever allow factories to produce them. Especially heroes like Superman and Diana they’d be the poster icons for mutant rights. And organizations like S.T.A.R. Labs, plus minds like Ray Palmer or Mister Terrific, would be actively working on real solutions to the mutant issue without violating anyone’s rights.
In the end, DC Earth was always meant to be populated by superhumans the only reason that was not the case is because outside forces interfered. It’s also just a better place to live. The heroes in DC not only have more influence and credibility, but they also tend to be far more competent than their Marvel counterparts. Even during the crossovers, Superman himself was disappointed by how little Marvel’s heroes had actually done to change their world.
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Superman. That’s it.
If superman was in Marvel, mutants would be less oppressed
The fact there was a mutant kid where the day he got his powers on the walk to school, his sole power ended being everything in like a 50 meter radius just melts and dies a slow painful death is probably why. Imagine living in a world where at any moment a kid near you could wipe out you and the entire neighborhood just bc they hit puberty that day
I can’t speak for DC, but in Marvel it’s explicitly explained that mutants are doing to baseline humans what we did to the neanderthals. To wit though: we out-bred them and also interbred with them until we simply overwhelmed their genomic line.
Mutants and humans can breed. And they do. The thing is, some of the offspring carry the X-gene and some don’t, but the ones who carry the X-gene end up out-competing the ones that don’t. So over time, mutants will eventually comprise all the people of earth, and baseline humans will eventually become extinct.
It’s easy to forget that most people’s first exposure to mutants wasn’t watching the X-Men save the world, or the magazine photos of the Hellfire Gala on Krakoa, or even Magneto floating through the sky promising to destroy humanity for the future of Homo Superior…
Children. The X-gene expresses in early puberty. Children without any idea whats happening to them, or how to keep from hurting the people around them. Surrounded by adults and authorities who have no idea and treat them as a threat. Which is terrifying, and the last thing you want is somebody who can’t control a mutant power having a panic attack.
To the average civilian, the “mutant problem” isn’t about the X-Men. It’s about the ticking time bomb in every middle school in the world that could go off without warning. Are your kids safe, or is today the day some random child is going to develop optic blasts, power draining, telekinesis?
Now add in the J Jonah Jamison factor – There will always be people who profit from making a group of scary outsiders into a political issue. Imagine how many unethical talk radio hosts and politicians decide to use fear of mutants to rise to power? There’s literally money in making mutants look like a threat.
Reed Richards saw hatred and fear forming for his friend Ben, and started a full-market PR campaign to make everyone think Ben was a hero, instead- that was the whole point of uniforms, and not wearing masks.
When the Avengers formed, Tony Stark started his own PR push, and then adding in Captain America sealed it.
This is why they re much more loved than say, Spider-Man.
Racism.
Mutants are perceived as a different class of people.
Metahumans are just people with a particular trait, no more linked to each other than people with blue eyes or red hair.
A key misunderstanding people tend to make when questioning mutant hatred is saying that it doesn’t make sense when Marvel’s other heroes are so beloved.
Put simply… they’re not. A key part of Spider-Man is the constant media smear campaign run against him that half the city buys into hook line and sinker, the Avengers frequently have protesters outside the mansion for one reason or another, there was an entire legislation passed after the New Warriors accidentally blew up a small town to try and control powered individuals that led to a messy civil war and Iron Man becoming a borderline tyrant for a couple of years, and even the Fantastic Four, while being famous celebrities, are still subject to regular scrutiny and mistrust; and it’s a frequently repeated fact that despite everything, Ben will never be fully accepted in his monstrous form.
I think this misconception stems from people only seeing the Raimi Spider-Man movies or the MCU, where this was heavily toned down, and assuming it was true of the comics, where the fact is that the X-Men films were just the ones who kept this aspect because it’s so central to the brand.
Now, as for the question of comparison, JLA/Avengers provided the most simple answer: Marvel civilians on the whole are just more likely to be assholes compared to DC ones. When the Avengers visited Earth-1 their first assumption was that the Justice League must have taken over the planet because they couldn’t fathom the idea that people would actually like and appreciate their heroes of their own free will, while the Justice League saw the crappiest parts of Earth-616 and assumed that the Avengers just suck at their job of keeping the peace.
See any Neanderthal around lately?
The majority of meta humans are feared. You may know them better as super criminals. Heroic meta humans, on the other hand, are worshipped to an extent not even Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are used to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/1jp60at/xmen_are_mutants_feared_because_of_how_their/
I want to say…labels? In practice, there is no real difference between a mutant and, say, Spiderman. Or the Fantastic Four, or whatever. But the label “mutant” carries baggage with it, both politically and socially.
Mutants are a next step in evolution. Anywhere, at any point, your kid could turn out to be a mutant and incinerate the block when puberty hits. It’s a fear, replacement, racism issue. There are also at least two villains advocating for the superiority of mutants and (depending on the universe/timeline) the extinction of the rest of humanity.
Metahumans are defined two ways; the more common one I’ve seen is just people that got powers. Those are feared, but not nearly as much, exactly because they aren’t the next step in evolution. They’re almost always either not human to begin with or created by some experiment, accident, artifact, super suit, alien involvement or whatever.
The other are people with a meta-gene, who are more comparable to Marvel’s mutants. Those are a LOT rarer than mutants and also have other ways of activating their powers. They tend to have them either from birth or due to some outside factor activating it – like stress, trauma, etc. – as far as I know. Those guys not only aren’t a replacement for humanity, but don’t usually have cult leaders advocating for that happening either.
Hell, look at their biggest representatives. Mutants are usually known via two groups: The first is lead by Magneto, the master of magnetism and hater of humanity. It has Mystique, who can be anyone at any time. Multiple Man, who’s a one man army. Sabretooth, who is a mass murderer. Juggernaut, who is actually literally unstoppable. The Blob.
The other are the X-Men, who – while obviously the good guys of the groups – are still really fucking dangerous. Wolverine can’t die. Storm can make planet-spanning storms. Jean Grey is an intergalactic fire demon. Rogue can zap people’s powers and life force by touching them. Professor X is a master telepath and also just kind of a weird dick.
Not to even mention Apocalypse.
Meanwhile the metahumans have…the Justice League? All of those guys are loved, even Batman when he’s confirmed not to be a myth. Flash has a museum, Superman has a statue and is loved world-wide.