My main gripe with superhumans being used as allegories for irl discrimination is the fact that most of the time it simply doesn’t work nearly as well as the writers think it does.
Take the X-men for example. Mutants are often discriminated against heavily by normal people, and this is often portrayed as unilaterally evil. But if my neighbor had the ability to kill anyone they make skin-to-skin contact with, or uncontrollable laser eyes that vaporize nearly everything, I would absolutely want them on some sort of list and/or constant surveillance.
Spoiler warning: Attack on Titan Season 4
In Attack on Titan, the Children of Ymir, also known as Eldians, are used as an allegory for the way Jewish people were treated in the 1930’s and 40’s. That said, if every Jewish person could transform into a 40-foot tall mindless cannibal just because someone spiked their drink, I would absolutely want them living on the other side of town.
The nature of discrimination is that it is often irrational and/or based on subjective opinions. But when the people in question are objectively dangerous to the people around them, it suddenly becomes rational.
TLDR: Discrimination against super-powered people doesn’t work because said people are a constant threat to everyone around them without proper training.
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Well thought out and reasoned argument for their use as allegories without taking away from their actual storylines.
Enjoy your upvote.
Duh. When people are dangerous and powerful, like those able to force your country to surrender because they’re so powerful, they cease to be people and should be rounded up into camps.
I wish being gay made me that dangerous. It just makes me a bigger target
Completely agree.
Every single Mutant discrimination story falls flat after you’ve read the story where some mutant kid had the mutant super power of “kills everything near him instantly”… No he could not control this ability. He just woke up one day and everyone close to him burst into flames.
The children of Ymir couldn’t do it actively though. The people of Paradis knew the children of Ymir were powerless without intervention. They were being punished for the sins of their people most importantly— even more so than the fear of what they could become.
But they are still people and not all of them are that powerful, by the same logic people who you perceive as a threat should be rounded up, if done right using them as allegories is fine
Um actually, Cyclops doesn’t have laser eyes, his eyes are a portal to the Punch Dimension, a dimension of pure concussive force
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Punch_Dimension
Highly recommend doom patrol. For the most part their powers are more like disabilities
This was actually the same reasoning that made me bounce off Dragon Age’s over hyped worldbuilding: it used magic users in general as allegories for oppressed minorities (in most governments and societies in the series, they are compulsively hunted down and placed into regulated orders that dictate their lives in order to circumvent fear of the capabilities of their powers).
The issue is muddled around a lot, and some of the inherent issues in such a system are explored with nuance, but there are several instances where the moral implications bottleneck because the only real endpoint to the debate at hand at that moment is “What if a spiteful sociopath could nuke a city with his mind?”
If they were born with that and had no choice, it’s not fair to assume they’ll use it against others. That same argument could be used against people with some kind of contagious disease. I don’t think they should be on any kind of list like that.
>But if my neighbour had the ability to kill anyone they make skin-to-skin contact with, I would absolutely want them on some sort of list and/or constant surveillance
You have the ability to push someone in front of a bus, stab them in the neck with a small blade, poison them with some bleach. You could behind the wheel of your car and run down a bunch of pedestrians.
Should everyone who has household chemicals in their house be under constant surveillance? Does someone get the right to break into your house and point a gun at your kid’s head because you got them a car for their birthday?
>But when the people in question are objectively dangerous to the people around them, it suddenly becomes rational
Define “objectively”. Most mutants have pretty low-level powers like extra skin, eyes or some things like horns and wings. Mutants like Magneto or Storm are a rarity.
And yet people try to exterminate them all as if they are one and the same.
Almost every discriminated group, at some point in history, was considered “objectively” dangerous to the people around them.
Doesn’t mean that it is the truth.
If you asked racists whether they believe their hate is justified, they would say that they are, of course, being one hundred percent “objective” with their low opinions on other races. “They are just not as smart/civil/hard-working as us,” they would say. “Just look at the historic data and crime numbers! I’m being 100% rational here!”
If you asked islamophobes whether they believe their hate is justified or rational, they would point at 9/11 and say “Of course, it is! I’m being completely objective here.”
If you asked transphobes whether they believe transgender people to be “objective dangerous” to those around them, they would point at the news and grifters and say “Hey, this guy said that transgender people are pedophiles! And I hate pedophiles because they threaten kids! That makes them objectively dangerous!”
That’s the thing about being “rational” and “objective”. Everyone got their own version of it.
It’s not much different than your neighbor owning guns
Yup. Dragon Age tried to frame the discrimination of Mages as an allegory for either racism or anti-LGBT+ folks (I think it’s more the latter), and that falls flat when you consider:
If Mages existed, fearing possession and/or abusing being a walking Weapon of Mass Destruction is a valid concern. That doesn’t mean blind bigotry is justified, but I can’t say I blame people for being a wee bit distrustful. Even an educated and well-trained Mage with a clean history is at risk, and we see examples of that throughout the games/other media. I’m saying this as a fan that predominantly plays Mages, because this dangerous nuance makes them more interesting when the writers don’t ignore it for the discrimination allegory.
Thank you so much for the spoiler warning as I am literally watching season 3, episode 19 as I’m typing this out.
This is a pretty popular opinion (at least on reddit). r/CharacterRant has dozens of posts saying the same thing.
Not this bullshit again…
You dont get to discriminate against an entire genetic population based on the potential to do harm from individuals within that population. Thats the point of the X-Men comics.
Okay, theres one kid that kills people by existing. Rogue accidentally injures/kills a kid. The logical endpoint of isolated incidents of unintentional violence cannot be genocide. You dont get to pragmatize your way to extermination. That’s literal Nazi shit.
The X-Men example doesn’t work due to the rest of the Marvel Universe, where equally dangerous, powerful, deadly, etc characters are beloved and celebrated by the public. Why don’t humans send the sentinels against Thor, Captain America, or Iron Man? The Hulk and Spidey occasionally receive similar hate, but less often. And even when the Mutants try to maintain safety without threatening others (Krakoa), humans will STILL attack their spaces with genocidal intent – which is something that has many real world parallels for marginalised people.
OK, but like, the anti-mutant sentiments in the source material aren’t limited to “Hey, maybe we should encourage mutants to make themselves known and learn how to control their abilities.” That’s what Charles wants to do. The anti-mutant crowd wants them segregated, sedated, and/or exterminated, and they treat every mutant the same regardless of if they’re “kill everyone by accident man” or “I have what is essentially a skin condition boy.”
This is just as wrong as the “Magneto did nothing wrong!” crowd. Magneto doesn’t want equal rights for mutants. He wants to either exterminate all non mutants or create a global anti-human apartheid state with himself as the ruler. Like, yea, depending on who’s writing him at the time he’s more or less extreme, but he is almost always genocidal.
As someone who is black, trans, bisexual AND latino I entirely agree racism or discrimination allegories that have real world parallels (with super powered beings) have always bothered me or atleast fell flat when you have an actual reason said oppression could exist… people are scared of people that could warp reality with they’re mind… thats surprising…? Y’all would be to in real life. i know that’s rare in universe but bigotry should be unfounded, it should be feuled by hate, it should be irrational. Because that’s always what real bigotry has been or felt like. The moment bigotry has an ACTUAL plausible beyond normal reasoning you’ve kinda lost me.
(Though I do think the allegories in attack on titan actually work since that is actually a case of irrational bigotry to some extent)
I think part of the issue is that there has been alot of power creep over the decades with X men.
Beast was a guy who had the powers akin to a large primate and Angel was just a guy with wings.
While fantastic, they weren’t the “wore ending” powers that would appear throughout the years.
The allegory works because a real life superman would be strapped to a government table the moment they were found out. Sounds vaguely familiar.
100% agree. superpower stories trying to portray discrimination kinda miss the whole point that the reason that irl discrimination is bad is because it’s based on differences that hold no weight and don’t make one group of people any more or less capable than another. such as the color of our skin, our gender identity, our sexual orientation, etc.
superpowers would make you objectively more capable and dangerous. it’s not the same situation as IRL discrimination. in fact, it cheapens the impact of actual discrimination by trivializing it with nonsensical analogies.
It couldve worked in My Hero Academia, but not too much.
There, nearly everyone has powers, but some people’s power include a permanently altered physiology.
During one of the arc, they tried to introduce the mentioned concept, and there was a whole terrorist organization or some such about it.
It falls flat for me, tho, because it just kinda had… no foreshadowing at all?
We’ve seen such alternately-shaped humans everywhere, but there was never any hint of discrimination at all. We are just told that was the case when that new arc started, and the issue only makes another reappearance at the finale’s battle, but only briefly as part of the weekly one-upping.
I’ve always hated these metaphors. Especially when so often the powers are triggered by emotions. Like yes I want the hulk checked, do you know how many people have been murdered cause he got stressed??
Exactly. Everyone is acting like the Marleyans and the world were monsters for how they treated the Eldians. Yeah, its extreme and brutal and racist….but if you don’t acknowledge the MILLENIA SPANNING horrors that the Eldians unleashed on the world then your sympathy for the Eldians is pointless. Entire peoples and societies smashed to a pulp or devoured, for thousands and thousands of years by Eldians and their Titans.
Yeah, I’d be completely against having people near me who at any moment could transform into a giant, mindless flesh cannibal. It’s not even racism at that point, its just practical safety, the same way I wouldn’t go on an advanced hiking trail as an amateur: its too dangerous.
edit: FURTHERMORE, that sentiment is exactly why Eren made the decision he did: as someone who hated Titans to the depths of his soul (like the rest of the world) he understood exactly how impossible it was going to be to force the rest of the world to accept a new Eldian nation. That type of generational hatred blinds people.
I think they could work but the problem is always “we distrust the government”.
Xavier can use Cerebro to find mutants, but it’s not something he does all the time. He also doesn’t have enough people to do widespread genetic testing to find out who could be a mutant (as some genes don’t express themselves until a certain age). If governments were allowed to be involved, then they could at least provide genetic testing and support programs to identify potential mutants and make sure they’re in a safe environment for their powers to express themselves. In an ideal scenario, that would prevent a lot of damage from happening.
Also pretty sick of the same ol Rudolph story about kid has weird quirk and everyone hates and bullies him until they discover said quirk is useful and now isn’t quite accepted into society but put up with him bc of it. Like people are being accepted in spite of their disabilities rather than being accepted bc they’re a human being like everyone else. You can be different but only if it’s convenient for society and you don’t rub it in everyone’s faces.
The issue with creating an allegory for a marginalized group is that real life people have used, continue to use, and will in the future use entirely subjective and irrational reasons to create said non-fictional marginalization. The suffering is the point.
So when you have a fictional setting that marginalizes characters for reasons that may be even barely sensible, you automatically give ammunition to the people who currently oppress people in real life. Fiction absolutely does influence real life, and to say it doesn’t is categorically ahistorical.
”if”
I see where you’re coming from, but a lot of the mutant discrimination stories absolutely work. While lots of mutants are super dangerous, a lot of them can just hear well or have blue skin and can jump well. Putting them on a list seems deeply problematic.
I don’t really think this would be an unpopular opinion, so much as it would be an outlook most people hadn’t considered.
I completely agree with you.
Shows like xmen and others with such allegories can only work because the discrimination that happens to them is going too far by asking them to die etc.. If the people were a bit more rational about it, viewers would likely realize that they have a very good point. But maybe their government didn’t listen to rational arguments and so people got frustrated and now go to extremes….. Maybe the X-Men are (also) the bad people?! 😮
I’ve always found the idea that the ones with the powers that save and change the world are the ones that are exploited or looked down on is tone deaf at worst and naively idealistic at best. Wicked is a good example of it being done poorly. Like no, being discriminated against does not give you powers and they don’t hate you bc you’re better than them, they just hate you regardless
It’s not just superpowers, it’s also with robots/AI, or cyborgs (Deus Ex series), aliens… It’s always stupid, I don’t know why authors keep trying these weird analogies that are completely backwards.
Just the other day I was thinking, how in media like movies, fictional people talk about how they were bullied as kids… Because they were tall. It’s always being bullied because of something cool, never for the crap real people actually receive the nasty bullying.
It’s like when authors want to write Mary Sues, but also insert some fake humility they don’t understand.
This was my problem with the movie adaptation of Nimona, while it was sweet and charming. I do get the point. She’s a girl who refuses to be what society wants her to be. Ultimately she means no harm but people fear her and want to hurt/kill her because she’s different. It’s an allegory for racism and discrimination against LGBT people.
But that does kind of fall apart when she becomes upset and says things like “don’t call me a monster” when… she kind of is? Most people have zero idea that shape shifters exist / existed. I would be scared of someone turning into a bear too. And when she ultimately decides fuck it, I’m going to do what I want because people are going to think poorly of me anyways, rampaging around and causing property damage is not helping your case. (From what I’ve heard the original comic portrayed her story differently)
And I’m not very much a fan of the lesson then kind of being “people of different races/identities aren’t quite like you but they don’t mean harm. They’re physically monsters but not actual dangerous monsters”. I get it’s boiled down and it’s fiction but seeing so many people praise the LGBT representation when she was literally a different species and actively threatening people felt… well-intentioned but maybe not executed the best.
The children of Ymir dont turn into monsters by themselves. Only the Eldians turn them into monsters. Just like how in real life. If you segregate a people, treat them as less than others and drown them in poverty, they are going to become monsters.
Imagine you kids going to school with children that can kill them inadvertently because they ” can’t control their power yet “
Oh, little Tommy didn’t control his teleportation and warped your kids 5km into the air 🙃
Yeah, just bring segregated school back, I don’t care about the ethical interpretation
Is this still an unpopular opinion? I feel like I see this take shared a couple times a week.
I think some of the allegories work for the xmen just not as a 1 to 1.
Like storm saying their is nothing wrong with being a mutant. Is a good good example of someone who has a disability, Like being deaf. Or blind. Where the world says something is wrong with them but it’s their normal. To them They don’t need to be cured of those things, To be normal.
Vs some like rouge who’s Mutant power is horrible isolating cripples her every day. She absolutely some one is a stand in for some one who has a crippling disability. Who isn’t impowered by being “handy capplable”.
I always thought that Wheel of Time put an interesting twist on that by making all male “wizards” went all crazy and then very dangerous.
I mean yeah, I guess that’s a way of putting the AoT tie-in, but that threat only exists because the Marlyeans were using them as bioweapons. Wanting to wall off all the Eldians because someone can “spike their drink” is about like wanting to put all religious people in camps because a handful of extremists can convince them that a religious crusade can “fix” the world; it’s just going to create a scenario where that happens anyway because your actions give rise to a leader who sells the idea as a viable solution for even the more reasonable of that group.
That’s pretty different from the little girl who throws a temper tantrum and winds up thanos snapping everyone in a three kilometer radius because her emotions got out of control. One of these is a group of people who can be reasoned with into not taking extreme actions via a third party, the other had an unfortunate stroke of luck in the genetic lottery and now their tears create a nerve gas that turns anyone near them into a vegetable.
I’m sure there are some obvious exceptions, but the basis of: “my neighbor can kill me and my family anytime they want”. As a basis for discriminating against them is a little too far.
In the US for example, this is true for anyone with a gun. In states where there are more lax gun laws, if you wanted to kill your neighbor, you would be jailed or worse, of course. But you could literally just go buy a gun then kill your neighbor, the mutant isn’t special here.
>Take the X-men for example. Mutants are often discriminated against heavily by normal people, and this is often portrayed as unilaterally evil. But if my neighbor had the ability to kill anyone they make skin-to-skin contact with, or uncontrollable laser eyes that vaporize nearly everything, I would absolutely want them on some sort of list and/or constant surveillance.
What if they just own a gun? Wouldn’t that kill you just as dead as laser eyes?
I kinda feel this way but in reverse about Invincible. Viltrumite racism is portrayed negatively, but the writing does nothing to show them as anything other than objectively better than almost every species shown. They look just like humans, but they can fly, are absurdly strong and fast, and equally if not more intelligent? How are these people anything besides genetically superior to everyone else? Obviously, racism isn’t really the main issue the series tries to tackle, but it does bother me a bit.
Totally agree OP. What happens when some kid is born with brain damage so his power is always stuck in the “ON” position and his power is ” nuclear bomb”. People are absolutely right to research cures for mutantism and mutants should be obligated to have their offspring vaccinated to prevent it.
In the real world gay people are just… People. They can’t do anything you or I couldn’t do as well. They’re not going to tumble society with their gayness, despite what evangelicals might say.
You should post this in change my view, and we could start a betting pool on how long it takes people to out themselves as nazis
One problem with your X-Men notion is that the x-men were actually based off of real characters at the time. Stan Lee gave homage to the Civil Rights movement by using that as a catalyst to depict how, the mutants, were treated in a society that just sees them as being hostile or entities that should always remain on a watch list as you would suggest. And at the center of it, you can note how religious ideology was expressed by zealots all throughout the comic.
The other thing you fail to realize in that analogy is that the characters Charles Xavier and Max Eisenhardt are based on the actual figures Martin Luther King, and Malcom X.
How about non-mutant super heroes? How do you know the Human Torch won’t go nuts and burn down all of NYC? Captain Marvel can punch through spaceships. How do you know she won’t destroy Washington DC?
Lets jump to DC. Do you know how incredibly powerful Martian Manhunter is, or Firestorm, or, Superman?
You have to hate all super powered beings, not just mutants, or else you’re just a fucking bigot.
I see what you’re saying, but wouldn’t that apply to a lot of people in the real world? A 500 pound man could absolutely throw me into the side of a building or into traffic, so should we track anybody with above average strength? What about people who own guns?
This feels like the Superman argument. Superman is boring because no one that powerful could be good. The point often isn’t realism, it’s aspiration. To encourage people to find comfort in being who they are, even if who they are can be confused and messy sometimes.
And power has more forms than physical. The Jews were maligned as part of the problem in Germany because they were presented as financial oppressors, and it doesn’t really take much more than a look around the world today to realize that financial oppression can result in widespread suffering and death just as readily as turning into an insatiable giant. Maybe a little more slowly. Not to say the Germans were right, they weren’t obviously, but as a purely theoretical extension of German politics at the time were Jewish people were being presented as corporations today actually behave I can definitely see the all consuming hungry giants as being a decent allegory. The truth doesn’t matter for the allegory as much as understanding it was the narrative pushed.
1000% agree. No one would be okay with literal human nukes walking around.
It’s even worse than that actually. The series describes all Eldians as just an extension of the founder. The entire population can be genetically modified, mind controlled, or mind wiped at any time. It would be like one Jew on Earth having the ability to control all Jews on Earth, even turn them into weapons if need be.
Eldians are quite literally too dangerous to exist. Marley propaganda isn’t even really propaganda. It was pretty much proven correct when Eldian powers were used to slaughter 90% of the planet.
The part that you’re forgetting is that people discriminate against Rogue because she can kill people with a touch… but they’re perfectly happy to accept the Thing or Captain Marvel.
Well there’s a lot going on in Attack on Titan. The point isn’t that the Eldians are innocent victims, the point is that the cycle of violence will keep turning until it is stopped. We just happened to tune into the story while the Eldians were on the receiving end instead of the giving end.
There’s also the fact that the handful of mutants we follow in the comics are absurdly powerful by mutant standards. We don’t follow Jane from down the road who can heat things slightly slower than a kettle, we follow a 200-year-old immortal asshole with an indestructible skeleton and claws that can cut through anything. It kinda adds to the minority element, because yes some members of a minority will be dangerous, just because a subset of all humans are dangerous. It doesn’t mean every member of that minority is dangerous, and treating Jane from down the road like she’s Jean Grey or some shit is still discrimination.
Agreed this was also the problem with the allegory in Pixar’s Elemental movie (to my knowledge the characters in the movie are based on one of 4 classical elements, and as such they believe that interactions between them can cause trouble, like a water person “putting out” a fire person, and the twist is this isn’t true). Like if we actually believed something analogous to this is true and that we would like explode if we touched a different then it would be kinda reasonable.
the incredibles did do a superhero discrimination thing quite realistically, i think.
Yeah that’s the problem. Your neighbour, who is a mutant, should be on a list because they can explode your house.
Your neighbour on the other side, who gained his powers in an accident, can also blow up your house but that’s totally fine.
Remember when stories were symbolic in nature and didn’t have to poked and prodded for not being logically consistent?
Good times
The dark truth is analogies are pretty poor at conveying the realities of discrimination and fascism. An example is Star Wars. Instead of making people understand how an democracy can easily fall into fascism, all people latch on to is the coolness of Vader and light sabers and the great plot twist. The political themes of the story just exist in the background.
Sadly, art doesn’t influence politics as much as we think it doesn’t.
they absolutely do work
also cyclops can’t vaporize anything, his optics are concussive energy LIKE A PUNCH
By this logic we should lock all men up because they have the ability to harm and kill women and regularly do so.
Thing about human rights is that you don’t get to judge someone for a crime they didn’t commit, but could if they wanted to. And you don’t get to restrict them just because their abilities make your skittish.
I would say there’s one mainstream property where it does work rather well, and that’s Final Fantasy XVI. In that, most magic users (called Bearers) can’t do anything that’s not replicable via magical crystals. Furthermore, using magic slowly kills Bearers, so liberation, for them, is the ability to just be normal and not be forced to use their powers.
I think that people miss the point in these allegories, because people don’t need superpowers to be dangerous to everybody else.
The guy who lives next door to me owns several guns. He could, at any time, come over to my place, knock on the door, and shoot me dead. How is he any less dangerous to me than he would be if he had the mysterious death touch?
The guy who lives on the other side of me works in mining. He has access to any amount of explosives. He could, at any time, bring home a couple of sticks of dynamite (or whatever they use), lob one onto my roof and demolish my home and everyone in it. How is he any less dangerous to me than if he had insta-explosion ability?
Make it even more mundane. The guy across the road from me is a gym nut. He’s built like a brick shithouse. He could, at any time, come over to my place and beat me to death. How is he any less dangerous to me than a guy with super strength?
I’ve agreed with this sentiment for years, but just reading it again gave me a thought: do minorities have strange and unusual powers?
Obviously physically and mentally no, but socially? Religious minorities have the power to not go to church on Sunday and transgress dogma (that isn’t enshrined in law). The queer community has the power to transgress all sorts of social norms around gender roles and sexuality. Racial minorities can have different hairstyles, a deeper connection to certain kinds of art or music, the ability to stand outside during summer without immediate sunburn.
I’m not trying to justify bad writing (or worse, justify irl bigotry) in any way, but I do think that there’s room for more nuanced writing which I’s love to see in a story.