Mutants, unless they activate their power at birth, unleash their power when they are young, without knowledge or control of it. How these children are usually in schools, parks or in their home surrounded by neighbors; when their power is activated it could create an accident, in the worst case scenario one similar to Jesse of Earth-1610 but is this the cause of mutant fear or is it just an excuse to justify anti-mutant prejudice? Even if this were the case, could the child be analyzed to prepare for when he activates his power or would that just cause more fear?
Other than that, once the mutant has awakened his power and learned to control it, what is it that usually scares people in the comics? How would he differ from another non-mutant super? Some say the hatred is because they are “the next step in evolution”, but other super mutants (non-mutants) have also had children who have inherited their powers, so what incident triggered this hatred?
Or did it just start like any other minority prejudice?
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It’s their different nature and their powers that make them feared. The average person isn’t going to feel very comfortable knowing that a living WMD could plausibly appear at any moment in their city/town.
“Other than that, once the mutant has awakened his power and learned to control it, what is it that usually scares people in the comics? How would he differ from another non-mutant super?”
putting aside highly dangerous powers, extremely large # of mutants, physical mutations that can make them look monstrous, powers that activate at puberty, random powers, or the mutant supremacist terrorists
the #1 cause for fear is….well the great replacement theory
Not getting involved into how that relates to our world (the idea exists, if it has any real validity is a totally different topic)
But in the world of Marvel, Mutants are described (by many mutants) to be the next stage in human evolution
so
a) Both made obsolete (a light hearted example would be on the 90s cartoon where Colossus makes an entire construction crew obsolete),
b) and into a minority
(there even exists one such alternate future where Mutants became the majority and non mutants were discriminated against, In this time-line, Spider-Man pretended to be a mutant, and when he was exposed he faced discrimination. He actually ended up faking his own death.
The key difference between mutants and mutates, is that mutates are so few. So people can tolerate the occasion Fantastic Four.
that’s a key aspect anyway in the world of Marvel IMO
(that being said, any mutate who received scary/ugly powers or acts evil can quickly discover mutant hate can quickly spread to mutate hate.)
Both, and more. It’s often simple tribalism alongside “these people are dangerous and we don’t know who will be one or what will happen if one spontaneously develops their power while surrounded by others.”
But there’s a third factor as well – the sapient bioweapon Sublime, a billions-year-old virus that mutants are immune to (time travel BS, long story short) and hates mutants, infected an amount of the human population and fostered that hatred in flatscans.
It’s Magneto’s fault. Before his debut, the vast majority of people had never even heard of mutants and the ones publicly active prior to Magneto and the original X-Men (like Namor, for example) weren’t known to be any different from other superhumans. Then Magneto, seemingly unprovoked, attacked a US military base and started ranting about racial superiority and world domination. Then he took over a small country a few months later and dressed up his goons like Nazis. Kind of set a tone.
Now we know that there’s plenty of stuff in Magneto’s background that helps explain why he behaves the way the does and we know that several governments (especially the diabolical Canadians) had been illegally abusing mutants for a while. But the general public had no idea about any of that. They just know that terrifyingly powerful and potentially malevolent superhumans can be born to anyone at any time and start wrecking shop. That’s scary and fear breeds hatred.
It’s grossly unfair, of course, that other mutants get the blame for his shenanigans but bigotry tends to be unfair like that.
With non-mutant supers, their powers come from one of: a)skills and training, b)technology and/or equipment, c)One-off events/accidents or d)They’re an alien, and so what is normal for their species is superpowers by human standards.
A and B aren’t scary. Given time and resources, anyone could be that kind of super.
C could be scary, but that depends on how you interact with them. The Hulk (as in the “Hulk talk like this” version) is dangerous, but only if you make him angry. Otherwise, he just wants to be left alone. There also aren’t many of them.
D could also be scary like C, but another factor is how many of them there are. One alien? Not scary to Earth as a whole. An invading alien fleet? Scary.
But mutants are different. Mutants could be anywhere. Unless they were born with their powers active, nor have conscious control over their powers, there is no way for the average person to tell who is a mutant and who isn’t. Their powers range from completely benign to incredibly dangerous. That’s scary. And that fear is what leads to anti-mutant prejudice.