this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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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.
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.
That was Malcolm's first mistake, his second was dying.
I think if Magneto was written in the present age, he would have been written without the mustache twirling aspect. It has become much more popular to portray both antagonists and protagonists with more depth and grey areas. For that matter, we saw it in some of the recent X-Men movies.
Depends on who writes him. The modern Marvel Cinematic Universe has more than its fair share of mustache twirlers.
Eh. I don't think they ever topped the original. Ian McCallen was in peak form.
Sorry to be pedantic, but a great man deserves it; it's Sir Ian McKellen
Sure, I'm talking general trends.
I'll spot you Scarlet Witch, who is more the victim of her own despair than a sincere villain. But Killmonger's regicide and subsequent civil war never seem to do more than satisfy his own ego. Thanos is even worse. I almost prefer the incel-esque literally horny for death motivations over the dime-store eugenics.
I'll spot you that they're more well-spoken. They sound sophisticated in their delivery, rather than like some cackling madman a la Skeletor or Ming the Merciless. But then you stop to think about what they're actually doing, and its just tying damsels to the railroad tracks on a grander scale.
That's a great sentence.
Fair enough
I'm wondering whether Magneto ever did something analagous to a hajj like Malcolm X did. It radically altered his views. I would imagine if Magneto did this there would be some deus ex machina to set him back to genocide.
He got brain swapped with Professor X back in the 90s, giving birth to Evil Xavier (Onslaught) and Good Guy Magneto.
I get the sentiment. But literally every single creator has come out and said he wasn't based on Malcolm X.
While the X-Men were an allegory of the civil rights movement from the get go, I'm quite certain at the time Magneto was just intended as a villain.
I mean... his terrorist group was called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, and some of the members were definitely of the moustache twirling puppy kicking kind, including Magneto himself, at first...
It was the 60s. That doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, mainstream comic book villains didn't start getting more nuanced until the seventies and especially the eighties, possibly as a consequence of the comics code, which included “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal”, and didn't allow “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior” until 1971 (and which also hilariously led to zombies being called “zuvembies” in Marvel during the seventies, as that simple change was apparently enough to make them kosher), which publishers didn't start mostly ignoring untill the mid eighties (though most didn't officially fully abandon it until the noughties or early twenty-tens).