Political Memes

It's kind of hard to argue that non-mutants aren't lesser beings when mutants literally have powers that no normal human could ever hope to have, powers that can even defy the basic laws of physics.

I love MLK but if I had been around in the days of civil rights, I would definitely have been a Malcom x guy

Mt.freeze just wanted to save his wife but the bills made him turn to crime.

Ivy sure, given what's happening with our climate I would agree.

Harley is just a straight psycho.

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.

I get the sentiment. But literally every single creator has come out and said he wasn't based on Malcolm X.

Magneto was meant to be a stand in for Malcom 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...

So magneto has actually fought for mutant rights from the beginning. And every time he gets ahead the xmen win and mutant rights don't really move forward. The xmen literally fight for the status quo. The status quo is bad for mutants, but they want to keep it for some reason. An analogy I've heard a lot is that professor x is the mlk to Magneto's Malcolm x. The difference is that mlk didn't bank roll a CIA black ops style team to constantly beat up Malcolm x whenever he started getting a leg up.

People are fed up. They're more open to extreme actions. That's why people are more sympathetic to Magneto

Put simply, given the state and direction of the world the lofty, idealistic goals of Professor Xavier of peaceful coexistence and mutual trust have come to seem quaint and naive in a world of division, exploitation, inequality, discrimination, and hate. Magneto, by contrast, has always advocated the use of force and exercise of power, not in the interest of "bwahaha, I'm a bad guy!" evil, but in the interest of enacting vigilante justice and/or almost anarchic self-determination outside the system when the system fails.

So in 2024, your sympathy towards Magneto is inversely tied to your faith in the system to deliver fair and just outcomes. The more your faith in that has slipped, the closer you get to the position that Magneto is right.

Depending on the story magneto ranges from Hitler 2.0 to anti-hero. The better stories tend to be him as an anti-hero. It generally boils down to Xavier believing people are good and they will chose the right option if you set a good example. Magneto believes people are bastards and you have to force them into the right decision.

Magneto's whole shtick is that he survived the holocaust. This made him a radical against discrimination. So when he sees the mutant minority starting to get the same treatment as Jews in Germany (dehumanizing propaganda, lists and "yellow stars") he's like "not this time" and decides to start fighting before things get concentration camp bad.

Professor X believes that regular humans and mutants can reach an understanding despite all the propaganda to the contrary. But if mutants on one side (magneto)attack then due to the powers only other mutants are really effective, both for stopping them and for showing that it's "not all mutants".

He just wanted freedom from subjugation for the mutants. Having survived the Holocaust, he had strong feelings about the government deciding they weren't people with equal protections.

He was akin to the Malcolm X to Charles's King.

I’m not super into comics so someone let me know if I’m off base here but…

Ok so the X men are stand ins for marginalized people. Their primary conflict is that they are demonized by society, even though they are a boon for society. Charles and Magneto attempt to solve this in different ways. Charles via working within the system, and appealing to saving their haters to prove they are good and restraining what makes them different. And Magneto is heavily militant in his defense of mutants against any who would harm them, and is big in not hiding who you are.

Now Magneto is villain coded so don’t take what the post said without a grain of salt. He does bad things. But these days he usually is given a sympathetic reason. And due to how comics and stories are told Charles Xavier will never succeed in his quest to prove mutants are not to be feared. (Especially when you have some kids who’s power is they turn into a literal nuclear bomb that will go off at any time for any reason… poor kid)

But this ties in with the rise in right wing authoritarian hate mobs

I'll take a shot but I'm not a die hard X-Men guy. If someone has a little more precision please correct me.

Basically magnetos driving idea is that people (and their governments) are out to get mutants and won't ever change, so it's up to him to lead mutants to fight back. Basically if they want respect and fair treatment, they have to take it for themselves. He tries many times in many ways to pull down the establishment by, for example, attempting to convert all people to mutants.

The premise of the post is basically that, since Reagan, social support is diminishing and power and wealth are concentrating in such a way in the upper class. Ergo, taking an... uh... active approach in advocating for ourselves is looking increasingly like a good idea.

No he does not, especially if you're going with 90s Magneto. It's the whole reason Fabian Cortez tried to murder him.

He is however a zionist and wants mutants to have their own homeland separate from baseline humans.

When Carnage brutally murders a bunch of billionaires.