aloeveracious

My stance is essentially an amalgamation of every free-floating complaint about the X-Men you've ever heard- that it's a bad metaphor for oppression because real minority groups can't kill buildings full of people on a whim, that the comics are frequently tone deaf in the comparisons drawn between real and fantasy oppressions (Kitty with the hard R, oppression-splaining to a Pakistani-American girl), the ugly ways in which the metaphor can intersect with real-life issues of nationalism and ethnonationalism (Is Magneto a Zionist? Locked after 12,000 pages, etc). Moreover there were always going to be fundamental cracks in the foundation because mutants-as-civil rights metaphor was a retrofit that they pivoted to from what was originally transparently a time-saving measure for the mass-production of silver-age cops-and-robbers participants. Even then it's still theoretically possible to make the metaphor work, but I think that the demands of serial publication are particularly injurious to the metaphor because it prevents the creation of a specific, unified, finite narrative that can dig into this in a way that sticks. They'll be stuck treading water on the issue forever, held back from really internalizing the thorny-but-interesting implications or meaningfully adjusting the status quo as long as the X-Men need to remain available in the toybox for future writers. The closest they can get is the umpteenth "mutants claw their way back from the brink of extinction" storyline. Are we on the second or third mutant ethnostate collapse?

At the same time you have to hold space for the fact that the X-Men are only uniquely vulnerable to these criticisms because X-Men authors had the audacity to try to center these themes, to try and use the space as it existed to do something new and thoughtful. 50 years of hindsight have made us aware of the limitations of what can be done with those themes within the monthly-serial context, but that wasn't clear at the time, and let's be real, we wouldn't be talking about this franchise at all if Claremont hadn't shot his shot and gotten the ball rolling. Perfect is the enemy of good, comic books are a conversation, yadda yadda yadda.