āThereās a cure?!ā asked the girl that kills everything she touches.Ā āHey shut up weāre perfā replied the girl that makes clouds.Ā
For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. āMakes clouds my assā she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and thatās how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.
I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY
āFinally, a cure for my chainsaw hands!ā decreed Chainsaw-Hands Joe.
āThere is no cure,ā said Johnny Five-Dicks. āThereās nothing wrong with us.ā
The last comment literally always cracks me up
The X-Men are an extremely good metaphor for oppressed minorities until they are suddenly an extremely terrible metaphor for oppressed minorities.
The scale on which the first reply misses the point literally never ceases to awe me.
I gotta say, though, this is a place where the X-men are being a good metaphor for oppressed minorities.Ā Specifically, in this case, the disabled community.
āYay, thereās a cure!ā says the girl with depression.Ā āCure for what, motherfucker, Iām not sick,ā says the person with autism.
āYay, thereās a cure!ā I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days.Ā āYes, because itās easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,ā says the Deaf person.Ā āāCureā is violent rhetoric.ā
The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of ādisability,ā and many of them donāt even resemble each other.Ā Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated).Ā Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community.Ā These things really should not be grouped together, but they are.Ā And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.
It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all āmutantsā as one group.Ā You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and thatās not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time.Ā āRealistically,ā if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches.Ā But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.
So itās actually not a bad take.Ā Mind you, the X-men have had bad takes, and will do so again, and Iām skeptical about whether āpowersā of any kind even work for a metaphor about minority representationābut this particular vignette has something useful to say.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what bothers me about purely social analyses of disability.
I got in trouble in an X-Men Group on Facebook for saying stuff similar to this
