https://nitter.net/bendreyfuss/status/1743815819224855029
watching x-men and thinking "yea those human supremacists had good points" is a big read flag, like most x-men stories arent subtle at all by making most their enemies literal nazis
Yeah. Comparing the mutants to real world marginalized groups isnt the cleanest metaphor because some mutants have world ending powers which no black/gay/trans/autistic/ect people have. Ive seen left cultural critics make this point. But this guy is relating to the actual fash in the comics. Big red flag.
The ruling class think trans people have world ending powers. They're scared that it rocks the foundation of patriarchy too much and that patriarchy and the nuclear family is a pillar of capitalism.
The "world ending" powers of marginalised groups are less obvious and require deep analysis to understand, but they exist.
because some mutants have world ending powers which no black/gay/trans/autistic/ect people have
Yeah even if he has a point he's expressing it in absolutely the worst terms. At core I agree, these metaphors are bad because when you have to explain them to people you end up also making racism rational, when it fundamentally isn't. I think maybe Jack Saint talked about this in the context of Zootopia, where the racism directed at predators is based on a history of violence and actual concrete biological distinctions that make one group objectively more capable of hurting people than another.
But to express that criticism as "I hope we can do a genocide on these people" is the most
way to say it.
Yeah sure NOW (most) people think black and white people are just the same.
They fucking didn't THEN though. That's the fucking point.
I don't even agree with the position that people don't perceive black people to have dangerous powers that affect society. A big part of the fear about equality that those in power had was that it could rock the system too much leading to it being overturned. This goes for other marginalised groups also. Trans people and patriarchy being a pillar of capitalism for example they see as an existential threat to the system. That is comparable to a world ending superpower, from a certain perspective.
I don't even agree with the position that people don't perceive black people to have dangerous powers that affect society
Shades of Hnery Ford funding country music and tap dancing to repress the influence of Black culture and the recent British crackdown on drill music.
Just thought of another angle on this. "Sure MOST of them might not be dangerous but SOME of them are violent murderers, we can't possibly give them equality or else something something something..."
Exactly the same thing applies to mutants.
And uhhh nothing changes whether they're equal or not. They can do equal violence without equality. It doesn't improve safety.
My mind wanders back to "super predators", a thing seriously said by people to justify a law
Yes precisely. They actively invent all kinds of superpowers that out-groups supposedly have that justify keeping them as out-groups because they're dangerous. The depiction of them as literal actual world ending superpowers is quite fitting.
I could be a video essayist if I wasn't so fucking lazy.
...this piece of shit just made me crave a cig and I've been clean of nicotine for months now. I wish us black folks did have powers, I'd fry ben's ass like a doughnut.
Who could have foreseen the "I paid a homeless person to hunt them for sport." guy was filled with bad takes.
I think using actual powers or magic isn’t a great way to explore bigotry in the same way as making non-human races an obvious expy for POC. But that is more of a genre criticism.
We should genocide the obvious minority expy in this work of fiction is certainly a take though.
I'm being forced to watch "True Blood" (in the middle of S1 atm) against my will and this reminds me of that. Some of the way vampires are discriminated against seem to be metaphors or based on actual discrimination real minorities face (Antisemitism, PoC, LGBT, etc.). It seems like a "let's do a fictional minority that's discriminated against, except the violent/satanic/predator stereotypes are actually true". I don't know what direction they're about to go into, so it comes across as problematic. I'm curious what kind of principled hardline theory some of the brainpilled leftists have to say about this.
I like True Blood. Its good slop. And youve already seen one of my favorite TV scenes ever (The AIDs burger scene).
But yeah vampires = real world minorities might be even messier than the mutant metaphor. Mutants arent fighting an inherent instinct to kill like True Blood vampires are.
True Blood is truly the most insane version of this. The vampires are so absurdly murderous, and they actually have their own secret world government. And they just keep using them as a metaphore for queer people! They're trying to combine "Isn't discrimination based on lifestyle bad?" with "This is the LGBTQ viceroy of Arizona. He has killed 542 people for fun.".
Reminds me of the ending of dragon age 2 when it’s revealed that the oppressed magic user minority was actually doing blood magic all along and the fash stand-in templars were right. Like imagine a retelling of kristallnacht where the Jews started shapeshifting and stealing children
