I just don't get people who say X-Men wasn't "woke" until recently. It never even tried very hard to hide the metaphors...
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Stan Lee even said himself that he created the X-Men as a statement about bigotry and how everyone, no matter how different than you, has good in them. It's straight up an anti-discrimination metaphor. It doesn't get much more woke than that.
I couldn't have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or zapped with gamma rays, and it occurred to me that if I just said that they were mutants, it would make it easy. Then it occurred to me that instead of them just being heroes that everybody admired, what if I made other people fear and suspect and actually hate them because they were different? I loved that idea; it not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the Civil Rights Movement in the country at that time
Aren't Professor X and Magneto modeled Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X? Kinda of a sloppy analog if it's true, but still progressive for the time.
Their backgrounds are very different, of course, but their ideologies were (loosely) modeled on those two, yes.
Magneto tends to waver between mutant separatist and mutant supremacist, but he's very militant in his methods either way.
I mean, make they could have had Magento with the one with X in her name if he was modeled on Malcolm X. I said it was sloppy. I didn't say it was wrong.
Magento just preyed on disenfranchisement mutants with charisma. Malcolm X had more going on than that.
A lot of problems I may have have more to do with it being a cape comicbook story. Any character arc that Magento has would be reset eventually.
Beast was one of the original and was made blue to show him as different but anyone who knows the character knows he is a black man analogy.