Mutants: Why does this idea work?

[steriaca]

If mutants are ok in the Avenger's book (enough to join the group), who am I to complain about it?

 

Scarlet Witch

Quicksilver

The Beast

Wolverine 

Wolverine 

Wolverine 

Did I mention Wolverine already?

[Hugh Neilson]

They never played it up much, but Cap's Kooky Quartet (Cap and three reformed super-villains) was not supposed to be well received by the press or the public straight out of the gates.  There was an issue where suspicion that the Beast was "related to that X-Man" was voiced.  Since the Avengers featured less mutant-centric stories, mutant prejudice was less of a focus. 

[steriaca]

Just watched a video which named 10 X-Men related mutants who were also Avengers of one kind or another. The list kinda surprised me (both Cannonball and Sunspot, Cable, Storm...Deadpool wasn't a surprise at all because he IS Deadpool...but Sabertooth was). No mention of Namor, but the Submariner was never an X-Man.

[Duke Bushido]

On 12/15/2021 at 9:30 AM, Hugh Neilson said:

To many of these points, I can only say "When did we conclude that bigotry is rational?"

 

 

 

Bigotry has _never_ been rational.  It does, however, follow a set of patterns that have been well-demonstrated throughout history. 

 

 

[Echo3Niner]

On 12/16/2021 at 6:44 PM, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

It does, however, follow a set of patterns that have been well-demonstrated throughout history. 

 

 

 

Ironic, since I was using actual history to make my points...   😉   (See what I did there, huh? 😄)

 

Edited December 23, 2021 by Echo3Niner
Added emojis to help clarify my intent with the statement

[Clonus]

On 12/14/2021 at 6:17 PM, Duke Bushido said:

 

Totally understood, and I take no offense. 

 

 

 

 

 

Accents and idioms will give them away, and even if they manage to (forgive this word; I hate it, but I can think of no other-- I am currently suffering from "work brain."  Every had one of those days where every thirty minutes you're another hour behind?) "pass" as one of the local boys, it won't last when the word gets out, via whatever method that might be.

 

Which takes me back to the "what about other supers?" question:

 

Unlike opposite ends of Ireland, where you still totally understand that the guy you hate is a guy just exactly like you, it's not the case with supers.  The thing pointed at when these 'freakish mutants' go by is their amazing powers-- powers that mark them as clearly different from you.  Cue the Flash or some non-mutant superhero to come super-ing by-- not even a _question_ that he might be one of those?

 

I believe our Canadian friend Lord Liaden mentioned physical differences such as fur or coloration or whatever it was (forgive me, both of you, please.  It's been an exhausting day, and as easy as it would be to back up and check, I just don' wanna.    ).  But then that, too, is found in "normal" supers.  The Hulk is green; Vision is, I think, red (his face was red in the movie, unless that's part of his costume.  Most folks here know that I'm not terribly comic book savvy, never having been much of a fan in my youth (I like the Westerns and some of the war ones-- and most of the horror ones, if that counts).)   I know there's an Aquaman knock-off with winged ankles-- little Hermes wings sprouting from his ankles!   Because ankle feathers are... good for... swimming...? [/sarcastic confusion  ]   At any rate, I am sure more savvy folks could quickly knock out a list of a hundred or more non-mutant super people with radical physical alterations.   I, however, would have to spend some time Googling.

 

The point is that the closer someone is in action, appearance, or even sentiment to another group of people, the more likely people are to assume that they are part of or closely-associated with that group.   Yet no one bats an eye hundred-year-old Captain America leaps twenty feet into the air and swats a missile to the ground.  The Hulk seems like someone that everyone should be absolutely terrified of, yet he has, if google has served me well, been in at least three team books.

 

I'm sure the Hulk has been in at least three team books.  But he's also the guy who Reed Richards and Tony Stark conspired to fling into space hopefully never to be seen again.  People ARE terrified of the Hulk.  At the point where the United States government was looking a bit askance at mutants they were flat out constantly trying to kill the Hulk and they kept on doing that for decades.  Killing the Hulk was a major line item in the defense budget.  Heck Canada even tried to kill the Hulk.  When the Vision is not part of the Avengers to lend him legitimacy  he has been treated with great suspicion and prejudice.  Aquaman is the knockoff.  Namor is the original.  And no, he isn't trusted or admired but that's only fair since he regularly turns supervillain.  The problem with the mutant menace thing is not that it doesn't inherently make sense.  It's that Marvel has 60 years of tangled continuity to saddle them with endless narrative twists, turns and inconsistencies.  At this point nothing in the Marvel universe can make sense if looked at closely.  After all they've got a bunch of guys in their 20s who have 50 to 60 years of personal history.  

 

Let me paste an answer I gave elsewhere to this kind of question:

 

1. Magneto is a moron. He first brought the existence of mutants to the attention of the general population with terrorist acts that he claimed to be carrying out on behalf of a new race. The other major supervillains don’t usually claim to be representing any group. Loki doesn’t claim to be the champion of Asgardians and Doctor Doom doesn’t strike blows on behalf of people with facial blemishes.
2. Professor Xavier is a moron. There is no good reason why he didn’t seek out teenagers who weren’t mutants for his school/army of child soldiers. Instead he chose to define the mutants as a distinct and separate minority. Mutants who join more heterogenous teams get a much more favourable response.  Mutants tend to come in two flavours. The first is those who are phenotypically unusual from birth and often not in pretty ways. The second are the ones that look normal from birth onward but begin to manifest their powers during the hormonal surges of adolescence. Which means when they actually have dangerous powers they tend to first manifest them during times of stress. So…usually by hospitalizing or killing a family member or a kid at school.
3. Mutants were for a time by far the most common origin. In order to generate significant prejudice, you need a large enough population that you begin to lose sight of them as individual and only regard them as a group. You stop seeing trees and start seeing “forest”
4. Some idiot called them “Homo Superior”. Can you imagine a better way to put the backs up of us Homo Inferior?

As for the issue of distinguishing people with acquired powers from mutants without special abilities, well it's certainly possible to make a misidentification and that has happened in Marvel comics both ways.  But well-known characters tend to have well known origins and in a lot of cases it didn't particularly matter one way or the other.  Nobody cared whether Spider-Man's was a mutant because they were too busy hating him for being Spider-Man or loving him for being Spider-Man.  And it's not like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four didn't get their share of haters just for being supers.  It's just they managed to win some degree of acceptance by both saving the world and being given government and media acknowledgement of that achievement.  Even when an Avenger was a mutant, just being an Avenger would legitimize in the eyes of many people who didn't trust either X-Men, or mutants who tried to live like they didn't have powers.  

[Sketchpad]

On 12/16/2021 at 11:36 AM, steriaca said:

Just watched a video which named 10 X-Men related mutants who were also Avengers of one kind or another. The list kinda surprised me (both Cannonball and Sunspot, Cable, Storm...Deadpool wasn't a surprise at all because he IS Deadpool...but Sabertooth was). No mention of Namor, but the Submariner was never an X-Man.

 

Actually, Namor was an X-Man for a bit during their first attempt at an island nation built from Asteroid M called Utopia. That's how he got involved in the whole "Phoenix Five" storyline.

 

10 hours ago, Clonus said:

Magneto is a moron. He first brought the existence of mutants to the attention of the general population with terrorist acts that he claimed to be carrying out on behalf of a new race. The other major supervillains don’t usually claim to be representing any group. Loki doesn’t claim to be the champion of Asgardians and Doctor Doom doesn’t strike blows on behalf of people with facial blemishes.

 

Doom does often proclaim his actions are for the betterment of Latveria and has hidden behind his Diplomatic Immunity in the past. Ultron has also committed horrible acts under the flag of a new species as well. I agree that Magneto can be a bit moronic, but I see it more as he does what he does for Magneto, not the flag du jour that he decides to fly. Looking at Chuck, he's really one of the true villains in so many ways.

[HeroGM]

1 hour ago, Sketchpad said:

 

Actually, Namor was an X-Man for a bit during their first attempt at an island nation built from Asteroid M called Utopia. That's how he got involved in the whole "Phoenix Five" storyline.

 

Looking at Chuck, he's really one of the true villains in so many ways.

 

Namor was also a part of the whole X-Men deal during the Dark Avengers days.

 

One thing I liked about the Ultimate X-Men was the throwaway line Xavier gave one time "Magneto and I have the same goals, just different ways of achieving it" (or close). They showed how manipulative he was in that universe.

[steriaca]

Kinda makes you think...how much mutant hatred truly is natural and how much of it has been manipulated by Xavier for his purpose? He is capable of mind control after all. Who knows who he has 'push' to make other mutants join his side. Prehaps he manipulated Forget-Me-Not into joining the group...assuming Xavier remembers him. Prehaps Forget-Me-Not is also a Brotherhood member at the same time (he is a living Schrodinger's Cat after all).

[HeroGM]

In UXM the President (Bush?) sees Xavier as much, if not more a threat even to the point of disliking Frost when the met, simply because she was a telepath. I hated what they did with Jean and a lot of them near the end though.

[steriaca]

On 12/31/2021 at 12:04 AM, HeroGM said:

In UXM the President (Bush?) sees Xavier as much, if not more a threat even to the point of disliking Frost when the met, simply because she was a telepath. I hated what they did with Jean and a lot of them near the end though.

Humm...no wonder Doctor Strange decides to keep a low profile in the superhero world. If the president in the UXM comics have a freakout over Xavier's mental powers and what they can do, imagine the rage organism over a guy who can do ANYTHING. Never mind that he has mega limitations over being able to do anything, let alone everything...

[Grailknight]

The Ultimate Universe was a bit darker in tone.

 

[Ninja-Bear]

8 hours ago, steriaca said:

Humm...no wonder Doctor Strange decides to keep a low profile in the superhero world. If the president in the UXM comics have a freakout over Xavier's mental powers and what they can do, imagine the rage organism over a guy who can do ANYTHING. Never mind that he has mega limitations over being able to do anything, let alone everything...

Let’s see Xavier is the most powerful telepath. So he could hack government secrets or worse yet cause people to set the nukes via mind control. (I think he can do mind control). So anybody thinking like Batman “ hmm what if this super goes unhinged” is a little justified. Humans are bad enough with vast power. Now imagine someone with super powers.

[Echo3Niner]

51 minutes ago, Ninja-Bear said:

So anybody thinking like Batman “ hmm what if this super goes unhinged” is a little justified. Humans are bad enough with vast power. Now imagine someone with super powers.

 

You mean, "What if this wasn't a comic book?"  If this was real life, and some people had powers, can you imagine how bad that would go?  Comic books are  what they are, for a reason...  They cater to all our inner desires to imagine ourselves heroes, in all the myriad forms that can take.  But, that is not reality...  That's why they're called "escapism"...

 

The movies Chronicle, Brightburn and series The Boys anyone?  And frankly, those are light weight as to what I think it would really be like...  Caligula, with unstoppable personal power vs. political?

 

It would be post-apocalyptic on a scale hard to imagine.

[csyphrett]

Just read through this thread and I have to agree with a lot of points made especially E-39's last post. In a realistic world where people had super powers of various stripes, I think we would either have something like the Federation/LSH with our people moving out into space and various bad actors put down when they arise, or the Battle of the Bean from the Dresden Files where whole cities are massacred in open conflict between powers.

CES

 

[Lawnmower Boy]

Like many children of my era, the late Seventies revival of the mutant franchise came as a powerful influence. And while it was not always to the good, as I've come around to seeing the whole "Fans are Slan" thing as not psychologically helpful, the mutant idea addressed prejudice with a polymorphic face that offered something for everyone and that reified "prejudice" as an operator with no object. In other words, prejudice was always and only an angry reaction to self, projected on others. This was, and is, something that anyone can learn at any point in their life, and the mutant/X-Men thing was always there, available, as great literature always is.

 

The particular criticism here strikes me as a categorical error, conflating the hyper-realism of a comics world with the lived reality of our own. The classic example of this is "Batman letting the Joker get away to murder thousands more people." That Batman would do this is, in my mind, more realistic than the premise we  have already bought into, which is an eternal Joker who keeps coming back dozens of times in the first place. Professional American football players play twelve games a season for six seasons. They don't go on fighting/committing crime at a rate of six-to-ten-capers-a-month for going on a century! "Real" Batman lets "real" Joker live because "real" Batman runs into "real" Joker all of four times in his "real" career. 

 

In much the same way, a great deal of the ridiculousness in our treatment of "the X-Men only they're real" derives from what parameters we choose to relax to get to our "real world." 

 

___________

 

John was tying his boots when he caught the familiar smell of sentinel robots in the draft from  windows both ends of the motel single. A lot of them. Way too many to fight.

 

Clarice was snoring. She's not going to like this, John thought as he stepped over to her bed and shook her shoulders, putting his finger to her lips.

 

Her eyes opened. "I was trying--" Long pause. Her head came out of the pillow, eyes focussed on the paper-thin wall. They'd talked about this. If DARPA had mikes on the bungalow, they would rush it the moment they heard John and Clarice on the move, to heck with causing a scene.

 

A portal opened where Clarice was staring. Not even bothering to look where he was going, John picked Clarice up and jumped through the teleportation gate, coverlet fluttering behind them. 

 

"Crap." Now it was his turn. "Here?" They were in the hospital.

 

"You didn't give me a lot of time to wake up!"

 

"DARPA didn't," he muttered. "But what about--"

 

"Do you see a bunch of X-Men going down the X-pole? You told me after you broke in last night. It's not a secret base for a renegade supergroup. It's what it says on the sign. A hospital. For eating disorders, which is why it's locked up. The only thing we have to worry about in here is running into a white girl sneaking out of her room to throw up and making fun of my pyjamas. Meanwhile, out there, there's DARPA drones in the air and it's not like I have a lot of indoor teleport points around here. Or shoes." She lifted her bare, right, foot and stretched her toes. Cute, somehow.

 

"Maybe we can somewhere to portal from the top floor windows," John said. "Stair's over here. Now we better get moving, because my Agent-in-Charge says if  DARPA kills us, I should walk it off and remember to file with HR  before my internship expires." 

 

"I still can't believe the FBI sent an intern to check a lead on the X-Men," Clarice said.

 

"Me either," John said as he punched through the wall to knock out the alarmed lock on the stairwell. It was easy, like a dream. Why did he think that? Not important right now. Why did he think that? Get your head in the game, John!  "I guess they figured it was a crap lead. Anyway, if they hadn't I wouldn't have met up with you."

 

"Rez kid and aged out foster, together against the Man. Story of every cellblock ever."

 

"Eh, at least we're co-ed." Clarice gave him a smile  and John got butterflies. Why did he feel like someone was smiling at him who wasn't Clarice? Weird.

 

Top floor. Also deserted. Funny. He couldn't smell anyone or hear anyone in the entire hospital. People made smells.

 

Clarice poked at the basket under one of those thingies nurses wheeled around, probably looking for slippers. "Why do I feel like we're being watched?"

 

"Yeah, no," John said. "I usually don't get that feeling because I know when I'm being watched. But yeah."

 

"Crap," Clarice said. "You've got to have more faith in your Faithful Indian Scout-fu, John. It's OP. Do you see any cameras?" 

 

"Probably as good a time as any to make my entrance," said a strange voice in the silence. John practically had to peel himself off the ceiling. Like he just said, he wasn't used to being surprised out of video games.  A middle aged man with a Jesus beard and long, curly brown hair, wearing one of those collarless hippie jackets that usually only that kind of girl could pull off, was talking. A man standing right there in the corridor where there hadn't been anyone to see, hear, or smell second ago.

 

"So." the middle-aged man said, "I've been reading your minds and projecting mental images. Creepy as hell, I grant you. On the other hand, like the song says, I was born this way. I hope we don't have to prove that you've been detained for questioning."

 

Five more people appeared out of nowhere, like hippie Jesus. An old woman with a definite family resemblance to both the man and Laura's little friend, Hope, the wide-shouldered, equally old current Director of the Hospital, Dr. McCoy, a pair of twins in their twenties that John didn't know from Adam, and  Laura's dad, Mr. Howlett. The one that his Marine buddies said was some kind of Special Ops angel of death.

 

"I can't make a portal, John," Clarice whispered, as she said it, John noticed that one of the twins' hands was glowing red. Okay, take him out first if this turns into a fight, John thought. Mr. Howlett slid three long, metal claws popped out of his right hand. Yeah. As if. 

 

"So let's get on with this," Hippie Jesus said. "We all have places to be in the morning. Tell me what you think you're doing here, John, Clarice."

 

John looked at Clarice. If either of them could talk their way out of this, it would be her.

 

Clarice said. "So, John's an FBI intern. The FBI figures the X-Men have a base within a hundred miles of New York and that it has some kind of cover. They've been checking out private schools for years, but John got the idea to try  hospitals instead. Meanwhile, when I aged out of the system last year. I started looking for Dr. Summers, who used to write to the group home about me sometimes." Clarice paused, because she didn't like that conversation about fosters looking for their birth parents. "Turns out he used to be the director here. And, oh, by the way, DARPA has a surveillance ops running on the street outside, watching your next door neighbour kid,  Laura Kinney. We got mixed up in it, and that's our story."

 

"Why surveillance? How did you get involved?" The curly-haired man prompted.

 

"Turns out that Laura and some friends escaped from a Mexican lab that was cloning people with superpowers. DARPA's in charge of American super agent work and is totally stoked with the idea of super clones. Way more reliable than waiting for someone to get bitten by a radioactive bat or whatever. Catch is, it only works with inheritable superpowers, which turns out to be a thing. They have a saliva test that finds people who inherit super powers. Me and John got "A"s! Which turns out to stand for "annihilate." Who knew? Anyway, Laura's living with her clone-daddy, but the other kids are undocumented. For some reason, instead of turning it over to INS, DARPA is  watching Laura to see if she contacts the other kids. Oh, also, her Dad is super-scary and they want to keep tabs on him."

 

"And do you know why DARPA decided to try to kill you?"

 

"One of the agents on our private death squad got really explanatory after John broke his buddies. Turns out when people inherit superpowers, a  lot of the time they're unstable. He says.  A double tap down at the garbage dump is just a mercy killing. He says. Frankly, it sounds like pretty much everybody who starts manifesting superpowers at puberty is either "unstable" or a slave clone from a Mexican lab.  Now that's creepy."

 

The Director cleared his throat. "Ever since the Nazis started studying birth supers in the camps for the war effort and found that one strain breeds true and pops up in new lineages, there's been a Nazi thing where they think they've  discovered Homo God-damn superior and are on the frontline of the war for human evolution, Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon, Part II. After the postwar rush to recruit those guys to fight the Cold War, the whole thing went mainstream. So that's you. Homo Superior, or alternatively,  "life unworthy of life.' Also, because this is covered by the same "born secret" doctrine as atomic weapons, just  knowing that you inherited superpowers puts you in violation of national security, so don't be going to the media." 

 

"Homo superior?" Clarice said, sounding calm although John could hear her heart racing at the comment about inheriting. She'd need to talk about her family, after. "That's crazy!"

 

"It's not crazy," the Director said. "It's a rounding error. Forget about the mutants, species, evolution. The genetics of an intelligent species of eight billion is too complicated for molecular genetics or science fiction. Focus on what's real. There's about ten people born with our kind of superpowers in the world every year, and DARPA thinks its half that. The people who run the super powered side of national security don't need to think about Big Ideas. All they have to do is shoot two Americans a decade, all the loose ends are tied up."

 

"We don't want to be loos ends, Director McCoy. In fact, maybe I'm putting words in John's mouth, but we're fine with going on living. That's what you guys seem to be doing." 

 

Dr. McCoy smiled. "Hide and Seek doesn't go very well if you let everyone into your hiding spot. But! We can let you in. Just, our house, our rules."

 

Clarice's hand slipped into his, squeezed. Yeah, John thought, not a line to  use on a foster kid, but Dr. McCoy noticed her reaction, too. "Here are some home truths for you: Since the war, we have put together a community of 300 people, about half of them in America. There's about as many more of us out there on their own, and a lot of them are out there because they're unstable. That's it, that's all. All the baby daddies, all the single ladies, all the everybody. I don't know if either of you have done population growth equations, but it's going to take five hundred years before there's enough of us to swing a single Congressional District.  I have no idea how you keep a secret for five hundred years, but that's basically what we have to do, all the while policing our own."

 

"So now what? We go live in another dimension, or a cloaked asteroid, or something?"

 

 "No," the Director said, "This is about staying under the radar. You go live in trailer parks and and raise your kids to be plumbers and nurses, and let your neighbours think you belong to a tiny Jehovah Witness splinter group. And if you don't like it, you can go play with the sentinels."

[csyphrett]

14 hours ago, Lawnmower Boy said:

Like many children of my era, the late Seventies revival of the mutant franchise came as a powerful influence. And while it was not always to the good, as I've come around to seeing the whole "Fans are Slan" thing as not psychologically helpful, the mutant idea addressed prejudice with a polymorphic face that offered something for everyone and that reified "prejudice" as an operator with no object. In other words, prejudice was always and only an angry reaction to self, projected on others. This was, and is, something that anyone can learn at any point in their life, and the mutant/X-Men thing was always there, available, as great literature always is.

 

The particular criticism here strikes me as a categorical error, conflating the hyper-realism of a comics world with the lived reality of our own. The classic example of this is "Batman letting the Joker get away to murder thousands more people." That Batman would do this is, in my mind, more realistic than the premise we  have already bought into, which is an eternal Joker who keeps coming back dozens of times in the first place. Professional American football players play twelve games a season for six seasons. They don't go on fighting/committing crime at a rate of six-to-ten-capers-a-month for going on a century! "Real" Batman lets "real" Joker live because "real" Batman runs into "real" Joker all of four times in his "real" career. 

 

In much the same way, a great deal of the ridiculousness in our treatment of "the X-Men only they're real" derives from what parameters we choose to relax to get to our "real world." 

 

___________

 

John was tying his boots when he caught the familiar smell of sentinel robots in the draft from  windows both ends of the motel single. A lot of them. Way too many to fight.

 

Clarice was snoring. She's not going to like this, John thought as he stepped over to her bed and shook her shoulders, putting his finger to her lips.

 

Her eyes opened. "I was trying--" Long pause. Her head came out of the pillow, eyes focussed on the paper-thin wall. They'd talked about this. If DARPA had mikes on the bungalow, they would rush it the moment they heard John and Clarice on the move, to heck with causing a scene.

 

A portal opened where Clarice was staring. Not even bothering to look where he was going, John picked Clarice up and jumped through the teleportation gate, coverlet fluttering behind them. 

 

"Crap." Now it was his turn. "Here?" They were in the hospital.

 

"You didn't give me a lot of time to wake up!"

 

"DARPA didn't," he muttered. "But what about--"

 

"Do you see a bunch of X-Men going down the X-pole? You told me after you broke in last night. It's not a secret base for a renegade supergroup. It's what it says on the sign. A hospital. For eating disorders, which is why it's locked up. The only thing we have to worry about in here is running into a white girl sneaking out of her room to throw up and making fun of my pyjamas. Meanwhile, out there, there's DARPA drones in the air and it's not like I have a lot of indoor teleport points around here. Or shoes." She lifted her bare, right, foot and stretched her toes. Cute, somehow.

 

"Maybe we can somewhere to portal from the top floor windows," John said. "Stair's over here. Now we better get moving, because my Agent-in-Charge says if  DARPA kills us, I should walk it off and remember to file with HR  before my internship expires." 

 

"I still can't believe the FBI sent an intern to check a lead on the X-Men," Clarice said.

 

"Me either," John said as he punched through the wall to knock out the alarmed lock on the stairwell. It was easy, like a dream. Why did he think that? Not important right now. Why did he think that? Get your head in the game, John!  "I guess they figured it was a crap lead. Anyway, if they hadn't I wouldn't have met up with you."

 

"Rez kid and aged out foster, together against the Man. Story of every cellblock ever."

 

"Eh, at least we're co-ed." Clarice gave him a smile  and John got butterflies. Why did he feel like someone was smiling at him who wasn't Clarice? Weird.

 

Top floor. Also deserted. Funny. He couldn't smell anyone or hear anyone in the entire hospital. People made smells.

 

Clarice poked at the basket under one of those thingies nurses wheeled around, probably looking for slippers. "Why do I feel like we're being watched?"

 

"Yeah, no," John said. "I usually don't get that feeling because I know when I'm being watched. But yeah."

 

"Crap," Clarice said. "You've got to have more faith in your Faithful Indian Scout-fu, John. It's OP. Do you see any cameras?" 

 

"Probably as good a time as any to make my entrance," said a strange voice in the silence. John practically had to peel himself off the ceiling. Like he just said, he wasn't used to being surprised out of video games.  A middle aged man with a Jesus beard and long, curly brown hair, wearing one of those collarless hippie jackets that usually only that kind of girl could pull off, was talking. A man standing right there in the corridor where there hadn't been anyone to see, hear, or smell second ago.

 

"So." the middle-aged man said, "I've been reading your minds and projecting mental images. Creepy as hell, I grant you. On the other hand, like the song says, I was born this way. I hope we don't have to prove that you've been detained for questioning."

 

Five more people appeared out of nowhere, like hippie Jesus. An old woman with a definite family resemblance to both the man and Laura's little friend, Hope, the wide-shouldered, equally old current Director of the Hospital, Dr. McCoy, a pair of twins in their twenties that John didn't know from Adam, and  Laura's dad, Mr. Howlett. The one that his Marine buddies said was some kind of Special Ops angel of death.

 

"I can't make a portal, John," Clarice whispered, as she said it, John noticed that one of the twins' hands was glowing red. Okay, take him out first if this turns into a fight, John thought. Mr. Howlett slid three long, metal claws popped out of his right hand. Yeah. As if. 

 

"So let's get on with this," Hippie Jesus said. "We all have places to be in the morning. Tell me what you think you're doing here, John, Clarice."

 

John looked at Clarice. If either of them could talk their way out of this, it would be her.

 

Clarice said. "So, John's an FBI intern. The FBI figures the X-Men have a base within a hundred miles of New York and that it has some kind of cover. They've been checking out private schools for years, but John got the idea to try  hospitals instead. Meanwhile, when I aged out of the system last year. I started looking for Dr. Summers, who used to write to the group home about me sometimes." Clarice paused, because she didn't like that conversation about fosters looking for their birth parents. "Turns out he used to be the director here. And, oh, by the way, DARPA has a surveillance ops running on the street outside, watching your next door neighbour kid,  Laura Kinney. We got mixed up in it, and that's our story."

 

"Why surveillance? How did you get involved?" The curly-haired man prompted.

 

"Turns out that Laura and some friends escaped from a Mexican lab that was cloning people with superpowers. DARPA's in charge of American super agent work and is totally stoked with the idea of super clones. Way more reliable than waiting for someone to get bitten by a radioactive bat or whatever. Catch is, it only works with inheritable superpowers, which turns out to be a thing. They have a saliva test that finds people who inherit super powers. Me and John got "A"s! Which turns out to stand for "annihilate." Who knew? Anyway, Laura's living with her clone-daddy, but the other kids are undocumented. For some reason, instead of turning it over to INS, DARPA is  watching Laura to see if she contacts the other kids. Oh, also, her Dad is super-scary and they want to keep tabs on him."

 

"And do you know why DARPA decided to try to kill you?"

 

"One of the agents on our private death squad got really explanatory after John broke his buddies. Turns out when people inherit superpowers, a  lot of the time they're unstable. He says.  A double tap down at the garbage dump is just a mercy killing. He says. Frankly, it sounds like pretty much everybody who starts manifesting superpowers at puberty is either "unstable" or a slave clone from a Mexican lab.  Now that's creepy."

 

The Director cleared his throat. "Ever since the Nazis started studying birth supers in the camps for the war effort and found that one strain breeds true and pops up in new lineages, there's been a Nazi thing where they think they've  discovered Homo God-damn superior and are on the frontline of the war for human evolution, Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon, Part II. After the postwar rush to recruit those guys to fight the Cold War, the whole thing went mainstream. So that's you. Homo Superior, or alternatively,  "life unworthy of life.' Also, because this is covered by the same "born secret" doctrine as atomic weapons, just  knowing that you inherited superpowers puts you in violation of national security, so don't be going to the media." 

 

"Homo superior?" Clarice said, sounding calm although John could hear her heart racing at the comment about inheriting. She'd need to talk about her family, after. "That's crazy!"

 

"It's not crazy," the Director said. "It's a rounding error. Forget about the mutants, species, evolution. The genetics of an intelligent species of eight billion is too complicated for molecular genetics or science fiction. Focus on what's real. There's about ten people born with our kind of superpowers in the world every year, and DARPA thinks its half that. The people who run the super powered side of national security don't need to think about Big Ideas. All they have to do is shoot two Americans a decade, all the loose ends are tied up."

 

"We don't want to be loos ends, Director McCoy. In fact, maybe I'm putting words in John's mouth, but we're fine with going on living. That's what you guys seem to be doing." 

 

Dr. McCoy smiled. "Hide and Seek doesn't go very well if you let everyone into your hiding spot. But! We can let you in. Just, our house, our rules."

 

Clarice's hand slipped into his, squeezed. Yeah, John thought, not a line to  use on a foster kid, but Dr. McCoy noticed her reaction, too. "Here are some home truths for you: Since the war, we have put together a community of 300 people, about half of them in America. There's about as many more of us out there on their own, and a lot of them are out there because they're unstable. That's it, that's all. All the baby daddies, all the single ladies, all the everybody. I don't know if either of you have done population growth equations, but it's going to take five hundred years before there's enough of us to swing a single Congressional District.  I have no idea how you keep a secret for five hundred years, but that's basically what we have to do, all the while policing our own."

 

"So now what? We go live in another dimension, or a cloaked asteroid, or something?"

 

 "No," the Director said, "This is about staying under the radar. You go live in trailer parks and and raise your kids to be plumbers and nurses, and let your neighbours think you belong to a tiny Jehovah Witness splinter group. And if you don't like it, you can go play with the sentinels."

I never really thought about the numbers like that where there are only 600-800 mutants in the world at any one time. A Phoenix or a Magneto makes the threat, but it's really WILD CARD math.

CES  

[Clonus]

1 hour ago, csyphrett said:

I never really thought about the numbers like that where there are only 600-800 mutants in the world at any one time. A Phoenix or a Magneto makes the threat, but it's really WILD CARD math.

CES  

As far as mutant social stigma goes, I've never had it without at least a hundred thousand.  Most of them unfit to be superheroes or supervillains mind you.  Glow Worm, the legless mutant who can produce a lightbulbs worth of illumination and Daddy Long Legs with the ability to extend his limbs by a couple of feet aren't going to going done in the annals of crime.  

[csyphrett]

12 hours ago, Clonus said:

As far as mutant social stigma goes, I've never had it without at least a hundred thousand.  Most of them unfit to be superheroes or supervillains mind you.  Glow Worm, the legless mutant who can produce a lightbulbs worth of illumination and Daddy Long Legs with the ability to extend his limbs by a couple of feet aren't going to going done in the annals of crime.  

That was why I was thinking Wild Card Math because most of the virus victims were Jokers, some were Deuces, and like one percent were Aces, and then however many drew the Black Queen and died.

CES

[assault]

The Wild Card virus is a nasty idea in the current world It gives masks a whole new meaning.

 

Maybe they are legally required!

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Ultimately the idea of the Hated Mutants campaign works great if you think the world is made up of oppressors and oppressed and want to play that out in your game.  Otherwise, its just an interesting one-time campaign or Convention game. Stan Lee leaned on it pretty hard, but the most acclaimed run by Claremont it only came up on occasion and was always balanced out by people who were fine with mutants.  He had some stories about mutant hate brigades, but every time he made sure there was at least one guy in a hardhat or passerby that was fine with them to show the whole world wasn't stupid like this.

[Lawnmower Boy]

It's good to see Chris responding since I posted because of his own earlier contributions to his thread. So I want to talk a bit more about that and also respond to Clonus and Csyphrett about what I think are some key issues distinguishing a "realistic" scenario and a "hyperrealistic" comic book scenario.

 

To start with, I get the sense that Chris is seeing the "Mutant idea" through a political lens, which I am not going to criticise, because it is what I do, and I'm awesome, if I don't say so myself. Chris is a creator I respect enormously with politics that are quite different from mine. Without making the politics the point I wanted to respond to him by presenting a non"woke," if not anti-woke "oppressed mutants" scenario. As presents go, this is like when your cat leaves a meadow vole at the doorstep in the morning. I brought Chris the kind of present that I like to catch, which might not be as generous as I think it is. 

 

So I'm going to start by talking about three cases of the "mutant idea" as a story of the oppressed and the oppressor which have been pretty strongly present since the creation of the franchise and which might help inform the discussion. 

 

-The first and most obvious is one that was already well established in science fiction/comic books fandom, which is the mutant as nerd. Adolescence is an alienating time for all, and some respond to it by forming found families around fandom. This can be great, and the X-Men present us with the ideal case of a basically wholesome group forming around a benevolent mentor. However, it can also be dysfunctional. Long before Gamergate, Lee and Kirby give us the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Their leader is an arrogant bully who enables the worst behaviours of the group. They include creepy and inappropriate Mastermind,  obsequious Toad, anger-management issues Quicksilver, hanging-around-with-loser-boys-because-she's-too-unassertive-for-real-friends Wanda, and eating-disordered Blob. (So not all of these things are like the others, but it was the 1960s, when no-one had much patience for "fatso.") Lee and Kirby thus carefully balance between fandom's need for a found family and the way in which these found families can impede socialisation. 

 

--The second is homosexuality, exemplified by Warren Worthington being suave, charming, successful with the girls and rich, but having to hide his wings in a nightmarish bondage harness and deny his true self, which he can only manifest, as a unique solo outing as "the Avenging Angel" demonstrates, when flying, masked, in a cruise against crime. This is not a story that is overtly about homosexuality, but homosexual readers were used to heavily coded representations in popular fiction, and may even project where it was not the original authorial intent. 

 

--The third is Jewishness. Marvel Comics, particularly in the early days, was something of a ghetto environment, and I suspect that its creators had the sense that they might have had much more successful and remunerative careers in more serious addresses along Madison Avenue had they not been Jewish. Whether or not that is the case, the fundamental fact of Jewish life is that the Cossacks are always out there. Oppression doesn't get old. It might be in abeyance now, but it might, indeed, inevitably will, come back at some point in the future. When that happens, chances are that fair weather friends will melt away and the community will face its oppressors alone. 

 

This "eternal Jewishness," to borrow an anti-Semitic trope, is also  my answer to Clonus and Cysphrett, who posit that some much larger number of mutants makes for a different story than the starkly small community that I posited in my vignette. It doesn't, and that's why I  turned to these very small numbers. Because whether there are hundreds of mutants or hundreds of thousands, human demographics still change over generational timeframes. The demographics, whether it be the number of mutant voters or soldiers, are fixed in a timeframe that spans multiple human lives. Women have kept voting rights, and gay people people will probably keep marriage rights, because there were and are a lot of them and always will be. Once the barriers in the way of effective political action fell, there was no way to restore them. In contrast, the basic premise behind the "mutant idea" is that there aren't many mutants. In the hyperrealistic world of comics, that can change overnight. In the real world, it will only happen over a millennial timescale. If you couldn't fight the Cossacks last week, you won't be able to fight them in your grandchildren's time. That is five hundred years out, and meanwhile you can only come out once. 

 

In recent times we have been telling gay people that they can come out and express themselves because "things are getting better." Can we say that to John Proudstar and Clarice Ferguson. I don't think we can. Clarice and John's experience with "the Cossacks" is very limited. They were arrested by a group of agents on a surveillance shakeout, and instead of being taken in to be booked (which DARPA agents can't actually do, because they don't have police powers), they're driven out to the dump, where the agents try to execute them. Does this mean that all DARPA agents would make the same choice? By no means! I recommend that fine recent documentary, Logan, to get some insight into the particular DARPA agents who were surveilling Laura Kinney. They are associated with a project to clone new genetic individuals from the genetic material of superpowered mutants. They believed that "uncontrolled mutancy" is obsolete, and that it is dangerous. A mutant that simply comes into their powers, unsupervised, out in the wild, is probably going to leave a trail of bodies behind them until they are run down by the law. They might even assuage their conscience by telling themselves that the clones of John and Clarice that they will create will be John and Clarice, only better brought up and benevolently supervised so that they can actualise themselves as people whilst all the while punching the faces of America's enemies. 

 

Other DARPA agents probably don't believe that, but they're not the ones that John and Clarice ran into. Who knows, over five hundred years, what kind of people that their descendants will run into? Remember that the basic idea here is that science is vaguely aware that there are a variety of genes out there that lead to children being born Inhumans, "X-people," Eternals, Deviants, and who knows what else besides? The only people who talk about "species" and "Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon" are Nazis and people with a soft spot for Nazi ideas. You could easily come to the conclusion that the very idea of "X-people"  self-identifying as a community is a mistake, that they should be "assimilated." The kill-them-and-clone-them model of assimilation is just one way that could go wrong. How do  you, as a young mutant parent, presume to make the choice to abandon the protection of secrecy and denial, knowing that you are making that choice for five centuries of descendants and exposing them to the threat of that? 

 

To check in with my vignette, in the fifteen years since John Proudstar and Clarice Ferguson found the X-Men, they have married, got community college educations, and have had four children. They live in a small house in a rapidly-depopulating inner suburb of a rapidly-depopulating west New York former industrial town, surrounded by former plant workers, trapped in homes steadily losing value and living on disability; and "people with issues." No-one around them is surprised, if they have the energy to even notice, that the family keeps to itself and its weird little church community. Probably if anyone did notice, they'd wonder why John and Clarice weren't more worried by "urban crime." John and Clarice live there, they tell anyone who does ask, because their church doesn't believe in mortgages. In much the same way, John is an independent contractor while Clarice prefers the evening and night shifts, after hospital admin has gone home. Their two youngest children are still at the unlicensed church-run daycare, notwithstanding that it is a sixty mile drive to drop them off. The eldest is in public school and very rapidly approaching graduation from Grade 7, which is when, according to church tenets, believers become adults and "put away childish things" by going into homeschooling. The second eldest is in Grade 4 and has few school friends due to the way that the church forbids participation in gentile holidays like Christmas and Halloween, and the fact that church children are removed from school for weeks at time for church festivals, and then sent to summer school together to make up for it. (Not that there are many church children, and in particular many church children in the same school district, never mind school.)   

 

The church also doesn't believe in student loans. Or credit cards, car loans, Mexican vacations. Or iTune accounts, for that matter. Members will tell you, "At least we're fine with coffee," but it is hard to tell if that's a joke, especially when so many of the older member of the church are downright scary to be around. If you were to somehow break through little James Proudstar's peer-ridicule-fed reserve about his religion, he'd tell you a bizarre story about how the head of their cult is a living Jesus who is actually the clone of humanity's saviour against the Antichrist, created in an alternate dimension. Teachers who have broken through are only really impressed by the fact that the church is headed by a living Jesus, the third generation of living Saviour from the founder of the cult, the independently-wealthy founder and director of a successful private psychiatric hospital in Lake Placid. This  just goes to show about how psychologists are crazier than their patients. (Push "Laugh" button on soundtrack machine.)  It's possible that the original family fortune is still being spent to subsidise church activities, although this is not obvious from his "hippie Jesus" lifestyle, which consists of wandering around Lake Placid in a Nehru jacket when taking a very occasional break from running a successful organic apple orchard on the family estate. However, sales of "cold pressed apple cider" aside, it is possible that the church is just a scheme to extract the heavy tithes that members like Clarice and John claim to pay.

 

Say the two or three teachers who care. It's not like anyone else is paying attention, after all, except to ridicule this unusual lot of "Jesus freaks." 

 

 

[Clonus]

On 12/11/2021 at 12:58 AM, Mick Price said:

 

But that doesn't explain why non-mutant supers aren't hated.  They aren't artificially separated by anyone. The reasons to fear mutants apply to them as well. Saying "don't waste your time trying to explain it" is a cop-out.  

 

Well it's kind of an overstatement to say that that non-mutant supers aren't hated.  "Protagonist must face hostility from the public and government" is a recurrent theme throughout Marvel in general.  

[csyphrett]

On 1/9/2022 at 1:37 PM, Clonus said:

 

Well it's kind of an overstatement to say that that non-mutant supers aren't hated.  "Protagonist must face hostility from the public and government" is a recurrent theme throughout Marvel in general.  

I think Clonus is right about this. I'm not much of a comicbook reader these days, but JLAvengers had a crowd attack the Flash because he was trying to help a monstrous mutant that had just activated (I don't know if that's the right word but I'm going with it) and the Avengers are taken aback with the way the JLA and various DC heroes and teams are regarded as celebrities and bright lights especially with the Flash Museum.

CES 

[csyphrett]

I had a big reply to your post LB where I stated that numbers would cause problems and everything but I closed the thread before I could submit it like an idiot. The short version is basically the more mutants around like Magneto, the more the government will want to do things. 500 mutants just doesn't matter when the percentage has always been minor monster with powers at the bottom and the most numerous, and people like the X-men and their enemies have been the least numerous.

 

I think civil unrest would end with rights extended to mutants, and things would move toward a Federation type society based on mutant tech and space exploration. Basically an uplift would occur.

 

But I could also see it going the other way where the government/maybe all governments just cracked down on every mutant in sight which would cause a lot of destruction before things ended one way or the other.

CES