[X-Men] the reason why most of people in Marvel Comics hate mutants because they think mutants are weird and dangerous with their super powers; but I think there is another reason why mutants are hated, is because some of normal people are jealous with them for having super powers. Am I correct? : r/AskScienceFiction Skip to main content

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**It's like Ask Science, but all questions and answers are written with answers gleaned from the universe itself.** Use in-universe knowledge, rules, and common sense to answer the questions. Or as **fanlore.org** calls it [Watsonian, not a Doylist point of view](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Watsonian_vs._Doylist)


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[X-Men] the reason why most of people in Marvel Comics hate mutants because they think mutants are weird and dangerous with their super powers; but I think there is another reason why mutants are hated, is because some of normal people are jealous with them for having super powers. Am I correct?

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I'm pretty sure most of the hate nowadays is because they consistently cause a lot of destruction.

Avengers vs X-Men wasn't a good look

u/Warp-Spazm avatar

I mean, wouldn't you be?

u/ACertainMagicalSpade avatar

Of course, IRL Plenty of people are jealous of much less impressive things then telekinesis.

From a average person's pov they see someone born with magic powers, they didn't earn them.

 How unfair etc.

It's always a collection of reasons.

Dangerous is true, if Cyclops suddenly got his powers in the middle of school, he would've destroyed the school.

Jealously can also be a apart of it, but it's a weaker excuse. After all there are plenty of superheroes aside from the X-Men that have powers and use the publicly that aren't hated, people don't hate on the Fantastic Four, even though the have powers which they even got by accident.

Well, shortly put, I don't think you are correct. There are plenty of super heroes with super powers that people don't hate. With your logic they should.

At any rate, people hate mutants because they're different. We can get in a lot more detail with how this psychological mechanism works, but that's the bottom line really. If someone is different from us, we tend to perceive them as one of THEM, not as one of US and due to evolutionary reasons we trust THEM less than we trust US. Your mind can do all kind of mental judo with this, and you can easily find examples and evidence why you should think your view is logical and just, but the bottom line is that your brain is already seeing THEM as potential threats and that colours everything you think or do.

I don't kmow if it's explored that much in the comics but it would definitely be a factor. It pisses me off that I haven't seen it explored more.

The reason for that not being explored may be because it was a metaphor for racism? People belonging to a real-life privileged group are probably not exactly jealous of the struggles of people belonging to a marginalized group.

Yeah, that's definitely the reason which makes it a very flawed metaphor. Using super cool powers as stand in for real life marginalized groups is simply stupid. Many mutants are objectively better than normal people.

u/Inkthinker avatar

Jealous of their struggles, no… jealous of their perceived, stereotyped advantages, though, maybe.

“I could do XYZ too, if I was just naturally smarter or stronger like those people. They think they’re so much better’n us! Let’s go burn their houses down!”

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Most of the mutant powers are dangerous and people get killed a lot, kids especially. Nothing like a 13 year old suddenly going nuclear in math class

u/Takseen avatar

Some jealousy, yes.

And also a fear that mutants will replace humans. Superman can't do that since he's only 1 man and his planet is gone so there won't be many more coming. But if thousands or millions of Kryptonians showed up, and some of them had explicitly supremacist goals like Magneto or Sinister, there would be a lot of anti Kryptonian sentiment.

Magneto has gone back and forth between wanting to rule over humans vs just having a separate nation for mutants. Sinister wants to do some mutant eugenics to accelerate the takeover. Having mutant powers does seem to produce a disproportionately high number of evil people, or at least makes their goals easier to achieve

Mutants are a new species, homo superior. Many homo sapiens think they're going to suffer the same faith as all those species homo sapiens replaced. I imagine if those same homo sapiens were homo superior, they'd have a lot less hate. So, I guess you could put a lot of it down to an element of jealousy. And so many other things too. It's a classic tale of people getting "othered" etc.

Also. Hatred and bigotry don't need logic. Some people just hate and that is a group that can be targeted

u/Jaded_Taste6685 avatar

I’m sure jealousy is part of it, but the X-Men comics in particular portray mutations as a life-ruining burden. If you have powers, you’re basically guaranteed to become a superhero or a supervillain. A normal life really isn’t an option, outside of a very few specific cases. Someone is pretty much always going to exploit your powers. That’s why jealousy is one of the lesser reasons for anti-mutant sentiment.

This is one of those questions that get brought up a lot here so a lot of people have provided really good answers before. I’ll try my best to list them down here. This is by no means an exhaustive list, please add more if you can

  1. ⁠⁠Mutants represent the flourishing of a new species and the extinction of the old one. People get concerned that the mutants will push humanity to extinction whether they mean to or not and that drives people on edge.

  2. ⁠⁠There are several mutant groups that are dedicated to enslaving or causing whole sale genocide of humans. Similar to terrorist cells acting under national or religious radicalism, their actions darken the perception of the entire group, regardless of whether or not the majority of mutants denounce their actions

  3. ⁠⁠One of said mutant groups was lead by a man (magneto) who now works with the X-men. It’s hard to take the X-men’s message of peace and coexistence seriously when the guy responsible for all the plans that both the Brotherhood of mutants and the Acolytes committed is now working with them. Ditto with Emma Frost. She was a high level leader of the hellfire club and she’s now LITERALLY in bed with the leader of the Xmen.

  4. ⁠⁠Mutants are a convenient scapegoat for ambitious politicians who want to enact draconian laws. Prior to civil war, it was hard to make any legislation controlling super heroes. The public support of them was too high. The average joe likes the avengers and the fantastic four. Any politician who went after Captain America was committing career suicide. But this wasn’t true with mutants. Mutants are a general group with a very clear baseline establishing who’s on and who’s out. Plus majority of them aren’t heroes and some of them are actually villains so going after them and rallying voters against them is much more expedient

  5. ⁠⁠At the end of the day, the X-men aren’t all that great in assimilating mutants with the rest of the world. They protect humans and talk about coexistence but their leader has on several occasions manipulated the minds of both allies and enemies. One of their core members was on multiple occasions possessed by a psychotic cosmic entity that eats stars. And post house of m/ schism, the x men adopted a more militant stance, making them very unpopular to even fellow heroes. Then there’s Krakoa but we’ll get to that

  6. ⁠⁠Sublime, an immortal super intelligent bacteria from the Stone Age has been mind controlling humans for centuries to hate mutants since mutants are immune to its abilities

  7. ⁠⁠Apocalypse, a powerful mutant despot who’s been around since Egyptian times, has been subtly manipulating super powers in order to incite a war where mutants would establish their dominance on the planet.

  8. ⁠⁠New developments regarding the Krakoa era storyline. Let’s just say gathering all the mutants (many of whom were former villains including the aforementioned apocalypse) into one island, establishing a mutant nation, softly threatening the UN to accepting them, alienating their former heroic allies, promoting (whether intentionally or unintentionally) segregationist ideology, Creating a disturbing post death culture, and gleefully rubbing it in to human kind that mutants are superior, had earned them a lot of detractors, even from former supporters.

  9. ⁠Many mutants are legitimately dangerous even if they’re well meaning. Mutants first manifest their powers after a traumatic incident. This means there are many many stories of civilians dying when a mutant first manifests. This makes more and more people in favor of mutant registration.

  10. Let’s be brutally honest. The X-men, what is supposed to be the best of the best in mutant kind, what’s supposed to get people on their side, are a mess and probably shouldn’t be used as role models in anything, be it heroism, family, love, etc. they try their best, which is the best that we can ask for, but there are other heroes and super powered groups out there with much less baggage.

  11. ⁠⁠Hey man it’s racism, who said it had to make sense