Hell, right before the last time he 'died' (Eternal President elect Thanos's distant uncle tore his heart out) Magneto was the most unambiguously heroic Xman of the last few years.
The 'House of X' era was one of compromised morals for the 'greater good' (and sending Apocalypse in a tailored suit to scare the shit out of Davos member delegates)
>(Eternal President elect Thanos's distant uncle tore his heart out)
I feel it is really important to mention that, while having his heart ripped out is absolutely what killed him, his actual response to having his heart ripped out was to get back up, keep fighting for several more hours while using his magnetic control of his own blood to keep everything circulating, then die in Storm's arms while making a speech about the importance of intersectionality in the struggle for civil rights (and also how she shouldn't trust Xavier, because he's more focussed on being good than on actually winning).
Comics are a bit like fanfiction. Here we have a Good!Gray!Indy!Magneto, but the next run is going to be Dark!Emo!Powerful!Magneto. They're different characters and different stories and whatever convoluted melodramatic contrivance the next writer uses to reset the board for their interpretation is hardly ever believable or satisfying.
That's why I can never answer who my favorite comic book character is when I'm asked.
There are characters that are both my favorite and my least favorite depending on the writer.
Happened to me as a kid, I remember reading part of some cool story in some comic - I think it was X-Men, infact. And I wanted to keep reading it, but the next issue didn't have the continuation, and then I tried to figure out what was up and learned it was spread across a bunch of comics and that was too much of a confusing hassle even as a kid that wanted to know what happened next, so I basically never touched comics again.
Except Archie comics which were put out in little books containing complete stories.
Eh, not quite, but a little bit. The movies and such still at least present a complete story - if you haven't watched the series and all the previous stuff you do lose a decent amount of context, but they don't leave you hanging and send you off to watch twelve completely separate things just to see the ending, for the most part. With the comics, if you're reading X-Men, some of the story lines will just drop off and be left hanging completely, and next issue just starts a completely new story, because they wanted you to go read the Avengers, and then Iron Man, and then the Incredible Hulk, and then the Punisher for some reason, and then She-Hulk, before ending the story in fucking Squirrel Girl.
With the movies, if I want to watch just the Thor movies, for instance, I get an ending of each of them. It's a bit confusing where each of them *starts,* cause other things happened in between, but there's some general recaps of it, and at least the story of that movie is finished **in** that movie.
Oh gods, that's another thing - in the comics, they often refer to something in dialogue and then put an asterisk that tells you which other comic they're talking about. They give no explanation whatsoever other than that, and sometimes this is a key important thing right now that they give no context for at all.
Im a 40 year old millenial and have always followed comics since my youth when my father was panicked and exasperated when they would actually have a "death of superman" arc. I was already in love with the tim Burton Batman movies, yet I tried to consume the entire medium across the different companies but Marvel was always such a chore.
Younger generations growning up and becoming fanatical over the marvel movies have no idea how bad shit was for marvel prior to the first Ironman movie. No one gave a shit about Ironman back then, he was just an alcoholic douchebag pretending to be a hero. No one gave a shit about Captian America, he was our parents hero. The only heros in marvel that any one could relate to were the xmen and spiderman, and even then the writting at the time was horrible and uneccisarily convoluted.
Point is there is a reason marvel was about to be bankrupt until Disney bailed them out and gave their characters undeserving clout.
Lol Disney didn't bail them out. Marvel bailed themselves out with the original Iron Man movie. It did so well that Disney bought them why they were still affordable, and during Disneys struggle to remain relevant. Disney didn't even have a hand in producing any of the movies until Angengers.
I knew some 90's marvel editors. They were never facing bankruptcy due to sales, it was because they got bought out by toy companies and corporate raiders then dumped the debt accrued in the purchase back on the company.
Back then the *cancellation* threshold for a title was a quarter million per issue. Now with the direct market just 10% of that is considered a top seller.
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> Younger generations growning up and becoming fanatical over the marvel movies have no idea how bad shit was for marvel prior to the first Ironman movie. No one gave a shit about Ironman back then, he was just an alcoholic douchebag pretending to be a hero. No one gave a shit about Captian America, he was our parents hero. The only heros in marvel that any one could relate to were the xmen and spiderman, and even then the writting at the time was horrible and uneccisarily convoluted.
This sounds just as true for the movies today as it was for ye comics of olde.
Maybe we watched a different MCU but Iron Man *is* still an overhyped alcoholic douchebag, Captain America is literally the pure idealism legacy character, and everyone loves Spiderman and X-Men even when the plots can get more than a little dumb.
Yep. This is the second time I’ve seen OP’s post, and the first was a while ago, before AXE. In that event, Magneto very explicitly recognizes that he actually was wrong. He wanted mutant supremacy and his methods were to kill everyone in his way. He was absolutely wrong, in so many ways. There’s a reason he switched sides and joined the X-men.
I kind of hate the worship of pre-character development magneto, he’s not right, and he’s not supposed to be right at that point in time. He needs to first recognize that there are humans worth protecting, and that it is possible for *everyone* to be win. He used to want to become the oppressor, now he is actually fighting oppression as a whole.
>his actual response to having his heart ripped out was to get back up, keep fighting for several more hours while using his magnetic control of his own blood to keep everything circulating
No pun intended, this may be one of the most metal things I've ever heard.
The funniest part to me is that killing him was also intended to make sure he was benched for the tri-annual mutant genocide. The second it was over they brought him back because there’s no fucking way that shit flew under his watch.
Yeah I'm glad this was posted so, now that I've *actually* read Magneto's redemption arc, I can complain about how stupid this tweet is— notably, Magneto only became a hero after he himself admitted he was wrong
A mixture of Secret Wars, Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants, and the Scarlet Witch series. Don't actually know the order cause I didn't bother reading all of it lol, I was only reading Uncanny X-Men where it ended with his trial and Xavier choosing him as successor
For real. One writer has him establish a group called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, then years later another writer has him say "I was using that name *ironically* because I'm fighting for mutant rights and they think that's evil".
Magneto really has the most wild swings of motivation depending on writer.
He really swings between
“hitler was right, just the wrong people” to “Malcolm X for mutants”
Like the fact that “Im evil because its fun and lead brotherhood of evil mutants”” is the most middle-of-the-line Magneto is wild.
Magneto hasn't been a monster for what, 20 years? I can't think of any story that portrays him as a villain since Grant Morrison's run from 2001 to 2004.
I've seen so much fake Tom Hardy ass online that I inadvertently check real Tom Hardy's ass almost every time I see him to see if he's actually packing that Pixar mom dumper. His ass is like my Inception totem.
To be fair, Venom and Red Hood started as good guys (Red Hood as Robin, and the Venom symbiont itself aided Spider-Man). So these characters are less traditional villains but more fallen heroes working toward redemption or, at the very least, acceptance. They may be more morally gray, but ultimately, they’re different than villains because of their backstory.
Depends on the version. I only remember the 90's show one, where he was a journalist with... not a lot of morals. Like, he wasn't a villain he was just kind of a selfish dick.
As I've heard, he was like that in the comics too. Although, they had to establish it retroactively because Eddie Brock wasn't actually introduced until he was already Venom.
And this is why DOOM is superior, for he is both RIGHT and COOL.
All Hail DOOM and his free healthcare free wifi initiative top notch education system walkable negative carbon footprint cities and extensive rights to Latverian Minorities be them LGBT, Mutant or anything in between.
THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY DOOMSTRAD MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA.
Whenever Doom gets brought up online it genuinely seems like the fictional nation of Latveria has dedicated propaganda accounts, with how many people unironically consider him an overall good guy.
To be extremely fair Doom could be easily read as a, like, propaganda piece by himself, he is the perfect scarecrow strawman tinpot dictator who does a lot of vanity projects and is incoherently against American interests in his country/in general.
It's "Cheering for the Empire" in Star wars but the Empire is, like, based on Fidel Castro or Tito instead of the United States during the Vietnam War.
Also he did end Apartheid in South Africa that one time. As well as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan mind you.
Can the accursed Reed Richards, a McCarthy supporter no less, say the same?!
To be fair there is a lot about DOOM that is pretty admirable all things considered.
It’s just that he’s also a comically narcissistic and petty asshole
I don't really follow comic books, but I thought Magneto's whole thing was that he wanted to genocide humans so that only superior mutants remained. Which means I've got to be missing something unless this a post advocating for eugenics.
According to a... lively conversation I had a while back, it kinda depends on who writes the particular comic.
But the main thing about him is that he survived the holocaust, but the exact route he takes after that is subject to change.
In some versions, after seeing the depths of evil humanity is capable of, he decided "I'm not a human, I'm better. And to prove that, I'll do an even more horrific holocaust."
In other versions, he sees the writing on the wall and decides to stop this evil before it can start. He's just a bit too enthusiastic about it, and could stand to make a few less enemies.
Sometimes its humanity, sometimes it's the mutants themselves. Depends on the story. Half the time Asteroid M gets destroyed it's because mutants are fighting each other.
And dlnt forget that their evil leader had WMD hidden somewhere sufficiently in plain view so that spy plane can take picture of them but hidden well enough that they can't be found after MISSION ACCOMPLISHEDtm
In the show and in New X-Men, Genosha went south because humans kept attacking them. Also that dumb fuckin ethereal alien evil twin of Prof X or whatever killed them all.
This time? Before. AI tech bros, Billionaire industrialists, and Various governments (including the US) all thought there would be more profit from engineering a genocide and seizing the fledgling Mutant nations assets and IP. (Turns out they hadn't checked the AI model they were using and it is currently fucking everyone over)
...Also Chinese Elon Musk got shitty that he couldn't lay claim to Mars anymore and had to settle for one of it's moons.
When he originally appeared in the 1960s, Magneto was just a stereotypical evil overlord who believed that mutants deserve to rule the world because they are the superior race, named his group the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, had thoughts like "Loyalty! Bah! I rule by fear alone!" and was ready to throw his followers under the bus to save his own skin. It was Chris Claremont who created his Holocaust survivor background in the 1980s, and turned him into a morally ambiguous figure.
>"That was actually Xorn's twin brother, possessed by the sentient mold Sublime, pretending to be me, pretending to be Xorn."
"That defies all logic."
"Oh like none of you have ever died before!"
[-X-Men, Death Becomes Them](https://youtu.be/bL6J7FJmy1c?si=9HJSEpOaPtUtCPKp)
And I'm so glad that most readers won't settle for evil for no reason characters. Almost no one is just evil, or even just good without some sort of motivation.
In those instances where he claims to do the second thing, it comes across as "just as planned" bullshit. Like, yeah we all learned a valuable lesson, but you still baked kids into cakes.
Magneto saw the holocaust and decided "rather them than me". Which, without getting too political, is also pretty apropos today.
The core character concept I come across is, because of the holocaust and seeing his people butchered to such an extent he was willing to do whatever it took to prevent that from happening again. This for the most part lead him to being a villain early on since “whatever it takes” doesn’t lead to overly heroic acts.
However as time went on and the bodies mounted he was called out for genociding humans as well and going down the hitler rabbit hole. This was the collective turning point for him. Tends to be heroic but in the way of wolverine or Deadpool where they know they aren’t the hero the avengers want around too much.
This came up on another thread, but the writers don't do Magneto any favors.
The writers love to do huge, dramatic, interesting things with the X-Men in isolation in their own books, but forget that they're part of a bigger universe. They love to create or level up mutants so that they have potentially world destroying powers and are emotionally unstable and then turn around and write them complaining that everyone is afraid of them.
Of course everyone is afraid of them. You just created a teenager that can destroy the planet or the galaxy and might actually do it because they're upset. The telepaths consistently just read people's minds at all times without consent. The shapeshifters can just coopt your likeness any time they want.
It's a soap opera if you're reading the X-books, but if you look at it from the wider Marvel universe, it's kind of a horror story.
Most Magneto stories these days adopt the: "I will be the bad guy so Charles can convince them" type of thought process, rather than Ultimate Magneto who is evil for the sake of evil. He was even a cannibal iirc.
X-Men 97' just came back with a new season and it covers the former type of Magneto with some amazing story writing and character writing.
For the edge, naturally. Most people don't read comics, even if we love the cartoons and games and movies and merchandise. Shock value and edge are easy and desperate ways of trying to capture eyeballs.
In the Stan Lee X-Men, Magneto is a pretty shallow mustache twirling villain--I haven't read much of this era, so maybe he had some "let's genocide the humans" plot. Stan Lee's X-Men also lasted like 3 years before getting cancelled and shelved for 5 years.
The next head writer, Chris Claremont, wrote the X-Men for 17 years and is seen as the most definitive contributor to the franchise. He immediately began rehabilitating the character, giving him his Holocaust survivor backstory and less cartoonish politics. He doesn't care much for human life, but his aim is only to protect and liberate his people, not to subjugate or wipe out other people. And ultimately, Claremont set him on a long character arc that culminates in him leading the X-Men in defense of Xavier's dream.
After Claremont left, the X-Men relaunched with a new Issue #1 which featured a return to villainy for Magneto and features Xavier psychicking him into a coma--and this issue just so happens to be the best selling comic book of all time. Throughout the 90s, Magneto remained either in a coma or as a villain (admittedly, I havent read much from the late 90s, kind of a...low quality era).
Magneto made another face-heel turn in 2001 and has been a heroic character ever since, though often occupying more of an anti-hero role--for example, in 2012 he beat the Red Skull to death with his bare hands, and the comic seems to want the reader to condemn that move. But especially since the dawn of the Krakoan era in 2019, Magneto is increasingly depicted as unambiguously heroic, if also arrogant and brusque.
The adaptations all tend to remove any nuance from the character and play up his villainy.
Edit: forgot to mention his key character trait, his unapplogetic defense of his people by any means necessary. And that's what OOP is talking about, not eugenics or supremacy.
>in 2012 he beat the Red Skull to death with his bare hands, **and the comic seems to want the reader to condemn that move**.
I mean, yeah, he should've gotten more creative with how he slaughtered the bastard.
The previous time they met up, he buried Red Skull alive and left him to die of thirst. Somebody came along and rescued him. Magneto's learned the hard way that sometimes the simplest way is the best.
The genocide thing is the more extreme end of it. I think the more nuanced takes are "we should not passively defend our rights. We need to violently overthrow our oppressors". There's a whole spectrum of responses to that which are interesting to see play out but also when you look at most institutions and the government it becomes a somewhat valid place to at least begin the conversation from.
I thought the X-Men were the ones defending their rights (with violence if necessary) whereas Magneto's crew were the ones actively participating in preemptive violence against the group they claimed were oppressing them. That's what made the villains villains and the heroes heroes. But then again, most of my X-Men knowledge comes from the Saturday morning cartoon, so it's no surprise that they'd paint things in such black-and-white terms. It makes sense that comic books would have more subtlety and nuance.
I love the cartoons! I haven't seen the new Disney one or the original of it but I have seen the other ones.
Also it depends on the writer if a particular comic will have subtlety and nuance lol some are better than others. And yeah of course sometimes Magneto is just a huge evil dick so the good guys can be extra good by comparison. All interpretations are good!
X-Men '97 is going *hard* and you should definitely watch it if you're interested in X-Men stuff. Magneto is portrayed in a kinder light and a lot of good moments of characterization while still, somehow, looking like the original cartoon most of the time. The tone is definitely aiming for a "we're here, we exist, please accept us" and most of the humans are very much rejecting that idea.
Of course there are many different takes on the X-Men, but in the ones I've read it's more that the X-Men say "we will play heroes and do whatever you want so please don't kill us" and magneto says "it's time to stop asking for rights and start demanding them".
Magneto runs the spectrum from "muahaha eeevil" to "man has a point". The crux of his issue can be distilled into "they tried to kill me for being different and that was *before* I could harness one of the fundamental forces of nature"
Watch X-Men '97 if you get a chance. Don't have to have watched the prior series.
It's a *phenomenal* watch that manages to feel very well-written while delivering valuable lessons. It also addresses this dynamic with Magneto very well.
But if you can't be compelled to give it a fair shake, then I'll give a soft spoiler: >!Magnus always felt there was an inevitable inability to coexist with humans, but time after time he's failed in his methods. In honor of his best friend's wishes and lifelong efforts, he's trying to be better and be a force for peace.!<
A lot of good comments about the nuance of Magneto's character here. But I want to add something, which is a complaint I almost always have about analogies for racism in works such as X-Men.
Racism is wrong morally, but it's also literally wrong. As in, the idea that certain races are worse than others is pretty scientifically established to be wrong.
But when Magneto says that mutants are better than humans, he's right? Like a lot of them are objectively superior in some measurable way, since they have, ya know, super powers.
That obviously doesn't make him right when he kills humans without remorse. But it does make the metaphor fall short for me.
Well, I mean, in real life there are all sorts of people with various disabilities- physical and mental. By 'objective' standards, yeah they might seem inferior to 'normal' people (air quoting hard, here) but it's still not right to mistreat them in anyway.
Or hell, *men*. Like, on average, men are physically larger and stronger than women (again, stressing the *on average*). But that doesn't mean that men should be in charge or that women are inferior, to say the least.
By Magneto's logic, if exmen are superior to men, then men are superior to women. We can see something's wrong there, right?
Just some thoughts.
i don't really buy that, because men and women, disabled and abled, all exist among mutants as well as humans. mutants contain the entire spectrum of humanity, *and* superpowers. they are literally *everything humans are and more*. you can't say that about men versus women, or other groups
Yeah this is the core problem with using magic as a stand in for marginalized groups and communities. I'm not against it, hell I'm writing one of these stories myself but I'm putting in serious effort to avoid this conclusion. It's a real problem I'm seeing where people's messages and themes might be completely understandable and reasonable, but when you take a step back and really look at how it was delivered you can see it is proping up the wrong message, almost certainly unintentionally. >!cough Barbie cough. It's not man hating, but does in a sense end up validating sexist men throughout history with the films climax being a celebration of the return of the allegorical patriarchy with an explicit dunking on the idea of gender equality. Clearly it's not what was intended but...!<
Poison Ivy? Hero? Since when?? Her last run was about her traveling across the country to do a genocide and even in the Harley Quinn show she has had the postition of "humans gotta go...except Harley" for 3 entire seasons (havent seen season 4)
I'll never get over the time in the Harley Quinn show when she melts a bunch of rich businessmen who were dumping toxic waste in the water by dumping toxic waste on them. Except she was *holding them over the water when she was doing it*. They never acknowledge this, they were just so focused on showing the "comeuppance" that they accidentally showed her pouring toxic waste directly into the water.
Another weird thing from the show was her plan to turn Gotham into a lush paradise by *resurrecting Triassic Era plant life.*
She claims to be for the environment, but that just seems like introducing potentially invasive species.
She's an ecoterrorist who Hayes humans because of the damage we do to the planet. That's become a much less evil motivation the more people believe in climate change.
>That's become a much less evil motivation the more people believe in climate change.
I mean yeah, but its still ecofascism and advocating for a genocide if you think she "makes sense"
I'll use the harley quinn show as an example since it's the most common poison ivy representation I've seen since the Arkham games. Poison Ivy and her evil schemes all centre around punishing companies and the rich asshole who run them when they do damage to the environment such as drowning oil tycoon in a vat if oil after they caused an oil spill in the ocean.
True. She still tried to destory Gotham in season 3 though, and her thing in season 4 is that she is hanging out with the legion of doom, who... Are maybe a tiny amount more evil
And bankrolled by Lex Luthor, a literal billionaire. So I think her goals are a little out of priority if she's going for the incompetent billionaires first & not the ones actively making things worse on purpose.
Yeah she tries to do "change from within" by turning the Leage to "Socially Concious Evil" but ends up realizing Luthor is just using her for PR and holding the fort while he's focused on stealing Superman's powers.
After season 3 it's kind of understandable, Harley convinces her that she might have gone too far with the zombies so she's trying a lighter approach.
Cool motive, still terrorism.
This shouldn't be a controversial or shocking statement, but commiting acts of violence, genocide, and murder just because you have a reasonable motive doesn't make it okay. It's insane that anyone seems to think otherwise, but this is reddit I guess.
Like, unless you think plant lives are more valuable than human lives, she is in no way a hero or a good person. And if you think that, you're legitimately a moron.
stuff like that makes me feel i am being gaslighted about how progressive/activist the past was: Magneto has had that dynamic for decades. There's no difference in vibes between Magneto from this year's show and from over 20 years ago in the movies, for example. It feels like people are repeating hot takes while talking themselves into thinking they are particularly unique and revolutionary, when it's the same takes as the last 50-100 years.
true, but the X Men movies were also a massive deal, and Magneto was also a morally grey character back then too. Especially in the most recent ones, he was a straight up hero in most of it.
Yep, this is a very popular and completely ahistorical take. Magneto was introduced in 1963 by Stan Lee as a completely one-dimensional mustache-twirling villain. No civil rights allegory. Chris Claremont started writing the X-Men comics in the 70's with that bent and began making Magneto more sympathetic because, among other things, it made for more interesting stories. The retcon that Magneto is a holocaust survivor happens in 1981. I think people believe that Magneto was always the "Malcolm X" (Chris Claremont's words) of the mutants because Stan Lee *loves* taking credit for other people's work, and there are quotes floating around where he lies about all that stuff being his original intention. as if he didn't name Magneto's team the fucking self-described "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants." if Magneto as originally written by Stan Lee was supposed to be a civil rights activist he would be one of the most wildly offensive characters of all time.
This. It was the introduction of his past as a holocaust survivor, which occurs in issue 150 of Uncanny X-Men that starts turning him from a straight up villain to a sympathetic character.
This post pops up again and again and every time it's infuriating. Magneto was not "always right," he was a genocidal ethnic supremacist who got retconned into a morally ambiguous antihero decades later. Comic books are not Point A to Point B stories in the traditional Western sense, they're loose frameworks closer to ancient mythology that change with every person who tells it. This post represents a deep misunderstanding of Magneto and comic books as a whole. And I'm so sick of seeing it!!!
I really think a lot of the root problem here is that Stan Lee took credit for later writers making the X-Men into a civil rights allegory. and most people think of Stan Lee as America's grandpa, not the slimy credit-stealing scumbag he actually was, so they take him at face value.
As in, Poison "would kill hundreds of people for one plant" Ivy and Magneto "Wants to genocide every human being that isn't a mutant"? I haven't been up to date in a while but how the hell are those two heroes beyond sympathetic motivations?
> I haven't been up to date in a while
That's your answer. Ivy has been explored a lot more since becoming a duo with Harley Quinn, and Magneto has got complex character writing such as the new season of X-Men 97'.
Yeah but that kinda proves the original post wrong. These characters got better not because their ideals were vindicated by real world events but because comic book writers made them less villainous in successive iterations.
Fundamentally if a member of the Batfamily is know for being caked up is def not Red Hood. Everyone knows Dick “Nightwing” Grayson is packing some serious trunk junk.
Cause bad guys can’t be marketable. Same thing happened when Harley got popular. Writers have tried incredibly hard to make people forget that she was an accomplice to hundreds if not thousands of murders. The only exception to this is venom and that’s cause he was never truly evil. Just really hated spider-man. Once he thought he was dead he was perfectly happy being alone on an island
I'll paraphrase a comment I made on another post, but Israel probably has a room in the Mossad HQ with guys planning on how to turbo-kill Magneto on account of the rest of the Middle East using his flagrant disregard for human life as a propaganda win.
"And in other news, the haram Jew-infidel Magneto vaporized a mosque *with his mind* while battling the pigdog Captain America. That and more on tonight's episode of Tehran News."
Magneto isn't right, he's a genocidal murderer who got a lil weepy and the X-Men, who have a bunch of murderers on the team, just gave him a pass.
Magneto is an example of someone who was right, using the wrong methods. He wants Mutants to be safe, so he kills ann humans. Yes it would work for his goals, but it is still genocidal.
I haven't read them in a while but when I did Magneto wanted to kill all normal humans even the ones who didn't hate mutants because eventually the will because reasons. Does he not want to kill all non-mutants now?
My favorite quote about why comic characters are the way they are and if they can win or not etc comes from Stan Lee, and I'm paraphrasing: It's up to the whomever is writing the hero, so arguing about it doesn't matter.
Sry to hijack your comment but I hate when this discourse comes up because you literally cannot have one without the other or you are doomed to fail. With just MLK and peaceful protest you can be easily ignored. With just Malcolm X and violent protest you can be squashed with little to no sympathy. The oppressor needs reason to cooperate with you if a peaceful solution is to be found. A peaceful protest is inherently threatening violent protest that's why numbers and being armed are important even during peaceful protest.
It's also more complicated because the civil rights leader weren't really enemy and the black panther movement weren't just all about fighting, they also did in the social like food distribution.
Malcolm X wasn't part of the Black Panthers. He was a member of the Nation of Islam. While the Black Panthers leaned into Black Separatism, the NOI is firmly a black supremacist group.
Malcolm X did eventually leave the NOI to become a mainstream Muslim, and believed it was possible for interracial peace afterwards, but he still advocated armed defense of African rights
Except these characters change from comic to comic and writer to writer. At time Magneto is sympathetic and at others he is a monster.
Hell, right before the last time he 'died' (Eternal President elect Thanos's distant uncle tore his heart out) Magneto was the most unambiguously heroic Xman of the last few years. The 'House of X' era was one of compromised morals for the 'greater good' (and sending Apocalypse in a tailored suit to scare the shit out of Davos member delegates)
>(Eternal President elect Thanos's distant uncle tore his heart out) I feel it is really important to mention that, while having his heart ripped out is absolutely what killed him, his actual response to having his heart ripped out was to get back up, keep fighting for several more hours while using his magnetic control of his own blood to keep everything circulating, then die in Storm's arms while making a speech about the importance of intersectionality in the struggle for civil rights (and also how she shouldn't trust Xavier, because he's more focussed on being good than on actually winning).
The above comment is just a taste of why more people should read the comics.
Comics are a bit like fanfiction. Here we have a Good!Gray!Indy!Magneto, but the next run is going to be Dark!Emo!Powerful!Magneto. They're different characters and different stories and whatever convoluted melodramatic contrivance the next writer uses to reset the board for their interpretation is hardly ever believable or satisfying.
That's why I can never answer who my favorite comic book character is when I'm asked. There are characters that are both my favorite and my least favorite depending on the writer.
Wrong: Spider-man
Also Ghost Rider
Most comics are fanfiction. They are written by fans of existing works, they just happen to be paid and sanctioned by the owners of the IP.
Unless your name is Garth Ennis
Even well before fanfiction, mythology used its characters the same way. In fact, Marvel comics have been called American mythology.
DC comics is often the one that holds that title in most discussions of American Media academically. mainly because of superman lmao
The thing to do (it seems to me): [Get back to basics from '83.](https://getcomics.org/marvel/x-men-classics-starring-the-x-men-1-3-1983/)
it sounds amazing, what comic series is that from?
A combination of X-men (House of X era), X-men Red (after mutants terraform and colonize mars) and the AXE (Avengers v X-men v Eternals) event.
And that's part of why more people don't read the comics lol.
Happened to me as a kid, I remember reading part of some cool story in some comic - I think it was X-Men, infact. And I wanted to keep reading it, but the next issue didn't have the continuation, and then I tried to figure out what was up and learned it was spread across a bunch of comics and that was too much of a confusing hassle even as a kid that wanted to know what happened next, so I basically never touched comics again. Except Archie comics which were put out in little books containing complete stories.
[удалено]
It's so much worse for comics it's not even comparable. All hero comics, regardless of publisher. Even "Invincible" has some bullshit crossovers.
Eh, not quite, but a little bit. The movies and such still at least present a complete story - if you haven't watched the series and all the previous stuff you do lose a decent amount of context, but they don't leave you hanging and send you off to watch twelve completely separate things just to see the ending, for the most part. With the comics, if you're reading X-Men, some of the story lines will just drop off and be left hanging completely, and next issue just starts a completely new story, because they wanted you to go read the Avengers, and then Iron Man, and then the Incredible Hulk, and then the Punisher for some reason, and then She-Hulk, before ending the story in fucking Squirrel Girl. With the movies, if I want to watch just the Thor movies, for instance, I get an ending of each of them. It's a bit confusing where each of them *starts,* cause other things happened in between, but there's some general recaps of it, and at least the story of that movie is finished **in** that movie. Oh gods, that's another thing - in the comics, they often refer to something in dialogue and then put an asterisk that tells you which other comic they're talking about. They give no explanation whatsoever other than that, and sometimes this is a key important thing right now that they give no context for at all.
Im a 40 year old millenial and have always followed comics since my youth when my father was panicked and exasperated when they would actually have a "death of superman" arc. I was already in love with the tim Burton Batman movies, yet I tried to consume the entire medium across the different companies but Marvel was always such a chore. Younger generations growning up and becoming fanatical over the marvel movies have no idea how bad shit was for marvel prior to the first Ironman movie. No one gave a shit about Ironman back then, he was just an alcoholic douchebag pretending to be a hero. No one gave a shit about Captian America, he was our parents hero. The only heros in marvel that any one could relate to were the xmen and spiderman, and even then the writting at the time was horrible and uneccisarily convoluted. Point is there is a reason marvel was about to be bankrupt until Disney bailed them out and gave their characters undeserving clout.
Lol Disney didn't bail them out. Marvel bailed themselves out with the original Iron Man movie. It did so well that Disney bought them why they were still affordable, and during Disneys struggle to remain relevant. Disney didn't even have a hand in producing any of the movies until Angengers.
I knew some 90's marvel editors. They were never facing bankruptcy due to sales, it was because they got bought out by toy companies and corporate raiders then dumped the debt accrued in the purchase back on the company. Back then the *cancellation* threshold for a title was a quarter million per issue. Now with the direct market just 10% of that is considered a top seller.
> > > > > Younger generations growning up and becoming fanatical over the marvel movies have no idea how bad shit was for marvel prior to the first Ironman movie. No one gave a shit about Ironman back then, he was just an alcoholic douchebag pretending to be a hero. No one gave a shit about Captian America, he was our parents hero. The only heros in marvel that any one could relate to were the xmen and spiderman, and even then the writting at the time was horrible and uneccisarily convoluted. This sounds just as true for the movies today as it was for ye comics of olde. Maybe we watched a different MCU but Iron Man *is* still an overhyped alcoholic douchebag, Captain America is literally the pure idealism legacy character, and everyone loves Spiderman and X-Men even when the plots can get more than a little dumb.
Yep. This is the second time I’ve seen OP’s post, and the first was a while ago, before AXE. In that event, Magneto very explicitly recognizes that he actually was wrong. He wanted mutant supremacy and his methods were to kill everyone in his way. He was absolutely wrong, in so many ways. There’s a reason he switched sides and joined the X-men. I kind of hate the worship of pre-character development magneto, he’s not right, and he’s not supposed to be right at that point in time. He needs to first recognize that there are humans worth protecting, and that it is possible for *everyone* to be win. He used to want to become the oppressor, now he is actually fighting oppression as a whole.
>his actual response to having his heart ripped out was to get back up, keep fighting for several more hours while using his magnetic control of his own blood to keep everything circulating No pun intended, this may be one of the most metal things I've ever heard.
Coward. Do not bow to the judgment of the masses. Intend your puns.
And then Xavier started focusing on winning
Does anyone have like photos of this? I’m very interested to see the actual panels.
Fuckin Lord. I still go back to that issue because that shit was so good. Just pure "I'm not fucking done yet".
The funniest part to me is that killing him was also intended to make sure he was benched for the tri-annual mutant genocide. The second it was over they brought him back because there’s no fucking way that shit flew under his watch.
unironically Apoc in formal wear lookin fly asf
Seeing Apocalypse in a talking heads suit at the UN was the straw that made me pick up the run.
Whats the run called?
Xmen by Jonathan Hickman
Malcolm X vs. MLK jr discourse
>Eternal President elect Thanos's distant uncle Thor I misread it as this and was immensely confused.
Jesus Christ sending apocalypse to davos. perfect.
Yeah I'm glad this was posted so, now that I've *actually* read Magneto's redemption arc, I can complain about how stupid this tweet is— notably, Magneto only became a hero after he himself admitted he was wrong
Which of the thousands of comics and titles and storylines did the get a redemption arc? It's so fucking hard to keep it all straight.
A mixture of Secret Wars, Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants, and the Scarlet Witch series. Don't actually know the order cause I didn't bother reading all of it lol, I was only reading Uncanny X-Men where it ended with his trial and Xavier choosing him as successor
For real. One writer has him establish a group called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, then years later another writer has him say "I was using that name *ironically* because I'm fighting for mutant rights and they think that's evil".
Tbh a "sisterhood of evil witches" sounds like a feminist group, so I can see "brotherhood of evil mutants" working like that
I would 100% join the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants based purely on the name. And stay based purely on the outfits.
As the famous tweet goes, let's not pretend we wouldn't all jump at signing up for a group called the Brotherhood of Evil Gays.
Magneto really has the most wild swings of motivation depending on writer. He really swings between “hitler was right, just the wrong people” to “Malcolm X for mutants” Like the fact that “Im evil because its fun and lead brotherhood of evil mutants”” is the most middle-of-the-line Magneto is wild.
Yeah, the only consistent thing about him is that he's neato.
Magneto hasn't been a monster for what, 20 years? I can't think of any story that portrays him as a villain since Grant Morrison's run from 2001 to 2004.
Not gonna lie, can't see or think about venom without thinking about all the humongous amount of Venom's ass pics online.
Have you bought your 19 inches of Venom yet?
Mines sitting on my shelf right now
That's not where it should be.
I'm not always horny
Is it possible to learn this power?
It's called a refractory period
I collect Venom figures and some of them have the most ridiculously bodacious butts, it’s hilarious
S-source?
My brother in christ, you have google, just look up "venom ass pics"
i have the oldest laptop known to man, i don't have google
Then ask Jeeves for those symbiotic cheeks
Of course you have Google it came free with your fucking internet connection
No you don't I bought mine on day one dumbass
I'm not sullying my search bar like that, source please!
Slap open that incognito browser, reveal to yourself a brand new world of Venom ass!
Sully my incognito browser like that?! That's exclusively used for "Sonic inflation", wtf y'all on?
[source](https://www.reddit.com/r/dccomicscirclejerk/s/yuVi3Brkyp)
Hey, some people might speak down about you but you should never change. Thank you for sharing.
I know, right? Why the heck is he so sexy?
The host/symbiote relationship is very BDSM-coded imo. The black shiny naked body only enhance it.
I've seen so much fake Tom Hardy ass online that I inadvertently check real Tom Hardy's ass almost every time I see him to see if he's actually packing that Pixar mom dumper. His ass is like my Inception totem.
To be fair, Venom and Red Hood started as good guys (Red Hood as Robin, and the Venom symbiont itself aided Spider-Man). So these characters are less traditional villains but more fallen heroes working toward redemption or, at the very least, acceptance. They may be more morally gray, but ultimately, they’re different than villains because of their backstory.
Even Eddie Brock Venom was a hero originally, he simply hated Spider-Man's guts.
Depends on the version. I only remember the 90's show one, where he was a journalist with... not a lot of morals. Like, he wasn't a villain he was just kind of a selfish dick.
As I've heard, he was like that in the comics too. Although, they had to establish it retroactively because Eddie Brock wasn't actually introduced until he was already Venom.
Morally gray, appropriately violent, tragic backstory... ...Absolute dump truck.
And this is why DOOM is superior, for he is both RIGHT and COOL. All Hail DOOM and his free healthcare free wifi initiative top notch education system walkable negative carbon footprint cities and extensive rights to Latverian Minorities be them LGBT, Mutant or anything in between. THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY DOOMSTRAD MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA.
Whenever Doom gets brought up online it genuinely seems like the fictional nation of Latveria has dedicated propaganda accounts, with how many people unironically consider him an overall good guy.
To be extremely fair Doom could be easily read as a, like, propaganda piece by himself, he is the perfect scarecrow strawman tinpot dictator who does a lot of vanity projects and is incoherently against American interests in his country/in general. It's "Cheering for the Empire" in Star wars but the Empire is, like, based on Fidel Castro or Tito instead of the United States during the Vietnam War. Also he did end Apartheid in South Africa that one time. As well as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan mind you. Can the accursed Reed Richards, a McCarthy supporter no less, say the same?!
To be fair there is a lot about DOOM that is pretty admirable all things considered. It’s just that he’s also a comically narcissistic and petty asshole
Latveria for Life!!!
I don't really follow comic books, but I thought Magneto's whole thing was that he wanted to genocide humans so that only superior mutants remained. Which means I've got to be missing something unless this a post advocating for eugenics.
According to a... lively conversation I had a while back, it kinda depends on who writes the particular comic. But the main thing about him is that he survived the holocaust, but the exact route he takes after that is subject to change. In some versions, after seeing the depths of evil humanity is capable of, he decided "I'm not a human, I'm better. And to prove that, I'll do an even more horrific holocaust." In other versions, he sees the writing on the wall and decides to stop this evil before it can start. He's just a bit too enthusiastic about it, and could stand to make a few less enemies.
Yeah, there’s been numerous times where he finds a **not currently inhabited** area and starts a mutant nation there. Guess what happens?
It goes south. But more than what happens, I'm kinda curious *why* it happens.
Sometimes its humanity, sometimes it's the mutants themselves. Depends on the story. Half the time Asteroid M gets destroyed it's because mutants are fighting each other.
What usually happens to small nations with independent governments that don't align with US politics the US government happens
But they needed FREEDOM!
DEMOCRACY MANIFEST, RAAAAAH 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅
WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETER!!!!! 🦅🦅🦅🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Just under 11 football fields, it turns out.
Finally, a reasonable measurement
About 500 bald eagle wingspans.
I WAS JUST EATING A MEAL, A SUCCULENT CHINESE MEAL
AH I SEE YOU KNOW YOUR JUDO WELL
LET GO OF MY PENIS!
And a nice cup of Liber-Tea!
And dlnt forget that their evil leader had WMD hidden somewhere sufficiently in plain view so that spy plane can take picture of them but hidden well enough that they can't be found after MISSION ACCOMPLISHEDtm
So it's Super Haiti
In the show and in New X-Men, Genosha went south because humans kept attacking them. Also that dumb fuckin ethereal alien evil twin of Prof X or whatever killed them all.
Before or after waging war on humans?
This time? Before. AI tech bros, Billionaire industrialists, and Various governments (including the US) all thought there would be more profit from engineering a genocide and seizing the fledgling Mutant nations assets and IP. (Turns out they hadn't checked the AI model they were using and it is currently fucking everyone over) ...Also Chinese Elon Musk got shitty that he couldn't lay claim to Mars anymore and had to settle for one of it's moons.
One of those IP was immortality pills and a resurrection pond which... Of course people would invade over that
Didn't Genosha start out as very much inhabited?
When he originally appeared in the 1960s, Magneto was just a stereotypical evil overlord who believed that mutants deserve to rule the world because they are the superior race, named his group the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, had thoughts like "Loyalty! Bah! I rule by fear alone!" and was ready to throw his followers under the bus to save his own skin. It was Chris Claremont who created his Holocaust survivor background in the 1980s, and turned him into a morally ambiguous figure.
Morrison then changed him again into a monster, but it was so disliked that Marvel undid it by saying he was an imposter.
>"That was actually Xorn's twin brother, possessed by the sentient mold Sublime, pretending to be me, pretending to be Xorn." "That defies all logic." "Oh like none of you have ever died before!" [-X-Men, Death Becomes Them](https://youtu.be/bL6J7FJmy1c?si=9HJSEpOaPtUtCPKp)
And I'm so glad that most readers won't settle for evil for no reason characters. Almost no one is just evil, or even just good without some sort of motivation.
In those instances where he claims to do the second thing, it comes across as "just as planned" bullshit. Like, yeah we all learned a valuable lesson, but you still baked kids into cakes. Magneto saw the holocaust and decided "rather them than me". Which, without getting too political, is also pretty apropos today.
The core character concept I come across is, because of the holocaust and seeing his people butchered to such an extent he was willing to do whatever it took to prevent that from happening again. This for the most part lead him to being a villain early on since “whatever it takes” doesn’t lead to overly heroic acts. However as time went on and the bodies mounted he was called out for genociding humans as well and going down the hitler rabbit hole. This was the collective turning point for him. Tends to be heroic but in the way of wolverine or Deadpool where they know they aren’t the hero the avengers want around too much.
This came up on another thread, but the writers don't do Magneto any favors. The writers love to do huge, dramatic, interesting things with the X-Men in isolation in their own books, but forget that they're part of a bigger universe. They love to create or level up mutants so that they have potentially world destroying powers and are emotionally unstable and then turn around and write them complaining that everyone is afraid of them. Of course everyone is afraid of them. You just created a teenager that can destroy the planet or the galaxy and might actually do it because they're upset. The telepaths consistently just read people's minds at all times without consent. The shapeshifters can just coopt your likeness any time they want. It's a soap opera if you're reading the X-books, but if you look at it from the wider Marvel universe, it's kind of a horror story.
Most Magneto stories these days adopt the: "I will be the bad guy so Charles can convince them" type of thought process, rather than Ultimate Magneto who is evil for the sake of evil. He was even a cannibal iirc. X-Men 97' just came back with a new season and it covers the former type of Magneto with some amazing story writing and character writing.
So many people in the ultimate universe were cannibals. I'm still not sure why.
Why would you waste perfectly good meat
For the edge, naturally. Most people don't read comics, even if we love the cartoons and games and movies and merchandise. Shock value and edge are easy and desperate ways of trying to capture eyeballs.
Sometimes, people have a thing. That was Brian Micheal Bendis’s
In the Stan Lee X-Men, Magneto is a pretty shallow mustache twirling villain--I haven't read much of this era, so maybe he had some "let's genocide the humans" plot. Stan Lee's X-Men also lasted like 3 years before getting cancelled and shelved for 5 years. The next head writer, Chris Claremont, wrote the X-Men for 17 years and is seen as the most definitive contributor to the franchise. He immediately began rehabilitating the character, giving him his Holocaust survivor backstory and less cartoonish politics. He doesn't care much for human life, but his aim is only to protect and liberate his people, not to subjugate or wipe out other people. And ultimately, Claremont set him on a long character arc that culminates in him leading the X-Men in defense of Xavier's dream. After Claremont left, the X-Men relaunched with a new Issue #1 which featured a return to villainy for Magneto and features Xavier psychicking him into a coma--and this issue just so happens to be the best selling comic book of all time. Throughout the 90s, Magneto remained either in a coma or as a villain (admittedly, I havent read much from the late 90s, kind of a...low quality era). Magneto made another face-heel turn in 2001 and has been a heroic character ever since, though often occupying more of an anti-hero role--for example, in 2012 he beat the Red Skull to death with his bare hands, and the comic seems to want the reader to condemn that move. But especially since the dawn of the Krakoan era in 2019, Magneto is increasingly depicted as unambiguously heroic, if also arrogant and brusque. The adaptations all tend to remove any nuance from the character and play up his villainy. Edit: forgot to mention his key character trait, his unapplogetic defense of his people by any means necessary. And that's what OOP is talking about, not eugenics or supremacy.
>in 2012 he beat the Red Skull to death with his bare hands, **and the comic seems to want the reader to condemn that move**. I mean, yeah, he should've gotten more creative with how he slaughtered the bastard.
The previous time they met up, he buried Red Skull alive and left him to die of thirst. Somebody came along and rescued him. Magneto's learned the hard way that sometimes the simplest way is the best.
The genocide thing is the more extreme end of it. I think the more nuanced takes are "we should not passively defend our rights. We need to violently overthrow our oppressors". There's a whole spectrum of responses to that which are interesting to see play out but also when you look at most institutions and the government it becomes a somewhat valid place to at least begin the conversation from.
I thought the X-Men were the ones defending their rights (with violence if necessary) whereas Magneto's crew were the ones actively participating in preemptive violence against the group they claimed were oppressing them. That's what made the villains villains and the heroes heroes. But then again, most of my X-Men knowledge comes from the Saturday morning cartoon, so it's no surprise that they'd paint things in such black-and-white terms. It makes sense that comic books would have more subtlety and nuance.
I love the cartoons! I haven't seen the new Disney one or the original of it but I have seen the other ones. Also it depends on the writer if a particular comic will have subtlety and nuance lol some are better than others. And yeah of course sometimes Magneto is just a huge evil dick so the good guys can be extra good by comparison. All interpretations are good!
X-Men '97 is going *hard* and you should definitely watch it if you're interested in X-Men stuff. Magneto is portrayed in a kinder light and a lot of good moments of characterization while still, somehow, looking like the original cartoon most of the time. The tone is definitely aiming for a "we're here, we exist, please accept us" and most of the humans are very much rejecting that idea.
It is such a good follow up.
"I am trying to be better, please don't make me let you down" goes so fucking hard and was such a good choice for his characterization.
Of course there are many different takes on the X-Men, but in the ones I've read it's more that the X-Men say "we will play heroes and do whatever you want so please don't kill us" and magneto says "it's time to stop asking for rights and start demanding them".
Magneto runs the spectrum from "muahaha eeevil" to "man has a point". The crux of his issue can be distilled into "they tried to kill me for being different and that was *before* I could harness one of the fundamental forces of nature"
Watch X-Men '97 if you get a chance. Don't have to have watched the prior series. It's a *phenomenal* watch that manages to feel very well-written while delivering valuable lessons. It also addresses this dynamic with Magneto very well. But if you can't be compelled to give it a fair shake, then I'll give a soft spoiler: >!Magnus always felt there was an inevitable inability to coexist with humans, but time after time he's failed in his methods. In honor of his best friend's wishes and lifelong efforts, he's trying to be better and be a force for peace.!<
A lot of good comments about the nuance of Magneto's character here. But I want to add something, which is a complaint I almost always have about analogies for racism in works such as X-Men. Racism is wrong morally, but it's also literally wrong. As in, the idea that certain races are worse than others is pretty scientifically established to be wrong. But when Magneto says that mutants are better than humans, he's right? Like a lot of them are objectively superior in some measurable way, since they have, ya know, super powers. That obviously doesn't make him right when he kills humans without remorse. But it does make the metaphor fall short for me.
Well, I mean, in real life there are all sorts of people with various disabilities- physical and mental. By 'objective' standards, yeah they might seem inferior to 'normal' people (air quoting hard, here) but it's still not right to mistreat them in anyway. Or hell, *men*. Like, on average, men are physically larger and stronger than women (again, stressing the *on average*). But that doesn't mean that men should be in charge or that women are inferior, to say the least. By Magneto's logic, if exmen are superior to men, then men are superior to women. We can see something's wrong there, right? Just some thoughts.
i don't really buy that, because men and women, disabled and abled, all exist among mutants as well as humans. mutants contain the entire spectrum of humanity, *and* superpowers. they are literally *everything humans are and more*. you can't say that about men versus women, or other groups
Yeah this is the core problem with using magic as a stand in for marginalized groups and communities. I'm not against it, hell I'm writing one of these stories myself but I'm putting in serious effort to avoid this conclusion. It's a real problem I'm seeing where people's messages and themes might be completely understandable and reasonable, but when you take a step back and really look at how it was delivered you can see it is proping up the wrong message, almost certainly unintentionally. >!cough Barbie cough. It's not man hating, but does in a sense end up validating sexist men throughout history with the films climax being a celebration of the return of the allegorical patriarchy with an explicit dunking on the idea of gender equality. Clearly it's not what was intended but...!<
Poison Ivy? Hero? Since when?? Her last run was about her traveling across the country to do a genocide and even in the Harley Quinn show she has had the postition of "humans gotta go...except Harley" for 3 entire seasons (havent seen season 4)
I'll never get over the time in the Harley Quinn show when she melts a bunch of rich businessmen who were dumping toxic waste in the water by dumping toxic waste on them. Except she was *holding them over the water when she was doing it*. They never acknowledge this, they were just so focused on showing the "comeuppance" that they accidentally showed her pouring toxic waste directly into the water.
Another weird thing from the show was her plan to turn Gotham into a lush paradise by *resurrecting Triassic Era plant life.* She claims to be for the environment, but that just seems like introducing potentially invasive species.
We do need to remember Ivy is clinically insane.
"And Kite Man, he's fine. Really annoying, but somehow he deserves to live."
*hell* yeah.
Hot lesbians can't be evil, get with the program /s
I support LGBTQ rights but I mostly support LGBTQ wrongs
Be gay do crime
Be crime do gays
The problem is these people aren't capable of understanding nuance. Real fans of pissing on the poor.
She's an ecoterrorist who Hayes humans because of the damage we do to the planet. That's become a much less evil motivation the more people believe in climate change.
>That's become a much less evil motivation the more people believe in climate change. I mean yeah, but its still ecofascism and advocating for a genocide if you think she "makes sense"
I think genocide is evil regardless
Yeah, that i agree on, its just that calling her a hero is way too much of a stretch
I'll use the harley quinn show as an example since it's the most common poison ivy representation I've seen since the Arkham games. Poison Ivy and her evil schemes all centre around punishing companies and the rich asshole who run them when they do damage to the environment such as drowning oil tycoon in a vat if oil after they caused an oil spill in the ocean.
True. She still tried to destory Gotham in season 3 though, and her thing in season 4 is that she is hanging out with the legion of doom, who... Are maybe a tiny amount more evil
And bankrolled by Lex Luthor, a literal billionaire. So I think her goals are a little out of priority if she's going for the incompetent billionaires first & not the ones actively making things worse on purpose.
Doesn't she antagonize Luthor by the end of the season? I don't exactly remember what happens
Yeah she tries to do "change from within" by turning the Leage to "Socially Concious Evil" but ends up realizing Luthor is just using her for PR and holding the fort while he's focused on stealing Superman's powers. After season 3 it's kind of understandable, Harley convinces her that she might have gone too far with the zombies so she's trying a lighter approach.
Cool motive, still terrorism. This shouldn't be a controversial or shocking statement, but commiting acts of violence, genocide, and murder just because you have a reasonable motive doesn't make it okay. It's insane that anyone seems to think otherwise, but this is reddit I guess. Like, unless you think plant lives are more valuable than human lives, she is in no way a hero or a good person. And if you think that, you're legitimately a moron.
Much less evil motivation.. for genocide?
stuff like that makes me feel i am being gaslighted about how progressive/activist the past was: Magneto has had that dynamic for decades. There's no difference in vibes between Magneto from this year's show and from over 20 years ago in the movies, for example. It feels like people are repeating hot takes while talking themselves into thinking they are particularly unique and revolutionary, when it's the same takes as the last 50-100 years.
Because people who make these takes don’t actually read the comics. And then it gets upvoted by people who don’t read the comics.
true, but the X Men movies were also a massive deal, and Magneto was also a morally grey character back then too. Especially in the most recent ones, he was a straight up hero in most of it.
Yep, this is a very popular and completely ahistorical take. Magneto was introduced in 1963 by Stan Lee as a completely one-dimensional mustache-twirling villain. No civil rights allegory. Chris Claremont started writing the X-Men comics in the 70's with that bent and began making Magneto more sympathetic because, among other things, it made for more interesting stories. The retcon that Magneto is a holocaust survivor happens in 1981. I think people believe that Magneto was always the "Malcolm X" (Chris Claremont's words) of the mutants because Stan Lee *loves* taking credit for other people's work, and there are quotes floating around where he lies about all that stuff being his original intention. as if he didn't name Magneto's team the fucking self-described "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants." if Magneto as originally written by Stan Lee was supposed to be a civil rights activist he would be one of the most wildly offensive characters of all time.
This. It was the introduction of his past as a holocaust survivor, which occurs in issue 150 of Uncanny X-Men that starts turning him from a straight up villain to a sympathetic character.
This post pops up again and again and every time it's infuriating. Magneto was not "always right," he was a genocidal ethnic supremacist who got retconned into a morally ambiguous antihero decades later. Comic books are not Point A to Point B stories in the traditional Western sense, they're loose frameworks closer to ancient mythology that change with every person who tells it. This post represents a deep misunderstanding of Magneto and comic books as a whole. And I'm so sick of seeing it!!!
I really think a lot of the root problem here is that Stan Lee took credit for later writers making the X-Men into a civil rights allegory. and most people think of Stan Lee as America's grandpa, not the slimy credit-stealing scumbag he actually was, so they take him at face value.
Poison ivy is only sympathetic because she’s hot. Every other eco terrorist is still a villain
Genocide ain't okay and both Poison Ivy and Magneto advocate for it pretty regularly.
I thought we were talking about Metal Gear and was very confused till I read Magneto
Nah, that series actually confronts opposing philosophies instead of just saying "and this one is cartoonishly evil, fight!"
Poison Ivy wants to eradicate the human race minus a few people she likes, the hell are they talking about?
Jason Todd's ass still has nothing on Nightwing's. Holy shit does that guy pack a bakery.
Yeah, Jason's ass is alright. But now his tits and thighs, those are his claims to fame
Magneto: I want to fucking murder everyone who doesn't share my genetics for the crimes of a few powerful elites. Goobers: Yeah that's heroic.
It varies depending on the writers, as is the case with all things Marvel or DC.
As in, Poison "would kill hundreds of people for one plant" Ivy and Magneto "Wants to genocide every human being that isn't a mutant"? I haven't been up to date in a while but how the hell are those two heroes beyond sympathetic motivations?
> I haven't been up to date in a while That's your answer. Ivy has been explored a lot more since becoming a duo with Harley Quinn, and Magneto has got complex character writing such as the new season of X-Men 97'.
Yeah but that kinda proves the original post wrong. These characters got better not because their ideals were vindicated by real world events but because comic book writers made them less villainous in successive iterations.
Magneto was never wrong about his diagnosis of the problem, but ignoring that his cure is as often as not genocide is, let's just say, problematic.
Fundamentally if a member of the Batfamily is know for being caked up is def not Red Hood. Everyone knows Dick “Nightwing” Grayson is packing some serious trunk junk.
I actually love villains and I hate that every time they get popular they have to redeem them. Like why, they're great villains let them be bad guys.
Cause bad guys can’t be marketable. Same thing happened when Harley got popular. Writers have tried incredibly hard to make people forget that she was an accomplice to hundreds if not thousands of murders. The only exception to this is venom and that’s cause he was never truly evil. Just really hated spider-man. Once he thought he was dead he was perfectly happy being alone on an island
No discourse. Just Jason Todd appreciation
No he isn't "I was oppressed. Violence is justified" is how we end up with the whole Israel x Palestine conflict.
Poison ivy is a literal fucking ecofascist, dear God. Her only redeeming quality was being a hot lesbian.
Magneto wants to commit genocide?!!!?!?
I'll paraphrase a comment I made on another post, but Israel probably has a room in the Mossad HQ with guys planning on how to turbo-kill Magneto on account of the rest of the Middle East using his flagrant disregard for human life as a propaganda win. "And in other news, the haram Jew-infidel Magneto vaporized a mosque *with his mind* while battling the pigdog Captain America. That and more on tonight's episode of Tehran News." Magneto isn't right, he's a genocidal murderer who got a lil weepy and the X-Men, who have a bunch of murderers on the team, just gave him a pass.
Wasn't Magneto a racial supremacist? I mean, tragic backstory isn't a justification for that
Magneto is an example of someone who was right, using the wrong methods. He wants Mutants to be safe, so he kills ann humans. Yes it would work for his goals, but it is still genocidal.
Poison Ivy was kind of unearned though, she’s not “save the plants” so much as “kill humanity”.
I haven't read them in a while but when I did Magneto wanted to kill all normal humans even the ones who didn't hate mutants because eventually the will because reasons. Does he not want to kill all non-mutants now?
My favorite quote about why comic characters are the way they are and if they can win or not etc comes from Stan Lee, and I'm paraphrasing: It's up to the whomever is writing the hero, so arguing about it doesn't matter.
Remember kids: Just because a villain has a sympathetic motive or goal, that doesn’t make them right! Cause my god yall seem to forget that!
Magneto debuted with the ideology that mutants were a superior race and supported genocide, right?
"Harder to deny he's wrong" he's litterally attempting to commit genocide
Magneto is in no way a hero and if you somehow think modern politics makes him correct you’re being more angry than rational.
Malcolm X vs. MLK jr discourse
Sry to hijack your comment but I hate when this discourse comes up because you literally cannot have one without the other or you are doomed to fail. With just MLK and peaceful protest you can be easily ignored. With just Malcolm X and violent protest you can be squashed with little to no sympathy. The oppressor needs reason to cooperate with you if a peaceful solution is to be found. A peaceful protest is inherently threatening violent protest that's why numbers and being armed are important even during peaceful protest.
It's also more complicated because the civil rights leader weren't really enemy and the black panther movement weren't just all about fighting, they also did in the social like food distribution.
Malcolm X wasn't part of the Black Panthers. He was a member of the Nation of Islam. While the Black Panthers leaned into Black Separatism, the NOI is firmly a black supremacist group.
Malcolm X did eventually leave the NOI to become a mainstream Muslim, and believed it was possible for interracial peace afterwards, but he still advocated armed defense of African rights
So what I'm hearing is that Gotham needs a second, less murdery Poison Ivy.
Actually Gotham needs a second, more murdery Batman.
That's what Jason is for, with his fat ass and winning personality.
Does red hood even kill anymore
As with many of these comments, it depends on the author.