bluesrat
replied to your post “So I’ve been watching X-Men movies and am about to be delivered of a…”Sometimes I feel like Magneto is the most meaningful thing to ever come out of Marvel. Not the most right or admirable, necessarily, but maybe the most important.
This is SUCH an interesting thing to say. Of course if one is talking about Marvel as a whole, there are so many different versions of Magneto, many of which make no sense next to each other. (One of my personal favorites will always be “Anastasia, it’s me, GRANDMAMA” Magneto in his first scene with Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd in comics.) But I agree that he has an unusual weight and power. I suspect this is because he’s allowed to be not-right and not-admirable— in other words, he as a character is not constrained by normative ideas of what “right” and “admirable” are; he’s not written in the expectation that he always demonstrate certain rules about the heroic. That’s also true of Bucky Barnes, especially in his more grey hat comics incarnation, and I think he benefits from it as a character in the same way.
meandering-stars replied to your post “So I’ve been watching X-Men movies and am about to be delivered of a…”
This is fascinating, especially your point about Erik and Charles interacting withthe world in fundamentally different ways; it’s something I hadn’t thought about before. Thanks for giving me another excuse to ponder the nature of mutants 🙂 and if you ever turn this into an academic paper, I would love to read it
I am lazy and probably won’t but a lot of my academic work looks at bodies that resist or challenge humanism! (Currently in Stargate SG-1.)
@angry humanists:
I would encourage you to consider how you would define the human, and the many problems in that effort that scholars have outlined— you might check out some of the work by Cary Wolfe, Mel Y. Chen, Stacy Alaimo, Donna Haraway, and others in the broad “new materialisms”/”nonhuman turn” area.
For me, it’s about his roots. He lived through the Holocaust. He does what he does because he took those lessons to heart and believes that what was done to one of his peoples, he can expect to see done to another. And, given the nature of human history, you can’t really argue he’s wrong about that.
It doesn’t make his reactions right, but it forces you to think about his reasons and empathize with the forces in the human condition that can create a terrorist, instead of just demonizing and dehumanizing them.
Another thing is that it draws a line on moral relativism. There IS a point where the pain a person has suffered can no longer justify their actions.
And the third thing is that he forces you to think about how the people in the system he’s fighting are complicit in things (and how they aren’t). If you can look at Magneto and see how he came to be what he is, and how it drives him to do what he does in the name of saving the lives of people he values, then…doesn’t that understanding confer on you some kind of responsibility to protect those people too? To try to play a part in creating a third way so that his approach isn’t the ONLY one available?
I’m not sure that’s completely coherent, but I am being called away to social activities right now, so I’ll try to clarify later if I’m not making sense. ^_^
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2cCQrT1