Chris Campbell
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:40:24 -0800
At 04:18 PM 11/15/2005, Dr. Core wrote:
X-men does a better job, especially the debate between Xavier v. Magneto. But the writer(s) didn't set out to test Magneto's Manifesto rationally, instead creating plotlines specificially to smear the natural fate of MR by the immoral values of Magneto. E.g. his "mutate all humans by force" scheme in the movie is a direct analog to the Colony Drop. To add to that, there's the recurring alien threats (e.g. Apocalypse) that perpetually delay the mutant vs. normal showdown.
Yes, but note that there are several forces at work here. First, you're mixing movie and comic continuities, and the movie version is by necessity a much simpler beast. Second, the nature of the comics varies considerably by writer and era; during Claremont's early years, Magneto and Xavier tried hard to meet in the middle of their respective ideologies, and for a time Magneto was even playing on the side of the angels. The King/X parallel was very strong at this point, and Magneto was driven more by fear of attempted genocide (against the mutant population) than by a desire to rule the planet. Most of that has been swept aside in recent years, leaving us with a character who's arrogant and ineffectual at best and megalomaniacal at worst.
One reason the mutant analogy isn't the best is because mutants are an on/off phenomenon; either you have mutant powers, or you don't. I suspect that in the case of Newtypes (or even Force users in Star Wars) you'd see more of a gradation between the haves and the have nots. This is, of course, a more realistic approach given the way genetics works in the real world, and it's why Jay's assessment of things is correct -- you'd likely see the MR and the LR intermingling, and eventually producing a single hybrid race a la modern humans and neanderthals.
That's basically one of the directions I want to cover, but the competition between Archaic humans is a bigger can of worms, with controveries around some of the facts and interpretations. I don't want to deal with the whole thing about "race" vs. "species", for example.
They're meaningless distinctions, as they aren't real categories to begin with. Species is an artificial term we use to label things that are a lot alike, and race (or variety in some cases) is used to label gradations within the species category. But in the end it's all pretty arbitrary, and there's nothing to be done about it.
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