X-men: First Class thought

[oneiriad]

I've been spending too much time in trains as of late, too much time idling and having random thoughts. For instance, today it occurred to me why I was cheering for the "bad" mutants on the beach scene in X-men. Yeah introspection.

And it's surprisingly simple, the reason. Really.

Take a look at Charles and his three boys. Now, take a look at Erik and his motley crew. What do you see? The movies only white male privilege holders vs. a scattering of people having various kinds of (whatever the word is for the opposite of privilege.)

Erik himself, of course, is easy - a German jew, a Holocaust survivor. He knows all about oppression. Then there's Shaw's bunch: Azazel, the only mutant who has never been able to pass for white normal and who I somehow with the impression was Russian, which would make him a Sovjet citizen and perfectly familiar with oppression. Riptide, who is non-white (though whether he's supposed to be hispanic or Spanish or whatever, who knows, hard to tell, without at least a name or an accent to go by, but at least not white). Emma Frost, a woman. A woman in the sixties. A woman in the sixties able to hear not just the comments men around her make, but the ones they think. Seriously, if Mad Men is anything to go by... Add to that Angel, the first of the kids to "desert" - another woman in the sixties, a coloured one at that, and since she's working as a stripper and possibly a prostitute when we first meet her, I'm going out on a limb and adding poor to that list - the girl's already being oppressed by society for three different things, any wonder she says enough at a fourth and leaves the CIA and their less than polite guards. And Raven, yet another woman, Raven who has never been able to walk down a street as herself - Raven, Charles adopted sister, though I do wonder, why isn't she off doing something? He's getting an education, being a professor - Raven's isn't that much younger, why don't we get to see what she does? Does he keep her tagging along as a pet?

On the other side, there's Xavier - born to wealth, Oxford education, just oozes male white privilege. Hank - prodigy, scientist at CIA at a young age, able to hide his physical mutation, world's worst case of internatilized homomutantphobia. Banshee - cocky young brat that he is. And Havoc - who they find in a prison. And they never did say what he was doing there, did they? I suppose we're supposed to just assume that the kid's out-of-control powers landed him there, but we're never told. For all we know he's a rapist. A bank robber. A con man. Worse. Who knows? They never do tell. I wonder why?

And these four white men - the only four mutants who has probably never faced oppression from their surrounding society before, by simply white male privilege, the one's who don't know what it's like to be lesser in the eyes of the world for simply being themselves - they are the one's choosing humanity's side. Humanity that's ruled by old white men - in the CIA as well as the American and Sovjet generals. Lecherous old white men, at that. Oh, the

Sorry to say, but I might be homo sapiens, but I'm cheering for Malcolm X Magneto more than Martin Luther King Professor X here.

I didn't include Darwin here, because while black and siding with Xavier's bunch, well, he dies long before the united human front against mutants by way of missiles thing (and seriously, how stupid is that? Yes, very clever, launch missiles against the mutants who you know include telepaths, teleporters, flyers, a guy who can create hurricanes and another guy who can juggle a submarine. You really think some of them won't survive and be pissed off?). He dies (or evolves into air form?) too soon for him to have been able to make an informed decision, like Raven later does. (Speaking of Darwin, is he original to this film, because I can't remember him, and I used to read X-men, though it's been years, and I can usually manage to at least recognize most of the characters in Marvel's movies, but not him (I suspect Angel of being the Wasp, btw). Anybody know anything?)

And everybody else already noticed all this, but I guess I'm slow and I'm just waisting your time, dear reader. Ah well...

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