Y'know, I do think telepathy at its core is about connection.
Newtypes in Gundam being an evolution in humanities ability to communicate with the introduction of the vast gulf of space. Empathy, speaking and knowing without words, all that. In Psychonauts its a means to connect with others, and explore and heal trauma. I don't have a particularly strong grasp on the narrative functions/theming of telepathy in Marvel specifically, but it is something of note to me that a lot of the more prominent telepaths are also people with a not insignificant degree of social power behind them.
Charles Xavier, Emma Frost, Elisabeth Braddock, Jean Grey are all people whose social standing is tied in part to their whiteness and wealth/class. There are others like Monet St Croix who are rich/upper class but not white, or neither such as Danielle Moonstar (Cheyanne) and Xuan Cao Manh (Viet) (who to my knowledge both started out on the weaker end of telepathy) but Marvel's premier telepaths are often white.
Telepaths of Color tend to have more limitations and clauses in place.
Its partially to that extent where I suppose, after bouncing between two vastly different backstories for him, I settled on making Locke a Black (specifically Afro-Jamaican) first generation immigrant, He's a telepath that was on the path to developing stronger "traditional" telepathy, but due to trauma from the state (through Weapon X) his telepathic skills relating to empathy, connection and interpersonal matters are either severely damaged or non-functional.
He doesn't live in a world where he'll be treated the same as his white peers, and the way how his powers develop reflect that (primarily he's an energy projector/manipulator by way of psychic energy, with some extrasensory abilities (precognition, he can perceive sites charged with strong negative emotions, and he's hyper aware of his surroundings) shifts connecting with other people back towards something he has to be intentional about. He can't cheat the process, he has to listen and learn and be there for his friends and allies the old fashioned way.
He's still someone whose strength comes from the people around him, but he's intentional about showing up and showing out. He's never going to be a Professor X, a Jean Grey, or an Emma Frost and the world was never going to treat him like one to begin with, even if his powers weren't fundamentally altered by childhood trauma.
