@stabbybutt gosh I’m sorry I didn’t see this till now I basically posted that and went to sleep last night BUT
This is definitely not going to be the most eloquent bc I’m Bad at organizing my thoughts but just like
Professor X, in his most consistent characterizations, is very much “ah, well humans are pretty awful to us but what can you do you know? can’t fight back because then we’d be just as bad as them/we’d be giving them a reason” He just kind of squirrels himself away with a bunch of kids in his big fuck-off mansion and hopes one day that things will fix themselves
And when being a mutant is supposed to be an easy allegory for marginalized identities, it really reads as a lot of the “don’t fight back, don’t fight hate with hate, you have to spend your time educating ppl that hate you.”
And then you’ve got Magneto, who actually goes and does things. He fights back, and then Xavier gets to have his moral high ground even if he benefits from things that Erik does in the long run. When fighting back doesn’t work, Erik eventually just builds an entire island where mutants can go and be safe (kind of like Xavier and his mansion) and even thats not enough because it gets blown up by anti-mutant terrorists. Erik does what Xavier wants him to do and it literally blows up in his face because the narrative needs an antagonist.
The Xavier and Magneto contrasts that get set up read way to much as the writers telling us that if we fight back against the people who attack us, we’re just as bad if not worse than them and we should just kind of bow our heads and get pummeled until they get tired and go away.
Also depending on which adaptation you’re talking he literally trains child soldiers and manages to get everyone to trust him despite being able to read and (sometimes) manipulate their thoughts. So fuck that
