I gotta say, though, this is a place where the X-men are being a good metaphor for oppressed minorities. Specifically, in this case, the disabled community.
“Yay, there’s a cure!” says the girl with depression. “Cure for what, motherfucker, I’m not sick,” says the person with autism.
“Yay, there’s a cure!” I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days. “Yes, because it’s easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,” says the Deaf person. “‘Cure’ is violent rhetoric.”
The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of “disability,” and many of them don’t even resemble each other. Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated). Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community. These things really should not be grouped together, but they are. And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.
It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all “mutants” as one group. You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and that’s not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time. “Realistically,” if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches. But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.
So it’s actually not a bad take. Mind you, the X-men have had bad takes, and will do so again, and I’m skeptical about whether “powers” of any kind even work for a metaphor about minority representation—but this particular vignette has something useful to say.
amandla
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
germansingergirl
