Okay, this forward is for jewishbuckyy in particular but genoshan ‘s reply was g9 and I’ll be replying to you next.
First of all, I apologize for jumping onto a post from someone I don't follow and don't know, and I skimmed through the rest of your blog earlier and I want to say that I'm a huge nerd and arguing comics is my life, and I think I actually upset you and that wasn't my intention. I love reading/watching Marvel and I'll jump at any chance to get a character debate. The last thing I want is causing you any more stress and everyone knows we've too much of that already in our lives.
In answer to why I wasn't originally going to answer the post, is because I was scrolling the Magneto tag looking for panels and art to reblog. That's all. Every so often I read a text post and when I read yours I was really surprised, but I've seen all sorts of opinions in my time. What drove me to reply was the number of notes, and when I looked at the reblogs to see what retort anyone had made, I was surprised to find that there wasn't any and that the consensus was that Magneto was NOT a villain.
That was not a viewpoint I'd before encountered, neither among my friends or RP partners, though I HAD assumed there were those that believed that. Again, I've seen all sorts of opinions. In all honesty, however, if you were to go to a comic con or even look at a Top 10 Marvel Villains review online, you'll find Magneto's name crop up, and as a villainous character.
I gave a slew of different versions of the character for you to comment on, as I wasn't sure if you were referring to a specific Magneto or the concept of the character in general. As you didn't react in particular to any single one, I'm going to go ahead and consider 616 the default again, as that seems to be the most widespread version with the most history. I'll refer to the others afterwards.
I like that you split up my reply into parts and replied to each section, but as it’s going to turn messy if I do that and honestly I have quite a lot to say in order to establish my postulates, so I’m going to only quote every so often.
Reading through your reply I believe it can be summed up as that you and I come from two different moral cultures. That and you totally misunderstood most of my points completely.
also if you actually think that erik is passing judgement on an entire race for no reason at all i don’t think you understand anything.
I had said that it was WRONG for him to pass judgement on an entire race, not that he was doing it for no reason. He had reasons. He had very strong reasons. But it was still the wrong thing to do. Believe it or not, but not all Skrulls are evil. Marvel has turned out some legitimately good Skrull characters. It's absolutely not Magneto's place to pull any "preemptive strike" nonsense out for-- yes-- revenge. It is a selfish motive at heart, for all the right reasons.
For it's not wrong or unheard of for a man to want to feel safe, and all his life Erik has felt attacked. He's angry and lashing out, and while he justifies his actions as something for the greater good, he's really doing this mainly and foremost for himself.
The desire for revenge IS selfish. It does no good whatsoever to those already hurt or dead, and it only breeds more and more violence. I'll give you a link to a documentary about Robert Clary's experience in a concentration camp as a child and his opinion on the matter, if you like. When asked whether or not he wants revenge for what happened he says 'No. We'd be no better.' I agree. What he does only causes more pain.
show me the where exactly he sacrifices his children for the sake of avenging an already dead family.
Okay. This will be given ignoring for the moment the recent retcon. For decades this has all stood as canon and so it's what the characters have believed for years, and that's what counts in the way they react to events.
His daughter Anya died in Ukraine, a victim of a horrible, horrible hate crime. It was ugly, it was painful, and it changed his life forever. He was perfectly willing to live a normal life as a carpenter before this happened, regardless of the Holocaust. He was rebuilding a new life, as most Holocaust survivors did, and everything that happened since has been set off by Anya's death.
Flash forward a few decades. It's the early Uncanny X-Men issues, starting around #5/#6 and moving forward into Avengers vol. 1. Erik's formed the Brotherhood of Mutants and recruited Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. He's brutal and uncaring. Wanda feels bound to help him because she feels like she owes him for saving her life, and she even sympathizes for him. Pietro despises the way Erik treats them, but he can't leave his twin sister. They develop a deep-seated hatred for Erik, though they acknowledge that his cause in securing a place for mutants is just.
Because yes, there were already anti-mutant sentiments beginning to form and they wanted safety too.
Flash forward about 15 years, to the present day. Wanda and Pietro have long since grown. They've been Avengers. They've-- YES I'M GOING TO SAY IT-- played the role of the villain as well as the role of a hero, off and on.
Traditionally, Pietro hates Erik with a passion, often attempting to kill him, and Wanda, while she regrets that they cannot be a family, has distanced herself from Magneto.
It's since been discovered that Lorna Dane is the biological daughter of Erik. He found her as a small child, in shock at her powers manifesting so violently and killing her mother and "father", and what does he do but gets Mastermind to screw up her memories so she won't remember and otherwise basically becomes the cause of her long running with mental diseases ever since.
What drives Erik is Anya’s death, whether he realizes how much or not. In Excalibur vol. 3 the Genoshan mutants are captured, Erik among them, The way they are sedated and prevented from any attempt to escape is via inducing a dream state in which the subject imagines themselves in a fantasy world of their ideal state of happiness: Erik’s is at home with his wife Magda and their daughter Anya. All he wanted was a “normal” life, with his child.
When she is burned to death in front of him he goes ballistic. He’s been ravaged by grief, over and over in ways unimaginable. He’s been a sonderkommando-- he’s burned thousands of bodies. This is his six-year-old daughter, and suddenly all his grief and rage boils over and he hates this world for letting such evil and wrong exist, and he devotes his life to fighting back.
And it’s vengeance because he doesn’t want to see another way. He absolutely does not believe another way is possible, and his method is to strike back first. He sees a crowd of sapiens tormenting a mutant, he slaughters them and saves the mutant. He is part of the problem but he doesn’t recognize it. People who otherwise might have been swayed suddenly fear mutants-- fear Magneto.
Even those times he overcomes the inherent retribution his cause is and does something out of the genuine belief he’s giving something, it’s almost always hurtful to someone else. He sees the victims of hate crimes and takes his pound of flesh from anyone close enough that roughly fits the bill. It’s still angrily lashing out.
I don’t care how much “someone totes deserves it”, because our POV is on the same street level as anyone else’s and nobody has the right to decide on their own if someone lives or dies. Let’s face it, we’re arguing to-mae-toe to-mah-toe at this point, as it depends on where we learned what a villain is. And Marvel is notorious for graying the lines in recent arcs.
I noticed you got angry mostly over the variants on the character that have cropped up over the years. Bear in mind not all of them experienced Auschwitz. They had different experiences that led up to different culminating moments.
For 10005 Magneto: Again. I stand by what I said. He didn’t mature until the very end. And even then it was ambiguous. A POSSIBLE realization that what he did had been wrong, even as I was sitting in the theatre wishing I had a “Magneto Was Right” shirt right then.
(Magneto WAS right in the sense that phrase actually applies. The bad future did happen. I believe it a combo of people in general are dicks, and Erik is a dick.)
Please show me references for how he was fighting for people like Raven, because Last Stand happened and said to me that he didn’t really give a damn about “people like her”, it was all about his personal righteous mutant cause.
He outright said that Jean Grey was a “weapon”. I-- don’t think anything gets clearer than that.
....What 1610 Magneto did was genocide. Genocide is, by definition, the deliberate mass murder of a particular people. He caused global environmental chaos in a attempt to wipe out sapiens. Millions of people died. Yeah. That’s genocide. He’s constantly tried to do this again and again.
If you want to defend Ultimates Erik, try a lot harder. He’s the one that pisses me off the most. I don’t believe he even had anything to do with Auschwitz or Nazis.
oh my god please tell me you aren’t being serious
Genocide is serious wherever it occurs.
your argument immediately became invalid when you say that erik is no better than the nazis.
Also, I have to remind you that 11052 Magneto never went to Auschwitz. My argument is still an argument, regardless of whether or not one of the versions of this character went off the deep end and became no better than the Nazis.
Again, genocide is serious wherever it occurs and to whomever it is perpetrated against.
for some reason i find it really fucking hard to believe that a holocaust survivor who was tortured by nazis thinks that war is necessary, that mutants should be on top, commits a genocidal attack “on his own people” (in your words), and trusts that “the decimation of thousands of mutants will provoke the rest around the world to join him in toppling sapiens government”
let me just address the last one in case that one isn’t clear. the death of 6 million jews didn’t provoke the jewish community around the world in toppling anti-semitic governments and politicians. do you know why? because the jewish population was decimated by the holocaust and there was no toppling of anti-semitic governments. did you know that the world had more sympathy for the nazis then it did for the jews? did you know that there are people who deny the holocaust even happened? did you know that the jewish population still hasn’t reached the size it was before the holocaust? i could continue but i think you got my point
8096 Magneto did what he did. Was it a good idea? No. It sucked. Ranting to me about it isn’t going to make him NOT try to slaughter the population of Genosha in the three-episode finale of Wolverine and the X-Men.
I refer back to my original reply for summary and comments.
I feel like going any further is just a recap of everything I wrote last time. I believe Erik is a villain because he did horrible, horrible things when there are alternatives. He didn’t try to seek those alternatives. He wasn’t remorseful for his actions, and some of his motives were quite unsavory.
I think the point the short series “Magneto: Not a Hero” (actually a really good read, I recommend if you haven’t seen it) was trying to get across was that while Erik often DOES mean well, he is still driven by anger and emotions that drive him apart from the classical definition of a “hero”.
I said he was an anti-hero at best. I had no idea what you were talking about when you said he was an antagonist and not an anti-hero, but I noticed that seemed to have gotten cleared up. He’s both. He constantly hampers the classical “heroes”, the X-Men, whilst trying to save mutantkind his own way. Even when he’s an X-Man himself. He knows that everything is going to go to pot and he’s frustrated the X-Men aren’t seeing it the way he does.
I feel what has made him a villain no longer applies in recent issues, however, and he’s back towards the anti-hero scale once more. He’s an X-Man and he’s been trying to temper Scott’s... uh... anti-villain tendencies of late. Magneto is a beautifully complex character, and he does change.
Which is still to say that he has indeed been quite villainous. And again, it depends on the version and the writer.
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