#this is also my take on the mutant metaphor debate and the krakoa debate and all the debates

[scarletwitching]

Do you have any opinions/meta on the portrayal of Doctor Doom's dictatorship in Marvel comics? As someone who is somewhat knowledgeable on the horrors of dictatorship, it always makes my skin crawl when writers unironically portray Latveria as this "benevolent dictatorship utopia" without bothering to put in the two seconds of thought/research that would immediately lead to the conclusion of why that is a wildly offensive, irresponsible, nonsensical, and logically unattainable concept to promote

I have to preface this by saying that I prefer the nice, likeable version of every character. Even characters I have no particular interest in, whatever the softer version of them is, that's how I think they should be written. I'm not saying this is a good thing or some kind of moral judgment. It's a matter of taste. Like, I can't handle Harry Potter because it's so mean, both in terms of the books themselves and a lot of the characters. People are always like, "Give us a Marauders show," and I'm like, why on Earth would anyone want to watch a television show about high school bullies? Are people okay?

Which is weird because I love Emma Frost. But I don't want Emma to be a villain. I don't know how to explain it. I guess I just prefer for characters to be well-intentioned. Characters can be prickly. They can have conflict, but when a character feels malicious, I lose interest in them.* I find it so much more compelling when characters are clashing but nobody is being cruel or monstrous, they just have their own viewpoint. So, on a purely character level, I do prefer for Doom to have good sides to him.

All that said, man, politics in superhero comics is tricky. It's a minefield. To play Devil's Advocate for the people writing these stories you dislike, what they're trying to convey is that the superhero perspective is not the only one, which is a sentiment I appreciate. I like when we admit that other people in this world do not have the views or experiences of the average superhero. I think that, theoretically, that complexity is a positive, but I don't think it's handled with much nuance or consistency within the stories themselves.

Where does Latveria fit on a left-right spectrum? What countries are they allied with? Who do they trade with? What are the internal politics? What real life country, past or present, is the best comparison point? Whomst can say. This is part of why politics in superhero comics is tricky. Because they don't really get into details. They just make broad gesturings at real life things and then the next writer contradicts that, and it all depends on what real world thing is trendy to reference. When you are Genosha, sometimes, you are South Africa, and sometimes, you are Yugoslavia. So it goes.

The flip side of all of this is, of course, that Doom is Roma, and the people who created him did not understand the sociopolitical implications of the character they created. What does it mean to be a "nationalist" when you are a Roma man from Eastern Europe? Sometimes, as a writer, you don't know that much about other cultures, and you write something with weird implications that you aren't aware of, and one day, it's 60 years later and that shit's still canon and we all just have to deal with it.

Like with a lot of dilemmas of superhero characterization, there's really no perfect answer because, no matter what angle you come at it from, there is the possibility of finding something questionable about it. If you get too far into trying to depict Latveria as a realistic dictatorship, there is weirdness/uncomfortable stuff on that end too.

Part of why our (read: USian) culture's current fixation on nostalgia is troublesome is that it is much more complicated to "fix" old canons than people think and often, it is impossible. We're stuck with all our movies being about characters created 60+ years, and they come with that baggage. A lot of times, it is the concept of the character where the problems lie, and the degree to which you can ever remedy that is... Well, it doesn't usually work 100%. And you can create other problems by trying to get rid of the old ones. Which is what you're complaining about, right? So, my tl;dr Doom take is that there is always going to be this weirdness to the character because of the nature of superhero comics. I get where you're coming from, but I also get the opposite argument. A true centrist, wow.

*Except, of course, for Zaladane, the only good supervillain ever created.

[seaweedstarshine]

literally black king Emma was so fucking good. we were robbed. Like on the one hand they should have let Matt Rosenberg cook but on the other hand. the really brutal Ruth death and rahne trans panic murder were a lot 💀

Oh you’re so so right — the mutant metaphor suffers from cis white writers, but I remember people calling it trauma porn like there’s no narrative purpose for there being a massive death count overall, and I'm like… mmmmmMmm.

Personal preference rambles as a found family heavy angst enjoyer (this is not a defense of Rosenburg X-Men), but in a general sense I really like when — so they might not get along, but they got each other, because as life keeps gloating it's hell to fight supremacy when you're fighting each other (not that causes of divisions amongst marginalized people are unimportant, but if you don't have your people, no one else will, this is how I feel; also not that anyone is obligated to loyalty towards a specific individual that harms them) — Hope shooting Scott in the head isn't fine, but what binds them is more important than grudges. Logan finally leaving his MCU-esque Post Credits Scene Era to be with Scott! The way Black King Emma (!!!) will stoop to any low as she manipulates Scott into doing what she wants, but she is trying to protect him, she worries when he's shot, and when the perceived advantage of their separation ends, she just welcomes them all into the Hellfire Club?? It's just cathartic for me.

There are some very significant caveats in this run that I only hope I remember well enough to speak on… The Morlocks deserved better, eons before anti-mutant hate got to that level, and between Jono and Dani's roles — the X-Men having overlooked the way it's always godawful for the most marginalized among them before it was quite this godawful for all of them, the hypocrisy, it could've been explored better here with less focus on Scott and Logan. Like in Sabretooth and the Exiles, sort of, but not entirely…

(I think sometimes this works better with side books. The Simonson New Mutants run is debatably my fav and overhated in my opinion.)

Yeah, Rosenburg X-Men is very flawed, and it's extremely valid not to be into it when you hold the same energy for Krakoa's flaws, but overall (for me) it really nailed the tension and the stakes and the angst and I was extremely hooked, especially with Age of X-Men meanwhile making choices in the other books.

(I might be misremembering a bunch, too, I literally just reread my college essay from almost exactly 5 years ago to try and remind me! I was low-key exaggerating in those tags where I called it a paper, it was a 3-page one-week essay with two sources which were Rosenburg UXM and the textbook. I also re-skimmed the Ruth death issue…)

…okay one more thing also I can't lie I was heavy into David/Ruth at the time and I read that issue like three times that week it dropped, I'm not about to say it she wasn't fridged for the purpose of setting up how bad it's about to get, nor that the interesting shit it did with her powers didn't literally just mirror the excuse to write out Destiny in a very concerning pattern, but at least the story was about Ruth's pain rather than that of those left behind (which is very different from, say, the focus being on Peter Parker's pain when Ms Marvel last died; and also very different from Rahne's death, which is the worst of the run)— anyway in 2019 I was just so happy to see Ruth again after that wildly OOC Legion series that didn't mention her while David was also being a plot device in Age of X-Men (which I didn't love). I had pretty much lost hope that my X-Men Legacy babies would ever be relevant again, so it was a win for me. Not as big as Way of X, but the bar was on the floor. That said a content warning was so needed to be at the beginning instead of a fucking suicide hotline at the end.

But the Rahne trans panic murder, god. Masterclass in taking the mutant metaphor to depict the most brutal things to happen to real marginalized people (without bothering to represent them?) and it goes grossly exploitative so quick. The way X-Men's lack of sensitivity readers shows…

ANYWAYS I haven't read it in years please take my opinions with a grain of salt.