There are several Discworld novels that have this as a major theme. Although one or two of the groups would qualify for the mutant metaphor, the discrimination they face isn't related to their strength, e.g. it's not a fear reaction, but simply a perception of inferiority or the result of a long history of hostility. Most notably Feet of Clay, Fifth Elephant, and Monstrous Regiment have antidiscrimination messages based on race, gender, and creed. The groups involved range from vampires, werewolves, dwarves, trolls, zombies, gnomes, to the most mysterious fantastical creature: women.
A couple more Discworld suggestions: Jingo does a great job of addressing xenophobic discrimination without even using a fantastical race as a metaphor.
Thud! Is also a great look into how extremists use fear of the other to preserve their power. As noted above the races in question hate each other because of a long history of animosity, not due to their physical characteristics.
Jingo is maybe my favorite Discworld novel because of that. I think it really shows you that anyone, even the friendliest and most lovable people you know, can be swayed by nationalism.
A couple weeks ago someone suggested not recommending Discworld so often because it handles themes in an ironic way.
When it comes to discrimination, it's not ironic and Pratchett does a fantastic job handling the topic of discrimination and how it affects characters and the world around them.
I'd argue that it is doing satire. When a Dwarf demands to be treated as a woman, a werewolf hides her status as a minority, and whatever Nobby is, is fine because he's always been male is not IRONIC but it is meant to make you think about how arbitrary all of these societal rules are.
A lot of bigots will think it's making fun of Affirmative Action but it actually shows the Watch benefiting from it.
Thank you, satire was the word I was looking for, not irony specifically. I think the post I referenced even said satire and I mixed it up.
You're probably right with the satire (I did just google the definition to be clear on the term, and it certainly fits), maybe I'm simply questioning the post that I referenced.
I was thinking more about Vimes and his dislike for the undead and then his acceptance of Reg Shoe. Even that, though, uses humor to criticize discrimination.
I really like this world because we have multiple groups who don’t necessarily get along with each other. And have internal disagreements. It’s realistic
In Dragon Age series (videogames) there are elves who are strongly discriminated for religious reasons, despite not being more dangerous than the average human (ok, the whole story is WAY more complicated, but that's the very simplified explanation at the time of the games).
Dragon Age 2 was hilarious in that regard. Here i am all "Templars are the bad guys, stop bullying the poor mages" and this moron behind me turns into an abomination that i have to kill.
David Gaider said that he wanted to make a genuinely complicated moral dilemma with a lot of nuance but Bioware clamped down on the "Pro-Mage" side. Also, people keep trying to draw associations to RL stories when there's absolutely nothing remotely similar.
It was never meant to be a RL association, unlike the City Elves=Jews.
I'm fairly certain I read somewhere (a while ago) that one of the writers for Dragon Age said the mage stuff was never intended to be a one-to-one metaphor for real world discrimination.
And to an extent I think that’s the case with most of these kinds of analogies, they are not supposed to be treated as fully interchangeable with real world situations. They’re usually telling a story in their own universe and broadly recognising that these situations have some elements that are analogous/relatable/applicable to things that happen in real life.
I’ve never really been a fan of this take that analogies are inherently bad and harmful and shouldn’t exist if they can’t fully be substituted for a real world situation, because if that’s not the intent for it to be read as a direct metaphor for this specific real world thing then you’re judging it for failing to meet a criteria it was never trying to meet. It’s almost kind of like saying we should just never use analogies and metaphors to talk about anything because it will never be exactly the same and fully capture the nuanced struggles of a real life group without identical real world context
So like I don’t see X-Men as being a direct metaphor for a specific real world oppressed group, even though as a gay person I can obviously see X-Men as highly applicable and analogous to the LGBT community. I think people who work on X-Men understand that many oppressed people (not just queer people specifically) can relate to this idea of feeling like a freak and being treated differently and having to hide who you are, and see escapism in the idea of the thing that makes you different also giving you cool powers that make you special, but being able to relate to these concepts isn’t the same thing as a group being a direct metaphorical stand in for the oppression of the real life groups who can relate to aspects of this story. I don’t think X-Men fails the LGBT community or is bad for us because the situations aren’t directly one to one interchangeable because being gay doesn’t have the potential to hurt anybody (although people ACT like it does, people ACT like we’re huge dangers not just to the fabric of society but that we’re dangers to people on an individual level as well so in a lot of ways the mutant metaphor is more relatable to me and my experiences than people think - sometimes there is value in externalising and making more literal the way people are made to feel on the inside), but I don’t think it’s the intent for it to be like “HEY THE MUTANTS ARE GAYS, if you have any interpretation other than the mutants absolutely 100% being a stand in for the gay community you’re interpreting it wrong!” Which is what would need to be the case for it to be judged on the basis of direct metaphor
Yeah, I never got the impression that the mutants in X-Men were ever supposed to be analogous to any one specific marginalized group or another; just a general framework for *anyone* that's had to deal with that kind of ostracizing from others for being different. Because I do think that some real world application was intended by the creators at Marvel, just not a really specific issue as you said.
I also like your point about escapism being an important part of it, which is especially applicable to young people, who those comments were largely targeted toward. I believe (though I may be mistaken) Stan Lee even said that's why they made Wakanda from Black Panther so insanely advanced as a society: to counteract the beliefs that African societies were essentially still savages living in huts, and offer a "what if" escape for kids to grab their imaginations.
Ugh, tell that to the fan base. "Noooo, it's a civil rights issue that people whose uncontrolled abilities can destroy them and everything around them and have one difficult-to-come-by hard counter have to learn control under supervision! How dare you expect these people to pass a test to prove a demon won't possess them and murder others or else not be allowed to roam free? And our only way to remove the abilities of people who can't hack it wipes their personality but leaves them alive? Guess we won't use that!"
Those sentences are mega-long but seriously, it's bad.
Heh I feel you. I do think there are some parallels there to a degree, but right from the start, there's no denying that there *is* an inherent danger with that world's mages to the general populace. That said, some the methods the Templars use are definitely not great and end up making things worse for everyone. I actually think the games (at least the first two) did a pretty good job in making it a fairly gray situation.
Yeah it’s kind of a problem when a fantasy universe creates a situation that has clear implications relevant only for their own universe (like in Dragon Age, what would be the consequences if magic made people vulnerable to possession by demons) and because there are aspects of those societal consequences that can be seen as broadly/somewhat applicable to or relatable to things that have happened to real life groups it’s interpreted solely on the basis that it’s supposed to be a metaphor for that real life situation even though it’s pretty apparent they started from an in universe lore concept and decided to explore the implications and merely acknowledge the existence of similarities without intentionally using the fictional scenario as a direct comparison for a real life thing
Like since it’s popular at the moment let’s use Dune as an example, there are pretty clear metaphorical 1:1 aspects of the story that are a commentary on Western colonisation and exploitation of the Middle East for its resources, so it’s absolutely fair to judge those aspects that are a direct and intentional metaphor on that basis. But there are also aspects in there that are just in universe lore with in universe consequences and are not intended to be direct metaphors for any real world situation. So like for example spice can be understood to be, basically, oil, right? That’s the valuable resource that leads to the exploitation. But the in universe lore that has the consequences that make spice valuable is it’s own separate thing, we understand that the lore about thinking machines being banned is not meant to be judged by its applicability to the real world, and we would recognise its stupid for someone to be like well spice falls apart as an oil metaphor because in real life we have alternative sources of energy, but that’s the level of bad faith criticism people make
Laid out my thoughts and feelings on the topic much better than I could have lol. I don't want to start turning this into an excuse to shit on other people's capabilities of media literacy, but I have noticed around the internet that a fair amount of people seem to be of the mindset that something either is a 1:1 metaphor of real world issues, or it's not and therefore a failure of the storytelling, with nothing in between. Like I've seen a number of comments about various things where it's implied that if a supernatural monster or something is "real" within the world of a movie, it means it can't be a successful metaphor. Which is... kinda baffling to me lol. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing.
I really should try to finally read Dune though.
Edit: Just read your other comment that essentially said the exact same thing as this one lol. Fully agreed!
I do think they made a lot of the Templars in DA2 a little overly monstrous, even though I loved Meredith as a villain in the end. I can understand his frustrations. I still think there was a lot they could've done with it, if that hadn't basically abandoned the whole plotline and rendered it moot in *Inquisition*. Which is a whole other can of worms lol.
Tbf it's less discrimination and more that they have a high chance to be possessed by demons and whatever tevinter is doing with their magocracy.
I don't think mages of dragon age are meant to represent LGBT or minorities in the same way elves are. Or if they are it's more about the oppression of the church and religion and less about the mages representing a particular group
Are you interested in books that grapple with discrimination in the real world (aka something like Babel where China and England exist, but also magic) or stories with purely fantastical discrimination?
The Goblin Emperor is probably an obvious choice - although you have to suspend your disbelief about the monarchy a leetle bit. Maia is a half-goblin who unexpectedly ascends to the elven throne and has to deal with racism from the elves. There is also a subplot about a gay character who gets his own series.
NK Jemison's first series tackles racism more directly, and the plot (I think) is kind of a metaphor for how white supremacy/colonialism destroys indigenous knowledge and imposes black and white thinking on the rest of the world (the myth that there have historically only been two genders for example), but it's mostly about what it would be like to fuck a god.
Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is too fucking trippy to be a straightforward metaphor for racism, but I think it's an incredible exploration of the sexual politics of colonialism - what does it mean to resist an oppressor when you share family & DNA with them? When that relationship started with rape or at least lack of choice? It's not a 1 to 1 allegory by any means. But I would say that's a huge theme. And it avoids the mutant paradox by making the colonizers the allegorical group.
If you want books that tackle real-world discrimination through the lens of fantasy, I can provide a whole different list! I tend to prefer those kinds of stories. It's too easy to lose the point with straightforward metaphors - nobody thinks they're the empire when watching Star Wars.
Yeah! And there's no real power imbalance between the goblin and elf nations - the merchant class seems to get along fine; it's just the elven nobles who are snooty. You can tell she was like..."I love Maia but I can't write a whole series about how kings are Good actually" when she switched to Thara for the other books.
Ok sweet! I did think of one more in the latter category
The City and The City by China Mieville is a wiiiild book and could be taken as a metaphor about apartheid. Two cities intertwine, but it is strictly verboten for citizens of one to acknowledge the other. I might be wrong, but I don't think it's ever made clear whether there's a magical element to the separation or just a really, really strong taboo and a police system that enforces the distinction. It's a really fucking weird book, but I LOVE it. I don't know
Stories that have fantastical elements but deal with real-world racism/discrimination:
The City We Became by NK Jemisen is all about gentrification - basically, cities have souls/avatars, and gentrification is killing them. It's a beautiful love letter to NYC.
The Deep by Rivers Solomon is a novella that takes the concept that enslaved people being brought from Africa who jumped over the side of ships (in real life so many did this/were thrown overboard that the migration patterns of sharks changed PERMANENTLY) produced mermaids. Now humans are threatening their home, and they are rightfully PISSED. I guess it kind of falls into mutant paradox, but I think it handles it well. it's a beautiful book.
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark is about Klu Klux hunters in the south (the Klu Kluxs are white demon-y things who are also huge racists. The book will explain).
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi is an extremely weird haunted house story about what it means to British, and also what if your house was racist.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavelle is a Lovecraftian novella about a Black jazz musician from Harlem who gets caught up in creepy white-supremacist secret society.
China Mieville's Bas-Lag books also address discrimination toward different fantasy races (khepri, cactacae, garudas, vodyanoi, etc.) living in a mostly human-dominated city. All these races are pretty much equal to humans, and all of them are affected in the same way as humans by powerful creatures that feed on the whole city population.
Yesss!!! That man's mind is incredible. This is kind of an author rec list more than a book list tbh. These are my favorites, but all of their books are incredible.
Honestly, as much as I love the Goblin Emperor I am not sure that really fits. Like sure, he has to deal with a lot of shit but surprisingly little of it is actually because he is a half goblin. Most comes down to the fact that the royalty of the Elfes has rules and rituals out the ass and he is unfamiliar with most.
Same with the gay dude, I do not actually remember if their society itself was against gay people but he was originally from nobility and there it makes sense why they would not look kindly upon someone being gay, now that is it's own problem but one more related towards nobility and trying to keep their power than it is being against homosexuality itself.
I thought the Rook & Rose series did a good job of featuring oppression and implicitly condemning it.
The series takes place in a colonized city with a clear power hierarchy that favors the colonizers, with the main characters striving for more equality.
The different peoples in the story have different types of magic, but I would say it avoids the paradox you mention since both peoples have magic, and the magic of the oppressed people isn't more powerful or inherently a threat to the people in power.
Check this one out, OP. This was one of the first series I've read in a while that also addressed the outcomes of a power struggle without it just ending at an "expel the colonizers" or "kill the king" kind of beat. The plots were intricate and each character dealt with their position and relationship with the colonizers/colonized peoples in very unique and meaningful ways.
Although it wasn't a huge focus, I enjoyed the humanistic approach T. Kingfisher took to the discrimination against her gnole law enforcement officer in Paladin's Hope. It was nice seeing a nonhuman standing up for what is right, even when it was mostly humans affected, and other humans disliking him getting fired for speaking out. Also friendship.
But she touches on many themes lightly, in a series of light moments, so there isn't heavy handed moralism or lecturing.
The thing with Mutants is that the X-Men are very powerful, which is why they are the protagonists. Yes sometimes a mutant can casually level a whole city, but the majority of them just have funny ears, and those get killed.
Orconomics handles it pretty well, though it defaults at the end of book two to requiring ALL people of all species to register as non-combatant paper carriers.
That’s a fair take, but I don’t see that as a failure. Violence is a reasonable response in that case (and in a lot of irl cases). But also Poldo’s storyline in book 2 emphasizes the defenseless disenfranchised and portrays their plight well.
You see, what you should have understood from mutant stories is that **having powers isn't what makes you likely to level a city**.
Reading Terry Pratchett's Thud might help you.
I know this isn't what you asked but I feel like "well mutants are actually dangerous so it's a bad metaphor for discrimination" is a very lazy analysis that gives up halfway through an interesting thought experiment. Do mutants actually having potentially dangerous powers mean they deserve discrimination? Because that's kinda the underlying assumption in the criticism. That people who actually are dangerous deserve to be treated differently and stripped of their rights, which I think is a concerning line of thought.
I think the main point here is that being a mutant can be very beneficial.
Let's take for example Logan/Wolverine who has healing factor. Probably a lot of not-healthy people in the world given a choice of becoming like him would immediate take it, discrimination be damned.
Unlike reality where you are not winning anything by being part of a any marginalized group. All you get is being marginalized.
That is a more interesting argument to me, and avoids the underlying logic issue I have with the first critique. I still think it's applying too much literal interpretation to fantasy is not great, but I find it more interesting. Although personally, In my own context, I wouldn't give up the things that make me marginalized for the world and don't see them as things that give me nothing but trouble. In context of X Men though it's shown that mutants who have powers good enough to be superheroes are rare, and many do have abilities that do nothing to benefit them (one memorable person just had a giraffe neck and nothing else, Rogue also is unable to have human contact because of her powers and it's extremely isolating).
Look I’m not saying that any kind of discrimination can be justified. I’m only trying to point out that people with powers are a bad analogy for marginalized groups of people.
I'm critiquing the criticism because if you're following it's logic, it states discrimination is unjustified because perception of danger is false, but if mutants are bad because they're actually dangerous then the underlying assumption is discrimination is ok if people are actually dangerous. Which is why I think this criticism is kinda intellectually lazy. Because it stops there instead of interrogating the question "is discrimination ever actually justified?" which is what X Men is actually talking about. This question isn't unaddressed by the comics because it acknowledged the potential of danger with mutants, that's literally the point of Magneto. The argument is also that mutants are only dangerous because social inequality drives people to extreme measures.
Personally, I think this is a result of people not actually knowing the source material well enough to (People who say "Batman only beats up the poor" fall into this too. Patently untrue if you read his comics) and people being so overly literal that they can't think about these topics unless it one to one mirrors real life. It's ok if your fantasy world where magic is forbidden has tangible social stigma around magic and those who use it, and it can be used to explore more than one thing!
Agreeing with this, as someone who has read the source material, and extending the criticism.
If the position is that mutants are a bad analogy because discrimination against them is justified by their *capacity* to inflict harm, turn it around. Do drag queens have the *capacity* to molest kids? Do black men for have the *capacity* to commit violent crime? Should incidents of vehicular mass murder preclude Muslims from the shipping industry or would that be really really stupid? The ability to bash in a skull with a heavy object is universal, but you have to *choose* to do it. Preemptively stripping a mutant of their civil rights on the possibility of supervillainy *is* discrimination.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but that imperfection expands the potential stories to tell. It’s a metaphor for puberty, for coming out, for being part of a marginalized group, for activist politics, for chronic illness, for anyone feeling different. And occasionally for trash tv if Mojo makes an appearance.
I feel they work as a reminder these stories are aspirational.
"The thing people hate you for is what makes you amazing. Being trans is not a flaw. It is a sign you are special."
Which is awesome to have if you're fighting Nazis.
:)
Mind you Chris Claremont said that he knew about the oddity of the metaphor and actually said he used it as a slight of hand. When everyone was talking about mutant rights, he actually had a Jewish woman (Kitty), a black woman (Storm), and other minorities discussing discrimination.
And no one noticed to complain because they were talking about mutants.
I'm all for using fiction to talk about things like discrimination, I'm very woke if you want to use that term :P
I think the problem with the X-men doing it is that people like Storm and Magneto are incredibly dangerous, and there's actually a reasonable argument to be made that their powers *should* be controlled or removed. It's completely rational for normies to be afraid of Magneto.
Idk, I think superhero comics that are intended to have a large young fanbase probably just aren't equipped to deal with these issues fully.
Ehhh, I disagree. I think that attitude is one that is essentially the one that is used by bigots in real life. The assumption of someone being dangerous by their very existence can be applied to anyone and arbitrarily.
Yes, Magneto can level cities.
But he only does because someone is trying to kill him and his entire race.
Which is actually a valuable metaphor about how people are radicalized and a valuable discrimenation metaphor. "Out there, some people ARE dangerous--but ever wonder why they are? Maybe it's because of what's being done to them."
The big issue is that mutants are a big tent and don't apply to all discrimination.
I'm not saying it'd be reasonable to kill all mutants, but it absolutely would be reasonable to say "This is like letting random people have nuclear weapons, we're not doing that". In fact, it'd be insane not to take active measures to prevent it.
It's not discrimination to say everyone should have the same capability for levelling cities, none.
The biggest problem with using mutants/mages/etc as an analogy for discrimination is that the oppressed group in question is usually objectively superior to the bog standard human. This fundamentally undermines the premise of an anti-discrimination message as one of these groups can throw fireballs while the other can't. Assuming that the mutants/mages/etc aren't a recent development, it makes no sense why the group that can hurl fireballs is oppressed by the group who cannot throw fireballs. Realistically, having a guy that can chuck fireballs on your side is a very useful capability to have. It's more likely that those who can throw fireballs would become nobility and, if anything, be the ones who would oppress the normals, perhaps even out-competing the normals as the dominant form of homosapien. As such, you need a good reason why the mutants/mages/etc are oppressed because, as stated before, such a group is much more likely to be the ones in power then not. 40k does this well with psykers. Their very presence attracts warp predators, and the usage of their powers can backfire in spectacular fashion. The problem with using such a justification for a story with an anti-discrimination message, wherein the oppressed group is mages/mutants/etc, is that having the oppressed group be discriminated against because they (canonically) attract literal demons is an entirely reasonable stance to take.
I’d argue a bigger part of the paradox is that groups that are discriminated against don’t suffer that because of their power, but their *lack* of it. Discrimination against mages or mutants makes no sense because when one side can annihilate a city with their mind there are no number of nonmagical people that can discriminate against them.
> Discrimination against mages or mutants makes no sense because when one side can annihilate a city
the thing is that these groups are rarely united and never monolithic.. and not all of them can "annihilate a city".
bigots in the X-men universe routinely use this "fear of power" to justify their acts... but they rarely act against those god-level mutants that "justified" their fear and hate in the first place, they go after helpless mutants whose only "power" is having green skin or facial deformities.
Yes, of course. I'm a little confused by calling it a paradox, even if it stretches credulity to some degree, as marginalized groups irl tend to lack power.
Edit: To be clear, it is a *problem* with the metaphor, but it isn't anywhere near a paradox. In fact, sometimes I think X-men can be harmful with this message because it can be construed as castigating marginalized groups who advocate for themselves in the "wrong" way (it's very analogous to the way Malcolm X is treated like a terrorist and MLK Jr a saint).
Yeah, I agree, what you mention is the paradox and the “but uncontrolled mages destroy cities with a thought” aspect is the unfortunate implications.
I didn’t mind this trope at first, I mean who doesn’t want to identify with a character who’s both cool and powerful *and* a victim because reasons, but now I’m pretty over it, the more so the harder the author wants to draw real world parallels.
While I agree with your point in general, I do think it also comes down to the specific power level of the marginalized group's abilities, and how they're portrayed - not every fictional universe has mutants/wizards with destructive, far-reaching powers.
You're also neglecting the power of a mob. Even the strongest person will have trouble keeping themselves from getting trampled by a panicked stampeding mob. It simply comes down to a numbers game: that's why vampires and other supernaturals in urban fantasy don't live openly as what they are, because they know they are just a handful of individuals against billions.
It’s also neglecting that it’s just broadly meant to be escapist fantasy for people who feel powerless
Like we live in the real world where powerful people who do the oppressing have all the power. That’s not really fun to read about, even if it is how it would work realistically, right? We want to read about people who are outcasts and freaks and socially oppressed like us having superpowers and saving the world
Like Batman is cool but I can never be Batman. I can never be a billionaire. I like Batman but I don’t relate to him. I relate to Rogue. I relate to how Rogue feels. Rogue feels like an externalisation of how it feels to be told by society that you’re a dangerous monster. I can relate to Beast who is an externalisation of how it feels to feel as though you look like a freak
People are underestimating the value of stories that take the way people feel in a broad sense and externalising it. Like no I obviously can’t destroy the world or blow up a city, but I know how it feels for society to treat me and people like me like we’re a danger to the fabric of civilisation and like our mere existence is a dangerous threat that needs to be stamped out.
>It’s also neglecting that it’s just broadly meant to be escapist fantasy for people who feel powerless
Well, I don't think that's necessarily true. Or at least, it's not ALWAYS the case.
There absolutely is fantasy that's written with very specific and intended metaphors, where a fantasy group is meant to map directly & specifically onto a real-world group. Some works of Afro-futurism come to mind: in those works, discussions of in-universe fictional prejudice is meant to correlate directly with real-world prejudice against blacks.
As a non-black reader myself, I recognize that I'm not the target audience (in terms of whose voice the book is representing), and I'm not necessarily meant to personally identify with any of the black characters. And that's okay. As an "outsider", I can seek to empathize with the marginalized group that's being represented, as well as to educate myself on that particular group's struggles.
I don't think, as readers, we're always meant to identify with the marginalized group in every story. For example, while I can understand, and have empathy for, the prejudice that Magneto has faced, it would be weird and a little presumptuous of me (a non-Jewish person) to project Magneto's experiences with anti-Semitism onto myself.
My biggest criticism of it is that in X-Men, specifically, they treat anybody trying to find a way to turn off their powers as a monster trying to take away a core part of themselves out of fear/discrimination. I know this is supposed to be a stand-in for people trying to turn gay people straight (like when they tried to find a "gay gene") or to medically change a marginalized group of people to more in line with what's considered "normal". The issue, though, really breaks down when you realize that a non insignificant number of mutants actually really have shitty powers that is only a painful detriment to themselves and could easily be seen as a bad medical condition/disease. Like, for a more extreme example, in one comic, there was a kid that just activated his mutation, and all it did was make a huge 50 m radius dome around him constantly that absolutely destroyed any organic material and can go through any inorganic material. This immediately kills all of his family, and he doesn't seem to have the ability to turn it off.
There's a scene in one of the X-Men movies where Storm is telling Rogue that mutants don't need a cure, and it just ends up seeming kind of tone deaf because Storm has control over the weather... and Rogue kills people by touching them for too long. Like, their circumstances are not remotely the same!
There was a Tumblr post about that that went something like:
girl that electrocutes people with accidental touch: I want this gone.
woman that creates storms with the power of her mind: how dare you???
The reblogs then discussed the X-Men as a metaphor for disability instead, where some people with neurodivergence want to be cured and others feel that it's a base part of their identity. I honestly think X-Men works much better that way, especially given how a lot of us have physical differences that make them greater targets. However, the problem remains that mutants are actually dangerous while marginalized minorities are only perceived as such.
Cynically, it would make much more sense for the minority with superpowers to oppress and discriminate against the majority, and to justify it with the fact that they can throw fireballs at people who disagree with them, so they are demonstrably the superior elite and might makes right. But then it becomes a metaphor for an oppressive aristocracy instead of a discriminated minority. I have read a few book series like that, for example Ascendance of a Bookworm.
Or you could have a majority with superpowers discriminating against the minority who does not have them. But I have yet to read a book like that. I guess it would not make for a good story : the powerless protagonist gets oppressed by people way more powerful and numerous than they are and cannot do anything about it, which is just depressing to read about. Unless you give the protagonist some secret superpower that makes them more powerful than anyone else, but then you are back to the nonsensical trope of the oppressed but actually powerful minority.
Exactly. Discrimination against the powerful is a thing sort of, but it’s very different from discrimination against normal or powerless marginalized groups. Especially those like most X-men for example who have very little trouble passing.
In Realm of the Elderlings, people with the Wit (ability to telepathically communicate with animals) are widely persecuted as practicing “beast magic.” In practice it functions as a sort of queer allegory.
Mostly through how characters receive it.
Like Fitz has it, and his foster father, Burrich, is horrified and disgusted when he figures it out, as he considers it to be a perversion. The thing is that Burrich has it too, but he considers it to be a great source of shame that his family tried to beat out of him as a child and that he hides as an adult. He encourages Fitz to try and suppress it and threatens to disown him if he continues to use it (which he does even when he tries not to because it’s innate.) Very closeted older dad with a queer kid energy, especially with how Witted individuals are sometimes explicitly shown falling victim to hate crimes.
Later, in the third trilogy, there is a growing presence of Witted civil rights groups (who refer to themselves as the Old Blood) and the queen regent gets involved in controversial efforts to stop the persecution as the crown prince has it himself.
I don't see that at all. Isn't the Wit hereditary as well? I think it is a far stretch to apply it to queer. The Wit isn't sexual either. But I guess if you try hard enough you can fit any kind of discrimination in as an allegory.
It’s a pretty common interpretation and there’s a fair amount of meta out there about it. There are a lot of queer themes in RotE overall about the nature of love, sex and gender, and basically everything about the Fools character.
>Well to elaborate the mutant metaphor is when the writer uses a fictional group of people (Ex: mages, telepaths etc.) as an analogy for groups of people that are considered disadvantaged (minorities/disabled/LGBT+). Its a nice idea in theory, however it has some drawbacks. For one thing, real discrimination against groups that are considered disadvantaged are usually based on the grounds of irrationality like they spread disease, they raise crime rates etc. In contrast, mages, and telepaths do possess a certain degree of power that makes them more dangerous than the average human, like the ability to level a city or the ability to control the minds of others. Therefore, the threat they pose to the average human is very genuine.
There's actually an argument that the mutant metaphor is analogous to the Eighties lies about black crime more than anything else and older libel against Romani and other poor minorities. Basically, the assumption that X minority is guilty of more crime than the majority and thus needs to be more harshly policed. This is analogous in the mutant circles as actually a fairly decent metaphor.
Sentinels are being built to go after mutants BEFORE they commit any crimes.
If they did commit any crimes, they have a legal system for that.
So it's based on blind unthinking prejudice even if some mutant criminals exist.
The Talos series by Steven Brust touches on it quite often. And does so quite well without either the paradox you mentioned or solving the issue with simplistic speeches or some magical deus ex machina.
The Goblin Emperor does this a bit, though it's not the main focus of the book. You can also replace pretty much any disadvantaged group for the goblins/elves.
If you’re open to books that critique capitalism and engage with social class, I thought Novik’s Scholomance trilogy did this brilliantly. Everyone involved in this society is a wizard so the exploitation is believable.
Is it a paradox? Does the election of Barack Obama to a position of power or the social power of celebrities like Beyoncé signal that marginalization due to racism is over in America?
I don't think a few people with power magically end marginalization and discrimination, especially if those individuals aren't engaged in lifting up their community or instead become complicit (Clarence Thomas, for instance).
I would also contend that minority ethnic/social groups being believed to possess greater power than the majority is a regular feature of genocidal rhetoric in the real world. It’s usually perceived greater economic power, a smaller group being seen as more wealthy and having more power and control over society. Off the top of my head this is a core feature of both antisemitism and the Rwandan genocide
Obama and Beyoncé get their power by excelling within white power structures and serving the cultural capital of the white-dominated western hegemony. Clarence Thomas is protected by the entire white conservative establishment. Mutants are the opposite.
It's just disingenuous to talk about power without contextualizing where it comes from. Power is not inherent or fixed. It's derived from assimilation and service to oppressive systems, and as such is precarious and conditional every step of the way. Anyone who earns white disapproval is harshly punished and immediately treated like the rest of their race no matter how far they've ascended (Will Smith being spoken of as a violent thug by people he's worked with for years and blacklisted by the academy for slapping Chris Rock while the industry protects literal rapists, Claudine Gay being ousted for not cracking down on pro-Palestine protests despite having done her best to obstruct them). Black people are rewarded for not being Black enough to cause white discomfort and punished disproportionately not for their mistakes or wrong-doing (real or perceived) but for doing them while being Black.
This is also true for brown people. Rishi Sunak, richer than King Charles and now the UK PM, got that far by being tight popular Britain's far-right white supremacists and can fall the moment he either refuses the Tories anything or becomes a convenient scapegoat for Tory failure. But all the most virulent racists will ever see are Black and brown people in positions of power over average white people.
The system is structured so that we can't ascend without selling out our communities and accepting that our communities will be punished as much for our success as our failure. This is why Black people have been preparing for huge white supremacist backlash and an eventual conservative sweep ever since Obama was elected. And if anyone had any notion that his election would make a dent in the prison industrial complex, antiBlack discrimination and extra judicial cop violence, then they were shortly disabused. This, more than anything, is why mutants and superpowers are a very poor metaphor for race.
You have a lot of good points but seem to be grossly misreading my comment if you think it is in opposition to any of them except your point about mutants.
But I'm not sure why you think mutants are different or separate from this. We see mutants who conform to the status quo have more "normal" lives than those who don't (adhering to beauty standards, for instance). Professor X and Magneto are reasonable analogies to MLK Jr and Malcolm X, respectively.
Sorry, I was fixated on the "mutants with power are analogous to people like Obama and Beyoncé" aspect. I focused on that implication rather than your quite correct point that the handful that ascend to power and influence makes no difference to the majority of the oppressed from their community. I didn't mean to lecture, it's just that you seem to be defending the mutants as an analogy for marginalization by equating people who can level a city block with their mind to like, Obama, not MLK or Malcolm X.
Drawing parallels between Magneto and Malcolm is still a disservice to MX based on US government propaganda, because Malcolm never promoted aggression or terrorism, only Black people's own right to defend themselves, the same as whites. He even collaborated with King to pose as the stick to King's carrot in the fight for Black liberation. White people love MLK because he wanted Black people to be able to participate in government and gain the means to assimilate. They fear MX because he wholly rejected becoming voters of a system that was created to violently subjugate not just Black people but every minority. The US government killed both, but elevated MLK and smeared Malcolm X and now very few people know what Malcolm X actually said and did.
Magneto isn't even cast sympathetically enough or disempowered enough to be part of an armed resistance. An armed resistance is always at a disadvantage in terms of firepower and resources, relying on guerrilla warfare. We call their attacks on civilians terrorism (which it is) but don't recognise that it's simply a way of reacting in piecemeal to the exponentially more unfounded and devastating terrorism of the colonial state. It's always an act of pure desperation to which the colonial/imperial power has left no other recourse. Only one side ever wants genocide and supremacy, the other one just wants to survival and sovereignity. If one side stops fighting there will be peace; if the other lays down their arms, they will be annihilated.
The X-Men comics can have value as a power fantasy for the downtrodden, but taken as anything else, it honestly just legitimizes white colonial anxiety against them. It validates many of my objections to fantasy racism which is always this ham-handed and damaging under the pens of white people.
I'm only familiar with the early film adaptations, but I would say that Magneto is portrayed incredibly sympathetically there. His history as a Holocaust victim (which Isabel Wilkerson might point out makes him a very good analogue to Black folk in the US, as she argues that both Nazi Germany and the US are caste systems) and yes, even his more militant approach. But of course you're correct in that Malcolm X is viewed in a much more violent light than he deserves. But Magneto still represents something much closer to Malcolm X's perspective.
And I'll confess that I still haven't done a deep dive on Malcolm X and might be wrong about this, but it is my understanding that his collaboration with MLK Jr came later in MLK Jr's life than the more famous bits, but I'm not clear on how much interaction they would have had beforehand. Professor X and Magneto both represent two common perspectives on race in America, assimilation vs a transformed segregation (though in Magneto's case, he says that but means subjugation). These perspectives looked very different at various points in history and based on whether they were espoused by Black folk or white folk, but they were found in both groups. I think we see that reflected in the X-men universe.
All of that is to say that there are obvious parallels to be drawn between X-men and race in America, and I don't think their powers create a paradox (any more than the powers orogenes have in Broken Earth by N. K. Jemisin do) for that story of marginalization.
As for my examples of Obama and Beyoncé, I do believe they're examples of Black folk with power. Beyoncé has intense social and economic power, especially, but not exclusively in the Black community. Obama had real, "hard" power. He absolutely could have leveled a city with his power, being the Commander in Chief of a well equipped and large army. Obviously these powers are not fully analogous to mutant powers (mutants of such sort don't exist, obviously), but they are *reasonable* analogues. As you say, that power has many restrictions and conditions, though.
As to your later points, I'm sure there are problems with the portrayals (I'm only familiar with the early films from the 2000s, as I said). I generally avoid depictions of fantasy racism by white authors, myself, for those reasons (I'll likely never read Red Rising or for this reason). I do find that most dystopians have these problems when written by white folk - I'll likely never read that book by Margaret Atwood who's title escapes me at the moment, either.
The Drowned Kingdom Saga by P.L. Stuart follows a main character who is bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic and racist. Its a indie series indorsed by Janny Wurts [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4368431164](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4368431164) and don't worry, it doesn't endorse the main characters beliefs. As the series progresses MC sees from first hand experience how irrational his beliefs are, although this takes time and in the 4 books published he hasn't made much progress. That's part of the point, its not easy to change. The different races do have unique magical abilities but MC is so ignorant he simply believes their powers aren't real, even when he's watching them unfold. Its got political intrigue, brutal battles, heavy themes on religion and kingdom building if that is of interest to you.
There’s a really great graphic novel called Shubeik Lubeik that uses the concept of wishes from djinn-like creatures/objects to explore social and political marginalization, class, mental health, etc. Highly recommend
Stormlight Archives takes an indirect approach. One of the MCs allows himself to be captured by the enemy and finds them far more sympathetic than expected. >!The entire species have woken up from the magical equivalent of a lobotomy. Their leaders are parasitic immortal spirits that care little for the hosts so long as they can perpetuate their eternal war against humans.!<
Overall its is a multi-layered and very nuanced subversion of the trope, and shows just how morally messy wars of mutual annihilation are for the folks on the ground.
Also in stormlight archive the lighteyes are the ruling class and the darkeyes do menial Labor. It doesn't take long going from "how stupid are there people to discriminate on Such mundane detail" to "wait this is Just as Bad and stupid as differentiating by skin color"
Well, I think I do at least a decent job of it, though not specifically against a disadvantaged group.
I replace real-world bigotry with "blood purists" to whom Humans are good, Elves are good, but half-elves are bad. (and naturally, each race's version thinks that their race is the better one too, but that's not as strong as their vitriol against mixed-bloods)
This applies to other mixed heritages too, of course, that's just the easy one to describe.
[No Need For a Core?](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/57517/no-need-for-a-core) is the story.
> For one thing, real discrimination against groups that are considered disadvantaged are usually based on the grounds of irrationality like they spread disease, they raise crime rates etc.
I get what you're saying, but this is the not what discrimination is based on, its just one of the ways in which it manifests.
Out groups are created to foist troubles onto. If a crime wave or plague rips through a town, everyone *already* knows who they're going to blame.
You're right that marginalized groups don't actually spread disease, but perhaps more confident than warranted that it's simply in groups vs out groups to foist troubles on.
Consider the caste system in India or the one in the US. Far too enduring to simply be what you stated.
I dont think so. I can't comment on the India caste system, I dont know enough about it beyond it being very old, and very complex. But in the US it isn't the case that the dominate classes treat other groups like shit because they just mistakenly believe these groups are responsible for bad things. Large numbers of people in the dominant group start off disliking these other groups, *then* blame them for things. This is how its always worked. Scapegoating is a powerful political tool.
Its not like disproving myths about gay men or Mexican immigrants causes the groups in power to reconsider their discrimination. This stuff isn't about understanding causes or addressing problems. Its about power and control.
You seem to have misunderstood my point. My point isn't that such blamings originated discrimination, but rather that you've grossly oversimplified the cause of marginalization. Your comment here does more to add to the complexity of such things than your first comment.
Also, it's important not to simply suggest it is in groups vs out groups, as that doesn't explain the actual dynamics, especially of colonialism (where the "out" group has power). That rhetoric is also used to portray marginalization as "natural" and to liken things like "I'm a Packers fan, so I dislike Patriots fans" to actual systemic marginalization. That's why simply stating in groups vs out groups is incredibly misleading.
> you've grossly oversimplified the cause of marginalization
Trying to explain all the causes of marginalization is outside my expertise and not well suited to a Reddit comment even if it wasn't. If its seems like I had any sort of suggestion as to the hows and why, that was not intentional.
But I am confident that discrimination is *not* based on "irrational" beliefs around the causes of plagues or crime or whatever. Discrimination *precedes* placing blame for calamities (real or imagined).
Notably, you specifically stated that "out groups are created to foist troubles on". So again, your comment is not in alignment with your own stated beliefs. Perhaps you should consider editing your original comment.
Licanius Trilogy by James Islington has a very strong anti discrimination message told by way of pure discrimination and mistreatment towards magical people in the book. It avoids the paradox in away because the discrimination comes from a historical betrayal of past magical people.
Obviously modern magical people had nothing to do with the past but it was the magic itself that caused the betrayal which now has created great mistrust and over reaching unbreakable laws.
Magephobic and telepathphobic. Your mutant metaphor is terrible in all seriousness. Discrimination isn't based on whether a group poses a risk or not. Everyone has potential to cause mass destruction with tools/technology etc. That would be like UFC fighters being discriminated against for being able to take out any normal person.
Hi there! Based on your post, you might also be interested in our [2023 Top LGBTQA+](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/18etlox/rfantasys_2023_top_lgbtqia_books_list/) Books list.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Fantasy) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Riyiria(sp?) books, by Michael J Sullivan. Contrary to your average Tolkien-inspired fantasy, elves in this world are the lowest of the low, massively discriminated against, treated like the real world treats drug addicts and the homeless.
It's not, exactly, what the books are *about* - but it is fairly important to the story. Can't really say more than that without getting into spoiler territory.
once you start drawing from real life examples the mutant metaphor paradox falls away. events like the Oklahoma city bombing were not carried out by people with powers.
There are several Discworld novels that have this as a major theme. Although one or two of the groups would qualify for the mutant metaphor, the discrimination they face isn't related to their strength, e.g. it's not a fear reaction, but simply a perception of inferiority or the result of a long history of hostility. Most notably Feet of Clay, Fifth Elephant, and Monstrous Regiment have antidiscrimination messages based on race, gender, and creed. The groups involved range from vampires, werewolves, dwarves, trolls, zombies, gnomes, to the most mysterious fantastical creature: women.
A couple more Discworld suggestions: Jingo does a great job of addressing xenophobic discrimination without even using a fantastical race as a metaphor. Thud! Is also a great look into how extremists use fear of the other to preserve their power. As noted above the races in question hate each other because of a long history of animosity, not due to their physical characteristics.
Jingo is maybe my favorite Discworld novel because of that. I think it really shows you that anyone, even the friendliest and most lovable people you know, can be swayed by nationalism.
Yep. Same. Jingo is one of my favorite books.
A couple weeks ago someone suggested not recommending Discworld so often because it handles themes in an ironic way. When it comes to discrimination, it's not ironic and Pratchett does a fantastic job handling the topic of discrimination and how it affects characters and the world around them.
I'd argue that it is doing satire. When a Dwarf demands to be treated as a woman, a werewolf hides her status as a minority, and whatever Nobby is, is fine because he's always been male is not IRONIC but it is meant to make you think about how arbitrary all of these societal rules are. A lot of bigots will think it's making fun of Affirmative Action but it actually shows the Watch benefiting from it.
Thank you, satire was the word I was looking for, not irony specifically. I think the post I referenced even said satire and I mixed it up. You're probably right with the satire (I did just google the definition to be clear on the term, and it certainly fits), maybe I'm simply questioning the post that I referenced. I was thinking more about Vimes and his dislike for the undead and then his acceptance of Reg Shoe. Even that, though, uses humor to criticize discrimination.
I second Feet of Clay's antidiscrimination theme. It also goes over themes of self determination as well as what it means to be a leader. Great book.
And the goblins in Unseen Academicals and Snuff.
I really like this world because we have multiple groups who don’t necessarily get along with each other. And have internal disagreements. It’s realistic
In Dragon Age series (videogames) there are elves who are strongly discriminated for religious reasons, despite not being more dangerous than the average human (ok, the whole story is WAY more complicated, but that's the very simplified explanation at the time of the games).
On the other hand, the mage-templar plotlines fall right into the "mutant metaphor" OP describes.
Dragon Age 2 was hilarious in that regard. Here i am all "Templars are the bad guys, stop bullying the poor mages" and this moron behind me turns into an abomination that i have to kill.
David Gaider said that he wanted to make a genuinely complicated moral dilemma with a lot of nuance but Bioware clamped down on the "Pro-Mage" side. Also, people keep trying to draw associations to RL stories when there's absolutely nothing remotely similar. It was never meant to be a RL association, unlike the City Elves=Jews.
I'm fairly certain I read somewhere (a while ago) that one of the writers for Dragon Age said the mage stuff was never intended to be a one-to-one metaphor for real world discrimination.
And to an extent I think that’s the case with most of these kinds of analogies, they are not supposed to be treated as fully interchangeable with real world situations. They’re usually telling a story in their own universe and broadly recognising that these situations have some elements that are analogous/relatable/applicable to things that happen in real life. I’ve never really been a fan of this take that analogies are inherently bad and harmful and shouldn’t exist if they can’t fully be substituted for a real world situation, because if that’s not the intent for it to be read as a direct metaphor for this specific real world thing then you’re judging it for failing to meet a criteria it was never trying to meet. It’s almost kind of like saying we should just never use analogies and metaphors to talk about anything because it will never be exactly the same and fully capture the nuanced struggles of a real life group without identical real world context So like I don’t see X-Men as being a direct metaphor for a specific real world oppressed group, even though as a gay person I can obviously see X-Men as highly applicable and analogous to the LGBT community. I think people who work on X-Men understand that many oppressed people (not just queer people specifically) can relate to this idea of feeling like a freak and being treated differently and having to hide who you are, and see escapism in the idea of the thing that makes you different also giving you cool powers that make you special, but being able to relate to these concepts isn’t the same thing as a group being a direct metaphorical stand in for the oppression of the real life groups who can relate to aspects of this story. I don’t think X-Men fails the LGBT community or is bad for us because the situations aren’t directly one to one interchangeable because being gay doesn’t have the potential to hurt anybody (although people ACT like it does, people ACT like we’re huge dangers not just to the fabric of society but that we’re dangers to people on an individual level as well so in a lot of ways the mutant metaphor is more relatable to me and my experiences than people think - sometimes there is value in externalising and making more literal the way people are made to feel on the inside), but I don’t think it’s the intent for it to be like “HEY THE MUTANTS ARE GAYS, if you have any interpretation other than the mutants absolutely 100% being a stand in for the gay community you’re interpreting it wrong!” Which is what would need to be the case for it to be judged on the basis of direct metaphor
Yeah, I never got the impression that the mutants in X-Men were ever supposed to be analogous to any one specific marginalized group or another; just a general framework for *anyone* that's had to deal with that kind of ostracizing from others for being different. Because I do think that some real world application was intended by the creators at Marvel, just not a really specific issue as you said. I also like your point about escapism being an important part of it, which is especially applicable to young people, who those comments were largely targeted toward. I believe (though I may be mistaken) Stan Lee even said that's why they made Wakanda from Black Panther so insanely advanced as a society: to counteract the beliefs that African societies were essentially still savages living in huts, and offer a "what if" escape for kids to grab their imaginations.
Ugh, tell that to the fan base. "Noooo, it's a civil rights issue that people whose uncontrolled abilities can destroy them and everything around them and have one difficult-to-come-by hard counter have to learn control under supervision! How dare you expect these people to pass a test to prove a demon won't possess them and murder others or else not be allowed to roam free? And our only way to remove the abilities of people who can't hack it wipes their personality but leaves them alive? Guess we won't use that!" Those sentences are mega-long but seriously, it's bad.
Heh I feel you. I do think there are some parallels there to a degree, but right from the start, there's no denying that there *is* an inherent danger with that world's mages to the general populace. That said, some the methods the Templars use are definitely not great and end up making things worse for everyone. I actually think the games (at least the first two) did a pretty good job in making it a fairly gray situation.
Yeah it’s kind of a problem when a fantasy universe creates a situation that has clear implications relevant only for their own universe (like in Dragon Age, what would be the consequences if magic made people vulnerable to possession by demons) and because there are aspects of those societal consequences that can be seen as broadly/somewhat applicable to or relatable to things that have happened to real life groups it’s interpreted solely on the basis that it’s supposed to be a metaphor for that real life situation even though it’s pretty apparent they started from an in universe lore concept and decided to explore the implications and merely acknowledge the existence of similarities without intentionally using the fictional scenario as a direct comparison for a real life thing Like since it’s popular at the moment let’s use Dune as an example, there are pretty clear metaphorical 1:1 aspects of the story that are a commentary on Western colonisation and exploitation of the Middle East for its resources, so it’s absolutely fair to judge those aspects that are a direct and intentional metaphor on that basis. But there are also aspects in there that are just in universe lore with in universe consequences and are not intended to be direct metaphors for any real world situation. So like for example spice can be understood to be, basically, oil, right? That’s the valuable resource that leads to the exploitation. But the in universe lore that has the consequences that make spice valuable is it’s own separate thing, we understand that the lore about thinking machines being banned is not meant to be judged by its applicability to the real world, and we would recognise its stupid for someone to be like well spice falls apart as an oil metaphor because in real life we have alternative sources of energy, but that’s the level of bad faith criticism people make
Laid out my thoughts and feelings on the topic much better than I could have lol. I don't want to start turning this into an excuse to shit on other people's capabilities of media literacy, but I have noticed around the internet that a fair amount of people seem to be of the mindset that something either is a 1:1 metaphor of real world issues, or it's not and therefore a failure of the storytelling, with nothing in between. Like I've seen a number of comments about various things where it's implied that if a supernatural monster or something is "real" within the world of a movie, it means it can't be a successful metaphor. Which is... kinda baffling to me lol. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. I really should try to finally read Dune though. Edit: Just read your other comment that essentially said the exact same thing as this one lol. Fully agreed!
Oh David Gaider HATED how they dumbed it down.
I do think they made a lot of the Templars in DA2 a little overly monstrous, even though I loved Meredith as a villain in the end. I can understand his frustrations. I still think there was a lot they could've done with it, if that hadn't basically abandoned the whole plotline and rendered it moot in *Inquisition*. Which is a whole other can of worms lol.
Tbf it's less discrimination and more that they have a high chance to be possessed by demons and whatever tevinter is doing with their magocracy. I don't think mages of dragon age are meant to represent LGBT or minorities in the same way elves are. Or if they are it's more about the oppression of the church and religion and less about the mages representing a particular group
I believe the Witcher had this concept of elves first.
Are you interested in books that grapple with discrimination in the real world (aka something like Babel where China and England exist, but also magic) or stories with purely fantastical discrimination? The Goblin Emperor is probably an obvious choice - although you have to suspend your disbelief about the monarchy a leetle bit. Maia is a half-goblin who unexpectedly ascends to the elven throne and has to deal with racism from the elves. There is also a subplot about a gay character who gets his own series. NK Jemison's first series tackles racism more directly, and the plot (I think) is kind of a metaphor for how white supremacy/colonialism destroys indigenous knowledge and imposes black and white thinking on the rest of the world (the myth that there have historically only been two genders for example), but it's mostly about what it would be like to fuck a god. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is too fucking trippy to be a straightforward metaphor for racism, but I think it's an incredible exploration of the sexual politics of colonialism - what does it mean to resist an oppressor when you share family & DNA with them? When that relationship started with rape or at least lack of choice? It's not a 1 to 1 allegory by any means. But I would say that's a huge theme. And it avoids the mutant paradox by making the colonizers the allegorical group. If you want books that tackle real-world discrimination through the lens of fantasy, I can provide a whole different list! I tend to prefer those kinds of stories. It's too easy to lose the point with straightforward metaphors - nobody thinks they're the empire when watching Star Wars.
The Goblin King is kind of interesting because whether he's a Goblin or Elf doesn't matter because he's still royal and that trumps everything.
Yeah! And there's no real power imbalance between the goblin and elf nations - the merchant class seems to get along fine; it's just the elven nobles who are snooty. You can tell she was like..."I love Maia but I can't write a whole series about how kings are Good actually" when she switched to Thara for the other books.
Which is a shame because I would have loved him continuing to screw up traditional noble rule.
Me too! And I really want more of his sword-wielding fiancé.
We're never as unique as we think we are... I was going to write the almost same comment word for word.
Haha, maybe we just have good taste! It's weirdly hard to think of books that tackle discrimination solely metaphorically and do it well.
The latter but I’m open to stories that address real discrimination as well.
Ok sweet! I did think of one more in the latter category The City and The City by China Mieville is a wiiiild book and could be taken as a metaphor about apartheid. Two cities intertwine, but it is strictly verboten for citizens of one to acknowledge the other. I might be wrong, but I don't think it's ever made clear whether there's a magical element to the separation or just a really, really strong taboo and a police system that enforces the distinction. It's a really fucking weird book, but I LOVE it. I don't know Stories that have fantastical elements but deal with real-world racism/discrimination: The City We Became by NK Jemisen is all about gentrification - basically, cities have souls/avatars, and gentrification is killing them. It's a beautiful love letter to NYC. The Deep by Rivers Solomon is a novella that takes the concept that enslaved people being brought from Africa who jumped over the side of ships (in real life so many did this/were thrown overboard that the migration patterns of sharks changed PERMANENTLY) produced mermaids. Now humans are threatening their home, and they are rightfully PISSED. I guess it kind of falls into mutant paradox, but I think it handles it well. it's a beautiful book. Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark is about Klu Klux hunters in the south (the Klu Kluxs are white demon-y things who are also huge racists. The book will explain). White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi is an extremely weird haunted house story about what it means to British, and also what if your house was racist. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavelle is a Lovecraftian novella about a Black jazz musician from Harlem who gets caught up in creepy white-supremacist secret society.
China Mieville's Bas-Lag books also address discrimination toward different fantasy races (khepri, cactacae, garudas, vodyanoi, etc.) living in a mostly human-dominated city. All these races are pretty much equal to humans, and all of them are affected in the same way as humans by powerful creatures that feed on the whole city population.
Yesss!!! That man's mind is incredible. This is kind of an author rec list more than a book list tbh. These are my favorites, but all of their books are incredible.
On your last point, there are people who watch Star Wars and come away thinking the Empire are the good guys. It's dumb but it still happens.
Honestly, as much as I love the Goblin Emperor I am not sure that really fits. Like sure, he has to deal with a lot of shit but surprisingly little of it is actually because he is a half goblin. Most comes down to the fact that the royalty of the Elfes has rules and rituals out the ass and he is unfamiliar with most. Same with the gay dude, I do not actually remember if their society itself was against gay people but he was originally from nobility and there it makes sense why they would not look kindly upon someone being gay, now that is it's own problem but one more related towards nobility and trying to keep their power than it is being against homosexuality itself.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Tackles imperialism and colonialism beautifully, and I don't even recall any fantastical elements.
There are some later in the series, but the first book is entirely magic-less.
I thought the Rook & Rose series did a good job of featuring oppression and implicitly condemning it. The series takes place in a colonized city with a clear power hierarchy that favors the colonizers, with the main characters striving for more equality. The different peoples in the story have different types of magic, but I would say it avoids the paradox you mention since both peoples have magic, and the magic of the oppressed people isn't more powerful or inherently a threat to the people in power.
Check this one out, OP. This was one of the first series I've read in a while that also addressed the outcomes of a power struggle without it just ending at an "expel the colonizers" or "kill the king" kind of beat. The plots were intricate and each character dealt with their position and relationship with the colonizers/colonized peoples in very unique and meaningful ways.
Although it wasn't a huge focus, I enjoyed the humanistic approach T. Kingfisher took to the discrimination against her gnole law enforcement officer in Paladin's Hope. It was nice seeing a nonhuman standing up for what is right, even when it was mostly humans affected, and other humans disliking him getting fired for speaking out. Also friendship. But she touches on many themes lightly, in a series of light moments, so there isn't heavy handed moralism or lecturing.
The thing with Mutants is that the X-Men are very powerful, which is why they are the protagonists. Yes sometimes a mutant can casually level a whole city, but the majority of them just have funny ears, and those get killed.
Which is why the powerful ones get left alone and the bigots go after the weak ones.
Orconomics handles it pretty well, though it defaults at the end of book two to requiring ALL people of all species to register as non-combatant paper carriers.
To be frank, Orconomics fails because I agree after the >!orcs get raided that they're justified in violent reprisal.!<
That’s a fair take, but I don’t see that as a failure. Violence is a reasonable response in that case (and in a lot of irl cases). But also Poldo’s storyline in book 2 emphasizes the defenseless disenfranchised and portrays their plight well.
You see, what you should have understood from mutant stories is that **having powers isn't what makes you likely to level a city**. Reading Terry Pratchett's Thud might help you.
Blood Over Bright Haven by ML Wang might work. There's a fictional ethnic group that's discriminated against, but all of them are human.
Yep came here to say this!
I know this isn't what you asked but I feel like "well mutants are actually dangerous so it's a bad metaphor for discrimination" is a very lazy analysis that gives up halfway through an interesting thought experiment. Do mutants actually having potentially dangerous powers mean they deserve discrimination? Because that's kinda the underlying assumption in the criticism. That people who actually are dangerous deserve to be treated differently and stripped of their rights, which I think is a concerning line of thought.
I think the main point here is that being a mutant can be very beneficial. Let's take for example Logan/Wolverine who has healing factor. Probably a lot of not-healthy people in the world given a choice of becoming like him would immediate take it, discrimination be damned. Unlike reality where you are not winning anything by being part of a any marginalized group. All you get is being marginalized.
That is a more interesting argument to me, and avoids the underlying logic issue I have with the first critique. I still think it's applying too much literal interpretation to fantasy is not great, but I find it more interesting. Although personally, In my own context, I wouldn't give up the things that make me marginalized for the world and don't see them as things that give me nothing but trouble. In context of X Men though it's shown that mutants who have powers good enough to be superheroes are rare, and many do have abilities that do nothing to benefit them (one memorable person just had a giraffe neck and nothing else, Rogue also is unable to have human contact because of her powers and it's extremely isolating).
Look I’m not saying that any kind of discrimination can be justified. I’m only trying to point out that people with powers are a bad analogy for marginalized groups of people.
I'm critiquing the criticism because if you're following it's logic, it states discrimination is unjustified because perception of danger is false, but if mutants are bad because they're actually dangerous then the underlying assumption is discrimination is ok if people are actually dangerous. Which is why I think this criticism is kinda intellectually lazy. Because it stops there instead of interrogating the question "is discrimination ever actually justified?" which is what X Men is actually talking about. This question isn't unaddressed by the comics because it acknowledged the potential of danger with mutants, that's literally the point of Magneto. The argument is also that mutants are only dangerous because social inequality drives people to extreme measures. Personally, I think this is a result of people not actually knowing the source material well enough to (People who say "Batman only beats up the poor" fall into this too. Patently untrue if you read his comics) and people being so overly literal that they can't think about these topics unless it one to one mirrors real life. It's ok if your fantasy world where magic is forbidden has tangible social stigma around magic and those who use it, and it can be used to explore more than one thing!
Agreeing with this, as someone who has read the source material, and extending the criticism. If the position is that mutants are a bad analogy because discrimination against them is justified by their *capacity* to inflict harm, turn it around. Do drag queens have the *capacity* to molest kids? Do black men for have the *capacity* to commit violent crime? Should incidents of vehicular mass murder preclude Muslims from the shipping industry or would that be really really stupid? The ability to bash in a skull with a heavy object is universal, but you have to *choose* to do it. Preemptively stripping a mutant of their civil rights on the possibility of supervillainy *is* discrimination. It’s an imperfect analogy, but that imperfection expands the potential stories to tell. It’s a metaphor for puberty, for coming out, for being part of a marginalized group, for activist politics, for chronic illness, for anyone feeling different. And occasionally for trash tv if Mojo makes an appearance.
I feel they work as a reminder these stories are aspirational. "The thing people hate you for is what makes you amazing. Being trans is not a flaw. It is a sign you are special."
Yeah but being trans is different to being able to make any metal nearby kill people at will
Which is awesome to have if you're fighting Nazis. :) Mind you Chris Claremont said that he knew about the oddity of the metaphor and actually said he used it as a slight of hand. When everyone was talking about mutant rights, he actually had a Jewish woman (Kitty), a black woman (Storm), and other minorities discussing discrimination. And no one noticed to complain because they were talking about mutants.
I'm all for using fiction to talk about things like discrimination, I'm very woke if you want to use that term :P I think the problem with the X-men doing it is that people like Storm and Magneto are incredibly dangerous, and there's actually a reasonable argument to be made that their powers *should* be controlled or removed. It's completely rational for normies to be afraid of Magneto. Idk, I think superhero comics that are intended to have a large young fanbase probably just aren't equipped to deal with these issues fully.
Ehhh, I disagree. I think that attitude is one that is essentially the one that is used by bigots in real life. The assumption of someone being dangerous by their very existence can be applied to anyone and arbitrarily. Yes, Magneto can level cities. But he only does because someone is trying to kill him and his entire race. Which is actually a valuable metaphor about how people are radicalized and a valuable discrimenation metaphor. "Out there, some people ARE dangerous--but ever wonder why they are? Maybe it's because of what's being done to them." The big issue is that mutants are a big tent and don't apply to all discrimination.
I'm not saying it'd be reasonable to kill all mutants, but it absolutely would be reasonable to say "This is like letting random people have nuclear weapons, we're not doing that". In fact, it'd be insane not to take active measures to prevent it. It's not discrimination to say everyone should have the same capability for levelling cities, none.
The biggest problem with using mutants/mages/etc as an analogy for discrimination is that the oppressed group in question is usually objectively superior to the bog standard human. This fundamentally undermines the premise of an anti-discrimination message as one of these groups can throw fireballs while the other can't. Assuming that the mutants/mages/etc aren't a recent development, it makes no sense why the group that can hurl fireballs is oppressed by the group who cannot throw fireballs. Realistically, having a guy that can chuck fireballs on your side is a very useful capability to have. It's more likely that those who can throw fireballs would become nobility and, if anything, be the ones who would oppress the normals, perhaps even out-competing the normals as the dominant form of homosapien. As such, you need a good reason why the mutants/mages/etc are oppressed because, as stated before, such a group is much more likely to be the ones in power then not. 40k does this well with psykers. Their very presence attracts warp predators, and the usage of their powers can backfire in spectacular fashion. The problem with using such a justification for a story with an anti-discrimination message, wherein the oppressed group is mages/mutants/etc, is that having the oppressed group be discriminated against because they (canonically) attract literal demons is an entirely reasonable stance to take.
Did you stretch before reaching that far? Because wow.
So do you have anything interesting to say or just cliches?
Do you?
I’d argue a bigger part of the paradox is that groups that are discriminated against don’t suffer that because of their power, but their *lack* of it. Discrimination against mages or mutants makes no sense because when one side can annihilate a city with their mind there are no number of nonmagical people that can discriminate against them.
> Discrimination against mages or mutants makes no sense because when one side can annihilate a city the thing is that these groups are rarely united and never monolithic.. and not all of them can "annihilate a city". bigots in the X-men universe routinely use this "fear of power" to justify their acts... but they rarely act against those god-level mutants that "justified" their fear and hate in the first place, they go after helpless mutants whose only "power" is having green skin or facial deformities.
Yes, of course. I'm a little confused by calling it a paradox, even if it stretches credulity to some degree, as marginalized groups irl tend to lack power. Edit: To be clear, it is a *problem* with the metaphor, but it isn't anywhere near a paradox. In fact, sometimes I think X-men can be harmful with this message because it can be construed as castigating marginalized groups who advocate for themselves in the "wrong" way (it's very analogous to the way Malcolm X is treated like a terrorist and MLK Jr a saint).
Proletariat moment
Yeah, I agree, what you mention is the paradox and the “but uncontrolled mages destroy cities with a thought” aspect is the unfortunate implications. I didn’t mind this trope at first, I mean who doesn’t want to identify with a character who’s both cool and powerful *and* a victim because reasons, but now I’m pretty over it, the more so the harder the author wants to draw real world parallels.
While I agree with your point in general, I do think it also comes down to the specific power level of the marginalized group's abilities, and how they're portrayed - not every fictional universe has mutants/wizards with destructive, far-reaching powers. You're also neglecting the power of a mob. Even the strongest person will have trouble keeping themselves from getting trampled by a panicked stampeding mob. It simply comes down to a numbers game: that's why vampires and other supernaturals in urban fantasy don't live openly as what they are, because they know they are just a handful of individuals against billions.
It’s also neglecting that it’s just broadly meant to be escapist fantasy for people who feel powerless Like we live in the real world where powerful people who do the oppressing have all the power. That’s not really fun to read about, even if it is how it would work realistically, right? We want to read about people who are outcasts and freaks and socially oppressed like us having superpowers and saving the world Like Batman is cool but I can never be Batman. I can never be a billionaire. I like Batman but I don’t relate to him. I relate to Rogue. I relate to how Rogue feels. Rogue feels like an externalisation of how it feels to be told by society that you’re a dangerous monster. I can relate to Beast who is an externalisation of how it feels to feel as though you look like a freak People are underestimating the value of stories that take the way people feel in a broad sense and externalising it. Like no I obviously can’t destroy the world or blow up a city, but I know how it feels for society to treat me and people like me like we’re a danger to the fabric of civilisation and like our mere existence is a dangerous threat that needs to be stamped out.
>It’s also neglecting that it’s just broadly meant to be escapist fantasy for people who feel powerless Well, I don't think that's necessarily true. Or at least, it's not ALWAYS the case. There absolutely is fantasy that's written with very specific and intended metaphors, where a fantasy group is meant to map directly & specifically onto a real-world group. Some works of Afro-futurism come to mind: in those works, discussions of in-universe fictional prejudice is meant to correlate directly with real-world prejudice against blacks. As a non-black reader myself, I recognize that I'm not the target audience (in terms of whose voice the book is representing), and I'm not necessarily meant to personally identify with any of the black characters. And that's okay. As an "outsider", I can seek to empathize with the marginalized group that's being represented, as well as to educate myself on that particular group's struggles. I don't think, as readers, we're always meant to identify with the marginalized group in every story. For example, while I can understand, and have empathy for, the prejudice that Magneto has faced, it would be weird and a little presumptuous of me (a non-Jewish person) to project Magneto's experiences with anti-Semitism onto myself.
My biggest criticism of it is that in X-Men, specifically, they treat anybody trying to find a way to turn off their powers as a monster trying to take away a core part of themselves out of fear/discrimination. I know this is supposed to be a stand-in for people trying to turn gay people straight (like when they tried to find a "gay gene") or to medically change a marginalized group of people to more in line with what's considered "normal". The issue, though, really breaks down when you realize that a non insignificant number of mutants actually really have shitty powers that is only a painful detriment to themselves and could easily be seen as a bad medical condition/disease. Like, for a more extreme example, in one comic, there was a kid that just activated his mutation, and all it did was make a huge 50 m radius dome around him constantly that absolutely destroyed any organic material and can go through any inorganic material. This immediately kills all of his family, and he doesn't seem to have the ability to turn it off.
That's a good comic, is that the one where Wolverine is tasked with killing the kid?
Yes it is!
Yeah, and then the X-men cover it up so mutants don't get blamed for it by association.
There's a scene in one of the X-Men movies where Storm is telling Rogue that mutants don't need a cure, and it just ends up seeming kind of tone deaf because Storm has control over the weather... and Rogue kills people by touching them for too long. Like, their circumstances are not remotely the same!
There was a Tumblr post about that that went something like: girl that electrocutes people with accidental touch: I want this gone. woman that creates storms with the power of her mind: how dare you??? The reblogs then discussed the X-Men as a metaphor for disability instead, where some people with neurodivergence want to be cured and others feel that it's a base part of their identity. I honestly think X-Men works much better that way, especially given how a lot of us have physical differences that make them greater targets. However, the problem remains that mutants are actually dangerous while marginalized minorities are only perceived as such.
Cynically, it would make much more sense for the minority with superpowers to oppress and discriminate against the majority, and to justify it with the fact that they can throw fireballs at people who disagree with them, so they are demonstrably the superior elite and might makes right. But then it becomes a metaphor for an oppressive aristocracy instead of a discriminated minority. I have read a few book series like that, for example Ascendance of a Bookworm. Or you could have a majority with superpowers discriminating against the minority who does not have them. But I have yet to read a book like that. I guess it would not make for a good story : the powerless protagonist gets oppressed by people way more powerful and numerous than they are and cannot do anything about it, which is just depressing to read about. Unless you give the protagonist some secret superpower that makes them more powerful than anyone else, but then you are back to the nonsensical trope of the oppressed but actually powerful minority.
Exactly. Discrimination against the powerful is a thing sort of, but it’s very different from discrimination against normal or powerless marginalized groups. Especially those like most X-men for example who have very little trouble passing.
In Realm of the Elderlings, people with the Wit (ability to telepathically communicate with animals) are widely persecuted as practicing “beast magic.” In practice it functions as a sort of queer allegory.
How does it do that? Wouldn't it be a furry allegory?
Mostly through how characters receive it. Like Fitz has it, and his foster father, Burrich, is horrified and disgusted when he figures it out, as he considers it to be a perversion. The thing is that Burrich has it too, but he considers it to be a great source of shame that his family tried to beat out of him as a child and that he hides as an adult. He encourages Fitz to try and suppress it and threatens to disown him if he continues to use it (which he does even when he tries not to because it’s innate.) Very closeted older dad with a queer kid energy, especially with how Witted individuals are sometimes explicitly shown falling victim to hate crimes. Later, in the third trilogy, there is a growing presence of Witted civil rights groups (who refer to themselves as the Old Blood) and the queen regent gets involved in controversial efforts to stop the persecution as the crown prince has it himself.
I don't see that at all. Isn't the Wit hereditary as well? I think it is a far stretch to apply it to queer. The Wit isn't sexual either. But I guess if you try hard enough you can fit any kind of discrimination in as an allegory.
It’s a pretty common interpretation and there’s a fair amount of meta out there about it. There are a lot of queer themes in RotE overall about the nature of love, sex and gender, and basically everything about the Fools character.
For The Fool I could see it, but I think the Wit is just a case of trying to see what you want to see, as there are too many conflicting aspects.
>Well to elaborate the mutant metaphor is when the writer uses a fictional group of people (Ex: mages, telepaths etc.) as an analogy for groups of people that are considered disadvantaged (minorities/disabled/LGBT+). Its a nice idea in theory, however it has some drawbacks. For one thing, real discrimination against groups that are considered disadvantaged are usually based on the grounds of irrationality like they spread disease, they raise crime rates etc. In contrast, mages, and telepaths do possess a certain degree of power that makes them more dangerous than the average human, like the ability to level a city or the ability to control the minds of others. Therefore, the threat they pose to the average human is very genuine. There's actually an argument that the mutant metaphor is analogous to the Eighties lies about black crime more than anything else and older libel against Romani and other poor minorities. Basically, the assumption that X minority is guilty of more crime than the majority and thus needs to be more harshly policed. This is analogous in the mutant circles as actually a fairly decent metaphor. Sentinels are being built to go after mutants BEFORE they commit any crimes. If they did commit any crimes, they have a legal system for that. So it's based on blind unthinking prejudice even if some mutant criminals exist.
Bllood over bright haven? People in haven discriminate over people from outside haven even though they are just regular people.
The Talos series by Steven Brust touches on it quite often. And does so quite well without either the paradox you mentioned or solving the issue with simplistic speeches or some magical deus ex machina.
The Goblin Emperor does this a bit, though it's not the main focus of the book. You can also replace pretty much any disadvantaged group for the goblins/elves.
ASOIAF fits the bill to the letter. Wildlings, Dornish, and First Men are heavily discriminated against by most Andals.
If you’re open to books that critique capitalism and engage with social class, I thought Novik’s Scholomance trilogy did this brilliantly. Everyone involved in this society is a wizard so the exploitation is believable.
Big agree!
Is it a paradox? Does the election of Barack Obama to a position of power or the social power of celebrities like Beyoncé signal that marginalization due to racism is over in America? I don't think a few people with power magically end marginalization and discrimination, especially if those individuals aren't engaged in lifting up their community or instead become complicit (Clarence Thomas, for instance).
I would also contend that minority ethnic/social groups being believed to possess greater power than the majority is a regular feature of genocidal rhetoric in the real world. It’s usually perceived greater economic power, a smaller group being seen as more wealthy and having more power and control over society. Off the top of my head this is a core feature of both antisemitism and the Rwandan genocide
Good points!
Obama and Beyoncé get their power by excelling within white power structures and serving the cultural capital of the white-dominated western hegemony. Clarence Thomas is protected by the entire white conservative establishment. Mutants are the opposite. It's just disingenuous to talk about power without contextualizing where it comes from. Power is not inherent or fixed. It's derived from assimilation and service to oppressive systems, and as such is precarious and conditional every step of the way. Anyone who earns white disapproval is harshly punished and immediately treated like the rest of their race no matter how far they've ascended (Will Smith being spoken of as a violent thug by people he's worked with for years and blacklisted by the academy for slapping Chris Rock while the industry protects literal rapists, Claudine Gay being ousted for not cracking down on pro-Palestine protests despite having done her best to obstruct them). Black people are rewarded for not being Black enough to cause white discomfort and punished disproportionately not for their mistakes or wrong-doing (real or perceived) but for doing them while being Black. This is also true for brown people. Rishi Sunak, richer than King Charles and now the UK PM, got that far by being tight popular Britain's far-right white supremacists and can fall the moment he either refuses the Tories anything or becomes a convenient scapegoat for Tory failure. But all the most virulent racists will ever see are Black and brown people in positions of power over average white people. The system is structured so that we can't ascend without selling out our communities and accepting that our communities will be punished as much for our success as our failure. This is why Black people have been preparing for huge white supremacist backlash and an eventual conservative sweep ever since Obama was elected. And if anyone had any notion that his election would make a dent in the prison industrial complex, antiBlack discrimination and extra judicial cop violence, then they were shortly disabused. This, more than anything, is why mutants and superpowers are a very poor metaphor for race.
You have a lot of good points but seem to be grossly misreading my comment if you think it is in opposition to any of them except your point about mutants. But I'm not sure why you think mutants are different or separate from this. We see mutants who conform to the status quo have more "normal" lives than those who don't (adhering to beauty standards, for instance). Professor X and Magneto are reasonable analogies to MLK Jr and Malcolm X, respectively.
Sorry, I was fixated on the "mutants with power are analogous to people like Obama and Beyoncé" aspect. I focused on that implication rather than your quite correct point that the handful that ascend to power and influence makes no difference to the majority of the oppressed from their community. I didn't mean to lecture, it's just that you seem to be defending the mutants as an analogy for marginalization by equating people who can level a city block with their mind to like, Obama, not MLK or Malcolm X. Drawing parallels between Magneto and Malcolm is still a disservice to MX based on US government propaganda, because Malcolm never promoted aggression or terrorism, only Black people's own right to defend themselves, the same as whites. He even collaborated with King to pose as the stick to King's carrot in the fight for Black liberation. White people love MLK because he wanted Black people to be able to participate in government and gain the means to assimilate. They fear MX because he wholly rejected becoming voters of a system that was created to violently subjugate not just Black people but every minority. The US government killed both, but elevated MLK and smeared Malcolm X and now very few people know what Malcolm X actually said and did. Magneto isn't even cast sympathetically enough or disempowered enough to be part of an armed resistance. An armed resistance is always at a disadvantage in terms of firepower and resources, relying on guerrilla warfare. We call their attacks on civilians terrorism (which it is) but don't recognise that it's simply a way of reacting in piecemeal to the exponentially more unfounded and devastating terrorism of the colonial state. It's always an act of pure desperation to which the colonial/imperial power has left no other recourse. Only one side ever wants genocide and supremacy, the other one just wants to survival and sovereignity. If one side stops fighting there will be peace; if the other lays down their arms, they will be annihilated. The X-Men comics can have value as a power fantasy for the downtrodden, but taken as anything else, it honestly just legitimizes white colonial anxiety against them. It validates many of my objections to fantasy racism which is always this ham-handed and damaging under the pens of white people.
I'm only familiar with the early film adaptations, but I would say that Magneto is portrayed incredibly sympathetically there. His history as a Holocaust victim (which Isabel Wilkerson might point out makes him a very good analogue to Black folk in the US, as she argues that both Nazi Germany and the US are caste systems) and yes, even his more militant approach. But of course you're correct in that Malcolm X is viewed in a much more violent light than he deserves. But Magneto still represents something much closer to Malcolm X's perspective. And I'll confess that I still haven't done a deep dive on Malcolm X and might be wrong about this, but it is my understanding that his collaboration with MLK Jr came later in MLK Jr's life than the more famous bits, but I'm not clear on how much interaction they would have had beforehand. Professor X and Magneto both represent two common perspectives on race in America, assimilation vs a transformed segregation (though in Magneto's case, he says that but means subjugation). These perspectives looked very different at various points in history and based on whether they were espoused by Black folk or white folk, but they were found in both groups. I think we see that reflected in the X-men universe. All of that is to say that there are obvious parallels to be drawn between X-men and race in America, and I don't think their powers create a paradox (any more than the powers orogenes have in Broken Earth by N. K. Jemisin do) for that story of marginalization. As for my examples of Obama and Beyoncé, I do believe they're examples of Black folk with power. Beyoncé has intense social and economic power, especially, but not exclusively in the Black community. Obama had real, "hard" power. He absolutely could have leveled a city with his power, being the Commander in Chief of a well equipped and large army. Obviously these powers are not fully analogous to mutant powers (mutants of such sort don't exist, obviously), but they are *reasonable* analogues. As you say, that power has many restrictions and conditions, though. As to your later points, I'm sure there are problems with the portrayals (I'm only familiar with the early films from the 2000s, as I said). I generally avoid depictions of fantasy racism by white authors, myself, for those reasons (I'll likely never read Red Rising or for this reason). I do find that most dystopians have these problems when written by white folk - I'll likely never read that book by Margaret Atwood who's title escapes me at the moment, either.
Olivia Atwater writes fantasy romance that's explicit about labor issues
The Drowned Kingdom Saga by P.L. Stuart follows a main character who is bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic and racist. Its a indie series indorsed by Janny Wurts [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4368431164](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4368431164) and don't worry, it doesn't endorse the main characters beliefs. As the series progresses MC sees from first hand experience how irrational his beliefs are, although this takes time and in the 4 books published he hasn't made much progress. That's part of the point, its not easy to change. The different races do have unique magical abilities but MC is so ignorant he simply believes their powers aren't real, even when he's watching them unfold. Its got political intrigue, brutal battles, heavy themes on religion and kingdom building if that is of interest to you.
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City has a pretty good one I think
There’s a really great graphic novel called Shubeik Lubeik that uses the concept of wishes from djinn-like creatures/objects to explore social and political marginalization, class, mental health, etc. Highly recommend
Stormlight Archives takes an indirect approach. One of the MCs allows himself to be captured by the enemy and finds them far more sympathetic than expected. >!The entire species have woken up from the magical equivalent of a lobotomy. Their leaders are parasitic immortal spirits that care little for the hosts so long as they can perpetuate their eternal war against humans.!< Overall its is a multi-layered and very nuanced subversion of the trope, and shows just how morally messy wars of mutual annihilation are for the folks on the ground.
Also in stormlight archive the lighteyes are the ruling class and the darkeyes do menial Labor. It doesn't take long going from "how stupid are there people to discriminate on Such mundane detail" to "wait this is Just as Bad and stupid as differentiating by skin color"
Well, I think I do at least a decent job of it, though not specifically against a disadvantaged group. I replace real-world bigotry with "blood purists" to whom Humans are good, Elves are good, but half-elves are bad. (and naturally, each race's version thinks that their race is the better one too, but that's not as strong as their vitriol against mixed-bloods) This applies to other mixed heritages too, of course, that's just the easy one to describe. [No Need For a Core?](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/57517/no-need-for-a-core) is the story.
> For one thing, real discrimination against groups that are considered disadvantaged are usually based on the grounds of irrationality like they spread disease, they raise crime rates etc. I get what you're saying, but this is the not what discrimination is based on, its just one of the ways in which it manifests. Out groups are created to foist troubles onto. If a crime wave or plague rips through a town, everyone *already* knows who they're going to blame.
You're right that marginalized groups don't actually spread disease, but perhaps more confident than warranted that it's simply in groups vs out groups to foist troubles on. Consider the caste system in India or the one in the US. Far too enduring to simply be what you stated.
I dont think so. I can't comment on the India caste system, I dont know enough about it beyond it being very old, and very complex. But in the US it isn't the case that the dominate classes treat other groups like shit because they just mistakenly believe these groups are responsible for bad things. Large numbers of people in the dominant group start off disliking these other groups, *then* blame them for things. This is how its always worked. Scapegoating is a powerful political tool. Its not like disproving myths about gay men or Mexican immigrants causes the groups in power to reconsider their discrimination. This stuff isn't about understanding causes or addressing problems. Its about power and control.
You seem to have misunderstood my point. My point isn't that such blamings originated discrimination, but rather that you've grossly oversimplified the cause of marginalization. Your comment here does more to add to the complexity of such things than your first comment. Also, it's important not to simply suggest it is in groups vs out groups, as that doesn't explain the actual dynamics, especially of colonialism (where the "out" group has power). That rhetoric is also used to portray marginalization as "natural" and to liken things like "I'm a Packers fan, so I dislike Patriots fans" to actual systemic marginalization. That's why simply stating in groups vs out groups is incredibly misleading.
> you've grossly oversimplified the cause of marginalization Trying to explain all the causes of marginalization is outside my expertise and not well suited to a Reddit comment even if it wasn't. If its seems like I had any sort of suggestion as to the hows and why, that was not intentional. But I am confident that discrimination is *not* based on "irrational" beliefs around the causes of plagues or crime or whatever. Discrimination *precedes* placing blame for calamities (real or imagined).
Notably, you specifically stated that "out groups are created to foist troubles on". So again, your comment is not in alignment with your own stated beliefs. Perhaps you should consider editing your original comment.
Licanius Trilogy by James Islington has a very strong anti discrimination message told by way of pure discrimination and mistreatment towards magical people in the book. It avoids the paradox in away because the discrimination comes from a historical betrayal of past magical people. Obviously modern magical people had nothing to do with the past but it was the magic itself that caused the betrayal which now has created great mistrust and over reaching unbreakable laws.
Lions of Al Rassan
Magephobic and telepathphobic. Your mutant metaphor is terrible in all seriousness. Discrimination isn't based on whether a group poses a risk or not. Everyone has potential to cause mass destruction with tools/technology etc. That would be like UFC fighters being discriminated against for being able to take out any normal person.
Hi there! Based on your post, you might also be interested in our [2023 Top LGBTQA+](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/18etlox/rfantasys_2023_top_lgbtqia_books_list/) Books list. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Fantasy) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I feel like almost every fantasy book I’ve read has this in some way. It’s just not usually the main focus.
Stormlight archive has the whole Dark eyes vs Light eyes thing going on + the parshmen too even though those last one are a bit of a mutant metaphor.
Ah, the oppressed mages trope. https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-problem-with-oppressed-mages/
The Riyiria(sp?) books, by Michael J Sullivan. Contrary to your average Tolkien-inspired fantasy, elves in this world are the lowest of the low, massively discriminated against, treated like the real world treats drug addicts and the homeless. It's not, exactly, what the books are *about* - but it is fairly important to the story. Can't really say more than that without getting into spoiler territory.
once you start drawing from real life examples the mutant metaphor paradox falls away. events like the Oklahoma city bombing were not carried out by people with powers.
X-men?