Are we mutants? o.O

Post Reply New Topic

My mother and I have started joking about being a family of 'mutants'. At first it was just us being silly, but lately I've been thinking it may be a very apt hyperbolic comparison.

Let it be said: My knowledge of X-men isn't super deep. I don't have a comic book collection, most of my knowledge is from the cartoons and movies.

But thinking back on it, there are some eerry simularitys.

1. We are both a group of people with strange abilities.
2. We both suffer socially for our abilities. We're discriminated against and misunderstood.
3. There is a great variety of special abilities. **cough**specialinterests**cough**
4. There is a great variety of ability to blend into society unnoticed.

In X-men there are several camps of thought regarding how to help mutants:

1. Pro-Cure: Consists of Parents, Scientists, mutant-phobs and visually unpleasant mutants tend to want to find a cure (and do!).
An unlucky percentage suffer from mutations that cause serious hindrances to quality of life.
Mutants like Rogue can't touch another human being. Another is telepathic but wheel-chair bound and paralyzed.

More sinister and unlike real life (thank goodness), some of these people want to find a cure not out of compassion, but fear of mutant power.

2. Anti-Cure: Other's believe the mutants need acceptance, not a cure. Many of the main charactors fall into this catagory. Being somewhat normal looking and not having super problematic powers let's them firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with being a mutant, and they try to push Public Opinion in that direction.

3. Supremacists: Some, frustrated with how they are treated, believe that Mutants are in fact superior to normal humans and it is the humans that need to stand aside.

Some contend that mutants are the next step foward. Extremests believe that that means that human's time is done and that Mutants should take their place as the planets rules.

Frankly I see all three of these attitudes happening to different degree's. Am I off base? or should our logo be:

I mostly worry about people assuming that certain traits in X-Men movies actually translate to reality.

The way one of the X-Men movies portrayed things, there were only two responses among mutants themselves, and the ideas grouped together were the following:


Group one (represented by the Brotherhood of Mutants):

* Bad/evil.
* More extreme views relative to the society they are living in.
* Separatist
* Hatred.
* Sense of superiority over non-mutants.
* Willingness to kill or betray without remorse, particularly non-mutants.
* In fact, willingness to kill all non-mutants. Only lives truly concerned with saving are mutant lives, and particularly mutants who are on their side.
* The strongly held belief that mutants are perfectly fine as they are and need no cure.

Group two (represented by the X-Men):
* Good.
* More moderate views relative to the society they are living in.
* Assimiliationist
* Love.
* Sense of equality with non-mutants.
* Primarily trying to save lives, killing only as a last resort and with reluctance, and a general sense of fairness.
* Saving the lives of mutants and non-mutants alike.
* More variety in response to the question of cure.

What I've found, is that people who make X-Men analogies to the way autistic people think, tend to honestly believe that those groups of traits are real. I mean like... that if a person has a trait in the first group then they must have all or most of the other traits in the first group. And I don't like that. It worries me. Because for instance, being a separatist doesn't have to mean hating the people you're separating from. (I'm not a separatist but separatism isn't the same as supremacy.)

My views on disability in general are really really far from the way my society views disability (including autism). Really, incredibly far. Further than most people in the autistic community. But. I also believe in love, and equality, and a bunch of other things that are not associated with the brotherhood of mutants. And a lot of people unconsciously follow those groupings and assume if your views are extreme then you're a supremacist or whatever, and I don't like that.

I'm not saying you're doing that, I'm just saying I see a lot of that kind of thinking when people bring up the X-Men in autism forums. If I were in the X-Men world I wouldn't be in either the X-Men or the Brotherhood of Mutants. People forget there's third, fourth, fifth options.

A mutant is a life form which has undergone a change to some aspect of it's genetic code, that sets it apart from others of it's kind.

To some extent, all humans are likely to be mutants because humans tend to have a lot of genetic variation. A few mutations may prove to be beneficial. Other mutations seem to have no immediate benefit, or produce no immediately obvious negative effects, but may appear to under certain conditions. Some mutations are irrelevant, and yet others have negative effects.

Whenever I think of the X-Men, I feel like the factions were handled pretty poorly to begin with, in such a way as to place mutants directly at odds with each other, rather than regularly dealing with conflicts with the rest of society. It feels very simplied and the entire concept is typically (but not always) used badly.

Because the X-Men are one of my interests, I did have similar thoughts about comparison, but this dragged me off into my own ideas about fiction about the emergence of superhumans and more thoughts about what would be interesting to explore (such as sensory and cognitive differences, which are not really explored in much detail even when introduced in comic books).

That isn't to say making them a metaphor for autistic people so much, although perhaps more broadly a metaphor for disability in general. Also a more nuanced ideological struggle that doesn't rely on superhero/supervillain tropes.

Like I could see mutant superiority types as separate from mutant separatist types as separate from mutant assimilationist types. I can see mutant acceptance (people who accept themselves as mutants) as opposed to pro-cure mutants, and so on. There's too many possibilities to contain in just two options, as anbuend said.

The X-Men are an interesting starting point, and they're filled with metaphors about disability, civil rights struggles, oppression, society, and so on. Worth thinking about as long as the metaphor isn't rigidly applied.

Yeah, the x-men have always been a good metaphor for civil rights in general, but with the emergance of Autism and Ausbergers, I'm thinking it can be a even better metaphor for Non-NTs. I mean Rogue can't physically touch people. That's a pretty damn good analogy for autistics who try but can't connect with others.

Heh, my reference to civil rights was the least important part of my post.

I see the X-Men as more broadly applicable to disability in general.

Bipolar disorder is associated with an increased kind of creativity.

I think it's more about having differences from what society expects. It's less about the powers than about being different and shunned and treated like rubbish for those differences. At least, that's what it is to me.

A lot of mutants to have explicit disabilities (Rogue and Cyclops come to mind), so I am not sure about making that into a metaphor for a different disability. I mean I think you have a point about Rogue's isolation, although I have to say I don't relate to isolation as a necessarily horrible thing. I think more of what happens when Rogue is touched and bombarded by other people in ways she can't always control.

I'm not criticizing your take, just that stating my own.

Compared to other comics/movies X-men does have a lot of material which reminds me of ourselves.
Autistics are mutants in the sense that our genes mutated to make us this way. I am honestly one of the people who believe we are going to take over the world. But I am not evil. Though, to the orthodox I am. But then the orthodox thought the sun circled the earth.

If they are able to detect us by locating a gene responsible for autism that everyone else (NTs) does not have then I would have to say yes.

OP, everybody's a mutant. That's just how genetics works. We all have mutations--even the most neurotypical of the NTs has on average a dozen new mutations per person. Now, granted, most of them are inconsequential and do nothing; but genetic variation is the norm, not the exceptions.

We just happen to be mutants whose genetic differences are obvious and probably started out with some autistic cave-man (or more likely multiple autistic cave-men) and have been passed down to us.

That's What I think actually being at my Dayprogram Achieve is like The X Mansion