Madner Kami wrote: ↑Sun Jul 31, 2022 12:46 pm
She wouldn't end up in "Arkham Asylum", if her power wouldn't have caused harm in such a way, so within the constraints of the story: it was necessary. Same for the other inhabitants. Using different characters would have been a better choice probably though. Aka: You wouldn't throw someone who stole a loaf of bread into Arkham Asylum. The character needs to be at Joker-levels of dangerous.
If you're referring to the asylum in the show, it's owned by the Essex Corporation and is run by the people who killed all the mutants in Logan. It's not because she's dangerous that she's there, it's because Sinister (or his analog in the X-men cinematic universe) wants to kill all mutants.
See that's the funny thing where the whole mutant-scare thing goes off the rails. That mutants are representative of minorities as a whole is a fairly modern idea. Mutants were originally much more a metaphor for the AIDS-epidemic and it stands to reason that someone infected with HIV very much is a menace to the general public, because their "superpower" literally kills or, rather, killed with almost 100% certainty and there was nothing you could do about it, other than isolating them or the general public from each other in a manner of speaking. In other words: Making them into a representation of all minorities is the problem, while still treating them like an infectious disease. Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Uh, they were created in the Sixties and Stan Lee says Professor X was based on Martin Luther King and Magneto on Malcolm X (which sounds like bullshit given Magneto was just a generic world conquering villain but never let the truth get in the way of a good story). THE LEGACY VIRUS by Stryfe was based on the AIDS epidemic but not mutants in general.
I've watched enough Linkara reviews at this point to decide that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were not great storytellers. They were ideas men. Most of the truly beloved stories that use their characters were not written by them. And X-Men no1 is a great example of that. If Lee and Kirby genuinely intended mutantkind to be an analogy of civil rights and it wasn't some marketing ploy then it doesn't come off that way and i'm willing to bet never did until comics entered the more mature writing of the 1980s.
Thinking about this, y'know who Lee and Kirby remind me of in retrospect? Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. Their ideas were amazing, but if you actually look into it, so much of what we actually enjoy about Star Trek and Star Wars came from the rest of the staff, not them.
Madner Kami wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 2:56 pm
Have you stopped to think about how the kids got there in the first place? That's no accusation, because the writers didn't think about that either. Outside of what happens to Danni, noone makes a statement or shows a behaviour akin to: "I was abducted by some dudes" or "I just kinda woke up here". The implication for them is, that their families and governmental authorities brought them there. It's hard to imagine that everyone is in cahoots with Mr. Sinister, while the Asylum is still being run like a relatively normal asylum, rather than a crazy extermination- and experimentation-camp on a surface-level, so (several) someone(s), somewhere, considers the Asylum to be a facility which is supposed to treat and help the children first and foremost (in addition to detain them) and heck, the Doctor is apparently trying to adress their traumas. This would all be very, VERY different if everybody knew what the facility and Essex Corp really is.
Unfortunately, I think you tried to make the setting more realistic than it is. The kids state repeatedly they think they're in one of Professor X's schools (and the audience is meant to think the same thing). They even talk about the possibility that they're going to become X-men. Which is to say they don't even think they're prisoners.
From what I remember I thought that the issue was that the power was typically beyond the adolescent's control. It's a common enough X-Men device, and it's not a direct connotation of social violence as far as anything is suggested. People are in psych wards because they're a danger to themselves or other, so it fits within the narrative. The allegory isn't supposed to mean that kids in psych wards are there because they will hurt people in society, the story is obviously about self or social harm.
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 10:58 pm
From what I remember I thought that the issue was that the power was typically beyond the adolescent's control. It's a common enough X-Men device, and it's not a direct connotation of social violence as far as anything is suggested. People are in psych wards because they're a danger to themselves or other, so it fits within the narrative. The allegory isn't supposed to mean that kids in psych wards are there because they will hurt people in society, the story is obviously about self or social harm.
As a neuroatypical person, I should mention that the mentally ill are 20 times more likely to have violence done to them than the other way around.
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 10:58 pm
From what I remember I thought that the issue was that the power was typically beyond the adolescent's control. It's a common enough X-Men device, and it's not a direct connotation of social violence as far as anything is suggested. People are in psych wards because they're a danger to themselves or other, so it fits within the narrative. The allegory isn't supposed to mean that kids in psych wards are there because they will hurt people in society, the story is obviously about self or social harm.
As a neuroatypical person, I should mention that the mentally ill are 20 times more likely to have violence done to them than the other way around.
Yes, that's a very good point, and part of what I'm saying; that X-men protagonists are typically victims of at-risk circumstance between home and urban life. And psych wards fit that narrative rather succinctly.
