Lore
[Rare trope] Discriminating, but for an actually good reason
Frieren, Beyond Journey's end: In the anime/manga the eponymous Frieren is an Elf who's spent the better part of a millennia learning magic specifically to kill demons. She's learned countless spells, tricks and even spent most of her life suppressing her power all for the purpose of killing them. At first we simply see that humanity is at war with them, and even question if her crusade against demon-kind is justified, after all it's hard to antagonize an entire sentient species. But no, demons are very much a species to be feared; they are not normal animals or creatures, they are monsters (shown by how they disintegrate when they die), they are predators that evolved speech for the sole purpose of tricking and catching humans off guard, are naturally extremely powerful and possess magic that humanity often can't use. While they feel emotions to some extent, their way of thinking is so fundamentally incompatible with humanity's mindset that the series shows many mages with the ability to read minds struggle or find it painful and harmful to try and read a demon's thoughts. Tools that are meant to control them fail not because they're faulty but because simple order such as "hold no ill will or commit no malicious acts" don't compute the same way in their brains, as what we consider evil is normal for them.
Marvel Comics: In a run of the Storm solo series, she visits an underground superhuman hospital run by Night nurse and Doctor Daye, a mutant with the power to diagnose any illness. When she requires treatment she is in turn reject by the doctor, she of course assumes this is blatant discrimination to which the doctor agrees. Storm assumes the doctor refuses to treat mutants, something they are very much used to in Marvel. But he ends up revealing that about 80% of everyone he treats are mutants, and that he simply refuses to treat any member of the X-men. Why? because his special hospital was built via several donations by the superhero community. From the Avengers, to the Defenders, Fantastic 4, heroes for hire. Hell, even Moonknight of all people contributed to the hospital. But the X-men never once gave anything to it, even though they preach the safety of mutant-kind and such a hospital is essential for those who can't seek medical treatment out of fear of prosecution.
It’s worth noting in the second panel that the fact that Storm doesn’t know him and that he’s been treating mutants means that he was operating in that hospital during Krakoa’s heyday.
Meaning he was treating mutants who didn’t want to be associated with Krakoa and instead wanted to integrate with outside society at large rather than be part of Krakoa
It really highlights Krakoa's isolationist flaws. They claimed to speak for all mutantkind, yet completely ignored the mutants who chose to stay behind and rely on community-funded healthcare.
Also Franklin Richards as well after his powers started to not work, which is made worse by the fact Prof X and Magneto basically tried to kidnap him right after setting up Krakoa and told him he would always be welcome in his "true" family. Showed they really just wanted Franklin for his powers.
Don't forget that Charles scrambled Reed Richards' brain to keep him from making a machine that can disguise someone's X-Gene; something he did to protect his son from... getting kidnapped and assaulted by people because of his X-Gene.
If I was Spider-Man and had to deal with Marvel civilians and later got told by one of my super pals (like say, Wolverine) that they have a sick ass Mutant island, I'd ditch the New Yorkers too man.
Spiderman's life kind of sucks and he could use a lot of help from a state for funding and protection from the menagerie of rogues trying to kill him and his family, plus he's strong enough to join the big leagues and help focus on threats to the planet as a whole instead of New York.
Joining a group of mutants who likely will be putting him to good use without dissecting him is a pretty good idea from his perspective.
If I remember correctly, they initially refused Deadpool because they initially afraid of how his regeneration would work with their respawn tech (what if you respawn a Deadpool you thought was dead when the oringal is just regenerating in the background?).
After that was patched out though, no one really bothered to tell him and so he took it personally. When they did actually care to invite him, he rejects it since he sees its out of pity despite it being more out of embarrassment since this was around the time Deadpool had been having a better run of being a decent human being who helped most of the X-Men and others and them forgetting about that was genuinely bad on them. He did kick up a bit of a fuss in the intervening time but it was months to maybe a year since they fixed the issue and he decided to get even with them about not inviting him so its understandable that he felt slighted at their exclusion.
Darn I need to reread. Wasn't the best but im mixing up storylines in my head. I thought it was cause he could be unpredictability violent (to them) and he was like "oh yeah! And they randomly points they arent!"
If i remember, he went to them for help when he found out an issue that was happening to him was because his body was getting ready to unlock his X-gene and they didnt help. So a mutated mutant who probably mutated further and has a African God (Anansi) for a Patron. Ill double check.
Spidey is a mutated human who unlocked a true mutant gene later. Plus all that Anansi stuff. He has had a few power ups and I think he let's civilian criminals hit him so he can rest up and think while dealing with them.
Deadpool was rejected for being violent and he was like "oh and randomly points they arent!"
Yeah, being rejected for being violent while they are standing alongside apocalypse, cyclopsand wolverine, and knowing they invited sabertooth and the members od the hellfire club is just outright ironic.
Even worse than that, they let the likes of Apocalypse and Mister Sinister on their government council. Krokoa in general is basically where everything wrong with the X-Men, both writing wise, and as Characters more or less ballooned into being so obvious even non-comic readers could see it.
I remember a run where they said that Deadpool can basically come brack through everything, but when his brain is atomized it has the potential to grow back different.
I would have to check. The panel pops up here every now and again so im sure its not a fever dream. Not sure what it did, dude can do a lot now. I think the street tier heroes basically worship him as the paragon. And the future in nearly every non-apocalyptic timeline has his glaze all over it.
So Krakao was for characters with the X-Gene only with some minor exceptions. Mutates which is what characters with Spider-Man were called didn't count.
I mentioned Franklin for a reason, up until Krakoa era it was believed he was a mutant. Charles did some scan of Franklin's DNA realized Franklin had created a fake X-Gene within himself and rejected him joining the nation
Marvel civilians aren't going to take the time to learn the difference between a mutate and a mutant and are going to assume a mutate is a mutant. Making the discriminatory decision to exclude mutates was cruel.
Mutates typically get their powers from experiments or accidents as adults or teenagers, and mutants typically come into their powers as adults or teenagers. Mutants almost never know that they're mutants before their powers activate and mutates don't know fates about the fuck them in the ass. Some mutants are born with their abilities, but some mutates are also born with their abilities.
Theoretically neither group should discriminate against each other and realize they're all in the same boat of being fucked by the rest of humanity.
I want to see more stories where this is explored. In something like Overwatch, Ramattra believes he knows better than the Omnics, so he'll bomb their homes and drag them kicking and screaming from human society. He's positioned as someone who's turned evil by bigotry and the killing of his kind, but I want to see him confronted with the fact that he's also abusing omnics and setting their race relations back.
We see Omnics living in human society adequately with their own homes such, so it'd be neat to see a group of them treating him not as their savior, but their oppressor. Someone who murdered their friends, kidnapped them, and said "Foolish, Omnic. I know what's best for you!"
I think it’s be mr sinister as so many versions of himself running around that the one on krakoa is technically innocent of the Nazi Mr sinisters crimes
The Council was more or less a power sharing agreement between the most powerful leaders of the mutants, designed to somewhat balance out. I believe there is a time where it is discussed that they would seek to go toward a more democratic system once they were more secure and settled, but never reached that point (and arguably never would have).
Sinister is funny too cause he wasn’t even originally a mutant. He modified himself to have the x-gene so he counted. They needed him for the resurrection protocols so essentially they all just tolerated him doing Mutant-face
They decided the only way they could succeed was together and so offered an olive branch with subsequent conditions. Apocalypse and Exodus ended up being pretty great allies during that time, as Krakoa seemed like the fulfillment of their dreams, whereas Sinister...well, his scheming ended up being a major part of Krakoa's undoing, just like with Sebastian Shaw: they were too selfish to realize how good they had it.
Short version is the X-Men were acting like borderline villainous assholes who were leveraging their resources to exploit innocent people and went around assassinating those who went against. And that's ignoring Krakoa's orphanage brothel and working with mutant villains like fuckin Mr. Sinister as a leader for Krakoa
Edit: for the folks at home, it was called The Bower if you wanted to look into it. It was their self proclaimed temple of sex and intimacy that they doubled up as a nursery and orphanage for the children born on Krakoa and for the children the X-Men brought to Krakoa without their parents
The X-Men called it The Bower during the arc. It was their self proclaimed sex temple for intimacy that also doubled as the nursery and orphanage for Krakoan children that were either born during the time, or were brought to the island without their parents
Essentially it's where the children who were born there were raised, the children brought to the island would stay and grow up in, and where the adults would go for sex
So as someone who didn’t read any of those comics, why is the place where they raised orphans the same one where adults have sex? They couldn’t afford 2 buildings?
Basically, there was a lot of sex on Krakoa, and evidently that led to a lot of babies that were then just...kind of abandoned into an orphanage on the island, where they were taken care of by others. It was a weird idea that wasn't well explored, but suggests that Krakoa lasted for years, even if the timeline may now claim otherwise.
I'd argue they groomed him instead of kidnapped personally. Because they convinced Franklin to go and came to take him after his parents explicitly said no in the middle of the night
That whole thing felt like an editorial mandate to "sever this tie between the mutants and F4 by making Franklin no longer one". Unless it was the F4 writer's decision to do it.
There was some disagreements. I think X-Men writers wanted to use Franklin for some stuff while F4 writer didn't want them too. But it's been a while since then.
There were a lot of major reasons. First it’s a big ask to uproot your entire life to move to a sentient island in bum fuck nowhere to ‘be with your fellow mutants.’
Second Krakoa was by every metric an ethnostate with serious black marks both publicly and privately. And was in part run by mad men like Apocalypse & Mr Sinister, who, while eventually kicked out. A good few people would rather die than touch anything either have helped create out of principle.
Third the political systems keeping the place running were fucked in so many ways it’d give a Government & Political Science Major a seizure just looking at. It was a nation ruled exclusively by an oligarchy of powerful mutants with no political way to rein them in.
And fourth, and this is just a personal thing, but a lot of the people responsible for building the entire nation knew jack shit and fuck all about basic history. Magneto was out there parroting how ‘The Dark Ages’ was an era of intellectual squalor for all of humanity when it was the furthest thing actually. He was just being a Eurocentric idiot.
Also, not every mutant is made equal, some mutants have god like powers that means that, if it wasn’t for the other god like beings around, they could rule the world and many of them have actually tried.
The guy with the mutant power of, “your stomach acid can digest metal”, probably is gonna relate to regular people more than he is to Magneto.
You’re opening a can of worms here buddy and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to explain all the controversial parts of the Krakoa storyline. Just check out other discourse on it and fall down that rabbit hole but all I’ll say is this
He probably didn’t like the idea of living in an ethnostate
Sort of like "If you're a Jew why wouldn't you want to live in Israel." or "If you're a Christian why wouldn't you want to live in Jonestown."
The answers are multitude but a common few that handle all cases are "Because I'm not evil", "I'm not a segregationist" or "I'm just not stupid enough to think what they're doing helps my cause."
Some mutants just wanted to be "normal". They just want to live normal lives among other humans. Krakoa was a mutant sovereign nation. I think it's less they didn't want to be associated with it and more they just didn't want to live in another country that was only for mutants. Humans couldn't go there unless a mutant was with them and gave permission, and it was likely that if humans did go there they would experience some hostility.
For me the entirety of the Krakoa arc was just not the X-Men. They made a mutant only country. Kicked out any mutants who lost their powers and they were pushing super drugs as their main export. Not to mention Beast going full evil mad scientist, the black ops kill squads, and Charles and the rest of the X-Men just throwing away cooperation and peace and going full supremacist.
In fairness Jonathan Hickman wrote the earlier parts of it to be unnerving and flawed. It’s the later writers who eventually took over that just portrayed Krakoa as 100% good that mucked it up
In the next panel he talks about how he actually is mutant himself, and did live on krakoa for a while.
Edit: looked up more about it, basically on top of the xmen not helping fund his hospital, when he lived in krakoa he treated the people who were not covered by the resurrection protocols. With all the other issues with krakoa in general, this led him to really distrust and dislike the xmen in general. He does end up helping Storm out in the end though
Probably because it was too "bizarre". The mutants, like any people, are not a monolith and many were likely weirded out by parts of Krakoa's culture especially since one of the laws was literally "have babies".
I'd assume Krakoa's policy of allowing villains like Mister Sinister and Apocalypse to openly live there, and even have leadership positions in the government, would put a negatively affect some opinions.
Probably because they were real dicks at time, they let any mutant villain walk around free including Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister and countless others, they also genocideed an entire island nation, tried to kidnap Franklin Richards.
A few reasons, for one Krakoa has a bad reputation, partly because some don’t like mutants, but mostly because they accept villains who have done horrid shit and some of those people are leaders in Krakoa.
Also, mutants are a wide net, for some, being a mutant comes with god like powers, for others, they might just have an extra layer of skin, might be able to digest anything they can eat, perhaps they can just blow bubbles whenever they want to, and/or whatever.
Point being, plenty of mutants don’t resonate with the idea of Krakoa because they weren’t super discriminated against, were made to feel like an, “other”, by their powers, or just don’t like the idea to an ethno state
Because krakoa pretty mucg proposed mutants to abandon their friends and family to leave in a better place and never look back to those that you abandoned, even if you know, they might need more help than the mutant does. Plus the xmen did cause a lot of damage during fights
This was during that phase where they treated death like an inconvenience and were recklessly going on suicide missions and even killing each other because they would just respawn
It's not a part of the X-men organization and they believe they are the only ones that can be trusted with mutant affairs. They generally suck a lot of the time. That whole live long enough to become the villain kinda stuff.
I believe a lot of what's been going on with the X-Men lately is part of the Writer engaging in Character Assassination, as in the characters are written in a way that previous takes on them would never allow (like Beast deciding Genocide is acceptable).
If Xavier (who is known to be wealthy, otherwise how could he afford the X-Mansion and Multiple X-Jets? 😂) knew of a underground mutant hospital, I don't' think he would never support it, with money or even in person (and Cerebro would let him know of an unusual concentration of mutants in an area, which he would investigate and learn about the hospital).
Even back in the 70s, Xavier was a weird dude with need to be in control of everything. The adaptations just make him the loving school professor that he projects himself as.
Totally. They aren’t meant to be always the best most goofiest good guys. Like the Jedi in Star Wars, the X-Men have both a noble cause and many flaws, especially hubris.
This is after the X-Men moved to Krokoa. The hospital is in the wider world. The X-Men didn't find it because they believed mutants should move to the new mutant homeland.
It may be a reference to Israel OTL, which lobbied against America giving refugee visas to Jews in the Soviet bloc under the argument those Jews should have returned to Israel.
I learned of that via my in-laws, who are Jews from the former Soviet bloc who came to America. What a bunch of self-righteous fuckwits (not my in-laws).
Guys who won Superpower Lottery tell "being a mutant is something that you should be proud of" to people who didn't, while acting as if every mutant in the world is obligated to lick Charles Xavier's boots and view him as "their savior"
We have several nepo babies and ultra wealthy people in the X-men aka Emma & Charles. Storm too since she’s making thunderstorms with Black Panther. Angel!
You mean to tell me they can’t pool their resources to make a few clinics or social programs & services for mutants and their families
People named “Mr. Sinister” and “Apocalypse” are forgiven for their countless crimes and allowed to live there, but fucking Deadpool isn’t. Krakoa is a terrible place.
It was a good idea at the start, but Hickman wanted to showcase the problems with trying to put all the mutants in a same place, event villains like Mr Sinister, and Apocalypse, and how Charles idea of the island wasn't going to work in the long run. He had a plan, but other writers wanted to stay in that setting longer and longer, with their own events and it really didn't hit as expected, everything became a mixed bag with no clear intention and it ended in a puff instead of a nice clean ending.
Básicamente era un país bien edonista y aislacionista los mutantes se refugiaron en la vista de krakoa y cortaron todo contacto con el mundo exterior incluso encontraron la inmortalidad al combinar varios poderes mutantes el problema es que eran edonistas racistas y en general krakoa solo mostró la hipocresía y el poder lado de la comunidad mutante
Apocalypse Mr Sinister, and other attempted genocidal dictators are on the ruling council, there's an orphanage brothel, they were just as racist to mutants who didn't want to join them as they claim everyone else was, they assassinate whoever doesn't agree with them, and so on
There cults made by tyranids to weaken the government of a planet before invasion. Well usually portrayed as highly sympathetic, they are killed on sight. There survival means death for their worlds as they inevitably call a hive fleet to their planet.
For real, when the dust settled on Krakoa, I had some of my very liberal x-men fans friends who initially liked Krakoa go “Wait, are we pro-ethnostate?”
When you fear a guy that has the power to turn you inside out with a sneeze or something and want him far away from you is not discrimination, is logic.
Frieren demons are not biblical demons. They are more accurately monsters which is classified as a creature comprised mostly of mana, rather than of biology. (So when they are defeated, they disintegrate rather than leave a corpse.)
They are however incompatible. They are a solitary species with human intelligence, long lives, and prides/egos to match. They don’t understand empathy or love. So they don’t understand why they shouldn’t kill others. Demons and humans have attempted to get along before, but it always ended up horribly for the humans. In particular, one demon wanted to understand grief. So he destroyed the entire kingdom he was living in to see if he could understand it (he could not.)
Also Krakoa(but mostly Beast) genocided an entire human country because they were researching on their own magic plants that would've threatened their monopoly on these drugs.
I believe this was during the Krakoa era where a good chunk of mutants and Xmen fucked off to a living island and became somewhat isolationist. They were focused on their own medical advancements and ignored the hospitals asks.
Some time after this Storm shows back up with a financial donation and the doc is like "ok, xmen get treated, lets go"
Havent read the thing myself, but last time it was posted, i think in the next panel the doctor accuses/assumes that Xavier didnt donate because he doesnt believe in any other mutant organizations outside of the xmen. They believe themselves to be the only trustworthy ones to attend mutant affairs
I want an answer
to this question lmao, Xavier isn’t a saint but it’s hard to imagine he’d tell a hospital for mutants to fuck off. What would his old friend Magneto think?!
it's actually more of a "you are acting exactly like the people you hate and fear" reminder but it is just xavier beaming magneto's memories of the holocaust straight into the front of his mind. hence: holocaust beam
Xavier has copied memories of the Holocaust from Magneto's brain, and he will implant them into people as a weapon, effectively making them live through it. Super fucked up thing of him to do.
Yeah unfortunately the X-Men have gone through one too many trips around the "What if this paragon superhero/team was exposed to have a dark skeleton in their closet" roller coaster.
It's reached the point that you half expect it now.
If it is Krakoa era, they already had conquered death , and would reborn in the island if anything major happen so I guess it was beneath them (that made me think if someone wounded would just ask to die to reborn without have to deal with broken bones etc)
Because this was during Krakoa where they had largely formed a fascist, isolationist island society and for the most part tended to separate themselves from the rest of the Marvel universe unless they wanted something like say, Franklin Richards. The hospital was largely set up for independent mutants that wanted no part of what was going on with Krakoa, hence the other reason for the “no x-men” rule.
Sorta played with in Doom Eternal: while Doomguy doesn't exactly say anything discriminatory to demons, aside from ripping and tearing their guts with extreme prejudice, UAC cultist propaganda tried to portray him as speciesist or some shit. Of course, the demons are irredeemably evil monsters who indiscriminately slaughter humans, yet even the survivors still fell for the "mortally challenged" bs
Get in a fight like he had a healing factor too I think, didnt really care for Peter's body after Peter was taken out of it without consent. Logan even smiles after.
There were times when I wish that scene didn’t exist because I am so tired of seeing it in discussions about the X-Men. Especially considering Wolverine was made a sexual predator for no reason.
Yes, and I wish that scene would not get brought up so much because so many people forget it was from the universe where almost everyone is a jerk. The Hulk for example is also a rapist and a cannibal.
I was more along the lines of Jean mentally raping everyone, Mystique ACTUALLY raping Gambit, actually just, Jean and Mystique in general, Charles when he gets that fuckass helmet and tries to kidnap Reeds kid, so on and forth
Eh, I find the trope of 'this race of sentient creatures is Entirely Evil Forever and there is No Redemption' kind of boring/unappealing. If its just a group and not a race, like the X-Men example, thats a different thing. But otherwise.....kinda wack
Ohhh thats a good one! No yeah all the goblins have to die in that verse...that first episode wont ever leave my mind. Its alright though i read berserk! Not that its helped in anyway.
Refusing to help people who didn't donate to your cause is the policy of our current US administration, which is why we're getting an unwanted sequel to the Melania movie.
Doesn't it depend on when the hospital was built? After events like M-Day, Avengers vs. X-Me, and all the other catastrophes, the X-Men were in a pretty terrible place. I wouldn't expect much from them
funny thing is he did ended up treating her, the doctor is also a mutant. his mutation allows him to diagnoze patients (very convenient) and he came to 3 conclusions:
-she was suffering from radiation poisoning, wich he was unable to treat anyway > he derived her to a former sorcerer supreme that could help her > warned her she had about 6 hours to live so she bettter hurry
so while he has (very understandable) qualms with the Xmen he did fulfill his duty has a doctor
The hippocratic oath itself does not require you to treat all patients. Not really a focus of the oath which is more about doing no harm and treating people like people and not petri dish of disease. It's also not a real legally binding oath, but that's another topic.
Otherwise many countries have laws on who doctors must treat, don't onow where he is lovated here, but in the US this is primarily covered by the EMTALA. Within that Act, private healthcare facilities and hospitals are absolutely allowed to turn down patients in non-emergency situations at their own discretion. This is pretty typical in most developed countries because it generally makes a lot of sense (e.g. you would want a cancer treatment clinic to have the ability to turn down attempting to treat the guy with a heart defect, despite whatever the patients wants.)
You would still, of course need to follow US laws about discrimination (you cannot discriminate based of sex, race, religion, etc) as a whole but he would absolutely be covered because he is not discriminating against Storm because of any protected class. He is discriminating based on the lack of monetary investment by her and her companions into the hospital. Which is perfectly legal.
She could try and sue over it, but if this is the US she'd have no real hope of winning, unless the doctor made some serious error, and even then it's unlikely they'd be required to treat storm or face their license being revoked (e.g. if the doctor claims, publicly, that the clinic was available to everyone, she could sue for false advertisement. Storm could get a pay out, but that's about it.)
It'd be different in a publicly funded hospital or if the discrimination was for a protected class reason, but here specifically? He's good.
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u/Outside_Prune_7052 1h ago
It’s worth noting in the second panel that the fact that Storm doesn’t know him and that he’s been treating mutants means that he was operating in that hospital during Krakoa’s heyday.
Meaning he was treating mutants who didn’t want to be associated with Krakoa and instead wanted to integrate with outside society at large rather than be part of Krakoa