Saturday, October 1, 2011

Even Comic Lampoons Are Unfair to the X-Women

I came across an interesting article called "Professor Xavier’s Guide To Puberty For Mutants.”http://io9.com/5845745/professor-xaviers-guide-for-mutants-going-through-puberty?popular=true. It’s got some relevant information about the Days of Future Past and Rogue issues. It even resembles a comic book. One panel has a Sentinel from Days of Future Past saying “Congratulations on becoming a target.” One example used to explain puberty for X-men is Rogue kissing Cody. The caption is “You may also accidentally kill everyone you’ve ever loved” and it shows a picture of Cody with x’s for eyes and a skull and crossbones in a thought bubble. The other examples of puberty superpowers depict boys and none of the examples show them killing anyone else, only Rogue. None of the other examples are deadly superpowers either. So why is Rogue the only girl used as an example and why does it have to be her superpower that kills people? Granted, some other examples used, like the boy who turns to rock and says “Will I ever know love?”, are pretty sad, but at least he’s not shown killing someone. There were plenty of other X-women that could have been used instead of Rogue killing Cody. Kitty could have been half way through a wall, or Storm could have been flying through the sky and controlling the weather with a caption saying “You can also cause snow days in the middle of September.” Overall, I thought that it was pretty funny, but slightly unfair to the X-Women and Rogue specifically.

3 comments:

  1. I disagree, I think this comic actually makes fun of the X-Men (or X-Boys...) just as much as the X-women. It's true that there is very little mention of the women at all, but I don't think that the way they wrote this was specifically targeting women. It wasn't particularly nice to women, but really it wasn't trying to be nice to anyone. It's true that Rogue was the only mutant shown killing someone, but she is the only mutant that has the power to kill by kissing someone. Since it was all meant in good fun, I don't find the article particularly degrading or unfair.

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  2. I actually think its kind of funny. It's a parody so nothing can really be taken as offensive because it was probably meant in a ironic way. I don't see how they were picking on rogue because they probably couldn't think of a clever way to tie weather changes or telepathy to puberty. But the kiss of death was a no brainer for them.

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  3. I don't think the comic lampoon is an attack on specifically female characters, in fact Rogue is the only female character who is made fun of in the comic. If anything, they're just using her X-Men power to make fun of the awkward events that take part when a child undergoes puberty.

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