X-Men was doing apartheid analogies in the 80s. Star Trek aired the first interracial kiss on us television in the 60s and did episodes on the evil of conversion therapy in the 90s. The Rebels in Star Wars are based on the viet-cong. Some people are just media illiterate bsky.app/profile/adam...
There is a large number of conservatives who did not understand the themes of their favorite shows, movies and comic books prior those franchises casting more black people in prominent roles. Star Trek and X-Men are among the strangest targets for this complaint bsky.app/profile/pete...
It's interesting that the comics' original portrayal of Stryker in the 1980s was an undisguised attack on evangelical conservatives, but the film adaptations over two decades later watered him down to a generic military guy with no religious overtones.
That graphic novel confused the hell out of me. The other ones Marvel published were really pushing the boundaries of superhero comics. But this one was outclassed by the regular New Mutants. It just felt like a big comic book.
It's binary thinking, isn't it? Everything is either good or bad, and the opposite of everything good is bad and vice versa, and Star Trek is the "opposite" of Star Wars (not because of any actual expressed values, but because of past fandom rivalry).
In the case of this fox news trekkie, I like the simplest and dumbest explanation that I heard on bluesky, that she wanted to show off her giant engagement ring on air so she picked something to rant about that let her do that.
I feel like some small part is boomers who went to HS / College before literary criticism was taught. Even my mom, who reads a ton, rarely sees past the immediate text.
A lot of these (Star Trek and X-Men in particular) often do make the subtext the literal text if not necessarily having Captain Picard or Professor X look at the 'camera' and say "THIS IS JUST LIKE RACISM, WHICH EXISTS IN YOUR TIME, AND IS BAD."
There’s actually some social/cognitive science on this, right?
Folks who don’t like “new” or “challenging” art are much more likely to be right wing. It’s all bound up with Openness on that big 5 traits / OCEAN personality test.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that
But Star Trek and X-Men are not new or challenging art! They’re both 60-year-old mainstream franchises aimed at a mass audience. Some people just lack the capacity to understand even simple, spoon-fed art
You wouldn’t believe how many students I get who resist allegorical/metaphorical readings of films/books/etc. To such a person, an episode about alien racial conflict is very much different from a Starfleet vessel featuring an interracial found family of LGBTQ characters (hence, Discovery backlash)
It’s a depressingly trite “smart kid” thing to do, I think in reaction to having had allegorical/metaphorical readings pounded into them in high school.
A lot of those “allegories” we read in high school felt extremely forced or stretched. I had great English teachers in HS, took honors English. I still don’t see the ending of old
Man and the sea as a Christ allegory or whatever. He was an old man. He died after a long hard life. The end.
Derrida once said texts can "participate" in genres without really "belonging" to them. I feel that's as close as MOST texts come to true allegory.
I don't think Tolkien DETESTED full allegory, as in his friend C.S.Lewis's "Narnia" books. But he was annoyed when people saw it where it didn't exist.
I was literally thinking of exactly that book as I read this thread. We read it in Grade 10. In class we discussed whether. Mary had a little lamb was literal or allegorical. :-)
It's ok to have a different interpretation, but the Old Man is literally named "St. James". There is a tremendous amount of other deliberate Christian symbolism as well. The Christ allegory is not at all a stretch.
I think they were pretty proud of the fact that they were not being subtle at all and given a lot of their audience I think they knew what they were doing
Stan Lee actually wrote editorials explicitly stating X-Men was an allegory. Right-wingers obviously didn't read those.
(side note: 'X-Men' was already a default word on my auto-correct. Proof that iPhones are made by nerds)
