I love the guys at MightyGodKing. Jim Smith over there wrote a piece about the X-Men film, but with a bit of spot-on commentary about the X-Men conceit in general. Here's the piece that made me want to chime in with "here, here!"
"Pop quiz, when was the last time the X-Men unequivocally won anything? . . . They blunder into a storyline and consider it a success if they escape with their lives. Restoring the status quo is a typical and acceptable goal for most superheroes, but that’s because most superheroes prefer the status quo. The X-Men are opposed to the status quo (“world that hates and fears them,” remember?) so every story where they don’t make the world better is sort of a failure for them. . . . A superhero story is about getting stuff done; the X-Men tend to just mope about how stuff is hard."
The more I really think about it, the more I dislike the X-Men as a metaphor for the fights of civil rights/tolerance. Either the X-Men will be forced to be elitist (we will allow the lowly humans to keep their society as long as they will allow us to share it) or defeatist (forget the humans, we will create our own society even if we have to fight others around us). Either way, there is still a distinct sense of "Other" about being a human or mutant, and true integration will never be possible in that Star Trek-like perfectly pluralist society. (Despite it happening various times like having the Beast on the Avengers team and Iceman/Angel on the Champions and Defenders.)
Instead, there should be a subtle shift. If you consider Spider-Man for a moment, a big underlining motif is the idea of "youth," in the sense of growing up, finding responsibility. In a similar way, the X-Men should also be about "youth," in the sense of trying to find one's place in society. Youth culture is distinct from adult culture, and there is a threshold of separation, isolation, and neglect that each individual youth must cross to come into society overall. That's what the mutants of the Marvel Universe should be a metaphor of. See where the sublty lies? Yes, the world "hates and fears them," but that's in the background, not the foreground, of forming a mutant's identity. The Marvel-world cries out for mutants to hide, to be mainstreamed, to become something they are not or remain excluded. The Marvel-mutant, instead, struggles with/is forced to stand out, to be unique, to understand him/herself. Maybe even to be a hero in the face of these odds, and maybe with a team of others from the same "school."
In my mind, this kind of youth-based story is only possible by keeping the X-Men on the fringes of the Marvel universe, in the underground (somewhat literally!), which is something that I've argued before. It makes them truly a secret society, and one that keeps them on the run. At least at that point, when the X-Men "mope about how stuff is hard," it makes sense, and it still allows them to "get things done," because it is more on a personal and community level, rather than on a societal one.
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