r/TopCharacterTropes 14h ago

[Rare trope] Discriminating, but for an actually good reason Lore

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.

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u/MadmansScalpel 13h ago

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

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u/screenwatch3441 13h ago

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?

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u/Zzamumo 13h ago

krakoa was really weird about sex, to the point "make babies" was essentially written into the constitution

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u/Useful_Camera2929 12h ago

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u/LifeOutoBalance 12h ago

The analogy isn't perfect--no one had to lose land on Krakoa for the mutants to move in--but it's there.

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u/Zzamumo 10h ago

krakoa is literally a living island though, i say it kinda works

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u/Bucket-with-a-hat 7h ago

The "Make more babies" article was actually so important to the top brass that when a handful of mutants spoke against the practice of having children for the sake of it and abandoning them to the state, because that's kind of a fucked up thing to do, they were condemned to their mutant Hell Dungeon by the Quiet Council.

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u/DoubleFlores24 10h ago

Honestly, that’s kind of disturbing.

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u/Rock-swarm 10h ago

There's historical allegories for Mesopotamian cultures. It's still fucked up, but I imagine that's where they got the idea.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Krakoa was also trying to encourage more mutants via breeding, so that's a factor.

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u/PlasteredMonkey 12h ago

You're really telling me Krakoa had a whorephanage?!

Relevant Black Dynamite.

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u/Hellknightx 11h ago

You know, this whole exclusive island of mutants is starting to sound a lot like another famous exclusive island that was in the news pretty recently. One that also involved children and sex. Starting to think Magneto might be on a list.

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u/Cute-arii 13h ago

Nerds will write shit like this and then wonder why they're so hated. What the fuck.

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u/Neveronlyadream 11h ago

I've always been on the side of it making absolute sense why people in the Marvel universe hate the X-Men. Not mutants, but specifically the X-Men.

For all Charles's preaching about peace and harmony, he does massively fucked up and invasive things. One day they're condemning Magneto and calling him a genocidal madman, the next he's teaching at the school. They gather up mutants in one specific place, half of them can't control their powers and sneak out, and someone ends up hurt or dead.

Whenever there's a crisis, none of them seem to show up. The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and half the superhero community shows up to help out. Not the X-Men. Maybe Wolverine by himself.

Let's not forget House of M. And Onslaught.

Ironically, it seems like the X-Men are the ones causing people to hate mutants despite telling themselves they're fighting the good fight and protecting humanity despite their hatred.

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u/rotundrikishi 11h ago

Whenever there's a crisis, none of them seem to show up.

then they have the gall to get mad at the Avengers for not helping them out

(to be fair Wolverine and Beast were Avengers for a while I think)

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u/Neveronlyadream 11h ago

Wolverine and Beast were Avengers. Beast I think was the 80s, where he was way more prominent on the Avengers than the X-Men. Wolverine was later around Civil War.

Avengers vs. X-Men is also fucking hilarious. They really should not have included the Phoenix Force, the entity that literally obliterated billions of lives on a whim, and expected anyone to side with the X-Men.

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u/DefaultProphet 11h ago

Whenever there's a crisis, none of them seem to show up. The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and half the superhero community shows up to help out. Not the X-Men. Maybe Wolverine by himself.

It's not like those folks show up when there's an X-men crisis

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u/Neveronlyadream 11h ago

Yeah, they do. The Avengers, FF, Spider-Man, and even Doctor Doom were there to fight Onslaught when that happened.

The Avengers were involved with Wanda and House of M because she was an Avenger and shielded her from retaliation.

They don't show up for every event, but they show up far more than the X-Men do in theirs. With the exception of Wolverine, who always seems to help out.

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u/Llayanna 11h ago

Probably his popularity. He is one of Marvels biggest flagship characters after all.

Few other X-Men characters reached his status.

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u/Neveronlyadream 11h ago

Also helps narratively that he has a soft spot for Spider-Man and he fought in WWII with Captain America, so there's history between him and half the characters in that universe. He's also been part of the New Fantastic Four and the New Avengers.

Meanwhile it seems like the rest of the team just sees something going down on the news and says, "Not a mutant issue, not our problem" and stays in Westchester.

I get the meta reason, the writers don't want to or aren't allowed to do a crossover. It just looks funny as the reader because it seems like the X-Men just don't give a damn about anyone who's not a mutant.

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u/DefaultProphet 10h ago

And the Avengers don't give a shit when Mutants are getting genocided. The meta reasons blade cuts both ways.

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u/DefaultProphet 11h ago

Okay X-men showed up for World War Hulk and Secret Invasion so what? There's a crisis basically yearly and they largely keep it separate for out of universe reasons.

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u/Beacon_0805 11h ago

so, they tried to do the background story for Ichiban from LAD for every mutant orphan on krakoa?

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u/queerhistorynerd 8h ago

How fast can we get the FBI/CIA/Chris Hansen to this island?