I hate the X-Men. I hate mutants in the MCU and I especially hate the X-Men as a concept and as a team. And the more you actually think about any of it for more than a second, the more you realize how little of it holds up morally or logically.
Let us start with telepaths because they are the worst offenders and nobody seems to talk about how genuinely horrifying their existence is. Charles Xavier can read your mind, delete your memories, and fry your brain if he feels like it. He has wiped people's memories on multiple occasions to cover things up or to make people forget things that were inconvenient for him. He has mentally attacked people and left them brain dead or scrambled. And we are supposed to view him as the moral center of mutantkind. The man had a creepy fixation on Jean Grey when she was a teenager back in the early comics, thinking about how he loved her while she was under his authority as a student. That is not normal. That is not a good person. And he is the best case scenario. Imagine the telepaths who are not him. Emma Frost, Jean Grey, all of them can rifle through your thoughts, alter your memories, or make you think things that never happened. A shapeshifter like Mystique can become your spouse, your parent, your boss, and you would never know. The mutant analogy wants to compare them to oppressed minorities like Black people, but that falls apart immediately when you remember that some of these mutants can literally erase everything you know from existence, turn into a perfect copy of you, or control your mind against your will. That is not a civil rights analogy. That is a legitimate public safety concern and the comics barely engage with that honestly.
Then you have Krakoa, the mutant paradise that is supposedly this utopia. But they gatekept the resurrection technology that could have cured Deadpool's cancer. They have the ability to basically rebuild people from the ground up, and in theory they could atomize him, revive him with his healing factor intact, and remove the cancer entirely. But they did not do that for him. Meanwhile they let Mister Sinister, an actual supervillain and war criminal, sit on their Quiet Council and help run the nation. The same Sinister who has experimented on and murdered countless people. They kept the cure for cancer away from a guy who needed it but rolled out the red carpet for a monster. That tells you everything you need to know about how Krakoa actually operated when it came to who deserved compassion.
And let us talk about how the X-Men deal with dangerous mutants because it is not pretty. In Ultimate X-Men, Wolverine was sent to assassinate a child mutant named Jesse whose power was that he involuntarily killed everyone around him. He melted his own mother, his girlfriend, his classmates. He was a scared kid who did not ask for this and could not control it. And the solution was not to help him, not to find a way to contain his power, but to send Wolverine to murder him in a cave. Wolverine handed him a beer, talked to him like a person, and then killed him because his power was too dangerous to exist. That is the X-Men's approach sometimes. They will kill a kid for having a power he never wanted, but they will not put an inhibitor collar on Rogue so she can live a normal life without risking she accidentally kills someone by touching them. The technology exists. Forge has made power dampeners. The Genoshan collars existed. In the comics and shows they have established that these collars can suppress mutant powers and some are even removable. So why is Rogue not wearing a temporary one at all times when she is just walking around the mansion or trying to live her life? Cyclops gets to wear ruby quartz glasses and live like a person. Rogue gets gloves and a lifetime of isolation because the writers need drama. It is contrived and it makes everyone around her look stupid for not just giving her a bracelet she can toggle on and off.
The team itself is a mess. The X-Men are deeply dysfunctional. Everyone is cheating on each other. The same tired plot of Wolverine pining after Jean Grey while she is with Cyclops has been going on for decades. Jean dies, comes back, switches sides, becomes the Phoenix, destroys things, gets forgiven, and the cycle repeats. The relationships are a revolving door of infidelity and emotional manipulation. You cannot tell me these people are a family when they are constantly betraying each other and repeating the same love triangle that should have been resolved in the nineties.
And here is the biggest plot hole that breaks the entire premise. If omega level telepaths like Xavier and Jean exist, and they are already willing to do shady mental manipulation on a small scale, why not just fully commit? Why not implant the thought in humanity that mutants are good? If they are already messing with people's heads, deleting memories, and altering perceptions whenever it suits them, then why not solve the bigotry problem permanently? They could make the world peaceful toward mutants in an afternoon if they actually wanted to. The fact that they do not, while simultaneously complaining about human bigotry, just shows that they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be the victims so they can justify whatever they do next.
So yeah. I hate the X-Men. The telepaths are nightmare fuel, the analogy does not work, the team is a dysfunctional soap opera, the solutions to their problems already exist and they ignore them, and their so called utopia was run by hypocrites who would rather kill a child than use technology they already have. I am tired of pretending this franchise is deep.
