Political Memes

So magneto has actually fought for mutant rights from the beginning. And every time he gets ahead the xmen win and mutant rights don't really move forward. The xmen literally fight for the status quo. The status quo is bad for mutants, but they want to keep it for some reason. An analogy I've heard a lot is that professor x is the mlk to Magneto's Malcolm x. The difference is that mlk didn't bank roll a CIA black ops style team to constantly beat up Malcolm x whenever he started getting a leg up.

People are fed up. They're more open to extreme actions. That's why people are more sympathetic to Magneto

Put simply, given the state and direction of the world the lofty, idealistic goals of Professor Xavier of peaceful coexistence and mutual trust have come to seem quaint and naive in a world of division, exploitation, inequality, discrimination, and hate. Magneto, by contrast, has always advocated the use of force and exercise of power, not in the interest of "bwahaha, I'm a bad guy!" evil, but in the interest of enacting vigilante justice and/or almost anarchic self-determination outside the system when the system fails.

So in 2024, your sympathy towards Magneto is inversely tied to your faith in the system to deliver fair and just outcomes. The more your faith in that has slipped, the closer you get to the position that Magneto is right.

Depending on the story magneto ranges from Hitler 2.0 to anti-hero. The better stories tend to be him as an anti-hero. It generally boils down to Xavier believing people are good and they will chose the right option if you set a good example. Magneto believes people are bastards and you have to force them into the right decision.

Magneto's whole shtick is that he survived the holocaust. This made him a radical against discrimination. So when he sees the mutant minority starting to get the same treatment as Jews in Germany (dehumanizing propaganda, lists and "yellow stars") he's like "not this time" and decides to start fighting before things get concentration camp bad.

Professor X believes that regular humans and mutants can reach an understanding despite all the propaganda to the contrary. But if mutants on one side (magneto)attack then due to the powers only other mutants are really effective, both for stopping them and for showing that it's "not all mutants".

He just wanted freedom from subjugation for the mutants. Having survived the Holocaust, he had strong feelings about the government deciding they weren't people with equal protections.

He was akin to the Malcolm X to Charles's King.

I’m not super into comics so someone let me know if I’m off base here but…

Ok so the X men are stand ins for marginalized people. Their primary conflict is that they are demonized by society, even though they are a boon for society. Charles and Magneto attempt to solve this in different ways. Charles via working within the system, and appealing to saving their haters to prove they are good and restraining what makes them different. And Magneto is heavily militant in his defense of mutants against any who would harm them, and is big in not hiding who you are.

Now Magneto is villain coded so don’t take what the post said without a grain of salt. He does bad things. But these days he usually is given a sympathetic reason. And due to how comics and stories are told Charles Xavier will never succeed in his quest to prove mutants are not to be feared. (Especially when you have some kids who’s power is they turn into a literal nuclear bomb that will go off at any time for any reason… poor kid)

But this ties in with the rise in right wing authoritarian hate mobs

I'll take a shot but I'm not a die hard X-Men guy. If someone has a little more precision please correct me.

Basically magnetos driving idea is that people (and their governments) are out to get mutants and won't ever change, so it's up to him to lead mutants to fight back. Basically if they want respect and fair treatment, they have to take it for themselves. He tries many times in many ways to pull down the establishment by, for example, attempting to convert all people to mutants.

The premise of the post is basically that, since Reagan, social support is diminishing and power and wealth are concentrating in such a way in the upper class. Ergo, taking an... uh... active approach in advocating for ourselves is looking increasingly like a good idea.

You're getting a lot of answers that are more sympathetic to Magneto than he deserves.

I'd argue that Magneto has a slightly better argument on diagnosing the problem (that humans and mutants can't peacefully coexist) than Professor X (that humans and mutants must find a way to peacefully coexist).

But the logical diagnosis of "the humans will genocide the mutants of we let them" doesn't make Magneto the good guy when he prescribes a solution for that problem. The history of the character oscillates between trying to create segregated societies where mutants are separate and not accountable to the human world, or outright subjugation or genocide of the humans.

Maybe peaceful coexistence isn't possible. But is it better to continually strive for that ideal, or is it better to reject humanity entirely and create strict segregation (or destruction) of the other side?

Because most superhero writers are assholes who never think of the bigger implications of the world they write.