So I’ve been watching The Gifted since it started, because I had hopes for a well-done live action X-Men series, especially one that tried to get out from under the baggage of the more-established well-known characters to try to play around in the periphery of the universe. Thing of it is, there’s something a bit…off about what’s happening here, and I want to try to put words around it, so stick with me a second.
The X-Men mythos was explicitly about being a fictionalized allegorical way to read the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and ’60s. In the time since, that’s been expanded to encompass LGBTQIA struggles and more, but in any event it started as a way to get people to sympathize if not empathize with marginalized people’s struggles to be seen and understood as people. As such, while the tagline was always “to protect a world that hates and fears them,” at the end of the day, the X-Men were triumphant, the mutants were right, and the question was only one of tactics and extremes to which it was “right” to go, to deal with that struggle. Anti-mutant perspectives, though possibly held by people whose lives had been disrupted or even destroyed by mutants, were always the wrong side.
