this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
1219 points (98.5% liked)
Political Memes
5620 readers
2119 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What makes you think they're mutated? There's a hint of mutation in the Spider Man origin story, as it's a radioactive spider, and radiation is associated with mutation. But, the rest of them get their powers in non-mutation-related ways.
They've been occasionally been referred to as “mutates”, as opposite to “natural” x-gene carrying mutants.
Also if their powers (or some form of power) can be inherited by their children (or clones), there's probably been some genetic change.
This is definitely the case for Spider-Man (so many clones! 😩) or the Hulk (though that could be radiation poisoning), and might be the case for the Fantastic Four (though it depends on the writer, and one of their children is a mutant, not a mutate, and radiation poisoning is also a possibility in their case).
Yeah, it starts getting especially blurry when you have people who might have both. There's a multiverse version of Spider-Man that was born a mutant and the spiderbite suppressed his X-gene characteristics.
Among many other things, like the Clone Saga clones having his powers, a Sentinel straight up scans Peter Parker and mistakes him for a mutant because his DNA has literal spider genes in it now. That's just Spidey canon.
Same with Super-soldier Serum that gave Rogers his power, it was a genetic modification and, eventually, the same is true of Weapon VI aka Luke Cage (Weapons Plus being a descendant program, he received a modified version of the Serum)
In Marvel comics there's generally a distinction between "mutants" and "mutates." A mutant got their powers from birth, typically from the X-gene, a mutate had something happen to them, but that's not a real scientific distinction. They've all been mutated. It's just in-universe discrimination and is often specifically portrayed as such. Like all discrimination, the distinction is quite often arbitrary and unjustified.
It's worth noting that mutants are often the ones making distinctions, even the X-Men..
If you're born with powers but don't carry the x-gene they'll be the first ones to tell you you can't be in their club, even if you used to be in it when they thought you carried it (see Wanda and Pietro Maximoff or Franklin Richards for notorious examples).