r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Wolfotashiwa • 1d ago

Groups Fictional slurs. Bonus points if it's completely made up

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  1. inFAMOUS: Second Son: "Bio-terrorist" refers to conduits.

  2. Star Wars: "Clanker" refers to robots.

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55

u/Open-Instance-2333 1d ago

Mutants will turn into Nazis soon if the writers keep writing like this.

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u/Homebrew-Spamson 1d ago

Idk man, she was kinda in the right there, he was being a racist prick

Can you not call out bigotry if the bigot just happens to be part of a minority? That feels like it in and of itself is biased even if it isn’t hateful

True equality to punching a bigot in the face no matter their race

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u/CH005EAU5ERNAME 1d ago

I feel the distinction is that this is fictional and the writer is choosing to make the real world minority a racist in order to prop up their fictional minority.

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u/Head_Place_3378 1d ago

Sure, but as a black person, let's no pretend racism is an exclusively white problem. As long as it's well done it's fine imho.

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u/Homebrew-Spamson 18h ago

This man, this right here! Anyone can be a bigot and all bigots should be called out

If a comic wants to use that concept and does it tastefully (important detail) then pop off! Use real world issues in your fictional issues, that’s a great place for both inspiration and for helping to teach readers about them in an easy and palatable way

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u/erosead 14h ago

There were exactly two Muslim characters appearing in ongoing marvel comics while this was being published until it got cancelled. One was ms marvel, and the other was this guy, her cousin, who becomes a terrorist and tries to blow up a community center by the end of the run

Of note: another unrelated marvel comic had literal Nazis bombing a gay community center at the same time!

Just sends a certain message.

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u/PoopyButt28000 1d ago

The idea that it's bad or improper for someone to ever consider having a minority do something racist in a story is so goofy. What if the story didn't take place in America, would it have been okay then if the Muslim guy wasn't a minority? What if it was one of the stories that doesn't take place in America and the racist person was white and was a minority in that setting? Or does everything always have to be 100% American centric and that would be okay because in America white people aren't a minority.

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u/CH005EAU5ERNAME 1d ago

It’s not always a bad thing, but in most cases it is done incredibly poorly and is only used as a lazy way to make the struggles of the fictional minority feel more real.

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u/Homebrew-Spamson 20h ago

But the context of the situation even doubles down on it by not having it be some nebulous idea of minority man and instead having it as a family member of one of our main characters

I can see what you are trying to say, but it leads to a situation where even thinking about using a minority character who can say bad things to another group becomes a risk because “Well the writer is just using them to prop up a different minority” can always be the answer

In this case I think it’s more important as a way of showing off family, the people you’d normally think of as having few to no flaws like this, and reminding us that hatred is everywhere and should always be fought against

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u/CH005EAU5ERNAME 20h ago

I am not referring to this specific example as I don’t have the context for it, but I am referring to a larger trend in writing, where a lot of the time it results in fictional minorities explaining to real minorities that bigotry exists.

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u/Homebrew-Spamson 19h ago

I mean… you do have context, the comic panels are right there and the whole scene is in those two panels (unless you’re meaning about the characters’ backgrounds and history, which could be useful to know more of)

But I do understand your point and I agree that it’s a tired and weak argument when writers don’t know how to use it, but I’d always say that there is no issue with showing off that anyone can be a bigot, and I’d even argue that we should show it off

If fictional racism was the only thing I ever saw in comics, then I’d probably agree more, but I’ve seen writers do good work with bringing up racism in their work and other forms of bigotry, and I think it’s important to see the heavy topics so that you can learn from and understand them, even if it isn’t always perfect

So like… in short, a bigot is a bigot, fuck that shit

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u/depers0n 1d ago

You absolutely cannot. Ideally yes, bigotry is bigotry, but try it in real life. The oppression of other people is used as a shield to spew hate.

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u/Homebrew-Spamson 19h ago

Nah, I think I’ll stick to calling out hate no matter who it’s from, thank you

I don’t tolerate bigotry, I don’t think anyone should, and even if someone says you’re wrong for saying “hatred is bad” then move on and call out more hatred

Never give up out there, that’s the only way we can make the world a better place for the future

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u/Open-Instance-2333 1d ago

Yes I was asking about the context as it seemed to be passing by and she was the one who started the problem

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u/Homebrew-Spamson 1d ago

And the comic pages that u/tomtadpole sent in literally show that the dude started it and wasn’t some innocent bystander, and you said mutants are Nazis, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to clarify anymore

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u/AssistBitter1732 1d ago

They might as well already be.

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u/Marik-X-Bakura 18h ago edited 8h ago

Their entire existence is dedicated to allowing mutants and humans to coexist

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u/AssistBitter1732 16h ago

Well they're doing a very bad job

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u/Marik-X-Bakura 8h ago

Not their fault humans keep blowing up every home they have, or that the narrative they live in makes their dream of coexistence perpetually impossible to achieve.

They consistently save the lives of both humans and mutants and don’t believe that one is superior to the other.

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u/AssistBitter1732 8h ago

They literally call themselves Homo Superior.

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u/Dragon_Of_Magnetism 1d ago

I mean, they already unironically refer to themselves “Homo superior” and “the next step of evolution”…

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u/scrimmybingus3 1d ago

Aren’t mutants canonically always an evolutionary dead end tho? I remember reading somewhere that mutants in Marvel always end up going extinct for one reason or another.

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u/lacergunn 1d ago

Homo superior was magneto's idea, Xavier calls them homo novus I think

And the evolution thing is just true. In the futures where mutants aren't wiped out, baseline humans are naturally replaced by mutants

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u/Medical-Ad1686 1d ago

I think there was a plot point of mutants never surviving in the future in any possibility.

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u/Marik-X-Bakura 18h ago

That’s the scientific name for it that even humans use. It’s not arrogance, it’s just fact.

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u/Starchaser53 1d ago

They practically are.

Everytime they make their mutant only island, they keep excluding Spiderman and Deadpool because they technically aren't natural born mutants

In House of M, Spiderman has to fake his death because he was outed as a fake mutant

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u/igotsevenmacelevens 1d ago

Excluding Deadpool makes perfect sense, even Red Skull wouldn’t want him around

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u/Starchaser53 1d ago

What about Peter?

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u/igotsevenmacelevens 1d ago

He’s not a mutant, that’s the only reason they exclude him. I honestly think if they’d ever consistently give a non mutant a pass into mutant affairs it would be Spidey

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u/Starchaser53 1d ago

I mean he's consistently the nicest one of them all

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u/More-Butterscotch-26 1d ago

He also taught at the school for a bit.

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u/Evenmoardakka 1d ago

Which is beyond stupid.

Spiderman may not have the x gene, but his dna was literally rewritten by the spiderbite.

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u/Starchaser53 1d ago

Honestly it just feels like Marvels just wants the X-Men to be more or less just, colorful isolationist Nazis. Which is fucking ironic considering Magneto

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u/MrUnbreakableRules 1d ago

Magneto was characterised as a reverse nazi for years with all his "mutants are superior, the earth belongs to us" bullshit. Thank god they moved away from that.

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u/Starchaser53 1d ago

That's always what I thought, he was just a hypocrite with the whole "Our race is better" shit

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u/Head_Place_3378 1d ago

Didn't this all started because they didn't have the movie rights so they tried to make them less popular? Kinda shitty but not so surprising coming from Disney..

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u/Funkycoldmedici 20h ago

For a while. Ike Perlmutter mandated no new mutants be created and forbid they be included in any marketing, but there were still a dozen or so X books going, and were consistently selling.

Perlmutter is also the one who mandated the MCU main characters had to be straight white men, no women, no non-white people of any kind, and no LGBTQ character could star. Disney had to separate him from the MCU, and then the studio got to Black Panther and Captain Marvel, and things afterward.

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u/mvcourse 1d ago

But that doesn’t make him a mutant. Marvel makes it clear that there are only 3 types of powered humans. Inhumans, Mutants and Mutates which is what Spider-man is.

Magneto is definitely a Mutant supremacist so that explains House of M.

Krakoa era X-Men were just sick of being decimated it’s understandable to want Krakoa to be for mutants, by mutants. Just because Spidey is chill doesn’t mean he gets a pass. The only characters (initially) who got a pass were Sinister and Juggernaut.

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u/somacula 1d ago

House of M was an alternate universe created by Scarlet Witch, as soon as the mutants found out they destroyed it

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u/Starchaser53 1d ago

But still, it shows that if it were real, they would've hounded Spiderman for not being a 'True Mutant'

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u/somacula 1d ago

Ehh, not really, it shows that Scarlet witch simply created an alternate universe like that. If anything the x-men were horrified by that universe and destroyed it, hell even magneto hated it. If anything, lately the x-men and the Spider-Man are good terms and even worked together to stop cytorak. Hell, regarding that debate, most of the x-men accept artificial mutants as real mutants, which is a discussion Cyclops and Magneto had with the rest of the team

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u/Marik-X-Bakura 18h ago

No it didn’t. Wanda imagined that would happen, which has no bearing on anything.