imagine it was just some undermotivated street urchin that got magneto's super busted power, and all he could figure out to do with it was to strip copper wiring and plumbing from places
Won't happen. Make a black magneto talking about the mutants being persecuted and how awful humans are and you'll be accused of making him a strawman parody of notable black civil rights leaders.
It's not easy. Slowing it down, "clocked" could be spoken as "clawcked" or "clo-acked". I'm not sure of the accent's thickness across the city or if Im hearing Peter Griffin or Will Hunting.
The funniest part is that Stan Lee created the x-men specifically because he was tired of having to come up with dumb origin stories. Basically went "fuck it, they are mutants, mutated by radiation or something, who gives a shit".
His backstory will be that he was a curious bassist from the Insane Clown Posse. He asked the bold question: “Magnets, how do they work?” Well he got his answer when he came of age at the ripe age of 43 and his latent magnetic mutant powers emerged.
I find the Indiana Jones sequels since The Last Crusade has struggled with this. Since Harrison Ford was aging, they had to age the story. Placing him the 50's and 60's. It just isn't as interesting when he isn't fighting Nazis.
Making him a Guatemalan or Hatian getting fucked up in an ICE concentration camp would be lit from a story perspective (cue the rageaholic "x-men is woke now" crowd with zero media literacy skills)
Kill the character or keep telling stories that are tied to that time frame. Every story has an end and sometimes you just need to start telling it from the start again.
Alternatively, disconnect the origin from the character by making it as vague as possible.
That's why Ive always been a fan of reboots to the universe in comics that move through time. Take a lot of what worked before and work in new stuff. It allows for a general "baseline" while also giving characters a beginning and end.
And I guess, that's also the difference between how characters are written and the types of stories involved. Superman, Spiderman, Batman - their stories are tied to their personal experience and it's somewhat timeless. I could see a Batman story set in Ancient Egypt during some darker times. Or Spiderman in Rome.
Nazi experiment that put him into indefinite stasis until he is randomly freed. But I think that's too similar to Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes so I'm not huge into it
That would be daring, isn't the Jewish-racial element of Nazi hatred kept purposefully vague for Hydra?
The real problem with Magneto's age is that Charles Xavier is also bound to him. They either both need to get frozen or something else worked up. The real solution is to either bound stories in a reasonable time frame after WW2 or just have Magneto and Charles die and tell new stories with them turning into legends
Some comics tweaked it so that Magnetos parents were in concentration camps and he was not to put him at the correct age for the 2000's.
I want to say that some of the 97 cartoons changed the lines to make it a fictional place and war similar to how the MCU Scarlet Witch is from a made-up Slavic country.
“My mutation makes me age slower, I’ve been in hiding until now, but I can’t stand the state of world anymore,” there it fits without doing Jewish erasure.
One issue with backstories is that they age. Holocaust origin makes sense for a super hero in the 1960s to 1980s but by 1990s they will be getting old and by 2020s they will be ancient. So I think you need, if you are not doing period/historic pieces, a more recent origin story.
Captain America in modern MCU was frozen for a time so he could be from WW2 while not being old. Maybe Magneto needs a similar way to stop time if he wants to still be a Holocaust story?
Immediately after ww2 everyone involved was frozen to make sure they'd be able to participate in super hero movies in the 2020s. Harry Truman got a lot of flak for this program at the time, especially after they had to unfreeze Eisenhower so fast.
It's not just his age though. You have to also freeze Professor X's age too (assuming you want to keep the frenemies angle) and more importantly you have to explain away why Magneto has waited almost a century to do anything publicly for mutant rights (assuming you want to tell a newish x-men story).
They can simply do what they have always done with Magneto. Handwave it as magnetism powers. Something something prevent oxidation something something fucking magnets how do they work.
Marvel's solved this issue before in the comics, it really isn't that complicated. Punisher was a Vietnam veteran, then it had to be shifted as time went on. He became a vet who served in Iraq before they just made up a fictional conflict that wouldn't have any date or age. Magneto wouldn't need any shenanigans when it's as easy as making a fictional tragedy.
Cap being frozen also isn't unique to the MCU, being frozen in ice was always part of his character. The Avengers were founded without him and he joined in issue #4 when they found him in the ice. The only thing that ages with his character is just how long he's frozen for.
Being “rescued” by Russians from a concentration camp, but also sent by then to a labor camp in the far north in Siberia could easily be a way they pull it off. But I think people would not be able to accept 2 major mcu characters getting the same treatment.
Namor is like 600 years old in the MCU, he's a mutant too, they don't touch directly into why he ages slowly, he just does and audiences accepted it as a fact. People overthink this a lot, just say "oh, he just ages slowly because that's one of his powers." And people will say "yeah, that makes sense."
Don't overthink it, don't overexplain it, keep it simplem
Make him a man out of time like Captain America and suddenly his worldview loses a lot of impact just because the world that informed those views no longer exists.
Make him immortal and suddenly the dynamic he has with Xavier changes. They no longer are two men of the same generation of mutants with radically different ideas on how to help their people.
Change his backstory to a more recent event and it kinda borders on erasure at a time when I think- for multiple reasons, it's more important to remember the utter inhumanity of the holocaust and what it represents than ever.
Change his backstory to a fictionalised event and it kinda sanitises him, makes him less real.
The last one is probably what they'll do. It arguably could be the right choice. Still not great though.
You don’t need something similar to the Holocaust. You just need an event that shows Magneto that humanity is violent and not worth saving. You can make him from Bosnia, Sudan, Rwanda, Myanmar, Uyghur from China, Yemen it doesn’t matter. It’s like Two Face in Batman. It doesn’t matter how his face gets disfigured, it’s that the disfigurement breaks his mind that matters.
There's actually a lot of creative wiggleroom they have. Hydra = Nazis in this universe. The Avengers were fighting against Hydra as recently as Age of Ultron, or even currently. If they have Hydra doing holocaust-esque experiments on jews in order to learn more about super-science, and it creates Magneto, then that's a way for them to cheat in this holocause story in a more modern time period
I'm skeptical that they can come up with a story thats just as good for his character, the holocaust works perfect and parallels what goes on with the American people fearing and hating mutants. I do understand why theyre changing it because they'd have to do some time travel shit since wwII ended 80 years ago.
Just have him get fridged by Sinister while he's out Nazi hunting in South America in the 50's. Sinister is looking for perfect DNA, unfreezes him when Jean and Scott appear. 40 year old Magneto in whatever day and age you want.
I think with the mcu taking place in more recent years it's harder to tie a younger magneto to his Holocaust origins
Its definitely possible if he's introduced from another timeline like any of the foxverse, then it has a potential to stick but if they go for a younger dude, it would be a odd to write him as a Holocaust orphan
If Magneto was even BORN in 1945 he would be 81, if you want him to have lived through it, he would have to be 90 atleast.
So the answer is either timetravel Magneto 40 years or set the story in the 80es and since they cant to both in the MCU...
Would be cool to make Magneto a victim of a new tragedy but then he would 99% not be white and wow imagine the reactions to an arab/african/asian/south American Magneto
Its not that they are moving it, its that the suggestion has been to move it to modern day American ICE problems.
You could easily move Eriks story to Bosnia in the early 90s, and accomplish much of the same that his holocaust origin does. You also keep him jewish and connected to the holocaust because of family. He would have been raised on stories of how bad it was, and this would be an example of it happening again which would feed his hate for humans in a natural and understandable way.
I mean, in order to have been a 10 year old during the holocaust, he’d have to be 91 years old.
Unless they’re bringing back Ian Mckellen long term, that just simply doesn’t work for the character.
They’ve also gone VERY young with the X-men casting so far and already recast Prof X so I doubt that very much. Assuming they want to keep similar ages between the two, Magneto would need to be in his 40s/50s and wouldn’t have been born decades after the Holocaust
Considering the amount of dumbasses on social media denying The Holocaust, i believe the change doesn't come from aging but to please them, they know they are the kind who pay anything for ego boosts.
Magneto as a survivor of Abu Ghraib would be apt for his fear of the future of Mutant kind in the world, but I really doubt Disney will have the balls to make that message.
Just retire that character and make a new villain. You don’t need to trot out the Holocaust for capeslop and you don’t need to use a character made by Jewish people reacting to the horrors that befell them and their families in a new way. It’s fine to just make up a new character.
I mean, it’s going to be… interesting… but the Holocaust was almost 100 years ago. That’s not me diminishing it, just pointing out modern incarnations of Magneto can’t have that backstory without being a period piece. Think about it. Even if he was six years old when WWII started, he’d be 93 by now. If we go from the beginning of the Holocaust though, he’d be 99. And that’s ‘if’ he was six. He’s usually depicted between 10 and 17 when it happens. That means he’d be between 103 and 110 years old. No 110 year old is going to be able to beat Someone like Wolverine in a fight. I don’t care what his powers are.
The more time passes from that event, the less plausible even actors like Sir Ian Mckellen can portray someone who even remembers the event/lived through it due to being so young at the time.
The comics can always explain it away with sci-fi shenanigans like magneto found something to keep him alive longer, and the MCU could've done the same tbh, but I'm just welcome to other interpretations of Magneto's past.
Why does everyone want to erase the history of the biggest Jewish character in comics? It's so infuriating, there are maybe 3 Jewish characters in the MCU and 1 of them had severe character assassination
I mean why not do some time travel shenanigans as the universe is going to reset anyway. Or when he awakened his powers he locked himself in the molten crust of the earth and with the shenanigans going on with Doomsday is awakened/hatched.
Or he could just have generic hatred of humanity after being subjugated, as we already saw Peter creating the next Mutant Killswitch
I mean he existed as a character in the comics for almost 20 years before they added this backstory in after the fact. And it's a good backstory for him but it's not like he hasn't existed without it before.
This feels gross to me. Why can’t they just keep his holocaust origin? Secret wars will mash all the universes together into a new universe so its totally plausible for them to just be like “the X-Men have been around for a long time and the worlds populace knows it” and move on, and guess what… literally every moviegoer would accept it as reasonable and then move on
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u/Zombiemorgoth 8h ago
Balkan origins it is.