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.
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.
Or turn him into a baby, and Acolytes (wasn't it the High Evolutionary in the comics?) shoot him with a growth ray. Kill him for a while to pause aging. Or simply clone him, which I think has been done several times, not including Krakoa. Or just don't address it at all; "I don't know how or why, but my youth has been restored, and my power is maximum."
Just have Cable snatch his ass and the magnetic field warp the time travel and grab him from whenever and dump him where ever.. or have it happen during their fight from X-force #25 and when the timeline is done with him have him drop back in #25.
Agree, granting him some form of enhanced longevity would work although it is not exactly part of his power set, people might not really care (they did the same with Shaw in the movies already with him not aging between ww2 and the Cuban Missile Crisis).
They can also keep him more in the background and focus on younger characters, Magneto was a kid in the 40ies, so it is not absurd that he would still be alive in the 2020s (although at a venerable age), he could theoretically play a mentor role to a new incarnation of the brotherhood in the present perhaps, his powers migth also still keep him very much as a threat even if physically he would not have the prowress to fight the heroes.
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 don’t even meet until post WW2 anyway, and post their meetings both Charles and Magnus travelled the world to meet and study mutants, with Charles specifically meeting and working with several people in that time. Charles settling on the idea of a school, and putting it together can take any amount of time, same thing with Magnus being slowly worn down by anti mutant events until he snaps.
So now you have two contrived plot points before you even start the movie...just because you don't want to update his story like they do for loads of comic characters.
Also, you didn't address why both men waited 70+ years to form the X-Men/Brotherhood.
Bottom line, McClellan and Stewart were already a decade younger than their actual comic counterparts that should have been more than enough of a sign that keeping a WWII origin was becoming quite a bit of a stretch.
Could even have some interesting fart sniffing bullshit like he has to steal time from non mutants, so they steal the time from some to renew themselves and someone points out they only reason they're alive is because of the humans
Then rogue steals his power long enough to reverse it because good ending or something, except Magneto obviously gets away to appear in another movie
Or, even easier, the X-gene also results in longer life spans. 120 years old is the new 80. So you have almost 100yo magneto and professor X acting like they're 66.
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
its really that simple. just throw a line saying "do not compare your short and pathetic life span to us the superior beings". its vague enough and covers their bases so that other mutants can freely be whatever age they needs to be for the plot.
Maybe. But namor hasn’t been in like 8 movies before this, so I think it works better for him to have vague slow aging powers. I just know if they mess up magneto’s origin I could tank any new movies, so I hope they find a way to make it compelling.
Magneto has been in zero MCU movies before, new universe, new rules. People will accept It. The only thing I'm sure that all these extremely convulted theories and changes will just be handwaved by Marvel to keep it really simple, slowly ageeing, one of his powers, done.
My Namor example is not about how a character already exists, but how you really don't even need to explain it in a universe of superheroes, it Is something audiences are not only prepare to accept, they go with the idea that anything can happen in these magical universes.
The whole thread is about how people won't accept any changes of Magneto's backstory or powers. Namor was very niche character and many people didn't even know about him before movie. On other hand, Magneto is very popular and sympathetic character specifically because of his backstory which already was shown several times in recent movies/animated series/comics.
Okay alternative. Magneto escapes the camp, gets captured by the nazis, frozen for future experimentation, it never happens, he gets freed 80 years later. Boom, there.
You can easily just say his mutation slows his aging due to the manipulation to magnetic fields or some dumb comic book shit like that and it will be fine.
It changes his character in an interesting way. He goes from a survivor of a recent tragedy the world learned little from to a reminder persevered in history. Resurfacing whens it needed most to remind people that humans have been doing this for ages and only action stops it.
Make magneto frozen as a result of nazi tests forced on him in a camp and maybe xavier voluntarily frozen on the consumer side as a result of what was learned from the nazi tests? Feels like one of the only ways to keep them together with something in common.
In the comics and atleast 1 cartoon adaptation they just have Magneto get de aged back to his prime at some point. He’s usually physically around his 30s, and his hair has just always been naturally white. They had to do this pretty early cause they established he was an adult who lost his family in the Holocaust, not a child.
The problem is Magneto is tied with professor x so will you also freeze him?
Mind you Magneto being a Holocaust survivor isn't even his original backstory so makes more sense to just change that again than it is to change multiple other things
Or you just make one of his powers an extended lifespan resulting from, pick your poison, the High Evolutionary de-aging him in the 80s, the whole thing with Cortez in the 90s, Onslaught, the Xorn/Joseph crap, or whatever other kind of hand wavy nonsense they want to use to justify it.
It mostly works for Magneto in the comics because in the late sixties or early seventies, he was turned into a baby and then a bit later aged back up. So his biological age is pretty nebulous even by comic book standards. What's funny is that this all happened well before the Holocaust was written into his backstory in 1980, so it wasn't a contrivance to keep the backstory from unraveling; it was just good, old fashioned Silver Age goofiness.
It still ends up creating issues because these characters' backstories are often linked to other characters. At some point Magneto can't really be a Holocaust survivor anymore, no matter what de-aging or whatever has happened to him because he has to have history Xavier. You might be able to gloss over this in a comic because all kinds of weird stuff happens, but you if you introduce Magneto to the MCU with some contrived reason why he can be a Holocaust survivor in 202X and beyond, then Xavier has to come in and be like "yeah I knew Magneto back then, but then I was trapped in the Astral Plane for thirty years and I didn't age," and then Xavier's step brother Juggernaut comes by and says "aging can't stop me. I'm the Juggernaut, bitch." And so on.
I mean the obvious answer to me is that if that want to keep his Holocaust origins... Just say as a mutant he ages slower. They're mutants. Who's to say their life spans aren't much longer than a normal human ?
But im also fine if they want to de couple him from it and come up with a new backstory.
You can do some nonsense like Captain America where he's frozen, but... if you use that more than a few times it gets stupid.
So you could then use time travel, but that also is very tough to use without abusing it.
Then you could also give me anti-aging super powers to go along with his other powers, but then you have to explain how he's been a super powerful mutant around for 100 years (or whatever) and no one heard of him until now.
So the best answer is to just redo his origin story.
He could be tied to modern neo-nazism maybe? Target of a mass hate crime, like maybe he was in a jewish school that got targetted by a neonazi extremist group?
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u/Astrocratic 8h ago
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?