X-Men Fans Have Misunderstood This Magneto Controversy for Decades

Magneto is one of the X-Men‘s most important characters. The character has long been an integral part of the team’s mythos, forming one of the axes of the group. Charles Xavier’s dream of peaceful co-existence has always butt up against Magneto’s more pessimistic beliefs in human cruelty, and for years, the two of them were separate poles around which mutants coalesced. As time has gone by, Magneto has become a much more complex character, especially when his Holocaust origin was revealed. Nowadays, fans don’t like the idea of the character as a villain anymore, and will actively rebel against stories that portray him as such, with one particular story the target of their ire.

“Planet X” is the penultimate story of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. It reveals that Magneto has been on the team disguised as Xorn, and he defeats them before taking over New York City, preparing to kill all the humans in Manhattan. While it was later revealed that Xorn was actually the one disguised as Magneto (it’s a stupidly complicated retcon), fans still talk about why it made no sense for the mutant master of magnetism to commit a Holocaust-like crime. However, these fans seemed to have missed the entire point of Morrison’s run.

New X-Men‘s Magneto Twist Showed the Price of Hate

Morrison’s New X-Men gave readers some of the best X-Men stories of the ’00s, and it did that because Morrison was working on multiple levels. This run wasn’t just a superhero soap opera, although it was definitely those things as well, but a story about love and the cost of hate. Love is a common theme in Morrison’s work, especially in the ’90s and the ’00, and it plays a huge role in New X-Men, where love literally saves the human race. This is why hate is such a big part of the 40-issue run — it’s all about the opposition of the two.

New X-Men had three main villains, each of them representing different kinds of hate. Cassandra Nova is all about vengeance; she wants to destroy what her brother loves to hurt him because he took the life she wanted. John Sublime hates humans and mutants because he wants to be the dominant species; he suffers from jealous hatred. Magneto is righteous hatred; his past as a victim shows the truth in his fears and in his own way, he’s trying to protect his people, by going to lengths no one else would.

Magneto is a delightfully complex character, and that’s what makes stories like this work so well. One of the things that I think a lot of X-Men fans don’t understand is that Magneto isn’t just leftist murder grandpa protecting the weak, he’s a racist and mutant supremacist. While he no longer wants mutants to exterminate humanity, he still believes that humans are lesser than mutants. Magneto isn’t really wrong about humanity, his own existence proves what humanity does to the “other”, but he’s wrong in his own racism. However, this idea of “Magneto is right” has poisoned discourse on the character.

Morrison wanted to show what hate can do to people in New X-Men, and Magneto is the most tragic. Magneto’s hatred of humanity, his inability to let go of the past, made him into the person he hated in “Planet X”. Max Eisenhardt hated the Nazis, and that hatred made him into them. He ignored the love that Xavier and others gave him, and walked down a road that made him into a monster, because that’s where these kinds of supremacist arguments always lead. This was the whole point of this story; Morrison wanted to show that allowing hate to control you destroys you.

Morrison Was Taking Magneto to the Ultimate Conclusion

For me, one of the most interesting parts about Magneto has been watching him evolve. Seeing his journey as a character since 1963 has been intriguing, but I find the current attitude towards Magneto to be extremely reductive. His belief in humanity’s violent nature is correct, but it’s what he does with that belief that is the problem. He’s a racist, and he hates humanity, and hate leads down terrible roads. Morrison’s entire run was all about showing what love and hate could do to people, and they wanted the “final” word (I highly doubt they came up with the terrible retcon that destroyed everything they were trying to say about the character in “Planet X”) on the character. They wanted to show Magneto for everything he is, warts and all.

I understand, in the 2020s, people love Magneto because he’s wish fulfillment for so many marginalized communities. Having a justified murder grandpa looking out for you is what everyone wants. However, he isn’t just a good-natured protector of the oppressed, but a mutant supremacist who hates humanity the way they hate mutants. Hate is a terrible thing, and it can twist even the best people into something they don’t want to be. That was Morrison’s point with the story in “Planet X”; it showed the costs of hatred, which was part of the point of the whole run. The reaction to it shows that a lot of people didn’t really understand what Morrison was trying to say with their X-Men run.

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