Is Magneto Better as a Hero or a Villain?

Magneto is always a lively source of discussion for a variety of reasons. Magneto is one of the big bads introduced back in the Silver Age of Marvel, one of the archfoes whose relationship with Charles Xavier and the X-Men was that of the dedicated hater. Reading early comics starring Magneto reveal a villain more in the mold of Doctor Doom at the time than anyone else. Magneto was a regal and evil presence, a monster who desired nothing more than destroying humanity. The original Magneto stories are nothing special, just the kinds of things you’d expect from a villain back then. Magneto would have been the type of evil antagonist that came and went if it wasn’t for the work of writer Chris Claremont. It’s just impossible to talk about the X-Men without talking about Claremont. Claremont created what we know as the X-Men using the bones of what came before, creating the personalities of some of comics’ most beloved characters. Magneto did especially well under Claremont and it’s why we repeatedly keep having to have the same conversation about the character.

Videos by ComicBook.com

Claremont’s Magneto is the layered villain that we know today. Claremont established everything that anyone actually loves about Magneto, taking a classic Stan Lee villain, and evolving it into something that is nearly completely unrecognizable from what came before. Entire generations of fans have grown up with Magneto as this righteous monster, someone who can push things too far but has some justifications for his actions. The question of Magneto is one that comes up a lot, especially with the MCU getting ready to do their own X-Men media. It all begs the eternal Magneto question —should Magneto be a hero or should Magneto be a villain?

Magneto Is Marvel’s Most Complicated Villain

The question of whether Magneto should be a hero or a villain is a complicated one. For example, Magneto has been a member in good standing with the X-Men since the ’10s. This was a very different time for the mutants; the mutant race was down to about two hundred mutants and their survival was in doubt. Magneto joined the majority of mutants in San Francisco on Utopia, and used his powers to pull Kitty Pryde back to Earth. He pledged his fealty to Cyclops, the hero who had fought him for years, and became a model X-Man. Magneto fought against every threat to mutantkind and he respected Cyclops’s leadership, even staying by his side when the Phoenix Force was driving Cyclops crazier and crazier. He helped free Cyclops from government imprisonment, and stayed with him until not long before Cyclops’s death from M-Pox. Magneto would start leading his own X-Men team, and later became an important part the Quiet Council in the landmark Krakoa Era of the X-Men.

So, the actual answer to whether Magneto is a hero is yes, and he has been for a long time. While his role has diminished in “From the Ashes” — his powers on the fritz and his body breaking down — he’s become an important part of the X-Men’s ecosystem. Recent developments in X-Men have seen Magneto getting a little more… I guess the best thing to call it is “suspicious”. “From the Ashes” is a blatant attempt to revert the X-Men back to a standard status quo easily recognizable by MCU and more casual fans. All of this is almost certainly leading to Magneto going back to being a villain, battling the X-Men who will almost certainly be at home in the X-Mansion. This is inevitable; X-Men fans like to pretend otherwise, but we all know that the X-Men are going back to the mansion and Magneto is going to be a villain again.

This change — which is definitely inevitable — is going to hit a lot of fans very hard. There’s this idea of Magneto now, one that pushes his trauma as a Holocaust survivor and our own hatred for anyone who would commit acts on that scale, of him being at the very least justified in his actions. However, Magneto is a genocidal monster. That’s the one thing that everyone seems to ignore about Magneto nowadays. Magneto wanted to exterminate humanity, wanted to hold humanity in thrall the way the Nazis held the Jews. Magneto may have been justified, but the point of Magneto, one that too many fans miss, is that hate is never the answer. This was the case when writer Grant Morrison wrote “Planet X” in New X-Men; the entire point of the story was to show that under all the nobility, Magneto was still a daft supremacist, one who had the same respect for human lives that the most bigoted human had for mutant lives. “Planet X” caused an outrage among the fandom used to getting Magneto as the dignified villain and not the insane racist that he actually is. Go talk about “Planet X” in X-Men fan spaces to this day and you’ll find fans ready to tell you how it misunderstands Magneto, an ironic statement.

This is the problem with Magneto. Magneto is at once an amazing hero, or at least protagonist, and also a perfect villain. He can work equally well in each role. However, thanks to the change in the way people regard the treatment of minorities, Magneto is everyone’s righteous murder grandpa and there are a lot of fans out there who don’t want to see him as a villain. However, without Magneto as a villain, the X-Men lose their villainous opposite. Magneto has been a hero for a very long time now, though, and it’s been popular enough to gain him a solo book and several starring roles in team books. The answer to what Magneto should be is a difficult one, but the truth of the matter is that Magneto is best as a villain or at the very least an antagonist.

Magneto Is a Better Villain Because of the Details of the Character

Watching Magneto kill a bunch of bigots is a cathartic experience and every X-Men relishes those moments. This is why Magneto has been such a popular member of the X-Men for the last fifteen years, but that’s not a great reason to keep Magneto as a hero. The lack of Magneto as a villain has actually hurt the X-Men because it’s robbed them of the one villain that defined who they were as a team.

There’s a reason why superheroes need archenemies. It gives them something to be compared to. The X-Men don’t really have that. They have a bigotry, but that’s a nebulous concept that you can’t fight. Magneto — a justified man who experienced the worst of humanity — deciding to destroy humanity first makes him one of the most compelling villains in comics, all while showing what the X-Men stand for. Magneto has always been a superior villain, and that’s where he belongs.