Stupid TikTok take of the day: “The MCU is going to use Magneto as Zionist propaganda.”

The character is literally a mutant Zionist and considering the MCU’s history of erasing characters’ Jewishness I don’t think the “Zionism issue” is something we have to worry about.

Can we resurrect Jack Kirby or something?

Even stupider takes;

If a Jewish Magneto was alive in the present day, that would have meant he would have participated in the Nakba and been genocidal towards Palestinians which is out of character”

“Magneto was only made a Holocaust survivor because it made sense for the time. His character is all about fighting oppressive systems and Israel is oppressive plus he’d be like in his 80s and that doesn’t make sense.”

Wow, that's stupid in multiple directions.

Like, obviously there's the ahistoric bullshit that is calling Israel's founding genocidal, but also....

Magneto being genocidal towards the historic oppressors of his people is not out of character? It's literally his entire thing when he's in villain mode?

I'm starting to think these people don't actually like the complex character that is Magneto, just the flat caricature of him they've invented in their heads.

Magneto's defining trait is "I will do anything to protect the Mutants"

More often than not that leads to the conclusion of "Mutants will only be safe once there are no more humans"

And while the narratives often don't agree with him, they seldom prove him wrong

Exactly. Him thinking the same way about Jews and the Arabs who literally launched a war of extermination against Israeli Jews while Holocaust survivors were still living in DP camps would be the most in character response he could have.

Though I do think that, timeline wise, Magneto was still in the Carpathian mountains with Magda and Anya during the Independence War and didn't move to Israel until the 50s, but being aware of that would mean that TikTok fans would have to acknowledge him having a love interest other than Xavier, so it's not surprising they ignored it.

Magneto: Okay so my whole thing is Zionism but for mutants. Let mutants have a state.

Antizionists: magneto my antizionist icon ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

OR

Antizionists: it's so problematic that the Zios at the MCU are going to make Magneto a Zio!!!!!!!

Magneto: The character arc that turned me from a stock villain into an actually interesting character centers around me confronting and regretting my own willingness to commit uncaring violence on a massive scale if I feel it will make my people more safe. I will always be defined by the conflict between my willingness to do whatever it takes to keep my people safe combined with my fear that we will only be safe when everyone who hates us is dead and my fear that such violence can only lead to more violence combined with my desire to believe that there could be a better way.

Antizionists: My unproblematic king! He would never hurt anyone I have designated as a Good Victim!

Okay but real talk on the fandomification: I think it's fine within fandoms. Like, fuck it, you're allowed to have weird headcanons. Magneto is fictional. I might not like your take, I might think your take is deeply erasive and fundamentally wrong, but I'm not going to say you shouldn't be allowed to say it, because that way leads a path that people say is the good path because they'll get censored if they say anything else.

But it's very alarming, the degree to which the conflict has been turned into fandom, and all these things that are okay in fandom -- binaries, simple moral arcs, fantasies -- are being viewed as valid when applied to real people.

Because real life doesn't have the kinds of things you can skim over in fiction. In fiction you don't need to think about the complicated aspects of vigilante justice and how that relates to superheroes. You don't need to grapple with the complicated things your blorbo has done, or assess things based on the evidence presented, or think about what the downstream consequences would be. And, in a fanfiction-specific thing, "facts" (as laid out in canon) don't matter. They are suggestions and inspirations rather than actual reality.

And we can see a lot of that in the antizionist fandom. An unwillingness to deal with complications or grapple with how this would actually play out is fine when you're discussing fictional characters, but not in real life. A refusal to allow for the fact that people are neither fundamentally good nor fundamentally bad but fundamentally people, and that flattening them does everyone a disservice--Palestinians who become either Angels or Babies With No Agency, Jews and Israelis who get treated as either The Heroic Jews Who Renounce All of Judaism That We Demand But Who We Still Don't Trust Because Maybe There's A Bit Of Jewiness Left or Basically The Devil. The carefully enclosed worldview, such that nothing outside of prespecified parameters is considered. A refusal to think about facts, treating them more as weapons than reality. The treatment of everyone involved as puppets and characters who should be doing the fan's bidding.

I realize that this is still about fiction, but it remains easily the best example I have seen of this, on some fanart of Israeli Miku:

I'm sure that other people have said the same thing far better than me, but I just wanted to hijack the conversation add some more thoughts.

(There are other elements, of course: latent cultural antisemitism in the West, an anti-intellectual strain that views nuance or caveats as inherently suspect, sophisticated foreign influence campaigns, a populist hatred of The Elites who keep insisting that things are more complicated than that, the TikTokification of everything such that it all needs to fit into short clips that someone not really paying attention could understand, the comforting appeal of having Someone to Blame for all your problems. But a lot of it stems from treating a real, complicated, issue as fandom, where facts are suggestions.)

My constant refrain is that their 'fandom activism' in the form of pop media functions as a replacement for whatever evangelical faith community they think they've gotten away from.

The thing is they've just moved onto another one with less oversight and more opportunity for exploitation because of the less formal structures, but the same inclusive high-control tactics paired with, ironically, capitalist hyperconsumerism and values-signaling through merch (Watermelons, Keffiyehs,) and behavior (Saying slurs to Jews and reveling in the praxis/practice of conspiracy-mongering.)

It's just popped up in a 'cuddlier' and more fun form. It's not just comics/movies, it's the parasocial relationship to media, and you can see it in all the astroturfed subreddits like Fauxmoi and the Pop Base style accounts that mix breathless Celeb updates with "ZIOJEW CRIMES."

Now we're stuck with these fucksticks inserting their pathology into every single hobby and media space as they fail to work out their mommy and daddy issues via public derangement and a fandom of race baiting conspiracism disguised as virtuous activism.

And it's already gotten people immiserated, radicalized, and killed.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline