The most evil rat that ever lived

Now here’s another person insinuating that Walt Disney may have been into the occult himself to get his films used by certain agencies to indoctrinate or abuse people with, but then again I feel even when it’s not always obvious (though the clues are there in some films like Hell’s Bells and the theme parks like the 33 club or something), if you can tell a tree by its fruit then it will still emerge in some other way. Mind you Disney actually has a radio network in Latin America and when it comes to its Mexican branch, it has played certain songs of a curious (or suspicious) nature like INXS’s ‘Original Sin’, ‘Devil Inside’ and what else, then comes Red Hot Chili Peppers with things like ‘Give It Away’, ‘Dani California’ (which contains the lyrics ‘californication’ and ‘she’s my priestess, I’m her priest’) and the like and the same band that showed up to consecrate the Devil by wearing little else and then there’s ACDC who are no strangers to alluding to the Devil at various points.

I’m not kidding that Radio Disney Mexico actually played some of these songs at some point, even when I didn’t really listen to them (but then again the Instant Audio stations often tend to mention the songs in mind on their playlists, so you could get an idea of what played on them at any point. Let’s not forget that there are some people who allege that Taylor Swift’s also into the occult, as is Lady Gaga, that makes one wonder if that’s why they got so famous that their popularity takes on a Faustinian character. Or even one member of the Prodigy for another matter, since there’s a book where Maxim joined them after getting advice from a palmist. Unfortunately they ended up releasing a very controversial song that defined them for years, sort of like what Barbie Girl did for Aqua and both of them seem to revolve around sexism of some nature being released in both the late 1990s by the way, even if they never intended these songs to come off this way.

(Oh well there goes the Bible verses about the tongue being an uncontrollable fire, how one reaps what they sow, the sword never leaving the home and so on.)

Then again musicians flirting with the occult and the like is disturbingly common in the music industry, even Christians like those in Ace of Base and Hanson have flirted with it at some point, wherein something bad happened to both of them and got them closer to God eventually. Jenny Berggren has actually released a Christian album herself, just as Zac Hanson (one of the Hanson members) went on as a deacon of a local monastery or church. A case of God turning evil into good. But the weird thing about Disney as a corporation and cultural institution is that it’s associated with family entertainment, though it seems its true Satanic nature peeps through from time to time with things like Gravity Falls. This is a programme by Alex Hirsch that gained a cult following and is technically about twin siblings having supernatural misadventures, where the recurring enemy is a glorified Freemason symbol called Bill Cipher. He recently released a book with the character in mind, which seems more explicitly occult.

And it got published by Disney’s own publishing house, Hyperion. There’s also a book called Disney And The Bible, which is about Disney’s involvement in the occult and popularisation of vices like blapshemy and infidelity through Touchstone. This was an adult label used to promote films that wouldn’t technically fall under Disney proper, but as of late from buying 20^th Century Films and Marvel it’s pretty redundant in a way. But I guess nothing new is under the Sun, as Disney still continues to promote filth like Daredevil, which is surprising that for a character who openly resembles the Devil himself, this never gained much ire from Christians. Even when they should know that as the Devil appears as an angel of light, they should be alarmed if he appears as a superhero out of the blue in Marvel comics. Or perhaps Cow and Chicken at some point where the Red Guy was even known as the Devil at some point.

It’s still pretty shocking to me why there’s little Christian backlash to things like Cow and Chicken and I am Weasel when you have a rather sympathetic portrayal of the Devil, or cartoon characters like Daredevil because he’s a Christian who dresses like Satan for some reason. As opposed to the immense backlash Harry Potter got, that as a Redditor said many Christians are worldly (even myself at some point or another a lot). So their discernment of things is shockingly poor, or that they do discern things but seem so desensitised to evil things as to continue enjoying them in some capacity (as it is with myself at times). So it’s no surprise why there’s so little backlash towards cartoon characters like Damian Hellstrom (Son of Satan), Satana, Daredevil and Illyana Rasputina, even when it should make sense to take issue with them as they’re openly demonic and Satanic. It’s no surprise that Disney played a role in desensitising people to sin and the Devil, even when it’s not always the main driver of these phenomena. No wonder why we’re so desensitised to these things that it doesn’t seem strange, even when it’s far from good.

Why it’s like this is because we became worldly, even when we shouldn’t be.

No Kazakh mutants

When it comes to underrepresentation, it seems to me that although other former Soviet republics and satellites do show up in the Marvel canon of comics, animation and the like, they generally appear as backdrops for American heroes to do their business there. But there are really no recurring characters (villains, supporting characters and heroes) coming from countries like Moldova, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Armenia and Tajikistan, let alone without resorting to stereotypes that they’re practically underrepresented this way. It’s even weirder to think that given a number of Marvel writers are no strangers to rewriting the characters’ backstories, that it might be feasible to out both Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver as Slovenian Romanichals this time.

It’s just as feasible to out Doctor Doom as Croatian or T’challa and Shuri as Cameroonian Bamilekes, there are even Cameroonians who do fanart of things like Looney Tunes and Hunter x Hunter. But I’m afraid there are likely two schools of thought Marvel fans fall into: the one obsessed with the franchise’s canon (or commonly called lore) and the one that dismisses the existence of these countries and cultures, regardless if there are possibly some people in those countries who’d like to see themselves represented in the Marvel world themselves. There are prominent recurring Russians throughout the Marvel canon like Red Guardian, Black Widow, Colossus, Illyana Rasputina and Darkstar, but their Estonian and Armenian counterparts are practically nonexistent. One would hope that given America’s declining stature, that it might be feasible to do a fiction story featuring prominent recurring Estonian characters outside of both Europe and Estonia itself this time.

The only place where you can find recurring Yugoslav representation in any way in the US comics canon is Joe Sacco’s body of work like Sarajevo and Safe Area Gorazde, even if these are nonfiction than the purely fictious tales that predominate the Marvel canon. But it does insinuate a certain message that since Marvel isn’t real, why bother retconning Doctor Doom to be Yugoslav himself? To them, Marvel is escapist. To do is to consciously pretend or ignore one’s desire for any real Yugoslav representation in the Marvel world, there are practically no mutants coming from Uzbekistan so far. There are no mutants who hail from either Baku or Tashkent, just as there are no mutants coming from either Baturi, Georgia or Tbilisi, Georgia. And when I mean by Georgia, it’s a European country next to Russia and Armenia I think.

There are really no mutants from Yerevan whatsoever, there are no mutants from somewhere in either Bucharest, Romania or Chisinau, Moldova without being vampires themselves. There are no mutants from Almaty, Kazakhstan; nor are there any mutants from even Belgrade, Serbia for this matter. As for Romanian speaking countries like Romania itself, there’s a tendency to tie it with vampiric stereotypes if it weren’t for Dracula. But if you peruse Romanian media from this country rather frequently, a different story emerges and one that’s in some regards more ordinary. Like if you use Romanian language websites to read up on things like lectionaries, foxes and more, then Romania is actually rather ordinary or at least much more (normal) than the popular imagination presumes it to be.

This is compounded by that America’s such a superpower, such a hegemon, that it’s going to popularise such misconceptions on a much wider scale than any other country comes close to doing. To get a Romanian or Moldovan character who’s not a vampire themself, despite the writer not being Romanian/Moldovan themself (or yourself), you’d have to regularly consume Romanophone media in any capacity and way to get a vision of either one of them not falling under popular stereotypes, or perhaps both. Even then it’s kind of hard getting a Romanophone character right without falling into popular memes, especially if you’re not Romanophone yourself. Not that Romanian characters are nonexistent in Marvel at all, but a non-stereotypical character is rare at best, nonexistent at worst.

Similar things can be said about the paucity of recurring Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian characters in either DC or Marvel, they might as well be glorified NPCs and mere afterthoughts in the wider scheme of things. A nonstereotypical Kazakh mutant would be nice, a mutant who comes from the European country of Georgia would be nice, an Armenian mutant would be nice, so on and so forth but they never really came to pass as actual, recurring characters in the X-Men canon. But when coupled with America’s declining stature that it’s feasible to create well-known Armenian superheroes outside of Armenia and possibly the rest of the former Soviet sphere itself, or their Estonian and Lithuanian counterparts for that matter. Maybe not immediately but it’s clear where it’s going now that America’s declining.

Zionist cartoons

When it comes to discussions about Zionism in X-Men, it does become particularly obvious concerning one particularly prolific scribe’s contributions to the X-Men canon. Chris Claremont is a man who admitted he doesn’t relate well to black people and Russians, spent time in Israel and the like to the point of feeling more sympathetic to Jews than he would with black people. Not that he dislikes them but it does explain why Storm’s written the way she is, and why in the earlier stories she was kind of othered. She is written through an Orientalist lens where she is an exotic black woman, the way she’s written is communicated through outdated ideas about Africans and African women most especially. From what I’ve seen African women don’t really go about in really skimpy outfits anymore, they even dress no differently from their western counterparts at this point. They speak the same languages as their colonisers do, well that’s what colonialism does to places like Nigeria and Ghana.

Many Africans are Christians and a good number of them are practising Christians even, something common depictions of Storm fail to take into account. She is ostensibly Kenyan but apparently doesn’t know that Boxing Day exists, even when it’s recognised as a holiday in not only Britain but also Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. Given writers indicate that Nightcrawler is German by sprinkling in German words whenever he talks, it shouldn’t be any different if writers did this to Storm when it comes to Swahili. It might even be more plausible because both Swahili and English are the national languages of Kenya, so a degree of code-switching would be inevitable. Unfortunately Marvel never bothered hiring Kenyan writers to do Storm stories, even when Kenya’s own Shujaaz publishes comics as well.

So roping in Shujaaz writers to write Storm stories shouldn’t be a stretch, since many Kenyans are bilingual in Swahili and English to varying degrees. There is a good argument for the Jewishness of the X-Men canon, given a number of X-Men’s seminal writers are Jewish themselves. Most notably Stan Lee, Brian Michael Bendis and Chris Claremont, where it does make sense to see mutants as glorified Jews. They don’t look much different from humans, but are distrusted for certain reasons. The strongly Jewish and then the strongly Zionist sensibilities inculcated into the X-Men canon could explain why there’s not a lot of mutants who speak in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Welsh, Cheyenne, Apache and Hmong, as opposed to just one character (Kitty Pryde) speaking in some Yiddish herself. Whilst having mutants speak minority languages other than Yiddish would powerfully push the metaphor more, it’s not something that interests them.

Or most X-Men fans for another matter, even when it would’ve helped people learn minority languages themselves. I really got into learning Irish from listening to bands like Altan, people get into learning Japanese from watching anime (Japanese animations). People get into learning Korean from listening to K-Pop, having Pixie speak Welsh or Rahne Sinclair speak Scottish Gaelic is potentially no different either. But these never really came to pass, even when it could’ve piqued someone else’s interest into learning such a language. The X-Men canon is Zionist nearly all the way, whether if it’s the mutant homelands being frequently likened to Israel, the antagonistic Arabs in the form of the Shadow King or how and why more attention’s paid to Jewish languages like Yiddish than to Gentile minority languages like Cheyenne, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. It even makes speakers of these languages even more underrepresented this way.

If Hebrew deserved to get revived, shouldn’t it also apply to Welsh? The argument is just as strong given it was suppressed in Wales for ages once it got incorporated into the United Kingdom, having Pixie speak in Welsh might make other people want to learn Welsh, even when they’re not Welsh themselves. But the pro-Zionist bent a number of X-Men writers have, accidental or not, would have this ignored for long. The pro-Zionist bent would explain why Jewish characters like Kitty Pryde and Magneto that even at their most deplorable are still portrayed more sympathetically than is given to others, sort of like how and why Kitty gets away with the same thing that got John Proudstar, a Native American, into trouble but thrice as he died until lately. That is angrily talking back to Professor Xavier, who’s the actual leader and figurehead of the wider X-Men organisation, John Proudstar did this once and then died. Kitty Pryde does this thrice and gets no lasting consequences for this, that it’s racist why a brown character had to suffer from the consequences of doing the same thing that a white character often gets away with.

It’s kind of bad enough that Chris Claremont identifies more with her to the point where assumptions that she is a Mary Sue might be kind of justified in here, which would explain why she’s written the way she is and doing the same thing that gets a brown character into trouble. If a Mary Sue character is an idealised author-surrogate, then it makes sense to label Kitty Pryde as such when under Claremont’s pen. It risks being kind of racist whenever an Arab character’s portrayed kind of unsympathetically, especially if they’re the only Arab around or that a brown character like John Proudstar is unable to get away with doing what Kitty Pryde does to Professor Xavier on a really bad day. The Zionist influence still lingers as Kitty Pryde’s apparently not above massacring an entire group of people and yet not get charged with murder, whereas actual marginalised criminals like Axel Rudakubana and Audrey Hale are slammed for doing something similar.

It’s even more telling that both of them are like Kitty Pryde in the sense of being moody but unassuming people with marginalised identities who take their anger out on people by killing them, Kitty Pryde even did this multiple times before. She killed somebody with a sword, threatens to kill William Stryker, has killed Emma Frost in one apocryphal story and isn’t above killing a lot of people in a single go. Whilst it’s true that Chris Claremont didn’t write these other episodes himself, but there is a precedent for this in his own run. It’s not just that Kitty Pryde has killed somebody out of anger before, but that she’s shown to fly into a rage quite often. She’s thrown tantrums, overreacted to Storm’s makeover, beating up a boy for being a bigot, beating up her classmates out of anger and then getting mad at a creature named Douglock.

Both Rudakubana and Hale were described as irritable and the former was even violent to his own classmates, that seems to resemble Kitty Pryde a lot. It could even be argued that what became of Kitty Pryde gives an idea of how and why both Audrey Hale and Axel Rudakubana ended up doing what they did to others, the anger at others was there before but it eventually escalated to the point of becoming very vicious. Kitty Pryde’s actually shown to be rather vicious when moody, vindictive even towards those she hates that she’s actually far from a nice person when looked at objectively speaking. But it’s not seen as it actually is because of the Zionist bias many X-Men writers and fans have, even when Kitty Pryde’s resulting personality more strongly resembles those of Axel Rudakubana and Audrey Hale than it does with the nonviolent protests done by many well-meaning activists.

DC’s Stephanie Brown does have a temper herself, but Kitty Pryde’s consistently more ruthless in her dealings. To my knowledge, many Batman writers don’t seem Zionist and it shows that a Gentile character like Stephanie Brown is allowed to suffer from the consequences of her mistakes in a way Kitty Pryde’s not allowed to when it comes to Zionists like Chris Claremont, even when she’s shown to be much more vicious towards people than Stephanie will ever be. My experience with the Batman canon’s pretty limited but it’s kind of obvious that Stephanie doesn’t seem to be excused a lot for her shortcomings the way it’s done to Kitty Pryde, despite both characters being kind of hot-tempered. It’s kind of telling that another Gentile like Jason Todd also doesn’t get excused for what he does either.

On a geopolitical scale this is reflected in the way western media portrays Russia and Israel as, both of them are white-majority countries but when Russia oppresses Ukraine it’s immediately painted as a bad guy. When Israel does the same thing to Palestine, it gets excused for doing this. It’s a double standard that gets people into boycotting Israel a lot, that if Eurovision banned Russia for oppressing Ukraine then it ought to do to Israel in kind towards Palestine. Israel has a strong one of us vibe that Russia doesn’t have, in the sense of being pro-gay rights and allied with America. Russia, despite being white-majority, is farthest from this in a sense. It’s not big on gay rights, kind of politically incorrect and one of America’s biggest enemies, Israel resembles other western countries more. Not just in being pro-gay rights but also having a lot of immigrants from nearly all over the world.

No different from countries like Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands in a way, to the point where any suspicion of Israel being a settler colony might be onto something. Though a historical Israel did exist, it’s most likely very different from political Israel. The modern nation-state of Ghana named itself from another African empire altogether, since it’s really the successor state to the Ashanti Empire. Another point of difference is that Ghana’s not that big on gay rights like Russia, which makes it more different from the west at present than Israel is. One possible reason why a number of Gentiles readily warm up to Zionism is the subconscious belief that Jews are the ultimate model minority, in some regards much moreso than with East Asians. Not just numerically because many East Asian countries (Vietnam, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Thailand) are densely populated.

But that Jews have resided in the west for a much longer period of time that they’re practically less othered than East Asians are, despite three of them being subjected to European colonialism before. Most especially Indonesia and the Philippines for nearly the same period of time together, but when it’s not uncommon for Jews to make it in high-earning fields coupled with being less ‘different’ from presumably Protestant-majority populations in some European countries that gives them a strong model minority glow that’s not afforded to others to the same degree. Coming from a Protestant background it’s not uncommon for a lot of Protestants to be more sympathetic to Jews, on the belief that Jews are Protestant-lite. I really personally don’t know much about Judaism but it does have the appearance of being Protestant-lite in some regards, even when Jewish temple services could still differ from their Protestant counterparts.

With both Protestant and Catholic sermons, they start with reciting Bible verses/scriptures before getting to the meat of the message. But Judaism seems more Protestant-lite simply because Catholicism relies on the intercession of saints and Mother Mary to help sort things out, even when it doesn’t always appear to be this way with the latter where despite the existence of feast days many Catholics don’t actually worship them for most of the part. Mind you I have a habit of listening to Catholic sermons a lot these days, though it can be selective at times but generally it’s not always the case. Even then I feel Zionism is an ideology that’s easy for Philo-Semites (which Protestantism has a lot of those) to latch onto due to a feeling that Jews are kind of Protestant-lite, that feels much easier to co-opt from and project onto. So they really are a model minority’s model minority in a way that’s not the case with the Romani.

They’re another immigrant group that moved to Europe but from India and although they’re just as disadvantaged as Jews are at various points, they don’t attract that same model minority glow. Although both Jason Todd and Stephanie Brown aren’t Jewish, nor are they Romani, I don’t consume Batman media enough to know which Batman writer might harbour a Zionist bias themself in any way, but it’s still telling that they’re allowed to suffer from the blowbacks of their mistakes in a way that Chris Claremont and his ilk would never do to Kitty Pryde. It’s like this in the Power Mark comics where the Chinese, Russian, African and Latin American characters are allowed to have flaws to grow from, but other than Biblical characters the Jewish characters don’t seem to have any flaws to get worked on in any way. It’s as if being Jewish is enough to cancel out any failings they have.

It’s like being Jewish is enough to absolve oneself of their own failings, as it’s quite evident that Chris Claremont identifies more with Kitty Pryde than he does with Ororo Munroe and Pyotr Rasputin. The Zionist mindset can’t really imagine that Jews can be and should be held accountable for their own mistakes, the way Gentiles are often allowed to or made to in any way. That’s why Kitty Pryde doesn’t face lasting consequences for her own shortcomings throughout the X-Men canon, if writers did that would mean she actually messed up big time. And why the Zionist bias is painfully strong in the X-Men canon.

A Harry situation

When it comes to whether or not Harry Potter actually introduces people to the occult, I’ll tell you something about this. Whilst I didn’t really become a Harry Potter fan, I kind of got interested in alchemy. It’s like the dark twin of chemistry, to put it this day, though as of late I outgrew it. And even if Harry Potter stories don’t necessarily introduce people to the occult, there’s really something about it that kind of riles up Christians in ways stories like Narnia and even Discworld don’t to the same extent. (The Discworld saga’s written by an atheist.) I remember somebody else saying on Facebook that in the world of Narnia, magic is really only derived from the main God figure in the form of Aslan and what Jadis does is a bootleg form, in the same way Satan appears to have power over people but it’s derivative of God’s own.

And another admitted to developing nightmares from watching the Harry Potter films alone, coupled with a number of characters getting away with being defiant towards authority, that makes it more annoying than it would be for things like Narnia and Discworld. If magic were connected to rebellion that it shouldn’t be surprising why some of the HP characters get away with this, additionally I have a cousin who was into it and admitted to being very rebellious to her parents before. Even if Harry Potter may not always introduce people to the occult, it still normalises or popularises other or even related vices like defiance in a way. I remember this other Facebook user saying that many of the HP characters get away with being defiant to authority figures, which they consider that a bad influence to kids.

And then you have a prophecy of God revoking things relating to Harry Potter in some way that if people don’t want their kids to be either into magic or defiance, then you’d really have to throw out the baby with the bathwater here as these are interconnected in the Bible. JK Rowling, the author, now wants to seek God in earnest. She may not be able to replicate the wild success she had with Harry Potter, but if God tells us to look forward then she could end up doing something else altogether when she comes under Him. Even then it seems the Harry Potter series really did set a bad example for kids to follow, not just because of the magic involved but also questionable ethics to boot. A secular blogger said that once the Harry Potter stories got darker, certain past actions seem far worse in hindsight. To the point where it even hurt the quality.

Even one Harry Potter fan admitted that JK Rowling was kind of flawed as a writer, having preferred showy displays of ability over more nuanced but trickier to pull off actions in storytelling. Spiritual or literary, it seems Harry Potter’s like a good example of something that seems light and cheery but ends up darker over time. It kind of gets compounded by JK Rowling’s own struggle with mental illness and from my experience, trying to be a good Christian whilst combatting it makes it harder to do right, even when you wanted to. One of my aunts admitted she’s not a fan of it because it’s too violent, but you could make an argument for it being too depressing, especially as time goes on. It’s also worsened by that JK Rowling actually got into two occult disciplines when writing Harry Potter at all, but most especially astrology and alchemy that it does explain things.

One would wonder if JK Rowling wrote a version of Harry Potter where she had never gotten into astrology and alchemy, being merely content with folklore and mythology that this one would’ve been less spiritually suspicious and possibly a bit lighter in tone to boot. This version of Harry Potter would most likely have characters merely encountering supernatural creatures, almost comparable to Pokemon in a way (also inspired by mythology). But something else would take its place as something that’ll rile up the parents and clergy a lot, something like X-Men in my opinion as I felt that there was a double standard between the two before. In the sense that at the height of Harry Potter’s popularity in the 2000s, I personally felt that people should be just as mad at X-Men as they would with Harry Potter.

X-Men even promotes some of the same things as Harry Potter like being rebellious to authority, but it goes further than that by depicting most Protestants as a hateful lot with the lone sympathetic Protestant Rahne Sinclair getting brainwashed twice. That and having a demonic heroine in the form of Illyana Rasputina that if Harry Potter was merely just a story of a schoolboy and his friends encountering supernatural beings with no nods to alchemy and astrology whatsoever, that this is the one situation where X-Men would rightfully stir up the ire from both clergy and parents the way Harry Potter got in real life. It deserves to be hated by the clergy as much as they do with Harry Potter, since it has some of the same things they object to in Harry Potter and more than that by depicting demonic characters as heroic and likable even.

It even has heroic characters indulging in affairs, heroic characters killing people out of revenge, heroic characters who continue to hold onto grudges, heroic characters being promiscuous and so on, that it’s actually just as bad as Harry Potter is. Or for another matter Rocko’s Modern Life when it comes to adultery, that it’s shocking in hindsight why my parents were fine with it but not with Invader Zim even when there are no IZ characters who indulge in it this often (but then again I know very little about IZ so). One would only wonder where others got the idea that adultery is okay from, if it weren’t for media like Rocko’s Modern Life not only popularising but also glorifying it in some way. Or even X-Men for another matter as there are characters who do cheat on their spouses thrice, characters who’re promiscuous and so on.

We can’t rewrite the past, but we can cultivate a better future from learning from it. And in the case with undoing bad childhood influences, it’s about time to cultivate a Godlier future and afterlife from then on. I suspect people fear death is really because they want to live in an endless now, instead caring about what their futures portend going as far as what their afterlives are concerned. It would even be a bit revealing to assume that the X-Men comics might even inculcate a hatred of Christianity onto people, as it is with others (including one atheist who got into JJBA), if because it kind of promotes it especially during Chris Claremont’s run. Not helped by the presence of an anti-mutant preacher in the form of William Stryker (who was made into a senator in other media), that it does insinuate that Christianity is fundamentally wrong.

I was kind of anti-Christian before and still sometimes reject God to my detriment and I was into X-Men, my father was into X-Men and is very anti-Christian himself. Another is an X-Men fan and very anti-Christian herself. If the X-Men stories are openly anti-Christian to a fault, then it shouldn’t be surprising this is where people learn to be anti-Christian from. Perhaps unconsciously so, but it does explain things. If bad company corrupts good character, then this is why people turn out this way. Like let’s say I learnt to bully people from being around bullies, then getting bullied myself and my cousin learnt to bully from being around bullies herself just the same. So bad company really does hurt good character, it makes harder to unlearn vices as it is with me before.

Or even my cousin in a way, but it still explains things. To the point where we’d be better off without those, and why both Harry Potter and X-Men are to be avoided.

The Mountain and The Mutant

I feel one reason why X-Men is more popular than say The Boondocks is that it’s far more palatable to white audiences in how it handles prejudice, especially if it’s conveyed through able-bodied white cartoon characters, combined with bouts of anti-black and anti-East Asian racism every now and then. The way The Boondocks handles racism, especially anti-black racism, is kind of realistic in the sense that even when you have well-intentioned characters like Cindy around, they still resort to racist preconceptions every now and then. It’s like knowing a lot about black people personally, but still resorting to racist ideas of them at the same time (it’s like this before). Or that white people may not be able to completely relate to what black people go through, especially in the western world, which explains Cindy’s cluelessness towards Jazmine’s feelings.

Characters like Jazmine and Riley struggle with internalised racism, but in their own respective ways, where the former denies her blackness and the one struggles to live up to such stereotypes from time to time himself. I don’t think the X-Men stories deal with this a lot, from my experience, but most X-Men writers like Chris Claremont are white. Add to that Claremont admitted he can’t relate to black people that much, to the point where it does explain why black characters are written the way they are in the X-Men canon, especially whenever he’s at the helm. Also in the X-Men canon you have characters like Emma Frost lashing out at South Asians for not understanding her, that and recurring themes of eugenics, where you have a guy named Mister Sinister doing a lot to engineer the perfect mutant. To the extent that X-Men could easily invite a white supremacist reading at any point.

With Storm being the good black woman who barely questions the white people she often hangs out with, Cheryl Lynn Eaton went on saying that she’s so disconnected from blackness that she should’ve been written as a weird black woman or something like this, though she’d eventually write a story featuring her as well. I’d say that she’s a good example of an exotic black person as written by a white person, where seems to be a kind of Orientalism aimed at black Africans that treats them as the antipode of white westerners. Albeit a black Africa that’s forever stuck in the past, whilst the west appears to be oh-so progressive (read civilised). Part of it has to do with that white westerners (until recently in Europe) aren’t really that constantly exposed to African media, let alone for a sustained period of time, as to truly know what else is going on in Africa itself.

White Americans’ exposure to African media is generally far more limited than in Europe, due to the latter’s closer association to Africa by prior colonisation. That’s why things like Afrobeats are popular in Britain, whereas this would be replaced by hip-hop and soul in America’s case. To think if Aaron McGruder had been British, the Freemans would’ve been from somewhere in the Caribbean, with Riley being really obsessed with grime and Jazmine would most likely have a posher name instead. And her father Tom DuBois would most likely be a recent African immigrant or at least the scion of one, someone who’d look down upon the unapologetically Caribbean Freemans to boot. But even then a British Boondocks wouldn’t be that massively palatable to white Britons the way the X-Men canon would for them just he same, despite the prominence of bands like Massive Attack and Lighthouse Family.

Ditto Shirley Bassey, Goldie, Morcheeba, Benjamin Zephaniah and the like. British or not, I guess black people can only succeed in the white mind if they’re into sports or music. But not truly relating to them as people, the way superpowered white cartoon characters do. Looking back more than a decade ago, I went about seeking nonstereotypical African representation in comics. Things might be better now in many ways, but it’s mostly not much different at DC and Marvel. There’s yet to be a Kenyan writer writing the adventures of Storm, the way there’s a Vietnamese American writer for a story featuring Karma. The Shujaaz magazines actually have comics in them, many Kenyans are bilingual in English and Swahili, one of them could’ve been hired to write a Storm story themself. But there are still no actual Africans at X-Men, much less writers, even if a Nigerian got to write a Black Panther story. Ditto making Kenyans write Storm stories themselves, even if they share her cultural background and experiences more.

Whilst The Boondocks might not be without its own faults at times, it does a better job at understanding antiblack racism. Cindy may not seem outright hateful towards black people, but that’s because she’s racist in another way. Meanwhile an X-Men story had a white woman like Emma Frost lash out at South Asians for not understanding her or something, where there are like only five actual Africans in the X-Men canon (Temper, Storm, Maggott and arguably both Apocalypse and his wife, Genesis, as they’re both Egyptians, Egypt is also an African country by the way) and stuff. Temper’s from Nigeria, Storm’s from Kenya, Maggott’s from South Africa and both Apocalypse and Genesis are from Egypt, whereas X-Men has a lot of white characters from actual western countries.

The Wolverines and Northstar are from Canada; the original five members plus the Guthrie family, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Dazzler, arguably Professor Xavier and Sage, Rogue, Gambit, the rest of the Summers family, Elixir, Mercury, the rest of the Hellfire Club, Firestar, Hellion, Cypher, Lorna Dane and Multiple Man are from the US. Moving onto Europe, characters like Rahne Sinclair, the Braddocks, Pete Wisdom, Quentin Spire and Chamber are from Britain, the Cassidys are from Ireland, both Nightcrawler and Mystique are from Germany, Pyro’s from Australia and if one argues, characters like the Rasputins, Omega Red and arguably Darkstar are from Russia. There’s a viral tweet stating that the most prevalent X-Men characters are white, able-bodied people. It’s kind of telling that white North Americans, white Europeans and white Russians significantly outnumber those from real African countries by a lot.

You’d really have to look in vain to find prominent Senegalese, Moroccan, Algerian, Ethiopian, Namibian, Rwandan, Tanzanian, Eritrean, Cameroonian, Ivorian, Malian, Ghanaian and Libyan mutants in the X-Men canon, because there are practically none at all and still none to this day. There’s really only one African Caribbean mutant that I think of and she’s Cecilia Reyes, a doctor and X-Men’s African Caribbean representation is also lacking, much less those from actual Caribbean countries to boot. So the tweet’s point still stands that white people from real white-majority countries significantly outnumber those from both real African countries and from the Caribbean, which means the search for more African representation is going to be hard unless if people turn to African media more instead.

But African media will feature African characters and mindsets by default, because they are made for African audiences in mind. The same thing can be said of Caribbean media, but African Americans are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They are highly influential in America, but they’re also marginalised and ostracised there. The Boondocks cartoons show this where there is white awareness of prominent black celebrities through the character of Cindy, but there’s not much real compassion for what African Americans go through. Then you have black people struggling with internalised racism that they either deny that they’re kind of visibly black (Jazmine in a way as she’s biracial) or struggle to live up to the stereotypes they’ve internalised themselves (Riley), then you have those who’re truly aware of the racist portrayals black people face like Huey, Riley’s brother.

I don’t think most X-Men writers (who are white) will get these themselves, if Chris Claremont’s any indication, so whenever they address prejudice it’s almost always directed at able-bodied white characters, and more specifically white Americans to boot. But it’s telling which is more palatable to white people and one which isn’t.

Something shocking really

I still think it’s kind of shocking why there’s not much Christian ire against the X-Men stories, even when they’re just as odious as their Harry Potter counterparts are, given it contains some of the same things Christians hate that it should be logical to chastise the former just the same. This includes a character who repeatedly gets into fights with her elders (Kitty Pryde for some reason manages to escape consequence free for doing the same thing John Proudstar did to Professor Xavier, which is also racist because she’s white while he is Native American), disrespect towards God’s word (Apocalypse, his wife Genesis and his own Horsemen), negative depictions of Christians and especially Protestants of all people (thus leaving Rahne Sinclair as the lone sympathetic Protestant and even then she gets brainwashed twice, like as if X-Men writers insinuate that such people readily fall for those kinds of things), flaunting LGBT, flaunting openly demonic characters like Illyana Rasputina who’s even a heroine there and so on.

It’s just as shocking as realising why not a lot Christians go after Discworld since it’s written by an outspoken atheist, but as what someone on Reddit said that the double standard exists because a lot of Christians are worldly and allow things that should’ve never been allowed due to their rather low standards for what’s edifying. Take no part in darkness but expose it for what it really is, whether if it’s X-Men or Harry Potter, but most especially X-Men as it’s something most Christians don’t seem to actually care to realise how ungodly it really is. Or for another matter, Daredevil because there’s something questionable about making an ostensibly Christian character dress up like Satan, it doesn’t make sense why would a Christian be shown to openly dress up like the enemy. It’s like Christianity’s fine for as long as it’s questioned and defamed endlessly, whereas other religions are usually portrayed more respectfully. It’s one thing to say that X-Men portrays Jews well, it’s another if it’s Protestant Christians in the same.

Either that they’re massive bigots who deserve to be killed like the entire Orchis group getting killed by Kitty Pryde in a fit of rage (she always has anger issues so), they’re massive bigots who’re out to kill people like Reverend William Stryker (this got toned down outside of comics) or they’re very misguided people like with Rahne Sinclair. Actually I don’t think it’s any better with Catholicism at times where for some reason within the Marvel canon, devout Catholics are almost always portrayed as kind of demonic looking. This risks sending a bad message that Catholics have been struggling with for years due to misinformation being spread about this denomination, where if you actually expose yourself to Catholic media it’s not exactly always the case. In Catholicism there are feast days or days dedicated to a saint, there are Bible scriptures getting recited before the sermon, but it’s not that anti-Christian. Online Catholic websites include both devotionals and lectionaries, which some Protestant websites do just the same. In a sense, it’s not much different.

(It’s not much different if one makes an idol out of Protestant preachers that it’s going to be the same thing anyways.)

There’s still something wrong about the Marvel canon’s treatment of Christianity where it’s either aligned with evil in some way or another, or questioned and defamed openly that it’s shocking why not a lot of Christians went after this. It’s even worse when Marvel itself has other openly demonic heroes like Satana and Damian, Son of Satan that it’s terrible why Christians don’t seem particularly concerned about this until recently, and even then it goes to show you how worldly Christians are and why others are in the right to suspect them of having double standards when their concerns don’t extend much to other things. Not a lot of Christians care about Discworld, much less the fact that it’s written by an atheist. It’s easier to complain about witchcraft in Harry Potter, than to complain about a Christian like Matt Murdock choosing to dress up as the Devil for some unknown reason, even when the latter’s just as questionable. I guess the Devil succeeded in getting their guards down when posing as a superhero, well literally in this case.

It’s harder to question idolatry with superheroes because it feels innocent even when the problem risks being the same thing really, but it’s harder to admit this outright because I feel it’s easier for Protestants to complain about things like Catholicism and Harry Potter, than something like DC and Marvel even when they do many of the things they hate (in theory). There are those who chastise DC and Marvel for having gay characters, but not much realise that they have a lot of openly demonic heroes like Blue Devil, Kid Devil, Lucifer, Daredevil, Illyana Rasputina and Nightcrawler in their echelons that it seems they’re never going to be on God’s side for real. It’s likely the real reason why there are so few truly Christian superhero stories out there, there was something like Power Mark and at any point where the character could’ve beaten up his sister for going evil, he forgave her instead.

Compare this to Marvel’s Kitty Pryde who has a habit of either killing people out of revenge or threatening people just the same, where if she doesn’t face any consequences for her actions, it risks sending a message that it’s okay to wallow in grudges because it’s alright if she does it. It’s alright to make fun of Christianity if Marvel does it, though it’s been covered before by a few people. But they’re unfortunately a minority because it’s more common for people to complain about Harry Potter this and that, over DC and Marvel having a lot of demonic heroes around. There are those who complain about witchcraft in Marvel, but there’s yet to be complaints over how and why there are even openly demonic heroes like Blue Devil and Damian among them. If Harry Potter inspires people to be anti-Christian, it would be no different if Marvel does the same to others.

I have a relative who’s like this where he watches Marvel and he despises Christianity a lot, as if he drank Marvel’s anti-Christian beverage so hard he internalised its message a lot. There’s something wrong about the way Marvel presents Christianity outside of lip service to popes every now and then, especially within its own canonical body of work that it’s more likely to be negative and suspicious, than glorifying and edifying. Or DC Comics for another matter, since it does more of the same thing. It’s not wrong to like superheroes but unfortunately both DC and Marvel indulge in such worldly things as to be judged for this, but this is unfortunately rather rare to encounter. I even struggled lustful thoughts for awhile because of getting back into a character like Supergirl to be honest. But the more corrupt DC and Marvel turn out to be, the more they’ll be judged for corrupting people to the point of being revoked from the planet for good.

It’s even shocking to think that secular DC and Marvel fans show more critical thinking than most Christians do, especially towards DC and Marvel’s problems not only frequently but earlier as well. This is to be expected when it comes to things like sexism, racism and ableism that they do deserve to be called out for these, It’s like when it comes to things like the sexualisation of cartoon women, from my experience Christians would think it’s a mistake on their part, but among a good number of comics fans it’s got to do with the cartoonists being misogynistic perverts that it shows in the way they portray them. Whether if they’re sexual fantasies depicted out in the open for all to see, demeaned when they shouldn’t be given their status and so on. That seems more honest and it’s unfortunate to think that secular fans show better media literacy than Christians do here.

As in being more aware of their publishers’ shortcomings earlier and more often than Christians do, maybe not always for reasons they immediately realise, but it does say things about the way a number of Christians lack real critical thinking. It doesn’t help that anti-intellectualism is openly encouraged in some Christian circles that makes it harder to critically analyse and evaluate whatever problems other stories may pose, especially if it’s something that seems innocent enough for them to not appear threatening or suspicious even when they should. This is also partly the real reason why not a lot of Christians seem concerned about the anti-Christian messages Marvel writers like Chris Claremont pose over the years, that they’d rather complain about Harry Potter than to be concerned about the anti-Christian messages other writesr harbour. Which makes for a depressing situation where it’s secular fans who have better media literacy here, or at least more likely to from my experience.

Some major renaming and musings on the character who inspired him

Davit Partzankian is the same character as Anatoly Sidorov/Smirnov, but with his nationality changed to Armenian and he serves the Armenian brotherhood instead. Mostly to avoid suspicion of an anti-Russian sentiment coupled with Canada disliking the United States nowadays, though it should be noted that Armenia was also part of the Soviet Union too. Considering that Jemima Szara’s based on Jemima Shore, Davit Partzankian is also based on her captor though he was Syrian in that story (this story appeared in A Woman’s Eye). Well to an extent when it comes to being put into the same role as he did, though at this point this story could be read as kind of anti-West Asian because there’s only one West Asian in the Jemima Shore canon and he’s a bad guy.

But then again Jemima Szara herself is also based on Nancy Drew and the latter was in a kind of relationship with a Russian, which could be seen as anti-Russian in a way because that story was written during the Cold War. I don’t think writers could get away with writing such a story without getting scrutinised by Russians these days, now that Russians could always vent out those feelings online if you head over to Russophone websites a lot. Admittedly it could be said that having an Armenian villain around could be seen as contributing to anti-Armenian sentiment in a sense, but I suppose if we were to find a way to make a video game like this endear to Russian audiences, you better not step on their toes lest they start protesting a lot. So making him Armenian works around this.

The original version of this character had an Armenian relative so it’s kind of there, but making him actually Armenian is another step. Albeit in not making him offend Russian audiences, if we’re aiming this game at a global audience. Given how problematic anti-Arab sentiment is, making him Armenian also skirts around it just the same. Just like the earlier incarnation, Davit Partzankian is based on Kitty Pryde. It’s there in his surname being derived from one of a handful of Armenian words meaning pride, he’s got a pet snake named Mikoyan, knows kendo, has a temper and is no stranger to killing people in a rage. Although earlier writers like Chris Claremont don’t seem to harbour an anti-Russian sentiment, I don’t think Colossus’s inclusion in his team speaks to a pro-Russian or pro-Soviet sentiment in any way.

Colossus being the resident Russian of the team, among others like his own sister. One is that if he was introduced today, he’d be portrayed as a villain right away. Two, writers like Chris Claremont seem to insinuate that a Soviet character like Colossus is only good if they join an American team like X-Men, in the sense that America wants to be seen as the hero of the world so badly it’ll do anything and everything to intervene in world affairs, even if it risks looking villainous in other places to some peoples. So much so that America’s got quite successful at continually publishing the adventures of nationalistic superheroes like Captain America and Superman, the latter who fights for truth, justice and the American way. There was also an animated programme called Liberty’s Kids, which is about the American Revolution.

It’s not that Britain hasn’t done any nationalistic stories before, but not so often at this point compared to the United States. And even then America is something of a declining superpower by now, which means that American influence could either be undone or minimised, which already is happening in some places to an extent. But it’s kind of telling that America is so jingoistic that its closest neighbour to the north Canada can’t even popularise its own nationalistic superheroes for long until now like with Captain Canuck, since its better known cartooning exports have little to do with superheroes if you factor in the likes of For Better Or For Worse, Cerebus, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World and Binky The Space Cat. Though one of their respective authors is a superhero fan, doing recurring superhero comics isn’t Canada’s strong forte.

So is Russia in some regards and this has to do with superheroes not meshing up well with both cultures’ ethics and values, the former wants to be seen as a major peacekeeper and the latter considers the use of violence to do what’s good to be kind of anti-Soviet, given how America habitually uses brute force to reinforce justice around the world so what superheroes do is really no different in some regards. Assuming if this video game this character will appear in is Canadian and knowing native-grown superheroes may not be a consistently strong suit for Canada, maybe pitching it as a superpowered detective story would help matters. It has enough of a superhero vibe to be kind of comforting to superhero fans, but different enough to be its own entity.

A world where this character, Davit Partzankian, plays a part in as one of the criminals there. A character who bears similarities to Kitty Pryde in most regards (short temper, swordsmanship, intangibility, hacking skills, being both out for blood on a really bad day, defiant and stuff), save for that Davit isn’t just male but also an Armenian criminal on the run at that. He’s also got black hair and dark eyes to boot, though there have been instances where Kitty Pryde’s portrayed just like that. An interesting counterpoint to Jemima Szara who’s more levelheaded and even-tempered, blonde-haired and blue-eyed and a worthy ally to the real detective of the story, Jean-Louis Lumiere who’s really a natural blond himself (he got a red David Bowie mullet lately).

Even the way Davit Partzankian wears is reminiscent of Kitty Pryde, albeit mediated by the influence of the late Australian singer Michael Hutchence from the band INXS. Kitty Pryde’s often shown in black and yellow clothing (the X-Men trainee colours, though at this point she’s a grown woman and it’s like seeing a 30-something woman wear a schoolgirl uniform to work, mind you I see her as being in her thirties by now*), sometimes all-black clothing and sometimes black and blue clothing (by now), the latter kind of befits her personality because she’s really eager to give somebody the black eye when enraged (she did this to somebody in God Loves, Man Kills) and she really does have a habit of throwing fits every now and then.

Perhaps outside of civilian clothing, she rarely wears anything brighter and cheerier than that. Davit Partzankian also doesn’t wear brightly coloured clothing much either, whereas somebody like Jean-Louis is not adverse to wearing red, white, light blue, yellow and peach. It’s not hard to see how and why Kitty Pryde’s deeply contrasted with Emma Frost, not just in powers and personality, but also in the way they dress as if they represent two opposing poles of femininity in X-Men comics, in some regards far moreso than it is with Jean Grey, Rogue and Dazzler with the possible exception of Betsy Braddock, who went from one pole of femininity to another. In honour of this tradition, let’s say that Davit and Jean-Louis represent two opposing poles of masculinity.

One tend to be criminal and malevolent, the other towards law enforcement and forensics. One stabs people with swords, the other kills by blowing up with lasers in hand. As it is with Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost, one is dark-haired and the other is blond (Jean-Louis is a natural blond). Even if Emma may not be a natural blonde herself, she still stands in opposition to Kitty in many regards. In some regards it’s much more drastic than it would be between her and Betsy Braddock, especially in her Psylocke days. The fact that Pryde became a ninja herself twice or thrice gives me the feeling that she could actually out-Psylocke Betsy Braddock, if not Kwannon but this would mean she’ll make both versions kind of redundant. No really, with the focused totality of her phasing skills and her willingness to kill, she could’ve replaced Psylocke as the de-facto ninja woman instead.

Just makes one wonder what’s holding writers back from having her be the resident female ninja for long instead, given she’s got the ruthlessness to go with her rather mercurial mood swings and ninja skills, she’s shown to kill people in anger and attack others in anger just the same. Making her the ninja woman permanently wouldn’t be a big stretch, though it’s shocking why writers couldn’t commit to long when she could easily fulfil the role both Psylockes did for years. It’s really puzzling, if not that some like Chris Claremont see her as a kind of authorial surrogate, even when she could be the character Betsy Braddock ended up as for long. Another is how underrepresented other ethnicities and nationalities are in both DC and Marvel canons, sort of like how and why there are practically no Yugoslavs in the Marvel canon.

At any point where both Pietro and Wanda Maximoff could’ve come from Slovenia and be Romani Slovenes, or Victor von Doom being a Croatian himself these never came to pass. They never happened, despite DC and Marvel writers’ willingness to change the characters’ backstories every now and then, same goes for how and why Tchalla never got outed as a Cameroonian Bamileke. This is also true for the DC canon where at any point where Tara Markov could’ve been Slovak herself, this never occurred and despite Marv Wolfman’s willingness to retcon Rose Wilson into being part-Vietnamese, he never bothered to retcon Tara Markov into being a Slovak herself. Flawed representation, surely. But no representation kind of means people like Wolfman would rather not get into the messy reality of the Communist Bloc.

So he and his cohorts invent proxies in their place, no need to learn about Slovakia when he could make up Markovia instead. Also it’s as if Eastern Europeans are practically exotic white people that they could make up details with, a step removed from both white North Americans and western Europeans (i.e. they’re not NATO allies, so why bother?). As of 2025, there’s still no Yugoslav representation in any way, even if there are likely some Yugoslav readers who want to see themselves represented in DC and Marvel stories, however flawed it may be. Also no Caucasian representation whatsoever, as in those coming from the Caucasus like Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. But this would mean that as a lot of DC and Marvel writers are Americans, Georgia might as well be the name of a US state and not a country and former Soviet Republic.

Armenia’s also underrepresented and despite some people’s sympathies for this country and its people, Armenian characters have yet to show up in either DC or Marvel. Actually they never show up at all, so this is how and why Armenia’s this underrepresented. At any point where Chris Claremont could’ve introduced an Armenian character himself, I’m afraid if they did show up in Marvel they’d either be the Soviet enemy (Natalia Romanova early on) or somebody who’s only good if they join an American team (Natalia Romanova later on, Colossus). Even if having Armenian villians like Davit Partzankian isn’t any better, there’s really no Armenian representation in both the DC and Marvel canons at all.

Maybe I could invent some Armenian good guys and the like to even things out, but it’s still telling that Armenia and its people are practically nonexistent in both DC and Marvel. Armenian characters have certainly shown up before, though mostly in Soviet fictions at most since Armenia was part of the Soviet Union before. Even if Armenia’s no longer part of the Soviet Union anymore, it seems American comics continue to ignore it. Better to have Sokovia in its place, than to have an Armenian show up in DC. Maybe they already did, but it’s very rare at all. As for Georgia, most Americans (including most DC and Marvel writers) would think of it as an American state, ditto Georgia the European country. Which says a lot about how American most DC and Marvel writers are.

No wonder why Russian characters are kind of commonplace in both the DC and Marvel canons, but not a single Armenian has ever showed up in either one of them. Not a single Georgian mutant ever joined X-Men, as in they come from Tbilisi and not from Savannah. An Avenger from Baku, Azerbaijan would be nice, but they never happened because no Marvel writer’s interested in Azerbaijan to begin with. It might as well be nonexistent to them, ditto mutants from Yerevan, Armenia or Astana, Kazakhstan. Despite cries for representation, characters from the Caucasus have yet to show up in DC and Marvel. But I suppose America’s declining stature and possible disappearance would shake things up for the better, moreso now that Canada doesn’t want to have anything to do with it at all.

Maybe allying more with Europe and if possible, Russia would be the viable, though more controversial alternatives given how unlikable America has gotten to the world over the years; it’s kind of astonishing that if Canada does ally more with Russia to the point of joining it, it would upend its longstanding relationship with its neighbour America all the more. But this results in a more Europeanised Canada, instead of the America-lite version we currently have. Perhaps an actually Russianised Canada this time and since Russia’s kind of politically incorrect, then Canada too will become a bit more politically incorrect over time due to Russian influence. Maybe not immediately but one less amenable to other strains of PC thinking, particularly when it comes to LGBT matters and the like.

Not to mention the DC and Marvel canons have a very strong America-centric worldview to the extent that otherwise European characters like Tara Markov and John Constantine gravitate to it for some reason, if because America likes to be at the centre of the planet’s attention and wants to be seen as such. Apparently it’s a country that doesn’t tolerate its rivals to the point of wanting to undermine them anytime they come close to outshining it, whether if it’s Japan or the Soviet Union in the late 20th century. It doesn’t want competition at all. Though with a growing multipolar world, it might as well learn to accept this. It would be all the more shocking if China gets all its Asia-Pacific allies or if Russia succeeds in getting all of Europe and part of North America, that America as a superpower is truly undone.

It wouldn’t be any better if both Russia and China became the new prevailing superpowers of the day, it will be a bipolar world again but where America’s totally out of the picture this time.

Combinations

Believe it or not there was an attempt to combine both DC and Marvel characters into one back in the 1990s, with people coming up with their own combinations years later and this is known as Amalgam Comics. It’s kind of influential in its own right, inspiring fans to create their own versions of it in some way. Here are my attempts at creating my own Amalgam comics, some combinations may even be strange for some. Dark Claw is one official attempt at mashing up Wolverine with Batman, with Jubilation Lee being analogised to Tim Drake. There was somebody at a forum who suggested Shadow Bat (combination of Kitty Pryde and Cassandra Cain) but I don’t think it’s a good or even creative combination, given how Cassandra Cain regrets killing people whereas Kitty Pryde doesn’t hesitate to do the same, especially at this point.

She’s killed somebody in anger before, she’s beaten up people in anger a couple of times, she’s even killed Emma Frost at some point, she habitually throws fits, frequently gets angry at Professor Xavier (and Emma Frost), she threatened to kill somebody, landed in therapy for anger management and as of 2023, she has massacred an entire group of people. So analogising her to Jason Todd would be more suitable, since he’s also got a temper and doesn’t hesitate to kill people too. Cassandra Cain’s way too much of a goody two shoes to pull off the things Kitty Pryde has no shame in doing, whereas Jason Todd would do just that despite not having superpowers himself. So this amalgam would be Alley Cat (hood is also an abbreviation of neighbourhood), in real life his name would be Jason Pryde because Jason Todd takes pride in killing people.

Imagine a gunman who goes through walls, looking for people to shoot or murder in some way. Since Kitty Pryde pointed a gun at somebody before, Jason Pryde would do the same thing because he’s really more of the same thing too. Remember cats have nine lives, so Jason Pryde phasing out of his coffin fits. Analogising Cassandra Cain to Jubilee is suitable because considering how fireworks can injure or kill somebody, Cassandra Lee would be very judicious and cautious with how she uses this ability for fear of repeating the same thing again and again. Despite or rather because of having a more lethal ability, Cassandra Lee would never be as ruthless as Jason Pryde is when dealing with enemies. So it’s something this poster didn’t consider regarding Cass Cain’s own conduct.

Another combination would be mashing up the other X-Man Cannonball with Firestorm to get something like Warhead, but since the other half is a scientist so the latter could be mashed up with Roberto Da Costa to yield Robert Stein. Mashing up Tabitha with Plastique would be easy, ability wise but she’d be willing to kill lives this time. Mashing up Rahne Sinclair with Killer Frost yields Snowdrop because wolfsbane’s also the name of a plant, assuming if the latter also becomes a werewolf then it would be too seamless. Mashing up Thinker with Dani Moonstar would be interesting in that Clifford Moonstar has issues with Warhead for tinkering with his reservation’s territory, considering the problem with nuclear colonialism onto indigenous lands. I could be wrong about certain things, so bear with me.

Now as for Mystique, there’s a missed opportunity in mashing her up with either the Joker or even Harley Quinn to get something like Brighella. Both the harlequin and the brighella come from Italian street theatre (commedia dell’arte) but the brighella is clad in mostly white. Mystique also usually wears white clothing, so mashing her up with Harley Quinn to get Brighella is something not many have considered. Even if this is a very interesting combination that if Sabretooth’s analogised to the Joker, shouldn’t Mystique be analogised to Harley Quinn by then? One would only wonder why nobody bothered to analogise Catwoman to Sabretooth, if because they’re both cat-themed in some way or another.

Considering that the sabretooth is also a felid, one could mashup Catwoman with Sabretooth to get Smilodon. Mashing up Wolverine with Batman has already happened before, but I feel calling this combination ‘Dark Claw’ sounds really stupid in my opinion. Renaming him to something like Lynx works in that it’s a predator that hunts at the wee hours of the morning, it also has retractile claws so it kind of does sum up the things he does. Much like the wolverine, Canada does have at least a handful of lynx species but most notably both the Canada lynx and the bobcat. Apparently we’ve got three felids around in the forms of Smilodon, Lynx and Alley Cat.

I’m at a loss to give Cassandra Lee a codename, whereas analogising Harley Quinn to Mystique to get Brighella is an interesting combination. Now as for X23 who’s a proper female counterpart to Wolverine, even when Kitty Pryde could’ve easily be her and at some point did come close to it a couple of times before in the X-Men canon, mashing up her with Spoiler to get something like Polecat. Polecats hunt by stealth and surprise, a spoiler is something or someone that spoils. Also polecats, like wolverines, are mustelids despite the name. Polecats were also used to hunt mice before the introduction of cats to Europe, much like how dogs were used to hunt mice and rats in China before the same thing happened.

Whilst mashing up Wolverine’s son Daken with Damien Wayne is nice, one would wonder why nobody bothered to mashup Forge with Tim Drake since both tend to be tech-orientated, though mashing him up with Barbara Gordon would work just as fine. Though I think an indigenous woman working in tech would be really interesting to consider, given how underrepresented this is and especially so in fiction. I actually know two Native American women (who are also white-passing) who have an affinity with video games, but only one of them knows her way around technologies meant to do drawing with. Also both Forge and Barbara Gordon are/were disabled, though in their own respective ways.

Whilst mashing up Barbara Gordon with Charles Xavier would be the more predictable conclusion, but I don’t think Charles is really this technology-orientated. Forge would be a more interesting and suitable character to mash her up with, if because indigenous women working in STEM are ridiculously underrepresented. Now that’s something not many have considered or contemplated, even moreso considering that there are Native American women who do know their way around high-tech devices. It’s something that does deserve more creativity and thought put into it, because these characters are practically absent in superhero media (well, as far as I know about it).

Mashing up Rogue with Tim Drake to get something like Carrion Crow or even Magpie is another combination that not many considered, even if some birds have a habit of stealing things from others (aka kleptoparasitism). Combining Rogue’s ability to absorb others’ abilities with Tim Drake’s high intelligence would lead to interesting ways of undermining opponents, something like Hunter x Hunter’s Chrollo Lucilfer who kind of does the same thing really. An interesting combination that wasn’t considered or done in the original version of the Amalgam stories, even if this would be interesting to portray really.

I don’t read comics that often, and even then a good number of them leave much to be desired. Especially the Marvel and DC Comics wherein if they make a lot of comics, they’ll also make a lot of stuff that’s kind of mediocre or bland. But amalgamating characters seem to be an interesting exercise and one that’s even accomplished in the real world, especially when it came to both DC and Marvel back in the 1990s. More recently both DC and Marvel have done some crossovers this year, though it remains to be seen if there’ll ever be another batch of Amalgam Comics but modernised for 2020s sensibilities.

End of superidols

It’s kind of rare for Christians to object to superheroes the way they do with Harry Potter, let alone without bringing up magic, that even when these stories don’t feature magic that doesn’t make them godly. It could glorify some other sin in some other way and it would still be problematic or offensive to God because all sins are equal, though it’s possible to pray for the salvation for authors while they’re still alive. I actually did this to one author named Antonia Fraser because one, she has to put an end to one of her characters’ bad habits, and two one devotional got me into interceding for her salvation when I prayed to God to do something about her fictional creation. Then I got recurring dreams of this character solving new cases, appearing in a new book, getting a new surname and stuff. Finally I got to a point where I prayed to God to help Fraser finish her stories and he said that I forgot something because it’s already happening.

I also prayed for Fraser’s salvation so at this point she’s being saved and if she dies, she’ll go to Heaven one day. Well that’s preferable to going to Hell and being lost to God forever, while she’s still around she’s getting sanctified whilst coming closer to him. She may not live long but she’ll have a satisfying afterlife for as long as we intercede for her, that she’s probably attending church services more often and reading the Bible more often now. Despite my mistakes at times, this got answered more immediately. We may get a new story featuring this character as a married mother these days, possibly getting a new televised adaptation in years. I said that somebody like JK Rowling could also be saved, now that she’s been disowned by a chunk of her fanbase from her Harry Potter days.

It’s also preferable to having her remain in Hell forever. Though it remains to be seen if JK Rowling ever accepts Christ in her heart, given at this point from being so rejected by her fans that Jesus Christ would be the only one who’d love her unconditionally. You could do the same with others like Gerard Way, or any other comics writer alive today. But I feel there’s something particularly odious to God about DC and Marvel is how they often enable their readers’ idolatry of the characters and stories, making these stories as immersive and addictive as possible. Like you have to watch all the movies, episodes and read all the comics, regardless if that time could’ve been spent on devouring Christian literature and listening to sermons instead. An idol is an idol, be it Superman or Buddha. Even without the occult, they still glorify sin.

For every writer who does get saved and puts an end to their characters’ bad habits (especially Antonia Fraser at this point who portrays one of her characters as a married mother), there are those who use their own to indulge in whatever sin they like or tolerate in some way. It needn’t to be lust, it could also be hatred. It could also be idolatry, so on and so forth. But I suspect the lust part is evident in a number of stories where it’s like these writers use their characters as vehicles for their sexual fantasies, if not lust then these characters become an outlet for their anger and disdain for others, or some other sin/vice/shortcoming. Antonia Fraser did this at some point, but now she doesn’t do this anymore. But it remains to be seen if these writers wouldn’t just be saved, but quit doing their own bad habits, read the Bible, listen to sermons and stuff.

For as long as we pray for these writers, they too will be saved and see the light. As for the overall DC and Marvel publishers, it’s possible to like the characters and stories without making them into idols. But a number of them are from a poisoned well, whether if it’s the hero Daredevil bearing a close resemblance to popular depictions of the Devil, or Chris Claremont’s apparent contempt for Christianity in his X-Men stories, or how you have characters getting away with certain sins that get others into trouble. It’s pretty surprising to me why there’s hardly ever a big Christian backlash towards X-Men the way there is to Harry Potter, even if X-Men really isn’t any better in other regards. Whether if it’s the scantily clad women, the rampant blasphemy towards God and biblical concepts, disdain for Christianity and Christians, or showcasing demonic heroes.

It’s like how Illyana Rasputin is a heroine who sometimes looks demonic but for some reason Christians never objected to this, or for another matter Kitty Pryde’s repeat ingratitude to Professor Xavier (who’s the figurehead of the wider X-Men organisation), and it’s so strange why she gets away with the things that got somebody else like John Proudstar into trouble. It kind of sends a message to people that you could get away with your faults and escape the consequences of those, made worse by the racism shown in these kinds of stories as Kitty’s white but John Proudstar isn’t. It’s also oddly coincidental that both their surnames relate to pride, a major sin in the Bible, but only one of them gets off scot-free. Even then as I get older, the more suspicious the X-Men stories get. Like there’s something deeply wrong about it that a lot of people ignore for whatever reason, even if it could be just as bad as Harry Potter is and gets.

Or possibly even worse as writers like Chris Claremont have the audacity to demonise Christians and Christianity, like how the one sympathetic Christian who’s not demonic looking like Rahne Sinclair often gets brainwashed into doing something, as if Christians are gullible enough to fall for these kinds of things. As well as mocking the word of God multiple times over, that it’s shocking why not a lot of Christians go after this more. I don’t think the Harry Potter stories have done these sorts of things, given I never read those, but somebody else said that part of the problem’s that a number of Christians are very worldly people so they often let in things that don’t do any good for them. This actually makes something like X-Men much worse because it doesn’t seem so spiritually offensive, even though at times it clearly is. Sort of like how Chris Claremont mocks biblical concepts a lot.

To the point where both he and the X-Men franchise will fall down in flames, for insulting God a lot and for misleading people. It would be even more horrifying if a future X-Men writer has the audacity to use the X-Men stories to insult pastors a lot, having more pastors as villains and more X-Men characters destroying churches. Like if a demonic character like Illyana shows up to kill a pastor for what they said to her, or if Kitty Pryde goes on massacring a lot of churchgoers because they said something about her. It would be horrifying to have X-Men characters have the audacity to kill Christians for persecuting them, which goes to show you how anti-Christian the X-Men stories truly are. Not just garden variety blasphemy, gayness and stuff but also outright disdain for God and Christianity, that such stories will reveal their true ungodly colours.

Both DC and Marvel will fall due to enabling their audiences’ sins in many ways, but most especially idolatry that they will be judged for this. These characters will be gone forever, forgotten to time, erased as to keep others from stumbling any further. Perhaps given my growing disdain for American imperialism in the Philippines, this could be a good thing because it’s pretty common for Philippine cartoonists to work for US publishers in some capacity. So it feels like American neocolonialism in the sense that Philippine cartoonists would rather work for US publishers to get extra cash, instead of either strongly supporting their own comics industry or even working for non-US publishers more. The end of DC and Marvel would be awkward, especially for those who grew up with these sorts of things. But the loss of these two would have others seeking substitutes, whatever they may be.

Maybe the loss of DC and Marvel would lead to a less westernised Philippine comics industry, now that Philippine cartoonists will come to actually support it in earnest. And since I’ve been praying for Philippine publishers to translate Chinese comics and the like, as well as praying for others to cope with these things in the future, that this will come to pass and maybe Philippine comics will be truly dewesternised. It remains to be seen if Philippine publishers will ever translate the likes of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Saiyuki, but the loss of the two US publishing giants would have others scrambling for viable substitutes. Publishing Tagalog translations of these two plus Bumilangit and maybe many more from our closest neighbours would lead to a less westernised Philippine comics industry, even if the same problems/sins/vices remain in some manner.

The fact that Philippine publishers rarely translate books from our closest neighbours in East Asia (including Southeast Asia) that perhaps this is a blessing in disguise because finally they’ll actually get to do this a lot more, once they start scrambling for doable alternatives in whatever form they appear in. It would be nice if something like Psicom actually translates both JJBA and Saiyuki into Tagalog, or if not these two then something like Nana and Star of Cottonland. It remains to be seen in the future but this is highly plausible as God’s out to take down DC and Marvel for what their writers have been doing for years like sexual harassment (which Neil Gaiman has been recently outed for) and so on. That and both publishers enable idolatry of their products a lot, which makes them just as odious as Harry Potter is really.

Like how these publishers will do anything to make people dig deeper into their obsessions with those characters and stories, coming up with things that take away the ability to spend time on something more spiritually edifying, like listening to sermons and reading devotionals. Though it wouldn’t be any better if it’s sport really, I personally consider bingewatching DC and Marvel programmes in a single go to be a major waste of time. In the sense that somebody could’ve spent more time livestreaming sermons just the same, though it wouldn’t be any better if it’s something like say Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. As I get closer to God, I spend less time on secular things. Maybe not all the way, but I don’t listen to this much secular music anymore.

But even then whilst there’s nothing wrong with liking superheroes, video games or sports, there’s something about secular companies doing everything and anything to make them really addictive, even at the expense of worshipping God when needed to.

Exotic Black People Part Five: Chris Claremont’s biases and the state of American imperialism

I said before that going from the book From Krakow To Krypton, longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont has admitted that he didn’t find black people particularly relatable (not that he hated them), but it does colour the way he wrote black characters when compounded by his Zionism, holiday in Israel and finding Jewish characters more relatable, that it does reveal a kind of racist bias in his works. In the sense that Jewish characters like Magneto and Kitty Pryde, for all their faults and with the latter being a repeat ingratiate to Professor Xavier, tend to be portrayed more sympathetically and also more sensitively than he would with black characters. It seems when black people do show up in his stories, they fall into three portrayals: exotic black people (Storm), black friend to white people (Storm and Stevie Hunter) and gangsters.

Considering that Cecilia Reyes, an African Caribbean doctor, was created by somebody else (Scott Lobdell), even if Lobdell himself’s not without his own faults it seems antiblack racism is not one of those but my exposure to his stories is very limited, so bear with me here. Given Chris Claremont never found black people particularly relatable, it does make one wonder why he never seemed actually interested in them or experienced with them the way he would with fellow Jews be they American or Israeli. This may not be true for how he portrays other black characters, but based on what I’ve read, it does feel this way at times. I said before that Claremont never seems particularly this exposed to African media, even when the Internet now makes it possible in a way. As in with the Internet, if you use it to upload X-Men fanart and listen to X-Men podcasts, you could also use it to livestream African sermons and the like.

You could also use it to scour for African documents, devotionals and the like, which is exactly what I tend to do with those. I’ve never been to any African country, though I do intend to go to one, but it’s still telling that Chris Claremont never seemed particularly interested in African countries, nor is he extensively exposed to African media in any way, online or not. As he’s never been to any African country, let alone stay there for quite a while like he did in Israel, he’s never particularly exposed to African media given when he was writing the X-Men stories at the time the Internet was in its infancy or something if it did exist at all. As Chris Claremont stayed in Israel for a while, it’s the country that’s going to have any real bearing over his stories. It’s not much of a stretch to even assume that he could’ve been exposed to Israeli media in any way, which would’ve further coloured the way he wrote the X-Men stories.

The fact that Chris Claremont wrote a substantial chunk of the X-Men canon, encompassing related magazines like New Mutants (in-story, they’re pretty much the junior wing of the wider X-Men organisation), Kitty Pryde and Wolverine and a number of Wolverine stories (I think), that his contributions are further reaching than those of Joe Kelly and Scott Lobdell. For every X-Men writer who seems particularly interested in any real African country (or at least has been there for a while) as it is with Joe Kelly towards Maggott/Japheth, there are many more who’re practically indifferent to it. In the case with East Asians and West Asians, and if we restrict it to Chris Claremont’s output, with the exceptions of Karma and Jubilee, they’re almost always portrayed in a kind of antagonistic light.

But then again Jubilee is Asian American and Karma hailed from a former French colony, so westernised Asians will be portrayed more sympathetically than those who’re not. I don’t read much comics so bear with me here again, but it’s kind of telling that there’s a racist streak in Chris Claremont’s stories. It also plays into a wider American sentiment against rising Asian powers that those who’re westernised (the Philippines for instance) will be regarded more favourably than those that aren’t under America’s control (China and at some point, Japan), which also kind of plays into a model minority rhetoric by pitting one against the other in some way. Even as a Pinay, I felt that X-Men stories were pretty iffy. But reading more of those stories makes them even iffier than one realises, especially if you remove those rose-coloured glasses and see the problems for what they really are. This kind of speaks to certain issues I knew before.

I said elsewhere that the Philippines does have a neocolonial relationship with America, especially whenever Philippine cartoonists chose to work for American publishers a lot, over actively supporting the local comics industry in search of money. It’s even worse when you realise that not a lot of Philippine publishing houses bother translating our neighbours’ books into local languages, like would it hurt to translate any of Haruki Murakami’s novels into Tagalog? Filipinos are no stranger to dubbing Japanese programmes into Tagalog, so translating Japanese books into Tagalog would really be more of the same. But we’d rather rely on US imports over personally translating Asian books into our languages, that I feel despite our infatuation with South Korea it’s a distant second to America.

Why? There’s a paucity of Korean books translated into Tagalog. Any Kpop fan that habitually translates Kpop songs into Tagalog should be eligible for translating Korean books into Tagalog, or even Korean comics as one of them could easily be our very own Erika Fuchs. She’s the woman who translated Disney comics into German, and she’s a very lauded translator. Regardless of how one feels about Korean comics or literacy in the Philippines, if you have Kpop fans who translate Korean magazines for personal use, they should be eligible for translating Korean comics into local languages, as Erika Fuchs may not have started out as this familiar with comics at some point but grew to love her job over time.

With America we get the whole package where we don’t just get exposed to America music, but also America television, American cinema, American food, American clothing, American video games, American books, American magazines and also American comic books. Our relationship with our closest Asian neighbours is painfully remote, not even our relationship with South Korea is as close as that of America, which is saying. I don’t think Filipinos are really this extensively exposed to Korean culture this much, despite the common sentiment, since our exposure to Korean culture is largely restricted to Korean programmes, films, food and music, since there are practically not a lot of Philippine publishers translating Korean books and comics for the Philippine market.

And even with music, it’s largely restricted to Kpop for most people and not something like Trot, Korean ballads, Korean rap and Korean rock as these do exist. Whereas Filipinos are highly exposed to a wider range of American music (rap, rock, jazz, pop and country), or for another matter American programmes (drama, comedy, reality television, educational programming and animation). Maybe I’m wrong but even then Filipinos are disturbingly distant towards their neighbours, not even as close to South Korea as they are to America. At any point where Philippine publishers could’ve translated Indonesian books into Tagalog, or Philippine television dubbing Indonesian programmes, these don’t happen. Most Filipinos’ exposure to Indonesian culture on our soil is usually just limited to food, Philippine radio stations don’t play this much Indonesian music.

The average Filipino really isn’t this exposed to Asian cultures this much, given how Philippine publishers barely translate Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai books into Tagalog, how Philippine television doesn’t dub Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese and Thai programmes this much and so on. Philippine radio stations may play Kpop, but they don’t play K-Rap, Trot, K-Ballads or K-Rock. Actually the other two (Trot and K-Ballads) are pretty popular in South Korea, though not widely exported to other countries the way Kpop is. I still think the Philippines’s exposure to Asian cultures is pretty shallow compared to America’s, even our exposure to South Korean culture isn’t this deep since we don’t bother translating Korean comics and books into local languages.

Such is the tragedy of American imperialism in the Philippines where despite much closer to Indonesia and Vietnam than we are to the US, we’re more heavily exposed to US culture than we are to both Indonesia and Vietnam. We’re more heavily exposed to American comics than we are to Indonesian and Vietnamese comics, and despite the existence of Japanese programmes dubbed into Tagalog, we don’t do a lot of the same to Japanese comics and books for some reason. Jline Comics is the only Philippine publisher that does this to my knowledge, it wouldn’t hurt for Philippine publishers to professionally translate something like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Saiyuki into Tagalog. But one possible objection is that it’s too extensive to translate multiple volumes of those into Tagalog, as the Philippines is bilingual in Tagalog and English, we could just import translated Japanese comics instead.

But since Philippine dubbers are experienced in dubbing hundreds of episodes from almost any anime into Tagalog, translating Japanese comics into Tagalog would be more of the same thing. I find myself wondering if Filipinos aren’t just remote towards our neighbours, but also suspicious or disdainful of them on some level. Not just China but also Japan at some point for elderly people alive today, even though it shouldn’t be this way. Even if these two have faults, America’s not any better either. America has repeatedly evicted Native Americans off of their lands and have them marginalised in some way, especially through reservations, whereas white Americans (descendants of European immigrants and colonists) needn’t to live in reservations. Even if not all Native Americans live in reservations, it’s not hard to see how and why they’re so marginalised on their own soil.

America is built on stolen land and what was once Native American territory has been made into American cities and towns by European settlers, you have some people suggesting that there were a lot more Native Americans back then. But once European settlers came, their numbers dwindled over time. Not to mention Hawaii was its own country but got subjugated by America and then got made into a US state as the 1950s came to a close, which goes to show you what an imperial hegemon America became. Any country it can’t readily subjugate is ripe for demonisation, which is how it feels around China and also Japan before. This is particularly evident in one X-Men story where the Mandarin decides to sinicise Jubilee even further, but she’s aghast at this or something.

Not to mention the other nonwesternised East Asians in that story are also antagonistic and though I could be wrong about the way the rest of the East Asians are portrayed in other Chris Claremont penned stories, but it does make sense how and why East Asians are generally written the way they are in the X-Men stories. It seems most of the more sympathetic East Asians in the X-Men canon tend to be westernised ones (Galura who’s Philippine, the Vietnamese Karma and Chinese-American Jubilee), but the antagonistic ones are the least westernised (the Mandarin and Matsuo). Also it seems most of the more sympathetic East Asian characters are also female, but the antagonistic ones tend to be male (I don’t read much comics to be honest).

It kind of does play into a sort of fetishisation of East Asian women, made worse by the presence of US air bases in some countries. Which means US soldiers will be out to have dalliances with Philippine, Vietnamese and Korean prostitutes, which sort of explains why DC’s very own Cheshire is portrayed the way she is. Though Chinese men having African women isn’t any better, but when it comes to American soldiers having dalliances with East Asian prostitutes, it kind of furthers or deepens the fetishisation of East Asian women at times. For every AF/WM relationship that’s actually not based around prostitution at all, there are those who come over for the prostitutes and the like. It’s a really insidious form of colonialism where people get trafficked for sex in some way or another, or if people are nothing more than living commodities for white people.

Nothing more than playthings for white people, which I feel makes the sexualised transformation of Betsy Braddock into an Asian woman worse. Early on she didn’t dress this skimpily (by superhero standards), but once she turned East Asian she started flirting with Scott Summers (who’s married to Jean Grey). And she habitually wore a thong leotard, which makes Peach Momoko’s take on her all the more refreshing. Instead of using her to act out fetishistic fantasies of Asian women, this Psylocke comes across as authentically Japanese. She’s not a white woman who got bodyswapped with an East Asian woman, but an actual Japanese woman whose name contains the Chinese character for west (clever one!).

It also helps that Peach Momoko is Japanese herself and would churn out a real Japanese sensibility, but she’s far from the only one out there in Marvel. But there’s something troubling about the Philippines’s sympathy for the west and especially America, where we’re quick to distrust easternisation like Filipinos drawing in a more anime style, but have no issue working for American publishers themselves. Coupled with a more distant relationship with our closest neighbours and it’s pretty shameful that we’re too close to America in ways that are really inappropriate, like the Philippines can’t effectively decolonise itself without letting go of America in some way. I even said before that most Philippine publishers don’t translate our neighbours’ books and comics.

Which means the Philippines’s relationship with the east is painfully and embarrassingly remote, compared to our inappropriately close relationship with America and the rest of the west. Not that there’s anything wrong with liking western countries, but when the Philippines is rather distant towards its closest neighbours it’s not a good sign really. Actually I don’t think the Philippines is close to the rest of the global east (which in my view includes Africa) either, given how most Filipinos are still far more exposed to western media than they are to East Asian and African media. It’s not something I like in the Philippines but it’s vanishingly rare for Filipinos to be this extensively exposed to nonwestern media, I could not be the only one here.

Even if something like the Bumilangit comics canon isn’t entirely resolved of other problems, at least offers a more authentically Indonesian sensibility and it’s proof that it’s possible to sustain a local big name comics publisher for long, something the Philippines barely even does with its own superheroes and our very own Bayan Knights didn’t last long. Philippine cartoonists would rather work for American publishers and get a higher payrate, over actively supporting our own superheroes which hints at the inappropriate persistence of American colonialism in the Philippines. And since it’s been speculated that Israel itself is an agent of western imperialism, it kind of does play into how certain ethnicities are portrayed.

Those that are westernised are highly favoured (Israeli Jews, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese) and those that aren’t are highly demonised (Chinese, Arabs, even the Japanese at some point), biases that are very much reinforced in the X-Men canon from time to time that gets inculcated onto America’s allies. It may not even be the X-Men comics that do the trick, but any other American story would do and it will turn out the same for as long as it helps reinforce these biases onto others. It’s worth noting that there’s nary a Palestinian X-Man, even though the Arrakkians serve as proxies for Palestinians. But when writers almost always side with Zionism, in which a good chunk of the X-Men canon owes itself to through Chris Claremont, it’s probably why there’ll never be a sympathetically prominent Palestinian mutant at all.

The sort of Palestinian characters who do get to appear in X-Men stories in any capacity are more likely to be Israeli Jews, something like Gabrielle Haller and her son with Professor Xavier, David Haller. As he appeared in the earlier stories, he was like Professor Xavier’s skinny teenaged son who got possessed by an evil Arab hellbent on killing Israelis. Outside of the X-Men and part of the larger Marvel canon is the Israeli Sabra/Ruth Bat Seraph, again one would wonder why Marvel Comics never had a prominently sympathetic Palestinian character in any way. Sympathetic Egyptians and Lebanese maybe, but not a single sympathetic Palestinian. That would run counter to the stronger bias towards Israeli Jews and Jews in general.

And whenever Sabra does appear with another character called Arabian Knight, she’s almost always portrayed as a sort of heroine against him. Like you have to side more with the Jews than with the Arabs, even those at their worst like Magneto and Kitty Pryde at times will still be portrayed more sympathetically, than is afforded to nonwhite, non-Jewish characters like John Proudstar. It’s like both of them are ungrateful towards Professor Xavier, but only Kitty Pryde’s spared from the consequences of her actions that befell John Proudstar. The fact that Claremont’s so biased towards her that it feels really racist when you realise why she barely ever faces the consequences of her own disdain towards Professor Xavier the way it did for him, which is really racist.

It’s like he sides with her more than the Native American guy, even though they’re more resentful towards Xavier and Kitty has fought with him like three times to my knowledge. It kind of communicates a certain message that you can get away with that attitude for as long as you’re of the right ethnicity and culture, like anybody who’s not a western white person will almost always face the consequences of the same actions that their white, western counterparts do often. It’s not a good message and when compounded by other iffy portrayals of nonwestern and/or nonwhite people, it’s as if despite X-Men writers and especially Chris Claremont embracing multiculturalism, it’s mostly on paper and not in action.

Most of the people making up the classic New Mutants lineup are white westerners (British Rahne Sinclair, white Americans Doug Ramsey and Sam Guthrie, white Brazilian Amara Aquila and white Russian Illyana Rasputin in my opinion, and then another white American like Tabitha Smith), given there are only a few nonwhite or nonwestern members of that subgroup (Native American Dani Moonstar, Vietnamese Karma and Afro-Brazilian Sunspot). It’s like despite attempts to portray Japanese culture and Japanese characters, X-Men writers and especially Chris Claremont seem far more biased towards white westerners above everybody else.

And when compounded by the paucity of sympathetic Palestinian Arab characters like there is for Israeli Jews like Sabra, it’s not hard to see that Chris Claremont and the overall Marvel canon seem far more biased towards white Jews than they would towards Palestinians. It’s kind of telling that the most prominent Muslim characters in Marvel Comics aren’t Palestinians themselves, be it Pakistani American Kamala Khan, Lebanese American Fadi Fadlalah and Turkish American Nakia Bahadir, which still sends a certain message that it’s okay to be Muslim and/or West Asian for as long as they are westernised in one way or another. It’s not just that all three of them are from their countries’ diasporas.

But that both Pakistan and Lebanon were former European colonies (British and French respectively), with Turkey being a West Asian country that’s in close geographical and cultural proximity to Europe. There’s nary a sympathetic Palestinian American among them, not even Palestinian Christians are portrayed much at all in American comics. Perhaps outside of Joe Sacco’s journalistic forays into Palestine, which they likely do appear, Palestinian Christians are vanishingly rare in the American comics canon. And Palestinian Christians are very much ignored in most western media, like this might tarnish the perception of Israel as the Christians’ favourite country. This is even more ironic that not only does Israel persecute Palestinian Christians, but that it’s rarely mentioned as one of those countries that persecute Christians at all.

The ones that do get mentioned are ironically the same countries that have very substantial Christian populations compared to Israel, namely these are Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Mexico and Uganda. Even if they have their own issues, they’re actually less hostile to Christianity than one realises. Uganda not only has Christian YouTube channels and radio stations, but also a newspaper called New Vision that even publishes devotionals online. Same thing goes for Nigeria’s Nigerian Times and Elanhub, in addition to having its own Christian radio stations and YouTube channels. There are even Christian websites coming from Nigeria, Indonesia and Vietnam, just as Indonesia has its own version of Radio Maria (a Christian radio network) and Vietnam even has Christian YouTube channels.

Even China has a sizable number of Christian websites, despite taking a few of them down. Unfortunately it’s easier to side with Israel for all its faults, than to see the good in these countries due to the Halo effect both Israel and Jews have in the Zionist mindset. And there’s a tendency for some Protestants to view Jews as honourary Protestants, which only deepens people’s suspicions of Christianity as linked to colonialism, especially if/when there’s no regard and respect for Christian traditions and denominations that have a longer history in countries like Vietnam, China and the Philippines, namely Catholicism. But others don’t see Catholicism as Christian, so it’s like Jews get a pass for being Protestant-like.

It’s not hard to see how and why a Zionist bias is prominent in not only some Christian circles, but also western circles as a whole and why it kind of drives a wedge between people really. Whether if it’s Zionism in Chris Claremont’s stories, the overall trend of Zionism in the wider Marvel canon and also Zionism in western culture, one gets the impression that Jews are the model minority to end all model minorities. The ones that can readily assimilate into white, Protestant cultures in a way not even those from white, Catholic cultures can’t aspire to (something like Ireland and Italy), which communicates a message that invalidates those cultures and countries.

Jews are the model minority’s model minority, which would make the Romani the original ‘bad’ minority. The former is stereotyped as high-achieving and amenable to white, Protestant cultures, the other will always be the scapegoat and the outsider. Both of them come from other places, with Jewish people that’s like twice because although a few Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Levant, most of them are more directly descended from Judacised Turkic, Iranian, Greek and Slavic populations between West Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Conveniently where the Khazar Khaganate would’ve been, whose own people were speculated to have converted to Judaism en masse to avoid taking sides.

There are studies that are conflicted over whether or not Ashkenazic Jews are even descended from them, even if they’re not wholly descended from them as they’re also descended from Judacised Slavs, Greeks and Iranians, but if Palestinians are said to be directly descended from the Israelites in some studies, even if Palestinians could really be Arabicised Jews in some regards (in the sense of being directly descended from the Israelites) but to most people, being Arab and Jewish are fundamentally incompatible concepts. Like to be Arab is to be Muslim and to be Jewish is to be westernised on some level, even if the possibility that Palestinians are directly descended from the ancient Israelites confounds these assumptions.

It seems in the world of Marvel and also in Chris Claremont’s contributions to the X-Men canon, an Arab can be a prominent character but never a Palestinian Arab. A Muslim can be a hero for as long as they’re not Palestinian, as if the Zionists that may be try to bury any memory and positive mention of Palestine at all. Not to mention a Palestinian can’t even be a Christian, despite Palestine/Israel housing the world’s oldest continuous Christian community. It’s not hard to see how western media’s greater bias towards both Israel and Jews make it harder to see Palestinians as people, let alone as practising Christians because that would surprise and upend one’s ideas about them.

So a Palestinian will never be a character in Marvel Comics, much less a heroic one or even an X-Man at that. If Marvel has Israeli Jewish characters like David Haller and Sabra, why not a Palestinian? But it’s never going to happen anyways, perhaps other than the coded residents of Arrakko. And even then mutants having to have their own ethnostate’s right there in Chris Claremont’s writings, who spent enough time to Israel to have both Magneto and Charles Xavier do the same thing. There’s also no mistaking that he would’ve been this exposed to Israeli media, in lieu of a more sophisticated Internet back in the 1980s and 1990s as this was a thing before.

And even in the early to mid 2000s, though the Internet and broadband connections were there, livestreaming had yet to emerge. And even then Chris Claremont’s still more biased towards Israel and western cultures, at least generally less antagonistic towards the former two than he is towards East Asia and especially both China and Japan (again, I don’t read comics much). His biases inevitably colour the way people are portrayed in his stories, his own inability to relate to black people or East Asians for another matter often results in dodgy portrayals, his greater bias towards Kitty Pryde has rendered her immune to the fallout of her own actions, despite being the same as what John Proudstar did.

David Haller was a poor Jewish boy (since he’s older now) who got possessed by an Arab, as if Arabs are out to corrupt Jewish minors at any point. And how Betsy Braddock came to look Asian, she actually got body-swapped with an Asian assassin with criminal ties, as like if being easternised makes you suspicious on some level. It’s no surprise that such portrayals of certain nonwestern cultures and peoples serve to drive a wedge between people, like how Philippine cartoonists kind of look down on their countrymen doing the manga style but have no shame working for American publishing houses. Even if it sounds like a stretch, it does inculcate certain ideas of what people ought to be and ally themselves with.

In American comics, even if there are white, western bad guys they’re still going to be portrayed more sympathetically than is afforded for their nonwestern, nonwhite counterparts, which affects how America’s allies see others as. This may not be the case anymore but it does influence people’s mindsets and sensibilities on a subconscious level, like if Americans have a habit of inculcating their culture onto Filipinos over Filipinos learning to develop stronger ties to their neighbours, then Filipinos will become more biased towards their cultures. Even if they sympathise with their neighbours on some level, they’ll still sympathise more with anything western still.

It’s pretty evidently problematic that due to years of American inculcation that most Filipinos aren’t this particularly close to their neighbours, even though this should make good logistical sense. They begin to absorb and internalise American ideas and mindsets, resulting in a worldview no different from their American counterparts. This also includes parallel attitudes towards Chinese, Arabs, British and so on, even if this isn’t how these people see themselves as. Or for another matter, how Europeans would see Arabs and Chinese as. If you keep presenting Arabs and Chinese as a threat to American hegemony, they will see them in this light. If you habitually erase Palestinians in your stories, people wouldn’t know they existed.

Let alone in a more humanising light as it is in Joe Sacco’s own comics, ditto the existence of Palestinian Christians. And unfortunately given the nature of American hegemony in the Philippines and the like, it makes it harder to see these biases as what they really are, instead of finding out Chinese and Arab made media to better understand where they’re coming from and see a different side to them. Or for another matter, Vietnamese, Ugandan, Nigerian and Indonesian made media, but the problem will be the same for as America and Israel both want to earn people’s graces. For as long as America continues to tarnish their reputations, it makes harder to understand and learn how they see themselves as. Even for all their faults, countries like Indonesia and Vietnam aren’t this hostile to Christians.

Israel might be more hostile to Christians than one realises, especially if these are Palestinian Christians at that, which go unnoticed in most Christian media. When coupled with poor media literacy, it’s not hard to see things in a biased manner. Unfortunately even researchers are biased towards something, making it harder to evaluate things objectively and are human in a way. So media literacy comes in handy when it comes to evaluating such media, which should also extend to something like the X-Men canon. Media literacy is really helpful in understanding one’s biases towards something and how it colours their work, such as how Chris Claremont’s Zionist bias coloured his tenure on the X-Men magazine series and its ilk like New Mutants.

Unconscious or not, it colours the way they see and expect things to be. No wonder why it’s so hard to see the Zionist bias and racism in the X-Men stories without realising it later on, well as it is for me, but it’s increasingly obvious how different certain people are portrayed compared to others. And why these media influence people’s perceptions and assumptions of something.