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X-Men Mutants and Autism

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TheWalrys435
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20 Mar 2017, 11:09 am

I'm not the first person to talk about this concept, but does anyone else feel as though the "mutants" of Stan Lee's Marvel world may well be a metaphor for autistics and in particular, aspies? The parallels are fairly obvious. There exist these people who are oddly gifted in some ways but are socially alienated, feared and even hated because of their differences. I know many aspies, myself included, feel this way...perhaps not to the same extremes but still.



ASPartOfMe
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20 Mar 2017, 5:24 pm

Not to many people would have been aware of autism when Stan Lee created X-Men. But he might based it on undiagnosed autistics.


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TheWalrys435
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20 Mar 2017, 7:29 pm

True. It is possible that Stan Lee was aware of it through research or personal experience with people. This link is pretty informative about the public awareness of Autism and Aspergers. projectautism.org/history-of-autism
It was known of but like you said, it could have been Stan Lee interacting with people who he noticed were often higher than average intelligence but painfully odd. My obsessive aspie self will make a new project of finding out everything I can about the inspiration for Stan Lee's characters.



naturalplastic
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21 Mar 2017, 12:49 am

TheWalrys435 wrote:
I'm not the first person to talk about this concept, but does anyone else feel as though the "mutants" of Stan Lee's Marvel world may well be a metaphor for autistics and in particular, aspies? The parallels are fairly obvious. There exist these people who are oddly gifted in some ways but are socially alienated, feared and even hated because of their differences. I know many aspies, myself included, feel this way...perhaps not to the same extremes but still.


Doubt that he consciously meant it to be that. But you can still take it as metaphor for that anyway. A buddy of mine collects all of the Marvel movies on DVD ,and I end up seeing many hours of them, and a WP member cant help but be reminded of WP folks (and how they talk about us aspies and those NTs) when you see how the Stan Lee superheroes talk about themselves ("we mutants" and those "normals") in those movies. Reminded in both good and in bad ways.

And who knows? Maybe Stan Lee was geeky himself, or knew of geeky but talented people, and thus "knew" about aspergers without knowing that he knew about aspergers back in those pre 1994 times. He might have been unknowingly inspired by neurodiversity.



TheWalrys435
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21 May 2017, 12:44 am

naturalplastic wrote:
TheWalrys435 wrote:
I'm not the first person to talk about this concept, but does anyone else feel as though the "mutants" of Stan Lee's Marvel world may well be a metaphor for autistics and in particular, aspies? The parallels are fairly obvious. There exist these people who are oddly gifted in some ways but are socially alienated, feared and even hated because of their differences. I know many aspies, myself included, feel this way...perhaps not to the same extremes but still.



Doubt that he consciously meant it to be that. But you can still take it as metaphor for that anyway. A buddy of mine collects all of the Marvel movies on DVD ,and I end up seeing many hours of them, and a WP member cant help but be reminded of WP folks (and how they talk about us aspies and those NTs) when you see how the Stan Lee superheroes talk about themselves ("we mutants" and those "normals") in those movies. Reminded in both good and in bad ways.

And who knows? Maybe Stan Lee was geeky himself, or knew of geeky but talented people, and thus "knew" about aspergers without knowing that he knew about aspergers back in those pre 1994 times. He might have been unknowingly inspired by neurodiversity.


Very true. The latest (and in my opinion greatest) X-Men movie, "Logan", really rammed home the notion that muties are aspies or autistics in general. Not definite, but there are undeniable similarities.