Cesare

azryal00:

turtletotem:

Yes, Raven, you HAD better hide because as insane as it seems now, you lived in a world where it barely made the news for a black man to be mutilated and set on fire for the crime of looking at a white woman. That’s a black man, a human being under the law with the right to vote and everything, whose race happens to be in the minority. Admittedly, you’re in England, not the Southern U.S., but all the same, what the heck do you think would happen to a scaly blue girl who can shapeshift? I figure it’s a toss-up between ‘burned at the stake as a demon’ or ‘squirreled away in a government lab, never again to see daylight through non-sedated eyes.’

Charles made a lot of mistakes, sweetheart, many of them with you. But hiding your true appearance from the public eye was not freaking one of them.

Thank you for saying this.

Thank you. Thank you.

Reason #84 why the notion that “Charles is naive” doesn’t fly for me. If he naively believed that humans would accept mutants peacefully, no problem, why did he exhort Raven to hide? He knew it wasn’t safe for her. His thesis suggests he was trying to give people a framework to understand mutants and provide reasons not to fear them. (I think to that end, his final draft might’ve soft-pedaled that whole “modern humans did away with the Neanderthals” passage. Btw, interestingly, recent discoveries suggest that isn’t true: turns out Neanderthals co-existed and interbred with modern humans. Modern AU Charleses can take heart in that.) There are arguments to be made with how Charles thinks that goal is best achieved and how much he’s willing to compromise. But he’s not naive about that.

ETA: I don’t believe in this scene that Raven was unhappy about hiding as if it was all Charles’s idea and if it weren’t for him, she’s run around blue. We saw her as a tiny child, already well aware that she needed to disguise herself. I think she was unhappy about the world sucking so hard that she needed to hide to be safe, and trying to make Charles understand the toll it was taking on her. To me the key line of the movie is Raven’s: “You know Charles, I used to think it was going to be you and me against the world. But no matter how bad the world gets, you don’t want to be against it, do you? You want to be part of it.”

(via 4xontuesdays)