And also, some of the fics do try to address at least some of the political and other stuff, but part of what makes the Mutant Metaphor(tm) evergreen is that it's always (metaphorically) about whatever our big issue is right now, for us.
By making XMFC a period piece, the metaphor becomes about the issues that were big for them, then. (And canon didn't do a great job with the back then issues, either.) So even the fics that try to address the other political/identity stuff often seem to not quite work, it's pushing it through both the Mutant Metaphor filter and the Historical Fiction filter and ends up a bit too mushy.
Pocky_slash (and a few of the others that use XMFC backstory) make it work because Picard/McKellan's Xavier/Magneto was always in large part about how the problems of the past keep haunting us in the present, and that is always one of the problems of us, now.
no subject
And also, some of the fics do try to address at least some of the political and other stuff, but part of what makes the Mutant Metaphor(tm) evergreen is that it's always (metaphorically) about whatever our big issue is right now, for us.
By making XMFC a period piece, the metaphor becomes about the issues that were big for them, then. (And canon didn't do a great job with the back then issues, either.) So even the fics that try to address the other political/identity stuff often seem to not quite work, it's pushing it through both the Mutant Metaphor filter and the Historical Fiction filter and ends up a bit too mushy.
Pocky_slash (and a few of the others that use XMFC backstory) make it work because Picard/McKellan's Xavier/Magneto was always in large part about how the problems of the past keep haunting us in the present, and that is always one of the problems of us, now.