Posted: 21 April 2018 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | 2
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The potential inappropriateness of Hate Monger comes from a couple of things.
1. The character represents, to some degree, a real-life person responsible for terrible atrocities. Readers in the 60s digesting a comic with a Hitler clone fighting Ben Grimm and Reed Richards, would have had relatives exterminated at the behest of the real Hitler. 2. The hate ray simplifies, or even sweeps under the carpet, a terrifying aspect of Nazi Germany. That genocide occurred at the hands of the bureaucracy of a developed nation. To boil the evils of the Nazi regime down to the rays of a gizmo, potentially undermines the true horror of what happened.
This is tempered by several things.
First, the intent of the story. As several posters here have pointed out, the story (and the use of the character) is well-intentioned. It is a morality tale, intended to point out the evils of the Nazi regime, lest we forget.
Second, it does not seek to portray the real Hitler. It is clearly a fictional tale. No one would get confused and think this attempts to represent the historical Hitler.
Thirdly, I have tried to think of an offensive analogy using a modern day villain like Hitler and have failed to come up with something that genuinely offends my sensibilities. A super-villain based on Bin Laden that tries to bring down skyscrapers by a mind-controlling ray? Possibly, just possibly, there are folks who'd get offended, but I think you'd have to go out of your way to do so, if it was a clone of Bin Laden, who was the villain of the piece.
Those are my two-penneth anyway.
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