Who's Power Fantasy tho?
I've been catching up on Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard's The Power Fantasy, which is very good and strikes me as Gillen taking another crack at the science fiction conceits of geopolitics under the influence of super humans capable of planetary destruction that were present in the Krakoa era X Men stuff Gillen worked on (it's got Krakoa data pages for fucks sake) just now with more freedom since it's not disney ip. My question, though, is that given one of the lead characters, Etienne Lux, is a super utilitarian professor x type telepath with questionable morals who is pretty much fine psychically manipulating or straight up killing millions in order to maintain relative peace and prevent global annihilation and just so happens to be black, has Etienne done anything about racism in the world of The Power Fantasy?
Like that seems like the exact kind of scifi "what if" ethical conundrum the comic is all about, and like if professor x in the krakoa era can mess around in a bunch of world leaders's heads to make it so they couldn't actually drop any nukes Etienne could do global brain surgery to stop prejudices like racism or sexism and it would line up with the character's whole philosophy of prioritizing the good of the many to simply flip a switch and reduce the oppression of millions of people.
And like I think it'd be really potent for this particular set of characters to deal with this dilemma cause like; Is that something Etienne is concerned with? And if not then why? Does he not identify with the racial minority experience? Like we know he's not aligned with the other atomics. Would Valentina and her emotionally driven morality actually say it's ok to maintain racism if they could do something about it?
And like given Etienne's whole master manipulator shtick there's a bunch of subtle stuff he coulda been doing that woulda been under the notice of the other super powers like stopping systemic financial discrimination like redlining in the US, or preventing hiring discrimination based on racialized names. Imo it'd be a really fun complication and reveal to all the dirt Etienne's been doing if he was also working on erasing racism while like Heavy was hanging out isolated in his big dumb floating island.