I recently watched all the X-Men movies again, and it took me back to the first time I discovered that world. I think X-Men was actually what introduced me to mutants and superheroes in the first place. The first comic book I clearly remember reading was an X-Men comic, and from that moment I was hooked. There was something about the idea of people being born different, not fitting in, having abilities they didn’t ask for, and then spending their lives trying to figure out where they belong. So when the first X-Men movie came out, I remember sitting completely glued to the screen. For some reason, the character who stayed with me the most was not the heroes.
It was Magneto.
Magneto, whose real name is Erik Lehnsherr, never felt like a simple villain to me. The more you learn about his story, the harder it is to see him as someone who is just evil. He was a Holocaust survivor, and as a child he watched his family taken from him in a concentration camp. In the films, you see that moment where he is separated from his mother, and that alone is enough to understand how early his life was shaped by fear, loss, and anger. He grew up in a world where being different meant being hunted, and that stayed with him.
Later in life, he loses more people he cares about, his wife and daughter. And every time it seems to confirm what he already believed, that humans will always fear what they don’t understand and will eventually try to destroy it. He genuinely believes mutants are the next step in evolution and that if they don’t fight back, they will be wiped out. In his mind, he is not the villain. He is the one doing what needs to be done to make sure his kind survives. And when you look at his life, it is hard to say he didn’t have reasons to think that way.
What makes it even more interesting is that James Howlett, the man we know as Wolverine, went through a life that was not very different. Logan’s story is also full of loss from the very beginning. As a child, he finds out the man he thought was his father is not his real father, and the truth comes out in the middle of violence. His real father is killed, his home falls apart, and his relationship with his brother, Victor, slowly turns into something almost unrecognisable. The two of them go through wars together, live through more violence than most people ever see, and over time Logan becomes someone who is constantly running, constantly fighting, never really able to settle anywhere.
In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we see one of the few times he actually tries to live a normal life. He falls in love with Kayla Silverfox, a mutant with the ability to persuade people by touch. She is the one who tells him the story about the wolverine. The name Stryker becomes synonymous with rage and loss. His memory is wiped, his body is turned into something almost indestructible, and when he wakes up he does not even know who he is anymore. He has to start again without knowing his past, without knowing who to trust, without even knowing what parts of his life were real.
When you watch Logan years later and see him old, tired, and carrying the weight of everything he has lived through, it honestly feels like watching someone who never really got a break. After all the fighting, all the loss, all the years of not even knowing who he was, he just looks like a man who has been holding himself together for too long (saying this with the assumption that all the movies happened in the same universe).
What stayed with me after watching all the movies again is how similar Erik Lehnsherr and James Howlett actually are. Both lost their families. Both grew up in violence. Both were feared for what they were. Both were used by others. Both had every reason to hate the world. But one chose to believe the world could never change, and the other kept fighting for it even when it gave him very little reason to.
And that makes me think about something I remember reading in psychology about the whole nature versus nurture debate, the idea that who we become is shaped partly by our genes and partly by our experiences. Some people seem to have certain tendencies from the start, but what happens to them in life can push them in completely different directions. Two people can go through similar trauma and still end up making completely different choices.
Magneto and Wolverine feel like that to me. Almost like two different answers to the same question. If life hurts you enough, do you become someone who wants to protect the world, or someone who wants to burn it down before it burns you first. And every time I watch X-Men again, I realise the story was never really about mutants or powers. It was about that uncomfortable question we don’t always like to ask ourselves. How much of who we are was already written…and how much of it is decided by the choices we make after everything goes wrong.