Magneto: Hero or Villain?

Magneto: hero or Villain?

When we think of villains there are several that quickly come to mind. For Batman there is the Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor as his great revel, and Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin. Yet no other character is as complex as the X-Men's villain, Magneto. From they very beginning of the comic series there has not been a person that has crossed the line between hero and villain as much as Magneto. Even though he has helped and saved the X- men on several occasions. What still makes him the villain? Along with that, why is Wolverine a hero when he has a bad attitude and kills more people then Magneto?

When you start talking about Magneto you have to start at the beginning of his story. As a young child he is put in a concentration camp. While in the camp he lives through the perils that everyone had to deal with. In the end of his stay, he was shot and then dumped in a mass grave, some how he managed to live. He then crawl out of the grave and managed to escape to freedom. As an older man he sees the way the normal people are treating the mutants and fears that it will end in an all out war.

To stop this war Magneto fells that he must take certain steps. These steps are such things as taking over the world and becoming the supreme dictator. This is the first reason that he is known as a villain. When villains are brought up, their plans usually consist of taking over the world, so it's no surprise that Magneto would want to do the same thing.

While the steps he wants to take are completely evil, the way Magneto goes about completing them are not. When he kills someone, it usually is a person that wanted to harm him. One example of this is in X2: X-men united, when Magneto is breaking out of jail he must kill the guard in order to get the bits of metal that was hidden in his blood stream. One could say that the guard had it coming because that was the same one that would beat Magneto when ever Stryker would come and visit. Right after the death of the first guard, then see Magneto kill the other two guard that where watching him as well. Their deaths where not as justified because, in the movie, they never harmed Magneto, they only did there job. So the only reason for Magneto to kill them is because they happened to be trying to keep him imprisoned.

Even though Magneto is reluctant to kill people, there is an even smaller group of people that he almost never kills. While his thought on mutant and human relations differ from the X-Men you hardly ever see Magneto flat out killing them. This is because he is fighting for all of mutantkind, so it would be unwise to kill those he is trying to free. He has even gone as far as saving the lives of several X-Men. As seen in X2, when there plain is about to crash Magneto steps in and saves the lives of seven "enemies."

Magneto is such a tough character to understand because he is, as Fingeroth puts it in his chapter Values and Villains, a "right man." This type of villain is the most dangerous because they feel what they are doing is right. It also means that they think they are the hero, and anyone that gets in their way is the villain. What makes this type of villain so menacing is the fact that they will stop at nothing to gain their