Marvel clarifies their Mutant Classification system...

[icon_uk]

For years Marvel Mutants have been bandying classifications around, but it's a little confusing as to which end was the upper limit, was it Alpha, or Omega....

Newsarama has a handy field guide up...

ALPHA LEVEL

An Alpha level mutant is someone who looks no different from any other human being, and whose powers are pretty effective in combat. Likewise, they have no limitation placed on them as a result of their X-gene.

Examples - Colossus, Dazzler, Kitty Pryde

BETA LEVEL

Beta level mutants are just like Alphas, but with a catch. While at first glance they can pass for a human being, careful scrutiny reveals they have some strange trait that sets them apart, like an eye color that doesn't generally appear in humans. A Beta mutant can also be someone who passes for human but has some limitation imposed on them because of their power, such as not being able to make skin-to-skin contact (which describes Rogue's condition for many years).

Examples - Cyclops (eyes), Gambit (eyes), Wolverine (via his bone claws), Northstar/Aurora (pointy ears), pre-furry Beast (disproportionately large hands and feet) perhaps, Annalee of the Morlocks (looked human, but couldn't switch her broadcast empathic powers off)

GAMMA LEVEL

Like Alphas and Betas, Gamma level mutants are pretty handy in combat situations. But as a result of their X-gene, they cannot pass for human without the use of a disguise of some sort.

Examples - Nightcrawler, Blink, post-furry Beast.

DELTA LEVEL

Delta Level mutants are those who, like Alphas and Betas, can pass for human at first glance. But unlike Alphas or Betas, their power is not something that is obvious and automatically combative. Their abilities are more subtle, enough so that an outside observer can't actually see the power in use. Delta mutants may go for years not realizing that they are, in fact, mutants, due to the nature of their abilities.

Examples - Domino, Forge, Cypher

EPSILON LEVEL

Epsilon level mutants either have a non-combative power or no real powers at all, but are like Gamma level mutants in that they cannot hide what they are. Many examples of such mutants can be found among the Morlocks, a community that chose to live in the sewers rather than among humanity.

Examples - Artie Maddicks, Tar Baby

OMEGA LEVEL

These are the people who truly make normal human beings and government agencies afraid. These are mutants whose power levels are such that they are considered the most serious threats, capable of wide-scale destruction and proving very difficult to take down, contain or kill.

Examples - Magneto, Iceman (now)

So your thoughts? Where does your own favourite fit in? Would YOU put them there?

Reminds me a bit of the informal classifications used in the Wild Card books; The mutagenic, alien-originated Wild Card virus has differing effects on those wo caught it, and the names used were appropriate to the card motif.. 990/1000 died horribly (Drawing the Black Queen),  9/1000 survived by only gained deformities (Drawing the Joker) and 1/1000 ganied superpowers of some sort (Drawing the Ace... though many powers weren't actually that useful, and such people rather bitterly referred to themselves as having "drawn the Deuce")

For legality, Doug proves that just because you're a Delta level mutant, it doesn't mean you can't cause some SERIOUS damage in the right circumstances... As the future Sentinel MCP is about to find out.

Comments

[salinea]

wow, that's a classification ripe for political deconstruction.

[icon_uk]

Go for it!

Fly, my pretties FLY!

(Before anyone complains I'm comparing them to batwinged primates, remember that they got snazzy waistcoats, and in so doing I'm comparing myself to Margaret Hamilton in green make up... who I actually have been compared to some mornings)

[salinea]

Isn't it obvious? There's two parameters that affect those categories. One is how people pass in human society; which can clearly easily be problematic - and the other is level of threat / of use as a weapon - which is also extremely problematic. I'd expect any mutant who'd think twice about it to completely reject those categories as extremely oppressive. They're kind of made to be oppressive.

[icon_uk]

Well, yes my own take on it is obvious to me, but I'm trying to engender a discussion here! :)

Given that most mutants we've met have more or less completely offensive powers, I can sort of see where degree-of-weaponisation would be one of the axes on the graph.

[salinea]

sorry, I was half asleep when I wrote those comments and on my way to bed :p


well of course they do, must mutants we've met were to be characters in superhero comics which naturally feature a lot of combats. But yeah, I think those categories make sense... in term of the government going "okay, how scared should we be of those people? And how useful could they be?" It's not that the categories don't make sense, it's just that I immediately started seeing the potential for fanfics where people start rejecting them because they're an obvious artefacts of discrimination.

[lakrids404]

Sounds right
We could make a rule, that we as community will not use this classification.
;)
And furthermore it's at least as problematic, to talk about a "mutant race", as most? mutants are born from two human sapient parents, and furthermore mutants and humans can have children together. So really mutants are humans. Subspecie is a far that I can go.

[freezer]

Yeah, but we've been using "Omega" for "shit-your-pants powerful" for years. Do we stop using that as well?

[spacebetween]

Unfortunately it never stopped Magneto, Cyclops and countless others in the Marvel universe thinking of mutants as a race.

They have even gone as far to give them a separate scientific label 'Homo Superior;. Which never made much sense to me as a majority of mutants have different powers. It would make more sense to me if they all had the same power or close to it. I suppose this is where is the Alpha to Omega levels fits in now.

[hybrid2]

I always wanted a someone to point out,how dumb the whole diferent race thing is.
And how they dount understand evolution.

If only to give a diferent point of view.

The whole speach from cyclop about being near extinct always make me laugh or anoy me.

[salinea]

We could make a rule, that we as community will not use this classification.
;)
lol don't want to be oppressive to mutants, right! XD


Yeah, the whole mutant race thing is always buggy, I can take it on suspension of disbelief but it tends to make me roll my eyes.


To go farther into the mutants as minority metaphor I'd love for them to develop some slightly more pertinent vocabularies, say for example DNA-typical to distinguish people who are not mutants from mutants :p

[dejadrew]

...Um, yes, but, well.... Can't human people of other different races have children together? White people, Black people, Asian people, First Nations, and others.

If you're talking about race in the High Fantasy tradition of the use of the word, elf and dwarf, different SPECIES, then no, mutants aren't separate that way, but if you talk about it in the way that we actually use race in the real world, as a social construct and sub-category used to divide and classify people according to physical traits, then race still isn't a great word, but it's probably the closest one we have in the dictionary right now for what mutants are in the Marvelverse, and I could see why they might adopt it.

[lakrids404]

I was thinking more in a biology scenes. Especially when normals and mutants seems so adamant to create an sociological categories, that will alienate them even more.

From Wiki (So take it for what it's worth)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_humans%29

"While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used [5] in a naive[6] or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all people belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.[7][8] Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies [9] that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete,[10] and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.[6][11]"