Drawing on theorized fundamental human freedoms, Social Cognitive Domain Theory, and Christian philosophy, the chapter highlights how beliefs about the nature of reality animate Grant Morrison’s New X-Men.

Explores how the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix sagas, as told in X-Men: The Animated Series demonstrate how beliefs can inform people’s morally-relevant treatment of others. Highlights the roles of ambiguity and disagreement in understanding Jean Grey’s superhero mission.

The findings suggesting that people understand morally relevant actions involving antagonists differently than those involving others–coupled with the fact that various forms of this distinction feature heavily in superhero narratives (e.g., hero-villain, criminal-victim, innocent-guilty, malevolent force-unwitting host)–point to a potential area of scholarly inquiry when thinking about what it means to treat others fairly across different contexts.

Constructivist analyses of Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Bishop help reveal some of the ways superheroes, despite their consistent motivations and frequent predictability (e.g., in terms of the motivations of many of their villains, use of violence, etc.), are both socially responsive to and adaptive within their differing social contexts. They are embedded in varied social interactions and relationships–an embeddedness that has implications for both pedagogy and scholarship.

By trying to understand the nature of the decisions made by such a complex and multifaceted character (the X-Man Bishop)—one who, despite occupying various positions within and outside of the law across dystopian and non-dystopian social arrangements, consistently fights to alter them in the face of injustice—we may come to a slightly better understanding of ourselves.

Dyson’s (1997) examination of the way children use superhero cartoons in their literacy practices to actively engage in their social worlds has implications for the potential use of superhero cartoons like X-Men to stimulate children’s sociomoral thinking. If we assume that children are capable of attending to various features of social interactions in ways that conceptually alter the meaning of events (Smetana & Jambon, 2018; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987; Wainryb, 2006), then cartoons like X-Men—with its myriad characters and multifaceted portrayals of harm (violence) and fairness (discrimination) issues—may be uniquely suited for such an endeavor.