brevoortformspring:

I honestly don’t know.

Fortunately, that hasn’t been a problem I’ve needed to grapple with, apart from his now-severed familial connection to Wanda and Pietro.

I think that in the long run, he and Professor X aren’t going to be able to remain as contemporaries.

To me, the biggest problem with supercentenarian Magneto is that he only started doing big things with his powers within the last decade or two. The timeline has always been like this:

1940’s: Magneto survives the Holocaust.

Circa 25 Years ago: Magneto meets Charles Xavier

10-15 Years ago: Magneto attacks the missile base in X-Men #1

I think Mags mutant powers are supposed to have activated during World War II, or at least immediately afterward. The problem is that this means he had incredible super powers for damn near *fifty years* before he befriended Xavier. So there was no one to temper his radicalism, and no X-Men to oppose him.

Helmut Zemo has a similar issue, but he just had a long lifespan, with no particular ideology or mutant powers to fuel it. He had to reunite with his father Heinrich to have any sort of direction. So it’s plausible for Marvel to say Helmut spent seventy years working for various engineering firms, because he had no motive to do anything more.

In Magneto’s case, all the ingredients were in place by 1950. He had the powers, the anger, and plenty of time to decide what to do with them. So what took him so long?