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Interesting thread. I've said before that I think reading the fantastic as allegory is often dead wrong, an outmoded litcrit approach for fictions that sever the vehicle of metaphor from tenor, concretise it, & then just let things run by the narrative logic of that reality. https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1358067448185053184
You can sometimes read fantasy as crude allegory because, you know, some writers bind their work to that for didactic reasons--e.g. Lewis's Narnia is a wondrous fantasia butchered & chained into a One True Meaning as Christian allegory, at its inescapable worst in the final book.
But for the most part, what may have sparked as a notional metaphoric relationship, X in the story standing for Y in reality, may even have started unconsciously & loosely rather deliberately. May even have been multiply metaphoric at the get-go, X standing for Y but also Z.
Even though X is bound to play as the vehicle of metaphor, the author may have had no single tenor, Y, in mind; they may have had *two*, with Z on totally level pegging with Y. They may even have just had a vague fuzzy sense of what they might be kinda sorta speaking about via X.
And no matter how they went into it, where they were very much *not* writing a deliberate allegory, *not* forcing the narrative dynamics to conform to their didactic purpose, to articulate a One True Message, the purpose of concretising the vehicle of metaphor is to *explore* it.
I.e. If anything, it's *anti*-allegoric. The intent is sorta the exact *opposite* of Lewis chaining Narnia into Christian allegory to make it a didactic preaching of "Y IS THUS!" It's letting X play by its own narrative logic for that to *generate* meanings new to the writer.
Like, by letting X run by the real world narrative logic of X if it were an actuality, where one has a fuzzy sense of it maybe kinda sorta mapping to Y and/or Z, "X is thus" *creates* readings as realisations, new ways of seeing Y and Z: "Y is thus" & "Z is thus". OMG! we think.
The fantastic is a way to *explore*. By severing the vehicle of metaphor from tenor, treating it as real, we complicate it. In exploring its ramifications, we intricate it, follow nuances into wild tangential paths of consequence that might suddenly map not to Y *or* Z but to A.
Suddenly in this one little corner of an incredibly ornate framework of relationships we've built in exploring the conceit, the weavework of wire seems to fit over a real life situation we hadn't even had in mind, and it *speaks to that*. The dynamics of X map to those of *A*.
And in so doing we recognise something about the dynamics of A that we hadn't seen before, or had seen but hadn't fully grasped, hadn't quite been able to articulate. Something we intuited but dismissed consciously perhaps. This is a far more powerful thing than crude allegory.
I remember seeing a critic's review of the movie Monsters where they didn't get that, criticised the film because it "muddled" its allegory. They complained that it read as 9/11 allegory here but as some other allegory--I forget what--elsewhere. I thought it was pitifully obtuse.
They were clearly fuckin *illiterate* in terms of the actual workings of the fantastic in fiction. They were criticising it for not being reducible to some frickin crude Pilgrim's Progress style mapping in which the aliens represent, fuck knows, Islam and only Islam. *face palm*
That's not how most fantastic conceits work. If you want to be fancy about it, there's a term, "pataphor", which fits what they're actually doing in concretising the metaphor and then severing the 1:1 link with a real world referent, letting it run loose.
So, this 
nails the problem with treating, say, the X-Men's mutants as crude allegory for gayness, but if we take the X-gene as metaphor for queerness that's had the vehicle/tenor mapping severed, been concretised & allowed to run wild, it's way juicier. https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1358067861500145664
nails the problem with treating, say, the X-Men's mutants as crude allegory for gayness, but if we take the X-gene as metaphor for queerness that's had the vehicle/tenor mapping severed, been concretised & allowed to run wild, it's way juicier. https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1358067861500145664
I mean, there *is* maybe a metonymic relationship here--a part of the whole taken as emblematic of the whole, one specific type of difference (mutation) taken to represent all types of difference? But maybe not, cause the tenor is more Otherness, abjection. Anyhoo...
So you make this fantastic conceit of a gene that makes you Other, a mutant, changing you, giving you superpowers. It's *not* a good 1:1 allegory though because powers *are* actually dangerous. But because there's an infinite range of possible powers, the conceit has huge scope.
Treat that as pataphor. Take the conceit as reality and just run with it, explore it, come up with some superpowers mutants might have: Wolverine's ability to heal from any damage, say; Angel's wings and greater strength & stamina etc..
One queer reader might well see in Wolverine's resilience a figuration of their experience of being queer, the toughness they've built up from dealing with the trauma dealt them by heteronormative culture. Another might very much not, feeling their trauma *just fucked them up*.
That second queer reader might be all, "Fuck that 'suffering toughens you up' bullshit." For them that could be a damned lie. But maybe for them, the imagery of a hot young dude who can *fuckin fly* speaks to their queer experience, captures the liberation of self-acceptance.
I mean, one part of one specific type of cis gay experience is fuckin going out to the gay club and dancing shirtless, being flighty af, throwing yerself into the hedonistic scene with gay abandon, just... being fabulous. That twinkiest of X-Men is a pretty good emblem of that.
But... like, Warren Worthington III having wings is not some crude allegory with a message that--*adopts simpleton voice*--"If you are queer, that makes you superior to the straights because you are inherently Moar Fabulous™ than the dull earthbound mundanes".
But of course it can speak to one queer reader as that. And it could speak to another, say, a self-loathing gay who sees their own ideal self repressed in an Angel trying to cut his wings off: https://twitter.com/weird_prophet/status/1358114386980851718
And equally, again, another might not only not identify with that but, where particularly straight readers take it as allegorical, roll their eyes back into their skulls at straights lauding this as a, to them tedious, "Oh, the torture it is to be an Gay!" message.
What if you're cis gay and 100% cool with yourself as queer, but actually kinda out of step with that whole club scene mode of being gay? You like opera over pop, literature & science. You're a nerd. But also a rough af bear, a burly brute. Well, I present unto you: Beast.
Beast is an idea that can just come from exploring the pataphor: one possible mutation would be just being brutish to the max, physically bestial; but wouldn't it be interesting to contrast that physical appearance with a massively *cerebral* personality? No allegory intended.
But with Otherness being concretised here, that's absolutely a figure some queer readers may well see as representing their experience symbolically--not in terms of their relationship with straight culture but in terms of how they relate to a particular white cis gay culture.
Where alterity as power becomes a monstrous threat as *plot engine* (Jean Grey, Wanda,) what makes mutation=abjection problematic as allegory is what makes it interesting (albeit infuriating) b/c the pataphoric exploration has resulted in a victim-blamey cisheteronormative trope.
Like, oh yeah, here we've got female desire unleashed with zero checks even in terms of physics--the conceit being a mutation that's virtual omnipotence--and of fuckin course the result is OMG Catastrophe!!! b/c the wumminzfolk is sO IrRaTioNaL!!!
But from a litcrit angle, well, that's awfully revealing of the prejudices engrained in our culture. And it's not unpossible for a self-aware writer (or team) to be savvy of that and decide to push the pataphor *further*, reject the superficial hysteria fear & reach for better.
I.e. you can say, OK, what if the motive is legit profound grief? What if the effect is *contained* rather than running amok such that the entire world is threatened? What if the negative impact is not murderous destruction, but control, the suppression of agency?
Maybe the attempt to change things up from the trope fails ultimately. Maybe you're too hamfisted and the end result still reads as reifying a cishet fear of female empowerment. But maybe OTOH the scenario you end up with does actually speak to someone's experience of grief.
