Oh, I thought you were talking about some big crazy CGI effect with her hair constantly moving and flowing, down to the individual hair.
No, just a full-bodied wig with some bounce to it, and enough springiness to respond to the actress's motions in a way that inexpensively gave the impression of something mobile and alive. The sort of thing you'd use in shots where her hair wasn't the focus of attention just to create a background impression, which would then be supplemented with CGI in the shots where her hair was supposed to be moving. That's a decades-old FX trick -- only use the effect in a few shots, but do something that creates the impression that it's still going on in other shots, in order to direct the audience's imaginations to fill in the blanks. So if you paid close attention to her hair in the non-focus shots, you could tell it was just a bouncy wig, but normally your attention would be on the dialogue or actions going on elsewhere in the shot, and the occasional CGI shot would've established that her hair
does move on its own, so the bouncy/springy quality of the wig going on in the background of your attention would create the subliminal impression that it was still moving on its own, because your brain would be filling in the expectation that the CG shots had created.
We've forgotten in these days when VFX is assumed to be all overt, photorealistic CGI, but for most of the history of visual effects as an art form, it's basically had a lot of techniques in common with stage magic. A lot of it is misdirection, making the audience
think they see something they don't actually see. It's still done even today -- using just enough CGI to create an impression, then cutting away to show characters' reactions or the like and letting the audience's minds fill in the rest. A full-bodied, bouncy Medusa wig would help sell that illusion better than the flat, lifeless thing they're using.
It only "works in its own universe" if you ignore how racism works. In the real world, some groups always get hit worse than others, and it only gets crazy if the X-Writers make Mutant Hate out to be psychotically over-the-top instead of more like real racism.
That's true. Bigots would see someone born with superpowers as more intrinsically "not like us" than a baseline human who got powers from an experiment or accident or what-have-you. True, a number of Avengers are aliens, androids, pagan deities, and the like, and one would expect some degree of intolerance toward all of those (I imagine the religious right would have fits over Thor), but the fear of mutants tends to be rooted in the fear that they'll replace us -- that they're a newly evolving competitor species and a harbinger of
Homo sapiens sapiens's looming extinction. It's similar to the way real-life white supremacist propaganda is rooted in the fear of "white genocide" and other races outbreeding the white race into extinction. (Which seems rather backwards, to insist on their own superiority yet expect to be defeated in a competition. But that just exposes the lie behind it -- it's not superiority, just insecurity and fear.)
Plus, even writers like Chris Claremont ignored the Mutant Hate thing when it suited him and had the X-Men be treated like normal heroes when he felt like it.
Well, of course, society isn't monolithic. There are groups that accept or welcome diversity and groups that deplore it, and which groups dominate the national conversation changes over time. And the mood can change quickly, often as a result of one group reacting against the ascendance of another group. Nine years ago, we elected our first black president and people were talking about how we'd entered a post-racial era. But instead it provoked a ferocious backlash and revealed that racist ideologies still held far more sway in this country than we'd thought, and now we have actual goddamn Nazi sympathizers in the White House.
So by the same token, it stands to reason that when the X-Men did heroic things earning them positive recognition, it would marginalize the mutant-haters in the national conversation, but they'd still be there in the background, ready to stoke up hate and spread their propaganda as soon as some setback gave them the opportunity, or as soon as they found a way to create an opportunity by making mutants look bad.
