[Cipher]

Originally Posted by Leo656

To what ends, though? People can rightly argue, "well, a majority of characters were created in less-enlightened times," but does that give another creator license to go back and tinker with someone else's work? Do we go back and remove every single offensive word from, say, Huck Finn, because we want the character to seem more progressive or enlightened?

There's a false equivalency when we talk about one-off fiction and long franchises, though.

1) Huck Finn is a particularly terrible example because his racial ignorance is actually part of that story, as opposed to, say, too-white comic-book casts which just handwave diversity because of the era they were written in, no other agenda.

But, more saliently, 2) Huck Finn isn't a franchise character. He hasn't changed. He wasn't made to change hands between authors. There aren't new versions of him every year. He isn't an evergreen, in-print-every-month, endlessly re-imagined character.

Comic-book properties, including Turtles, are. They change all the time for any number of reasons, have multiple versions running at once, etc. They stay updated. Which brings me to the question I brought up last page:

Originally Posted by Me, last page

Splinter can be a mutated rat, or he can be the once-human Hamato Yoshi. He can be a vengeful, short-sited purveyor of the old ways, or he can be a humble father intent on keeping his sons from harm. Casey can be a whacked-out vigilante, a father, a struggling teen. April can be a reporter, a frustrated computer technician, in her thirties, in her twenties, in her teens. Karai can be an amoral ninja leader, Shredder's conflicted daughter, or a sycophant villain. None of the Shredders are even remotely similar.

How, and why, would an ethnicity change be any more egregious than what we've already seen?

Originally Posted by Leo656

You know who else I really liked? Ron Troupe, the guy who replaced Clark at the Daily Planet when Clark/Superman was dead. There was another really solid black character that got totally swept under the rug a few years later, after a ton of build-up and execution. Why can't we have more of that instead? They actually did the work! Every time someone suggests color-swapping an existing character, we lose a character like that, it seems. I actually find that less progressive, personally.

It's not like you can't have both, though. It just feels like a way of shutting down the conversation.

There's zero reason the next version of TMNT couldn't have Angel and a non-white April.

Originally Posted by Rooish

Laird says that April was never intended to be black and although his memory is kind of bad I think he'd remember something like that. So there. I think it would be odd to change her race entirely at this point.

For what it's worth, I think Eastman's said the opposite at some point: that he did intend for April to be black or of some non-white background. Which Laird disputed, but I think the takeaway is that it's just not something either one of them thought or cared much about, and she could appear one way or the other depending on the art team until later on.