Quote:
Originally Posted by sdp
Most people praising all these race changes are usually white, which is even more insulting for preaching what is good for "us". I can assure you changing an established b-list character isn't doing it for them either, why not instead make a NEW character who is actually worth a damn, now that would be something I can get behind. If you're going to race swap then don't insult people and actually change the main heroes, make Steve Rogers black and Clark Kent Latino.
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To be fair, they
do create great new characters, but the problem is that it's very hard for a new character to get a fair shot in a crowded universe/marketplace that automatically favours older, known and already-popular characters and properties. It's great when they do catch on, and I'd like to see more of that. But the deck's stacked against them from the start.
And let's be honest, the main reason the vast majority of the biggest established superheroes are white is because most of them were created before the Civil Rights movement. It was just the automatic default, and merely
having a non-white main character would be instantly controversial and was almost unheard of in the old days.
You gave Steve Rogers as an example. But context matters. Some characters' races actually
are integral to how they're represented. Steve Rogers was a publicly-celebrated WWII-era hero during a very racist time, so anything else would strain believability. Also, the symbolism of a man who looks like the Aryan "ideal" punching Nazis in the face is automatically striking and important. There are a number of characters that do "need" to be white to work on their original conceptual level, but that doesn't apply to
every white character. Does Peter Parker need to be white? Does Daredevil? Does The Flash, or Wonder Woman, or Aquaman? There's not as strong an argument.
Even then, generally what they do is put another character in the superhero identity for a while, rather than changing the original character themselves: Miles Morales as Spider-Man, Sam Wilson as Captain America, Jane Foster as Thor... Yet it seems that the same crowd consistently loses their minds over
that, too.