Diversity in Magic: the Gathering
It's interesting to see how diverse characters in Magic: the Gathering have become recently.
MtG has been decently diverse for a long time. For a long time they've been consistent about having equal representation for male and female characters, including leaders, protagonists, villains, and miscellaneous cool characters of many kinds. Way back in 1996 they had a bunch of sympathetic dark-skinned characters, including Teferi.
But in the past two years, in addition to that, we've had:
The introductory articles for Alesha and Narset are well done, introducing us to the character as a whole, with all their circumstances and traits, not making a big deal of the "representative diversity" in a tokenistic tickybox way, but rather letting it be present as one of many characteristics that make up each character.
MtG has been decently diverse for a long time. For a long time they've been consistent about having equal representation for male and female characters, including leaders, protagonists, villains, and miscellaneous cool characters of many kinds. Way back in 1996 they had a bunch of sympathetic dark-skinned characters, including Teferi.
But in the past two years, in addition to that, we've had:
- Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver: a terrifying soulsucking mage who invades people's dreams, and whose gender is unstated, generally believed nonbinary
- Guardians of Meletis, the first overt reference to a same-sex relationship on a Magic card
- Daretti, Scrap Savant, an ingenious goblin artificer who's wheelchair-bound
- Alesha, Who Smiles At Death: the leader of the Mardu clan, a powerful, aggressive young woman, who turns out to be trans
- Narset Transcendent, a scholarly mage who seeks knowledge in all its forms, and who's non-neurotypical in the way she processes information
The introductory articles for Alesha and Narset are well done, introducing us to the character as a whole, with all their circumstances and traits, not making a big deal of the "representative diversity" in a tokenistic tickybox way, but rather letting it be present as one of many characteristics that make up each character.