As long as I'm back on the internet...

[scdsam]

Let's rage about some articles and shit, eh?

Spider-man should be black. Ya know. Just cuz.

This annoys me to no end. TO NO END. Mostly because racebending.com has grabbed hold of it and is supporting. I'm sorry, last time I checked we were AGAINST arbitrarily changing an established character's race. Right??

Don Glover needs to fall into a pit and

Comments

[gargoylekitty]

[scdsam]

You're right that the Avatar universe is centered on Asian culture, but that still doesn't change the fact that Peter Parker is white.

A big thorn in my side is the hypocrisy at play. Racebending's website has been decrying a lot of "based on true story" movies that have decided the real-life minority character to a white guy for the movie. For example, take the film backlash coming from a director casting his white son as famous sniper Billy Sing for an upcoming war movie. Billy Sing was a native-born Australian, and enlisted in the army just like thousands of other young men. There's nothing really "asian" about that. Except that he WAS asian. You can't undo it. You can't just pretend like he wasn't.

I'd be all for a classic pass-the-torch storyline where a new (colored) Spiderman is chosen to fight villains...but I don't see how, "Surprise! Peter Parker was black all along!" is going to work well for anyone.

[gargoylekitty]

That would be where the "aside from the excess of white folk in the media and history of replacing POC with white folk that makes the comparison lopsided" and the fact that they're attempting to depict a real person not a character who was created at a time when there was little chance he would have been made black and if he was his name would have probably been something more like the 'Black Arachnid' or 'Black Spider' or anything with the word 'Black' in it.

The 'pass-the-torch' thing wouldn't work in this case though since they're rebooting the Spider-Man movies, there is no torch to pass. Personally, I think it works more in a 'another universe' sense. It's the movie-verse.

[dungeonwriter]

I'd be okay with a new Spiderman (not Peter Parker) who was Indian ala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavitr_Prabhakar

[scdsam]

In one of the few moves that I think DC does better than Marvel, they have perfected the "heir to the title" flow. Batman trains Robin who becomes Nightwing and so on ad infinitum. There have been SO many Green Lanterns and Flash heroes I have trouble keeping the timeline straight. BUT IT WORKS.

Marvel holds on to the same superheroes foreeeeever. Which, in comic book reading, is quite helpful but doesn't work as well for the big screen. I'm still sort of miffed that they have Chris Evans as both the Human Torch and Captain America (I happen to like his acting, the double-dipping within the same universe just annoys my sense of order though).

A new Spiderman would be fine. New incarnations (or even just new presentations) of colored heroes would be awesome. But if colored is what they want, they need to move forward and bring it, make it the FUTURE not spend all their efforts trying to rewrite the past.

[dungeonwriter]

I actually think the X-Men universe is a better area to feature characters of color. With Storm, Dust, Jubilee, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Karma, Sunspot, there's a whole rich canon to tap into.

[scdsam]

Yes, I meant to delve into that last night! Why is nobody rallying to make a New Mutants/X-force movie?! It's overflowing with PoC in every direction, and they're all AWESOME (I remember wanting to be Danielle Moonstar SO bad as a girl).

They shot for a Generation X tv series back in the 90s but it got axed to just a TV movie...I think if they tried again now it'd be amaaazing (even though in the movie Jubes was painfully white, they had Skin, Mondo, and Monet who were all colored so pretty good by then-media standards).

[iholdmytongue]

To everyone who says we don't have enough ethnic diversity in our superheroes, I say, "Then write your own!" Quit your bitching and write your own damn comics and make history then, if you want it so badly. We should not be changing the long established characters for the mere fact that people didn't write in more black/asian/hispanic/whatever people into their comic books, which they were writing for the pleasure of doing so or for the pleasure of their possible fans, not to make some kind of statement for equal rights. Sometimes things are just written for fun. Does that mean that every book written must have an equal distribution of white/non-white characters to satiate the raging (anti)racists who say we should all be equal? I agree with you, hon. If we want to promote equality, then we should stop giving special treatment. We can't change how things were written in the past, and we can't change what people are going to want to write. So instead of waving their signs, they should step up and make the change they want. Take it

[arcanelegacy]

This is one of those topics that utterly rends me in two.

On the one hand, I would love to see more diversity in my superheroes. I would be so giddy for it.

On the other, Peter Parker has long been established as a nerdy little white boy, and that can't be undone simply by changing his ethnicity. In fact, if they ONLY changed his ethnicity and didn't alter anything else - not his upbringing, not his outlook, nothing - I think they'd only be adding to the problem.

I don't know that it's a terrible idea in theory, but I'd rather see diversity in a new cast of heroes instead of a retcon of the old (now, if they wanted to come up with a new Spiderman with his own origin story and such, and not just recast Peter Parker, I'd be completely on board. But that's different.)