LogFAQs > #925102310

Blighboy posted...

It's ironic because diversinazis is giving the movies cancer and killing masculinity among the nerd culture

Sarcasm aside, diversity isn't the problem. Forced diversity written by people who don't really relate to the characters they're writing in any way is the problem.

Miles Morales and Kamala Khan are probably two of the better characters Marvel's invented over the last 20 years or so (with only the flaw that both are legacy characters, because no one seems able to push diversity characters as their own entity without bolting them onto a more popular existing character first). Comic fans tended to latch onto them with a minimum of backlash. The same goes for Spider-Gwen, who was an unexpected success - even Marvel was surprised how quickly the fanbase fell in love with her as a concept.

DC hasn't been as good about this (and both Marvel and DC went through a desperate phase of trying to pander to everyone because their sales have been abysmal for like 15 years now), but even they have Jaime Reyes (though again, legacy character), Kyle Rayner (sort of), and they even managed to make Static pretty popular for a while (and then completely squandered him, but that's DC for you). And for about 20 minutes, "Batwing" almost seemed like it could be one of the few New 52 titles to be interesting... until it wasn't. But still!

We've seen enough successes to show that "diversity" characters can become popular if written well, and even the stereotyped "comic nerd" is willing to accept them (no matter how often people try to dismiss comic nerds as racist, sexist assholes), but there actually has to be more TO them as a character than "Hey, it's Iron Man, only now he's a black teenage girl".

The whole "character you know, only now in spicy ethnic flavor!" trend isn't even new - Marvel had Rhodey take over as Iron Man in the 80s, after all (and again, it was generally well-received because it was actually well-written). But there was definitely a period a few years back when both Marvel and DC seemed to be trying to reset, replace, or replicate nearly every major character they had in ways that just screamed pandering to Tumblr, because they loved how Tumblr would explode every time they made a new announcement.

Unfortunately, Tumblr doesn't actually buy comics, even if it enjoys complaining about them. So it didn't really help all that much, and Marvel at least has dialed things back a bit since then.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family