No. He’s not a real person, so he can be *whatever *his current writer and artist makes him.
If the current writer and artist make him African American and say “this is Peter Parker”, is your comeback going to be “That’s not the *real *Peter Parker”? :dubious:
Except you and I are real people, and Peter Parker is a comic book character. You and I are white because our parents were white, and their parents were white. Peter Parker is white because, when he was first written, our society expected superheroes to be white, and white superhero comics sold better than minority superhero comics.
Peter Parker is whatever the writers say he is. He is portrayed in the movies by whatever actor the casting department says he’s portrayed by. Because, he’s not a real person.
If a black PP isn’t identical to a white PP, that’s OK. When someone creates a new work, all the characters and situations get changed a bit to fit the director/writer/producers vision.
That has been a very gradual change, year after year. Comic characters always exist in the nebulous recent past. Also, PP has grown gradually older over the years and is now an adult. It’s not like coming to work and saying “Oh, Bob’s Asian this week. Looks good on him.”
No, it would be “This is a different Peter Parker.” New version. If they tried to retcon the PP I’ve always known and act like nothing’s changed at all and Earth-616 Peter Parker is just suddenly and has always been black, then yeah, I would.
Well, I think race is one of our most basic character traits, along with being male or female or trans or gay or straight. None of those are important in every situation, but if you change any of them it changes a big part of who we are.
While I understand that any fictional character can be stretched and molded like silly putty, the whole thread was about when it should/shouldn’t be done. It’s a, “Where do you draw the line?” question. Way back in my first post I basically said that the more invested I am personally in a given version of a character, the less accepting I am of any deviations. That’s why my line is drawn way tighter around Peter Parker than it is around Wally West. It’s why Trank’s version of the FF isn’t a movie I am willing to watch.
I get that some people are “anything goes” and don’t care about any changes anyone makes to anything, except perhaps in how it affects the social balance sheet for representation. I’ve said my piece and have tried to explain as best I can how I feel and why, but it’s getting to the point that pretty much everyone is saying the same things over and over. Either we are talking past each other or have just reached an impasse.
And there it is folks.
Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud.
Quiet part!?!?! I’ve been saying it the whole damn time! Do you honestly believe that YOU wouldn’t be a different person if you had been born a different race? Had a different gender or sexuality? If race is NOT an important character trait, then why be at all concerned about the level of representation in the first place?
Look, if some kid grew up reading Miles Morales’ Spider-Man mags, absolutely loved the character, then someone decide, “Nope, from now on Miles is going to be white. It’s my artistic vision and all.” If that kid felt like Miles was being done dirty, that this change was unjustified and just wrong for the character, would you just disagree with him and imply that he’s just a closet racist at heart? What it’s a white kid who doesn’t like the change? Or do you only trot out that kind of nasty horseshit when it’s a white guy?
Does Peter Parker have to be a New Yorker? Can he be from somewhere else? Can Spider-Man be based in a different city?
There may be a misunderstanding here. For a lot of people, their racial identity is a pretty significant part of their identity. This is actually something I hear more from African Americans than from white people. I’ve heard from a fair number of black people who think of their blackness as a core part of their own identity, and who are exhausted and frustrated by “color blind” approaches to education, equity work, etc., feeling that a central part of their humanity is denied by people who say they “don’t see color.”
In a racist culture like ours, your racial identity–especially the racial identity assigned you by the culture–absolutely shapes your experiences from childhood. That’s fucked, absolutely, but it’s how racist cultures work. A black Peter Parker who grows up in a racist culture is going to have some different race-related experiences from what a white Peter Parker would have.
I don’t think it’s racist to recognize how culturally-inflected racial identity affects experiences. And I suspect that’s what CAH66 was saying.
THAT SAID, I still disagree that his whiteness is an immutable part of Parker’s experiences. AIUI, writers over the year have tweaked a wide variety of details in Parker’s backstory, in order to play with new ideas. That’s part of the fun of comics, watching how old characters are reworked by new artists to create new stories. Pavitr Prabhakar is obviously Peter Parker, just with a Hindified name and backstory; and that’s delightful.
Given that Parker’s whiteness was determined, at least in part, by the racist milieu in which the original comic was conceived and published, it’s 100% one of the parts of his character ripest for tweaking. Clinging to his racial identity and not letting it be changed is a way to let institutional racism continue.
Okay, first things first: one thank you and one apology. Thanks** Left Hand of Dorkness** for explaining what I was trying to say far better than I was saying it.
And I am sorry** BeagleJesus** for the snide bit at the end of my last post. When you pulled that tiny bit of my post out and slapped “racist” at me I was seriously offended and angered, in large part because I felt you were deliberately misreading me. The whole of what I said was this: “Well, I think race is one of our most basic character traits, along with being male or female or trans or gay or straight. None of those are important in every situation, but if you change any of them it changes a big part of who we are.” I think it’s clear that I am using the phrase “character trait” to mean some characteristic that forms part of our persona or identity. I am absolutely NOT in any way trying to use the word “character” as any sort of moral judgement, as in someone “having character” or “lacking character.” I stand by the fundamental assertion, however, that our racial identities (thanks again LHOD) are as basic a building block of who we are as our gender identities, or sexual identities, age, biological gender, etc. And I really don’t think of a change to any of those as being either trivial or immaterial. If you think that somehow makes me a closet racist or a bigot then… I really don’t know what to do with that, but I’d rather hear the reasoning behind it just the same.
I’m going to try and lay out, as clearly as possible, how I feel about all of this. I understand that many of you won’t necessarily agree with me, but I at least hope to make some headway in making people understand what I am saying and why. But I just can’t manage it tonight. I will try and return here tomorrow when possible.
Well, it’s not. There, that’s sorted.
Identity =/= “character trait”
Let’s put it this way, if Tom Holland was black, you wouldn’t have to change a single thing about his portrayal of Peter Parker. Not one line would have to be rewritten, not one facial expression changed, nothing, except you’d need to recast Aunt May.
Frankly, the change of Aunt May from a little old lady to a 50 year old Marisa Tomei has more impact on the plot and the implied experiences of Peter Parker than his race.
I agree they’re not identical, but they have some effect on one another. CAH66 would’ve been better served using the language I used; thus the misunderstanding, IMO.
For that matter, another change the MCU made to Spider-Man was making Peter into Tony Stark’s Li’l Pal. Comic book Spidey was always the quintessential loner (despite headlining a team-up book for most of the 70s). He developed his own gadgets, solved his own problems, and was always basically on his own. And he was always teetering on the brink of poverty. MCU Peter, on the other hand, gets regular tech upgrades from Iron Man, stuff he could never afford on his own, and is practically Robin to Stark’s Batman.
Both of those things (young, healthy Aunt May and rich genius benefactor Stark) are major, unprecedented changes to the source material. But almost no one claims that those changes make Peter into a different character. Race, somehow, gets treated differently.
Because a black kid can’t have a white aunt? Or in this case an aunt-by-marriage?
And speaking of Batman, it would be a bigger change to make Bruce Wayne Black simply because of how wealth and race and vigilantism intersect in the American culture; in short, White Batman can say he has an obligation to Gotham and can leave it at that. Black Batman has to either say he has an obligation to the Black people of Gotham or he can pointedly not say that; either way, said or unsaid, it’s there, and it can’t not be there.
I think Idris Elba would make a great Batman. I also think he’d be meaningfully different and that any script written for Elbatman would have to take that into account.
When I said “character trait” I ONLY used it in the sense of “one element of all the things that make up an indivdual.” Tall, brave, old, shy, funny, loves cats, has a weird laugh, limps, stutters, kind, rich, jock, smokes, good artist, atheist, clumsy, and any other thing you might say when you described someone would all be character traits in the way I used the term. Some of them are self-evidently more central than others, and many of them change over time. I used race, gender identity, and sexual orientation as examples of ones that are lifelong, have a powerful effect on how we see ourselves, how we interact with the rest of the world, how others perceive us, what relationships we form, what opportunites we have, throughout our lives. In as much as those things are true, they are fairly central to our identity.
You could actually say the same things about a number of other characteristics. Peter could be played by somebody 4’5" or 6’6" or with muscles like the Rock, or with a mohawk and tattoos. All of those things could be dropped into the movie without changing a line of dialogue, but they would all trip my “That’s not the Peter Parker I know” buzzer.
I wholeheartedly agree about Aunt May being poorly cast, and what they did with the Vulture was soooo different I can’t even consider the movie Vulture to be the comic version. They share a name and literally nothing else.
The only thing different about Stark being Peter’s mentor was that they moved it up in time (because they are trying to cram plotlines from almost 60 years’ into a cohesive cinematic continuity.) When Peter was an Avenger and his home was destroyed during a battle, Tony Stark let Peter and family live in Stark Tower for a while, and they developed a close relationship. He hired Peter for his science and engineering skills at a pretty generous salary, and Stark made the Iron Spider suit you saw in the movies. For a time, Stark was every bit a mentor/father figure to Peter who kind of hero-worshiped him in return. They had a significant falling out during Marvel’s Civil War event, and haven’t ever really gone back to that closeness they once had.