Doubtless nowhere near as many as the people laughing at them for being outraged, but some. For example, this Tweet had 458 likes on Twitter, last I looked:
Over the past 24 hours, I’ve stumbled upon three “rant” threads on the subject, each filled with numerous cosigns and even more “likes”. Maybe only a small minority are frothing at the mouth, but it does appear that enough people feel strongly enough about it to voice a negative opinion about it in a public forum.
I really don’t get it.
Sorry that I’m so late to the party, but I don’t log into this board as often as I was, for a while there. First, I would say that
[ol]
[li]“Does Peter Parker have to be a New Yorker?” and[/li][li]“Can Spider-Man be based in a different city?”[/li][/ol]
Are two questions that have nothing to do with each other, provided that you accept the premise that Spider-Man does not have to be Peter Parker. I think that Spider-Man can be from anywhere, because I don’t think that there’s anything inherent to the myth of Spider-Man that requires him to be based out of New York City.
THAT BEING SAID… I would secondly add that Peter Parker absolutely has to be a New Yorker. But I would take it a step further and add that Peter Parker being from New York is way more important than Peter Parker being white. Like, I don’t think that you would have to look too hard to find an “essential” Peter Parker story arc, where Peter’s experience as a New Yorker is relevant to the plot. And I also don’t think that you would have to look to hard to find an “essential” Peter Parker story arc, where Peter’s experience being poor is relevant to the plot. Conversely, I think that you could look from now until the end of time, and not find a single “essential” Peter Parker story arc where Peter being ethnically white is relevant to the plot.
I think that the same principle applies to Superman. In order to claim that it is relevant to any part of the mythology of Superman that he be ethnically white, you’d probably have to start by proving the case that it’s essential to the mythology of Superman that he landed on Earth in the pre-Civil Rights Act American midwest. If that were true, then Superman would be stuck in a time loop, and every time DC had a Crisis event, they wouldn’t just have to reset his history, they’d have to take him all the way back to the forties. Every time. And they obviously don’t do that; I think that the current continuity has baby Kal-El landing on Earth sometime in the mid to late-70s. I think that the most important element of the Superman mythos is that he be found and adopted by a couple who raise him to have the core values which make him Superman. Which might require him to be found by a rural couple. And even then, if you think it can be extrapolated from that data point that either he or they have to be white… I don’t know, you’re going to have to show your work on that.
One thing I think would be better – instead of changing Clark Kent’s race, make a NEW Superman. Have him be someone else from Krypton, someone new.
A new character. Stan Lee was always getting hate because he stated he didn’t want to change Peter Parker’s race, or sexual orientation, but he said it was because he preferred to create new characters, rather than just change old ones. And I do kinda get his point. It’s a wee more creative.
I didn’t mean to imply such people don’t exist and I apologize for leaving you with that impression. Nor do I wish to invalidate your feelings of frustration. You’re making a valid complaint. I admit that sometimes I do care if they switch the races of characters but other times it doesn’t matter one bit to me. I could watch a play with King Lear played by an Asian man and his three daughters played by a Native American, an Irish woman, and a transgender Honduran and it wouldn’t phase me a bit. Brandy, formerly of Moesha, was in a very successful made-for-television version of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella that featured a multi-racial cast back in 1997 (I had to look that date up). According to Wikipedia, approximately 60,000,000 people tuned in to watch Brandy play Cinderella which are some serious numbers.
Is it possible things have gotten worse since the 90s? Growing up I don’t recall anyone complaining that Ellen Ripley, Princess Leia, or Sarah Conner (the Terminator 2 version not the original) were Mary Sues. I never heard anyone complain that Blade or Independence Day featured African American leads. But in recent years I’ve heard complaints (almost all online) against movies that feature women prominently. I heard of people who wanted to tank Black Panther because they didn’t want to see a successful block buster starring so many black people. Is there a bigger problem now than there was twenty five years ago or does the internet simply amplify the voices of so many assholes. I’m not quite sure.
Holy cow. While I was reading through this thread today, I was reading this post when I heard my sister watching TV in the other room. I heard Japanese. Turns out she found Miss Sherlock on demand while I was reading about it here. We just finished watching season 1 (with episodes 2,3,4 missing for some reason). It really is a hoot. And it works.
Is there going to be a season 2? I hope?
Your question is very hard to answer. Twenty-years ago, there weren’t that many action/sci-fi movies starring women or minorities. So what did people have to complain about? Nowadays, we have more movies and TV shows starring minority characters than we used to AND we also have the internet. I don’t know how we’d go about separating the effects of the two.
I don’t understand your point then. When I said he had slowly aged you asked if he was the same Peter Parker who had gradually changed over time, and that it was not different in the same way that we all are recognizably the smae people as we age. Then you countered with not having changed your birthdate so… how does any of that relate to what you posted here?
My opinions are my own. They just happen to be like a ton of others in fandom based on what I see. You don’t have to like, agree, or even believe it, but your “anyone, any role, any time” attitude is far less mainstream than traditionalist views of the characters. But fear not, I won’t “presume” to talk atcha no more.
Stan Lee created a crap-ton of characters. People who know comics only from the movies, or who have only been into the past 10-20 years, often aren’t aware of that. In the 1960’s and '70’s Lee created new characters - both hero and villain - about as often as he ate breakfast. So not only is that statement believable it is also consistent with reality as it actually happened.
It was also a reason for a lot of friction between Lee and the other people working at Marvel - he’d dash out an idea for a new character, someone else would flesh it out, and Lee would be off creating another character, then later make statements that sounded like he was taking all the credit for all of them and not mentioning the work other people put into the characters which often had as much if not more to do with their popularity than Lee’s contribution. Which is why a lot of characters are now credited as created by “[Insert Name of Artist/Writer] and Stan Lee”
There are very few places out side of NYC where Spider-Man would work.
First, he needs to be in a city with a lot of skyscrapers in a pretty compact area. The image of Spider-Man swinging from building to building on a webline is pretty iconic and it’s also how he gets around. Imagine Spider-Man operating in LA or Washington DC.
Second, he needs to be in a city with bombastic tabloid newspapers a la The Daily Bugle
My point was that the various “tricks” used to deal with the relatively static age of comic book characters are not really comparable to recognising a person after 10 years.
You stated the following about Peter Parkers:
I wondered what changes you would accept to consider it same Peter Parker, and what would make it a different one. Personally I do not see it as inherently a qualitatively different change to alter race along with birth date, just a quantitatively larger one. So I asked about that as a starting point, to see how your mind worked.
Comparing that to people aging for me just isn’t a valid argument that this is an invalid opinion, people may age, but they’re never rebooted to have a different birthyear. But you can of course have any opinion you chose.
Okay then. The kinds of changes I’d personally accept for Peter and still view it as being* the same* Peter would be the kinds that happen within the narrative.
If Peter Parker was just suddenly black I would think of him as one of the endless variants in the multiverse unless it was somehow explained inside the continuity in some way. Heck, we had the Superior Spider-man for a while where Doc Ock had taken over control of PP’s body and Peter was dead (Got better though) and that worked out fine. In comics, the sky’s not even the limit, so if there were something that happened to Peter and he ended up as black in the storyline I’d be perfectly fine with it. But if he just showed up one day that way and the audience is just supposed to accept this is the same Peter Parker, no explanations given- then no. I would feel the same way if there were any portrayals that were jarringly different visually, even if they didn’t change the storyline one bit. Going from the comic panels to the screen, maintaining the look of the central characters is part of what makes the movies feel right to me.
Lot’s of focus on Superman. 
I think a highly imaginative rethinking of that story could work with a non-white Superman. However if it just portrayed the same basic story where race didn’t matter, Superman’s race didn’t matter, I think such a production could also come under criticism for taking that tack, even from a ‘woke’ POV. Whereas, it’s not straightforward to weave a struggle against racism into the story. But, for anyone now to produce a new ‘Superman’ that isn’t trite, they’d probably have to do something pretty different. A story of non-white Superman, in a world where it mattered than he wasn’t white, might be that new thing.
Assuming the goal is purely artistic. In reality the controversy about the race of characters is a lot about work opportunities for actors of different races. That issue can have validity separate from art. And lots of other factors go into producing popular entertainment that aren’t about art, whether or not about race (and audiences’ perception of it). However I’d still distinguish switching character races to generate employment opportunities for certain actors v casting that’s focused on improving the artistic merit of the production, and frankly give artistic demerits for race switches that have no artistic purpose.
On other cases mentioned, for fantasy-type stories that don’t exist in any real world there’s no particular argument IMO against depicting race blind worlds with diverse characters as is often done. The issue with Superman or Batman is that Metropolis and Gotham have become almost semi-historical from repetition. As above I think an imaginative enough team could pull off either black Superman or Asian Batman but it would be more of a challenge than fantasy stories which aren’t as familiar.
Whereas in a historical piece about the Viking era the Norse protagonists have to be Norse looking (which doesn’t mean blond necessarily, but still). Just because we don’t know every detail of their culture and particularly their mental outlook, so are always making up the latter in particular, doesn’t mean it’s believable to make those characters obviously non-European. It would not obviously would not be IMO. Likewise their gods, even though we generally don’t believe they were real, and again don’t know exactly how the Norse viewed them, still IMO cannot credibly be portrayed by obviously non-Northern European (ethnically) actors.
I’d say same for even semi-historical stories like Tom Cruise/‘Samurai’. If that character were Japanese it would be a different story. The whole idea is the character is an outsider. And there were ethnic European military advisers in Japan at the time, that part of the set up is not wholly ridiculous. Nor would they have been black, Asian, latino ex-US military at that time. It’s a semi-fantasy and somewhat ridiculous IMO movie, but the same story with a non-white Cruise character would be more ridiculous or just not the same movie at all. IOW make your own movie, in a case like that if you can’t accept the main character in that movie being played by Tom Cruise.
A quasi contrast to that movie might be the South Korean TV series ‘Mr. Sunshine’, where a child born into slavery in Korea escapes to the US in the wake of the the small war between the US and Korea in 1871 (Shimiyangyo as it’s known in Korea), IOW around the time Samurai is set. He later becomes a US Marine officer who returns to Korea and ends up fighting against Japanese domination. That story is pretty historically challenged in that for example the first Korean American wasn’t commissioned a USMC officer until WWII. It wouldn’t necessarily be less believable if the main character was the white Korean-speaking kid of American missionaries. The first arrived in the 1880’s but that’s less anachronistic than a Korean-American Marine officer in the late 19th century. But in South Korea people generally assume ‘us’ is Koreans, expect stories to be told from ‘our’ POV and don’t consider that ‘racist’ (complaints about that show in ROK are mainly that it doesn’t portray pro-Japanese sentiment among reformers negatively enough). At one time US society had a fairly similar outlook, though was always more diverse. Now it has a very different attitude, even on behalf of non-US societies. For example people in the US complaining that Tom Cruise is the lead in ‘Samurai’: why do they care exactly? Does it all comes back to the actor employment issue? but actors are an infinitesimal % of the labor force in every country, and a tiny % of would be actors of all colors succeed in being employed as such.
Shinmiyangyo, misspelled that.
Native American tears, too.
Which makes me wonder: The Little Mermaid isn’t White, but The Little Mermaid is a Danish story. It isn’t ancient folklore. So… how about a Chinese Peter Pan? Just to fuck with everyone, how about a Black Vlad Dracula? Do Romanian tears matter if someone takes their national hero, deracinates him, and gives him a dye job? Everyone here would probably be fine with a Black George Washington, but Dracula has some Weird Sexual Overtones which get a lot more complicated if the character’s Black like King Kong.
Hasn’t there been any attempt at doing traditional African folktales, rather than just doing rehashes of the same old thing? I think THAT would be really cool.
I think the closest Disney came was the Br’er Rabbit stories:
… which aren’t African so much as African-American… and which are attached to Song of the South… which is so absolutely horrible Disney really, really wants us to stop talking about it now.
Sort of been done before but not quite. Blacula
It was incredible in the sense of “MST3K-level bad” incredible. It’s… well it’s a thing. I… yeah. Just don’t have the words because on some level I loved it as pure schlock (although I haven’t seen it in like 25+ years) but on another level it’s just… not good. It’s like a joke you are embarrassed make you laugh.
I’ve often wondered why Disney has never re-themed Splash Mountain. Fewer and fewer people have any idea who these characters are, and they are never going to re-release Song of the South…