PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "Guys, I think we need to make more diverse characters. We should appeal to a larger demographic."

REASONABLE PERSON: "Yeah, that sounds great. And we should bring our diverse characters into the foreground to show how truly cool they are."

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "I'm SO glad you agree! Comics should appeal to a lot of people, and there's a way we can show every type of person that what they are can be a hero and do great things!"

REASONABLE PERSON: "I'm fine with that, and I can't wait to see what new ideas we come up with. We've got plenty of stuff that we can do and get some new ideas rolling around to bring in something fresh and fun!"

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "You are SO right, and people shouldn't get the idea that this entire thing is just for white guys. It's [current year]! Let's do this!"

REASONABLE PERSON: "You know, there's already a lot of characters that are diverse and do need to be brought into the spotlight. It'll just take a bit of work to write them into a good story, and we can showcase them. I mean, for fuck's sake we made Cyclops cool. We can do this with like, anyone. Especially Storm, War Machine, Black Panther, Jessica Jones, Wiccan, and the multitude of characters that are just waiting to-"

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "I'm thinking we should make some of these characters like Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, and Wolverine into women, People of Color, and LGBT people!"

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REASONABLE PERSON: "Um... I don't think that's really so much 'featuring diverse characters' as shoehorning someone else into a character's name, costume, and stories and outright replacing them and getting rid of the old ones. Don't you think we should work with the diverse characters we have, and maybe bring in some new ones?"

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "See? It's already upsetting the white male bigots out there!"

REASONABLE PERSON: "No, I'm just questioning this- you want to do something, and there's an obvious way we could do it without risking losing readers from our current titles and possibly introduce some new titles and get more readers. It'll just take a bit of work and love, and it can happen."

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "What? You want me to 'work' and be 'creative'? No. We'll do this thing, and when the sales go down we can reassure the stockholders by pulling the most racist and vile tweets out of thousands- and prove it's just 'bigotry'. All other criticism will be ignored."

REASONABLE PERSON: "...You're wanting diversity, and this doesn't sound like a genuine idea to-"

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "Mmmmm actually, it's more about getting rid of the white males."

REASONABLE PERSON: "Don't you think it's a bit 'bigoted' that the only way you can make a character relevant is to just... throw a white man's costume on a woman or person of color? Like, as in that's the only way they can be 'cool' is to make them take over after a white man's laid all the groundwork and done all the heavy lifting and networking?"

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "No, it's about -diversity- and appealing to a broader demographic. We want women, people of color, and LGBT people to read comics, don't we?"

REASONABLE PERSON: "But you're insulting them. You're going to shove some random person into a character's costume and role, and reduce that former hero's identity to nothing more than an outfit and a name. And then for two or three years, you'll be writing stories about this woman, person of color, or LBGT person being 'just as capable' as the white heterosexual man before them- something we kind of already know and have established without a swap."

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "Do you have any idea how racist you sound?"

REASONABLE PERSON: "Pot's calling the kettle black here."

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "YOU FUCKING RACIST! BLACK LIVES MATTER! YOU ARE KKK TRUMPETEER GUN LOVING HOMOPHOBIC-"

REASONABLE PERSON: "What exactly do you intend to do with our current characters, and how are you just going to make this transition to a new person 'happen'? I mean, for fuck's sake people hated BUCKY as Captain America."

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "We'll take care of that 'Captain America' thing... he he he..."

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REASONABLE PERSON: "You just took a character created by two Jewish guys, one that united America during World War 2 in both story and real life, and turned him into a literal Nazi. You are genuinely a terrible, terrible human being. According to Dante's 'Inferno', people like you who desecrate art end up in the same part of hell for people that fuck animals. A fucking Nazi. You have to be-"

PROGRESSIVE WRITER: "And we turned a Nazi into Donald Trump!"

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REASONABLE PERSON: "You know, if people get tired of seeing those movies based on stories written 20 years ago, we're going to work for webcomics about sentient dildos."

Just as an interesting note: The comics have, for quite a few years now, been essentially loss leaders for the movies. They aren't making a profit, haven't made a profit in years, maybe decades, and mostly just exist to keep the IP alive, and keep the die hard geeks 'invested'.  naturally its a great way to earn taht SJW virtue signalling cred without actually damaging the cash cow with messaging.

Also: Having recently picked up a few 'big ticket' trade paperbacks, I can now say with some authority that guys like Brian Michael Bendis are overrated hacks as authors.  Deeply overrated hacks.

Quote from: Crüesader;907330A [hopefully] Fictional Conversation in Marvel HQ

I suspect it was exactly like that, only there wasn't any REASONABLE WRITER during that conversation. Other than that? Bingo.

If there's one thing I don't like about new is piggybacking on old glory to "catch up" with modern trends. There's always a room in any setting for new heroes, new stories, new dangers and challenges - this approach should be preferred over such a sloppy solution like retconning, or "we X nao".

They recently killed off Rhodey (War Machine), who in my honest opinion rocked the cooler armor (I mean, 'guns and rockets and shit').  In the Ultimates continuity, which has always been sort of a clusterfuck, Iron Man is being 'replaced' with a 14-year-old black girl.  This irks me for a lot of reasons...  we're replacing Tony with a teenage girl, when we could have used a grown woman to replace Rhodey and missed out on an opportunity to make IRON MAIDEN?  An armored chick covered in guns and ammo?  That's like, perfect.

Quote from: Crüesader;907366They recently killed off Rhodey (War Machine), who in my honest opinion rocked the cooler armor (I mean, 'guns and rockets and shit').  In the Ultimates continuity, which has always been sort of a clusterfuck, Iron Man is being 'replaced' with a 14-year-old black girl.  This irks me for a lot of reasons...  we're replacing Tony with a teenage girl, when we could have used a grown woman to replace Rhodey and missed out on an opportunity to make IRON MAIDEN?  An armored chick covered in guns and ammo?  That's like, perfect.

...

I... Ummm... Nervous cough.

I'm happy to admit I don't follow BIG ones anymore and instead stay in the safe borders of "unrelated".

I think we've reached this bizarre point where "progressive" antics creates a lot of annoyed backlash, and drives a lot of advertisers attention seeking behavior. IE *Any publicity is good publicity, so pull down your pants and start jerking off in public.*

I predict the bubble will burst sooner or later, when enough people get tired of reacting to this shit.

The problem with this "non-white-washing" is that it's temporary and we all know it.  Iron Man will go back to being a Cis-Hetero White Male Billionaire, Mjolnir will once again be wielded by someone with a penis, the Hulk will stop being asian, etc.

So what was all the diversity?  A circlejerk.  A temporary virtue-signaling masturbatory exercise.  They need new heroes.

Donald Glover would have made a great Miles Morales / Spiderman.

A Storm-led X-men makes total sense, and Halle Berry has the star power for the budget.

I don't get a female Thor when there are plenty of strong female Asgardians to choose from.

But hey, at least they didn't make the Asian guy into Yellow Hulk. That's a common sense saving throw they could have failed.

Quote from: Crüesader;907366This irks me for a lot of reasons...  we're replacing Tony with a teenage girl, when we could have used a grown woman to replace Rhodey and missed out on an opportunity to make IRON MAIDEN?  An armored chick covered in guns and ammo?  That's like, perfect.

That's an excellent idea.

BTW, there is an Iron Maiden in Marvel (but very minor character)
http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Iron_Maiden

Quote from: Spinachcat;922410A Storm-led X-men makes total sense, and Halle Berry has the star power for the budget.

No kidding.  Btw, thanks for reminding me how much Apocalypse sucked.  As much as I loves me some Fassbender, they need to flush the Macavoy-verse, let Stewart and Gandalf play semi-retired chess somewhere in Switzerland, while Storm and Mystique run shit for the next 6 movies, crossing over with Deadpool when necessary.

I like the idea of characters actually, well, aging and needing to retire. "Passing of the torch" (or Hammer, Iron Man Suit etc...) to someone deemed worthy by the original is a cool concept to me.

Also: creating NEW characters or elevating less popular ones seems like a kick-ass idea too. I'm sure that there are plenty. I'm eager to see what they're gonna do with Cloak and Dagger, to be honest. We need more interracial couples on the big screen.

I don't mind race-swapping certain characters either. I don't get what the big fucking deal is about making Nick Fury a black guy, Flash Thompson hispanic or having Idris Elba be Heimdall.

"GO TO HELL NECROZIUS, YOU PANDERING SJW WHITE KNIGHT!" there I got it out of the way for you. As you were.

Quote from: Necrozius;922658I like the idea of characters actually, well, aging and needing to retire. "Passing of the torch" (or Hammer, Iron Man Suit etc...) to someone deemed worthy by the original is a cool concept to me.

Also: creating NEW characters or elevating less popular ones seems like a kick-ass idea too. I'm sure that there are plenty. I'm eager to see what they're gonna do with Cloak and Dagger, to be honest. We need more interracial couples on the big screen.

I don't mind race-swapping certain characters either. I don't get what the big fucking deal is about making Nick Fury a black guy, Flash Thompson hispanic or having Idris Elba be Heimdall.

Well. My reaction is that it rarely comes across as a creative choice, a new vision for the character but forced “diversity” to score more readers or a subtle admission that the writers don't really feel a minority character would have draw on their own. There's a deeling of ham fisted naivete too. Changing a character's ethnicity is not just a palette swap. A black Nick Fury would have faced different issues from a Caucasian one, be a different man. No less heroic but different. The swaps usually feel shallow in that regard.

On a more nerdy level I feel like these are established characters, they have a background and appearance that go back decades. Sometimes that fit the archetype (or stereotype) that defines them. End if the day, they're fictional characters and their creators can do what they want but there is a matter of attachment and a feeling f “its not broken, why are you fixing it!?”. Such is nerdom.

For characters like Heimdal it mostly stands out for me because he's an alien. Why do Asgardians have to have human ethnicity groups? Though the reasonable counter point could be “why can't they?” I suppose.

Quote"GO TO HELL NECROZIUS, YOU PANDERING SJW WHITE KNIGHT!" there I got it out of the way for you. As you were.

FWIW. I don't feel that way.

I like the new Pakistani, islamic, fanfic writing Ms. Marvel, but everything else seems so pointless.

Well i rather agree there are a lot of characters that are more then under used, more like non existentially used.
If you want more minority characters rather they do some stupid race swap use one of the ones you already have.
Like rather then doing the black superman that's totally not Obama use Vixen, who was intended to haver her who comic any way originally.  
You want an Asian lead then try Hiro Okamura. There are more then enough heroes and villeins in DC and Marvel both for the most part. They don't need a bunch of random lets dump the historic wearer of this costume for a gender or race switch, they need to start using there massive and under used cast.  

Quote from: JesterRaiin;907368...

I... Ummm... Nervous cough.

I'm happy to admit I don't follow BIG ones anymore and instead stay in the safe borders of "unrelated".

I started reading shatter my self its a cool read.

It's also got one of the most unique looks I have ever seen in a comic.

New characters so they can "dramatically" kill them off in a year or three.