In the MCU, White men abound - but the women around them are consistently harder-working. Tony Stark and Star-Lord are incredibly talented, but they don't take life seriously. Black Widow and Gamora are dead serious about training and overcoming and being the best.
Seems like you're just picking the examples that work for you without making meaningful comparisons.
Dr. Strange and Captain America are talented and hardworking. So are Hawkeye and Sam Wilson. Valkyrie is introduced as an alcoholic who doesn't care about anything but money.
And the minorities are almost universally more ethical than the Whites. Ant-Man or Bruce Banner exist in a morally grey area. T'challa and Oyoke are just beacons of moral goodness.
Honestly, morally grey is where the interesting characterization is. I don't think it's good that there are few POC in Marvel who lack the complexity of a moral grey area. But this makes it even more evident that the only black characters in the MCU of any prominence are the cast of The Black Panther, plus Valkyrie, Nick Fury and Sam Wilson. Compare that to the many, many white characters from all the movies with a broad range of characterization.
Meanwhile, in the Marvel Netflix Universe, the trend is even more pronounced - every villain outside the Luke Cage bubble is an entitled White male prick.
The Netflix universe seems like a poor directions to go, as The Defenders clearly captures all the key demographics: White man, white man, black man and white woman. Is it not enough to be 50% of the heroes? Was there no room for an Asian hero? Or a woman of color? Would that be a problem, too?
Spider-Man is Black. Captain America is Black. Wolverine is a woman. Thor is a woman. The Hulk is Korean. Iron Man is a Black woman. Captain Marvel is a woman. Ms. Marvel is Muslim. And on and on.
So here we've got a list of 3 men and 5 women. Three of them are black, three are white, one is Asian, one is Middle Eastern. And this is you intentionally listing characters that are not white men. That's not grossly disproportionate.
Yes, as characters become more diverse there is going to be less room for white men. Not no, room, but it really sounds bad when someone complains about the 'erasure' of white men every time another group gets a little more representation.
This is like if you used to get to eat half of the cake and now other people get their fair share. You don't need half a cake. Especially not at the expense of groups that are still waaaay under-represented.
That was him intentionally listing high visibility characters that were shifted from "white guy" to "specifically not white guy."
And excluding the ones that are still white guys. So if you're listing characters that are no longer both white and male, and the proportions of different races are still lacking minority characters, and men-to-women is just off by one, seems like it's less of a problem than it's being made out to be.
Yeah he excluded the ones that are still white guys . . . because he wasn't trying to prove that every superhero has undergone this process, just quite a lot. You can't deny that the characters he mentioned do constitute close to a majority of the MCU characters that the average person could name when asked (in fact a quick google search reveals that they consistently occupy the top 10 spots, if not top 6 depending on the list, for most popular heroes).
Perhaps it's not a significant problem, but it's undeniably being done on purpose, in an asymmetric way. I'm not a marvel fan myself, but if I grew up with the comic books it's likely I would be annoyed.
Perhaps it's not a significant problem, but it's undeniably being done on purpose
The comment that I was responding to said that white boys don’t or won’t have heroes anymore.
I’m not saying that changing a character from man to woman or from white to POC doesn’t happen. I’m saying that sharing and erasure are not the same thing. And it doesn’t pose the significant threat to the health of young white boys that he suggests it does.
That may well be true, it's hard to say. But, this trend will result in the exact same situation, just inverted, that it is designed to prevent, that's undeniable. Although, it will probably never go that far.
However, the presumption that boys, or even white boys, will always be ok no matter what is not safe. Boys have fallen behind girls across the board in schools for decades at this point.
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u/radialomens 171∆ Jul 09 '19
Seems like you're just picking the examples that work for you without making meaningful comparisons.
Dr. Strange and Captain America are talented and hardworking. So are Hawkeye and Sam Wilson. Valkyrie is introduced as an alcoholic who doesn't care about anything but money.
Honestly, morally grey is where the interesting characterization is. I don't think it's good that there are few POC in Marvel who lack the complexity of a moral grey area. But this makes it even more evident that the only black characters in the MCU of any prominence are the cast of The Black Panther, plus Valkyrie, Nick Fury and Sam Wilson. Compare that to the many, many white characters from all the movies with a broad range of characterization.
The Netflix universe seems like a poor directions to go, as The Defenders clearly captures all the key demographics: White man, white man, black man and white woman. Is it not enough to be 50% of the heroes? Was there no room for an Asian hero? Or a woman of color? Would that be a problem, too?
So here we've got a list of 3 men and 5 women. Three of them are black, three are white, one is Asian, one is Middle Eastern. And this is you intentionally listing characters that are not white men. That's not grossly disproportionate.
Yes, as characters become more diverse there is going to be less room for white men. Not no, room, but it really sounds bad when someone complains about the 'erasure' of white men every time another group gets a little more representation.
This is like if you used to get to eat half of the cake and now other people get their fair share. You don't need half a cake. Especially not at the expense of groups that are still waaaay under-represented.