Imagine if you just made Peter Parker black. Cool, I guess. But is it enough just to swap the skin color? IMO, it is not. You have to represent the culture as well. So you change the family dynamics, the character background, relationship dynamics etc… after all of that is it still essentially Peter Parker? If so you have succesfully race swapped a character but most of the time I think it fundementally changes the character. At that point I believe it is better to create new character like Miles Morales and call him Spider-Man. But that is just my opinion.
It’s interesting that you picked Spider-Man as the example of creating a different character being a better alternative, because there are plenty of racists out there that really hate that Miles Morales is even a thing. They would say “Why do we need a black Spider-Man? The original was fine!”
It’s almost like racists are only ever going to whine about inclusivity, and “characters remaining their own race” vs “creating new characters” is a moot point because the people out there who are upset by the former are going to be upset by the latter anyway.
Imagine if the new scooby show had a cast of all white kids and a single black, well written character was added and made a pivotal role in the gang. The exact same people complaining now about race swapping would be complaining then about the new character being shoe horned in because of “woke” inclusion. Just like they do with Miles Morales.
The answer is just that we need to keep creating media with both of those scenarios and accept that shows created with a single color cast are products of their time and we can do better now. Racists aren’t going to be happy either way.
Edit: Bring on the downvotes. If you consider “they’re not supposed to be that race” as a valid, lone criticism of a character, you might have to ask yourself some difficult questions.
It’s almost like racists are only ever going to whine about inclusivity, and “characters remaining their own race” vs “creating new characters” is a moot point because the people out there who are upset by the former are going to be upset by the latter anyway.
Uhm, no?
Have you seen the reception to both Spiderverse movies? It was overwhelmingly positive. I’d say they were probably the most universally liked Marvel movies of the decade. You would really compare that to the reception the new Little Mermaid or Ghostbusters got and say “yeah, the same amount of people got upset by both things”?
It’s nowhere nearly close. Obviously, it’s also because the spiderverse movies are written much better, but that’s also a symptom of better writers being hired for better projects. The fact that raceswapping a character and writing an entirely different one are received the same way is just plain false. Not to mention, even better, just making new movies with black characters altogether. But those two things require considerably more effort than taking an old, already liked movie’s script and copy-pasting it with a random character of a different race. And Hollywood doesn’t like effort, they just like money and free advertising.
You obviously didn’t hear all the people complaining about Miles in the Spider-Man game, which is what I was referring to.
Have you considered that the racists in question just didn’t go see the Miles Morales movies? Also, the fact that they are independently good movies has to do with the turnout. The little mermaid remake and the Ghostbusters new movie weren’t exactly masterpieces. Saying that the spiderverse movies succeeded where they didn’t is wholly attributed to the metric of creating new characters vs race swapping others is just wrong. The fact is that those movies were lazy, and that was the reason they failed.
The fact is that those movies were lazy, and that was the reason they failed.
I addressed that before, in a sense. Imo, the raceswap is part of the laziness. And yes, the reason they failed is because they were lazy, but if they weren’t lazy they wouldn’t have been just bland raceswaps. That’s what I think about it, at least.
And honestly no, I didn’t hear complaining about the game, but I admittedly read very little about it online. My friends liked it a lot and that’s all I know. Complaining about that seems even dumber to me though: the franchise just got a very popular movie with a new main character, why wouldn’t you put him in the game too? I don’t think the complaints could’ve been that many, at least not at the level of those two above (or pretty much any disney remake).
I would have just as much of a problem if they made blade white or asain or Latino and the same if they made black panther white. Changing some characters race is kind of a big deal as race is kind of an important issue. If all races were treated 100% the exact same and all had the same culture then it wouldn’t be a big deal.
I said if your lone criticism is that they changed the race of a character, you might be racist.
Obviously, if race plays into the story, there’s a valid reason to be bothered. But also obviously, if you’re upset that shaggy is black despite still being the stereotypical stoner type he always has been, you might need to think about why you’re upset.
The former logic should not be a sweeping ban on the latter from ever happening.
But is it enough just to swap the skin color? IMO, it is not. You have to represent the culture as well. So you change the family dynamics, the character background, relationship dynamics etc…
How is this not racist?
“Racism: noun - a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement…”
Can Peter Parker not be black and have experienced everything that white Peter did? Shit, can Peter Parker not be black and adopted by a white Aunt May and Uncle Ben?
I really don’t understand why this is getting downvotes. Like, sure, you maybe open up the character to a racism storyline now, or racial character explorations, which is good, and you couldn’t do some of that subject matter with a white peter (or with a white author, probably, as, double-sided, taking on those storylines is playing with fire sometimes), but it’s not a necessary thing, that every black character has to experience some racist trauma.
Lots of media is aspirational. Part of that is being able to imagine a world where not every racial minority has to experience weird racist comments to the degree that it works its way into being a primary aspect of their personhood. I would say, if you were to advocate for every minority character to broach this subject matter, that would also be problematic, and you would also be tokenizing every minority character in a weird and fucked up way. It’s not “denying racism exists” to portray a black peter parker that doesn’t struggle with, like, extreme character defining racism, or even like, any racism at all. You can also just choose to have that aspect of the story be ignored, or assumed, like how 99% of characters in media don’t ever stop to take a shit.
Because sadly the world doesnt work that way. Imagibe if you had a black peter parker in segregation era. Could Peter be black and still go through the exact same things? And i am not saying that because being black inherently different. Its just that black people go through different hardships due to inherent racism in america. It is not racist to say people with different backgrounds have different cultures and values.
And there are cases where this is not important, for example in the new batman film we had a black Jim Gordon and it was great. But again that is just my opinion.
Because of the principle of it. If your goal is inclusivity how is completely changing the race of an established character inclusive? It’s not. It’s just pandering.
If you’re actually trying to be inclusive then make a new character. Anything else is a pathetic attempt that just shows how disingenuous the attempt is.
I mean I think the problem here is the like, “changing the race of an established character”, right. What established character? Black superman, or whatever else, isn’t superman, he’s black superman. That’s it, basically, that’s my justification. It’s not the same character text to text, even. Is it the same bilbo in every lord of the rings book? Is it the same bilbo sentence to sentence? It’s not like girlboss velma and dumb rich white guy fred are the same velma and fred, they just share the same symbols. If you actually dissect the characters and compared them, then you’d find very little in common. The show doesn’t even have scooby fucking doo, it’s not even called “scooby doo”, it’s, in my mind, and I think it should be in everyone else’s mind, it is tangentially related to scooby doo, at best, you know? I see it as a standalone work, and in that sense it’s just kind of a mediocre show that I don’t think anyone should really care about, rather than this kind of abomination on the face of scooby-doodom and this thing that we need to all be frothing about because scooby-doo has been done so dirty.
SO, all of that can be true, right, they just share symbols. But this is also true of race as a whole, the symbol of race, here, being like, whether or not somebody is black or white or asian or whatever. If you’re race-swapping superman, you know, I think it’s kind of more in line with the message of superman, if he’s the same guy, regardless of whatever race you decide to cast him as, you know? If you don’t change the backstory, if you do change the backstory, whatever, he sort of exists beyond it, as a kind of human ideal for everyone to live up to. For that to be true, superman has to be possible if you put him in basically any circumstance. So, even though superman himself is the same, have we “made a new character”, even though we’ve changed his race, maybe changed his background, and then, in line with that, we’ve maybe flavored him different in terms of like, say, what music or food he likes? I dunno if we really have or we haven’t. Made a new character, I mean. The character has changed, but the core remains the same, the label is the same, the symbols are the same. That’s kind of the question I’m asking, where do you draw the line as to what’s a “new” character, and what’s not? You could just as easily draw it to be where any change in surface level characteristics, from eye color, to hair color, to skin color, results in a “new” character, even if the character, of that character, remains the same. Red shirt shaggy vs green shirt shaggy.
So I dunno, really, like, I’ve never got this critique of like oh no we’re not being inclusive in the right way because we decided to make velma indian, instead of deciding to call the series Shmelma or whatever. What if they did that, what if her name was Shmelma? That’s an extremely surface level difference between the two, but now they have a separate set of labels, so are they separate characters now, or what? I think if I’m going to critique the show, it’s not really going to be on the basis of indian people not having their own shmelma, or even just their own separate scooby-doo, you know. I’m not going to condemn all indian people to forever only engaging with goobert and the ghost chasers, or whatever. If I’m going to critique the show, I’m gonna critique the show because the show itself is mediocre to bad, and has mediocre to bad writing, and cost too much money, and maybe I will critique it for, for some reason, the most popular multiracial iteration of scooby-doo has to also be the one that has the worst writing, where everyone can easily punch at it for that, and producers can also maybe try to use that as a smokescreen for putting out a mediocre show.
I dunno why I’m even talking about this shit, scooby-doo is bogus gen X bullshit. I’d rather watch like, the muppets. Nobody’s ever gonna really complain about kermit being race-swapped, I’ll tell you that.
This take always seems a bit myopic as it ignores the fact that it cements in the exclusivity that already existed. Not allowed to change an established character’s race? Only option is to tack on a new character to the already existing cast and that certainly doesn’t seem like pandering. Of course maybe the new inclusive characters should only be in new content that isn’t established and has no following.
It misses the most important line: and finally I wanna scream, and I was like, “WHY ARE THEY REPLACING EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER WITH SOMEONE WHO IS DIVERSE??”
It’s weird, it’s hokey, these remakes look & feel very forced, agenda driven. I ask for more than original characters; I want actually new fucking ideas. New stories! We’re not seeing very many of those lately; we’re getting re-skinned versions of established characters, they just cut off their face & wear it around, and we’re supposed to act like we don’t notice. If we do notice, we’re racist, or sexist, some -ist or -phobe. No, your work is just a lazy, contrived retell of a story that was already told pretty well. Wrapped up nice & neat with a bow on top.
Personally I’m not super invested in the whole debacle, and I simply choose to not see the new stuff & remakes. I’m an adult man, I have no kids, anyway. No dog in this fight. It’s alright. If it’s truly better and/or a fantastic story, it will probably bear out at the box office & I’ll hear about how what an incredible movie it is.
So maybe actually integrate that character into a new concept entirely. Make a new story where you can choose whatever race everyone is supposed to be from the start. Don’t take an existing story and change the races just so you can go “See guys! I’m being inclusive! I made this character black! I’m so progressive!”
I’m honestly speaking generally not just about Scooby Doo. It just so happens that this portrayal of Scooby Doo is just pure blatant pandering.
Why did they even call it Scooby Doo? Why even attach the show to that franchise when it’s so separated in it’s basic concepts?
The answer is because they were trying to use the franchises name to push some stupid race pandering bullshit.
They put in all the effort to change each character to the point that they only resemble their original designs by physical appearance. They literally could have just come up with a completely different show that had nothing to do with Scooby Doo at all.
I call it pandering specifically because it’s disingenuous. It’s not a real attempt at racial inclusivity it’s going “Ah fuck we’re getting bitched at for not being inclusive. Fuck it this characters black now. They act exactly the same because we can’t be bothered to actually put in the work to make the cultural changes, but, good enough. Fuck you”
And that’s why it’s pandering. They literally just change the color of their skin without giving a single fuck about cultural identities.
Edit: Removed my first paragraph because I phrased it wrong.
![[Alzwards Corner] EXCUSE ME?!](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f683868d-d0bb-4c7e-83a5-4cccb60ff9ec.png){kind=link}
I’m all for racial inclusivity but just create a new fuckin character.
If you can’t be racially inclusive by making a whole new character then all you’re doing is pandering/race baiting.
Why does it matter that the characters retain their original races?
Imagine if you just made Peter Parker black. Cool, I guess. But is it enough just to swap the skin color? IMO, it is not. You have to represent the culture as well. So you change the family dynamics, the character background, relationship dynamics etc… after all of that is it still essentially Peter Parker? If so you have succesfully race swapped a character but most of the time I think it fundementally changes the character. At that point I believe it is better to create new character like Miles Morales and call him Spider-Man. But that is just my opinion.
It’s interesting that you picked Spider-Man as the example of creating a different character being a better alternative, because there are plenty of racists out there that really hate that Miles Morales is even a thing. They would say “Why do we need a black Spider-Man? The original was fine!”
It’s almost like racists are only ever going to whine about inclusivity, and “characters remaining their own race” vs “creating new characters” is a moot point because the people out there who are upset by the former are going to be upset by the latter anyway.
Imagine if the new scooby show had a cast of all white kids and a single black, well written character was added and made a pivotal role in the gang. The exact same people complaining now about race swapping would be complaining then about the new character being shoe horned in because of “woke” inclusion. Just like they do with Miles Morales.
The answer is just that we need to keep creating media with both of those scenarios and accept that shows created with a single color cast are products of their time and we can do better now. Racists aren’t going to be happy either way.
Edit: Bring on the downvotes. If you consider “they’re not supposed to be that race” as a valid, lone criticism of a character, you might have to ask yourself some difficult questions.
Uhm, no?
Have you seen the reception to both Spiderverse movies? It was overwhelmingly positive. I’d say they were probably the most universally liked Marvel movies of the decade. You would really compare that to the reception the new Little Mermaid or Ghostbusters got and say “yeah, the same amount of people got upset by both things”?
It’s nowhere nearly close. Obviously, it’s also because the spiderverse movies are written much better, but that’s also a symptom of better writers being hired for better projects. The fact that raceswapping a character and writing an entirely different one are received the same way is just plain false. Not to mention, even better, just making new movies with black characters altogether. But those two things require considerably more effort than taking an old, already liked movie’s script and copy-pasting it with a random character of a different race. And Hollywood doesn’t like effort, they just like money and free advertising.
You obviously didn’t hear all the people complaining about Miles in the Spider-Man game, which is what I was referring to.
Have you considered that the racists in question just didn’t go see the Miles Morales movies? Also, the fact that they are independently good movies has to do with the turnout. The little mermaid remake and the Ghostbusters new movie weren’t exactly masterpieces. Saying that the spiderverse movies succeeded where they didn’t is wholly attributed to the metric of creating new characters vs race swapping others is just wrong. The fact is that those movies were lazy, and that was the reason they failed.
I addressed that before, in a sense. Imo, the raceswap is part of the laziness. And yes, the reason they failed is because they were lazy, but if they weren’t lazy they wouldn’t have been just bland raceswaps. That’s what I think about it, at least.
And honestly no, I didn’t hear complaining about the game, but I admittedly read very little about it online. My friends liked it a lot and that’s all I know. Complaining about that seems even dumber to me though: the franchise just got a very popular movie with a new main character, why wouldn’t you put him in the game too? I don’t think the complaints could’ve been that many, at least not at the level of those two above (or pretty much any disney remake).
I would have just as much of a problem if they made blade white or asain or Latino and the same if they made black panther white. Changing some characters race is kind of a big deal as race is kind of an important issue. If all races were treated 100% the exact same and all had the same culture then it wouldn’t be a big deal.
I said if your lone criticism is that they changed the race of a character, you might be racist.
Obviously, if race plays into the story, there’s a valid reason to be bothered. But also obviously, if you’re upset that shaggy is black despite still being the stereotypical stoner type he always has been, you might need to think about why you’re upset.
The former logic should not be a sweeping ban on the latter from ever happening.
How is this not racist?
“Racism: noun - a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement…”
Can Peter Parker not be black and have experienced everything that white Peter did? Shit, can Peter Parker not be black and adopted by a white Aunt May and Uncle Ben?
I really don’t understand why this is getting downvotes. Like, sure, you maybe open up the character to a racism storyline now, or racial character explorations, which is good, and you couldn’t do some of that subject matter with a white peter (or with a white author, probably, as, double-sided, taking on those storylines is playing with fire sometimes), but it’s not a necessary thing, that every black character has to experience some racist trauma.
Lots of media is aspirational. Part of that is being able to imagine a world where not every racial minority has to experience weird racist comments to the degree that it works its way into being a primary aspect of their personhood. I would say, if you were to advocate for every minority character to broach this subject matter, that would also be problematic, and you would also be tokenizing every minority character in a weird and fucked up way. It’s not “denying racism exists” to portray a black peter parker that doesn’t struggle with, like, extreme character defining racism, or even like, any racism at all. You can also just choose to have that aspect of the story be ignored, or assumed, like how 99% of characters in media don’t ever stop to take a shit.
Because black people are treated pretty differently in the usa than white people are and to deny that is pretty racist.
Because sadly the world doesnt work that way. Imagibe if you had a black peter parker in segregation era. Could Peter be black and still go through the exact same things? And i am not saying that because being black inherently different. Its just that black people go through different hardships due to inherent racism in america. It is not racist to say people with different backgrounds have different cultures and values.
And there are cases where this is not important, for example in the new batman film we had a black Jim Gordon and it was great. But again that is just my opinion.
Because of the principle of it. If your goal is inclusivity how is completely changing the race of an established character inclusive? It’s not. It’s just pandering.
If you’re actually trying to be inclusive then make a new character. Anything else is a pathetic attempt that just shows how disingenuous the attempt is.
I mean I think the problem here is the like, “changing the race of an established character”, right. What established character? Black superman, or whatever else, isn’t superman, he’s black superman. That’s it, basically, that’s my justification. It’s not the same character text to text, even. Is it the same bilbo in every lord of the rings book? Is it the same bilbo sentence to sentence? It’s not like girlboss velma and dumb rich white guy fred are the same velma and fred, they just share the same symbols. If you actually dissect the characters and compared them, then you’d find very little in common. The show doesn’t even have scooby fucking doo, it’s not even called “scooby doo”, it’s, in my mind, and I think it should be in everyone else’s mind, it is tangentially related to scooby doo, at best, you know? I see it as a standalone work, and in that sense it’s just kind of a mediocre show that I don’t think anyone should really care about, rather than this kind of abomination on the face of scooby-doodom and this thing that we need to all be frothing about because scooby-doo has been done so dirty.
SO, all of that can be true, right, they just share symbols. But this is also true of race as a whole, the symbol of race, here, being like, whether or not somebody is black or white or asian or whatever. If you’re race-swapping superman, you know, I think it’s kind of more in line with the message of superman, if he’s the same guy, regardless of whatever race you decide to cast him as, you know? If you don’t change the backstory, if you do change the backstory, whatever, he sort of exists beyond it, as a kind of human ideal for everyone to live up to. For that to be true, superman has to be possible if you put him in basically any circumstance. So, even though superman himself is the same, have we “made a new character”, even though we’ve changed his race, maybe changed his background, and then, in line with that, we’ve maybe flavored him different in terms of like, say, what music or food he likes? I dunno if we really have or we haven’t. Made a new character, I mean. The character has changed, but the core remains the same, the label is the same, the symbols are the same. That’s kind of the question I’m asking, where do you draw the line as to what’s a “new” character, and what’s not? You could just as easily draw it to be where any change in surface level characteristics, from eye color, to hair color, to skin color, results in a “new” character, even if the character, of that character, remains the same. Red shirt shaggy vs green shirt shaggy.
So I dunno, really, like, I’ve never got this critique of like oh no we’re not being inclusive in the right way because we decided to make velma indian, instead of deciding to call the series Shmelma or whatever. What if they did that, what if her name was Shmelma? That’s an extremely surface level difference between the two, but now they have a separate set of labels, so are they separate characters now, or what? I think if I’m going to critique the show, it’s not really going to be on the basis of indian people not having their own shmelma, or even just their own separate scooby-doo, you know. I’m not going to condemn all indian people to forever only engaging with goobert and the ghost chasers, or whatever. If I’m going to critique the show, I’m gonna critique the show because the show itself is mediocre to bad, and has mediocre to bad writing, and cost too much money, and maybe I will critique it for, for some reason, the most popular multiracial iteration of scooby-doo has to also be the one that has the worst writing, where everyone can easily punch at it for that, and producers can also maybe try to use that as a smokescreen for putting out a mediocre show.
I dunno why I’m even talking about this shit, scooby-doo is bogus gen X bullshit. I’d rather watch like, the muppets. Nobody’s ever gonna really complain about kermit being race-swapped, I’ll tell you that.
This take always seems a bit myopic as it ignores the fact that it cements in the exclusivity that already existed. Not allowed to change an established character’s race? Only option is to tack on a new character to the already existing cast and that certainly doesn’t seem like pandering. Of course maybe the new inclusive characters should only be in new content that isn’t established and has no following.
It doesn’t necessarily matter. Did you watch South Park: Into The Panderverse or whatever it’s called? I can only find this super short cut down clip of Eric Cartman’s nightmare he’s explaining to his psychiatrist
It misses the most important line: and finally I wanna scream, and I was like, “WHY ARE THEY REPLACING EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER WITH SOMEONE WHO IS DIVERSE??”
It’s weird, it’s hokey, these remakes look & feel very forced, agenda driven. I ask for more than original characters; I want actually new fucking ideas. New stories! We’re not seeing very many of those lately; we’re getting re-skinned versions of established characters, they just cut off their face & wear it around, and we’re supposed to act like we don’t notice. If we do notice, we’re racist, or sexist, some -ist or -phobe. No, your work is just a lazy, contrived retell of a story that was already told pretty well. Wrapped up nice & neat with a bow on top.
Personally I’m not super invested in the whole debacle, and I simply choose to not see the new stuff & remakes. I’m an adult man, I have no kids, anyway. No dog in this fight. It’s alright. If it’s truly better and/or a fantastic story, it will probably bear out at the box office & I’ll hear about how what an incredible movie it is.
I don’t agree. If they’d just written a new character there would be grounds to complain that the new character was pointless tokenism.
So maybe actually integrate that character into a new concept entirely. Make a new story where you can choose whatever race everyone is supposed to be from the start. Don’t take an existing story and change the races just so you can go “See guys! I’m being inclusive! I made this character black! I’m so progressive!”
Scooby Doo doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to integrating a new character.
I’m honestly speaking generally not just about Scooby Doo. It just so happens that this portrayal of Scooby Doo is just pure blatant pandering.
Why did they even call it Scooby Doo? Why even attach the show to that franchise when it’s so separated in it’s basic concepts?
The answer is because they were trying to use the franchises name to push some stupid race pandering bullshit.
They put in all the effort to change each character to the point that they only resemble their original designs by physical appearance. They literally could have just come up with a completely different show that had nothing to do with Scooby Doo at all.
Is it “race pandering” to make a cast more diverse in order to broaden its appeal?
It is when you’re just taking an existing character and basically giving them black face.
It would be infinitely easier to integrate a new character entirely than to just race swap a character without changing their cultural identity.
I don’t think I understand what you mean by “race pandering”. Is it a kind of pandering? Pandering to whom? And how?
I call it pandering specifically because it’s disingenuous. It’s not a real attempt at racial inclusivity it’s going “Ah fuck we’re getting bitched at for not being inclusive. Fuck it this characters black now. They act exactly the same because we can’t be bothered to actually put in the work to make the cultural changes, but, good enough. Fuck you”
And that’s why it’s pandering. They literally just change the color of their skin without giving a single fuck about cultural identities.
Edit: Removed my first paragraph because I phrased it wrong.