Mark Steyn agrees with me, the only reason the left has to remake classic white male characters into trendy new genders and races is because the left utterly lacks the creativity to create new compelling characters.
I do regard this sort of thing as, to coin a phrase, cultural appropriation – in the sense that what our age mostly does is appropriate the cultural creations of greater talents and make them into something other. The Mighty Thor becomes a woman, Spider-Man turns Afro-Hispanic, Green Lantern goes gay; even in the Archie comics, Archie dies taking a bullet for his gay best friend, and Jughead comes out as asexual.
The clever thing is to create Archie (as Vic Bloom and Bob Montana did in 1941) and Captain America and Iceman, and turning them into modular furniture to be repositioned round the room at will – now female, now gay, now Hispanic – is an achievement of a considerably lesser order. As Brendan O’Neill points out, it’s also shallow – although very suited to an age in which Facebook offers you a choice of 50 gender identities.
And when the ratings tank, they’ll blame misogyny. It almost makes you think the writers are building a cushion to excuse poor performance. Blaming the prejudices of the audience is easier than admitting you’re a hack.
I don’t have a problem per-se with heroes passing on the mantle to new heirs. But I agree, it’s far more interesting if creators say, “What if so-and-so was male/female/black/white/straight/gay,” and then come up with an original character that way.
So I don’t have a problem with the concept of Miles Morales (the black Spider-Man Mark references), but I wish Marvel had respected Peter Parker enough to make Miles a protege, perhaps a kid Peter was helping out in a youth mentorship program (we’re talking about a guy smart enough to intern for Tony Stark here people), and not a kid who decided to take up his costume after Peter got freaking murdered by Green Goblin.
I have no problem with a woman wielding Mjolnir- but couldn’t we have please dropped the preachy “you go girl” sermons and just flat-out said “Thor’s girlfriend has the hammer now because he thinks he’s unworthy because she got cancer under his watch”?
And for crying out loud, a gay Green Lantern did not require rebooting the entire universe to do. There have been multiple Green Lanterns active at the same time because they are members of a universe-spanning police force. We’ve had three white guys, a black guy, a Lebanese guy, and a Latina. Would a gay man really have been that much of a stretch?
Much of Hollywood is running out of original matterial because they were not the original source of alot of movies. Epic books were, but authors have become increasingly reluctant to let go of creative control, mostly because they see the mangling done to their work. There are exceptions, but these are either books of little political content or leftest. Does anybody remember what they did to Starship Troopers