Hostility towards Muslims is not unwarranted, the terrorist atrocities across the world (Killing over 32,000 people in 2014 alone) the organised sexual abuse rings, and the rise in acid attacks and various other imports from their 'Rich' culture have lead to people feeling unsafe in their own countries, many for the first time in their lives. Yes of course these events are due to a minority but the unwillingness of the Muslim community to address these very real issues and the immediate accusations of racism towards anyone who does just leads to more division and distrust.Scots Dragon wrote: ↑Thu Aug 03, 2017 7:54 amExcept that the story that's lost most sales for Marvel lately has been Secret Empire, while the push towards diverse books has resulted in a far greater readership, with the explicitly feminist and positively-portrayed Muslim Ms. Marvel being a pretty clear example of that. Especially in a day and age where Muslims are being met with unwarranted hostility over the actions of a group of extremists largely active in the Middle East, despite the fact that white supremacist violence is far more common and a far greater source of terrorist actions in the west.Jabroniville wrote: ↑Thu Aug 03, 2017 6:50 am Though I'm with Ares in deriding how a lot of modern comics has become way too strict and dogmatic in its biases. Sure, almost all art is based around the creator showing people how they see the world in some way, but looking back at the '60s, '70s and '80s, writers were actually capable of things like subtlety and not being overly preachy. Compare Chris Claremont's openly feminist Carol Danvers to the stuff she'd doing nowadays, and it's STILL night and day. Going over the top only creates a backlash, and (probably more importantly, if you're a comic book company) loses sales.
It's also telling how people call out supposed left-wing biases, but very few people are willing to call out the identity politics inherent in making nearly every single character a straight white male. Or the identity politics inherent in the complaints which are made whenever a given character is presented as anything other than a straight white male.
And I have to ask, where is the top?
Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear was labelled as going 'over the top' and 'pushing an agenda down peoples' throats' because of these pretty limited lines of dialogue;This resulted in a gigantic controversy where death and rape threats were levelled at one of the lead writers, Amber Scott, and the worst people on the internet went on a multi-week screeching contest. All because of forcing the SJW agenda of 'there is a transgender person', with one common complaint being that it didn't fit the Forgotten Realms setting. This resulted in perhaps the most hilarious bit of fake geekery when people shared a statement from Ed Greenwood, who claimed that it did fit the setting, and the complainers thought he was one of the Beamdog designers and not, y'know, the person who created the Forgotten Realms to begin with.Mizhena: I am Mizhena, faithful of Tempus. Praise the Lord of Battles!
Charname: Mizhena? That's an unusual name. I don't think I've heard it before.
Mizhena: I created the name myself several years ago. My birth name proved unsuitable.
Charname: What was wrong with your old name?
Mizhena: When I was born, my parents thought me a boy and raised me as such. In time, we all came to understand I was truly a woman. I created my new name from syllables of different languages. All have special meaning to me, it is the truest reflection of who I am.
As for comics, genuine comic book fans don't use the race or gender of a character as an indicator as to whether they'd pick up a title or not and yet those long term fans are the ones being accused of bigotry just because they don't want the character they grew up reading being killed off and replaced by less interesting copies. What's worse is a huge number of those new fans are using race and gender in their decision and yet somehow that's seen as perfectly fine and not bigoted in any way. If for instance you've never previously been interested in reading a Spider-Man comic because Peter is white but now will because there's a black kid under the mask then frankly you're racist.
There are untold non white and non male characters in Marvel and they have been starring in their own titles for decades. Only a handful of characters are popular enough to maintain a long term book, these character are usually the genre-defining icons of the industry (Spider-Man, Wolverine etc.) and they're still the most popular characters to this day despite the vastly more diverse modern fan-base. Most characters, including most white male characters never become successful enough to maintain anything other than a limited series.
If for whatever reason a writer feels the need to primarily feature characters of a specific race or gender (Which is wrong in of itself, you can't fight the perceived discrimination of one group by being discriminatory against another) then push some of the many that already exist or use some imagination and create new characters don't just replace all your most beloved, most successful established characters with race/gender swapped teen copies and then accuse the fans of racism/sexism when the copies don't sell as well, it's unnecessary, it's disrespectful to the fans and the characters and frankly it's just lazy. The complaints from fans aren't inherently about that the character is now black or female it's that an established popular character was unnecessarily changed or replaced in the first place, again promote existing characters or create new characters and release their books alongside the original icons then everyone wins.
I've recently been watching the reaction videos to trailers for movies such as Captain America: Civil War and Thor: Ragnarok and among the literally hundred of videos a high number of the people in them were black, Asian and female fans and do you know what I noticed? not a single one of them was complaining about 'Yet another' movie about a straight white male nor did any of them seem to have any problem 'Identifying' with the characters (Which is the primary justification by SJW types for all aforementioned race/gender swapped copies in the comics) they were all just ecstatic to see the characters they love on screen.
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