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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • You’ve misunderstood so many of my points, this is exhausting.

    You insist on gatekeeping the term “raceswap”. Fine. Call it “reimagining an existing character as another race”, if you want. You would have to be delusional to deny that Miles Morales is a Black-Latino version of Spider-Man.

    The article I linked to mentions the backlash and controversy about political correctness and Morales. I’m a little surprised you missed the point there.

    I’m not sure what specifically you’re on about with the “usual crowd” paragraph. I know that lots of non-racists are also against “reimagining an existing character as another race”. I agree that race swaps can go wrong a lot.

    Please read this carefully: The specific claim I am contesting is OP’s strong thesis that raceswapping is always bad. I gave examples of it sometimes being good. Miles Morales is certainly an example, down to the criticisms of too much political correctness, racists complaining, fan “controversy”, claims that it’s a cash grab, etc.

    My point was not that the multiverse is bad like elf slavery is bad. I am saying that your explanation gets things backwards: the multiverse doesn’t show how it’s not a race swap. On the contrary, the race swap is the reason why they needed to use the multiverse as a narrative tool. Forget the analogy to elf slavery if you don’t get it. The point is that some writer wrote a multiverse storyline in order to justify the existence of a Spider-Man of a different race.


  • Everyone likes him because the storytelling is good, which proves my point: Race/gender swaps are fine when done right. But when Miles Morales was first introduced, it was considered a race swap, and the usual crowd definitely moaned about it.

    The multiverse explanation reminds me of people saying “But the elves liked being slaves!” in Harry Potter. Yeah, they were written that way, and they could have been written another way. The multiverse is being used to narratively justify a black Puerto Rican Spider-Man.


  • Kind of. Excerpt from this article by Ridley Scott:

    “I think the idea actually came from Alan Ladd, Jr. I think it was Alan Ladd who said, ‘Why can’t Ripley be a woman?’ And there was a long pause that, at that moment, I never thought about it. I thought, why not? It’s a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went.”

    This was the late 70s. “Man” was still so powerfully default that Ridley Scott had not even thought of the possibility of casting a leading woman action hero before a meeting with an exec. That, to me, is clearly a gender swap moment, because until that moment, it was a given that Ripley would be a man. The gender-neutral script just allowed for the possibility.


  • It’s hard to do well, but I disagree that it’s a slap in the face or a low blow. The gender swap of Starbuck from Battlestar Galactic was seen as sacrilege by fans, but she became one of the highlights of the show. Miles Morales was a creative way to do a race swap for Spider Man, and the narrative is richer for it. Jason Mamoa turned Aquaman from white to Polynesian, and the depiction was better than ever. Would Nick Fury be better as a white guy, as he was originally for decades, instead of Samuel L Jackson?

    And then there are all the “swaps” that happen before the first day of filming, like Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien, who was originally (edit) going to be cast as a man. This was “controversial” at the time, with people decrying “political correctness”. I would not take “causing controversy” as a reliable indicator for whether something sucks.

    Edit: point taken about gender neutral script. See discussion below.


  • This is also how I read it. I actually really appreciate attacking the idea of “white as default”. It’s kind of like how some gamers think representing anything besides the “default” demographic is “political”.

    I think this is the more revealing excerpt:

    This is the defining irony of white film-making. The more oblivious your film is to matters of race, the whiter it plays. Because whiteness is often exactly that: the freedom not to see race, even when it’s right there in front of you.

    Basically, being aware of whiteness makes for less racist movies. There’s nothing wrong with white movies, but it’s wrong when white movies pretend they’re not white, but universal and default. The article concludes:

    Instead, our twofold expectation should be this: 1) The industry affords more film-makers of colour the same creative freedoms and commercial opportunities that are now afforded white film-makers, and 2) That the film culture – including the film-makers themselves – develop the confidence, insight and language to discuss and dethrone white cinema.

    This does not sound like racist dog-whistling or white supremacy to me.


  • Happening in Canada too. For the last decade, virtually every province has been led by Conservative governments (except BC and that was just half a decade ago). Healthcare and housing has been slowly falling apart.

    Looking at the polls, what’s amazing is that most Canadian voters seem to think the problem is insufficient conservatism!






  • Yes, sometimes Amazon is cheaper. But one reason I quit amazon was because, even when it’s cheaper, I got so much counterfeit and super low quality disposable junk.

    Seriously, take another look at your local stores. I suspect many people aren’t and are just making assumptions. I was surprised to find my local pet store offers free delivery, and literally everything at my local mom and pop hardware store is cheaper and better quality.



  • At the same time, it was also an era where the gender neutral or gender unknown pronoun was “he” for those roles. Eg “The congressman spoke at length. I don’t know who it was, but I’m sure he must have been tired by the end.” It was to the point where most style guides claimed that “he” was the correct gender neutral pronoun. Conversely, it wasn’t truly gender neutral because “she” would be the default for roles like secretary and nurse. I find it implausible to believe that all this really had no effect on the impression that women were not the typical congress person, firefighter, etc. So I think it’s a spectrum, and I believe you that you personally used it in a gender neutral way, but I doubt it was truly gender neutral in society overall.