As long as I'm back on the internet...

[scdsam]

Let's rage about some articles and shit, eh?

Spider-man should be black. Ya know. Just cuz.

This annoys me to no end. TO NO END. Mostly because racebending.com has grabbed hold of it and is supporting. I'm sorry, last time I checked we were AGAINST arbitrarily changing an established character's race. Right??

Don Glover needs to fall into a pit and

Comments

[gargoylekitty]

Eh, the thing that makes Spidey different from Aang, aside from the excess of white folk in the media and history of replacing POC with white folk that makes the comparison lopsided, is that nothing about the character really makes his race an issue. He's a nerdy kid who was raised by his grandparents, one of which was killed, and bitten by a radioactive spider giving him superpowers. Unlike Aang who exists in an Asian-fantasy world and comes from a group based directly off Tibetan monks, Peter Parker lives in New York. In the modern United States. He could very well be black just as easily as any other race, tbh(in fact, there's a comic with an Indian Spider-Man out there).

Oh and this seems be the article that started it all.

[scdsam]

You're right that the Avatar universe is centered on Asian culture, but that still doesn't change the fact that Peter Parker is white.

A big thorn in my side is the hypocrisy at play. Racebending's website has been decrying a lot of "based on true story" movies that have decided the real-life minority character to a white guy for the movie. For example, take the film backlash coming from a director casting his white son as famous sniper Billy Sing for an upcoming war movie. Billy Sing was a native-born Australian, and enlisted in the army just like thousands of other young men. There's nothing really "asian" about that. Except that he WAS asian. You can't undo it. You can't just pretend like he wasn't.

I'd be all for a classic pass-the-torch storyline where a new (colored) Spiderman is chosen to fight villains...but I don't see how, "Surprise! Peter Parker was black all along!" is going to work well for anyone.

[gargoylekitty]

That would be where the "aside from the excess of white folk in the media and history of replacing POC with white folk that makes the comparison lopsided" and the fact that they're attempting to depict a real person not a character who was created at a time when there was little chance he would have been made black and if he was his name would have probably been something more like the 'Black Arachnid' or 'Black Spider' or anything with the word 'Black' in it.

The 'pass-the-torch' thing wouldn't work in this case though since they're rebooting the Spider-Man movies, there is no torch to pass. Personally, I think it works more in a 'another universe' sense. It's the movie-verse.