This is where my view on the issue comes in. By turning a white character into a minority, the only message being sent is that the person wanting to add color to the story lacked the imagination and talent to come up with their own compelling character; and the irony by extension is that the paint by numbers move ends up only propagating negative racial stereotypes (such as people of color being "lazy", "stupid" or otherwise "criminal"). Honestly, the best that could be done to represent another race was to steal an existing white character?
That doesn't hold water. If you're doing an adaptation of something where
almost the whole main and supporting cast was white, then your choices are either to relegate nonwhite characters to a tiny minority of peripheral roles -- which is hardly inclusive or fair -- or to drop some of the original characters altogether in favor of the new characters you've created (for instance, the way
The Batman initially avoided using Commissioner Gordon and gave us Chief Rojas and Detectives Bennett and Yin instead). Using the familiar cast but giving them a little more variety in appearance seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise.
And I do think that's a part of it -- simple visual variety. Animation designers don't want their characters to look alike; they want them to be easy to tell apart as well as having enough variety to be interesting. Think about it. If they wanted to make a character Hispanic, Sally Avril is the logical choice, given her surname. But they made Liz Allen Hispanic instead, because Liz is apparently going to be a more prominent character, so they wanted to give her a distinctive look so she wasn't just another blonde like Gwen. It's no different from their choice to put glasses on Gwen and frump her up a little. Get past all our society's stupid hang-ups about race, this ridiculous notion that it matters one way or the other, and it's a simple design question.
The problem is that our culture makes too big an issue out of ethnicity, assuming it's some huge overriding thing that totally defines a person's identity. I don't see why it's that big a deal. Hell, John Byrne totally changed Lex Luthor from a completely bald genius scientist to a merely balding corporate magnate. I think that's a far huger change than giving him a darker skin pigmentation would've been.
Bleeding hearts can say whatever they like, but I find this kind of half-assed race inclusion to be offensive; it is tantamount to a white actor slapping on black face instead of actually giving the job to a black person.
That's crap. If it's "tantamount to" anything, it's tantamount to casting someone with an actor of different ethnicity. Which has been done plenty of times. Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent in Tim Burton's
Batman. Dean Cain (who's half-Japanese) as Clark Kent/Superman. Kristin Kreuk (half-Chinese and raven-haired) as the usually redheaded Lana Lang and Sam Jones III as Pete Ross in
Smallville. The TV adaptation of
The Dresden Files made an Irish character from the books Hispanic, a Hispanic character from the books blonde, and a white character Indian, not because of any "quotas," but just because they wanted the best actors for the roles regardless of appearance. (For that matter, they cast an Englishman as the American lead and an American as his English sidekick.)
And really, how is that any more horrible than casting the brown-haired John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen in
The Flash, or casting the blue-eyed Chris Pine as Captain Kirk? Why is skin pigment so much more horribly important than hair or eye pigment? Are we ever going to grow up enough as a culture to stop pretending this kind of thing actually matters?
I think enough time has passed since Spidey's first public appearance--and according to the show, Peter was bitten by the radioactive spider the year before--to have dealt with the loss of Uncle Ben and move on. There was a brief moment when Peter touched the picture of himself and Ben that gave him pause, but I don't think this version of Petey is the type to beat himself up forever over it. He's still very much a kid at this point, and a fairly realistic one for a cartoon aimed at kids (IMO, kids these days either self-destruct after a tragic event or learn to move on with their lives).
You're still missing my point. I'm not talking about whether he's still actively grieving. I'm talking about the fact that the events surrounding Uncle Ben's death are his whole motivation for being a superhero, and the moral principle underlying that is what defines and drives his character. And that's what makes Spider-Man such a special character, what makes him more than just some guy who gets superpowers and decides for no good reason to put on goofy Spandex and fight bad guys. So that backstory should be included and acknowledged in any faithful
Spider-Man adaptation. It should not be glossed over to the point of invisibility. I don't care whether you can make up rationalizations for why it hasn't been addressed yet. I'm a professional tie-in writer, I'm an expert at making up rationalizations for plot oddities. My point is that it
should be addressed, that it's too thematically fundamental to sweep under the rug no matter what excuses you can dream up for doing so.
