Changing the race/gender of characters

There are exeptions, you just posted one
He was born to play kingpin

>>84830480

A shit excuse for cashing in money from unimaginative mediocrity.

If they want more blacks make better , new black characters. If they want more women make good female characters.

Replacing characters is stupid and will kill Marvel in the long run.

Some characters' race matters. Some don't.

With Green Lantern, for example, you have a ton of them and the concept allows for OCs very easily, so it's better to just bring in John or Simon or Jessica than race-bend Hal or Guy.

>(Green Lantern etc)
OH THAT GUY

>>84830480
What did HP change?

I don't like too much change from the comics in general.

It can be done right, and it can be done wrong in my opinion. A good example is Ben Urich from Netflix Daredevil. The actor played a great Ben Urich, and skin color did not matter.

A bad example is Flash Thompson in the new Spider-man movie. You're telling me that kid is supposed to be a stereotypical high school jock? He likes like the kind of person Flash should be bullying.

It's also much easier to get away with when you're doing it to more minor characters most casuals haven't heard of like Urich or Heimdall compared to more recognizable names like the Human Torch.

>>84830667
The whole cast in the play The Cursed Child.

>>84830480
You posted the best exception to the rule. Michael Clarke Duncan was great.

I miss him
;_;

>>84830743
I honestly just Googled race change comic books-Lol. But if you say so!

>Michael Clarke Duncan's Kingpin takes on Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin

What happens?

>>84831147
Michael Clark Fisk wins the fight but Vincent Fisk wins the war.

>>84830480
Look, my only issue is if there's a conscious effort to cast AGAINST character's race.

You open casting to everybody, and you feel an actor that isn't the character's original race best embodies the character? Fucking awesome, go for it. Heimdall and Kingpin, hell maybe even the new Urich are great examples of this.

I just don't like it when you can find nothing good to say about your casting except "Oh we wanted to ensure diversity." Like the recent Valkyrie casting.

If you want to ensure diversity then just cast the best minority and praise them for being such a great fit for the character. I don't want to hear about your agenda. It doesn't make me think you care about the source material.

>>84830480
Sometimes it works,other times it really doesn't.

I'm generally OK with it in adaptions if it doesn't change the fundamental thematics carrying the character, though. Kingpin is a good example. However, I don't think you could do the same with, say, Daredevil, because his Irish heritage is a bigger part of his character.

I'm a bit more iffy with it in comics. I'm fine with legacy characters but changing a character out of the blue (like they did with Iceman) is usually a bad move.

>>84831581
This is what worries me about Spider-Man: Homecoming, and how brown its cast is. If they nail the characters then I couldn't care less what color they are, but it they only cast them because of their race, and it's obvious that's the only reason they were cast, then I'll probably lose faith in MCU Spider-Man.

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so when is hate monger going to get a race change?

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>>84830543
Anyone else think he could play Kingpin II in a hypothetical Old Man Logan movie/miniseries?

>>84834131
he died

>>84834131
*Could have

>>84831939
You could make Daredevil work as a Hispanic man.

>>84833874
Black Israelite all the way.

>>84830738

Even the author said "Suck it, racists".

>>84830480

In terms of movies/shows the characters are side characters/really good actors so it's not a big deal

In comic books 90% of these characters don't have personalities outside of being Gay/Black/female etc. I'm not looking forward to the new Ironman because she seems like a Mary sue to just push comics, I'd love to see Diversity in comics more but I want it done organically and well instead of just trying to push sales

>>84834382
JKR has hit Lucas levels, no one cares what she thinks.

>>84834405
>Mary sue

Truly this term has lost all meaning.

>>84834515
It fits pretty well in this scenario considering she's apparently a 15 year old supergenius who built her own armor then got picked by Tony Stark, the man who once attacked SHIELD, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and a fellow Avenger on the assumption they might be using his tech, to be Iron Man. It doesn't have the self-insert or wish fulfillment connotations, but they're not really required. She's young, unrealistically skilled and capable, and is immediately important and connected to established characters.

>>84834515

>15 Year old Girl who appeared out of nowhere and is Smarter then Tony ever was

sounds pretty mary-sue to me

>>84830480
There are some characters where the race of that character if you really bother to consider it change the story of that character. Awhile back I believe Stan Lee said he'd think a Black Captain America would be great. But a black Captain America changes the story, or should change the story of how blacks were treated in the army and America at that time. Then characters like Iris West, That are side or support characters and there race being changed really has no significant effect on their surroundings or interactions.

My earlier examples are both changes of race with changes of media. And there are several others. And those in my mind constitute new stories with their original characters just being inspiration But when you talk about changes in comics, whether there was some form of reboot or anything short of explaining this is a different reality. Then changes to the race of those characters make less or at best little since at all.

What bugs me about race change in general is the attitude or presumption that even with minor characters or characters whose direct story points wouldn't be changed with a switch in race, is the smaller changes in perspective. How people even if going through similar or the same experiences would have different outlooks on those events because of their personal history. And this almost never changes, more times than not it seems you get the same white character but with [enter race here] coloring. And then what's the point of changing the race if it has absolutely no effect on the character? If it's just a matter of inclusion then just include more diverse characters.

That's my opinion on it.

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>>84830480
People only care if they perceive it as a shoehorned appeal to please sjws. Sjws have hurt their cause far greater than any other force.

>>84834989
she's older than teen tony, so no, she's not that impressive

>>84830480
I don't care about race changes in adaptations so long as the actor is a great one.

>>84830480
Race doesn't matter that much, performance dose.

OP's pic is a good example of performance over race. Fuck if anything, he actually looks A LOT like Kingpin ignoring the skin tone.

>>84834482
but she still has creative rights if you dont care what she thinks when shes the one who does the thinking you're stupid

>>84835349
teen tony didnt build an iron man suit from junk around campus

>>84834873
Just like Rey from Star Wars.

>>84839861
Finn too when you think about it.

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Alright hard mode

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>>84830480
So Marvel is ripping off Papa Midnight why?

>>84830480
I would say that there are a number of different factors that play into it, most of which are based on personal preference honestly.
For me personally:
If a character changes shape or physical appearance, then I don't see the issue in changing the ethnicity from source material to adaptation. Take for example Mystique in the X-Men movies; it wouldn't matter if the actress playing her was white, black, asian, hispanic, or a fucking inuit, she shapeshifts anyway.
There's also Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, it didn't matter that the actor was black because he ended up turning blue.
I could apply the same principle to The Thing from the most recent Fantastic Four movie, if they had made his character black instead of Human Torch then there would have been less of an issue (and as with Electro) it wouldn't matter if he were black because he turns into a rock monster anyway.

I have another example, but I'm not quite sure how I would classify it. It has to do with the change of The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 from Chinese to Middle-Eastern.
At the time when The Mandarin was originally created the Vietnam war was going on. The "American enemy" at the time was asian people so it made sense for Tony Stark to get kidnapped by asian militants and for The Mandarin to be Chinese.
Fast forward to modern day and the "American enemy" is Middle-Eastern people, so to me, it seemed like a cool change for The Mandarin to be portrayed as Middle-Eastern.

Those are just the two examples I can think of off the top of my head.

>>84830480
Racebending doesn't usually matter that much because race isn't usually that much of a factor in the way characters are created.

If a character's race is essential to the story, or if changing the race makes the story not work, then that's different.

It's kind of arbitrary because it depends almost entirely on whether we think it works for the story or not.

So nobody minded that Ultimate Nick Fury and MCU Nick Fury are black, because there's no reason he shouldn't be, and Samuel L. Jackson is cool.

But if they made original 1940s Nick Fury black, that would be just weird because it would raise so many questions that would go unanswered, and it wouldn't be believable. You could make it work, I guess, but it would be a completely different character from the one we know because it would change so many other things.

In the grey area, though, a lot of it is just whether we liked the original character so much that we don't want anything about them changed. Some of the backlash against Ghostbusters was just about the idea that these very different characters were there to replace our favorite characters. If Peter Parker were black today, there's no reason he couldn't be (while there are reasons he couldn't be black in a 1962 story) but it would feel like the writers telling us "the old version was not the real version."

>Is the race/gender change specific to that actual character? As in is it literally the same character with a different race/gender?

>Does the change affect the character in any major way? As in does it change their story in a significant way, or would it mess with there characterization?

And with comics and cartoons being a largely visual medium:
>Does the character have an iconic look that would ve tampered with if their race/gender was indeed to be changed?

Lastly,
>Does the change have a purpose, or are they simply making the change to add more diversity or push some agenda that is unrelated to the work of fiction itself?

These are the four topics that should always be considered when changing a character in such a way.

>>84840405
People get mad at the concept of "forced diversity," but it can happen. It's just hard to define because it's more of a sense we have that something is fake, rather than something that we can define.

It's like sitcoms sometimes have a token black character to spice up an otherwise all-white group of friends, and it feels fake because you don't get the impression that they would really be friends, they're just there to add diversity and it's no more convincing than if you had a token white friend on a black sitcom.

That doesn't mean every story about inter-racial friendships feels fake. (Luke Cage and Danny Rand's friendship feels real even though it was done for no reason other than to combine two comics into one.) It's just a matter of what the writers can convince us is true.

>>84840735
I completely understand that. I'm more talking about when an established character is changed to push an agenda that would otherwise be irrelevant.

>>84835297

No; it's usually straight white males upset that they aren't the ones being pandered to.

>>84837810

No, Tony built one in a cave from a box of scraps.

>>84840203

I usually only have a problem if a minority character is made white, or if a story based on a real-life happening has minorities switched-out for more white people, cos, of course, white people just don't have enough stories of their own, they have to have ownership of everyone else's as well.

>>84834989
wasn't Pym smarter than tony anyway?
why is everyone comparing the girl to Tony and not Pym?

>>84837756
Nah, creators can be total morons themselves

Hence why that anon mentioned George Lucas

>>84841714
The problem is that a lot of these characters were created in an era when it wasn't pandering so much as reflecting reality. It was perfectly plausible for Peter Parker to be at an all-white school in 1962. Today it's unrealistic, in New York City anyway.

So some of it is just the awkwardness of trying to update franchises created in a different place and time. It would be like taking MAD MEN and changing it to a story about an ad agency in 2016. Which might still be mostly white, but they'd have to at least pretend they thought it was a problem.

I wish American's would stop caring about race so much.

Look at Asia we're all racists against each other but our economic block is doing better than Europe's.

>>84830480
Give me a good actor and you can race bend any character, unless being a certain race is central to that character's background (for example, you wouldn't want a white Black Panther or an Asian Iron Fist). Race bend a character just because you want to make a statement about diversity and that's when I have a problem.

>>84830480
Sometimes it matters. Usually it doesn't. Especially in the case of Marvel/DC, where movies and alternate comics are just parallel worlds which don't react with the original, it doesn't matter much if a character is different.

What really matters is if the character (or actor, in this case) can pull off the character correctly. Your example is a great one. I'd much rather have a great black Kingpin over a shitty one just to keep him white. There was nothing about the Kingpin that demanded he stay a white guy.

The problem is when comics or other media try to change the "current" line to match up with another continuity, for publicity or something similar. Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury in the movies was a great casting call. Killing Nick Fury in the mainline comics just so a Samuel Jackson-lookalike as his "nephew" named Nick Fury could take his place was just stupid. Again, just fine with a black Nick Fury in the black Nick Fury-verse. Not okay to just screw around with a storyline because of a popularity poll. (It could've been handled better.)

Some characters can have their race or gender changed without issue. It depends on whether the characters race or gender are vital to their story. One example would be magneto whose Jewish heritage is an essential aspect of the character and his motivations.

>>84830738
Plays are usually race blind it's the nature of the medium.

>>84831198
Clarke wins if he figures out that Vincent is highly unstable exploiting people's weaknesses is a very kingpin move.

>>84834989
Exect her to get venom blast too :^)
-BeNiS

>>84830480
How do you feel about changing their age genders?

>>84833874
They should make a Chinese Hatemonger and just let them suck on that.

>>84844844
Hehehehe. BeNiS.
>>84844865
>age gender
This concept is new and frightening to me.

Why is /co/ so full of cucks? I just came here and I see 20 threads about ridiculous cuck-tier garbage

>>84830480
I honestly dont care if they do a fantastic job
MCD was the fucking best in Daredevil. I wouldnt want anyone else to play Kingpin now.
They need to justify the switch with their talent. If its not justified, its just forced diversity.

>>84830743
My wife worked at a bank and he would come in and take like $2,000.00 and ask for a security guard to walk him to his car.

>>84846734
Would he ask your wife about her son?

>>84845335
Why is /pol/ so insecure? Why do you act like terrified children?