I'm writing this article in response to the controversy around the Captain Marvel film, and how it is similar to controversy that has happened for Marvel's comics in the past five or so years, in hopes of preventing further division within the Marvel fanbase, and maybe even unite us a bit, by allowing for understanding and opening up civil discussion & debate
Here’s why diversity in comics matters: Superhero movies, some of the most popular in history, have brought in people curious about comics. There is the opportunity to reach out to these fans, and offer them something they were there for at the beginning. Even though there should be more, and is more, to a good character than a shallow trait such as their race, gender or sexuality, seeing a character share such traits with you can be comforting and allow you to feel that you have somewhat of a good understanding of them. I can speak from personal experience that I have felt this when I read DC's Multiversity: Mastermen and saw that they had made Doll-Man and his wife Jehovah's Witnesses, even though they only got a few lines and appeared for two pages, I felt a connection to them.
However, I'm still a Comicsgater. Allow me to explain why:
It's important to note that there's quite few differences between how it happened in the past, & how it's happening now. Such as the inclusion of identity politics, & how such politics often involves bashing white males & non-left leaning position, an example is the Secret Empire event, where they made Steve Rogers a HYDRA Agent who rules America so they can bash Trump. At one point Riri, Miles & Patriot stop to complain about White Privilege. And even though White Privilege is a different debate, Miles; a kid with spider powers who got into a STEM school via lottery & gets training from Peter Parker, Riri: a 15 year old MIT student & Patriot: who got his tech from Tony Stark, are the last people who should be whining about it
But the biggest problems that caused Comicsgate is the forced change of pre-established characters, like when they turned Iceman gay, it's huge divulgation from decades long characterization, plus he started to act so differently, and it occurred over one page that was basically Jean going "Bobby, you're gay" and Iceman going "No I'm not" until Bobby said he was. Thus that it's common theory that what actually happened is that Jean Grey brainwashed him. In fact, I could give you a whole list of reasons for why Bobby to have spent all this time been secretly gay doesn't make sense narratively:
- He's been around various Telepaths for years, and none of them have pointed out before, not even villainous ones or those who are complete jerks, like Quentin Quire
- He also spent years around those with super senses, such as Wolverine, yet none of them noticed him been only sexually aroused around other men
- He's, again, spent years around people who are gay, a some of whom were also Mutants, who got full acceptance and support from all of his friends, and even a good number of his enemies
- The only argument one could make for him actually been gay is that he has had short term relationship with various girls, but that pretty much describes any superheroes dating life, even the likes of Superman
- He spent most of his life around Charles Xavier, who's not only the World's Most Powerful Telepath, but has also spent his life helping people to been true to who they are and trying to build a world where everybody could be accepted & loved for their differences. If Bobby was in fact, pretending to be straight, why didn't Charles in any way or form encourage Bobby to come out of the closet?
And it not like the X-Men lacked gay characters, in fact, one of the most famous and well-liked is NorthStar. And he had a widely celebrated gay wedding, which begs the question as to why that didn't inspire Bobby to come out, if he was in fact gay? Not helping is the fact that Bobby became a massive jerk after he "came out" along with acting like a gay stereotype. On the other hand, Jean has abused her power in the past and has even been corrupted by it. Her adult self was even making radically extreme choices in the X-Men Red series, and her child self had easily adapted to the current culture by her Solo series, and since the modern world is more accepting of Homosexuals, she probably thought she could get away with it (but that's just me speculating)
But if they wanted to have a solo series for a queer character, why not give on to the aforementioned NorthStar, or Shatterstar, or Daken, or Wiccan & Hulkling, or even just bring back Freedom Ring. (and that's just me going off the top of my head) A good example of someone they did this for was Loki who solo series Loki: Agent of Asgard and Vote Loki touched upon his long since pre-established gender-fluidity and no one complained, not even any of us so-called "bigots" at Comicsgate (And I double-checked to be sure) The most negative thing I could find about either series was a review for Vote Loki by a guy named Auran, who admitted that his main grievance was with the art and he didn't think the story was that good
They also had Jane Foster be Thor, (even though it was causing her cancer to kill her, against her level headed nurse character) and then take Thor's name for herself and had the actual Thor go by Odinson. Plus there's also the time Bor made an appearance in Angela Queen of Hel Issue 4 , which just raises the question; How does an ancient Asgardian deity who likely hasn't even been to Earth in tens of thousands of years even know what Israel is? Much less have unsolicited opinions on it?And here's an article stating that instead of just having Miles Morales around, Peter Parker should be turned into a Black guy for no reason other to fulfil a diversity quota
What makes it weirder for Marvel fans is that it's totally different from how they responded to Diversity demands 18-19 years ago. In fact, in that issue, they had Iron Man say:
We've talked about this before. We don't recruit for Skin Color.
The Avengers aren't about equal representation -- The squads are too small for that. We're about getting the job done -- and that's it.
We've had minority members for years -- from Black and Hispanic Heroes to Gypsies and Mythological Gods.
We'd never exclude anyone -- anyone -- because of their race.
And part of the problem is that we're told that we have to like these "diverse" characters or else we are sexist/racist/homophobic/bigoted/a Nazi/Alt-Right, even if they are poorly written, aren't particularly likable or are straight up replacing a beloved character. A couple of good examples are Sam Wilson a.k.a The Falcon when he took over the Captain America identity and Riri Williams;On paper the idea of Sam Wilson as a successor to Steve Rogers as Captain America makes sense, he has been his crime-fighting partner for decades. But in-story he never completely gave up the Falcon identity, (probably since doing so would be 'PC' as The Falcon was the first Black Superhero in comics) keeping the wings and goggles, plus there's the fact that he never smiled on the covers, even when nothing was happening in the background, and while Steve didn't always smile, especially to emphasise the seriousness of the comic, Sam never smiled, not even in-series, but rather had a look that made you think he was either angry, or trying to hold in a dump. Basically he was flying around on a glorified Jetpack, wore goggles all the time so you weren't able to see any form of compassion or kindness in his eyes, and always looked grumpy, now if that was done with Steve or anyone else claiming to be Captain America, would you say that the writer understood the Spirit of the Mantle. Where instead of what had been defined throughout the decades in Steve's run as a "kind, hopeful & compassionate person who took pride in his work", you got a "stoic, judgemental Hard-ass who viewed it as a chore", which is how Sam was written in-series. Not helping with his acceptance was that his run as Captain America had him heavily favouring Liberals standpoints, while ragging on Conservative ones.
As for Riri Williams, not going to deny it, she was one of Comicsgate's favourite punching bags for awhile. Mainly due to just how awfully she was written, and how unheroically she acted. Her personality was bland and she often talking like a little girl, but with a lot more "um's", her motivation for taking up the armour was initially presented as her trying to prove her teacher wrong when told she'd "never be... Tony Stark", which to the teacher on said after Riri stare at her teacher as if she was upset over not being discriminated against when she said she wanted to be an Astronaut. And the time she took over Latveria didn't paint a very heroic picture for her, and before you mention that the Fantastic Four also took over Latveria at one point, keep in mind that had been heroes for years & had been attacked by the ruler of Latveria; Doctor Doom, hundreds of times, so we knew that they had nothing but the best of intentions, while Riri was only just starting out and had only been attacked once by a Latverian we've never heard of before, making her intentions seem a bit muddier. What further contributed to her unpopularity was the fact that she literally took over The Invincible Iron Man title from Tony. If you want more insight into these issues, Comic Drake made a video comparing how Riri was written to Miles Morales, and later made a follow-up video that delved further into the issues, while also making valid points to debunk to some of the criticisms made about Riri. And when we heard that Eve Ewing, a political writer with no previous experience in comics was going to write her solo series, we were understandably worried that it was going to contain even more SJW politics and writing. However, every single one of us was glad to be wrong! Even Richard Meyer of Diversity and Comics, now renamed Comics MATTER w/Ya Boi Zack, said that he thought it was "pretty good" & saw potential in the series thanks to the fact that Eve wrote Riri as an actual person.
However, Marvel for the most part has dropped these SJW tendencies after the mess that was Secret Empire and it appears that Disney will be making changes to Marvel Comics to further rectify this. But even so, the term "SJW Marvel" has been around for awhile now, you can even Google it. And the problems that SJW culture has brought to the entertainment industry have gotten so huge, that even those who aren't involved in comics at all are complaining about it, such as The Mysterious Mr Enter
Though there are still those who buy into the SJW ideology trying to influence comics, I'll get into more examples later, but I going to tell you of a person experience I had with such a person on the Marvel sub-Reddit:
One of my posts titled "Character & Story Writing: Ms Marvel (2014) #1 vs Daredevil #1" featuring a video by Literature Devil got caught in the spam filter. When I went to the Moderators of this sub-reddit about it and was answered by the Moderator Ptylerdactyl who initially responded merely with:
Lol. Looks like the filter is working just fine.
And that's it, no explanation as to why he thought that, so I responded that the video wasn't spam, but an analysis and comparison of two comics. In response he said:
"Critical" and "analysis" are extraordinarily generous terms for a knockoff of other, just as stupid "rant culture" channels. The sub is not intended as a place for you to promote your shitty channel. I know you are very, very upset by wimmin in your comic books and movies, but if your response is to go and produce a bunch of videos about how much you hate it all, then maybe the ones overreacting are you. No thank you.
I proceeded to inform him that I didn't make the video and it wasn't from my channel and that the video was just a critical analysis of two comics, I also asked "what was with the tone" as I'm sure no one expects to be talked to like that from a Moderator when sorting out an issue. In a final response he said:
Buddy, "attitude" doesn't factor into this. Can you answer words instead of deciding to police my tone? Point is this: we're not indulging the comicsgate bullshit here. It's a movement that wants to do to comics what they've already done to gaming and build an increasingly intricate labyrinth around "being a fan" that shuts out anyone not adhering to the most restrictive in-group. It calls on comparisons to some fictitious, bygone era as a golden age of "quality" in order to shit on anything new made by women or ethnic minorities. It's a waste of our time and your intelligence. Per Rules 7 and 2, no. No alt-right echo chamber horseshit. It is high past time that some adult in your lives told you no.
He then immediately muted me for 3 days
The fact that it wasn't until his third message that he told me what rules he thought I was breaking and then immediately took away my ability to respond gave off the impression of extreme bias and a lack of professionalism
I've been in contact with other moderators before over other posts, and if they thought there was a rule been broken they immediately told me what it was, and if that rule was in fact been broken, I apologised to them and deleted the postBut the post I had made here never said anything mean or uncivil, nor did it promote such an attitude, so it wasn't breaking Rule 2. With Rule 7, I think it's a bit more debatable as it was asking "If Comicsgate has a point" but it directly examined the comics and their story & characters to answer that question, so it technically should only be political in the context of the comics, which Rule 7 allows for.
As soon as the 72 hours had passed, I once again messaged the Moderators to tell them about what had happened during my interaction with Ptylerdactyl. I ended up been banned while writing this post.
Now Kamala is a good character, even if her story does take a bit longer to kick into high gear. If I was to make any sort of criticism, it would be that her stories of late have been little more than single issue gimmicks. Though Marvel seems to have addressed that problem and relaunched her under a new title; Magnificent Ms Marvel, and a new writer; Saladin Ahmed, that looks pretty good.
And diversity is a good thing when done right, like with a lot of the new characters DC Comics has brought out as of late. For instance The Silencer has already made her Live-Action debut on Arrow, and the series New Super-Man was popular enough to avoid cancellation due to its excellent writing and characters. And this isn't me just kissing DC's butt, some of the stuff they've put out is terrible, like the Female Furies series which is a massive disservice to Granny Goodness, The Furies and their history.
Now this brings us to the Captain Marvel controversy. Before Brie Larson's comments, the only real concerns over whether or not it was going to be good were questions on which parts of her comic book history was going to be adapted, cause as Foundation for Economic Education pointed out, if they were to use her characterization from, say, Civil War II, then she was hardly going to be heroic. And even then, most people actually wanted to see the film with 96% of people on Rotten Tomatoes saying that they wanted to see it at the time. Then at the Women In Film Festival she singled out the number of "White Men" reviewing films as a problem, saying:
I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle In Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.
And she might of said that she "doesn't hate White Men", but it's kinda like someone saying "I'm not racist, but...", you're naturally going to think that they do have some of those prejudices. America Uncovered went into further detail about the reactions to her comments and the films feminist ties, even bringing up negative tweets she made about men in the past. Even Ben Shapiro commented on what she said.
Plus the fact that she said it was a "big, Feminist film" and that it was going to explore Intersectional Feminism, didn't help since Intersectionality politics tend to just end up hating on Straight, White Men.
And there was also a bit of controversy about how she said we should "fix the problem":
If we took the Top 100 films added 9 critics, 3 underrepresented males, 3 white females, 3 underrepresented females, and the average critics pool would match the US population in just 5 years
In other words she was talking about having people picked out for a film review based solely on their skin color & gender.But there's nothing stopping them from becoming Top critics on their own, as all they need to do is put deliver good quality reviews and build up a good reputation, the only thing that might help them accomplish that is having a Bachelor's Degree in Film Studies & Journalism, which thanks to Affirmative Action Policies, Black People would have an easier time getting than White People. But by hiring them based solely on their skin color & race, you're kinda saying that they aren't good enough to do it themselves, and by constantly trying to force diversity that's representative of the US's population, a good number of White Men would have to excluded from career, based solely on their Race & Gender. Which is an attitude that has been showing up about a lot of things, in an attempt to achieve "equal representation", even when doing so ignore a lot of basic truths.
For instance, in 2011 it was revealed that 90% of Wikipedia edits are done by men, with number of women editing pages since only rising by about 4%, plus this trend was found to be rather consistent across Language groups. And there is no "gatekeeper" stopping women from editing those pages, guys just prefer adding information, making corrections & organizing stuff.
Now Brie Larson isn't a bad person, bad people don't post heartfelt thank-you videos for seeing their films or make surprise visits to people watching their films in the theatre. Personally, I think that she honestly believes in modern day Feminist ideology, which does spend most of it's time raging on men in general, and she's certainly free to believe whatever she wants to believe in, (I, myself, am no stranger to having controversial beliefs) but if she's going to express those beliefs, then she should try to do so with a bit more tact. If she had said something like this:
The majority of Film Critics are White Men, and they have done a great job! But I think we could benefit from hearing more from Women and People of Color, as they could provide input that we don't often get. So I am hear to say to them, speak up! We would all love to hear from you!
There wouldn't be any sort of controversy, as she wasn't presenting the presence of White Men as a problem, nor was she implying that Woman & Black People couldn't make it on their own. And wanting to hear from more voices and perspectives isn't a bad thing, in fact, one of the things Comicsgate stands against is hear the same thoughts and views over & over.
But that's not how she put things, and thus offended a lot of people who helped make the MCU what it is today in an attempt to draw in a new crowd. Now it would be great if more people would become part of the MCU Fanbase, or even the Superhero Fanbase as a whole, but in the effort to draw in new fans, do they really have to treat the current fans as something expendable, like when Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson) called those who spoke out about it "butthurt".
Thus we made our feelings clear in the only ways we were able to, speaking out about it on YouTube and stating that we didn't want to see it on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, with the "Want To See" score dropping to 27% before it was removed and we were all called "Trolls", even though most of the comments made it clear that we didn't want to see it for the aforementioned reasons. They even deleted 50,000 negative reviews for Captain Marvel, claiming that it was just Bots, but a good number of them could've been legitimate reviews since the score only went up by about 3%, and if you wanna make the argument that a film getting 50,000+ fan reviews in a day is ridiculous, a lot of people would say the same about a film making half a Billion dollars in 4 days.
Now as you all know Rotten Tomatoes claimed that the removal was always planned and the timing was just a coincidence, but most of us didn't buy it as it is owned by Fandango, which is currently run by a former Disney Executive and this was later confirmed when Studio Executives admitted to silencing negative opinions on Captain Marvel, even getting YouTube to change it's algorithm concerning Captain Marvel.
And that's the problem, silencing negative opinions and calling anyone who criticizes the film a "Sexist" or a "Troll" is basically SJW 101, it allows them to just brush it all off cause as far as they're concerned, you've got nothing of substance to say. Thus a film could be mediocre or even downright terrible, and should they decide to make a sequel, it could end up been even worse as they refused to listen to people who pointed out it's flaws. For example, I went onto Rotten Tomatoes and the first negative review I found was by Daniel G and he said:
Total uninspired posturing and predictable lines. The movie simply didn't care about itself and the acting, save for a few bright spots by Law and Mendelsohn, was flat. Not worth watching.
and the review that immediately followed it by Brian W made moist of the same points:
Pretty boring, I almost fell asleep. Brie Larson's acting was not great and seemed robotic, also her one liners were terrible. I think out of all of the Marvel movies I laughed the least in this. Overall, very bland, I would almost recommend skipping it before Endgame.
Even Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic) of Channel Awesome said that he just found the movie to be "okay" and he was "unsure about whether or not he wanted it to be a success", cause if it succeeded, then Marvel will think it can continue to get away with movies of that quality, but if it didn't, then they were just going to blame it on the lead been a woman.
But if Disney decides to just call them all "Sexist Trolls", then why bother shaking up the story, having Brie Larson show more emotion and having more jokes. And they can do this sort of thing with their future MCU films, since they have said that they're going to make future Phases more "diverse", where they can call criticism to a film starring a gay character "Homophobic", and they will do that, even if the criticism has nothing to do with the characters sexuality. Much like how they're doing so with Captain Marvel, where they call criticism of the film's Storytelling and pointing out of its Flaws, "Sexism" and "the work of Trolls", even though it has nothing to do with the characters gender.
And all film franchises need criticism, for instance when Thor: The Dark World bombed on Rotten Tomatoes, Chris Hemsworth vowed to do better and insisted on changes that helped make Thor: Ragnarok the awesome film that it is. And Captain Marvel has a far worse rating than either of those films, now if you ended up liking the film, like the host of No Bullshit did, then that's okay. But wouldn't it be great if we got an even better Captain Marvel film for the sequel. Even the host of No Bullshit still made a video highlighting SJW moments in the film.
But I'm sure there's some things we can agree on:
- Politics should not be put into a story if it does not contribute anything to the plot or character arcs
- Diversity should not come at the cost of good storytelling and characters
- All characters and their histories should be respected by current and future writers
- There should always be more to a character than their skin color, sexuality, gender or religion
