ace_of_something said:
It's not 'FORCING' diversity. The heroes he mentioned are all canonically their respective races. Honestly I was a little surprised they didn't make Hawkeye a different race. Either way I think Power Man and Iron Fist should get a Heroes for Hire movie. They should make Iron Fist completely Asian for this as opposed to half or not at all. Though it might be boring to have two more 'we can punch stuff really hard' guys join the team.
I thought it was awesome they have Black Widow. Little kids identify with people 'like them' weather you try to train them or not. My foster daughter wants to be Black Widow for halloween now. She's a superhero for little girls. Nothing wrong with it.
Would it kill us to let one of the existing minority characters join up? Like it or not kids watch superhero movies. I mean Black Panther has been in the avengers FOREVER. What about Falcon?
Also, when is Doctor Strange getting a movie? IT WOULD BE FUCKING AWESOME.
[a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Avengers_members]The Wiki[/a] there's been like 100 avengers. I think we can find some minorities with cool powers without 'shoehorning' anything.
Understand that The Avengers is Marvel's big dumping ground for characters. It's not the kind of flagship title the JLA is where you routinely have all the big names together, even if the two are compared (and both are successful in their own right). In general there is one major character in The Avengers to act as an anchor (which rotates), and generate base appeal. Then the rest of The Avengers is made up of second string characters, those who are popular, but not popular enough to hold their own book at that time, or characters with a waning fan base, or experimental works that Marvel is unsure about. The idea is basically to sell a title by having all these second stringers together, where few people would buy a title just about that character. Sometimes Avengers characters go on to their own titles (or recovery back to them), or disappear to occasional cameo appearances or disappear entirely. The cases where you actually see "The Avengers" concept in action, with all the Marvel big wigs (Thor, Iron Man, etc..) together happen, but are comparitively rare because those characters can hold their own title. From a publishing perspective they all take turns being the anchor character (or maybe two of them) but that is never anything like a permanant position. On a few occasions there have been Avengers teams with absolutly no "A list" marvel characters at all, or where with all the regular Avenger anchors being busy within the continuity another big character had to be written in when the title started to flag a bit. As a result we've had cases where characters not normally associated with The Avengers have been with them for a brief period of time, and might even occasionally be brought up as Avengers reserve members as a technicality. Spider Man for example is an Avengers reservist, but he's usually holding down his own comics, and even balancing multiple titles specifically based on or around him at one time.
The point of this explanation is that the majority of those characters are Avengers because they suck and failed (sorry to say it). They are characters that do not have any substantial fan base. In some cases it's even a matter of the character being a result of Affirmitive action where they wanted a black character just to have one, and by setting out to do it caused the character to suck, and it never went beyond third string status. Going through the Avengers list of minority characters would probably be almost like a like a gallery of fail and examples of exactly how you don't do this, as proven by that character and it's performance.
My basic attitude is that we'll see good minority super heroes, but they can't be created because someone sets out to create them for the sake of balance, it has to happen on it's own, as a result of someone creating a decent character on their own, without prompting, that happens to be black. As soon as race, sexual orientation, etc... gets mentioned at the forefront it's a recipe for fail. The minority characters that succeeded to an extent like say Apollo & Midnighter (gay), or Spawn (black), did it in part because nobody was screaming "we are going to have these gay super heroes", it just sort of happened. Likewise Spawn was never promoted as being some big minority thing as far as I ever saw, he was just Spawn, and Spawn happened to be black... and incidently it pretty much made Todd Mcfarlane's career.
Political correctness and affirmitive action are never good things, and destroy everything they touch. Indeed the more you act on those principles the less the chances are that you'll ever see genuine change in any signifigant way. Pushing for things, right this minute, especilally if based on principles like guilt, and perceived injustices that don't really exist in any current context, does not end well.
Incidently if your ever really interested look up some of the black and minority characters Marvel and DC has run over the years. There are shocking numbers of them, if you really read up on them, you'll notice that pretty much all of them were created for the purpose of diversity, and all of them were both forced and kind of sucked. The handfull of characters we have that are minorities in comics are usually ones that came about with other intent, or happened to be good. Storm, Black Panther, etc... they have been in publication for decades compared to some characters like oh say Rocket Racer (anti-hero, started as a spider man villain if I remember), Battlestar, or Triathlon who at best seem to get occasional appearances or mention nowadays (and only pretty serious comic nerds know who they are). They have been used in teams (and Triathlon was even the crux of an entire Avengers story arc) and given plenty of chances... but well, crap characters tend to all wind up in the same place, and really comics is pretty cutthroat.
Of course some of those characters are probably the very favoritist of someone out there despite their performance. I myself really liked a few (now obscure) characters that never went anywhere, but sadly it's just the way it goes.
If they are going to put a minority into The Avengers, not that it would be a good idea, the movie continuity would require a major character of which there are only a couple that come close, as the movie-verse is fueled differant, and involves The Avengers as the major characters all the time as opposed to being a dumping ground (ie people right now would not go to see a movie based around your typical Avengers roster, they want characters they know, the gimmick that created The Avengers, not what the title turned into and was used as).
I would find it absolutly hilarious if someone who had no clue about comics greenlit an FX-fueled "Avatar-Like" extravaganza featuring an intentionally diverse cast of characters he hand picked from Marvel's roster based on apperance, and inadvertantly created a huge gallery of big budget fail, as some of the stupidist characters in comics all showed up in the same movie together. amd demonstrated in detail why they did not work to begin with. "Oh hey, here is a super hero that is basically a homeless guy, who looks like one! We'll put him in for the sake of diversity!, A hopeless nerd with Cybernetic Lobsters, that's gold!". It would be awesome to see 800 million dollars spent so we could see Cybernetic Lobsters used to fight crime (and these are normal sized lobsters... and no I'm not making that up, his name was Gomi I believe,it's been a while but I think he ran with The New Mutants).
