DearFilm said:
So according to Bob, embracing double standards is the only real way to treat our popular culture's derth of interesting or complex minority characters. So changing a Norse god's race was preferable to creating a new character who is black. Thor had an entire Earth-based realm that was set in modern day America, and yet it was less culturally diverse than Asgard.
This strikes me as a kind of racism in and of itself. It is as though you do not trust minorities or those who write them to create a new and unique character on their own, so you have to "gift" them characters who have already been created. You are allowing them to "prove" their racial equity only through the appropriation of another race's character. It's like if a black African chef wanted to prove his worth in a French kitchen, but rather than let him make his own recipe, gave him a recipe already perfected by a white French cook. This betrays an astounding amount of condescention on the part of anyone who argues this way.
Honestly, some characters can be changed and can benefit from said change in the long run. I think Spider-Man as a young black kid from Queens makes a lot of sense and could be interesting because this is the real world, and that character is set to reflect modern ideas and experience. A Norse god, however, seems to resist this change. Instead, we should be trying to create characters grounded in a racial identity, so "appropriation" instead becomes "creation."
I do like parts of your arguement, but I think we'll have to wait a while for any new substantial ethnic characters in the realm of comics, and I tell you why. Many of the most famous comic book characters, the ones the cartoons and movies are made from, are very old, the youngest about thirty years. many of them predate even the earliest days of racial sensitivity, and DC has been known to have vocal racist (as in, edit background characters so that they were white, moved all black people in the universe he wrote in to a segragated island, racist) writing characters. When the first batches of ethnic characters came around in the 70's they were laughable stereotypes, such as Apache Cheif (who's power had nothing to do with his name or Native American garb), The Samurai (who's powers had nothing to do with his name or somewhat Japanese clothing), Black Vulcan (Insert smae bullshit here), and El Dorado (See before). Marvel did better at times, but they were still far from perfect. The Falcon, was a pimp or something at one point and Luke Cage was a jive-talking mercenary.
Now Marvel and DC both hold a major monopoly on the heroes we are introduced to. And it's highly unlikley that they are going to hire ethnic writers solely for the purpose of writing ethinic characters. While minorities could start their own publishing companies to write ethnic characters, that doesn't seem like an idea that is going to do well to me. So for now we're basically stuck with hopeing that whatever white guy (I'm sure they do occasionally have enthic writers, but for the most part, this) is writing are characters at the moment has some racial awareness, and isn't a secret member of the klan.
Now on the subject of Norse Gods, three points can be made. One, nobody is really worshipping Odin anymore, so how upset can we be? It's not like they made Budhha an Inuit Eskimo or turned Jesus gay? Two, Heimdall, to my knowledge, was something of a minor character, I had never heard of him before the controversy, and he only get's about ten minutes of screen time anyway. Three, the Norse gods, as depicted by Marvel, are ALIENS. does it really matter what their norse creators pictured them to be when we've already reduced them to aliens?
