Before anything, I am about a quarter into the 10th book of the Wheel of Time series. I came across an article with the showrunner of the upcoming Amazon Prime adaptation and he was answering questions from Twitter. I guess the changes are to be expected, but one person asked if there will be LGBT representation in the show and he said yes. They also asked about the "problematic" aspects of the book regarding treatment of women (due to torture and punishment).
Those two were the most annoying. The books have a lot of women in power and honestly so far women seem to be more competent than males. I notice the constant whining by some female fans if a female character has the least bit of adversity but men are routinely tortured and beaten ( saw this on the game of thrones reddit). As for the LGBT representation that just goes to the annoying trend of fans who have to "see themselves represented". Goes for everyone men, women, LGBT, etc. I would say you can always write your own story or only read stories written by someone that looks like you. I'm a black male and have read plenty of books where the characters were white and I never once thought about how diverse the characters were because I enjoyed the book. Same goes for books I ready by black, Asian, or Hispanic authors. Like I said, people who obsess over a diversity checklist need to write their own stories.
I remember Peter Jackson said that his goal was to show Tolkien's vision and not his. I guess nobody does that when adapting a book now. I'm undecided if I will watch it. Maybe wait for what they say here or what some of the youtubers I follow say.
The Left is all about superficiality. A character should be relatable because of who they are or what they do, not because of what they look like. Like finding Rincewind or Arthur Dent relatable because they appreciate boredom and know what an Interesting Life is really like. As for their damned sexual orientation, I don't see why I should care unless it's a love story/porno, and I'm not into either of those.
My two favorite comic book characters are Superman and Spider-Man. Then being white never mattered. I related to the fact they were idealistic like me.
Eh, that kind of isn't true about Superman when considering other versions like Val-Zod from Earth 2.
Val-Zod being black means from a comparative point of view against Kal-El, or any non black Kryptonian, he should be weaker.
Black skin exists because of localised geo-anatomical evolution where intense solar activity needed to be offset with melanin production so an individual would survive long enough to reproduce. Lots of other characteristics exist for the same reason, eye colour, blood types, etc.
As everyone organism has an energy budget [the sum total of energy they have to spend in their life] they need to balance how much is spent on surviving against how much is spent on reproducing given all things considered reproducing is the only endgame that matters to biology. So rather than going ham on producing more offspring that would just as easily die due to solar intensity related problems, some energy is spent on means to survive this environmental condition in both the parent and offspring.
Elsewhere in the world this physical feature isn't needed so it doesn't occur naturally. Hence white populations being endemic to temperate regions of the planet where the sun isn't as intense along with eye colours turning lighter the further you travel from the equator.
How this relates to Superman, and also to an extent space-faring, is that assuming Kryptonians also have darker skin for the same reason [which is admittedly applying IRL logic to things so more dismiss-able in the case of Superman than the other example I'm about to give], then the presence of melanin would hamper the ability to absorb solar energy as the melanin being above the rest of the skin cells would absorb it first. Kryptonians are literally solar power bio-batteries in many regards to the point that Poison Ivy has mistakenly tried to kidnap Clark Kent for that very reason because she could detect massive reserves of solar power in his presence not realising who he was at the time.
The other example regarding space-faring relates to how in the absence of planetary solar exposure, such as that you would find on spaceship, a human population would trend towards paler skin just as historically happened travelling from equatorial to temperate/arctic regions. Except more so in this case unless said space-farers found themselves on another planet or were actively exposing themselves to intense solar activity beyond what white populations experience on our planet. A light box for example can't turn you black, and neither can tanning beds but especially in the former case they still have uses. Spaceships would need to be very well shielded so any crew weren't irradiated outside of Earth's atmosphere.
Yet despite this Paradox kicked off about mods in their Stellaris game that would skew populations like this under the guise of it being racist despite it being just the usual, modern woke anti-white bullshit you get from popular entities these days.
I was saying as a kid those two were my favorite. I’m black and didn’t feel that they had to look like me to enjoy them. John Stewart green lantern was my favorite black character but I liked him because he was cool. But I grew up before the whole diversity checklist thing.
Same. The JL and JL:U cartoons are perhaps my favourite incarnation of the DC frontliners even though in some ways the lineup could perhaps be considered using a checklist what with using Stewart as the GL on the team and not Hal - although Hal does cameo in a timeline episode.
As a more topical question:
What did your parents think of those options?
We'd have much better stories in writers understood that we relate to what's inside more than what's on the outside.