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Augen on 12 May 2014
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binary solo said:


But why does Spiderman have to be a white person? If Peter Parker is killed off and they chose to 're-create Spiderman then why does the new Spiderman have to be a white dude? What exactly is wrong with introducing racial diversity in that way? The way that is contrived and awkward is if Robert Downey stops playing Tony Stark and they replace him with Denzel Washington as Tony Stark. But if Tony Stark either quits or dies then Don Cheadle taking over as Iron man is all good, nes pa?

And of course the other point is we should not be confined by the casual racism of the first 3/4s of the 20th century where almost every Superhero was a white dude, and occasionally a white chick. The fact that our default expectation of a Superhero is they are white means there's still an underlying racial bias.

Spider-Man is Peter Parker, who happens to be white, happens to be American, an American and starts out a nerdy teenager.  He is not Ben Reilly or Otto Octavius (who both are also white) so it is more with the lack of respect to a character or a mythos than being against diveristy. Given the way he acquired his powers (by an accident) the only successor I could see is an offspring.

Make a new hero, make him or her what ever you want, and let them stand on their own. Cyborg is black and has managed to move up the ranks in DC from the TItans to the Justice League. It feel authentic over decades to see a character grow and develop and come into their role.

On Iron Man, Rhodes, who is War Machine, did take on role of Iron Man for a bit.  The question to me is why can't War Machine be his own hero, get his own stories and not always feel like a level below Iron Man.  Make a War Machine movie with Cheadle and I'd be fine with that.

I agree with this last point that white should not be a the deafult. We should introduce characters that show the diversity of humanity in super hero stories to get unique and interesting stories.  However, we shouldn't do it by just killing off and replacing all the old characters for the sake of it.