Also? Not a good source to cite
He backs his criticism with an
on screen copy of the comic he's criticizing. So go watch it, to get the view of why it's bad, according to a major voice in the movement of people who think it's bad. If you're going to refuse to watch his take on it purely because of the politics you
think he has, then you're the one being much more prejudiced. He's hating on the diversity push
because it's a diversity
push. The character's races are chosen specifically to have a character of that race for the purpose of representation. That's tokenism. That's pandering. That is
a bad thing. The entire reason for the opposition is that it's
forcing diversity, rather than making characters that
happen to be X race. This is Marvel Comics fans, they had Storm
decades ago and rose no fuss about it. They'll sling shit at giving Blade a cameo because it's
solely a cameo referring to a comic they
actually liked.
Comicsgate is about hating on
pushing for diversity instead of just writing a diverse cast. They hate that the point of the characters being minorities is to have minority characters, rather than just making a character a minority because there's no reason not to and it doesn't impact the story
right now. These are not racist bigots, otherwise they'd not be into Marvel Comic's
real, unforced diversity from
decades ago. As in the
fucking 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement was still going on.
They're prime movers in a harassment movement
Comicsgate has firmly moved to "opposing subindustry" at this point, as they've literally gone and set up their own distributing and hide who's printing their stuff because the
last lot got shit slung at them by the established industry, leading to them needing to find new printers/distributors because the last ones were
bullied out of the deal. Also, it's hardly harassment to relentlessly nitpick
actual writing flaws like the shitshow of Riri Williams, as most of Comicsgate actually spends its time doing. Constantly slinging shit at authors for telling
bad stories, as decided by
their (former) customers, is ruthless criticism, not harassment.
harassing stores for not caring their books
He
pointed out that stores were refusing to carry their books and criticized the fact that the stores were refusing product that, by all appearances, was going to sell well, for
ideological reasons. He didn't hammer it relentlessly, as is needed to qualify as harassment. Seriously, he did, like, two videos on it, using
their own tweets to show it was about politics, rather than economics or personal likes.
They aren't well informed on comics
...You fucking
what? Dude, these are people who have been reading comics for
d e c a d e s. Some of them have fucking 80s issues they bought new. These are Marvel's
long term fans doing this criticism and being driven off by being handed things
they do not like in
replacement of what they
did like.
Which is... really something that should be intuitively straightforward, right? Serve more audiences > serving less audience, whether talking quality (if in range of types of quality if nothing else) or profit.
What this statement forgets is that white men were (and probably still are) over 80% of the consumer base, while also being about 30% of the population of the primary market space. Europe has white men be around 40% of the population. And they're
removing the old audience appeal, rather than introducing new lines. As I said, these people
would not have a problem with a full progressive message soaked line focusing on all the biases those people think society has en mass
if it was just a new line. Their issue is that
every line is being warped to fit this
single message and forcefully
push diversity.
The entire racial minority population of the United States is only a third or so larger than white men. And Marvel's done a whole lot to anger than demographic by taking away their representation, if you insist on that being needed, and on pure principal of nostalgia, these long-term fans have reasonable cause to despise the way Marvel's going because of rampant character replacement, however temporary. Bruce Banner got replaced by an Asian man with little-to-no forewarning, Iron Man got replaced by a black chick who's justifications are fucking racialized
spite, Peter Parker's replacement was at least written well enough to draw them back, but there was
quite the spike of hate built on "They got rid of Peter Parker in the Ultimate lineup"...
Marvel's
driving away its existing audience while trying to seek one that is considerably economically smaller and not much larger in population than their previous one, presuming the previous target audience was white men instead of Americans in general. It's bad business to replace your current lineup to seek a poorer, smaller audience. Poor minorities are a
terrible target audience, economically, so if this was
actually a reasoned business decision, then they'd have left the existing lineup untouched to retain the old audience as they tried to bring in a new one. But no, they're
politically motivated, and this time, the politics are intersectional,
demanding everything be tied together into a single message.
And the
existing customers want nothing to do with this, because they're mostly liberal white men. There are literally
hundreds of racial minority superheroes predating the turn of the millennium. Black Panther debuted in
1966, with nobody raising a fuss about it. And, quite notably, he became popular enough for the MCU. You don't see characters like Blade there (oh, and by the way, Blade had
three movies, all in the top 50 selling of their year, before Obama was President. Not a fucking
word about race was spoken in serious critique, and those movies are often considered responsible for the success of Superhero films going forwards. And Blade is, like, a C-lister, his primary presence in popular culture is the films).
Race alone
is not a problem to Marvel Comics fans. They've had diversity for the last 70 years or more, and never complained about it unless it was
actively pushed. Hell, even
with some of the pushed diversity, they were perfectly accepting. Ever heard of Iceman? The complaints about him being gay, when it first happened, were largely centered on the fact he was quite explicitly heterosexual in previous issues, rather than anything about hating gays. The fans were grumpy about a retcon for the sake of inclusivity, not the inclusivity itself. The modern homosexual characters get shit slung at them because their stories focus far too heavily on their sexuality for the fans' liking. They're perfectly fine with
having those characters, but it's
Marvel comics, they're in it for action, not a fucking soap opera romance fairly transparently done for the sake of
pushing diversity.