Chanigng characters race or sexuality for DC characters

[AmiMizuno]

How do you guys feel about this. I mean Dc already has many characters that would fill the need for diverse. Yet doesn't use them and changes a character people know. Like we have Alan Scott. I mean they have his son who is gay. I mean they could also being back Earth 2. They have gotten backlash before. So why keep doing this?

[sifighter]

I'm fine with it, to me unless it's really significant the characters race or sexuality to who they are then I can accept the change. Like what does it matter if Alan Scott is gay, yes it does change his past relationships but it doesn't effect who he is as a superhero. It's not like I'm suddenly disinterested in reading him, it's just now he is going to be dating men in his free time. Like the Black Adam movie has Hawkman being black, what exactly does that hurt especially with a character whose various past lives could be an ethnicity.

However if you were too suddenly say make Black Adam American instead of egyptian or Midnighter straight then I think it is a problem because you are taking away from underrepresented groups.

[Celgress]

I'm fine with it, to me unless it's really significant the character's race or sexuality to who they are then I can accept the change....

My thoughts exactly. You can't make Wonder Woman a man or Aquaman gay (unless you gender swap Mera because she is so important to his story) for example.

[Lightning Rider]

Writers have to reckon with the fact that they are reproducing a genre defined largely by straight white male characters. It can't just be ignored, even if I love those characters.

I prefer when existing characters of color who are authentically conceived to be of color are given the spotlight. It's better for everyone.

New characters are also welcome. The counter-argument to that is that new or legacy characters routinely get ignored or shuffled back in favor of the originals, and there is a point there. You'd be hard-pressed to argue that a brand new character will ever challenge the trinity in stature, but that doesn't mean they can't become wildly popular.

Where any bending does occur, I'd rather it be very limited, selective, and that it make internal sense for a character. Revealing a character with opposite-sex partners to be bisexual, or a character with no previously depicted romantic partners whatsoever to be gay, or a presumably white character to have an alternative ancestry that still tracks with their origin, can work without disrupting the story. But often the approach is half-baked and feels forced. Nobody likes that.

[superduperman]

As time goes on, white people will become a minority. That's just an objective fact. In order to stay relevant, these characters are going to have to change eventually anyway. I see it more as getting out in front of something before it happens more than "political correctness". Comics, and DC in particular, have a bad history of being behind the times on social changes. I think they want to avoid that. As far as someone like Alan Scott goes; look, we're over five years out from gay marriage becoming legal and you still have people trying to undo it. My experience is, the people who complain about gay characters and whatnot are usually the same people who, by their own admission, don't want these groups gaining acceptance in society to begin with. So it's a little hard to take their criticism seriously. Alan would still be straight if people had just gotten over this stuff 20 years ago like they should have. And, yeah, getting new characters to catch on is hard in this day and age. And I think a lot of the people who keep saying "why can't you just create a new character" are sort of counting on that. They don't want these groups gaining anymore traction either. So if some rando character banged out five minutes ago doesn't catch on, that helps them.

Does Alan Scott being gay take away from his ability to be a Lantern? Is he suddenly going to lose to Solomon Grundy? If the answer is no, than nothing is really lost storywise. Yes, companies can go a bit overboard with the "perfect minority" stuff (looking right at you, America Chavez) but it's also sometimes necessary to move society forward. Again, my view is that we should be well past some of these fights by now anyway.

[I'm a Fish]

With sexuality, in real life that actually can change for people. Sexuality is a wide spectrum, some people might be 99% more attracted to one gender than the other but still find that one person of the same sex they are attracted too. Also sexuality can be something people go into denial for for years before coming to terms with it.
When a comic book character comes out as gay or otherwise, I don't really see it as a retcon. I have know people who's sexuality I assumed was straight due to the people they dated, but it was more complicated than that. So when a character comes out, I see it the same way.

(Also bisexuality is a thing that comics could use more of I think...)

Race is more complicated in some aspects because it's not something a person can hide, like sexuality. With race bending, as with sexuality bending and gender bending, it has become a tool used by cooperation's to garner positive publicity. (No company would change a characters race, gender or sexuality if someone hadn't convince them it would make the company money, that extends to creating new characters as well BTW, it's all for money in the eyes of the cooperation.).

I think it all depends on how the person responsible for the new status quo of the character handles it. If they approach the change with sincerity, than I approve of it.

These changes are usually more apparent in comic-to-movie adaptations anyway, in which case it is providing more job opportunities of a wider verity for minorities in the entertainment industry. And a wider audience demographic watches movies than reads comics.

[Digifiend]

Making Alan Scott gay made a lot more sense than when Marvel did it with Iceman. Homosexuality was illegal in the US until the 1970s, so it makes sense that someone who was born 100 years ago would stay in the closet and even get married and have kids. I think he probably waited for his wife Molly to die before coming out to his kids. Compare that to Iceman, who would've been born about 30 years ago and had a number of girlfriends before being outed by his telepathic teammate Marvel Girl. Had the X-Men been time displaced from the 1960s it might have made sense, but the teenage version of him was only from around 2000 (bear in mind the story was published in 2014), so there would've been no reason to pretend to be straight.

[The Darknight Detective]

Making Alan Scott gay made a lot more sense than when Marvel did it with Iceman. Homosexuality was illegal in the US until the 1970s, so it makes sense that someone who was born 100 years ago would stay in the closet and even get married and have kids. I think he probably waited for his wife Molly to die before coming out to his kids. Compare that to Iceman, who would've been born about 30 years ago and had a number of girlfriends before being outed by his telepathic teammate Marvel Girl. Had the X-Men been time displaced from the 1960s it might have made sense, but the teenage version of him was only from around 2000 (bear in mind the story was published in 2014), so there would've been no reason to pretend to be straight.

There are still some people today who are in the closet, so it wouldn't be that unusual even in this day and age. The thing that annoys me is when a character you know is straight, either by internal monologue and/or actions, is now completely gay. That's just stupid writing, IMO.

[BatmanJones]

There are still some people today who are in the closet, so it wouldn't be that unusual even in this day and age. The thing that annoys me is when a character you know is straight, either by internal monologue and/or actions, is now completely gay. That's just stupid writing, IMO.

Is there a gay way of thinking or behaving? Surely you mean something other than “talking gay” or limp wrists. What does gay “by his actions” mean outside of one’s sex life, which we wouldn’t have seen in old comics anyway?

[The Darknight Detective]

Is there a gay way of thinking or behaving? Surely you mean something other than “talking gay” or limp wrists. What does gay “by his actions” mean outside of one’s sex life, which we wouldn’t have seen in old comics anyway?

I most definitely wasn't talking about some stereotypical "gayness" in my previous post. I'm talking about, i.e. a female character who is gushing about this imale or that one in her own internal monologue, but later on her attraction for men just disappears in her thinking. That just makes no sense to me. Now talking about the opposite sex is a different matter, because that may just be a disguise in itself.

[Jim Kelly]

It often seems like they just throw a dart and whichever character they hit that's the one they select for diversity.

Alan Scott doesn't make much sense to me having read his original stories. At a stretch, pan-sexual maybe, but not gay. Now Al Pratt that's someone I can see as being a closeted gay male in the 1940s. I don't object to it when there's some basis for it, but it's just so random.

They seem to take any red-headed character and say now you're a person of colour. What is it about being "ginger" that gives them this notion, I wonder.

[Primal Slayer]

I'm fine with it as long it is still the character that I know and love.

When they attempted to reboot and racebend Wally, nothing about him was Wally except his name.

Changing sexualities is great, especially if it is a reboot of the character. Either you can go the Alan Scott way where he was closeted, still loved his wife and had kids but wasnt IN IN love with her. Or say if they rebooted Barry where he was gay....I would be fine with them genderbending Iris into a male.

They seem to take any red-headed character and say now you're a person of colour. What is it about being "ginger" that gives them this notion, I wonder.

It is funny/weird that red heads are most commonly race bent.

There are still some people today who are in the closet, so it wouldn't be that unusual even in this day and age. The thing that annoys me is when a character you know is straight, either by internal monologue and/or actions, is now completely gay. That's just stupid writing, IMO.

Yeah, bisexuality is still very commonly erased and ignored no matter the medium. We could definitely use more bi characters that actually act on it.

[The Darknight Detective]

Yeah, bisexuality is still very commonly erased and ignored no matter the medium. We could definitely use more bi characters that actually act on it.

Right. Making Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer bi would have been perfectly fine, but to have her not being attracted to men (and especially Zander) anymore was just asinine.

[BatmanJones]

It often seems like they just throw a dart and whichever character they hit that's the one they select for diversity.

Alan Scott doesn't make much sense to me having read his original stories. At a stretch, pan-sexual maybe, but not gay. Now Al Pratt that's someone I can see as being a closeted gay male in the 1940s. I don't object to it when there's some basis for it, but it's just so random.

They seem to take any red-headed character and say now you're a person of colour. What is it about being "ginger" that gives them this notion, I wonder.

I don’t think it’s random. It’s a far different thing thing for a man that’s married with kids to come out of the closet than one that seems to make more sense because we know less about him.

I grew up with kids whose fathers were coming out of the closet after having lived in it for most of their adult lives right into middle age, filled with shame and self-loathing, but also filled with love of their families. That’s not even about representation, it’s about telling an interesting and important story. It’s heavy and it’s real and it’s emotionally complex and it’s filled with ethical dilemmas like so many great stories are. And it’s very different than just learning something new about an old character.

I actually think making Al Pratt gay would be way more random and way, way less interesting.

[John Venus]

You're limiting the idea of exoticism to the color of her skin and green eyes as opposed to her actual features, which are incredibly Caucasian; if this woman or someone similar to her were to play Starfire there'd be nothing about her that sets her apart from a crowd in comparison to Anna Diop, who has her dark skin and her Africanized facial features setting her apart.

Also just the very definition of forcing or expecting a person to appear 'exotic' is already icky in itself.

Plus, Anna's face is a 1:1 match for comic book Starfire:



And under the right production can look like a comic accurate Starfire:

Most of the classic, most popular Titans don't 'need' to be white if any of them do. Gar is green, Donna is an Amazon, Dick isn't white in comics and shouldn't be white in adaptations in the first place, Garth is often seen as Asian coded, the most popular version of Wally West (that people know as Wally West) is black. The only one that might need to be white is Roy and that's to avoid dangerous stereotypes.

No disagreements there except for maybe the Wally part. The JLU and YJ versions of Wally West still has a lingering fan base.

I actually think making Al Pratt gay would be way more random and way, way less interesting.

Plus Al is a minor character in the grand scheme of things. Alan Scott is a member of the JSA trinity and associated with the GL franchise even though he's not technically a Corps members. Making him gay is a much bigger deal since he's a character you can't ignore easily.