@faraday said in Good TV:
@groth said in Good TV:
In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?
Not at all. I liked Connor Mason's character very much in Timeless as the eccentric billionaire inventor.
But I think it gets murkier when you have established properties. People come at it with expectations about the characters. There's more to Tony Stark than just "billionaire playboy". He has a backstory, which comes with a certain set of baggage.
For example, I didn't like it when RDM's Battlestar gender-swapped Starbuck. Not because I have anything against inclusion (on the contrary, I think it's vital), but because I had this "Dirk Benedict" image of this character etched in my head and it created a weird cognitive dissonance. I would much rather them have reimagined Sheba or Athena, or promoted a new character.
I get that it's different in comics, since there are already so many variants of characters. And that there's some marketing value in making a "female 007" versus a new and original spy character. At the end of the day, I applaud having more diversity. I just sometimes wonder if there's maybe a better way to get there.
Just my opinion, but it's sort of a 'chicken vs. egg' problem. You need to have diverse characters in order to encourage and attract diverse creators to make diverse characters that are more representative of diversity.
Example: the two iconic Black comic characters are, arguably, Luke Cage and Black Panther. But, both were created by White (Jewish) creators; Archie Goodwin and Jack Kirby, respectively. And at the time (late 60's/early 70's), Luke Cage and Black Panther sound and act like stereotypes. But, they inspired a generation of Black creators (Ta-Nehesi Coates, Christopher Priest, Dwayne McDuffy) who not only went on to make the characters more authentic and redefine them in the modern age, but also would create groundbreaking new characters like Static, and that increased the diversity of comics overall, bringing in more minority creative talents that created characters like Ms. Marvel and more.