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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Characters like Miles Morales generally have pretty high approval ratings because he is an interesting character in his own right and they didn't just make Peter Parker black.

People can repeat this as many times as they like, but I refuse to believe it. At best, it just feels like historical revisionism.

Miles was very much made as a black Spiderman, and only worked when they actually, y'know, killed Peter off. It's telling that the only way they made Miles work as a character when matching him up with the original was by changing the original completely - making him older, wiser, and a little more cynical.

No, Miles is just a bad collection of racial tropes pasted onto the original, and very much a racial takeover of the worst type - oh, and he has a hot blonde girlfriend, because that's what always happens with black characters in American comics, for some reason.

'Comic book popularity' is a worthless measure when the entirety of comic book sales in America are outshone by a single manga series. 'But the movies' are a worthless measure given all the sheer effort they had to do to make it work, and when people talk about 'Into the Spider-verse', all I hear is stuff about Miguel O'Hara.

So, no, I disagree. I place Miles alongside all the other race-swaps - worse, because people keep trotting him out as 'one of the good ones', when he really, really isn't.

I've never read a comic book in my life so those could be different. I thought the first movie was pretty good though and I went in expecting to hate it. Also isn't he gay? All I know about him is that movie and people's impression of it and the video game which people seem to really like.

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