Diversity and Comics
Gamergate has started up again. To arms, citizens.
I have become a loyal fan and follower of Zack (not his real name) who works at a Sunny D factory (not his real work) and made videos roasting or praising modern comic books, usually Marvel, which he called “SJW Marvel.”
The name of his channel is Diversity and Comics. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrlzSqLSGj8GIOeT5jrQsJA
To be sure, there are other critics and commentators on the state of modern comics, but Zack has a particular appeal, because he is funny without being frantic, he does not swear, and he knows more about comics than even someone like me; and I consider myself pretty well read in the field.
Or, rather, I once was. I stopped reading comics when a sniper killed off Captain America. I took that as a symbol, a sign, of the attitude of the comic book writers and company owners toward America itself, and realized that the wonder, the spectacle, the thoughtless awesomeness, the color and action and over-the-top heroism I sought in superhero comics would no longer be forthcoming.
I told myself that once they resurrected Cap from the dead, winch as a comic book company, I thought they were bound to do eventually, I would return.
Good lord, how I underestimated the true depravity, narcissism, and utter lack of talent of these people who took over Marvel and made it into SJW Marvel.
If Zack is to be believed (and I, for one, believe him) that selfsame rot which turned the Hugo Awards in one decade from the most highly respected fan award in science fiction for the most popular and best written works in our genre and reduced it to a far-leftwing joke for freakshows with mental problems; that selfsame rot has run rampant in Marvel, and ruined all our best beloved characters we have known since childhood.
The excuse given is this is being done in order to introduce more diversity hires among the superheroes at Marvel. The excuse is false and unconvincing, indeed, insolently so. The excuse is meant to offend, to tell Marvel fans, who have always been the most entirely unbigoted fans in the history of anything anywhere, that we are bigots. I call shenanigans on that, and bull droppings.
Like having a riot at Berkeley, or accusing Star Trek of being too Rightwing, it is not the conservatives any SJW ever erects the banners of war to crusade against, but only soft targets, people already on their side, people already friendly and unwilling to raise the feeblest defense.
Marvel has had many minority superheroes from their earliest days, and been more diversified than the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise. Ben Grimm is Jewish; Invisible Girl is female, as is Hellcat and Mockingbird, Wasp, Valkyrie, Medusa, Crystal, Marvel Girl, Scarlet Witch, and Storm; Black Panther, Luke Cage, Misty Knight, Monica Rambeau, Falcon, War-Machine, Blade, Brother Voodoo were black characters introduced half a century ago, or longer. Black Panther is actually older than the anarchist movement of the same name.
A personal favorite character of mine is Dwayne Tailor, the Nigththrasher. He is a millionaire orphan who use as a bulletproof razor-edged skateboard to fight crime. If you do not get that, you do not get comics. They are finally bringing him to the screen in a new show, but I will not be watching it, since they jammed in a token lesbian into the team lineup, and I have been conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs with the knowledge that lesbian superheroine = bad writing. Nonetheless, Nightthrasher is awesome in a way that only a teen ripoff of Batman, with a skateboard rather than a batmobile, can really be.
Note that some of these minority characters date back to the first days of Marvel. They were real characters with real problems. But the modern incarnations turn all the girls either into silly millennials, or ultra militant masculine girls. And the blacks suddenly lack personalities, problems, and differences of opinion.
I cannot list them all, but here is a choice few: Thor is gone, upstaged and replaced by Lady Thor, who is actually Jane Foster.
The Real Jane Foster
Foster was once a nurse, the love interest of Don Blake, and she did things like help sick children. Now she coldcocks evildoers with a honking big hammer, and says she never feels truly alive save when shedding enemy blood in battle a la Conan the Barbarian.
Not the Real Jane Foster
Gal Thor is not an original character, like Sif or Valkyrie, but merely an attempt to blot out male Thor at a time when the Chris Hemsley movies are blockbusters.
She is not even original with herself. Jane Foster picking up Thor’s hammer is from an episode of WHAT IF #10 (August, 1978). Her name is actually Thordis.
It is not new. It’s been done. Except the WHAT IF handled it better (she ends up being granted immortality and marrying Thor by the end).
And, by the bye, no one else who ever picked up the hammer of Thor, not Beta Ray Bill, not Throg the Frog, even took on the name of Thor, or gained his skill, memory, or personality. But this insolent insult to the continuity hinders not the onward rush of social justice. Logic and good storytelling are flung out the window by these Philistines.
Spiderman has been blotted out by Miles Morales, a half-hispanic half-black with no particular personality. The writers seem not to want to give him any personality, for fear of giving his troubles and woes, which in turn might open them to the witchhunter accusation of being racist.
Hawkeye has been blotted out by female Hawkeye. He has an interesting backstory, and some dramatic personal problems. She is a nonentity who suddenly is the best archer in the Marvel Universe for no particular reason.
Iron Man has been blotted out by Riri Williams, a teen-aged black girl who steals things and accidentally conquers eastern European nations. Instead of having problems like shrapnel lodged near the heart as Iron Man does, the girl version of Iron Man is both utterly incompetent, and utterly flattered, praised, and supported by one and all.
Wasp has been blotted out by Wasp, a girl who never puts on her wasp suit, never shrinks down and never fights crime.
Hulk has been blotted out by Amadeus Cho, and also by She-Hulk, both of whom now use the name Hulk. Unlike Bruce Branner, whose is cursed by a Jekyll/Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster combo of infinite strength and brain-destroying rage, Cho and She-Hulk are possessed of perfect self control, and have no drama. She-Hulk has lost her John Byrne era good looks, her green skin, and her desire to fight crime, and instead looks ugly and gray skinned.
Sam Wilson, the Falcon, has replaced Steve Rogers as Captain America. This one is not as egregious as the others, and, if taken in isolation, might have seemed legitimate, not an attempt at blot out. But Sam Wilson now has the same problem any black student in an affirmative action college has, when people can no longer tell is his diploma was earned or merely granted.
Also, I like Falcon. Why is his black super identity being smothered? Are blacks somehow not legitimate in SJW eyes until they put on the garb and take up the name of a white original?
Let me emphasize that these are not cases where, for example, Robin grows up into Nightwing and someone else puts on Robin’s outfit to replace him, or where Blue Beetle takes up the costume and legacy of the original Blue Beetle.
Neither is any one of these a case where Superman has a cousin or Commissioner Gordon has a daughter who is a female version of a previously established character. That kind of thing happens in comics all the time, and no one cares or minds. Those things are meant to honor the previous character, or provide an interesting variation on a theme.
This is different.
This is like Muslims dynamiting the giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. It is the destruction of the icons and symbols of infidels.
This is blotting out the old character. Anyone who is white, straight, heroic or male is being replaced by someone who is not.
The Fantastic Four is gone. Iceman is now gay, despite sixty years of his previous history. America Chavez is a gay Latino from another dimension, not from Mexico or South America, so she is not actually Latino. She comes from a dimension where the humanoid species has only one sex and reproduces by parthenogenesis, so, technically speaking, she is not gay either.
Ms Marvel turned into female Captain Marvel, who blotted out male Captain Marvel, who was a turncoat Kree. The new Ms Marvel, who has nothing to do with the Kree, is an Inhuman Muslim girl from Jersey whose book contains nothing other than SJW propaganda and pro-Jihad crapola. She also is grotesque, since her superpower allows her to swell up in size, strength, and make her fists larger than balloon.
Oh, and, yes, they did indeed, as predicted, resurrect Captain America back from the dead. And then they made him into a Nazi. Hail, Hydra!
Basically, all the books now draw all their female characters to be flat chested and narrow hipped and square jawed. The menfolk, meanwhile, instead of being muscled like Greek Gods, are portrayed either as nice hence weak, ineffective, and effete, or as masculine, hence barbaric, ignorant, silly and evil.
Plots, writing, drama, and storytelling has been flushed away down the water closet with very few exceptions.
The fact of the matter is that SJWs cannot tell stories. We saw this same thing in the science fiction field among the Hugo nominees: the more SJW was in a story, the less drama. The reasons for this are complicated, but the basic problem is that SJWs have a worldview that is false to facts about nearly every aspect of human nature and human morality, and instead have a fake, flat, one-dimensional view which contains neither heroism nor personal responsibility.
You cannot have drama in a situation where no one is responsible for his own actions, and no one can change any outcomes.
If society or skin color is to blame for everything, and explains everything, individual action, that thing which makes drama dramatic, means nothing.
A victim who can never win, and merely whining, is not drama. An oppressor with no redeeming characteristics, who can never repent, likewise has no drama. And yet the SJW worldview allows for no other type of people: everyone is either an utterly helpless victim or an utterly irredeemable oppressor.
You cannot have any drama in a story where no one is responsible for his actions for the same reason you cannot have an exciting debate between two people who neither use reason nor have any ability to explain or defend their positions. Without reason, without an objective rational standard, the debate cannot be an attempt to find the truth by means of an adversarial exchange. There is no movement away from error toward truth.
Likewise, without personal responsibility, without morality, there is no drama. No one is fighting the evil impulses in himself, or the evil men menacing the peace, and no one is crusading to defend and uphold the good, if there is no such thing as good and evil. No moral standard means no drama.
SJWs are parasites who cannot create, only destroy. They are naturally attracted to longstanding characters, as in Star Trek or comic superheroes, who have years and years of franchise material behind them, because such characters automatically bring a weight of influence and gravity to them.
Inventing a new character does them no good, because it destroys nothing, and tweak no one’s nose. The SJW does not want to tell a story about a Viking warrior goddess. He want to blot out Thor. And Iron Man. And Wasp. And Captain America and Captain Marvel. And Spidey. And Hulk. And Iceman.
Well, the truth hurts. Even though my boy Zack is merely a guy who works at a Sunny D factory making Go-Gurt, Marvel comics now has it out for him and and the press has joined in a concerted, coordinated, orchestrated effort to demean and disparage him and other comic book critics like him.
In the same way that Larry Correia (hispanic) and Sarah Hoyt (female) and Brad Torgersen (married to a black woman) were painted as being white supremacist, neo-nazi, woman-hating racists, merely for raising a voice in protest about the ongoing corruption and destruction of the science fiction field, so too is Zack and others like him now under fire as a neonazi and racist for raising a voice in protest about the onogoing corruption and destruction of the comic book industry.
This is the same battle as we saw fought with gamers during Gamergate. The sides are the same: lonely freakshow sociopaths who make Political Correctness into their religious cult attacking and attacking and attacking innocent patrons, clients, and customers who want a good product, and some return for their entertainment dollar, not to be lectured to.
The fight is starting again. Raise your voices in protest, if you have ever loved a superhero. They want all our heroes blotted out, and even the idea of heroism dead.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
