Hated Tropes
Things meant to be progressive just end up being incredibly offensive
What If - In one of the comics Miles becomes Thor, and it's full of stereotypes about black people such as the Mjolnir having graffiti on it and the infamous "by Odin's fade"
i think the writer was paid per racist stereotype. like he had random shoes hanging on wires. kept confusing things seen in poor urban areas with black culture.
"We made a progressive comic everyone! Black Batman is hanging from trees, Black Killer Croc is baiting crocodiles, Black Moon Knight picks the cotton for his suit himself and we also made Black Iron man look like he's wearing blackface but he also doesn't look like Robert Downey JR in Tropic Thunder! Surely everyone will love that!"
A story framed as an anti-colonial resistance narrative, ends up whitewashing a brutal slaver Kingdom (Dahomey) that played a pivotal role in the Transatlantic slave trade.
Thank god this is at the top. That Kingdom was one of the most evil in history. The only reason it had female soliders was because it had enslaved so many men it didn't have enough to form an army.
Genuinely insane this got green lit. Whilst woke has lost all meaning with how much its been used, the people who thought glazing an evil slaver Kingdom as an anti slavery icon is the embodiment of woke stereotypes, out of touch and living in an alternate reality.
It's probably the same reason why you'd never be able to do a Hernan Cortes movie with the Aztecs as protagonists. The Mexica really were dicks in every way (most of the recruits for Cortes' army were Mexica vassals/rivals who wanted payback for previous defeats/"flower wars" they would be forced to host so the Aztecs could gather up victims for human sacrifice).
I don't know, there have been plenty of movies with the Spartans as the protagonists. They were also very oppressive to the helots in the area around Sparta. The helots were somewhere between an enslaved class and serfs, and their subjugation was the main reason Spartan citizens were able to live in relative luxury and practice a form of eugenics. That said, there's been a lot more time in recorded history to whitewash them
There is a blog called "This Isn't Sparta" which argues that the agoge is much more equivalent to gang indoctrination than military training or public education, and that every single Spartan boy was both a victim and a perpetrator of sexual assault (you could only be a Spartan citizen if you were admitted into a mess group, which required a unanimous communal vote from everyone, including the "dorm parent". If that guy said he would endorse you in exchange for sexual favors, there was no way to refuse).
I know a Paedo hunting group called Spartan Protection something here in Scotland and I wanna say to them their name is stupid but then I remember they probably watched 300 rather than actually read a fucking book
I remember when 300 came out, critics said it was this allegorical right-wing wet dream about the Iraq War (since a bunch of buff white guys shouting "FREEDOM!" are slaughtering a bunch of ugly Middle Easterners), but the hilarious thing is that the Persians (a massive multinational multiethnic empire hellbent on conquest) are more more analogous to the USA than the Spartans (a bunch of fanatics so committed to their beliefs they would rather suicidally charge to their doom than give up)
Adding El Dorado (Latino) Apache Chief (Native American) Black Vulcan (African-American) for Superfriends in 1977
They were added to diversify the roster, but they never gave them fleshed out back stories and half had poorly defined and inconsistent powers.
They were also barely used in the show as more air time was given to the more popular established superheroes.
El Dorado, whose name means "the golden one" in Spanish and refees to a legendary city of gold, could teleport (his most common power), super strength, telepathy.
Apache Chief could grow in size by saying "Inuk Chuk", had a danger sense and was a good tracker because he's NA. Also he spoke in the stereotypical terse talker way most NA characters were depicted as in Westerns.
Black Vulcan was supposed to be the already established Black Lightning, but DC didn't want pay his creator Tony Isabella licensing rights.
Samurai had wind powers and could travel by becoming a floating head with jet of energy coming out the back. Despite being a samurai, he never used a sword or any other weapons nor did any martial arts.
Explicitly focusing on their ethnicity would have helped the originals not suck ass. The lack of study or care for their ethnicities is what made them bad.
If the creators did two minutes of research into Latin American mythology, they could have come together with a distinct set of powers and appropriate backstory that would actually help.
If Samurai has anything to do with Japan, he's be better than "floating skull guy."
The motive isn't the problem, is the zero-effort execution.
Nobody gets mad about The Thing's deep Jewish roots as a character or inspiration from the Golem. You can get iconic characters and good stories from respectfully integrating ethnic or religious history.
This is the flip side of thought that anything can be a joke, it just really depends on who's telling it. These character beats CAN be super cool and meaningful, but you have to tell the story right.
The Black Lightning CW show made it clear that it was impossible to separate his ethnicity from his life, and it worked! It was compelling! Same with Luke Cage; a bulletproof Black man in a hoodie was not an accidental image.
The Boys did a great job with this in the A-Train storyline too, and even lampshaded it in the bio pic they were forcing him to make.
I know I’m getting old when I think the teen designs look adorable lol. But these guys look so *mom voice* handsome! Their street clothes look so thoughtful and well intentioned to their backgrounds without being overt!
My friends used to watch venture bros all the time, and there was this one gag where a native american superhero hero says his
power was to grow three inches taller or smaller. I could never figure out who he was supposed to be based on...now I finally know it's Apache Chief.
This has been a mystery in my life for like 8 years and you finally solved it. Thank you lol
The gag in venture bros was that he was interviewing to join an evil villain society, and to show off his powers he “grew” by standing on his tip toes lol
Family guy has a cutaway gag to the Apache Chief growing super tall to help put a satellite TV dish on Peter’s house
They made her supernaturally more skilled than all the guys without trying. I get that they were probably trying to go for a girl power thing, but it sort of comes off as "Unless you're built different like Mulan, and you aren't, you can't do any of this shit so don't bother."
Why make the most strongest princess in the Disney princess cast a cardboard Mary Sue who just wins with barely any effort. It feels more disrespectful and more like it's making fun of her potential and her achievements. What I loved about Mulan is how brave and hard working she is, she wants to save her country and her family, and uses her brains and brawn to get strong enough to achieve her goal. She is a great example for girls.
I also hated how they deleted most important characters like Shang, Mushoo and the Mongolian Warlord main villain. Why? What's the point? And they replaced main antagonist with some boring bird witch, or whatever, she is forgettable as fuck, I don't care.
I love how their reason for not including Mushu is cause he’s unrealistic but then they include an actual fucking sorceress that wasn’t even in the original. They made up an entirely new, MORE unrealistic character
I'd argue even more important than Mulan's bravery and hard work was the fact she succeeds by being who she is. By bringing her own personality, skills, and perspective, she is able to figure out solutions to problems that others struggle with. Its a great message not only about how being yourself can help you to meet challenges, but also paints the conservative system that rejects being yourself as foolish and destined for failure.
I gotta a theory that’s exactly why they gave her superpowers.
If you look at all the live action remakes, none of the main characters resolve their stories any more. A character with wealth or power unobtainable to the masses does.
Cinderella? Gives up and resigns herself to lifelong servitude. The prince rescues her.
Aladdin is now too dumb to trick Jafar, the Genie does it for him.
Belle cannot break the spell on the castle, everyone dies. The witch fixes everything.
But hard work was the original message of Mulan, so they were stuck. How do you make the success of hard work unobtainable? Make it magic instead. Problem solved. Now the children won’t get ideas.
Just when you think it can't get any worse the ending has Evil Sorceress Lady ask Mulan to join her because they're both highly skilled and fuck the patriarchy. Mulan tells her to know her place and get back in the kitchen.
In the Artemis Fowl movie Holly Short's superior officer, captain Root, is changed to be a woman. The problem is that Holly is supposed to be the first woman to join that prestigious unit, and her trying to prove she can fit in is a big part of her character. Having there already be female officers in the unit takes that away. It also removes a lot of Root's character, since in the books he's so hard on Holly because he knows she's going to be the trend setter for future women in the force.
Another from Artemis foul is that the butler is black and they made it clear the butler’s bloodline served the fowl family for generation after generation
I'm more annoyed that he's described as "Eurasian" but w/a case to be made for an Arabian actor playing him, making it a rare case of casting of a black guy making the casting less progressive/boundary-pushing than it could have been.
My read on him was more that he came from the communities in the southern portion of the Soviet block, where you have non-white, non-slavic peoples. So maybe ethnically Uzbeck or Kazakh.
Would also have been cool. I can't recall a single movie character from that part of the world who isn't "ethnically ambitious unnamed terrorist," or "Sasha Baron Cohen being racist, but most people think it's funny enough to not matter."
The cancelled 2020 New Warriors Reboot written by Daniel Kibblesmith and Luciano Vecchio. The plot was going to include the og New Warriors mentoring a new generation of "progressive" heroes. However, it was clear the writers only had a stereotypical idea of the characters they were writing, with the most notable example being the names of some of the heroes in the group, like "Snowflake" and "Safespace" and their designs reminiscent of ones made by Tumblr users to seem progressive, such as adding meaningless neon colours.
Wait wait, he can't just Google any fact, he can also see augmented reality. So he is effectively just wearing those dumb-looking Apple glasses or whatever they were
It was cancelled before it could be released, but the characters were announced and the book was shown off beforehand to drum up hype (hah). One of the characters was Screentime, a screen addicted teenager who was exposed to his grandpa's experimental internet gas...That was his officially planned backstory.
Context, A long time ago when DC first started headlining black superhero their main draft was about a white obese racist solider in the Vietnam war that transform into a black guy under stress or when he says the N word. Alter ego jekyll and hyde situation.
I feel like I remember reading an article about that where the writer intentionally wrote the worst character he could think of and it got approved by editorial.
Yeah, between the Lannister siblings, kid who's power is the same as a phone, and a character who bears WAY too much of a resemblance to Dora the Explora the brand new teen vampire who fell for the marketing and got his gear from hot topic is probably the only salvageable character.
Honestly I can’t bring myself to believe this was done in good faith. Safespace maybe I could get, but Snowflake has been an insult for progressives/"wokes" for a looong time. It felt like the kind of stuff Stonetoss would come up with.
I've always believed that it was intentionally absurd. The New Warriors have often been a commentary on "corporate" heroes, from having their own TV show to starting Civil War because of their recklessness to having their team basically usurped by Norman Osborn. I thought the New New Warriors had a lot of potential as an over-the-top parody of rainbow capitalism and could tell an interesting story on who the characters wanted to be past their corporate branding. Maybe I'm giving too much credit but with the team's history I can't imagine it was intended to be played straight.
The thing that gets me most about the Miles Morales one is that that is NOT Miles Morales. Miles does NOT act or talk like this. Generally Miles is someone who talks in a rather well mannered and polite way, but the writers of this comic decided NOPE, he's the black Spiderman THEREFORE HE'S GOTTA TALK IN THE MOST HOOD ASS WAY POSSIBLE AT ALL TIMES. They ditched Miles in favour of stereotyping.
"American Society of the Magical Negroes" is named after the "magical negro" trope, but it doesn't really touch on the trope itself, instead the story is about a Secret Society of Magical African Americans who exist because, and I swear to God I'm not making this up, in the movie every white person has a "white discomfort" meter that only black wizards can see, and if that meter goes into the red that white person will just randomly kill a black person.
It was heavily criticized by black people by portraying that idea that black people with magic would be nothing but scared servants to white people, and it was criticized by white people for obvious reasons.
Lois Lane turning Black for day. Maybe it was better recieved in 1970 but now it just seems tone deaf. Also weird that Superman owns a raceswapping machine.
Lois wants to do a story on the black experience in the slums of Metropolis, but no one is willing to open up to her because she's white. She asks the Superman can use a Kryptonian device from a previous adventure to temporarily make her look black.
With the caveat that this was made by white people in the early 70s trying to make a story about racial equality for children, it was good for the time. There's a really nice moment where Lois has a favorite cabbie she uses to get around, who just drives past black Lois. She has a moment of realizing that people who are kind to her may in fact be prejudiced and racist, and she's never realized it.
But it does suffer from the fact that apparently there are no black people working at the Daily Planet, and it is only about the poor black experience. A radical black activist learns a lesson that not all white people are bad when Lois gives him a blood transfusion. So, racist white cabbie doesn't ever suffer any comeuppance, but the black guy is the one who has to learn a lesson.
The most memorable bit that people post for memes is when Lois asks if Superman will marry her even if she's black, and he reminds her that he's not marrying her no matter what the color of her skin. Also that he isn't even human. Lois counters that he sure does look like a white person and is treated differently because of that, but then the device wears off and Superman changes the subject.
If I remember correctly, a Kryptonian scientist who escaped the destruction of his home planet Dhar-Nel, fell in love with Lois and showed off his invention, a device that changes your appearance. She decides to marry him, but he dies at the end and Superman just takes the device for safekeeping.
She has a moment of realizing that people who are kind to her may in fact be prejudiced and racist, and she's never realized it.
This is actually pretty poignant. I say all the time, as a cis het white ally that I don't always see the bigoted side of people, but I hear about it from my friends
I think it was supposed to be based on John Howard Griffin, who pretended to be black in order to record his experiences in a segregated society. Though a lot of people didn’t like his approach, either.
The title is sending me, wtf is “I AM CURIOUS (BLACK)” supposed to mean? Is it a pun that I’m missing? What are the parentheses for? It makes less sense the more I think about it
That’s actually a reference to the 1967-68 Swedish erotic drama duology of films I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), which would have been two years old at the time of this comic’s release
EDIT: I’m sorry that 300 other people got there before me and now you have every film nerd on Reddit clogging your inbox, my bad
Remember that guy that said "before I went to watch Black Panther, I joked with a guy that the movie would start with some Black kids playing basketball and rap music in the background"?
The Simpsons episode "There's something about marrying" is progressive on paper, as it's about Marge coming to terms with her sister Patty being gay and is overall very supportive of gay marriage
However Patty's wife-to-be Veronica is revealed to be secretly a man at the end of the episode, and is a caricature of a real life trans golfer
There's also the subplot of Homer becoming an ordained minister specifically to perform same-sex marriages when Reverend Lovejoy won't, but then he admits that he's only in it for the money and will marry anyone to anything, including animals and inanimate objects. These are exactly the kinds of ridiculous talking points that conservative pundits of the day were using against the legalization of same-sex marriage, saying that it'd start a slippery slope of hedonistic debauchery that'd lead to total societal breakdown.
...So, is the show for the LGBTQ+ community or not? Because the episode treats them all like one big stupid joke. Which is very in keeping with the general attitude towards gay people in the late '90s and early '00s, which touted itself as progressive but really wasn't - "We're going to acknowledge that you exist, but we're still going to treat you like walking punchlines."
Not just a man, but a man pretending to be a woman to gain a competitive edge in women's golf. It's every negative stereotype that plagues trans athletes to this day.
That honestly sounds like a South Park episode when written on paper except they'd already done that joke with a trans woman loosely based on Macho Man Randy Savage demolishing a woman's athlete competition.
It was part of a What If miniseries imagining Miles as different Marvel heroes. All of the comics were written by black writers…….except one. You can guess which.
DC's first idea for a lead black superhero was black bomber, who was a white bigot (emphasis on bigot. In the first scripts, he was disgusted when he accidentally saved a black person and shouted a slur upon saving a black baby) that transformed into a black man during times of great stress. Also his superhero outfit was a basketball uniform. Also he gained his powers because of an expirement in Vietnam that was supposed to make him blend into his surroundings. Neither identity was aware of the other.
Thankfully, after 2 scripts, this idea was shot down by somebody with a brain.
Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda is EXTREMELY progressive as a “trans-positive” work in a time where such things didn’t exist at all.
Except, by today’s standards, almost all of the information in it wrong, outdated, or genuinely offensive.
But, the conceit of the project is still glowing in there. It’s Ed Wood. He was passionate to a fault, and didn’t really take that much time to figure out the art form.
In this case, it’s more of the times. He really seemed to give a bit more research and such into this project than his other works, and it shows.
Thats because Ed himself was a crossdresser, though not trans. He was very eager to take what was sold as a shock shlock picture and make it an emotional masterpiece
Its not of course, its complete shit, but he did try
The, "-exagerrated swagger of a black teenager" line from the Gamespot review of Spider Man Miles Morales. The guy who wrote the review and spoke the line is black though, so I'm not sure if that makes it more or less cringe.
Changing Snape’s skin colour in the upcoming Harry Potter series may be problematic:
casting a Black actor as a harsh, bitter, and initially villainous authority figure risks repeating problematic tropes where minority characters occupy sole antagonist or unlikable roles.
Flashbacks show James Potter and his friends cruelly bullying a teenage Snape. Recasting Snape as a black student targeted by a group of privileged white peers unintentionally adds heavy racial undertones to the schoolyard bullying.
Harry Potter’s immediate, deep-seated distrust of Professor Snape in the early books could be awkwardly recontextualised if a young white protagonist is instantly hostile towards the only black teacher.
Oily and greasy are other descriptions of his hair in the books. Hermoine was the easiest slam dunk to not have be white. Or professor McGonagal or something
And if they adopt the flashback where Snape gets bullied faithfully from the books, James has a line where he justifies himself by going "it's not that he's done anything, more so that he exists" (paraphrasing bc I haven't read the books in 7 years or so).
Similarly, Hermione being cast as black in The Cursed Child
Hermione canonically is the only person in the wizarding world to have a problem with house elf slavery. Making her black makes that already uncomfortable problematic storyline even worse
My job offered a cultural sensitivity training and at one point, the presenter (a white woman) stopped herself after speaking on the “latinx” community to clarify that most latinx do not prefer that term - - and then continued on using that very word throughout the rest of the presentation.
I worked for the Census back in 2010 as one of my first jobs and we were forced to ask if someone was 'Black, African American, or Negro' because it was in a script the government gave us. If we deviated from their script we'd get in trouble.
This reminds me of a similar experience I had in a LGBTQ+ sensitivity training about a decade ago where two gay men got in a rather heated argument that derailed the presentation. The older man grew up in an environment where the term “queer” was unsafe and not considered positive in his community growing up. The younger man couldn’t understand or just downright refused to acknowledge the older man’s perspective. Things escalated until one of them had to leave the session. I found the entire interaction more engaging and informative than what was otherwise monotonous corporate jargon.
For context, the term “queer” had recently been added to the LGBTQ+ community by GLAAD.
Whats weird is that not only is latinx not phonetic to spanish in any way, but adding an e to the end of gendered words is already the accepted way to make them gender neutral
Any mod making the Brosca family black (Dragon Age Origins)
Imagine a poor low-class family where the father is absent, the mother is an alcoholic, the older daughter is a prostitute and the younger sibling is a gang member. Dwarf Commoner and their family are the least suitable characters for a race swap in this game.
Black Lightning is an important character, he is legitimately DC's first black stand alone superhero. At the time DC knew they needed to create a hero of color that could stand on his own..Black Lightning is not what they came up with. Instead the original idea was "The Black Bomber" a racist white guy, who could turn black and gain powers when he became stressed out, thanks to some kind of camouflage gas they were working on for Vietnam. Tony Isabella told them how stupid they were being and came up with Black Lightning. "The Brown Bomber" eventually showed up decades later as a throwaway joke.
The Movie Honey, Don't! is about a lesbian P.I. who has to solve a murder case in a desert town surrounding a sexually exploitative megachurch. It comes off as a girlboss noir mystery at first, but it starts to become apparent that the director really just wanted to film Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza doing it, and in great detail.
I feel this way about Promising Young Woman, but I understand others may interpret it differently.
A rape revenge story where we never see the victim of the crime, where the men who commit these kinds of crimes need nothing more than to be embarrassed, and where the only way to enact change is to martyr yourself and let Alfred Molina and the police save the day.
Metroid Other M was meant to be a defining shift for the Metroid series, the game to delve deep into the stoic and quiet badass Samus Aran and really explore what makes her tick and what shaped her into being the galaxy’s most feared hunter.
… Instead we got a parade of nonstop sexist tropes that really focus on her daddy issues, how the boys made fun of her for being a girl, her obsession with “the baby” Metroid against other weird motherhood references, her being overly emotional and irrational, and having all the men in the game actually be the ones to get anything done while she quietly submits to male authority and refuses to even use life-saving equipment without direct permission. All while getting a hyper-sexed up anime girl redesign by Team Ninja with her boobs three sizes bigger, clothes two times tighter, running around in high heels with camera angles that keep lingering on her curvy bits.
… Let’s just say I’m glad Metroid Dread and Metroid Ravenous went the complete opposite direction.
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u/Casual_necromancy 12h ago
And Odin in the comic is fuckin bald anyway.