Every single time there is a gender or race swap of a white male character (fictional or not), there are several responses.
1. It is just a fictional character, race/sex should not matter, shut up racist. (I am not sure they would like a white Spawn or Blade but that is a different matter.)
2. OK, it is a historical character but back then they had no concept of race as we do, so shut up racist. (I guess Egyptians, Romans, Europeans in the Middle Ages, etc. did not recognize people from Sub-Saharan Africa or from South East Asia as somehow different. Maybe their eyesight was impacted somehow. I wonder what the first person who recognized African features thought. He must have believed he was going insane.)
3. We picked the best person for the role, regardless of gender or race. (Which is in itself interesting -I would like to ask how they think a black woman is the best person to play a white man's role -I am looking at you, Lucien- , but whatever.), so shut up racist.
4. We need to have more representation of historically oppressed minorities, so shut up racist.
And then, we have The opposing idiocy -coming from the same people- who suddenly find it problematic when a non-Jewish person plays a Jewish person on screen, a somewhat overweight person playing a morbidly obese person, or when a straight person plays a gay person on screen. The latest example: Bradley Cooper's fake nose. Maybe he was the best person for the role, who knows? And are we seriously going to argue that Jews are underrepresented in Hollywood? I mean if you take this line of thought to the logical conclusion, only the given person could play the given person on screen, and we do not possess enough knowledge in necromancy to do something about it when it comes to dead people. Plus the whole thing goes directly against the above detailed arguments for race and gender swaps.
This post has one purpose: to highlight the contradiction, and ask for a line of reasoning from anyone and everyone that can explain it away. I am very open to a logical argument.
