niobiumao3:

whoopsrobots:

reversingyourpolarity:

hello-hayati:

materassassino:

samuel-vimes:

lierdumoa:

I was reading this article that was complaining about people should be more focused on bringing characters that were originally conceived as POC to the screen than on recasting white characters as POC. 

Which I actually agree with.

But in the same article the writer complained (I’m paraphrasing) “If you cast a black guy as Tony Stark, no one will think of him as Tony Stark, they’ll always think of him as Black Tony Stark.”

I have to point out a big flaw in that logic:

Children.

Everyone in the older generation thinks of Obama as “the black president.” You know who doesn’t think of Obama as “the black president”? 10 year olds. Obama is the only president they can remember. He got elected when they were two.

There are children who listen to Fall Out Boys’ “Centuries” and don’t know they borrowed the opening riff from Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” As far as they’re concerned, that’s Fall Out Boy’s riff.

There are children who don’t remember that The Rock was Dwayne Johnson’s wrestling name.

My favorite version of  A Christmas Carol is The Muppet Christmas Carol. I don’t care how Bob Cratchit was written in the original story because as far as I’m concerned, the real Bob Cratchit is a bright green frog puppet that’s my canon you can’t stop me.

There are a dozen incarnations of every possible comic book character. And every vigilante superhero we read about today is based on the original vigilante superhero – The Scarlet Pimpernel. There is no real version, there is only your favorite version. Every version that isn’t your favorite is going to feel fake to you.

But it’s going to feel real to someone.

Nick Fury, I’m just saying.

If we went back to white Nick Fury, it would just be fucking WEIRD

dude i forgot that nick used to be a white irish guy

I regularly forget about white Nick Fury. So much so that the current iteration is just Nick Fury while the former has become ‘white nick fury’.
Also green lantern. We all know who was best.

My little brother (who’s six)  loves the avengers, and a while back he got some kind of retro avengers game to play on the DS, and about half an hour after he plugs it in I hear him freaking out and I ask him what’s wrong and he says “They ruined Nick Fury! The ruined him! They made him white and he’s got hair!” and honestly I’ve never heard him so betrayed. Six year old little white kid, btw, and he was so disappointed because it wasn’t OUR Nick Fury

I was thinking about this in a different context last night, specifically about how the things which happen before you’re able to consciously comprehend them and remember them and their effects long-term, feel like long-dead history even when they may have happened only a year before or after you were born.

Take all the 18 year olds this year, for whom 9/11 is just something from a history book. That’s the same as kids born right after Pearl Harbor. It’s not something you learned about in real-time, and watched change the world–it’s your baseline.

And that’s why so much of this change in representation is so important: it is changing the emotional and societal baseline these kids come into (as these posts show). The longer it keeps up–the longer we have MCU!Nick as *the* Nick, the longer James Olsen is Mechad Brooks and the longer Iris West is Candice Patton and Zendaya is MJ and the longer the most recent Magnificent Seven isn’t just seven white dudes but instead has black, East Asian, Latino, AND Native American cowboys–we will shift the world view kids open up to and so their expectations.

This is why representation matters, including altering the races of long-standing characters.