All Black comic book characters should be replaced with white actors for film adaptations

How hard is this? She's white, she should be cast as white to reflect how she's depicted in the comics.

I don't know. You're the one making the claim, if you can't explain it, I certainly can't.

To be perfectly frank, I thought up to about half an hour ago that I could explain at least the reason, albeit not the rationale, behind your stance, by assuming that race is a lot more important to you than it is to me. But now that you have said that rule applies to MJ Watson but not to other fictional characters, I truly don't know what you're thinking at all.

Would it make sense to cast Peter Parker as black?

Yes, at least if you're going with the current Marvel temporal structure, i.e. he is now considered to have always grown up about 30-35 years ago. If you wanted to deviate from that and recreate some of his 60s and 70s stories, in some of which racism plays a major role, then making him a black man would change his character's place in those stories. This could still make sense if there was a plan behind it, but in that case I would not say, as I do for this MJ casting, that it doesn't change the character.

Okay I'll spell it out for you. Mary Jane is white in the comics, so if you're making a Spider-Man movie you should try and hire actors who are good, but also closely resemble the characters they are playing. That doesn't always work out, hence black Perry White. Perry White is a minor character fine, but don't hire Idros Elba for Superman. All of that is a side point. Here's what I think happened. Zendaya's character is listed as Michelle, not Mary Jane, so it was probably going to be a surprise, mostly for shock value. My guess is that this wasn't supposed to get out. I think they cast her because they wanted a big enough name and it wasn't because she was just the best actress. I think there's a trend in Hollywood to race flip and they did it on purpose because of diversity. Then they said, "what about Flash Thompson he's white, we can't have too many white people" . So they flipped his race. It has nothing to do with acting ability and everything to do with being PC and that's why they cast Zendaya. Do you really think the director looked at a picture of Mary Jane and said, "we need to hire a black girl because Mary Jane looks black to me."? I'm just sick of the PC nonsense and race flipping. And I'm sick of discussing this.

I can't believe none of you knuckleheads didn't come up with this.

If they chose a bad actress, they made a bad choice. But I don't see why they can't find good actors of any race. Even if they decided they wanted a black actress, that won't force them to choose a bad one. But frankly, if they did want MJ to look like a black girl, they didn't choose the right woman for that.

No, I think that race just doesn't define the character for them either way; and at least as far as Stan Lee is concerned, he has said as much.

I think that Marvel feels that it is. Since it's their property.....
Besides, it's a comic. About a kid in a leotard. Who has spider powers.
It's not Ovid.

Is this picture, like, your primary spank bank material or something? You seem childishly obsessed with it.

This Mary Jane also has no nose and inhumanly large eyes. I can only conclude that no human actress should hbe allowed to play her without plastic surgery.

As long as nothing about the character's back story precludes it, then who gives a crap?

Hard to say, what's her ancestry?

Why not?

Sure. Might make more sense, actually.

Now you've circled back to "CANON!!!", when a few posts ago, it was "the darkies is takin' over!! ".

Oh to be a fly on the wall when FF's biology class starts learning about genetics and he gets told that genetically speaking there is no such thing as race.

You just know he'd stand up and try and argue down the professor like some character out of a 2000s chain email.

Wow - Packard is killin' it. That new chick looks WAAAAY more like the comic. She's purtier, too.

We all know that FF is still going to pay 7-12 dollars to see this movie, regardless of any arguments he makes here.

So the studio wins and FF will have to admit that that he is bitching over nothing.

It will be interesting to read his review.

Why is black Perry White okay but not black MJ? Why is dwarf Bolivar Trask okay when he has always been depicted as a full statured person in the X-Men comics?

Why do movies have to exactly follow the source material? Insignificant deviations are not a big deal. And a black MJ is what you'd call an insignificant deviation.

FF's argument is inconsistent. We don't even know how big MJs role is. She could just make a cameo while Gwen Stacy or Betty Brant is the primary love interest (as it was in the comics).

You made this idiot wank thread, buddy, you don't get to be be sick of discussing it.

You got your ass handed to you again, and somehow managed to pull a Katie Ledecky style comeback to replace Dayton AND Dinner as the WF village idiot this week. Congratulations.

I don't know who Katie Ledecky is, but yeah, I can be sick of it if I want.

Oh look. He's pouting.

I suppose nobody would mind if Jim from Huck Finn is race flipped to white, right?

No he doesn't, hence the summer school

What amazing logic.

So, if race isn't central to a theme, then it's *not* racist to use a black pencil to color in skin of a historically white character. Poof!; the history or background or what that character was all about, is just simply taken care of with bit of darker ink? How simple, makes you wonder why race relations in US has sprinted backwards the past decade or two.

It sounds almost as bad as liberal logic.

[which raises the question, why hasn't the Man-in-black's head exploded with such ridiculous logic-error? Agent K., right?]

Would people be shitting their pants as much if Mary Jane were black in an elseworld in the comics?
Is it just that it's the MCU?
If so, why?
You know the MCU itself is an elseworld, right?
As soon as Iron Man was wounded in Afghanistan instead of Vietnam, it was a parallel world.

Have you not watched VOY? Janeway isn't a role model for anyone. She was extremely poorly written to say the least. Is simply being a woman your only qualification there? I'd have thought you'd want someone who was, you know, not insane, and maybe even competent.

Incidentally I'm curious, if originally the Mary Jane character was black, or *gasp* Native even, and had traditionally been depicted as such in every adaptation to this point, what would you say if a white actress was cast to play her in an upcoming adaptation?

I've heard it said once that we've reached equality when minorities can be rewarded for mediocrity as often as any white male.

This was in a discussion about the show "Scandal," where the lead actress plays the most powerful woman in DC's behind the scenes clean up crew while having the big secret of screwing the POTUS herself. I said she was a horrendously weak character and it was beyond me why everyone was so gaga for her. Someone else said, yeah that's kinda the point. How often do black women get to be the girl with an awesome career and a fucked up personal life? It's a trope we see with men and even a bit for white women like Grey's Anatomy, but usually black women are strong and independent or the side character being the rock for their usually white friend.

Olivia Pope is a horrible character, like every other person in that universe, and apart from having a dad that reminds her how much harder blacks have to work to be successful, it's a role that would've sucked if you stuck a white actress in it.

That's equality.