Comic Strips

You insist on gatekeeping the term “raceswap”. Fine. Call it “reimagining an existing character as another race”, if you want. You would have to be delusional to deny that Miles Morales is a Black-Latino version of Spider-Man.

Except it’s not even “reimagining an existing character as another race”. It’s a completely different character, with a different personality and a different backstory. The “existing character” is even in the same movie. The only thing they have in common is that they have spider powers, and they aren’t even the same powers. Goku and Superman have more similarities than those two. And that’s why

The specific claim I am contesting is OP’s strong thesis that raceswapping is always bad. I gave examples of it sometimes being good. Miles Morales is certainly an example

This isn’t a good way to contest it. What OP said is “If new movies can’t make new characters and stories with different races and sexes without seemingly purposefully causing controversy by replacing one race or sex with the other I’d take that as a low blow”, and Miles Morales is exactly that: a new character with a new story.

The article I linked to mentions the backlash and controversy about political correctness and Morales. I’m a little surprised you missed the point there.

My point is: where is that backlash and controversy? The article talks about it but only shows people painting it as a good thing. This feels like the one time where “People want to cancel Snow White because of the non-consensual kiss!” made the headlines, and then the headlines were more than the actual people complaining.

I am saying that your explanation gets things backwards: the multiverse doesn’t show how it’s not a race swap. On the contrary, the race swap is the reason why they needed to use the multiverse as a narrative tool. Forget the analogy to elf slavery if you don’t get it. The point is that some writer wrote a multiverse storyline in order to justify the existence of a Spider-Man of a different race.

First, not really. The multiverse exists to have Miles interact with Peter. It’s not needed for him to exist, since a Peter Parker already existed in his own universe. That’s also why I’m saying they’re different characters. If anything, the narrative tool is the original spiderman of that universe dying.

And even then, if it was a narrative tool for that purpose, so what? Every author uses narrative tools to tell the story they want to tell. This isn’t anything new, and no one is bothered by their existence. They’re annoying when they’re blatantly shoehorned (i.e. Star Wars 9), but everything people want is a reasonable explanation for stuff and it’s usually good. Obviously, unless the message they’re trying to convey is disturbing to them (like “slavery can be good” to normal people, or “black people can be superheroes” to racists).

Really, I don’t get the point of that last argument. What did I say that you’re trying to confute? I agree I probably misunderstood that.