Stand-Ins

It's a familiar story; a media company takes a property that has a large and devoted fan base, makes some or other change designed mainly to appear to modern sensibilities, a bunch of said fan base becomes upset, and this is taken as proof of their hatefulness on the part of those fans. Whether its a Black elf in The Rings of Power, or Scooby Doo's Velma Dinkley crushing on a girl, the pattern is always pretty much the same.

So as to not have any elephants in the room, I'm going to mention that when racial or sexual minorities are recast as straight White people, any anger is considered justified. But that's not really what I'm concerned with here.

What I'm interested in is the switch from this being considered "tokenism" to being "representation." Personally, I'm old, and so a lot of these instances still feel like tokenism to me. I find them lazy, mainly because they take advantage of the fact that so many fans are desperate to see someone like themselves in certain media properties that companies can rack up points more or less instantly with these sorts of insertions, which don't call for actually doing any of the world or character-building work that building these sort of characters would normally entail. Granted, in some instances, it can be made to make sense. In the various iterations of the Scooby Doo franchise, the characters have always been more or less sexless, only the Cartoon Network crossover with Johnny Bravo having any indication that the characters even knew was sex was, let alone had active attractions to other human beings. The various Scooby Doo shows were, after all, children's television, and any mention of sexuality tended to be strictly verboten. This is what made Cartoon Network's winking nods funny, the absurdity of adult characters being so chaste as to be effectively neuter.

Of course, the problem is that while there are minority and queer elements to many fandoms, they aren't particularly large. In the nearly 30 years since Milestone Media was founded, its comic universe has barely made a peep. Only one character, Static Shock, managed to find any mainstream success, and, if my last trip to a comic-book store is any indication, he's faded back into obscurity. I know that I, as a Black comic book fan, didn't find the characters to be particularly compelling. For me, the miss was that they were Black super-heroes, rather than being Black super-heroes. Sure, Marvel and DC tended to trade in tired tropes and stereotypes in their characters, but at least the things the characters were doing were worth reading.

But I'm an outlier in that sense; questions of Black identity, and the difficulties of fitting those questions into a world with superhumans in it don't really intrigue me. But there are, from what I understand, a lot of people for whom those sorts of stories are supposed to be compelling. Why were they not buying these comics?

There is a part of me that sees various groups seeking representation, even in small ways, in popular media properties, not because they want to see themselves, but because they want other people to see them. Legacy media properties have built-in audiences who are going to see a Black elf in Tolkien's Middle Earth, or a bisexual/lesbian Velma in Scooby Doo.

In in a situation like that, a new character, or a new franchise, simply doesn't have the pull required. Black people may not have purchased Milestone titles in large numbers, but White comic fans could be forgiven for never even knowing the company existed. This made their titles poor vehicles for increasing the audience for Black characters.

It's going to be a while before the people in various media properties are allowed to simply be people, in all of their disparate traits and confusing contradictions. Right now, many of them are being pressed into service as ambassadors, in the sense that they are not only representations of various groups, but also the representatives of those groups. Personally, I find it an awkward fit, and I look forward to when it doesn't seem so forced.