More DC Race Fail

[goggle_kid]

Dave Brothers Beat Me To This One

More of Ian Sattler at the the Heroes Con DC Nation panel.

"A serious topic came up about how characters who are minorities who happened to be legacy characters like Ryan Choi are killed off so their caucasian counterparts can return and how they feel like they are being cheated or sidelined out of their roles. Sattler took a more serious tone. "It's so hard for me to be on the other side because it's not our intention. There is a reason behind it all. We don't see it that way and strive very hard to have a diverse DCU. I mean, we have green, pink, and blue characters. We have the Great Ten out there and I have counter statistics, but I won't get into that. It's not how we perceived it. We get the same thing about how we treat our female characters."

Comments

[theanswer]

Your personal opinions do not really matter here. These resulted outcry.

Secret Invasion was a gaffe, yes. The mishandling of the Wasp's character ended with her death, most people seemed displeased with the ending, and as a whole it was considered an extension of the mistakes in Civil War.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

That resulted in snarky blog posts and a couple of critics having mean things to say. By that standard, fucking everything that either major company has put out in the last couple of years has been a "gaffe," up to and including the stuff that's good. After all, you just qualified the critically-successful, financially-rewarding, Eisner-winning (Best Writer, 2007, 2008, nominated in 2010) Brubaker run on Captain America as a "gaffe."

There's a difference between an organized consensus of people wondering aloud what the fuck is wrong with you and a bunch of people using you as that day's grist for the blog mill. DC's current "whitewashing" controversy is decidedly the former, and Marvel hasn't fucked up that badly since Quesada shot his mouth off about One More Day. (Everyone pretty much agreeing that Siege's ending was crap is not the same thing.) If your primary exposure to comics fandom online is Scans Daily, though, you may think otherwise; this community has different demographics, and often reacts very differently.

[theanswer]

You're letting your personal bias cloud the matter again. I qualified Captain America's death as a gaffe, not the whole of Brubaker's Captain America run, and at the time the consensus was overwhelmingly negative.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

Was it? From what I recall, it wasn't negative so much as it was a cynical disbelief that the death would stick. The issue sold a little under three hundred thousand copies and made national news; if any of those national news articles were predominantly negative, I'm not finding them now.

By any measure, though, it is not a gaffe on the level of the current DC backwards thinking, particularly in retrospect, now that it's led to such a successful comic.

[theanswer]

You're proving my point about these gaffes though. The reaction on the Internet does not translate into sales.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

You're really determined to shoehorn that point in anywhere you can, aren't you? That point's just as irrelevant in this discussion as it was in the other one, because this obnoxiously long, I'm-only-still-here-because-the-energy-drinks-have-yet-to-wear-off thread is about gaffe comparison and has nothing to do with sales.

I brought up the sales on the floppy of The Death of Captain America as part of pointing out that it isn't a controversy rooted in failure; it was a deliberately manufactured media event, and it paid off big for Marvel. Again, the only thing Marvel has done in recent years that even approaches the DC whitewash controversy is OMD exploding people's heads with its stupidity, and even that just made Quesada look like he took a fictional character too goddamn seriously.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, regardless of whatever I was saying at the time. I figured it'd be your answer if I suggested we should go get pizza.

[theanswer]

Yes it does have to do with sales. This entire discussion is about the relevance of fan anger and how the companies measure it. YOU CANNOT HAVE THIS DISCUSSION WITHOUT BRINGING UP SALES. Sales is the scale they use to determine what we do and do not like.

And the second part of your post again is proving the point that may seem to be the consensus isn't always the case and doesn't translate into sales, which is again the scale with which they use to determine what we dislike. While the reaction to Steve Rogers death may have been overwhelmingly negative, what Marvel saw in sales said that this opinion was in minority.

And your opinion on DC's whitewashing may not translate into their sales. If it doesn't then that anger isn't getting across to them.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

Dude, I never even brought up the relevance of fan anger. I don't give a fuck. That's all you. The closest I came was saying that Marvel hasn't done anything this bad in a while.

[theanswer]

And they have, they've been doing that for years. It's Quesada's favorite hobby, and I've pointed out several examples.

And your entire discussion has been about fan anger.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

Quesada likes riling up the fan base over Speedball and saying stupid shit about Spider-Man and marriage. He's not committing well-known logical fallacies in an attempt to combat open accusations of racism.

One's silly shit about fictional dudes. One's cramming your foot down your neck 'til a shoe pops out your groin. There is a difference.

My entire part in this conversation's been about me being entertained that DC can't stop fucking up. I'm not angry; I'm amused, now more than ever.

[theanswer]

And I countered your argument with the sales point because if Brightest Day sells as well as Blackest Night then they are not fucking up, as far as they are concerned.

And again, your personal bias is showing. Women and gays are well known victims of Marvel policies.

Quesada championed Freedom Ring as Marvel's spotlight gay superhero. He was later killed shortly after in his own series in a very questionable and offensive manner.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

What they think is irrelevant. They're still fucking up.

I'm really not seeing how "Marvel policies" victimize women or gays, particularly in the last couple of years. They've certainly told some regrettable stories that featured both women and gays, like that time they killed off Northstar three times in one month, but "well known victims"? What crap is this, now?

[theanswer]

Again, if it sells well they are not going to think they're fucking up. Marvel would feel the same way.

Do you realize you just denied and acknowledged my point as false and fact at the same time?

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

And again: I do not care what they think.

You're making it sound like it's a matter of Marvel editorial policy to write stories where women and gay people wind up as victims. Yeah, bad things have happened to both female and gay characters at Marvel (and at any other company), but not as part of Marvel's Heteronormativity is Awesome story initiative. Your point is poorly phrased at best, particularly now, when Marvel is deliberately trying to do more with its female characters.

[theanswer]

Doesn't matter if you care or not, it's still fact. And you seemed to care up until the point where you were proven wrong.

Marvel is only just now starting to do more with their female characters AFTER the backlash they received for a long period misogyny. They're still not doing the same thing for their gay characters.

And there was in fact editorial policies that hindered the development of those gay characters. For a while any title with a gay character was instantly deemed mature.

On the subject of Freedom Ring, the treatment of which Marvel received considerable backlash. Here's two quotes on Robert Kirkman concerning FR and gay characters in Marvel.

"Freedom Ring was always planned as an inexperienced hero who would get beaten up constantly and probably die. I wanted to comment on the fact that most superheroes get their powers and are okay at it... and that's not how life works. During working on the book, I was also noticing that most gay characters... are all about being gay. Straight characters are well-rounded characters who like chicks. So I wanted to do a well-rounded character who just happened to like dudes. Then I decided to combine the two ideas. In hindsight, yeah, killing a gay character is no good when there are so few of them... but I really had only the best of intentions in mind."

A very similar situation to DC's statement here. It was their intention, but it happened anyway.

"Frankly, with the SMALL amount of gay characters in comics in general, and how unfortunate the portrayals have been thus far, whether intentional or not—I completely understand the backlash on the death of Freedom Ring, regardless of my intentions. If I had it to do all over again... I wouldn't kill him. I regret it more and more as time goes on. I got rid of what? 20% of the gay characters at Marvel by killing off this ONE character. I just never took that stuff into consideration while I was writing."

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

I was never proven wrong, because you're not making a coherent enough argument to prove much of anything. As a general rule, for a debate to be useful, both sides should probably be fairly clear what they're discussing, and you keep flying off into questionable assertions and irrelevant proclamations.

[theanswer]

I see my mistake was engaging in a discussion with someone who cannot acknowledge a fact if it means they're wrong.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

No, that implies you made just one mistake. Mine was perpetuating this discussion in an attempt to figure out what the hell you were talking about.

[theanswer]

Well if you have trouble understanding obvious facts and realities then it's no wonder.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

Look, let's just both drop it and walk away. Neither of us seem to have a handle on what the other is trying to say, so any further discussion is truly pointless.

[theanswer]

Well no, I have firm handle on what you were saying. You were just wrong and I pointed that out and proved it.

[stolisomancer.insanejournal.com]

You didn't prove I was wrong the first time, because me saying I'm entertained by DC fucking up is not an argument.

You didn't prove I was wrong, because none of the "gaffes" at Marvel that you mentioned have been a systematic, near-unanimous accusation of racism, myopia, and toxic nostalgia.

You haven't proved anything, except maybe that we both have too much free time.

[autolychus2]

No, you didn't. Stolis is right.