sindri42:

thespectacularspider-girl:

concentrated-sunshine:

boggy-y:

reperspectivity:

sunsteel:

reperspectivity:

sunsteel:

it’s so annoying how LGBT people, women and/or POC can’t be protagonists without geeks calling it “politically correct” or something. that’s how they see us, we’re only allowed to be secondary characters in any media otherwise it’s “stop trying to make political statements!!!!”

That’s not how it works.

There’s nothing wrong with LGBT protagonists. When they’re well-written.

But this requires a build-up, and it requires the character to have other traits besides what genitalia they’re into. And there’s just been one too many instances where this isn’t the case.

Dumbledore for example? Only LGBT by ‘word of god’. Korrasami? Their relationship development spanned all of two minutes before they were ready to elope.

The same requirement applies to both women and POC. It needs to be well-written. I’m pretty sure Wonder Woman was popular for a good long time. It was only when the writing went downhill and she went up against a chauvinist caricature and started using feminist buzzwords that people started to give up on her.

Same with FemThor. IIRC, critics stated that there was another woman in that universe that would’ve done really well with that mantle. But instead, they were given a character that was feminist and woman before she was human or a hero.

There’s also a couple of panels going around from a comic that kinda displays this, of… Is it Miles Morales? A raving fan having a podcast in which she celebrates the fact that he is black, but it only upsets him because he wants to be Spiderman, not ‘black spiderman’.

It’s the writing that makes all the difference. And when your story sets out, in the first place, to put an LGBT, female or POC hero in the spotlight, the angle is off, and that is pandering. And it’s going to bleed through into the writing.

If your story sets out to tell a good tale, then the protagonist’s superficial traits don’t matter.

Want proof? There’s plenty of POC and women protagonists all over the place that are/were well liked. Bayonetta, Jeanne, Buffy, James Heller, Lúcio, Fareeha Amari, Symmetra, Princess Zelda, every female cast member of the Tales series, the Halliwells, etc.

It all comes down to the writing. And that hinges for a large part on intent. If the intent is to pander, it will crack.

i want you to know I didn’t read a single word of that

I expected as much. You don’t care about the issue, you’re just in it because you think it makes you look good.

Here’s the tl;dr summary:
People like good characters regardless of their attributes as long as they’re well written and interesting to follow.
People don’t like token characters that exist as either part of a quota or as a thinly veiled hype machine or gimmick who are lazily written and undeveloped.

Yes there are always bigots that hate a thing because whatever, but that’s not the majority.

Originally posted by dailyhappylife

I will flat out defend Korrasami as not being rushed, but was done fairly subtlety over one and a half seasons.  They couldn’t just come out and do it, else Nick would’ve pulled them.  So they slipped things in during the last bit of Season 3 and throughout Season 4.

Interviews with the creators already indicated that as early on as Season 1 they were thinking Korra-Asami was an interesting relationship but knew they couldn’t get away with it.

I saw the possibilities in Korra/Asami from the first moment they made eye contact, but figured it was extremely unlikely through the first two seasons. Then pretty much all of s3+4 was a slow burn of their romance. As the writers have said, anybody who thinks that it came out of nowhere was watching through hetero lenses.

As for Fem!Thor? Sales of the first issue were darn near the highest they’d ever been, because people were optimistic. The drop in sales between issue one and issue two was the biggest ever, because once people saw the writing nobody, not even the hardcore feminists who bought it to make a statement and who had never read comics before, wanted to continue this bullshit. The problem has never been female heroes, because some of the most popular heroes ever have been women. The problem has always been shitty writing, usually by people who think that they can substitute buzzwords for writing and get piles of money for zero work because their audience is idiots.