Re: Fantastic Four Reboot
Heimdall isn't a villain. And honestly, casting Idris Elba -- whom I love as an actor, by the way -- in that role was....weird. Just an odd choice. It stood out and sort of took me out of things for a moment. It didn't really MATTER, of course, but it was like "Uh...why'd you do that?" It'd be the same if they gave a white guy as Heimdall all pink armor or something. It's just an odd stylistic choice. Heimdall, though, is also a much smaller character than Johnny Storm in a FF movie.
But yeah, it's a big deal when you change "default" white characters to another race/ethnicity.
Ask yourselves this. If we accept the premise posed in the article that most white characters are "default" rather than specifically white or required to be white by circumstances (such as Doctor Doom), how would you folks feel if:
- Cyclops was Asian-American
- Doctor Strange was hispanic.
- The genders of all the characters in Spider-Man were reversed. (Spider-Man becomes Spider-Woman, Uncle Ben's role is actually played by Aunt May and vice versa, Mary Jane is a redheaded guy named Matt James Watson, and goes by "MJ", etc.)
All of these things would be jarring and would seem like intentional tokenism. Subverting an established "norm" for the sake of saying "look! We subverted a norm!" To me, that's every bit as patronizing as creating a specifically ethnic character and calling him [Ethnic]-Man or something. Anything you'd want to do with a subversive gender/race reversed character you can do with a new character who happens to be a particular gender/race (but isn't "gendered" or "racialized"). The only thing you can't do is be inflammatory and subversive.
