I dunno, my biggest thing as a kid was the Doc, as a 5 yrs old I was wearing my bathrobe climbing up the staircase pretending I was him hanging from the clock tower and never once it bothered me that I didn't have long white hair...I also remember my friend's mum who was a massive fan of Stephen King and the like and she said she can't care less about the typical novels written for women about love and the like, she has that, she wants something that's out of the ordinary and compelling. So yea as long as the characters make sense in a well written story does it really matter what their gender, ethnicity, age is...? I really like Rey in TFA, does that make me a woman then?
And for the record I'm not arguing with you I'm just shooting the breeze.
I do agree that tokenism can make a character more popular to a certain demographic due to relatability but it’s a pro when comparing a great character. I don’t think many fans were roleplaying as short round when you can be Indiana Jones.
Not taking it at all personal.
No, liking a character has nothing to do with being a different gender, ethnicity, or age. It's just one of those things that can be taken for granted when it's the status quo. Like I said--Luke, Han, Superman, Batman, Indy, Rocky Balboa, etc.--heroes of mine, the lot of them. Liking them didn't make me any more white than liking Rey makes you a woman. I definitely would've been over the moon if there was a kick-ass, brown-skinned Puerto Rican hero/action star that I could pretend to be and look up to, though. It's an intangible thing, and very difficult to describe, but it's still very much a thing. Not having it, at the time, didn't diminish my enjoyment of those guys, I just know it would've been cool to not have to be some tertiary character when I played pretend with my friends because Superman and Batman aren't brown-skinned with wavy 'fros. None of that came from a mean-spirited place in my friend's hearts, and it's possibly no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is just a tiny example of why something like that matters.
That said, I don't read comic books anymore (and haven't in a looong time), but I
LOVE the version of Miles Morales depicted in
Into the Spider-verse. He looks like me! And he's not just an ethnic swap of Peter Parker. He's his own person, with his own story.
Sorry, that's more of a tangent than I wanted to go off on.