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Muslim Teenaged Ms. Marvel


turbojet

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It would be pretty interesting if Dust and this Ms Marvel meet up, Dust is a pretty likeable character and one of my personal favourite females.

 

And yes, I love Spectacular Spider-Man a hell of a lot more than the mess the original Spider-Man series is in, it's really enjoyable.

 

Also, it's not like DC hasn't used this sort of thing as a publicity stunt, either. They retroactively made Alan Scott, the original Golden Age Green Lantern, gay in the New 52 reboot.

 

DC are the lesser company when it comes to tolerance, honestly. There's been a few arguments regarding them being a bunch of slime balls in the artist community as artists leave them because of their degradation of women in media i.e. making Harley Quinn look like a dominatrix and the victim of weak woman tropes.

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I don't get it, there's already a Muslim Marvel character named Dust:

 

Dust_016.jpg

 

A new Ms Marvel shouldn't be as big of a deal as people are making it out to be.

Ms. Marvel is the first with a solo comic book. Dust is apart of the X-Men who regularly recruit new body of students every 10 or so years. The recent generation of new kids have been extremely diverse which did garner complaints from fans which is ironic because that is the entire point of X-Men. As of late, they only serve as background characters for the principal member events. Also, Dust is not being written by a Muslim woman. Ms. Marvel is.

 

I'd certainly like to know how.

 Legacy characters in general are common. It is a common thing in comic books in general for their to be a second, third, or even a fourth iteration of an alias. We all know that superheroes die all the time in comic books to the point that people are desensitized  when a character dies. It becomes a big deal the minute they deviate from the norm. Carol Danvers prior to her becoming Captain Marvel had only two volumes of her book being published solo which sold enough to warrant 50 issues in one volume. She is usually a supporting character in Avengers and serves little to no purpose outside of that and has been around for decades. Characters like that are usually the one's who get others taking up the mantle for the exact reason of being not relatively known, but popular enough to be worth noting. Hell, I've mentioned that she is taking over for Captain Marvel and there is no outrage of a woman filling in his position. Ms. Marvel is not as a big deal as Captain America who has been killed and replaced several times. If a character is important enough to have a legacy, they get a legacy. Hence why the Marvel Universe is the most convoluted universe to follow in general. 

 

Comic book characters change mantles all the time. However, people only get offended when the mantle is placed on the character because they aren't white. This is a comic book world where there are aliens being superheroes yet when it comes to an actual minority becoming a superhero(something that has been done so many times), they need to have a plausible explanation to be who they are other than for the sake of diversity. It is racist because it pretty sets up the idea that white characters can be pretty much anywhere(According to Superman, you can have an entire planet of alien white people without justification), but the moment character gets rebooted as a minority, it becomes an issue.

Edited by turbojet
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It's good i guess...but ultimatley, I don't really care....

 

The race/ religion of acharacter doesn't bother me at all and if Mrvel's idea is to show it doesn't have any problem with it either and is a progressive company, then they should have just made her a muslim and not mentioned it.

 

...but of course that's not how it works is it? Gottaadvertise and sell booksobviously, so I don't know really what they should do...

 

But overall...yeah...meh

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I see far less wrong with advertising that you're at least attempting to show recognition of social minorities than I do the public reaction to social minorities as being problematic themselves, either as being inherently publicity stunts or as unfit for the mantle.

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Legacy characters in general are common. It is a common thing in comic books in general for their to be a second, third, or even a fourth iteration of an alias. We all know that superheroes die all the time in comic books to the point that people are desensitized  when a character dies. It becomes a big deal the minute they deviate from the norm. Carol Danvers prior to her becoming Captain Marvel had only two volumes of her book being published solo which sold enough to warrant 50 issues in one volume. She is usually a supporting character in Avengers and serves little to no purpose outside of that and has been around for decades. Characters like that are usually the one's who get others taking up the mantle for the exact reason of being not relatively known, but popular enough to be worth noting. Hell, I've mentioned that she is taking over for Captain Marvel and there is no outrage of a woman filling in his position. Ms. Marvel is not as a big deal as Captain America who has been killed and replaced several times. If a character is important enough to have a legacy, they get a legacy. Hence why the Marvel Universe is the most convoluted universe to follow in general. 

 

Comic book characters change mantles all the time. However, people only get offended when the mantle is placed on the character because they aren't white. This is a comic book world where there are aliens being superheroes yet when it comes to an actual minority becoming a superhero(something that has been done so many times), they need to have a plausible explanation to be who they are other than for the sake of diversity. It is racist because it pretty sets up the idea that white characters can be pretty much anywhere(According to Superman, you can have an entire planet of alien white people without justification), but the moment character gets rebooted as a minority, it becomes an issue.

 

That doesn't answer my question regarding how people seeing the move of a Muslim Ms. Marvel as a publicity stunt, perhaps to actively cultivate that controversy which will undoubtedly arise, is a hypocritical position to hold rather than a cynical one. In fact, your argument that Danvers dying and being replaced would be a non-event by all accounts actively contradicts the hypocrisy argument; since the fact that Danvers stepped aside (or, rather, up) rather than be killed and have her previous position assumed is already more out of the norm than most people would expect for comic book character succession (and thus drawing even more attention to the new Ms. Marvel).

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I think one of the things that people here aren't taking into account is the fact that, like turbojet said, for quite a long time (ie still up until now) comic book heroes have been woefully lacking in headlining characters that fans of different minority groups can relate to. I get that most people nowadays don't really read comics thinking to themselves 'Wow So and So is the coolest hero ever and I want to be just like them', but I know that for many kids they did look up to superheroes like this (hell I still see posts to this day on the forum of people talking about how Sonic or some other cartoon/videogame character really inspired them or gave them something to look up to in life). 

 

It's all well and good for young kids to look up to the typical white guy superhero, I know there were plenty of characters that fit that bill that at the time I was a kid I thought were awesome, but it also begs the question of why it has to be that way. When all your 'hero' or fantasy characters are unrepresentative of you, in some ways you have to wonder why the idea of an idealized hero doesn't make up a lot of things that represent you.

 

It's certainly not just a given that every story or character has to be told to be written specifically for the sake of giving role models or being some inspiring message to all readers, I mean most stories are just going to be story for the sake or story (or money lol), but I think superhero comics in some part have a long standing history of being escapist fiction that people sentimentally latch onto so in many ways I think that's why this can be such a big issue with so many people. 

 

As far as acting like a stereotype goes, while I get that that's a real concern, a lot of the time I think people are quick to suggest that any trait a character displays that signifies some sort of difference they have is venturing into stereotypical behavior. One common example that I can think of is people are very quick to cry out that 'gay' is being shoved in their face anytime a gay character even says they're gay. As much as people like to think we're all individual special sparkles that and all of our cultural dimensions don't matter, it is true that things like our gender, religion, culture, sexual orientation and so on impact us in many ways beyond just being throwaway labels we stick on ourselves. Is it heavyhanded to have a young, Muslim superhero character have her religion impact aspects of her character and story, or is that just likely to be the way it would be?

 

Regardless the reason that this is newsworthy still is because it is a rarity in the comic book industry, and that fact is still pretty reflective of some things in our culture. I get Roarey's point that in the end it's not like a comic needs to be some social illuminator, but I still think that for many people they just enjoy being able to read stories and get excited about characters or stories that speak to them on some personal, reflective level. 

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DC are the lesser company when it comes to tolerance, honestly. There's been a few arguments regarding them being a bunch of slime balls in the artist community as artists leave them because of their degradation of women in media i.e. making Harley Quinn look like a dominatrix and the victim of weak woman tropes.

 

Also some of the people who were working on Batwoman left the book because DC wouldnt let them have her get married to her partner and their reason was that married people arent interesting or not happy either way it was BS

Edited by Dejimon11
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Don't see this as a big deal at all. In fact, just as Mogtaki pointed out there's Dust already... so who really cares if she's Muslim? It's mostly Marvel doing a publicity stunt than anything. People shouldn't get annoyed for that. What it matters is how that is going to be explored in the comic itself.

 

People (and the media) are blowing this out of proportion and it's not the first time. I remember that recently, in X-Treme X-Men, an alternative universe Wolverine was gay and loved an alternate universe Hercules. And by the end of the series I believe that they both died. Reactions were:

 

BUT WOLVERINE CAN'T BE GAY!! DESTROYED THE CHARACTER FOR ME

MARVEL SUCKS

 

People didn't even bother to look that it wasn't even the Wolverine that matters. lol.

 

 

As for Spider-Man, I'm enjoying SpOck a lot. As I enjoy Miles Morales.  And okay, Superior sells a lot but just go into a comic book forum and see the outrage that this series caused. It's hilarious and the hate only started to die down because people are getting over it and actually enjoying or simply not caring about it. Same thing with Miles - at first, everybody hated him. Now, almost everybody loves him and is afraid of him dying in Cataclysm (together with the entire Ultimate Universe).

 

If you tried reading SSM/USM and didn't like that's fine. But don't go hating on it just because it's Doc Ock/Miles Morales.

 

tl;dr: Just read the comics you enjoy and be happy.

 

edit:

 

Also some of the people who were working on Batwoman left the book because DC wouldnt let them have her get married to her partner and their reason was that married people arent interesting or not happy either way it was BS

 

Wasn't this more of a "no marriage allowed" thing than a "no lesbian couples" thing? Because I'm pretty sure that almost everybody that was married in the DC universe got their marriages wiped out in the last reboot. Granted, it's still stupid but at least it's not really that bad.

Edited by Supaidaman
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