I'm not American so I was entirely unaware of how its usage has changed in such a way - thank you for the link, it was very illuminating.

Better to call a spade a spade - it is a racist, kinda eugenic-y comment that they wrote.

The Toast commentariat does skew white, and that kind of comment is the sort of thing that falls out of white mouths when they feel safe to do so (aka not mixed company). Thing is, she is welcome to have Views on having the perfect white baby be her offspring, such is her right as an autonomous woman, but it's definitely one of those things you keep to yourself and not on a public board community that prides & pats itself on the back on being inclusive and self-aware.

Really I'm disappointed not more Toasties pointed it out.

I was speaking to a friend about how you could still have a "german shepherd-as-a-person cop who wants to help and save everyone" character by literally swapping the actors for Will and his cop partner. A Latin cop having a complex relationship between the force and the people makes MUCH more sense, ditto the immediate suspicion he would get for assisting a young kid. The scene where a BLACK nurse goes off on Will about saving a kid gangster who may "later kill someone else" ugh ugh the whiteness the BLINDING WHITE OBLIVIOUSNESS OF THIS WRITING.

All Riley was made to do was Suffer Tragically, she didn't have enough scenes with the other Sensates beyond Will to balance it out. I understand her parallel to Angelica ("mother" of the new cluster vs literal mother to a dead child; the suicide attempt), and ditto Will's parallel (I assume) with Jonas, but ... I just didn't care. Somehow these two became more boring together than all of Wolfgang's sullen Grim Troubled Blonde Videogame Protagonist plotline.

SPOILER SPACE OBV!!

I marathoned it and really enjoyed Sun & Capheus in particular (to me they're 2 sides of the same "shonen hero" coin lmao), and Lito (with Hernando and Daniela) is a treasure ahh <33. I love the scenes where they share positive emotions or just hang out with each other, especially how joyously Capheus responds to new places or how he and Riley love to ask questions and show people things about where they live and what they like. It's very sincere and lovely.

But I had ... a lot of problems with it at the same time. I really DESPISED the tone-deaf "white saviour cop" with Will's introduction, especially with the police state as it is. I sympathised with Riley but did not really care about her story, and I disliked how it still ended up being Fragile White Woman Saved By Hero White Guy at the end. With the threat of Whispers being what it is (and they did a great job showing how SCARY and sinister he is just with the breadth of his powers once eye contact is made), the whole "no one's gonna die i'm gonna live" with the entirety of the last episode/s being Will/Riley focused my basic response was just "ugh white folks doing shit again". Narratively I understand WHY you'd like the parity of a full group of 8 sensates (contrasting with the previous cluster being ripped apart), but i was so sick of them at the end, even with the amazing "infiltration" scene where everyone would swap places with Will to help him out in different ways (or in general, i love it each time one of them goes "lemme do that for you" for a fellow sensate).

Granted I know I shouldn't come to a Wachowski project expecting race nuance (especially knowing how anti-black/racist Lana Wachowski is), but it was a clunker. I wanted to go back to Capheus watching movies with Kala or everyone having a great time watching fireworks. :/

Clunky dialogue is such a Wachowski/Straczynski-ism that I expected it, but OI it got near-offensive levels when it came to Sun or Capheus's story, Sun in particular to me since I'm Korean. Her dialogue scenes in Korea were as clunky and stereotypical as shitty 70s English dubs of HK action films, all stoic intoning about "my daughter" and so on. UGH.

I understand WHAT they were going for, especially in making everyone speak English for the audience, but my god if you're going to do that at least polish their dialogue enough so it's natural and not as if the only PoC you know are the ones you saw in films. The point later on in the series with the sensates going ??? in their own languages to each other will still work.

Yes that's what I mean - we have to approach the conversation within the framework of Marvel comics, and its nature of being a "shared universe" on top of having an "elastic timeline" and how the film franchise adopts that, and what its effects are on consumers and the stories that inform us. Big 2 cape comics are fascinating because they ARE living narratives, a permanent "Act 2", which means it is built-in to their DNA to interrogate their history, something regularly tackled now with a new vanguard of more self-aware creators. The films in that sense are doing the same, in a very Marvel way, of taking old characters and spinning/updating them to be plausible in the real current world, which is why it's frustrating when higher-ups specifically embrace or step over what was wretched in the comics. This view is not in isolation from the "raze the ground and make something of our own" perspective; the realistic view is that honestly you need to do both - the latter doesn't exactly have money and a 70+ year marketing behemoth.

Doctor Strange, to me, is similar to Iron Fist in that there is something very oldschool about the core story (redemption of a hubristic man, an errant son embracing duty) but its true potential is completely mired in white colonial and white supremacist values plus jaw-dropping Orientalism and fetishistic racism. A lot of it struck me as white guys trying to hammer very classically non-European story traditions around a white American framework, and get a mess out of it because they only half-listened to the original stories anyhow.

And because I know some of these stories, I can see how even the Ancient One or K'un L'un's inherently racist current setup can be fixed (embrace the original stories from the pens and mouths of the originating cultures, not the white guy comic knockoffs), but it's a huge amount of care and work involved and Feige honestly doesn't appear to give a shit, alas, but there stands a better chance in the comics.

Legacy cape comics and the franchise are ALL about semantics, and that's both its problem (why IS it so hard to get completely new characters off the ground?) and its draw. As I said, you can take it or leave it, and a lot of people leave it, but that means you are not looking at the same game I am, which is maybe where this disagreement lies.

We all know that it's wrong to have a Chinese manservant, but that story exists, and has existed for decades, and will never go away (much as I wish it would), and it's not a little insulting to say "but semantics" as if we don't know what the core problem was. Rebooting will not erase the stain, obviously, but it is SATISFYING as an Asian comics fan to see that racist trope with this name and this character upended. The resonance is not as strong if you just erase Wong or any other core-problematic character (e.g. Psylocke) completely - I and many others want that history interrogated honestly, to show what should have been done, which is the magic of these big shared universe comics that have different creators playing in the same sandbox and picking up each others' toys and improving on them.

"More trouble than it's worth" is basically just going "why bother with making change", though?

The thing to understand about the draw of MCU/DC films is that much as lay people (non-comics) folks say "well why not invent someone completely new to begin with", it's not how those comic book films are built. Their whole thing is to grab decades-old characters wholesale from comics, reboot them to their own ends, and sell them back again (and as a nice bonus the comics division gets a massive popularity boost, hence the resurgence of the industry's wider popularity once MCU got big). That's the novelty, though I guess if that's not your thing you can take or leave it.

What I see, as a comics fan, is that a progressive move in the films means blowback into the comics, which if they get big enough, start to cycle back to the films (case in point, Captain Marvel being greenlit). If Wong is, say, rebooted as a savvy, clever, competent magician character on his own, he'll pick up popularity, kids watching the movies will go "who is that he's cool and looks like me and I fuckin love magical shit" and get curious about the comics because there's more content coming out regularly. Comics divisions of Marvel/DC will latch onto most things that's popular in order to bolster their general poor sales (and it has been poor, American corporate print comics has been in decline for decades), Wong starts showing up rebooted in the comics to match up to MCU depiction (Marvel comics officially denies this influence, but come on, we aren't naive), and bam, one more little piece of Marvel comics character tapestry is less odious to look at and is actually enjoyable as an Asian reader.

I don't want an "Agent Wong" because I and many other Asian comics/film fans want DIFFERENT types of Asian characters, from magician/sorcerers to spies (fun note, there's already a cult-fave Chinese-American ex-SHIELD agent named Agent Jimmy Woo/Wu, who has his own fascinating history and team in Agents of Atlas). I LIKE the universe set up by Marvel and the baseline concepts of given characters, and I want to see them rebooted as less racist, better-researched, etc., because it makes an even richer universe that future diverse creators can come into and be less afraid of building on top of it with aspects and understandings from their own cultures. It makes for fun films with diverse casts and an authenticity to their stories, and certainly gives minority actors more fun in a variety of roles instead of playing Ethnic Nurse #2 or Gangbanger #5.

So yes. I think it's worth the trouble.

I don't think it's that difficult at all though, story-wise; the challenge is finding a writer who is actually capable of seeing Asian characters as people with agency, not as props. I don't think it difficult, for example, to reboot Wong as a peer instead of a manservant, which makes room to eliminate the "wise old Chinaman" stereotype and cast someone whose age aligns with MCU's current casting for their heroes. Strange gets an ally, a storied Marvel Asian character has their racist roots course-corrected, and an Asian actor gets a job.

A lot of Marvel's Asian characters (or white characters that co-opt Asian cultures, a la Iron Fist) have insanely racist/orientalist roots that frankly just need to be uprooted and thrown aside for something smarter and better-researched. That goes from everything from the Ancient One & Wong for Strange's stories, down to Psylocke and her literal embodiment of a white woman colonising an Asian woman's body and life. As long as they're kept having their powers and names and symbols, realigning the narrative is really only a matter of finding the right kind of creators and being unafraid to face the howling of white fanboys stirring up a cloud of Doritos dust as they pound at their keyboards.

I take issue with both these criticisms because they're both very shallow in that they only advocate the writer's own brand of feminism, and if it doesn't perfectly match up, it's automatically not-feminist. Like who makes you arbiter of what works for other women or not? Not to mention it's that trend of fighting over scraps, where whatever scrap you pick up MUST be representative of EVERYONE and if you only choose 1 take in 1 type of story in 1 genre it's automatically bad feminism, the creative work of a particular story be damned (double-damned be the underrepresented people who see themselves in the story!).

That being said, in Sarkeesian's case, hers was incredibly frustrating because her total tweets read more like she chose a thesis before seeing the movie (or frankly just the trailer, her critique is that flat and shallow). She has a good fundamental point (embracing toxic masculinity) but it's weakened from the getgo because she intentionally ignores the concept of WHITE feminism embracing WHITE masculinity (which is a topic well worth exploring by someone who actually paid attention to the film), an extremely particular and prevalent brand of crummy and poisonous feminism.

I personally got more out of articles or tweets written by PoC, ranging from "thanks for showing us we don't exist even in post-apocalypse, i guess we all died? mmkay" to "quite frankly let the white people have that shitty life, yeesh".