168
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
168 points (94.2% liked)
News
23287 readers
1694 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I think the character is white, though. Some people are. Doesn't really matter. Blade is black, I enjoyed the first film.
Santa Claus isn’t really a character, though. He’s a mythical figure. No one owns a trademark or copyright of Santa Claus. It would be like saying the tooth fairy is white. There are common depictions of Santa Claus, like the Coca Cola Santa, but those are just adaptations of a myth.
Blade, on the other hand, is an actual character, owned by Marvel. So Marvel decides what is canonical with regard to the character.
Genuine question, is being black an integral parto of the story of Blade? Never read the comic, saw the movie and don't remember if it was. Kinda different of other characters, like Black Panther where being black is an essential part of the characters background. Going back to Santa, he's based on a white guy, but the current cultural character of santa is so disconnected from him that it barely matters who the guy was. The character is a representation of Christmas, and Christmas is celebrated by basically everyone everywhere, so it was just a matter of time until local adaptations of Santa popped up.
The actual reason as given by one of the creators was that they were trying to diversify their characters by adding a black character when the vast, vast majority of characters at the time were white. It just happened that this character was the theme they were working on at the time.
It fits his theme visually, since he can be in the sun (Daywalker) and the pasty white vamps cannot. But that is just coincidence. Since the vast majority of superheroes still lean towards white due to keeping a lot of legacy characters around, it is important for Blade to stay black because he is part of an under represented race/ethnicity group.
All that said, Santa being white and Blade being black is a meaningless comparison. Santa brings gifts to all children and having multiple representations that fit different groups is a positive. Changing Blade erases an early example of a non-white superhero, which is a negative.
I agree that it would be stupid of Marvel to change Blade to a white guy (and that Marvel would never do it), but it would be theoretically possible given that he's a fictional character - just like Santa Claus. Making black Santas hurts nobody. Well, except racists who see any black representation as injurious to their fragile white ego.
Changed my mind, Santa is Chinese now. Or like, Southeast Asian, let's go with Southeast Asian.
And people could have Southeast Asian Santas while others have black Santas and still others have white Santas. Nobody (except the racists) is saying that Santa has to be ONE ethnicity and can't be any others. Just because one family has a black Santa doesn't mean EVERY Santa needs to be black.
Thanks for your answer. Legacy characters that are not a white cis male usually have a story or plot related reason of why they're not a white guy, because if the background didn't mattered they just made him a white guy.
It’s hard to say. The historical person, St Nicholas of Myra, was probably of a lighter complexion, given he was a native of Greece.
However, in traditional Catholic art, he is depicted as anywhere from pale-skinned to dark-skinned depending on the location of the images (Bari in particular has many paintings of him with darker skin, possibly to show that they were cool enough to be able to attract a ‘foreign’ saint).
So given that even the person who is the origin of ‘Santa’ is depicted with many different skin tones, I’d say Santa can be whatever skin color people want him to be.
Santa white as fuck mate. Just a fat white guy in Lapland. Baron Samedi, less so. Although he does wear whiteface a lot of the time.