A friend of mine mentioned how Marvel is coming out with a female Muslim superhero and he said, “I hate forced diversity.” It’s an odd statement to make when you’re talking about fiction. What do you suddenly consider “forced?” It’s not like they have the creators at sword point telling them what to write. Well, some editors might work that way. But even still, how good was “non-forced diversity” working for the comic book industry for the last eighty years? To get to a point where people don’t think twice about the gender or ethnicity or religion or sexuality or cultural background of a character, you need a well balanced group of characters. The only reason people use the term “forced diversity” is because there is a flipside to that statement which is “white male is the status quo.” If you go off-script with character creation, some people are going to grumble. But that script needs to be thrown out so that every character that is created can simply be the next individual character to come along. Comic book readers should not have a standard base white male idea in their heads. I don’t even know why they’d want to!
My basic thought on diversity is fucking just go for it. Companies can’t listen to outspoken people that can’t handle change or difference. I don’t give a fuck if a character is Malaysian, Canadian, or Spanish as long as they interest me. But you know, if you can reach a wider audience by increasing the representation of the various characters, do that! If you lose a reader because they can’t handle different skin tones, fuck them. Who wants to cater to someone like that anyway? If you want to use the term “forced diversity,” then I say diversity should be forced. Force it down our throats until it’s commonplace. And once it’s commonplace, you’ll never again have to hear somebody use the term “forced diversity.” It will just be status quo.
Also, remember that thing I said about fiction? Fiction is forced! It’s contrived! Somebody has to think up something and there are many reasons why they choose the aspects of plot and character that they choose. Just make the characters interesting and people will read the comic book! Are you telling me there are people picking up Teen Titans simply because it’s full of whiteness (if we ignore the stinky smoking sulfur woman) and avoiding The Movement because it’s full of “forced diversity?” The Teen Titans is a horribly written pile of crap. The characters are bland, without motivation, and have only been reacting to time travel shenanigans and antagonists from the future. The Movement’s characters actually have motivation to better their community. They’re working for some kind of change even if they might occasionally go about it in really horribly awful ways. But at least they’re fucking interesting!
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