You’ve misunderstood so many of my points, this is exhausting.

You insist on gatekeeping the term “raceswap”. Fine. Call it “reimagining an existing character as another race”, if you want. You would have to be delusional to deny that Miles Morales is a Black-Latino version of Spider-Man.

The article I linked to mentions the backlash and controversy about political correctness and Morales. I’m a little surprised you missed the point there.

I’m not sure what specifically you’re on about with the “usual crowd” paragraph. I know that lots of non-racists are also against “reimagining an existing character as another race”. I agree that race swaps can go wrong a lot.

Please read this carefully: The specific claim I am contesting is OP’s strong thesis that raceswapping is always bad. I gave examples of it sometimes being good. Miles Morales is certainly an example, down to the criticisms of too much political correctness, racists complaining, fan “controversy”, claims that it’s a cash grab, etc.

My point was not that the multiverse is bad like elf slavery is bad. I am saying that your explanation gets things backwards: the multiverse doesn’t show how it’s not a race swap. On the contrary, the race swap is the reason why they needed to use the multiverse as a narrative tool. Forget the analogy to elf slavery if you don’t get it. The point is that some writer wrote a multiverse storyline in order to justify the existence of a Spider-Man of a different race.

Everyone likes him because the storytelling is good, which proves my point: Race/gender swaps are fine when done right. But when Miles Morales was first introduced, it was considered a race swap, and the usual crowd definitely moaned about it.

The multiverse explanation reminds me of people saying “But the elves liked being slaves!” in Harry Potter. Yeah, they were written that way, and they could have been written another way. The multiverse is being used to narratively justify a black Puerto Rican Spider-Man.

Kind of. Excerpt from this article by Ridley Scott:

“I think the idea actually came from Alan Ladd, Jr. I think it was Alan Ladd who said, ‘Why can’t Ripley be a woman?’ And there was a long pause that, at that moment, I never thought about it. I thought, why not? It’s a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went.”

This was the late 70s. “Man” was still so powerfully default that Ridley Scott had not even thought of the possibility of casting a leading woman action hero before a meeting with an exec. That, to me, is clearly a gender swap moment, because until that moment, it was a given that Ripley would be a man. The gender-neutral script just allowed for the possibility.

It’s hard to do well, but I disagree that it’s a slap in the face or a low blow. The gender swap of Starbuck from Battlestar Galactic was seen as sacrilege by fans, but she became one of the highlights of the show. Miles Morales was a creative way to do a race swap for Spider Man, and the narrative is richer for it. Jason Mamoa turned Aquaman from white to Polynesian, and the depiction was better than ever. Would Nick Fury be better as a white guy, as he was originally for decades, instead of Samuel L Jackson?

And then there are all the “swaps” that happen before the first day of filming, like Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien, who was originally (edit) going to be cast as a man. This was “controversial” at the time, with people decrying “political correctness”. I would not take “causing controversy” as a reliable indicator for whether something sucks.

Edit: point taken about gender neutral script. See discussion below.

Agreed. I think both are part of the picture. Consumers are buying the wrong kind of car (or manufacturers are selling the wrong type of car), too big and too inefficient, and there is price gouging, especially during the pandemic shortage. It’s telling that car prices were the fastest to come back down of almost any consumer category last year. Shows how much they could come down.

Cars have also ballooned in size since the 90s. In the 90s, sedans were the most common type of car. Now, it’s SUVs and light trucks, which use tons more materials.

This was my thought as well. A lot of these games are never made, even when the ads do very well (as evidenced by the ad continuing for years). Someone actually made the bait game for real, in recognition of the fact that the games have been advertised for many years and never made.

Even if OP’s explanation is sometimes correct, it doesn’t seem typically correct. In fact, it seems like a rare edge case, at best.

I agree, but just to clarify a minor point: small rural towns are actually some of the most walkable and bikable because they were built before cars. If you’re staying within a rural town, you don’t need a car.

The critic rating is better than the audience rating. I’ve never seen a film with a high critic rating that didn’t have something worthwhile about it. But I’ve seen a lot of audience hits that were garbage.

I don’t understand. Can someone explain this to me?