Deadput wrote:Evil Eye wrote:Look at it this way- if it were the other way around and the only revealed main character who WASN'T white was the mad scientist villain, there'd be complaints. It works both ways; if you're claiming to be diverse, you need to be, well, diverse. And "Everyone is one race except the villain" is not that, regardless of what those races are. It could be that everyone was from Venezuela except the villain who was Mongolian and it would be equally ridiculous.
Prime, for all the things I found subpar about it, did it right. You had a white kid, a Japanese kid, a Latino kid, a black agent (also the best character incidentally) and it never felt forced. Likewise, Animated has the main human character be of Indian descent, and she's one of my favourite humans in Transformers. This? It just feels very much like pandering. Not even to black fans or even black kids- rather, to people who literally just want to see THEIR worldview given credit, THEIR egos stroked (even if they aren't black themselves) at the expense of everybody else, even though they can literally go to any other property for that already.
A mainstream cartoon having representation of other people in it? That's cool, no problem. A show aimed at a black audience? Why not? But mixing the two together seems incompatible- you're going for a show that's supposed to have as broad an appeal as possible specifically targeting a relatively niche audience.
Honestly I would have thought the classic Japanese approach of "Mukokuseki" would have been a better one- making race beyond basic skin colour pretty indeterminate and honestly utterly unimportant to the story or character's personality. To children- you know, the actual audience for these shows- even assuming they care about being "represented" beyond basic skin colour and sex, their main draw to a character will be "They're cool/cute/funny!".
Plus, quite aside from anything else, the character designs are objectively hideous.
Dude your comments about the race of the characters is utter nonsense, families are usually comprised of one race, who cares if the villain is white or any other skin color, who cares if the family is black, you bring up Animated who's main family was both also one race and the human villain's in that show were also mostly white but you ain't saying nothing about how that show did it huh? TFP was diverse in it's cast because guess what it's human cast wasn't a family! Turns out that's a pretty different god damn dynamic.
Because having the entire main character cast be from one family is not great. And let's be real- if it were a white family we'd be having people accusing it of "white supremacy" and demanding the husband be made black or something.
You act like we know the whole cast for the entire show but we don't, and even if these are all the humans why does it matter?
They're clearly the MAIN cast, hence why they've been shown to us. As for why it matters...did you read my post?
What's even different here? What's different to having the black family this time as opposed to the white family in RID or in the OG G1 cartoon? (which had other characters of other skin colors as occasional allies which can also be the case here.)
If it doesn't matter, why are you so adamant in defending it? But I'll tell you why it's not great.
1: America (where this is presumably set) is a majority white country. If it were made in, set in and made for Jamaica, I'd be a bit surprised if the characters were all white, or Hispanic. There are bits of America that are more black, but even so, setting the series in such a specific environment limits appeal. If they want to go for "realistic representation" then for a children's toy-promoting cartoon, which NEEDS as wide an appeal as possible, it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to aim solely at a minority. It'd be like if the target audience were Mormons; the majority of children in America buying Transformers and watching the cartoon are not Mormons. It isn't going to work.
2: Why does the whole main cast of humans need to be from the family? Why can't it just be the brother and sister, with the parents as incidental characters, and the other two main kids being, I dunno, Christopher (a white boy) and Lailani (a Filipina girl)? That's how you do GENUINE diversity- you know, having MORE THAN ONE GROUP REPRESENTED.
3: It's obvious WHY they've done this. It's partly to gain kudos from the (probably childless and white) people on Twitter that want every single media property on Earth to conform to their (patently stupid) personal politics, and partly so when it inevitably fails they can blame its failure on "racism" and call everyone who criticized or just didn't watch it as a "white supremacist chud" or whatever. Which is bad enough with a franchise for adults, but for a kid's show is downright grotesque. This has nothing to do with wanting positive representation for black people or whatever, and everything to do with wanting to shield their pet project from criticism in the worst way possible.
Want a similar example? Look at the upcoming LOTR Amazon series. It looks...bad. Very bad. But because it has a black Elf in it (which makes zero sense in a setting based on old England and written by a man who extensively studied Anglo-Saxon history) you can't criticize it without being smeared as a proto-Klansman. Which seems especially pointless with a fantasy work- if you want to make an LOTR-like fantasy story similarly inspired by IRL mythology, but wanted a black main cast, you can! There's SO many fascinating mythologies and cultures to draw upon- Africa alone has thousands, and then you have Aboriginal culture which is absolutely incredible. In fact, that's FAR more doable than trying to make what is, at the end of the day, a vehicle to sell toys to American children, but using an almost entirely black cast. But no, the greedy, lazy gits in charge of the Rings of Power production didn't WANT to make a new story, that would take effort and time- they wanted a quick buck with a gimmick to sell the product and also use as a shield against critique. Hence why they just took an existing and
comprehensively explored setting like LOTR and wore its skin like a suit.
Also there's the fact that having the sole main-cast white person be a villain is classic nu-media virtue signalling/anti-white dogwhistle but that's a whole other story.
Just straight up, your worldview here from how you present it is just straight up wrong and backwards thinking,
Because...? What's wrong and backwards thinking about saying "this won't appeal to the average kid"?
why is it only that people say stupid stuff like this when the main characters are anything but white.
I mean that's patently wrong. Just talking about things I found annoying, look at Avatar The Last Airbender's original live action movie. They took a really interesting world with fascinating cultures inspired by Asia, and made everyone white. That sucked. As for stupid criticisms, look at Overwatch, which I genuinely enjoyed until Blizzard came out as essentially stooges for Communist China and its despotic tyrant. People had a fit every time a new character came out that wasn't black (especially if they were white, poor Ashe!). And when they DID bring out a new black hero- Baptiste- they got mad because he wasn't a black WOMAN. So yeah, saying "people only get mad about non-white people appearing in media" is completely incorrect on every level.
Earthspark will not work as a mainstream Transformers cartoon. It will not appeal to the average child. It won't appeal to the average adult fan even. It's just a poor decision all around. Adding non-white characters or even a main protagonist? Sure. Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.
The sad thing is that they're CLEARLY doing this to deflect any possible criticism as "racism" or whatever. And you're playing into their hands.
