Week 3: Phase 3
Marvel's White Washing Problem, Queer Bating, and Long Due Diversity
“In Marvel’s main comic universe (Earth-616) series of events, Magneto (Max/Magnus) saves Magda from concentration camps in 1936, where she was targeted for her Roma ancestry. Like any convoluted love story, the rest is history, because Magda and Magneto later had the twins. Throughout mutant and non-mutant history—seeing as the twins aren’t necessarily mutants—Marvel Comics has changed and retrofitted Wanda and Pietro’s family.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.themarysue.com/mcu-whitewashing-problem-roma/amp/
The Maximoff twins are Romani people and the fact that their heritage is ignored is even more problematic because the Romani people were one of the groups persecuted by the nazis and the main antagonist group Hydra is a fantasy nazi science group. The Macimoff twins were also experimented on by Hydra which was a fate that the Nazis cast upon many Jewish people during the holocaust. The whitewashing of Wanda may have occurred partly because her initial character arc centers around her being a mysterious gorge in witch and there are heave negative connotations of Romani women within spirituality and their “curses”
Within Dr. Strange- although the original character designs were racially ambiguous at best if not, just white, there were so many opportunities to show the diversity of Asian actors in this film that wasn’t taken. The majority of the characters were white when the film focused on cultural and spiritual aspects of Asian cultures. The colonization of the idea of chakras and spirituality has been colonized and commodified to a point of disillusionment and commercialization.
Thor Ragnarok has a rather large amount of diversity reflecting the changing Hollywood that created it. Tessa Thompson, a queer actress of color, plays Valkerie the last of a legion of warrior women who ride around on pegasi. Despite being about Norse mythology, the Thor movies end up being almost more racially diverse than the rest of the MCU. The Valkerie were incredibly strong and even role models and icons in Thor’s childhood as he states that we wanted to be one when he grew up. Valkyrie never has a specific love interest but some audiences speculated that she was queer-bating- a term coined when a character or person personifies queer traits to profit and commodify LGBTQIA+ culture and clout within explicitly stating sexual orientation.
Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/860680178756682328/
Thor Ragnarok went pleasantly off the books with Valkeries character design, other than the fact that in the comics she is blond hair and blue-eyed, the costume was completely different. The original comic design had Valkerie fighting in a leotard/swimsuit with armor over parts of it. The male gaze was heavily entrenched in this design. Thompson took the time to redesign the costume to be more fitting to the character, as well as creating more appropriate fighting gear.
Black Panther is probably Marvel’s most well-noted film for both being influenced by culture in the real world and influencing the real world. “Wakanda Forever” was heard for months after the movie was released, even SNL did a skit about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGKffRRIMko). Throughout the movie, there were nods to different African Cultures and the only white person of interest in the movie is the CIA operative. Almost every aspect of this movie fought against racial stereotypes, especially when it comes to intersectionality. We have a dark-skinned woman as the gentle romantic lead, women with shaved heads who lead the entire military and are highly respected, a young woman who leads the countries work in STEM fields. The audience is shown the first admittance from the MCU that the US is not an equal place for everyone, and finally shows somewhere besides rich houses in LA, NYC, or ambiguous countryside. The soundtrack for Black Panther was incredibly powerful and popular as Kendrick Lamar leads most of the songs. This soundtrack also featured SZA, 2 Chainz, Jorja Smith, Future, The Weekend, and Travis Scott.
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