I went full autist in the Star Wars thread and responded to a complaint that the First Order is a bunch of WHITE MALES while The Resistance is diverse. LTDan suggested I spin this off into it's own poast. Office is dead on new year's week, so why not?

Slightly revised and expanded from here:

http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3842354&mc=100&forum_id=2

It's much harder to have a minority antagonist because ljl @ libs.

So, Finn is supposed to be heroic, Rose is supposed to be kind, etc. Nobody would conclude from that all black people are heroic or all azngirls are kind, because people aren't fucking retarded.

It doesn't work this way with negative attributes. If you switched the Finn actor and the Kylo Ren actor and kept everything else the same, you fucking know there would be a million think pieces about how Kylo Ren stereotypes black people and Rey is a problematic white temptress playing on tired racial tropes of white women redeeming black men, #StarWarsSoWhite, etc., etc., etc. A major movie franchise cannot risk having a human villain who is something other than a white male, unless the protagonist has those exact same demographics.

So, e.g., the Avengers can face Loki (WHITE MALE despite technically being an alien), a bodiless AI, and an alien, but they would never team up to take down a black dude. Captain America will never be pitted against a female antagonist, but Wonder Woman can have the female Dr. Poison as a secondary antagonist. Black Panther can face a black dood in his own movie, though, and of course there would be no problem if he fought an evil white guy (and he probably will in the second movie).

The most extreme example of this I'm aware of is the fucking Mandarin. Iron Man is a white guy so, of course, his movie antagonists are too. The Mandarin is a comic antagonist they wanted to use for a movie and, as you can probably tell by the name, a Chinese bro. So, what t do? Simple: In-universe, he's a white British criminal merely pretending to be Chinese because another white guy (a fucking American!) is paying him to do so. Seriously: http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Trevor_Slattery

Shitlibs have taken us to a strange place.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3842455&forum_id=2#35026307)