Oh, she did.
It just didn’t happen until after the movie had come out.
See, in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter was interested in Liz Allen, played by Laura Harrier.
Liz is a ‘lower tier’ Spider-Man character, in that she’s not instantly recognizable the way Mary-Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy are, and her appearance and ethnicity have waffled back and forth depending on the medium. The comics have her generally as being white and blonde, she looked to be Latina in Spectacular Spider-Man, she was brunette in the 2017 Spider-Man series, and Laura Harrier is biracial.
Zendaya’s character, Michelle Jones, is inspired both by Mary-Jane Watston, and another character, Michele Gonzales, and the “MJ” reveal is in the last moments of the movie. Since then, there have been plenty of racists coming out of the woodwork to say ‘hashtag NotMyMJ,’ but by that point, most people had already decided they liked the character, before learning she was ‘MJ.’ The racists have come out again since she showed up with red hair at a press event, quoting Mary-Jane’s signature line on Instagram.
But again, she did this after the MJ reveal. Moreover, she’s not rocking the red in the movie, and she’s still technically not Mary-Jane Watson, she’s Michelle Jones. They’re evoking the spirit of a character without having the actual character.
Halle Bailey has no such luxury. There was no way of getting around ‘this girl is playing Ariel in The Little Mermaid,’ without immediate connections to her pale-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed animated counterpart. Even if they hadn’t named her Ariel, but suggested that the character might have a different name, we would still be dealing with this nonsense.
1 Comments
Good
ReplyDelete