When we’re discussing villains, anti-heroes, and/or a complicated character who has done bad things, but has an in-universe reason for doing them, you cannot take race out of it, okay? You cannot pretend that the fact that this character is being played by a conventionally attractive white man has no bearing whatsoever on how the story is shaped or how you react to him.
Your media does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in a continuous timeline of marginalized people being used as fodder for straight white men and their pain, their motivations, and their humanity. Characters of color are never as humanized as white characters are, and don’t get to play as many complex characters as white actors do; and even when they do, they get erased, vilified, and devalued by the fandom because they don’t fit the stereotype we’ve come to expect. Look at Nick Fury. Look at James Rhodes. Look at all the recent bullshit with Sam Wilson and Antoine Triplett. That’s what happens when you get complex, interesting, well-rounded black male characters: fandom tries to argue that they could be villains in disguise and/or write them out to focus more on their white male characters.
Even with villains, only white men get to play the kind of complicated, intelligent, sympathetic villains we all love, like Loki. Imagine if Loki were played by Michael K. Williams. Do you think fandom would’ve embraced him with open arms if he were played by a black man? Do you think Michael K. Williams would be at Tom Hiddleston levels of adoration by fandom? Would people be writing tons of meta trying to excuse Loki’s actions if he were black? Do you think Loki would’ve been in three major movies, one as an outright villain, if he were played by a black man, especially a black man who is as an amazing actor and Shakespearean thespian as Tom Hiddleston, maybe even more?
If you said yes, you weren’t paying attention when the internet screamed the walls down for Branagh casting Idris Elba as Heimdall. Or Fantastic Four casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm. Or Quvenzhané Wallis being cast as Annie. And I’m sure it’ll happen again because people get astonishingly angry when people of color, especially black people, get to play characters who are heroic in any fashion.
Meanwhile, black and brown men are cast as thugs or drug dealers or terrorists, with no backstory to explain their motivations and no moments to humanize them to elicit empathy or sympathy. When there is an intelligent, sympathetic villain in a big box office movie that could have a person of color in it, sometimes specifically because the character is chromatic, it’s given to a white man because no one would believe that there is a chromatic actor out there who could play a cunning, ruthless yet sympathetic character better than a white man.
So yeah, love your villains, support your anti-heroes, and argue for their humanity if it’s needed, but please don’t act like the fact that they’re usually played by good-looking, able-bodied, cis white men does not play a big role in how much you empathize with them, and how much that is a specific calculation by a media industry that does not give enough of a fuck about marginalized people to represent them accurately, or at all.
Characters of color do not get the same treatment and opportunities as white characters, and it matters, especially to those of us who had to grow up never seeing any kind of positive representation of ourselves, and had to fight to get what little we’ve gotten.
It matters that we get two Chinese-American female characters, like Skye and Melinda May, who aren’t stereotypes and are allowed to express emotions without the narrative punishing them for it; it matters that we have a character like Rhodey who is heroic yet down-to-earth and someone that Tony can trust, no matter what; it matters that we have a heroic black man like Antoine Triplett, who is a legacy, and another heroic black man like Sam Wilson, who is a genuinely good man that is trusted by Captain America; it matters that we have a complicated, morally ambiguous black man like Nick Fury who can be fearless and vulnerable and a father figure to Natasha Romanoff; it matters that we get a mixed-race character like Raina who has her own motivations and complex morality; it matters that we have someone like Mike Peterson, who has been kidnapped by Hydra and forced to do evil with threats to his life and his son’s life, but he clearly doesn’t want to, and it eats away at him every time he has to do it.
You cannot take race out of it, especially when the default hero is a straight white man, and you have been trained your whole life to automatically be sympathetic and understanding of white male characters. You cannot pretend that a character being white and male does not have a significant impact on the way you relate to him, and the way you relate to the rest of the cast.
It has a significant impact or people still wouldn’t be arguing that Sam and Trip could be Hydra, despite all evidence to the contrary.
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