The hypocrisy is stunning

This writer nailed it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/01/not-your-asian-ninja-how-the-marvel-cinematic-universe-keeps-failing-asian-americans.html

excerpt:


Look, I, like every other Asian-American geek in the country, was on board with the#AAIronFist petition, which asked Marvel to consider casting an Asian-American actor as the traditionally white kung fu superhero Danny Rand. I have nothing against Finn Jonesas an actor and I think he could probably do a reasonable job with a “faithful” adaptation of the Iron Fist character. Just like I didn’t think it was a necessity that the racially ambiguous Dr. Strange be cast as an Asian guy, although making his faithful manservant Chinese felt like a slap to the face.

But here’s what gets me: They did do a “race lift” of a martial arts-oriented character. They took Elektra Natchios, who, if you couldn’t tell from her name, is supposed to be Greek, and cast the French-Cambodian actress Elodie Yung to play her. In order to justify this casting choice they radically changed Elektra’s backstory, making her an adopted child of the Greek ambassador Hugo Natchios rather than his biological daughter and removing the daddy issues between her and Hugo that—in case you couldn’t tell from the not-very-subtle reference in her name—played a big role in her original characterization.


All of this is exactly the same as what people asked for when they asked for kung fu superhero Iron Fist to be an Asian guy. “Danny Rand” could easily be the name of an Asian kid adopted by a Caucasian family. All the stuff in Danny Rand’s story about him being a Mighty Whitey outsider to “kung fu” culture could be about an Asian-American guy reconnecting with legends and folklore he’d long dismissed as irrelevant to him. We even have precedent for that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Stellan Skarsgard’s Dr. Selvig’s incredulous reaction to the absurdity of his childhood stories of Thor and Loki being real.

But for whatever reason, they decided against that. They were willing to “racebend” one well-known character—one who’s already had a movie where she was played by Jennifer Garner—but not a much more obscure character who, unlike Elektra, was the focus of a massive community demand for positive representation.

So what gives? What are the differences between those two characters?
Just off the top of my head: Elektra isn’t the hero of her own story, and Danny Rand is. Elektra isn’t really heroic at all, in fact, while Danny Rand is. Elektra, in all her portrayals, is an amoral killer who’s a foil for Matt Murdock’s morality, and in this particular portrayal she’s some sort of inherently evil demonic killing machine. Danny Rand, by contrast, is an ordinary likable guy in over his head trying to do his best—the kind of Everyman hero we’re used to seeing played by white guys named Chris.

Finally—and this is the big one—Elektra is a hot chick who’s there as a love interest for a white guy main character to lust after, and for the audience to lust after by extension in various sex scenes and half-naked fight scenes. Danny Rand is a guy, and therefore of less interest to fetishists, thanks to the racial preference hierarchy that says Asian women get to be sex objects and Asian men get to be invisible.


It is a double standard. And the writer is correct that Electra, thanks to a motion picture made about her, was arguably the more well known character among mainstream audiences. And yet TPTB had no issue in changing her racial identity and tweaking her origin story to boot.

What I also noticed was how few fans objected to this. Which demonstrated a pattern among fanboys, or more specifically, white fanboys. When the race bending took place for a character that was NOT a white male character there was far less outrage (Think: Electra, Iris West, Sunspot, Terry Fitzgerald of the Spawn film, Alicia Masters of the F4 movies from ahwile back....hell Sue Storm of those same F4 movies considering Jessica Alba ain't exactly white). But let that racebending happen to a white male character (even though 95% of the heroes and villains in comic book history are white males) and white fanboys lose their minds.