This and this to now this...

What the flip ever happened to diversity? I for one love me some fantasy. The reason it is so awesome is because it's pretty unrealistic fantasies imposed on idealized things that are pulled from real life. But dang, a big girl can't have one serious representation in a comic? Flying funk this. You can have Kingpins and Penguins, Professor Pyg and old folks being assassins, and a crap load of other fat, thick, old, or not as in shape dudes getting along just fine in these fantasies all the time. Then by some miraculous thing called diversity and the juxtaposition of fantasy and the reality that there are thousands of different types inhabiting the earth, it’s decided that a triple whammy is on order and a fat, brown skinned, FEMALE who is NOT a joke character, means serious business, and doesn’t look like an undesirable hag fish in the form of Amanda Waller is born. Then oh my stars and garters she becomes iconic for not just her looks which include her heavyset body, but her bad arsery as well. That’s just fantastic news, we have some more diversity being illustrated in the wonderful world of fantasy, BUT apparently that’s just to dang unrealistic for a freaking fantasy. So she has to lose weight and show some cleavage to become lost in that shallow typecasting of women in comics as it is instead of the unique individual she was.

I really want to know why of all the changes that have happened in their new reboot, why in the world was this one of them? It’s one of those things that stands out because it’s completely asinine in the scheme of things to change. A girl can’t have ONE large iconic female in a serious role that she can somewhat relate to in comics when it seems that every other categorization or affiliation of person has a character that they can identify with. I seriously didn’t get the big deal of having a character on a team that every nationality, gender, or type of person, etc. that one could identify with if the story to be told was (at first), but after seeing this, I can definitely see why people get so hot and bothered by these things. I wish that they weren’t even factors in what makes you interested in a particular series, but they are. Everyone likes to be able to have someone they can identify with or relate to, because that’s what grabs your attention. Sure it’s fantasy, but when they are drawing close to home, it becomes a fantasy that you can see yourself living. So when you take an underrepresented minority character from mainstream and make a radical change after such a long standing and iconic look such as this, it is utterly infuriating. It’s not like there are any fat (let alone brown) chicks walking around any mainstream comic series that isn’t background fodder or comic relief (I can’t even think of comic relief in truth). At this point even if there was some reason for her radical change, I’m sure it’s founded in some shallowtastic reasoning. “We had to make her thinner so she could be more athletic”. Kiss the left side of my car trunk! Just because you have weight on you doesn’t mean you can’t be athletic. Everyone carries it differently. You’ve never seen a fat cop or karate master? True you may not be the world’s finest at keeping up with Superman who’s faster than a speeding bullet or Batman who climbs mountains in his spare time for exercise, (and really not many are) but that doesn’t mean a thick chick couldn’t hold her own in a fight or haul some tail when she needed to.

In the end this probably won’t even matter to a whole lot of comic fans, but for this big, brown chick who found one representation that she could identify with and actually LIKE the characterization of the character, this has just been more of a disappointment than anything else the DC reboot has done.

Think imma’ go achieve all the Amanda Waller appearances in comics and cartoons while I can so that I can at least go “Once upon a time I was represented in comics to children”. 1 step forward and somehow wind up devolving in the process.

Thanks,

Just your average Phat Blaque Chick comic fan.