[Jester]

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

I didn't respond to you with a cliché...

You seem to respond almost entirely in cliché.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

I also didn't know "first world problems" had an actual dictionary definition, as I can't find it in Oxford and Wiki and Urban Dictionary don't count for much more than gibberish.

I suspect that you know this already but "First World Problems" are what you have when you're living so comfortably (including having the extra income to spend on large numbers of expensive pieces of plastic) that the only things that you have to complain about are absurdly minor annoyances that a less well-off person would never have the luxury of being bothered by.

In your case, this applies because, evidently, it's not good enough that a black superheroine is, and has been for decades, one the most popular and prominent members of her particular group of characters, strong, brave, beautiful and powerful, loved and respected by her peers and desired by numerous powerful and popular male characters (up to and including literal gods like Thor), no, none of that counts for anything because she had a brief career as a child pickpocket and was introduced "barefoot and topless." But neither of these things are in and of themselves unreasonable given Storm's backstory: Africa is an infamously impoverished continent despite its tremendous wealth of natural resources and while many nations are home to well-developed, modern cities, (often orphaned) street children engaged in endeavors of varying degrees of legality are still an issue in many places. Likewise, even in 2020, African women in some regions will still attend traditional ceremonies quite literally barefoot and topless (although it's apparently becoming common for many of the participants to wear sneakers).

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

Go figure, here I thought it was just a silly toss away line people on the internet use when they feel threatened by something that challenges their worldview and/or a deflection used when someone is too lazy to commit thought to a presented concept/pondering.

But go on, do tell us more about your argumentative technique.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

If you think what I wrote constitutes an attack (my goodness, what would you do if was really "attacking???")...

In your words, the genesis of the Storm character is a tale of "negative African stereotypes," involving "worst depictions of native cultures," "antiquated tomes like National Geographic," "cringe-worthy backstory," "other grating elements, "ugly silliness" and "off-putting devices." Token caveats aside, that's a very clear attack on Chris Claremont and other early X-Men writers, particularly given the pretentiously pseudo-academic tone that you're couching it all in.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

...maybe viewing liberals as "snowflakes" is yet one more in a long, long list of projections. Without getting into how you could possibly divine the intent/motivations of the the creative team in question as it pertains to that particular image...

For a guy who sees himself "as a person of color with a sense for both history and perspective" you're displaying very little awareness of the latter two categories. You've cited Daniel Patrick Moynihan; perhaps you've also heard of his contemporary, Marshall McLuhan, another influential figure in late 1960s/early 1970s public discourse, and his famous observation that "the medium is the message." In the case of Giant-Sized X-Men, what sort of message do you think is being conveyed, in 1975, by the medium of a group of heroes comprised of a Japanese man, a demonic-looking German, a reservation Apache, an ugly, near-midget Canadian, a Soviet collective farmer and a beautiful African woman?

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

"Ardent liberals" by the standard of whom exactly? Daniel Patrick Moynihan? I don't expect you to get the reference, but hey, maybe you'll do some independent research of him, his views, and how the field (i.e. his own peers and history) came to regard his work and ideas as toxic and dangerous.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

All because you believe that accurate cultural depictions are 'bland and boring' doesn't make it so. Maybe try to learn about ethnicities outside of your own without falling back on comfortable and erroneous over-simplifications?

"Accurate cultural depictions" could include such things as eating albinos to gain magic powers, raping virgins/children in the hopes of curing AIDs or lynching alleged "penis-thieves". Rather horrifying, of course, but certainly not bland or boring by any estimation.

But bland and boring is apparently what you want, given your whining about Storm's traumatic childhood and adolescence (which appears to betray an unfamiliarity with one of the recurring themes of the X-Men series as a whole, that being the titular heroes having to endure various hardships prior to finding a spiritual home with the team).

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

What was the last "tribal setting" you visited? lol cray-cray much?

Do you even reed dance, bro?

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

Bonus: ARDENT - nice lexical expansion on what I usually see from you! You get a nickel from the PSAT bank You dug deep on that one...but I have to take 3 cents back for lack of effort in that you repeated the word and only changed it slightly by converting it into an adjective. You could have gone with something like "unequivocally" that second time around, which would have netted you a full dime and offered variety to the reader...

Congratulations, you own a dictionary.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

I wasn't whining. I was pointing out an observation that I made even as a young child.

I'm glad that you're able to acknowledge that your objections are childish.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

An observation that so very obviously bugged you to the point that you felt the need to "whine"...twice over now.

Don't throw stones from glass houses.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

You see, this is where you fall short; maybe this is a theme with you - dunno. Beetz's casting didn't create the circumstance that lead to that poor woman's death, a death that you obviously don't really care about because if you did you wouldn't have tried to make an inane point using it as a frivolous prop for an incredibly weak argument. The production team made a series of tragically poor decisions all of which were entirely independent of the one made to cast a black woman as Domino. They could have easily made similar decisions leading down the same path had a white woman been cast in the role. Unless, of course, you are presupposing that all white stunt women emerge from the womb popping wheelies on dirt-bikes. Yes, your logic is embarrassingly flawed on a number levels, in my honest opinion.

I have no grounds to regard your opinion as honest, if you're not even willing to accept that I am or that I even could be genuinely perturbed by such a tragic and unnecessary loss of life.

The fact is, though, that death was a predictable outcome of "Current Year" racial/sexual insanity, which appears to hold that any existing white fictional character with a bit of name-recognition is fair game for portrayal in a live-action adaption of the material by a non-white (especially black) performer, that women are physically equal to men in all respects, and that films or printed fiction featuring black and/or female characters should be directed/written by directors and writers with the same melanin count/genitalia as the primary characters (something that veteran comic-book scribe Christopher Priest complains has resulted in his being pigeon-holed into the box of "black superhero writer"). These are all obvious influences on your "series of tragically poor decisions" which started with casting Beetz as a sop to the fragile ego of Donald "let me play Spider-Man" Glover.

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

Hey, just food for thought, it takes a really stilted and insular perspective to try to twist that scenario into an anti-affirmative action argument. It's really not good for the soul. If you don't subscribe to individuals having souls? Then it's not a healthy outlook if you want to continue to evolve as a human - aka an intellectual dead end.

By any honest liberal assessment, affirmative action isn't good for the soul (or the body either, as experienced by the late, unfortunate Joi Harris), prioritizing as it does the color of your skin rather than the content of your character (or the extent of your experience and skill).

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Originally Posted by TheBlueMarvel

uhh, I'm not sure where you pulled this from:

See 2-2 (doesn't quite say what you said, but I guess we all comprehend things differently - "literal" interpretations are on the spectrum, ya know?)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stereotype

https://sites.google.com/a/isd112.or...ebsite-builder

See here (nice backhanded accusation of autism, BTW):

stereotype (n.)

1798, "method of printing from a plate," from French stéréotype (adj.) "printed by means of a solid plate of type," from Greek stereos "solid" (see stereo-) + French type "type" (see type (n.)). Meaning "a stereotype plate" is from 1817. Meaning "image perpetuated without change" is first recorded 1850, from the verb in this sense. Meaning "preconceived and oversimplified notion of characteristics typical of a person or group" is recorded from 1922 (Walter Lippmann, "Public Opinion").

It's kind of like "bigot," appropriately enough. The truer sense of the word is a person who believes himself to occupy an exalted moral position versus his neighbors (cf. the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14) rather than someone who simply bears an unreasoned dislike of someone or something else, so in fact, the sort of people who nowadays are most likely to accuse others of bigotry are in fact bigots themselves according to the uncorrupted meaning of the term.

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Originally Posted by Starlord67

And here they are...Emma needs a cup-holding hand to complete the look but wow...what a great set!

Have they ever explained why the male members of the Hellfire Club dress like 18th century gentlemen but their female counterparts dress like mid-20th century dominatrices?