Trevor McKee

"I want classic pop culture characters to be around forever" and "If you want diverse characters just make new ones and stop messing with the superficial details of existing ones" are not compatible statements...and I'm pretty sure the people making them together know this, at least on some level. There's a finite amount of headspace available for pop-culture stuff in (for this argument lets say American) society. Either be willing to let go of the old, which won't happen as long as companies are making money off of it and we keep accommodating those companies desires to indefinitely extend copyright privileges to characters they had no hand in creating (because all those people are long dead)... Or accept that as society matures the logical result is going to be that changes are made to be more inclusive of an evolving demographic. Personally I'm all for letting anything over 50 years old fall out of copyright. No exceptions. Sherlock Holmes is (for the most part) public domain, and he's doing just fine. If Micky Mouse loses popularity because Disney no longer has control over the character, the world will go on. But to the original point, no.. we can't have both. Many-decades-old Pop-fiction dominated by the demographic representations of those who created it...AND a reasonable/fair amount of representation of people other than Caucasian males. Of course, some strides have been made in the last few decades... what I'm referring to is the lamentations from certain crowds about the fact that it's happening and how they KNOW DAMN WELL the "just create new stuff" rational isn't realistic. They say it hoping we'll just ignore the obvious problems with it. Intellectual dishonesty, is what that's called.