I mean I think the problem here is the like, “changing the race of an established character”, right. What established character? Black superman, or whatever else, isn’t superman, he’s black superman. That’s it, basically, that’s my justification. It’s not the same character text to text, even. Is it the same bilbo in every lord of the rings book? Is it the same bilbo sentence to sentence? It’s not like girlboss velma and dumb rich white guy fred are the same velma and fred, they just share the same symbols. If you actually dissect the characters and compared them, then you’d find very little in common. The show doesn’t even have scooby fucking doo, it’s not even called “scooby doo”, it’s, in my mind, and I think it should be in everyone else’s mind, it is tangentially related to scooby doo, at best, you know? I see it as a standalone work, and in that sense it’s just kind of a mediocre show that I don’t think anyone should really care about, rather than this kind of abomination on the face of scooby-doodom and this thing that we need to all be frothing about because scooby-doo has been done so dirty.

SO, all of that can be true, right, they just share symbols. But this is also true of race as a whole, the symbol of race, here, being like, whether or not somebody is black or white or asian or whatever. If you’re race-swapping superman, you know, I think it’s kind of more in line with the message of superman, if he’s the same guy, regardless of whatever race you decide to cast him as, you know? If you don’t change the backstory, if you do change the backstory, whatever, he sort of exists beyond it, as a kind of human ideal for everyone to live up to. For that to be true, superman has to be possible if you put him in basically any circumstance. So, even though superman himself is the same, have we “made a new character”, even though we’ve changed his race, maybe changed his background, and then, in line with that, we’ve maybe flavored him different in terms of like, say, what music or food he likes? I dunno if we really have or we haven’t. Made a new character, I mean. The character has changed, but the core remains the same, the label is the same, the symbols are the same. That’s kind of the question I’m asking, where do you draw the line as to what’s a “new” character, and what’s not? You could just as easily draw it to be where any change in surface level characteristics, from eye color, to hair color, to skin color, results in a “new” character, even if the character, of that character, remains the same. Red shirt shaggy vs green shirt shaggy.

So I dunno, really, like, I’ve never got this critique of like oh no we’re not being inclusive in the right way because we decided to make velma indian, instead of deciding to call the series Shmelma or whatever. What if they did that, what if her name was Shmelma? That’s an extremely surface level difference between the two, but now they have a separate set of labels, so are they separate characters now, or what? I think if I’m going to critique the show, it’s not really going to be on the basis of indian people not having their own shmelma, or even just their own separate scooby-doo, you know. I’m not going to condemn all indian people to forever only engaging with goobert and the ghost chasers, or whatever. If I’m going to critique the show, I’m gonna critique the show because the show itself is mediocre to bad, and has mediocre to bad writing, and cost too much money, and maybe I will critique it for, for some reason, the most popular multiracial iteration of scooby-doo has to also be the one that has the worst writing, where everyone can easily punch at it for that, and producers can also maybe try to use that as a smokescreen for putting out a mediocre show.

I dunno why I’m even talking about this shit, scooby-doo is bogus gen X bullshit. I’d rather watch like, the muppets. Nobody’s ever gonna really complain about kermit being race-swapped, I’ll tell you that.