You see, something I see a lot of on Facebook and other social media is people in various fandoms whinging that EVERYTHING IS RUINED FOREVER because some aspect of said fandom isn't exactly like it was during some rose-tinted past that usually coincides with the person being in their teens. Quite often these whingers are white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual Western men, in other words: privileged, and quite often the thing they are whinging about is how whatever fandom is changing to be more inclusive for those less privileged: black people, gay people, women, et cetera.
Marvel has had some kind of social conscience for quite a long time, indeed there used to be Stan's Soapbox, in which Stan Lee would provide a brief monologue on some subject or other, and you can see from the below example that people getting worked up over Marvel's "moralizing" is nothing new... it's just that nowadays every dickhead has a Facebook account and so can get their whinging seen by so many more people.
Marvel tackled issues like alcoholism, racism and women's rights... and yeah, sometimes it made a few mis-steps (like Stan Lee citing the presence of Man-Ape, a black criminal who actually dresses like a fucking gorilla, as an example of diversity, or pretty much everything Valkyrie said in 70s Defenders), but its heart was in the right place, and it got better over time to the point where Squirrel Girl schools Galactus on assuming people's gender, Carol Danvers and She-Hulk actually look like physically strong women rather than sex objects, there is a Muslim hero (Kamala Khan AKA Ms. Marvel) who chooses to dress modestly, the one currently worthy to wield Mjolnir is a woman (Jane Foster, and BOY did that piss a lot of people off who couldn't see the stupidity of objecting to Thor being a woman when Thor has also been a bipedal space horse), when the Super Soldier Serum was driven out of Steve Rogers' body he passed the mantle of Captain America to Sam Wilson (The Falcon, who also happens to be black and politically liberal, and thus in the eyes of some an unpatriotic traitor; an attitude which Marvel themselves masterfully take the piss out of in their comics), Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman) is a single mother... and so on.
These things are all reflective of a diverse society, a modern society... and yet people complain about it as if it were the worst thing ever; and the people complaining about it almost invariably seem to be white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual Western men...
The classic "pandering to SJWs" often crops up. For those who don't know, SJW means "Social Justice Warrior" which is used as an insult against anybody who disagrees with these white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual Western men (and, to be clear, I am a white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexualish Western man, I'm just not a dickhead about it)... The problem being of course that Social Justice is a good thing, and being a Warrior is fucking awesome (although I am more of a Social Justice Wizard/Rogue).
These are the people who'll hold a door open for a woman because of Chivalry, and then call her a stuck-up bitch because she doesn't agree to have coffee with them later. These are the people who will use crime figures as evidence black people are worse than white people, without understanding the wider social issues behind those figures. These are the people think female lead characters in action & sci-fi films is "over done", without acknowledging that men are still the majority of characters. These are the people who will complain about the "gay agenda" just because a character happens to be gay, without understanding that most characters are still straight. These are the people who will dismiss issues that don't affect them entirely, or claim that because "X thing is worse" people shouldn't worry about another issue as if it's only possible to care about one cause at a time.
I often get into arguments with these people, because I can't just walk away when somebody is being so flagrantly wrong. I don't know if it's an "SJW" thing, or an Asperger's thing, but it's definitely some kind of thing. I think there's an extent where I hope I can change somebody's mind, make somebody think about it beyond their fragile masculinity or whatever... but there's also a bigger extent where I'm just bloodyminded enough to keep pummelling them with reason and logic until either I get too tired/annoyed to articulate myself or they rageblock me, because blocking people on Facebook is exactly like winning the argument.
But I'm not going to stop, for the very reason The Man himself gave in that Soapbox column: we don't live in a vacuum; we're not untouched by the world around us... and hilariously it's the people who act like they do who complain that the Liberal Social Justice PC Nazis just inhabit social echo-chambers and don't understand the "real world".
Yes, comics are supposed to be entertainment, but that doesn't mean they have to be devoid of social commentary. There's absolutely nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake, but when you hit the point that all your entertainment is like that you need to start questioning whether you're getting a true picture of the world around you or if you're just sitting in your echo-chamber pretending you're the only one who sees the world as it really is while anything which runs contrary to your opinion is "just virtue signalling to the regressive left" (actual quote)... because really, that's not many steps away from wearing a tinfoil hat and claiming the government is poisoning us with chemtrails.
So, if if you're one of those angry anti-PC people and somehow you're still reading this after having been obliquely called a cunt over several paragraphs, please consider that just because a social or political issue isn't about you doesn't mean it's bad, or that it's against you, or that it's trying to take anything away from you, or that it should be ignored. Stop. Think. Listen. And maybe, just maybe you'll learn something.
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