Und My Name iz

Can a comic/cartoon have a diverse cast of people without pandering?

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You need more 80's and 90's in your life.

Well? What's your name? Don't leave us hanging.

I miss those days.

Yes and No.
It's very easy to make an "organically" diverse cast of good characters who happen to be from different ethnic and national backgrounds. I use quotes because it's a fucking cartoon, nothing happens in a cartoon that isn't a conscious decision atleast not without really fucking up it doesn't.
It doesn't matter someone will always complain it's pandering in the end.

No, because every decision most comics and definitely ALL cartoons make are some sort of pandering now because they have to market it and in order to market things they have to know who they're marketing to. And that is very rarely an afterthought.

The cast of Captain Planet was very calculated as far as diversity, then again so was Star Trek, the reason these don't come up as examples of 'forced diversity' or 'pandering' is because the people it was supposedly pandering to weren't as much of market force at the time as opposed to straight up nuclear family having white people.
Now they are, and now white people have to deal with shit outside of BET not necessarily catering to them.

Hanzel?

Hanzel...

Hanzel!

WHO WANTS A BODY MASSAGE?

Look at the end of the day they're selling a product and casting the widest net possible by appealing to as many groups is important. What it all boils down to is not How man X race or colors there are but how strong the writing is for them.

A well written character will never seem token even if they where one. Pic fucking related.

Wait, I'm confused, isn't the purpose of most media to target a specific demographic anyway? How is it 'pandering' if it's intended for a specific audiance anyway, especially if it's a new ip. I get why you would call something like Loonatics Unleashed pandering because it's a pre-existing property made to please a crowd outside an initial target demographic, but why would a totally new thing be pandering if it was intending to hit that demographic anyway?

It seems more like 'pandering' is the new short hand for 'thing I don't like' on Sup Forums.

Wasn't literally every one of those mostly white guys, with a token black guy and token white woman

There were a shit ton of Joes so there were definitely more than a black guy and woman. Though yeah it was mostly white guys.
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Hansel

>no asians
>not even the fucking ninja

The only to avoid accusations of pandering is to self-censor yourself if you ever think about putting any kind of minority in something.

There's Quick Kick

Maybe creators should stop worrying about how others are going to react and put whatever they want into their work, somebodies going to bitch no matter what.

Storm shadow eventually became a good guy

Also Jinx

America was something like 80% white at the time. Also, roadblock wasn't the only black character (there was doc and stalker) and he certainly wasn't a token. Later on there was hardball, heavy duty, bullet proof, alpine and Iceburg.

Not to mention there was more than one woman on the team. There was Lady Jaye, Scarlett and cover girl. Later on, there was Jynx.

Well, if you're going to put s minority in your show, make them actual distinctive characters instead of stereotypes that are all the same.

Captain Planet was sort of a world wide thing, so it made sense to represent different people from different nations. So we had the American, the Russian, the South American, the African and the Asian.

With Star Trek, the show was supposed to be a vision of the future and was again a united worldwide effort. So that's why we had the Russian, the African, the Japanese, the Irish and so on as a crew. Also each character was an actual character. Given the direction things have been going for over 100 years, it's realistic to believe that multiethnic crews would exist. Later on in the movies,mthe you even had black captains and even black admirals that outranked Kirk.

The concept of "diversity" itself is pandering and shallow, because it's based on slotting people into ethnic demographics.

If an author doesn't have those shallow preconceptions and he makes something that just happens to have a multiethnic cast, then it can avoid being pandering. Especially if the author's taking a lot of inspiration from life instead of using movie/TV/comic formulas.

At some point, the author has to create the characters. Part of that is choosing their race and there's usually a reason for that.

Doug