Very, very tangentally related to something Doc Lemming was talking about

[james_davis_nicoll]

What's the correct response for a superhero who discovers their crime-fighting name, selected in all innocence and without malice, happens to be an ethnic slur?

Come to think of it, this situation has come up before [1]; the late Mark Gruenwald decided to give the new Captain America's sidekick the same superhero name the original Cap's orginal side-kick used, Gruenwald being unaware that there could be anything problematic about calling an African American man "Bucky". I know they changed the name but I don't recall how it was handled in-story.

1: Note that Marvel also once named a superhero after a combination of cocaine hydrochloride mixed with morphine sulfate; presumably Speedball himself was unaware of the other meanings of his name. In his defense, he was just a teenager.

Comments

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

You can probably only pull this off once, but have you tried saying "Well ... we weren't going to tell you this until you were older, son. But you're not black. You're actually ... Korean." (or whatever other ethnicity looks amusing, though he probably wouldn't get "Polish"), and maintaining a straight face for the crucial two or three seconds until his inner "WHAAAAAAT?" is complete?

--Dave, this one was not listed in Cruel Tricks To Play On Small Children

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

Nah--too close to the sequence in Easy A, which he watched with us.

That sequence made me a Stanley Tucci fan. That movie made me a Patricia Clarkson fan (though she had intrigued me on Strombo).