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I think that Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse qualifies. The first Peter dies and has his mantle taken up by the black Miles Morales. The second Peter doesn’t die for Miles but it’s clear he’s prepared to, and his story is that of a white screwup being redeemed by tutoring a non-white replacement.
You have to understand, Spiderman's writers absolutely hate Spiderman. If he isn't suffering horrifically, they're not interested. He's now on his second or third non-meme usage cuck arc, and that's not counting all the other gratuitous shit they do to make him suffer. So long as Miles isn't actually, literally cuckolding Peter Parker (and he hasn't yet, to my knowledge), Spiderman fans have much bigger targets to hate.
Yeah, Nybbler has it correct. Spiderman's whole story is about a young man who has a great deal of frustrations and bad times to deal with in his civilian life, but takes it upon himself to be a hero regardless, even when the latter contributes to the former. He's not Tony Stark or Reed Richards.
His whole idea is to make sacrifice a virtue.
There's a difference between writing struggle and tragedy, and what reads as gleeful ragebaiting, which Spiderman seems disproportionately affected by (though of course it touches every superhero eventually).
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That's Spiderman from the beginning; his origin involves him being angst-ridden from allowing the escape of the criminals who shortly thereafter killed his uncle.
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For what its worth it is still controversial with me. I really liked ultimate spiderman, and Bendis (the writer) specifically said that he had the idea to add a black spiderman and decided that just adding him in with Pete still around wouldn't really work and so he started looking for a way to kill Parker off, which really was in my view incredibly brazen and the fact that he felt comfortable saying it and everyone else seemed to applaud him for it blew my mind.
However I am also not surprised that it worked out as well as it did, as there were many factors working in its favor.
This was in Ultimate Spiderman, not the main universe book. That didn't help me, I liked USM more, but the Ultimate universe was always an alternate universe where lots of bold/edgy takes on characters could be played with in a frankly low stakes way. That made killing White Spiderman explicitly so he could be replaced with Black/Hispanic Spiderman somewhat less of a provocation.
In the interview where he said he killed Peter explicitly so he could replace him Bendis said he'd had that idea years ago and had been looking for a good time to kill Peter, which means he waiting until a time where the death would be more set up and more epic, and critically less jarring and less obviously forced.
Timing. This was not part of a clear trend to replace white or male characters with more progressive versions so it was able to be judged more on its own merits. Unlike a few years ago when Hulk, Captain America, Thor, and a few other characters were all replaced with ethnic/female options at the same time. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. If something occurs in isolation it gets more benefit of the doubt.
Quality, obviously the most important part. If quality is maintained people with forgive most sins. I dropped the book when they did this switch (I'd considered keeping on with it before the "yes this was done for racial replacement reasons" interview) so I cannot say first hand that the book was good, but Bendis is very talented (though he was on the downslope at the time he was still well above average) and this was one of his babies, and general opinion was pretty high on the change (hard to be sure how real that kind of thing is since anyone saying it sucks gets called racist and their opinion buried and every positive opinion signal boosted, but having been through this kind of thing a bunch of times this one certainly seemed very genuine). The thing with fan favorites in the current comic book market which has veered SUPER woke over the past decade is that fans who don't like it drop out (as I did with this move) which leaves the remainder people who by definition do like it, but this was an early enough move that I think for the most part it was in fact very well received.
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in addition to the other reasons given in this thread, Peter Parker wasn't race swapped. He was replaced with another character, Miles Morales, After Peter Parker was killed. All this happened in an alternate universe.
Also, it is very common for conservatives to be initially upset about something, but after a while they accept it. Miles Morales was introduced over a decade ago. There definitely was some complaining at the beginning.
James Rhodes was Iron Man at times. Sam Wilson was Captain America at times. There have been various Captain Marvels.
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After the initial shock that was his introduction in ultimates, he actually was revamped into an interesting character.
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This is a good example in part because it reminds me of the first time Miles Morales took over for a dead Peter Parker, back in the Ultimate Marvel lineup in 2011. The whole Ultimate Marvel Universe was aggressively jumping the shark at that point, but I remember my biggest gripe was that Morales had these new electric powers? It was reminiscent of the Red/Blue Superman moment for me, since I mostly enjoyed Ultimate Spider-man to that point. But saying anything about it mostly just got me called a racist.
I’m not an expert but it seems to happen a lot in modern comics. If you want an innocent explanation it probably looks something like:
People are bored of our classic hero (or younger demographics aren’t showing enough interest).
We need something new and fresh. Maybe a gender swap or a race swap, which makes them obviously unique and also gives me warm fuzzies. Let’s also give them a cool new trick (eg lightning powers) that we can market.
To keep the old fans on board and introduce the change, let’s have a handover. Maybe the old guy can mentor them a bit, show the old fans he approves, then conveniently die and leave the whole thing to his replacement.
Truth be told, there’s probably something to the above but I’m not actually that much of a quokka. There’s some political stuff going on here, I think, not just the straightforward minorities-good-whites-repent propaganda but also the cuckold fantasy as you say of having someone younger and more virile than you show appreciation and desire for what you have whilst simultaneously promising to take it off your weary shoulders.
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