Please remember to cite your sources so we have proof it's not just one person's thinking! Citations are done as follows:
- Blah Story Blah Blah Circumstance Blah Blah Implication Blah. Example Website
- The citation needs to record the opinions of several people; a citation that mentions only one person isn't enough.
- The citation should be in a reputable source. We'd prefer you cite something a bit more formal than someone's Tumblr blog. Anyone can write a blog post and then call it a "citation".
- Also, citations stuck behind paywalls or mandatory logins don't count. If people can't see your proof, then it doesn't prove much.
Keep in mind that Unfortunate Implications are unintentional. An intended offensive message (for example, a piece of Axis propaganda about Jews) does not belong here, nor does natter about the author's true intentions.
- Terra, the star of the infamous New Teen Titans saga The Judas Contract, is a super-powered 16-year-old hired by the mercenary Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke the Terminator, to infiltrate, spy on, and destroy the Titans (she was actually 15 when she started doing this). During her time with the Titans, it's revealed she's having a sexual affair with Slade, and the story's creators have confirmed that the purpose of this was to shock the readers at what a slut she is, never mind that nothing indicates she's ever slept with anybody else, she actually seems to think Slade loves her, and Slade is committing statutory rape. When the time comes to betray the Titans, they try to reason with her and fail, and she dies while trying to kill them, destroyed by her own powers. The story becomes quite Anvilicious at how evil she is. She's explicitly called evil, the narrator informs us that she's both completely insane and completely responsible for her actions (a contradiction in terms), even Slade later says her evil scared even him. Her death is essentially a teen suicide (in a series that was about and originally intended for teens) where everything is being blamed on the teen. And as for Slade, her boss and lover, the man who's decades older than her, a multiple murderer, who created the Evil Plan she was following, whose own stated intentions were to murder all the Titans, he is (comparatively speaking) Easily Forgiven by the Titans afterwards and is treated by DC Comics as an Anti-Hero for the next several years. He's even treated as a father figure by several of the Titans he was trying to kill. This storyline exonerated the adult in this murderous partnership while trying to blame everything on the 16-year-old girl. The blogger tamaranorbust has a thorough, multi-part study on Terra, covering her appearances, her background, how she's referred to, the characters she affected, the histories of her two later namesakes, and the very unpleasant implications of her story.
- The now-infamous The Avengers issue #200, in which Carol Danvers suddenly becomes pregnant and gives birth at an impossible rate of speed, only to learn that her baby is, in fact, his own father, having abducted her to his home in another dimension and used "a subtle boost" from mind control machines to impregnate her with himself, because he wanted to escape said dimension, an encounter which she has no memory of. And the Avengers are just peachy with this, even allowing her to go back to the other dimension with him at the end of the story despite ominous hints that the mind control is in effect again. Several critics quickly pointed out the horrifying implications of this, coining the name "The Rape of Ms. Marvel" for the event which it would become infamous under. To their credit, Marvel realized how fucked up this all was — many of the people involved in it would later publicly disown the issue as an Old Shame and formally apologize for it, stating that it never should have been released in the state it had been in. There was even an In-Universe mea culpa under writer Chris Claremont's pen, which had Carol return in Avengers Annual #10 and call out every single one of the Avengers present — and the writers of Avengers #200 by proxy — for not realizing that she was brainwashed and raped and therefore not helping her in the slightest.
- Moviebob does a two-part series on this topic alone.
- Former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter talked about the subject in his blog: Avengers #200. He stated he did not know what he was thinking when he allowed that tripe to be published, and he apologized for that story.
- Naturally, Linkara had a field day with this issue. He ended up calling it the worst comic he had reviewed (aside from Holy Terror).
- Moviebob does a two-part
- One of Linkara's main berserk buttons is sexism. Thus, when he reviews much of Frank Miller's works, such as All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, he hates how Miller objectifies women. He's pissed off about it in All-Star Batman & Robin #5, in which Frank reduced Wonder Woman of all people into a hyper-violent Straw Feminist with Psycho Lesbian undertones that needed a "Strong Man to make her 'right'", he became absolutely livid.
- Uncanny Avengers, a book with a pro-tolerance message, has come under fire for seemingly endorsing not integration but assimilation. The intended aesop was "Mutants should be treated just like any other superhuman," but was phrased more like "People should have no cultural identity other than just 'person'."
- The December 2014 issue of Batgirl had the heroine confront a villain who tried to build up his popularity by going around dressing himself up as Batgirl and plays it as a textbook Unsettling Gender-Reveal with Batgirl being shocked. Naturally, some fans were quite livid over this, and the creators (though not DC Comics) issued an apology over it. Made worse by the fact that the previous writer had made headlines when she introduced a sympathetic trans woman to the cast who was promptly sidelined by the new creative team despite their earlier statements that this wouldn't happen.
- One of the more famous racial controversies in 2000s comics related to the death of Ryan Choi, The Atom, who was graphically killed by Deathstroke and his shrunken corpse sent to his Arch-Nemesis in the mail. Ryan had taken up the mantle of the Atom after his white predecessor, Ray Palmer, went into seclusion after discovering his ex-wife was a murderer; Ray returned during Final Crisis but let Ryan hold onto the mantle, before retaking it during Blackest Night, with Ryan being killed almost immediately after this happened. This well-known essay addresses the controversy, calling it a symptom of a greater problem of writers wishing to write characters they were fans of as kids, most of whom are white, and as such killing off or demoting to extra their successors. The essay does not accuse the writers of racism, merely shortsightedness, but points out that this shortsightedness tends to result in uncomfortable trends.
- The Agony Booth was very critical of The Killing Joke for its treatment of Batgirl, serving only as a helpless victim to the story. They were particularly bothered by its original anniversary cover, which depicted The Joker menacing a terrified Batgirl, with a Joker smile forcibly painted on her face, which they believed glorified him.
- In Justice League 3000, Guy Gardner is transformed into a woman. The handling of Guy's situation has been accused of transphobia, primarily due to the comic suggesting that having female hormones alone would make him behave like a female (and think like one) despite identifying as male; that his constant shock at this is Played for Laughs does not help things in the least.
- Hank Pym is infamous for striking his wife, something which he has yet to live down. Jim Shooter intended for this to be the culmination of Pym's mental breakdown. This scene has stuck on Pym, however, with writers going back and forth on whether to reunite the two explicitly because of the implications of a woman forgiving and getting back with the man who physically assailed her.
- In 2015, Marvel Comics announced a storyline focusing on a conflict between the X-Men and The Inhumans, which has been framed as a conflict between two oppressed minorities. As this article mentions, this is not without some problems, because whereas mutants have long served as metaphors for LGBT individuals and other minorities, the Inhumans have long had an elitist, eugenicist bent, and for most of their history have largely been white.
- As this editorial explains, things have gotten worse in 2016 with the Inhumans vs. X-Men comic, with the reveal that the Inhumans' Terrigen Mist is actually gassing mutants to death, and the only peaceful solutions mutants have are to either let the gas kill them, go into hiding, or get "cured" by gene therapy that will remove their powers.
- As this editorial explains,
- In Green Arrow, writer Benjamin Percy introduced the Lukos virus as a scientific explanation for lycanthropy. Percy's stated intent was to use people turning into werewolves and the people who rise up to kill them as a metaphor for the conflict between HIV/AIDS patients and anti-gay activists. Multiple critics pointed out that the metaphor was "clumsy and unsettling", since the werewolf people, once infected, are unable to control their impulses without medication. Though this could maybe have remained sympathetic, the main faction of 'Wargs' (the werewolves/AIDS stand-ins) are shown to be a violent biker gang who deliberately infect others with the condition and revel in their violent impulses, which is uncomfortably close to a lot of anti-gay beliefs regarding AIDS.
- Captain America: Rick Remender's run on Captain America was criticized, especially for its handling of women. Of its two major female characters, Cap's love interest Sharon Carter and new teenage heroine Jet Black, the former is killed off to make Steve feel bad and is mourned only for her role in Steve's life (she gets better), and the latter is uncomfortably sexualized for her young age. Later, Jet Black (introduced as a young teenager) sleeps with The Falcon, who is very much an adult; Jet had experienced an age-up to 23 via time dilation, but the comic did not make this very clear (it didn't help that she was drawn more-or-less the same way, making the whole thing look like statutory rape). The article directs additional criticism at Communist Chinese villain Iron Nail and the retcon of Cap's father into being an abusive drunk.
- In Marvel's Black Panther, one of the titular African superheroes' few enemies from his homeland of Wakanda is M'Baku, a member of a rival tribe who has also gained superpowers through mystic rites associated with his tribe's totem animal. The problem is that his totem animal is the White Gorilla, and M'Baku's supervillain name is thus The Man-Ape, as he runs around in a gorilla-themed costume. The long history of demonizing African men by comparing them to primates has led to backlash against the character by African readers in recent years. To their credit, Marvel has listened to the critique; both M'Baku and his brother, who inherited the identity, were killed off in the comics, for a time at least, and Marvel has gone on record stating that they chose to both avoid the use of the Man-Ape name and to adjust M'Baku's costume to downplay the ape imagery for his depiction in the 2018 film precisely to avoid this trope. M'Baku even lampshades the implications: after he and his men drown out Caucasian CIA agent Everett by imitating gorilla challenge calls, M'Baku declares "YOU may not SPEAK! If you open your mouth again, I will feed you to my children!" almost immediately followed by "I'm kidding, we're vegetarians... the look on your face." When a 'new' M'Baku was introduced in the comics (a seemingly unrelated figure who leads the rebel Maroons in Wakanda's space empire), he lacked any of the original's gorilla associations and is depicted as a tough-but-fair Reasonable Authority Figure.
- This article details the highly problematic depiction in New Teen Titans of Mirage's relationship with Nightwing and how it falls under Double Standard Rape: Female on Male. To give a summary, Mirage, a character from a Bad Future and is in a relationship with Nightwing in that timeline, travels back in time and sleeps with Nightwing while disguised as his current girlfriend Starfire, in the process committing rape by deception. No one calls her out on this, even though she did it fully knowing the circumstances, and instead accuse Dick of cheating on Starfire, essentially having him be forced to defend himself for being raped. What's more, later on, the version of Nightwing from the future (now an insane villain named Deathwing) rapes Mirage, and this is treated as a horrifying event. However, given that she was massively unpopular for what she did, it's easy to read Mirage's rape as being her intended karma, which the article also mentions. This gives us a double whammy: a male rape victim is mocked and judged, and the female rape victim is left to wonder if her trauma was punishment.
- Robert Jones, Jr. argued in an editorial that the New 52 reboot of Cyborg's origin suffered from some dodgy implications, particularly the way the story made it clear that the character lost his genitalia in the accident that disfigured him, something which was not the case in Cyborg's initial '80s originnote . The problem here is that black men are often treated as inherently sexually threatening, and the event that turned Victor Stone into a superhero also happened to desexualize him. The fact that it occurred at the same time DC was attempting to elevate the character to A-list status as a member of the Justice League and DC's premier black superhero made it seem even iffier, as if they wanted to make him neutered and inoffensive for mainstream consumption. DC writer David Walker publicly agreed with this sentiment, which is why one of the first things he did when he started writing Cyborg's short-lived solo title was to have the character begin to regenerate his organic tissue, including his genitals.
- If M'Baku the Man-Ape was bad, fellow Marvel supervillain The Mandrill is even worse. This D-lister mutant, a recurring foe of Daredevil, escapes a lot of public scrutiny for his obscurity, having first surfaced in 1973 in Shanna the She-Devil, but those who learn of him invariably marvel that he can still make appearances in the modern era. He combines the worst "Africans are monkeys" stereotypes, being a mutant who was born as an African-looking child, then transformed into a literal humanoid baboon in puberty, with the "African men are all rapists" stereotypes: his secondary mutant power, after an enhanced physique based on his ape-like form, is to be a Living Aphrodisiac, capable of controlling the minds of all but the strongest-willed women through his pheromones, which reduces them to infatuated, love-sick slaves and is even addictive with long-term exposure. This is a rather cringe-inducing power to begin with, but the Mandrill is an out-and-proud misogynist who regards women as nothing but toys for him to use and discard as he sees fit, up to and including raping any of the women he enthralls if he feels like it. The character's second appearance revolved around him using his powers to create Black Spectre, a terrorist organization made of brainwashed African & African-American women that wished to overthrow the US government and make Mandrill the ruler; after Black Spectre was defeated, he then raised another army of female slaves, called Fem-Force. Oh, and to make things even worse, Mandrill is technically a Caucasian man whose African-esque "dark skin" was an early manifestation of his dehumanizing mutation, meaning he's technically a Blackface stereotype on top of everything else! It's not that surprising that he was ultimately killed off in the "Hunted" storyline.
- Wonder Woman: This essay points out that the Wonder Woman's New 52 series and origins not only miss many of the ideas behind the original series but also manage to portray nearly all the Amazons as vicious harpies, completely undermining Marston's vision of a community of women who supported each other.
- While the main criticism of the storyline "Spider-Man: Sin's Past" is the Retcon that Gwen Stacy slept with Norman Osborn and gave birth to his children while she was dating Peter,
Lewis Lovehaug explains how the storyline veers into this when one knows behind-the-scenes details; Marvel writers wanted to dispel the notion of Gwen as a Purity Sue, and decided her having had premarital, unprotected sex was a good way to do that, and the decision to make the children in the story Norman Osborn's instead of Peter's was also partially motivated by how they didn't want Peter to look bad by having had sex the same way. This gives a Slut-Shaming and Sex Is Evil subtext of the entire story, especially since the storyline insists that Peter and Gwen never had sex at all. - The ultimately Quietly Cancelled 2020 reboot of New Warriors was heavily criticized for, among other things, introducing two characters named Snowflake and Safespace, who were lambasted due to the exceptionally tone-deaf way they are handled. Their names, which are commonly used in a disparaging way towards racial and gender minorities (both characters are black, and Snowflake is non-binary), were especially poorly received - the intent was to have the characters reclaim the terms by adopting them to describe themselves (especially since they also fit very well with their ice and force-field projection powers), but having said reclamation be written by authors who aren't part of these minorities made the explanation fall flat. Another aspect that was criticized was the usage of a blue and pink color motif for Snowflake and Safespace, respectively: even inverted, the Pink Girl, Blue Boy motif still adheres to the gender binary, which is not a good look when applied to a non-binary character. Although the intent may have been to spread awareness of the issues these minorities face, the characters are handled in such an insensitive way that many readers found it very easy to assume they're from a parody created by less-tolerant authors when taken out of context. This backlash is speculated to be the reason why the series was cancelled without seeing print.
- What If...? Miles Morales is What If? series exploring what would happen if Miles Morales had taken on the mantle of a different hero, such as Captain America or The Incredible Hulk, instead of Spider-Man. Issue #4, which was set in a world where Miles Morales is Thor, swiftly drew a lot of controversy and criticism for pushing the Black stereotypes to an uncomfortable level: on the first page alone, we see a version of Asgard that appears to be combined with Brooklyn, with buildings covered in graffiti and sneakers hanging from power lines, while the narration is delivered in the form of rap lyrics. The rest of the comic has Miles-Thor speaking like a Jive Turkey (none of the other Race Lifted characters speak this way), wearing high-top sneakers, and wielding his version of Mjolnir, which is covered in graffiti. The result is something that's been compared to modern-day Blaxploitation.
- Flashpoint:
- Much head-slapping ensued when the Flashpoint world map was released and people saw that most of Africa is listed simply as "Ape-controlled." Apparently no one at DC thought this might be taken badly when applied to a continent overwhelmingly populated by black people, given the historical tendency for black people to be likened to monkeys and apes in racist propaganda. For the record, "ape" in context refers to Gorilla Grodd, a previously established Flash villain who is literally a gorilla, but the fact that this is the only information we had on the entire continent (besides the fact that a large part of Northern Africa is missing due to the same war that destroyed most of Europe) was the real unfortunate part, and the fact that Batman: Incorporated had done something similar with the "Batman of Africa" (falling into an unfortunate tendency to treat the entire continent like it's one country) a few weeks earlier did nothing to help.
- A variant cover that was released that showed Wonder Woman holding Mera's decapitated head drew controversy due to its blunt visual (ironically said cover is speculated to be a homage to a similar cover of Crime Suspenstories that was used as an example of bad taste that eventually led to the creation of The Comics Code).
- There was an accidental Race Lift in a promotional comic released on Free Comic Book Day where Jenni Ognats◊, aka XS, the biracial granddaughter of Barry Allen, was colored as Caucasian with blond hair◊. This was clearly a coloring error or a case of mistaken identity (for one thing, the incorrect version colored what should be skin on her legs the same as the fabric of her costume) and was corrected for later versions, but it left a bad taste in some fans' mouths and caused some controversy regarding diversity in the industry.
- Much
- Superman: Originally created as a way to introduce ethnic diversity to Krypton, the Vathlo Islanders were a dark-skinned and highly intelligent but isolationist people, who chose to remain separate from the other, all-white Kryptonian continents; writers for years had avoided mentioning them in detail because, in hindsight, the concept seemed like a well-meaning but misguided attempt to justify racial segregation.
- As Linkara pointed out during his "15 Things Wrong with Marvel's Civil War" video (at point 6), the prominent casualty of an event named Civil War is a black guy...killed by a blond, blue-eyed guy based on Nordic Mythology note and his body gets wrapped up in chains afterwards. What's worse? Said blondie was cloned from the original Thor to act as a, for lack of a better term, slave. Not helping matters is that Clone Thor's shutdown code is Richard Wagner, whose image would come to be associated with Nazism due to his infamous antisemitism and being a role model for the Nazis. In the same review, Linkara was also struck speechless by Tony saying that the Thor clone acted like any police officer would — that is, he immediately decided to shoot to kill against a black man. It gets even worse then The Initiative shows that one of the people involved in making the clone of Thor was... a literal Nazi war criminal who'd been forcibly recruited by the pro-reg side.
- Several publications have called out Kamala Khan's death in The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) as yet another example in the long, shameful tradition of comic characters being Stuffed in the Fridge, with some, like The Mary Sue outright name-dropping the trope, and Polygon calling it out for being a ploy to get more sales for the book; said Polygon article even points out the sheer deluge of hate-fueled reactions on social media in celebration of the death of a hero who is both an ethnic and religious minority. A Twitter user quoted by Vogue sums up the reaction of the majority of both Spider-Man and Marvel fans:I’m sorry but I can’t think of any other explanation for this other than sexism and racism. You decided to fridge Kamala Khan outside of her own book during AAPI month and angered Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel fans even further in the process. An astonishing play, Marvel. Truly.
- Yara Flor has attracted the backing and backlash of comic book fans for a variety of reasons, with the most vocal supporters eager to see her replace Diana Prince as Wonder Woman...she ended up joining Donna Troy and Cassie Sandsmark as yet another Wonder Girl. Relevant to this page, she is technically an indigenous Pre-Columbian South American whose people lived in the Amazonian rain forest before the Portuguese founded Brazil, but out of the over a million people belonging to over a thousand tribes living inside Brazil's borders, the three hundred in the parts of The Amazon in Brazil's territory, the DC Comics character was not created with any intent to represent a single one of them, if her name wasn't enough of a clue. Given the Brazilian government wavers back and forth between protecting the indigenous Pre-Columbian tribes and actively trying to wipe out or assimilate them while down playing the number that even exist to make aggressive entry into their territory seem more justified, only recently allowing people practicing precolonial tribal traditions to become citizens at the time of Yara Flor's introduction, there was some backlash to the very concept of the character. Another puddle DC stepped in was making an Amazonas Wonder Woman type character to begin with, since Wonder Woman uses a lasso, and "snare" was a euphemism for rape before Europeans came to the region. It became worse when the conquering colonials took it literally and forced themselves on native women after tying them up. One of things that made people hate Yara Flor the most was an image of her wrapping boleadoras around venerated Nature Spirit Caipora, unintentionally sending the message this new character was here to violate a beloved cultural icon. Boleadoras were especially insulting, as they're most commonly associated with capturing cattle. Guilherme Preusse was among the minority of Brazilian commentators who looked at Yara Flor with optimism, and described his disappointments with how she turned out on Word Press. White Brazilian school teacher Débora Carvalho linked an article from The Brazilian Times and also interviewed a few indigenous women around the country before submitting her conclusions to The Medium.
- This is the reason that the graphic novel The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future was pulled from publication at the behest of its author, Dav Pilkey. As explained here, a large portion of the plot centers around its protagonists interacting with incredibly stereotypical Asian characters; one of them is a Kung Fu teacher who spouts stereotypical Chinese proverbs, the other is little more than a love interest for the white male lead, and both of them have dashes for eyes and ultimately require rescuing from the non-Asian characters. In the wake of increased hate crimes against Asian-Americans, Pilkey would ultimately apologize for writing the book and make donations to an AAPI-affiliated organization.
