[Criticism Corner] Riri vs. Miles 2 (Patreon)

So my Riri vs. Miles video is close to becoming the most viewed video on my channel and... I don't really like it.  So this video is meant to address a lot of the criticism that it received and better explain my points.  I would seriously love you input. 

So about a year ago, I posted this video comparing two characters by Brian Michael Bendis, Miles Morales and Riri Williams.  I expected it to do fine.  What I didn’t expect was for it to become one of the biggest videos I’ve ever made.  I’m not going to lie, I’m extremely disappointed that THIS is the first exposure that literally hundreds of thousands of people’s had to my channel.  I think the video itself was fine, but I’ll be the first one to admit that I wasn’t super clear on all my points and I could have done a lot better.

Based on people’s reactions online and in the comments, lots of folks came to the conclusion that I think Riri Williams is a good character.  I don’t.  Hell, I explicitly mentioned that in the video.  Oof, I always forget how blurry it was.  I’m a one man operation and I had just gotten a new lens!  Throw a guy a bone!  Anyway.  I think Riri is fine overall, but I’d hesitate to say good.  My real issue is that there are plenty of legitimate problems with her, but most of the people complaining didn’t actually read her book and instead rely on third parties recounting it to them with a clear “SJWS RUINED COMICS “ bias.  I mean look, issue one of her series was the fifth best selling physical comic when it was released and it didn’t have even one hundred thousand copies sold.  You trying to tell me that that on a video with one and a half million views that every one of them actually read it?  Of course, if you’re not reading the source material and just have it paraphrased at you by a third party, you’re going to naturally absorb their bias, myself included if you just watch my content.  So Riri, let’s talk about what ACTUALLY makes her lackluster in comparison to Miles.

- Intro -

Riri Williams was introduced in sporadic pages of the Invincible Iron Man series totaling in at SIX pages before she made her proper first appearance as a hero in Civil War II, an event that was pretty bad in and of itself.  You know what she mostly does in Civil War II?  She was pretty much thrown in there without much explanation so she mostly just appeared in the background.  The middle of a huge event isn’t really the best place to establish a new character unless you make them a front and center part of it.  It also didn’t help that the ending of the event led to Tony going into a coma and having Riri immediately replace him which made it very obvious that her entire character was created to replace Tony.  That was really bad since it’s something that needs to be earned.

Miles Morales on the other hand WAS explicitly created to replace Peter Parker, but it was done in a much more natural way where we were introduced to him, his personality, and his supporting cast BEFORE he was bitten by the spider.  It also helps that he didn’t jump right into being Spider-Man right away.

To make things even worse on Riri’s end, I went and counted how much page time she got from her main appearance in Civil War II up until she took over the Invincible Iron Man series.  It was sixteen pages which is generous since I counted double page art spreads as two pages and I even included super small cameos in other books.  I don’t know if there really is a right number of pages that she should have had first, but I really get the feeling that it’s not sixteen.

Obviously Rhodey would have been the logical choice to replace Tony as Iron Man.  Hell, he’s done it before, but he was killed off at the beginning of Civil War II as one of the main catalysts for the event in the first place.  If Marvel specifically wanted a young black girl though, then of course they could have used Rhodey’s niece, Lila who was already established in the Iron Patriot series.  She doesn’t have much connection to Tony though so replacing him would be weird and out of left field, but then again, so is Riri.

While I do enjoy Marvel’s push for more diverse characters and I’ve enjoyed a lot of what they’ve produced, I think that creating more characters and making things even more convoluted for readers is not the way to go about it.  There are a lot of underutilized characters of color that have already existed in the Marvel universe for years.  Use them!  Of course, this is Brian Michael Bendis that we’re talking about and while I do like plenty of his other writing, one of my main frustrations with it is how much he disregards continuity and how he’s much quicker to completely invent something new rather than building upon previous works.

There’s also the matter of “RIRI IS A MARY SUE!” which I also addressed in my video, albeit poorly.  I still very much stand by my statement that the term is thrown around so much to the point where it’s become meaningless, especially since it seems like the only people who use the term unironically are armchair critics that think they’re scholars because they know the names of tropes.  You know, the kind of people who think that CinemaSins is legitimate criticism.  If this is you then I know that there’s literally nothing I can say that would change your mind.  If you haven’t already, feel free to just leave a comment calling me a libtard or cuck.  If you want to stick around though, I wouldn’t mind.

For the most part, a Mary Sue is an overly perfect character with no flaws that characters treat as super important and in their eyes, they can do no wrong.  I take issue with that because people who throw around the term tend to overlook character flaws.  This is funny to me considering that most of the people  who call Riri a Mary Sue are the same ones that are quick to point out several key personality flaws such as how she’s an arrogant sociopathic thief that's quick to anger and makes terrible decisions by asserting her viewpoint on others to the point of literally taking over a nation.  Those are some big character flaws, ones that lay the groundwork for character growth and parallel the arc of Tony Stark or are we just going to just pretend that he was already a nuanced character at the point of his creation?   Are we just going to pretend like Tony Stark didn’t start off as (and still sort of is) an arrogant sociopath who manipulates others and is known for making bad decisions by asserting his viewpoint on others to the point of literally starting a superhuman civil war?

This by no means excuses the issues that Riri has, but it takes time to build character development.  VERY few characters in any series are fully baked from the get go and most compelling characters make mistakes and overcome their flaws.  We’ve FINALLY been getting this payoff with Riri ever since someone other than Bendis was able to write her, most notably when she joined a team of young heroes called The Champions.

Now plenty of commenters in the last video were also quick to point out how terrible it was to have Riri make a perfect Ironheart suit from the get go with a bunch of scraps.  I mean she didn’t.  Her first suit was a clunky mess and she tweaked it over time.  She didn’t make anything as streamlined as her finished suit until she had the help of an A.I. version of Tony Stark.  As for her age, here’s pre-teen Tony Stark single handeldly controling a team of top of the line robots at a science festival that were decades ahead of his competition who I might add were an entire team at a robotics company.  If genius level intellect at a young age is a flaw for Riri, it’s have to be for Tony as well.

This ties into a statement I made in my last video that if Miles Morales and Riri are incorrectly labeled as Mary Sues by ignoring their flaws and focusing on their extraordinary abilities, you’d also have to call Peter Parker and Tony Stark a Mary or Gary Stu as well since they have a lot of the same qualities.  Of course, assigning that label to Tony and Peter would be wildly inaccurate.  The difference is that Peter and Tony have had decades of multimedia properties to further their character development and flesh them out as characters which is something that Miles is finally starting to get and something that will naturally take time for Riri.

I’m a firm believer that there is no such thing as a bad character.  There’s only bad writers.  A good enough writer can turn the worst concepts into something of quality.  Hell just look at The Falcon.  He started off as a stereotypical black criminal, but with more love and care put into his history, we have a much better character these days.  I agree with the assessment that Riri was pretty poorly handled when Bendis was writing her, but again, new creative teams are already starting to quote unquote “fix” her.

It also didn’t help that although Riri was using the codename Ironheart, she was given the Invincible Iron Man publication title.  A lot of non-comic readers expect a one to one correlation between production title and in-universe name so a lot of people screaming about replacement legitimately thought that Riri was being called Iron Man.  The very similar looking costume wasn’t doing her any favors too.  At least Miles Morales had a badass suit that was clearly his own.  While I’m not a huge fan of her current suit, the new Ironheart armor is a hell of a step forward towards separating her from Tony and better establishing her as her own character.

Last but not least for this video, we can’t ignore that Miles Morales went through the same treatment when he was first introduced.  It’s been great seeing comments from more long time comic fans who actually remember that a lot of the same arguments being thrown at Riri were ones that he received as well.  The difference was that admittedly, people were more accepting of Miles since he replaced an alternate universe character as opposed to the main one, but he’s also had more time to grow as a character and be incorporated into outside media.  I’m looking at you Spider-Verse!

Besides that, time itself plays a huge factor in acceptance.  With the hyper reactionary world of modern social media, everything is either “THE BEST THING EVER!” or “THE WORST THING EVER AND IT’S GOING TO KILL -INSERT THING HERE-!”  In the close to a decade since Miles Morales was first introduced, not many people are as mad as they first were when he was introduced.  In just as much time, I guarantee that not many people will be as mad about Riri as they are now, that is if they even remember that she existed in the first place.