-snip-
Honestly I know a lot of people support this... and I know "I" seem like the insensitive person here.
But I just flat out do not like rewriting characters for the sole purpose of the political necessities of the day. It feels disrespectful to the character and on an even deeper level it feels like blatant tokenism... It reminds me of all those people these people INSISTED had learning disabilities in order to give LD children heroes when, in fact, most of them didn't and it came off as extremely fake.
But then if you don't like it... It is because "You don't like 'insert whatever the person was replaced with'".
Don't get me wrong though. I don't mean expansion or changes in general... Just the politically charged ones or the ones that stink of tokenism.
-snap-
Hmm, counterpoint. I don't really see the harm in representing a character differently than in past adaptations... especially when used to address whitewashed media, sausage parties, etc. I agree, there's ways to do it badly, or ways to be shitty about it as a creator... but there's also a majority of cases where it doesn't make a lick of difference, apart from making the cast a bit more diverse.
For starters, a lot of non-visual media like books (and even more stylized visual media) often don't specify Race or Identity. In cases like this, the details of a character are free to be interpreted by the audience, and by anyone adapting the work into a visual medium. I've seen performances of Shakespeare that gender-swapped a character or two, or even took the only black character and made them white, and took all the white characters and made them people of color. Sometimes this is done because you want a specific actor in a specific role, sometimes it's used to make a statement, and sometimes it's just to add representation of non-white or non-cis or non-male characters. All of these are important and helpful!
If we're talking about adaptations, those are constantly changed from source material anyway, often drastically shifting the tone, reconstructing a character, etc. In cases like this, changing a character's physical traits is not even a thing, even if completely changes the character. Which, in most cases, it doesn't. If Superman can be redesigned as a Soviet Communist Superhero, a stage adaptation of Harry Potter can have a Black Hermione without people freaking out. Batman could just as easily be from a wealthy Korean tech-industry family as he could be or the heir of an American military-industrial fortune. Batman could even be bi or gay without otherwise changing his character at all; if his old love interests were important, you might redesign them as Male, or even tell a story where he's lying to himself by staying with them. Whatever is important to your reboot, or tells a good story.
You could call that kind of representation Tokenism, but gender, ethnic, and identity representation is actually a problem in media that needs to be addressed... and when you're dealing with old media, often that means changing things. Even if it's only a superficial change, it's still important. Slight tangent, but for the sake of perspective:
Linko