I’ll file this one under opinion.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the next phase of Marvel coming to Disney+ and Theaters, but not much is being mentioned about the character shifts. We are getting some great, fresh characters and stories moving forward with the “Moon Knight,” “Ms Marvel,” “Eternals,” and “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” But a lot of Marvel fans are concerned about how the MCU is going to look now that Marvel and Disney have sidelined or killed off most of the characters fans have spent ten years building attachments to.

Instead of getting fresh stories and characters we are getting just gender swapped versions of the iconic characters we already knew. What’s worse is that these characters haven’t really been able to sell comics and some have been cancelled and restarted a couple of times.

When you look at it, they are all just female counterparts of what we’ve already had:

• Iron man is now Iron Heart
• Captain America is now America Chavez
• Hulk will now be She-Hulk
• Hawkeye is going to Kate Bishop
• Thor will see Jane Foster become Thor too

I am all for girl power, 100%, but this just seems like we are getting knock offs of decades old characters. It’s like Marvel knew that they needed more diversity and instead of creating new characters and building them up they just made female versions to take over.

It feels a bit like the Marvel version of lazy live-action reboots. 

I’m sure several of the actors wanted to move on so they needed to make changes anyway. But some of these characters should have been brought in earlier so it wasn’t a sudden change. They tried switching everyone with the comics and it didn’t work. No matter how many times they haven’t been able to make some of these characters work, Marvel just keeps trying again.

It seems they think if they put them in the films people will have to love them .  They tried that with Ms. Marvel in the ‘Marvel’s Avengers” video game and it failed.

Since the characters don’t stick well why not just make new ones or shift around other characters they have already established. It worked with “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It all feels lazy. Disney and Marvel keep getting offended by people calling it the “MSHEU” now, but frankly that’s pretty much what it’s lining up to be. They are doing a disservice to women by forcing it.

If it goes like many of the comics, and we get diversity just for diversity sake, instead of good stories and characters, the phase will fail.

When it fails fans will not be allowed to dislike these films because if you don’t like them Disney and Marvel will hide behind “diversity” like it’s a shield that erases all their bad choices. I fully expect fans to be called names, like we saw with “Captain Marvel,” which frankly wasn’t that great of a movie. It wasn’t terrible, it was just average and people expected better. If you didn’t like the film you got called names and were “against diversity.” Disney and Marvel just watched it happen, and used the people they claim they want to help as shields for their missteps. It was wrong.

I’m hoping it doesn’t go this way, but I think they are changing too many things and making too many grand announcements indicating that diversity is more important than story. If they would just show and not tell it would go better for them.

The Mandalorian showed us and didn’t tell us. They gave fans great characters and story that happened to feature diversity, without making the show about “diversity.” That’s one of the reasons why it was so good. The MCU needs to look at how Jon Favreau did it moving forward and focus more on story and character.

And if we are lucky Captain Marvel will be Monica Rambeau instead of Carol Danvers, like it should have been. Maybe Rogue will show up and fix it for us?

But that’s this woman’s opinion.