If the DCU really wanted to do Black characters right, they wouldn’t have introduced Guy Gardner before John Stewart, and they definitely wouldn’t have introduced John Stewart alongside Hal Jordan, making John look like another sidekick to the audience.
The only time John Stewart really works properly is when they basically pretend Hal Jordan doesn’t exist at all, like in the Justice League animated series. John is allowed to simply be Green Lantern without constantly having to exist in relation to Hal.
That audience backlash outcome was completely predictable.
Of course people are going to want more Guy if they already know him and enjoyed him, and of course people are going to gravitate toward Hal when he’s historically been treated as the main Green Lantern. You’ve put John in a position where he has to compete for relevance with two characters who have a stronger claim to the audience’s attention before he’s even had a chance to stand on his own.
And honestly, this is my bigger problem with the way Black characters, especially Black men, are handled in a lot of predominantly white-created fiction. We’re constantly introduced as side characters, successors, replacements, or alternate versions of characters who were already established as white.
Miles Morales is another obvious example. And that stuff never works out well in the long run. There’s always going to be a clash when you introduce a new character whose entire existence is tied to an already-established one. Now you have people saying Miles is invading Peter’s stories, like we’ve seen with the Spider-Man PlayStation games criticism.
This leaves the Black character in a no-win situation. If he remains secondary, the representation feels tokenistic. If he becomes equally prominent, people accuse him of taking the original character's place. If he replaces the original, the character becomes defined by the controversy surrounding the replacement.
What exactly do they expect?
That’s why, personally, I’ve stopped caring about representation. I don’t care about demanding that white people write more Black characters, and I don’t care about being handed another Black character whose primary function is to play second fiddle to somebody else.
Clearly, there’s an issue with depicting Black men in original leading roles where they aren’t filling somebody else’s shoes.
I’d rather they just leave us out of it. I’m personally not interested in being constantly depicted as somebody else’s sidekick, replacement, legacy character, or diversity checkbox.
This isn't even mentioning the fact that they never give Black characters proper movies outside of Black Panther. It's always shows with low budgets or animated movies. The only movie they gave was to Falcon another Black replacement character and they knew that was going to flop.
