>>304809
>It's not like black main-chars are uncommon either.
Yeah, nobody has ever had a problem with relating to black characters. You can go back decades, and audiences have never had that issue. Studios have for the longest time assumed that audiences only want to see protagonists that are the same color as they are despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. White audiences had no problem whatsoever cheering for Bruce Lee or laughing with Richard Pryor. Hell, kids were putting on masks and swordplaying like Don Diego de la Vega in the fifties. Nobody–absolutely nobody–except for studio executives has ever thought that the race of the protagonist was a big deal.
Take Shaft. It was aimed at black audiences, because that was a demographic that executives felt was a potential cash cow. What happened? White audiences loved it, because it was a good movie. Richard Roundtree was great in it, and everyone liked the badass private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks.
In that way Shaft is just like My Little Pony. It was targeted at little girls, because Hasbro assumed that there was money in doing so. When guys liked it owing to the fact that it was genuinely good (thanks to Faust and company) studio executives had no idea why, because they never learned this basic lesson. The identity of the protagonist does not matter in the slightest so long as she is likable and the story that she participates in is good. That is why men can appreciate a talking purple unicorn who studies magic.
Studios, quit trying to tell us that we care. We have never, ever cared. We didn't need John Saxon in Enter the Dragon (although John Saxon is a good actor), we didn't need Raymond Burr in Godzilla, and we don't need a white character in Black Panther.