Peter Parker is Caucasian and heterosexual. That isn’t a description: it’s a contractual obligation, one glittering clause in the solid-gold expanse of a licensing agreement between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios.

Tom Holland is Caucasian and heterosexual. He will, according to the flat pronouncement of Marvel’s official press release this week, “play Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the next Spider-Man film, in theatres in IMAX and 3D on July 28th, 2017”.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Stan Lee said in response to recent complaints, “if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian, or anything else, that he stay that way. But we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that.”

Tradition is the typical recourse of those opposed to change. Reconceiving Spider-Man as black or as gay, the argument goes, undermines a legacy cherished by fans for 50 years. (Nevermind that in 1962, when Spider-Man was introduced, a gay or black Spider-Man would have been unthinkable. Quite a lot has changed over the last half-century and it isn’t unreasonable for people to demand that pop culture reflect it.)

Besides which, it’s said, if people want a black superhero or a gay superhero — or a disabled superhero, or a transgender superhero, or any sort of superhero beyond the classical triumvirate of straight, white, and able-bodied — why can’t they simply write their own, from scratch, rather than pervert the familiar?

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