But if, for instance, some writer/editor suddenly decided to pass the mantle of Silver Samurai down to a Brazilian journalist whose small plane crashed while visiting Japan, well, I might have issue with that.
That's not all that different from the origin of Iron Fist in the Netflix series. Just sayin'....
But you're right, sometimes editor and writers make bad decisions. Sometimes they write bad stories, or make stupid decisions when creating a character, or whatever. They do so for a
thousand different reasons. Making a bad decision to try for a more diverse audience is not any different than going too grimdark because they want a "mature" audience, or adding in annoying comedic relief because they want a younger audience. Trying to appeal to a specific audience works sometimes. Just because it can fail doesn't make it always a bad thing. It hasn't killed comics in the past, and it's not killing comics now.
The truth is that a lot of comics suck. Some only a little, some a whole lot, but most to some degree. The same is true of fiction, non-fiction, magazines, cook books, and every form of print media. It's true of movies, games, websites, television, and every form of media, period. There's a lot of mediocre stuff out there, and a lot of outright crap, and only a little tiny bit is so amazing that it truly stands the test of time.
Trying to be diverse is
not causing all comics to suck. It's not even causing all comics that try to be diverse to suck. It's not causing an increased ratio of bad comics. It's not killing the comic industry. It's not even a new thing for comics.
To try and distance this discussion from diversity... The Clone Saga in Spider-Man sucked. It was bad. The whole "Is Ben Riley the original or is Peter?" thing was poorly handled, and there were too many clones, and it went on too long, and it just wasn't well written. However, the problem was not clones. There are a lot of great SciFi stories about clones, and even more terrible stories about clones. "The Clone Wars" was terrible, but "The Clone Wars" was 100% amazing, and "The Clone Wars" was a really mixed-bag, with some truly awful episodes, but also some really great stuff, and I'm glad it's coming back. Thailog in Gargoyles was a pretty cool character. Styfe in X-Men comics, not so much. I personally like Guardian, and X-23, and Superboy; but all the Jean Grey clones got a little ridiculous, and Madelyne Prior was the worst of that. That's not to mention all the other crappy clones that don't even stick out in my memory because they were so bland they were forgettable.
Just as clones can be used well, or used horribly, the same goes for any plot element. "Diversity" is no different from "clones" in that regards.
And "but it's an editorial mandate and that means it's bad" doesn't hold water. Just scroll down the list of
editorial meddling in comics, and notice that sometimes it's turned out really well. "Batman can't go around shooting people", and "Batman has to have a kid sidekick who doesn't have superpowers" both turned out pretty damn well. While it's true that most of the list is times editorial decisions went bad, keep in mind that the list only exists because those are noteworthy. The amount of times editorial decisions were just fine, and thus not worthy of being on a list, is going to far outweigh the times they made a huge impact on comics history in a good way, or when they went horribly wrong.