its really weird how thorough it is and there are a ton of examples. new spiderman movies, mary jane is black. little mermaid black. starfire black (though still a redhead, which is interesting). triss in the witcher is black (though brunette in the books not the game). orphan annie is black now. wally west is now black (flash movie). they turned cyclone (a redhead with storm powers) into a black lady, which is kinda a trope at this point... hawk girl is black now, cw rendition of arrow. bat woman is black now. april o'neil from TMNT. heimdall in the marvel comics was a redhead but black now. beau from she-ra was redheaded but black now. the thing's wife is now black. alice monahan from hellboy is now black. artemis in wonder woman used to be a redhead. judge renslayer in loki (from the most recent thing). bat girl is black now. the character design of domino in deadpool is very cool though.
i think itd be lit if we got some historical african religious stories with a fantastical twist, i really would like to see some authentic stuff rather than just copy pasting black people over redheads. wakanda is an example but the fusion there does africa dirty, i think. theres so many cultures and so many dead myths and religions to explore that simply havent even been considered. they could make some fantastic watching material that no one has considered or seen before.
or just come up with new characters and weave them into plot importance
The best guess I have is that these characters were already the "diverse" character in the past and now they have to be non-white to maintain that ...brand, for lack of a better word. I seem to notice most of these are side-kicks or otherwise not the main characters of the stories that they're in, so that would make sense that they were a sort of token red-head in the past and are now being updated to a different token character.
Typing that out feels really gross though because of how many shitty stupidpol-esque tropes I have to engage with to get that idea out. To be clear, white genocide isn't real and stupidpol is dogshit.
yeah thats the big thing that stands out to me too. none of the main characters end up black, they just throw a black person in to be a love interest for a white character or have the black person show up for 30 seconds and do something cool and leave