A recent cover of The Village Voice features a colorful rendition of Ms. Marvel, the Pakistani-American superhero published by Marvel Comics, with the headline: “The Superhero For Our Times: Ms. Marvel and the New Inclusive World of Comics.” Comics and their adaptations have been going through a much needed revolution in regards to diversity. At least that’s how it looks at first glance: Wonder Woman is finally hitting the big screen next year for the first time in her 75 year history, Ta-Nehisi Coates is currently at the helm of the Black Panther series for Marvel, and Neflix’s Luke Cage features several complex black women who steal the spotlight from the titular hero. But as minorities gain prominence within geek properties, the blowback against this progress has increased in kind, especially within the fandom itself.

The Flash, the CW show based on the DC Comics hero who fights crime with superhuman speed, premieres its third season this week—and for a third year, Candice Patton’s Iris West, a journalist and love interest for the titular superhero Barry Allen, has been a target of racist discussion amongst the geek community. The attacks on her character range from obvious bigotry referring to her as a monkey to more subtle remarks about how the two love interests don’t “look good together”. Look through Tumblr, Twitter, or even the recaps on popular sites and you’ll find an inordinate amount of hate toward Iris for things other white female characters get a pass for. The fandom for shows like this have always been intense, but the issues with Iris often seem less based in the writers not using her well enough, and more in her not being a blank slate that white fans can project their desires or identity upon. Being a woman of color and enjoying these storylines means you learn quite young to see yourself in places the creators can’t imagine people like you exist. For the first time, white male audiences are asked to empathize with characters who don’t look like them in properties they have intense nostalgia for.

Since her comics debut in the mid-1950s, Iris has been portrayed as a white woman; casting a black actress in the role was both a major selling point and point of contention amongst fans. Patton embodies the role spectacularly. She’s warm, brave, and really, the heart of the show along with the other members of the West family. But Iris isn’t just the usual, forgettable Superhero Love Interest™. It’s the love she and Barry share for each other that saves him from oblivion time and time again. The pointed criticism toward the character doesn’t just come from a vocal section of the fandom that argues Iris doesn’t deserve to be with Barry and ships him with white female characters he has no romantic chemistry with. The showrunners often sideline Iris’s storyline in favor of whatever temporary, usually white love interest the writers want to throw toward Barry. Even worse, critics seem to feed into the bitterness of the fandom by writing articles that demean Iris as “self-centered” for being angry at Barry for gaslighting her about his secret identity. Iris is integral to the Flash mythos—something many of the criticisms seek to downplay. Her role as Barry’s love interest and future wife isn’t going anywhere.

A similar level of animosity came to the forefront when it was announced that Zendaya, the former Disney Channel star, would be playing Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming. Both Iris and Mary Jane are long-running female characters intrinsically tied to the stories of their superhero partners; they are also some of the most superhero fantasies that readers can identify with, or desire for themselves. That DC and Marvel have decided to disrupt these fantasies is why the casting receives so much backlash. Underneath the complaints that Zendaya isn’t a natural redhead like Mary Jane—a fact which didn’t stop Kirsten Dunst from playing the character three times on-screen—or that Patton isn’t good enough to play Iris, is the idea that black women shouldn’t exist in these worlds in the first place. (And they especially shouldn’t be the cherished love interest—a rarity for black women in any genre.) Even Marvel’s Netflix show Luke Cage isn’t immune to such criticism. Despite being about a black hero with a primarily black and Latino cast, which is been true in the comics as well, a subsection of fans feel that the show itself is racist for not including white people. Perhaps this reveals the heart of the matter—that white viewers are forced to empathize with characters that don’t look like them in a genre they thought they owned. If you’ve been involved in the dedicated fandoms of comics, science fiction, and fantasy as a black woman for any length of time you’ve undoubtedly had to face a degree of racism and sexism that such tweets are rooted in. It doesn’t matter if you’re an actress or a journalist, a screenwriter or a director, the price of visibility for black women in geek properties feels too high.

This summer, when SNL writer and Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones faced criticism for starring in an innocuous reboot of a mediocre but beloved 1980s franchise, her website was hacked, nude pictures leaked without her consent, and an onslaught of vile racist comments were sent her way on Twitter. It isn’t a coincidence that Jones faced scrutiny in ways her more established white co-stars did not: Jones was targeted for being a dark-skinned, “unconventionally” attractive black woman moving through a geek fandom that white men consider their own.