I absolutely remember people being mad about the first one.
The others not so much. The fantasy movies don’t really matter the same way as a historical movie about slavery does. The fantasy characters are even gender swapped without a problem at conventions.
And yes that means the racists who got mad about Ariel are dumb.
Is Johnny depp white?
If it’s bad to use white actors for black (or other colored) roles then it’s bad for black actors to do white roles. If it’s okay to do those switches then it’s okay for all. Forget colors it shouldn’t matter.
Having said that, Disney just did the Ariel thing ffor the “look at us being sooooo progressive, please give us your money for this utterly shit movie” instead of trying to just make a great movie
I think people need to figure out if the race of a character is culturally significant in any way in the context of the story and IRL. Like, part of Black Panther’s whole deal is he’s from Africa. Hard to budge on that character’s ethnicity. Ariel from the Little Mermaid could literally be any ethnicity and the story would remain the same. Crying about white erasure is pathetic when no actual culture relevant to white western people is being lost.
But Ariel wasn’t white. She was a fish person. So they were free to do whatever.
The virtue signaling just backfires. “Rainbow washing” is a thing now. Companies never gave a fuck about a progressive message, they care about trendy things to cash in on.
A big issue here, especially with the MCU stuff, is that it’s not a skin color thing with those changes. They updated the whole character in order to make them into races that are more friendly to China. They’ve done this repeatedly and stripped identities and character traits from characters over and over again.
Every single Romani character that’s appeared in an MCU movie has had their heritage removed and replaced with generic white. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are good examples (since they’re the ones in the meme) but I don’t see any way that Robert Downey Jr is going to be able to do the complicated Romani backstory of Dr Doom very well.
I agree that Ariel was swapped for marketing reasons (and arguably specifically to cause outrage and get people talking) Ariel doesn’t have a racial heritage that plays into her life and identity… She’s a mermaid from the sea… Not a member of a group with a large history of being discriminated against.
The original actress/singer for Ariel absolutely dominated that role as well, and really the whole cast was damn near perfect. It’s one of the few Disney Princess movies that should have been left alone.
I personally think it isn’t wise to use an actor of any race in substitute of another, if that character’s race is part of the story. The only reason I could think of to change the character’s race, gender, status, etc. would perhaps be to tell a different story, but then it should be renamed and be a different story. But if a character’s race, gender, status, etc. is tied to that character’s story, then it shouldn’t be discarded frivolously.
From what I see, I feel that a lot of the disconnect is based on whether people find an attribute (in this case, race) important or not as part of the character’s story.
My issue is that we are pairing nationality with skin color or ethnicity here. Those are not mutually exclusive. There are 2nd or 3rd generation Asians immigrants in Mexico, just as there are Mexicans living in Ireland, and Irish people in India, etc… Somebody could be a fully integrated national but not part if the nations major ethnicity. Even saying AFRICAN-American is kind of pointless, like it matters where your grand-grand-grand-grand-parents came from. They’re as much American as anybody else. We don’t call everybody else European-American for comparison.
People reference white Americans as “Americans of European descent” very regularly.
Tbh I’m perfectly fine with other races picking up any roles, except for historical movies.
Another thing on historical movies that irk me to no end is the perfect posh English for every effing Roman or Greek movies
I mean tbf, all of the above have people enraged and people who dgaf, it’s just those flip flop depending. I’m sure there’s no shortage of people here, in this very thread, that aren’t cool with say Native Americans being played by white people, or that Scarlet Johansen played that one lady from GITS (can’t remember her name, never really got into that series, but she’s supposed to be Asian.) Understandably so, really, but still.
I take it a step further personally, stop remaking anything and if you adapt say a comic or book, stick as close as humanly possible to the source material. Race/genderswapping and reboots for a moneygrab is cool or whatever but can we have good original stories again please?
My issue with Scarlet funnily enough is that she’s Scarlet. She’s too big of a star to really meld into the majors role. I just felt like I was watching black widow on screen. Sorta spoilers for anyone who cares but
Tap for spoiler
the majors body is full on robot so technically she could be any nationality and color but it would have fit better if they picked someone who fit her original motif since it sorta matters. With the whole, ghost in the machine thing. I’m a huge fan of the franchise and I’m sad that this was the big live action debut.
So what is white if Romani isn’t? I really do not understand the American concept of race, for me they are all humans.
Other people have longer explanations which are great. I just wanted to point out Romani people are not Romanian even though many Romani people have settled in Romania. It’s just a coincidence.
Romani people are Indo-Aryan, more closely related to modern day Indian people than Europeans. They typically have darker skin than Europeans as well. It’s not really an American concept either; I’ve generally seen a lot more anti-Romani sentiment in Europe than the US.
Roma people have historically been very persecuted because of racism and ethnocentrism. Case in point: the holocaust killed up to 500,000 Romani people, but the actual figures are not known. Roma people are among the groups that are rarely talked about when the Holocaust is mentioned, despite losing up to 50% of their total population at the time.
Arab and North African folks are usually considered white on the US census but that isn’t really an accurate picture.
Race is a social construct that doesn’t have clear borders. Racial categories mostly exist as a way of creating division and limiting access to resources, to flatten the diversity of individual cultures represented by a racial category… or to inflict direct and systemic violence. The experience of being a racialized person is entirely the creation of the society that a person lives within; for example, African folks usually don’t self-identify as “black,” within Africa, but that’s an important racialized experience that people can speak to in a place like the US.
Holocaust killed Russian and Jews as well, which are white. In fact I would say the Holocaust killed mainly white people.
Racism is not limited to skin color
Whiteness, at least from a racist perspective, isn’t really about skin color, it’s more like a club for ‘approved’ ethnicities. There’s many Italians with darker skin than Mexicans, but Italians are considered ‘white’ and Mexicans are not. Same for large parts of the Middle East and Asia.
Romani are white skinned Europeans, but they’re not ‘racist approved’, so they make up rumors they’re actually from Egypt and omit them from the White Club.
The determination for what counts as white is highly inconsistent. Before the 1700s Germans were not considered white. Before the 1800s Irish were not considered white. For a time in the 1900s Finnish people were considered Asian (while many Finns were striking for better working conditions, what an odd coincidence). Italians weren’t considered white until about a hundred years ago. It goes on and on.
Hating Romani is more a European thing.
So what is white if Romani isn’t?
Race science is less a formal science and more a series of excuses for doing social murder and war crimes.
“Not white enough” would be my guess.
In fairness to Tilda Swinton, they decided to entirely rewrite the character to be a Celtic woman instead of a Tibetan man. This was probably to avoid being censored in China, but getting away from the racist 1930s, “oriental mysticism,” trope was probably a good idea. It’s certainly a lot better than letting Jonny Depp pretend to be a Native American because he’s one-eighth Cherokee.
deleted by creator
Yeah, but they did that specifically because Disney convinced the Comanche to adopt him before the movie came out. He certainly wouldn’t be a member of that tribe if he hadn’t been cast as a member of that tribe.
Liam Neeson is also like Samual L Jackson.
I don’t give a shit was race the character was originally, the character is about to be transformed into a next level badass.
I have mixed feelings about Liam Neeson in that role. His performance is great, and given that they got rid of the whole, “immortal genius from the Islamic Golden Age,” backstory, I guess the character’s race is less important. It feels very strange that an Irish guy is somehow the leader of a group of Asian ninjas, though.
The Sam Jackson/Nick Fury story is pretty hilarious. When Marvel created the Ultimate Universe in the comics, they changed a lot of characters’ backstories. One of those changes was making Nick Fury black, and one of their artists started drawing him looking a lot like Sam Jackson. Jackson talked to his agents, and Marvel was basically like, “Well, instead of suing us, would Mr. Jackson like to play the character in any future projects?”
Well, the Ariel thing is basically the same kind of ‘rewrite’.
Also Ariel isn’t even “white”… she’s a mermaid
Well, I think it’s a bit different. The Little Mermaid takes place in an unidentified kingdom on the surface (it seems vaguely Italian or Mediterranean, I guess?) and an underwater Atlantian kingdom, so race doesn’t matter. The original Dr. Strange comics have all sorts of uncomfortable racial and religious tropes; it’s about a white guy who finds magical order Tibetan monks, not only learns their magic, but becomes even better than them at it, and moves to New York with an Asian man-servant named Wong who serves him tea. Changing up the races and backstory on that one isn’t just acceptable, it’s advisable.
Exactly Ariel is basically fish,
I remember reading he was one third German and sometimes I cannot sleep at night because I am trying to figure out the math. This has been like 15 years ago and it still bugs me.
If it makes you feel better, “one third” is realistically a reduced precision approximation of something like 23/64 (from a genealogical perspective) or near 33% of certain markers on a genetic panel.
I mean I guess that’s what they referred to, some approximation, but it still breaks my brain every time I think about it
Just like I once watched a video titled something like “this boy did the unthinkable” and then he did something very thinkable (he just ate someone’s face) and I am still mad about that
Sprinkle in a little incest and we are good to go.
I also have no idea, I thought it was all halves of halves.
You can get some odd fractions by two parents having similar lineages. Like, if your mother is Irish, and your great-grandmother on your father’s side is Irish, you would be five-eighths Irish. I’m having trouble finding a combination that gives you thirds, though.
Doesn’t exist, 3 is prime. No combination of 2^-n will get you a 3 in the denominator.
…unless somewhere along the tree there’s a person who shows up twice.
Gotcha. Three-eighths is roughly one-third, so I guess that? One-quarter German on one side, one-eighth on the other?
It’s honestly really gross how the U.S. film industry works. There’s a widely held belief that you basically have to have a white lead character in most films for it to be successful. Look at marvel, just as an example. Every single main character was a white man or woman. Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, etc. All white people. Black Panther was the exception, not that he was even really part of the avengers officially. He wasn’t really in their crew at their headquarters. But even the person who played vision, which was heavily dawdled in makeup… White person. That role could have been anyone! The dude looks like an alien, why did it have to be a white guy? Now look at Star Wars, another extremely popular franchise. Every single lead character is white without fail. Luke Skywalker, Anakin, the emperor, Leia, Han Solo, Kylo Ren, you name it, they are white. Mace Windu was the exception, and they just killed him off needlessly Like he was some inconsequential character even though he was literally the most important person in the entire Jedi order. Then Star Wars The Old Republic launched a video game and guess who is the leader of the Republic now? White woman.
Mace Windu getting killed was the turning point and point of no return for the three film character arc of Anakin Skywalker. That’s a long way from “needlessly”. Sure the character didn’t have to be killed, but the impact of him being betrayed and killed was enormous. The plot of the third film (and the entire prequel trilogy) culminated with his death scene.
To be fair in star wars, it’s one big unhappy family.
I’m pretty sure the Supreme Chancellor in SWTOR is a green woman after the white guy preceding her was offed.
The other side has a white woman queen, but to be fair, they are racists.
That said, I would agree white people are overrepresented among humans in SWTOR.
I only care when it’s stupid, like Medieval Poland being full of black people, not even modern day Poland has that many black people.
You can call me racist if you want but casting a black guy to play the president of the USA in like 1910 would be as stupid as casting a white guy to play Nebuchadnezzar.
The Witcher isn’t in Medieval Poland though, it’s in a fantasy land.
Rings of Power was far more dumb because there’s black people, but only in a few extremely important roles. Almost as if there’s some sort of reverse curse going on, where a baby pops out black, and they immediately make it their king/queen. Or more likely, they realised very late on that they’d made a very white cast, and made a few last minute changes.
deleted by creator
The Witcher isn’t in Medieval Poland though, it’s in a fantasy land.
So by that logic it’s fine to make Wakanda full of white people because it’s fantasy land right?
I mean yeah. If the writers wanted to make Wakanda have white people, that would be fine.
Sure it would, if the writers had written it that way. South Africa is full of white people, it might have even made sense.
But since they didn’t do that, and then wrote their entire storyline around having not done that, this is a poor argument.
Wakkkanda it is.
Wakanda is supposed to be in Africa, where Uganda is irl.
I sometimes think the token representation is on purpose. Riles up the “anti-woke” and means that internet discourse about your show is all about how there’s some black people, not about how shit the writing is.
Like I really don’t give a rats ass if the dwarves are brown or purple or pink. (Although the lack of bearded dwarf women is unacceptable.) The other changes in Rings of Power are actually bad.
Meanwhile middle age fantasy had black knights and it was fine.
Racists are gonna be racists is all there is.
You can call me racist
As tone deaf as it gets.
It’d be as bad as having people of color play Hamilton and associates!
“Here are three examples I made up to prove how not racist I am!”
sounds like some men in black 3 setting
Representation matters. Giving the few traditionally non-white roles that get written in Hollywood to white actors is an actual problem.
Getting mad about the existence of black characters in fiction fucking stupid. Really fucking stupid. Unjustifiably fucking stupid. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
100% agree, but what should be done would be to green light projects by writers of other races based on different cultures and folklores diversifying the pop culture space (for lack of a better term).
What is done instead is treating minorities as a checklist that needs to be checked in every piece of art even when it doesn’t make sense for them to be in that story.
Getting mad sure, but it is definitely a dumb creative decision to have characters be random races that don’t make sense in the historical context and it’s fine to criticize it. If it’s a purely fictional world with no basis in reality then no one should care.
No. Fuckin stop it. Its unbearably stupid.
Historical fiction has existed for a long time.
Y’all ain’t out here throwing a pouty parade when someone adds technology or magic or monsters into historical fiction.
But black people? Existing? If that’s where you draw the line, it’s really clear why. Make all the excuses you want.
Historical or alternate history fiction falls under pure fiction imo. That’s fine as long as it makes sense. If it’s meant to be some super grounded realistic historical slice-of-life then it would just make me think “when are they going to bring up the fact that there’s X type of person walking around here” for the whole story.
Not exclusive to black people. If there were a story that took place in 12th century Mongolia and there was some Nordic guy walking around I would be like “huh, what’s his story” and then be confused when it was never mentioned. That’s how I feel about a lot of these creative choices.
That’s literally just a longer way of saying that it’s okay if it’s magic but it’s not okay if it’s black people.
& yeah, I’ll hold my breath for people getting equally upset about white people in fiction. Any day now. I’m sure.
I can’t disapprove a hypothetical, I guess, but a hypothetical isn’t proof of anything either.
But magic doesn’t have any grounding or association with the world as we know it. Neither does aliens. We can only use the world as we know it as a frame of reference for a story.
I’d argue in lbaudia’s example that it is confusing if in 12th century Mongolia, there was some Nordic guy walking around, I’d imagine there to be a backstory of some kind. If there wasn’t, then that would definitely be an example where I’d be annoyed at white people in fiction.
I thought a great example of casting was the TV show “The Expanse”. To be able to cast someone as specific as Bobbie Draper so well - these studios have no excuse to whitewash as they do except laziness.
People made these exact same arguments about the inclusion of a black samurai in an Assassin’s Creed game.
A black samurai who was based on a real person who actually existed in history.
The game they’re playing is very obvious to anyone who’s actually paying an ounce of attention, and it has nothing to do with caring about historical accuracy.
It’s bullshit. It’s an excuse. It’s foolish. I do not suffer it gladly.
Oh the sweet voice of a reason, they don’t take well to that around here. Good on you.
The only one of these that is remotely acceptable, to me, is Tilda Swindon, because they explicitly detached themselves from the character to avoid getting shat on by the CCP for casting a Tibetan and from Americans for casting a Chinese person.
The others are all crap, IMO.
Every time a character is <color>washed we lose the chance to be exposed to global actors that would fit their profile.
The only one of these that is remotely acceptable, to me, is Tilda Swindon, because they explicitly detached themselves from the character to avoid getting shat on by the CCP for casting a Tibetan and from Americans for casting a Chinese person.
That makes it worse tbh
Eh, they weren’t happy about it but were caught between a rock and a hard place, I can sympathise.
More like a revenue loss and a bigger revenue loss place.
The people who made the casting choice were told by Disney they couldn’t cast either, it was that or get replaced by someone else who would play ball.
It’s ridiculous to expect them to remove themselves from a multimillion dollar project that would get done anyway with or without them.
The entire point of making a movie, yep.
Because there’s not enough diversity in marvel, nope
Earning less money is haaaaaaard
Can I be upset at all of them? The little mermaid should probably be
DutchDanish, and all the rest should be their canon ethnicities. White Disney princesses don’t bother me because most of those stories are European folktales, but that cuts both ways.Yeah it’d be a similar reaction if Jasmine & Aladdin were recast as northern Europeans. Sure it’s a fantasy tale, but the story is set in a fantasy version of Arabia.
Isn’t she a fucking mermaid who comes from the ocean? Why should she be any real nationality/ethnicity?
Her ethnicity should be Innsmouth.
Trace her back to her origins, and she’s literally based on a Danish folktale. I can guarantee you no one in Denmark when the story first was told was thinking of her as black.
But then I think all of those examples were bad and should never have been cast that way. A black Anne Boleyn is exactly as bad a choice as a white Mansa Musa, for example.
Oddly enough, the Harry Potter franchise handled this well.
I could be convinced that mermaids should have dark backs and light bellies
Dutch not Danish?
Danish would be my guess
deleted by creator
How was Highlander not included?
Spanish and Scottish accents are basically identical.
My problem is her eyes not sharing the same postal code.
Like Anya Taylor-Joy
I swear Hollywood has an addiction to those big eyed weirdos because they are a kinda pretty that isn’t exactly normal pretty and it makes you remember their face for triggering your uncanny valley reflex.
if you’re making fun of her looks, I’d like to see the women you pull.
ones with eyes where you can’t project a film between.
pics or you’re a eunuch living in a relatives basement.
Don’t forget Snow White who looks like a white person but is mixed-race white and Latina, so she isn’t white enough to play Snow White.
And also don’t forget the very light-skinned black woman who couldn’t play Cleopatra because Cleopatra wasn’t black. (How do we know? We don’t? Cool. Cool cool cool.)
deleted by creator
Yes. Because the noble lineage was passed through her father. We don’t know who her mother was.
How would cleopatra not be white?
Because we don’t know who her mother was.
But she ruled so it would be presumably nobility and thus not black?
Sorry… what are you talking about?
Well I was going by the logic that illegitimate child wouldn’t tule Egypt, but that may in fact that be the case, but the argument that her mother isn’t known for sure as an argument that she was black is not very strong, when the only depiction of her being black comes from Jada I cheat on my husband then make him talk about it on video Smith
You’re still making no sense.
What does illegitimacy have to do with it?
Why can’t her father have been legitimately married to a dark-skinned woman?
Edit: Wait, you know the Ptolemys, like all pharaohs, had multiple wives, right?
Probably went into it thinking with a too European, bloodline, mindset
There has been unmistakenly black pharaohs, they came from what is now Sudan, but ruled the whole Egypt of the time. I’m not saying Cleopatra is related to them, but black pharaohs did happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Dynasty_of_Egypt
Yeah I know about them, also there were some pretty powerful rulers and kingdoms in Africa, I don’t have an issue with that, but when Jada Smith makes a “documentary” about how she was black, without scientific consensus then that’s kinda wrong imo, it would actually be cultural appropriation unlike copying some haircut
“latina/o” is not a race aso yeah, that doesn’t make sense.
There’s no race in current humanity, it’s a cultual thing with no scientific backing so you can make whatever you want like the USA administration did for their convenience.
I think a lot of la Raza would disagree with you there.
You do realize that that is mainly from a USA point of of view and mostly directed towards mexico, right? So this isnt’t only kinda xenophobic but you’re basically telling me I should consider myself a different race because random yankees think I am? Yeah, no thanks. The country you were born in does not determine your race.
you’re basically telling me I should consider myself a different race because random yankees think I am?
Race doesn’t really exist*. No one can tell you you’re a race you don’t think you are
*I mean it exists, but it’s a social construct that only has any meaning because we give it meaning culturally. Any person with a particular racial identity, in a different cultural context, could have a different racial identity. Would have a different racial identity, most likely. But that doesn’t mean the concept is meaningless, just that its meaning is derived from its use, rather than the other way around.
You do know that there is no scientific definition of race, right?
Also, she’s from the U.S., so…
Who is “she”? The acress in the live action mermaid movie? I literally never talked about her, so…
No, the actress in Snow White. The one I called mixed-race. And then you said that she wasn’t mixed-race because Latina isn’t a race. Caught up now?
