TV/Movies Megathread

[Solmyr]

The problem with making Ciri a PoC is that she's the daughter of the book's equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm. Her country of origin is an allegory of the Empire of Germany, as seen by a Polish writer. Can't see the metaphor working as well with black nilfgaardians

Poles feeling threatened by black people? What could be more realistic?

[Syt]

Dagon was from the Middle East.

But popularized for Western speculative fiction by Lovecraft.

[Duque de Bragança]

Just wait till Jehova (and his wimpy sidekick Jesus) show up in Marvel comics as super heroes. 

Too late, the Japanese did worse with Jesus and Buddha!

[Malthus]

For example: the adaptation of King's Dark Tower novels with a Black actor.

This would have been a very bad idea - if the movie stuck anywhere close to the books - because, though a fantasy, the fact of Roland being visibly white-skinned (in fact, a medieval deliberate expy of spaghetti western gunslingers like Clint Eastwood) was an actual plot point in the series: he meets, and eventually befriends, a major character who is a Black woman, and one of whose personalities initially takes a strong exception to Roland because he is White (in fact, attempts to kill him ...).

This leads to all sorts of in-book implications about race, power, gender, movie tropes, etc., which the series is rich in (for better or worse). Changing his skin colour changes the story fundamentally.

Patrick Stewart starred as Othello, and every other actor was African-American.  http://www.playbill.com/article/patrick-stewart-stars-in-race-reversed-othello-in-dc-nov-17-com-72158

Absolutely makes sense - because in that case, changing the skin colours of the actors forwarded the story (that Othello was under social tension because he was different), while making a point (that it was this isolation, not the specific race, that had an impact on the story). Not all changes to the original story are bad, or undermine the storytelling - each has to be examined on its own merits: this is an example of a thoughtful change, made for a purpose.

[Malthus]

Oh for fucksake. I apologize for trying to have an earnest discussion. Far be it from me for asking an academic for evidence for their bullshit.

Nevermind. Throw out all the garbage you want.

???
It's not an earnest discussion: it's a bloody tangential point.

But sure: we only have a vague idea of what Jesus looked like, if he existed at all. Huzzah. Same with King Arthur. But it never has prevented Western art, from the middle ages on to this very day (i.e., just do a simple google image for popular devotional images of Christ) to look a lot more like a pale, brown-haired delicate, European than any other simultaneous representations that were produced about people from the Levant. And yes, I am aware that there are many representations of Christ from Coptic traditions, or Ethiopian art, or some Black Panther militant, have represented him as a black man. Why, I am sure if all those devotional images sold in the US started depicting Christ the same way generic Arab men are depicted, there would be no backlash at all.

People depicted Jesus as looking like they (the artists and their customers) themselves looked, not surprisingly.

The main reason they did so was that most artists throughout large stretches of history lacked any sense of the historic: medieval illustrations of Alexander the Great showed him looking like a Medieval European monarch.

In the case of Jesus, there are sound theological reasons for this, though: Jesus was both god and man - he's the 'son of man' - a term sometimes used to indicate Jesus' universal importance (he's not the son of *a* man). Thus, every Christian can see Jesus in his or her own way - he's not Black, or Levantine, or White - he's all these things at the same time.

[Malthus]

Just wait till Jehova (and his wimpy sidekick Jesus) show up in Marvel comics as super heroes. 

Too late, the Japanese did worse with Jesus and Buddha!

The holy bros. 

[garbon]

And this is why my medievalist colleagues must now address the issue of white supremacy in their classes.

That's a sure way of creating a cohort of easily offended young adults who find prejudice everywhere.

You don't cast blacks because they're black and need to be casted, that's just stupid.  It has nothing to white supremacy to resist the urge of americanizing everything in the world.  I thought a nationalist like you would have understood that.  I am extremely disapointed.

Slavs are massively white.  Not black or yellow or pink or green.  Most of the characters in the Witcher series are white, slavic in their ways.  There's a strong analogy to what that girl is writing about: the strong neighbour preying on its weaker neighbours, fucking up their economy, their politics, killing their peasants, inciting hatred among groups for its own purpose, the disunity of these small neighbours, etc, etc.

I'd be really pissed off if Netflix did a series on a black D'Iberville.  Or an asian Louis XIV.

That would be totally, totally retarded.

Portraying John Wayne as Ghenghis Khan is stupid.  Using a white actress to portray an asian actress that looks white isn't cultural approriation, no more than a Toronto restaurant offering poutine on its menu is.

If you want to create a black monster fighting hero, please do so!  Call her Buffy the Vampire Slayer even.  Call her something else.  Invent your own story.  Use characters of all diversity.

Their excellent Frontier show is a good example of excellent casting choices.  There's no black merchant in Montreal, that didn't exist in 1790.  There's no ninjas either.  Indians act like indians of the time acted in the North, the lead actor does look like he could be Metis (even if he's Hawaiian), that is just perfect, imho.

There's no more need to blackwash stuff then there is need to whitewash it.

I really, really, really hate that new tendancy to cast blacks everywhere just because they're black.
But we've been down that road before and you will, again, disagree with me.

It sounds like then people of color should just plan not to be actors then? You remove them from the running for a wide variety of roles because 'only white actors would be appropriate' for the roles in the stories being told and then on the other hand allow for white actors to take on roles that are POC characters.

[Berkut]

WEll shit. If we can survive having a POC play Alexander Fucking Hamilton I think they can survive their entirely made up person being played by a POC.

Christ.

[HVC]

we should go back to the greek theatrical masks. no more problems!

[Valmy]

WEll shit. If we can survive having a POC play Alexander Fucking Hamilton I think they can survive their entirely made up person being played by a POC.

Christ.

Huh. Yeah did anybody have a problem with that?

But stage is a different medium than on-screen stuff maybe. We understand that portrayals on stage are going to have these sorts of abstract or representative qualities. Like how sets are more representative than they are supposed to appear to be the literal place like you normally see on TV or film. So maybe that is why that seems to be less upsetting to...certain people than the TV stuff.

Or maybe they were upset and I just did not notice.

[viper37]

I will say that I do think that it is a bit ridiculous. Black Panther showed that there is a lot of interest in African stories. Why not make a show about some kind of African mythology if you really want to cast black actors? I am sure we would rather see that than another godawful video game adaptation anyway.

yes!

no, wait, I want to see the Witcher!  I desperately want it to be good and hope it's not a fuck up.  I have only one book left to read and one game to play, it's great stuff!

I'll give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt, in that with the Defenders, they had lousy material to begin with: Iron Fist was totally annoying as a character and Luke Cage only had some "black power" thing for his back story.

Black Panther was great and it tapped into a lot of African things, hinted at many different cultures and brought them under the giant Marvel umbrella.

I'm pretty sure there can be other very interesting tv series/movies along the same lines that would be huge successes.

[viper37]

Err. The students who get offended in these classes are the bunch of racists who take offense at the mere suggestion that there were people of color in medieval Europe.

They get offended by everything and then stage protests to censor other thoughts claiming it is:
- patriarchy
- savage capitalism
- racism & white supremacy
- anti islam
- transphobic or homophobic
- a combination of all the above.

The fact that Ciri has been designed as white should not preclude the fact that she can be reinvented as whatever color one wants. Because it's a bloody fantasy world.

It's a lot more than that for these people, and it's a hugely popular franchise with already established characters, complete physical and psychological descriptions.

Jesus has been thoroughly reinvented for centuries as lily-white, and few people apparently object...

I don't know what color he was in real life, the Bible never really described him

At this point, many characters exist as collections of traits that ought to go well beyond skin color. There is little reason why Captain America, or Batman, or Hamlet, are white, except the fact that they were born of a time - no longer ours - when there were little to no representations of heroic people of color, and the fact that they have been carried through time by the sheer wealth of explicitly racist states and empires. James Bond mat very well be a black man soon, and that will be awesome.

It will neither be awesome nor awful.  It will be Bond, 007, secret agent in his/her majesty's service.

Now, make 007 an American, and there will be riots in London

The skin color of a character does not change the cultural content of show itself.

Yes, it does, because that is specifically what they are searching for: someone that "looks" American and "oppressed".  Ciri's story is a tragic one, always on the run from something, not really knowing about her past, only knowing someone wants to fuck her and have her baby.

To be offended by having a black person in what would essentially remain a heavily Slavic-inspired fantasy world, is to acknowledge that black people cannot truly be Slavic, and that their skin color renders the whole thing more unbelievable that a white dude with cat eyes, shape-shifting dragons, and magic potions. I find that selective offense disturbing.

When you think Slavic, you think white people.  You don't think Mongol hordes, you don't think Arabs, you don't think Africans.  Defiance was a great movie, imho.  Should they have included a token black character?  Make the leaders of the resistance black to please american audience?

If you think "Polish" or "Czech", you can have black characters.  You can have Asian characters.  You can have Arabs/Muslisms, all possibilities are open.

But recasting the Romanovs of the Hohenzollern as black because doing it otherwise would be reinforcing white supremacist tropes is just plain dumb.

You don't fight a problem by going all the way to the opposite.  You don't fight cultural appropriation for a culture by doing it in reverse everywhere else.  You don't fight right-wing authoritarian currents by going all the way to left-wing authoriatrain currents.

As for historical drama, it is indeed more complicated. To be offended by an Asian Louis XIV is to assume it would actually require *more* suspension of disbelief, than the fact that I can plainly recognize Gerard Depardieu under a wig. If I can accept one as serious, and the other as ridiculous, I think it warrants some introspection. However, a show in which issues of race would have a role to play may want to conform more to the historical situation.

I picked Louis XIV, because he has a lot more importance to France than another king, a lot more of Versailles is ingrained in popular imagination than Louis IV or V.

If you were to take The 3 Musketeer integrally and play it with a black Louis XIII and black musketeers, it wouldn't work.
But changing a few subtle details and introducing black characters, like the BBC did, it worked real well, imho, but it was never accepter in France.

In the case of Frontier, this was a precisely a world where issues of Indigeneity played a crucial role in how the characters would be treated.

I grew up with Daniel Boone and D'Iberville on TV, watching Davy Crocket's adventures on sunday nights.  Mingo wasn't played by an american indian actor.  And if I were to look back at it with my 40something eyes, I would likely see all the flaws of the shows, with regards to how the indians and the blacks were portrayed.

Still, to correct such a mistake, if there was a reboot of such show, recasting Daniel Boone as a half-black/half american indian wouldn't be right.


There's a lot of stories to be told about African, African americans, blacks of all origins, first nations/aboriginals, etc, it's just not right to insist on recasting everything as black/asian/trans/homo/pinkskins for the sake of diversity.  That is just leftist dumbness, the kind of things that really leads people to vote for Trumpresque politicians.

[viper37]

It sounds like then people of color should just plan not to be actors then? You remove them from the running for a wide variety of roles because 'only white actors would be appropriate' for the roles in the stories being told and then on the other hand allow for white actors to take on roles that are POC characters.

No.

they can play a lot of characters were it makes sense to have black character.  Marvel's Thor could be become a black woman, it could easily be explained in Marvel's own mythos.

It would be like making a theater play about slavery everytime, everywhere, and having only white people in the distribution... no wait, bad example.

Captain America is a soldier from the 1940s.  Afaik, from 1941 to 1945, black soldiers did not serve with white soldiers.  I think it would be stupid to reinvent him as a black super soldier.
Iron Man, Thor, it would work.  Wonder Woman wouldn't.  Jiggling tighs or not.  Black Batman?  Why not, if you anchor it in today's world.  If you make him a 1930 hero, that's just wrong, scifi universe or not.

Like I said, it depends on the context, and using black actors for the sake of having black actors is just plain stupid, just like white washing everything.

I believe all humans to be equal and not defined by their race/gender/sexual identity.

If you want a black transexual Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I couldn't care less.  But don't make it a show about a black transexual vampire slayer, make it a show about a vampire slayer who happens to be black and transexual, like it's totally normal.

[garbon]

So you just draw arbitrary rules around things / want to make sure that fantasy characters conform to the historical racism that there was in society?

Why, in the hell couldn't Wonder Woman be a black woman? All white woman clause for the fictional Amazons? The most recent Wonder Woman outing wasn't even set in the same time period that she's typically seen in.

Also, if you want race and gender to not be featured prominently, then have a black soldier hero in the 30s where no character reacts to that.

[grumbler]

I'm not understanding this argument that some fictional fantasy and has to conform to European racial prejudices because to do otherwise would be somehow ahistorical.  The story has magic and supernatural monsters, but it is a particular skin tone that is somehow unacceptably unrealistic while the magic and monsters are okay?

Somebody needs to move out of mom's basement.