Another example of "took a new name to get out of the Batman's sidekick shadow", though to be fair she became Batwoman. I honestly wasn't aiming for exhaustive lists, much like I didn't dare try to name every named Green Lantern.
Can I talk about this modern trend in "diversity casting in TV shows?"
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Right, yes-- and when it wasn't a white dude, people moaned more.
So what? The canon justification for why they passed on the mantle is entirely irrelevant to our discussion.
That's the difference between the condescending term 'character actor', aka, actual real actors, and the pretty confident people who are called 'actors' because people like to look at them.
If you pay any attention to Bucky in the movies, you'd realise that he doesn't want to be fucking Captain America. He's been the Winter Soldier for over seventy years and only around Avengers: Infinity War was it apparent he was being given sanctuary to exercise his own agency and do what HE wanted to do. He chose, with one arm, to raise goats.
Look, I've only seen Leslie Jones in GB2016, so my experience of her acting chops is not high. She seemed to be in a different movie from the rest of the cast.... which is pretty accurate to the token black friend in the original
Anyway, generally I agree. I cut one piece out of a quote earlier to come back to later when things have calmed down. That does not look like it's going to happen so... here goes
I legit couldn't care less if someone Japanese was Alice. Or the Mad Hatter. Or the Queen of Hearts
I couldn't care less if Willy Wonka was Mexican. Or Israeli. Or Indian. I always found it weird that, when I read the book, it felt like the competition to see Wonka was a world competition, but all the winners could have basically come from London in the movie
I couldn't care less if the Ghostbuster were all female. I would say that a team of all one gender is stupid, maybe let's stop doing that... on both sides. AND if there was multiple genders in a team, that doesn't mean they HAVE to be a romance between team members. Please and Thank You
I would note that he's been forced into the Winter Solider for most of the time. I read it as him just wanting to be himself, rather than been attached to something/ having to do something
I haven't scrolled through all four pages yet but my take is: Depends a lot on settting and tone.
If you're making a fairly grounded, accurate adaptation based on history, sticking to the historical races/groups as best as you can is important.
If you're doing something a bit more abstract or adaptational or the casting is meant to make a point along those lines, cast per the theming of the work, such as Hamliton being mostly POC by design.
Fantasy and Sci-fi stuff I don't really care unless the skin color/race is very important to the story you're trying to tell or the background info. So I don't really give a shit if the elves are played by black people or white people unless it's very, very important that all the elves have to have skin of the shade of pure whitness and hair of gold because......the lore of magic. I can totally buy that a world that has dragons and magic also has black and gay people in it. I can deal with the fact the actors playing the elves aren't speaking elvish in the same light.
Or stuff like Shakespeare or Oedipus. I really don't give a shit about the casting much there as long as the actors can play the part, because plays are generally abstract anyway.
Now, if your setting is "A space ark launched by China crashed on an isolated planet and is only now making contact with the rest of the universe after decades or centuries" yes, it makes totally sense the cast for said colonists are Chinese descended with no exceptions(though I'm sure the casting agency will basically use anyone who looks Chinese at a glance, despite the fact not all East Asian people are Chinese). If you're trying to pull the same trick with say "Star Trek" where interstellar travel is commonplace and apparently quite inexpensive, I'm gonna ask about your casting process. You can extrapolate his to historical fiction as well, especially in societies that were major trade hubs and migration was reasonably commonplace. So if you were do a relatively grounded story set in Roman-era Ireland, the "everyone is white" thing works a hell of a lot better there then if you set it in the Roman Empire, which had a hell of a lot of trade traffic and encompassed a very large area on 3 continents. Of course, if you're doing "Jesus Christ Superstar", all I care is that they can actually sing(Sorry Ted Neeley, your singing can't carry the role and Carl Anderson stole the movie from you).
If you're making a fairly grounded, accurate adaptation based on history, sticking to the historical races/groups as best as you can is important.
If you're doing something a bit more abstract or adaptational or the casting is meant to make a point along those lines, cast per the theming of the work, such as Hamliton being mostly POC by design.
Fantasy and Sci-fi stuff I don't really care unless the skin color/race is very important to the story you're trying to tell or the background info. So I don't really give a shit if the elves are played by black people or white people unless it's very, very important that all the elves have to have skin of the shade of pure whitness and hair of gold because......the lore of magic. I can totally buy that a world that has dragons and magic also has black and gay people in it. I can deal with the fact the actors playing the elves aren't speaking elvish in the same light.
Or stuff like Shakespeare or Oedipus. I really don't give a shit about the casting much there as long as the actors can play the part, because plays are generally abstract anyway.
Now, if your setting is "A space ark launched by China crashed on an isolated planet and is only now making contact with the rest of the universe after decades or centuries" yes, it makes totally sense the cast for said colonists are Chinese descended with no exceptions(though I'm sure the casting agency will basically use anyone who looks Chinese at a glance, despite the fact not all East Asian people are Chinese). If you're trying to pull the same trick with say "Star Trek" where interstellar travel is commonplace and apparently quite inexpensive, I'm gonna ask about your casting process. You can extrapolate his to historical fiction as well, especially in societies that were major trade hubs and migration was reasonably commonplace. So if you were do a relatively grounded story set in Roman-era Ireland, the "everyone is white" thing works a hell of a lot better there then if you set it in the Roman Empire, which had a hell of a lot of trade traffic and encompassed a very large area on 3 continents. Of course, if you're doing "Jesus Christ Superstar", all I care is that they can actually sing(Sorry Ted Neeley, your singing can't carry the role and Carl Anderson stole the movie from you).
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NGL kind of a stupid opinion. The problem with that idea is that characters are writen to fit the story and therefore it requires casting to fit. Gandolf wouldn't work as a tween, for example. Harry Potter makes no sense if Harry is played by The Rock (i dunno why I keep bring him up as an example im sorry).
In some places your idea could work. Like In Guardians of the Galaxy Quill could be played by Zoe Deschanell and it wouldn't make much difference. HOWEVER for the story to still work, Gamora would have to be played by a man as their relationship is interspecies-hetero.
So you are half-way there I guess on the idea. It's a nice dream, but it doesn't quite work out if you tried putting it into practice.
Nothing wrong if you are trying to make a terrible movie, also probably highly offensive.
So do you think it would be okay fi someone black played Princess Diana in her biopic? Does doing something like that kind of disrespect the person? Would it have been okay to cast Britney Spears as Selena in her bipic instead of J.Lo?
I think what you say here is key.
STORY is the most important thing in any film/movie/show/book/comic whatever. Everything else is secondary. It's perfectly fine if your race of elves in whatever fictional fantasy you are making are all black. If that's what the story calls for then cool. Even if you remade LotR and made all the elves Japanese or whatever, fine. I don't think that's a big deal so long as those actors still fit the performance requirements.
There are some things like that where race is interchangable. But in those instances you must have actors that can portray the part accurately, or convincingly whatever. Like Tessa Thompson in the past couple of Thor movies has been fucking garbage. She can't act for shit and is only in the film as a diversity hire because I find it hard to believe she nailed the audition. And she was trash in the Men in Black reboot too.
It's important to make sure the performance sells the character.
Yes and no.
When certain characteristics are important to a story or character (e.g. race for MLK, or gender for Queen Elizabeth I) I think the casting anyone likely becomes very problematic, because it can dissolve the sense of the narrative. Now, I can see situations where there could be a valid artistic point or message to subvert real life, but for your average biopic, probably a no.
Where factors don't mean much however, such as Samtendo's example of Anne Boleyn being portrayed by a black actor, we could take it in our stride. Anne Boleyn being played by a man would be more difficult, given a key point of Anne Boleyn's story was that she was executed for her inability to produce a male heir.
This is why this is such an issue. If you flip the situation around where white men are getting cast for X that traditionally had POC/women/LBGTQ, there can and has been an epic shitstorm. Cast people because they are POC/women/LBGTQ to replace white men and women though? Not a peep despite the fact that it is 100% just as racist/sexist/whatever as the other way around. I don't know about everybody else but it's the sheer hypocrisy that bothers me the most whenever this happens.
Plus, it's mother******* Samuel L Jackson. I'm pretty sure nearly nobody is going to complain about that particular casting. Anybody who has ever heard of the guy knew he won that role on his acting chops and he would do an excellent job, which he did. He wasn't put in because "hey, let's make Nick Fury black as a publicity stunt." Which is what people are actually complaining about. People getting cast because of their race, gender, and/or sexual orientation rather than the only thing that should actually count, their merit at the job is the problem for the vast majority of people who complain about this except a tiny microscopic minority of racist/sexist/whatever assholes.
On the note of Spoiler, her entire tenure as Robin was basically everybody telling her "You suck because you are a girl" and her repeatedly proving it until she faked her death and switched to becoming Spoiler, which was her taking on her own identity rather than taking another's like I suggested doing earlier and when everybody in universe and out started giving her much better reception. It's almost as if taking a traditionally male character and slotting a female in their place for publicy's sake is almost always an extremely terrible idea that rarely ever results in good works of fiction.
I don't recall anyone having any issue with John Stewart when he was the DCAU Green Lantern.
Yes, people tend to moan when a traditionally white character is portrayed by another race/gender/LGBTQ, but that's correlation, not causation for the vast majority of people. For most people they're moaning because of the issues that nearly always accompany this kind of change in portrayal. Like blatant publicity stunts, it was probably forced in by executives, the writing for them tends to be godawful because the writers never wanted to actually put them in so they're looking to torpedo the character so they can get the go ahead to put the originals back, the popularity of the original character, hypocrisy on the part of the people both making this decision and the people supporting it...
In short, people tend to moan about this because all too often it makes whatever media awful.
For an example of this, see Miles Morales, who showed both how to do this wrong and how to do it right. In the Ultimate Marvel Universe Peter Parker gets killed off, emotional ending for a hero, all that jazz. Then there's fanfare about there being a new "Black Spiderman!" all over the net for weeks. Nothing about who he was, his motivations, anything, "he's black" is all that is shown. Also half Hispanic, but even that was swallowed by "HE'S BLACK!!!" This irritated people long before the character debuted. The first several issues were even about the fact that his attempts to emulate Peter while wearing the same costume are pretty insulting to the dead kid's memory and how uncertain Miles was about filling his shoes. Which showed Marvel was perfectly aware of how badly they were botching this. It took years of work, changing his outfit, and eventually transferring Miles over to the main comics before the character was redeemed, when it wouldn't have been tough to just do him correctly in the first place.
Cut to the Spider-Man PS4 game. A bit before Into the Multiverse made Miles a main protagonist on the big screen in his own right. Peter is the main protagonist and stays alive. Miles has a few scenes here and there that help establish him, he forms a relationship with Peter as Spider-Man, Miles shows his own cleverness in NOT annoying gameplay sections, and the game ends with Miles getting spider powers and showing that fact to Peter, which leads up to him getting his own game.
Miles spends the game as a supporting character long before he gets spider powers of his own. Miles isn't a publicity stunt, in fact the game's advertising had very little about Miles prior. Miles is portrayed as a human being and not a caricature. Miles isn't upstaging Peter nor does Peter have to die or step down for Miles to take center stage... He pretty much avoids every pitfall he fell into in his origins or other similar characters did. Into the Multiverse only cemented Miles as a worthwhile Spider-Man.
It's all because of one simple reason: Miles Morales being black had NOTHING whatsoever to do with his character portrayal or why he was included in the latter two cases. Miles was just there to fulfill a role in the story. Mile's race wasn't treated as significant at all by either the narrative or the advertising, which is how it should be. Outside of comedy people of color/women/LGBTQ should be portrayed as perfectly normal by the narrative and have little to no fanfare outside the media they are in. As well as not put there just to have them, they need to be vital to the narrative on their own merits with those merits having nothing to do with which diversity check boxes they mark off.
In short, if you can tell a diversity character exists solely for the sake of diversity they are being done wrong.
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I'm not saying it would be a good portrayal. Only an interesting one. What is art if it does not constantly challenge us to look at things in new ways?
I think all the hyperbolic examples could work. Not well, but they could work.
I understand that this is an opinion not shared by pretty much anyone, and this isn't a hill I intend to die on. Only that much of my experience with theater involves seeing people playing roles they seemed ill suited for and yet somehow performing well.
I will admit that this is sort of an unobtainable ideal, and not remotely practical in nearly every case. Ah well.
Also I want to address this point:
Maybe art should, on occasion, offend us. Probably not in this way, granted.
Yeah but not well is the problem everyone has with these race washing castings. Nobody would complain if the end product was good, the issue arises when it's not, and when you cast for archetypes first, you are failing on everything else almost automatically.
Theater falls upon performance first thought right? Nobody stays in the theater if they suck. And I would argue that theater is much harder to cast because during a live performance you get no extra takes, no chances, if you fuck it up the audience sees it. Whereas in film that's not the case, you can do a take over and over until it's perfect and that should tell you how bad you have to be of an actor to have a shitty performance in a film where there is no excuse.
I've made that argument about comedy as well. But nobody agreed with me.
Massive disagree. I've seen enough complaints that focus specifically on the characteristics of the characters in question.
When Tim Drake got a boyfriend, my god the amount of rage and whining, a lot of it quite explicitly and obviously homophobic.
Yet even when they are treated just the same, the moans continue.
Dude, unless you missed it, Miles being black actually does get addressed in the game. The only difference here in reality is that you liked the piece of media, so you're overlooking it.
It's cool and all to want diverse characters in media that doesn't address those characteristics at all. That's fine (although the status quo warriors still tend to gripe, saying there's no "reason" for them to be XYZ so they shouldn't be).
But also... People with different characteristics have different experiences of life. That's just a fact. Why should art shy away from depicting those different experiences? Why should art just pretend that everyone experiences life exactly the same, when that's patently not true?
Best answer in this thread! It's over and done!
My word is either watch the show or don't, and move the fuck on with your life. I am not watching it, because I don't like Game of Thrones and have 0 interests in a spin-off. My brother might watch it, but that is about it. Otherwise, most of you are bitching about the same shit over and over again, with little change.
This is pretty irrelevant when playing a pre-written character though right? Like the life experiences of the actor don't matter to the audience, all that matters is the experiences of the character in the story being shown.
It shouldn't and I don't think that's the argument being presented. I think the argument is that if "depiction of different experiences" is the goal, then it should be written that way to begin with.
It shouldn't be a matter of "this character can be black, white, asain, whatever it doesn't change the character". Instead it should be "This character HAS to be black, white, asian, whatever and here is the story as to why".
I don't want character's race/gender to be interchangable. I want diverse characters with purpose behind their diversity imbeded in who they are as characters. Quite frankly if your character can be portrayed by anyone, then your character is shit.
That's a selective interpretation, though. It's unclear whether the word in Old Norse represents colour (whitest), or shininess (e.g. brightest). Plus of course that such words have long had conventions to mean things other than visual, such as purity, holiness, cleanliness, morality, etc.
Irrespective of that, it's surely not a problem if Heimdall is portrayed by a white actor - but that's some weird and pointless reversal of the real issue, which is why get your knickers in a twist if the actor is black?
No, I don't really have a problem if she's played by a white woman, per se. I'm not bothered that Tilda Swinton played that elder wizard in Dr. Strange, either.
Where I might have a problem is where underrepresented minorities are squeezed out of even the relatively scarce room available to them (which could be an objection in relation to Hummingbird), or where any demographic at all is excessively stereotyped into certain characterisations.
Agreed. But I guess my argument is that the portrayal should contribute to the artistic point, not detract.
I remember someone telling me he was looking round an art gallery with a friend of his, and he told that friend he thought all the art was rubbish. To which his friend replied "Well it's worked then, because it's made you think and feel something".
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