BobDobolina said:
Okay, that was a bit of a low blow, I'll cop to it. Sorry.
No problem at all.
BobDobolina said:
No, it's only a problem if you believe "Norse Gods" are a purely ethnic property in a way that other gods are not. There is no particular reason for that belief and no need for writers of fiction to subscribe to it. If you want to adapt the Norse Gods a capable of taking on different forms and appearances, but still want to make use of some of their traits and narratives, do so. Same with Nigerian orishas or Hindu gods or Japanese gods or Native American spirits. What matters is the integrity of the story, not some irrelevant ethnic 'verisimilitude;' if it works on its own terms it doesn't have to be answerable to what the chronologically earliest depiction 'looked like.'
I don't believe it to be ethnic, rather cultural. In the pagan Norse culture, the god was portrayed consistently in a specific manner. If there is no consistency or specifics, then fine, do what you like with it.
My point is that if we are not portraying a widely-known and established character accurately, then the whole point of the adaptation is rendered moot as the particular nuances of the character are thus not relevant. I have said before, if you make a white character black, they face a whole different set of challenges and if they stick to the pre-written origin story, the character is made unrealistic, and if they make the character 'different' to suit the problems they encounter, it is no longer the original character and instead of co-opting a perfectly good character they could have simply created a new one. The integrity of the story is corrupted by not paying attention to what makes the character the character, and while you might not like it, race and gender are major factors in defining a person.
For example, if we create a hypothetical character called Jim. He's white, a bit tall, middle-class and generally not into music. He lives in a typical American suburb in the south.
Can we accurately portray this character as exactly the same, but black? No, of course not. Events that happen to White Jim do not affect Black Jim in the same way, and vice-versa. He might be surrounded by latent, low-level, passive-aggressive racists, but as a white man, he'll never know it. He'll never experience what its like to be discriminated against because of his ethnicity, and he will never grow as a character because of it.
Black Jim, however, has experienced this low-level racism, and one day confronts his old, red-neck, gun-owning neighbour, has a tense showdown with him and eventually persuades him through force of words to apologise, and makes him change his ways. It's an epic scene where Black Jim is unarmed and facing a loaded shotgun controlled by a man who fundamentally hates him.
This is something White Jim could never have done or experienced, because the circumstances that lead up to this situation would never have occurred. To White Jim, the old guy next door is just nice old Mr Jones, who occasionally asks him to lift something heavy.
So if we want to create a movie about Jim, and we use Black Jim, we can't use the tense showdown in the story as it never happened in our fictional comic books, however, if we did make a movie with Black Jim, this would be a character defining moment, that is completely incompatible to the character as the audience knows him if we did include it. Black Jim has grown into a different character to White Jim, and it makes sense that he should have been a new character called Mike from day one.
BobDobolina said:
Comics don't often answer to quite so noble a standard, of course, but if you know anything about them you should know that this:
.. is a comical thing to say. Complaining to Marvel comics about the "verisimilitude" of their adaptation of any deity is just dumb; when has that ever been a concern of comics?
Well, its not about verisimilitude towards the pagan god Thor, but to the Marvel portrayal of him. They portrayed him as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, muscular Scandinavian. That's great, but if you wanted to be ethnically diverse, you should have made him something else to start with. Changing the record half-way through just looks blatantly pandering.
BobDobolina said:
"Naturalism" in scuplture had nothing to do with "realism." "Realism" as you mean it is carefully comparing things to their original ethnic contexts because for some reason this is important to you with the depiction of deities. The ancients had plenty of naturalism, they simply did not give a shit about realism. Your complaint about "verisimilitude" would have made zero sense to them.
I don't think any of this would make sense to them, but realism to an ancient person would have been Zeus changing into a bull and fucking a virgin on an altar. That happened. We might find it patently stupid, but they really didn't. Realism is entirely relative, IMO, but this is straying off the subject.
BobDobolina said:
Straight imports and comparison were both practised widely. In the case of imports, the ancients were not concerned with the ethnic "verisimilitude" of appearance. The representations might carry forward one or two key identifying characteristics: Mithras' origin is hinted at by his Phrygian cap, but Roman artists otherwise were unconcerned with whether he looked Phrygian if indeed such artists ever had cause to lay eyes on someone from Phrygia.
This should be no shock. Representations of Jesus follow similar patterns. He looks Syrian in early paintings, Italian or European in paintings from the Renaissance, black in Ethiopia, Asian in Korea. It's a perfectly normal thing for artists to do.
That's fine. This makes perfect sense. This happened homogeneously over centuries. The fact that black actors are playing white characters in movies is nothing to do with cultural representations, its entirely to do with playing the PC bit and saying "hey, look how progressive and modern we are, we've put a black guy as a white character!"
If it was not a concern, the white character would be played by a white actor, the black character by a black actor, and an oriental character by an oriental actor. Why? Because it makes sense.
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