How do all of you feel when they race swap characters?

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Victim of The Night
The pendulum does swing back and forth, but that does not make history inevitable. We, collectively, are the ones swinging it. Nudge the crowd and you nudge the pendulum. And you are swinging it yourself in your own way.



If we collectively cash out for a sort of historical fatalism or determinism then we become like the heartless observers in the old Bruce Hornsby song, "that's just the way it is." I think we can reasonably observe where the pendulum is swinging relative to the new Pepsi generation of Zoomers, TikTokers and Twitteratti, but still reasonably speak our minds. And we should. History as wild-fluctuations of the pendulum, swinging from one extreme to another is not optimized for human flourishing. The more developed and mature a culture, the smaller the swings should be as we fine-tune for human flourishing.



In a very small way, our conversations here and elsewhere influence the movement of the swing. And isn't that why we talk to each other in the first place? To move and to be moved?
Well, I'm actually in favor of the pendulum swinging and constantly finding the new normals so I just feel like I can't complain when it swings against me.



Victim of The Night
I don't see where he's supposed to be saying any of that. He said it "must swing," and was pretty clearly endorsing the swinging overall. He didn't throw up his hands and declare it was some inevitable process.
Thank you, yes.



Victim of The Night
I don't see it as penalizing, so much as encouraging. Be brave keep going. Dig into that nuance. Keep working on it. Don't hide. Moreover, it's a sort of encouragement for us all as I think that we've been habituated to accept change as not only inevitable, but good (as is captured in that dubious phrase "the right side of history" and in earlier cultural deification of "progress" goading us to accept that change is generally good).



Frankly, I'm heartened that the thread here offers a rather mature response to the mischievous OP who dropped the prompt and apparently did hide(!). It can be done. And we are capable of it. Moreover, it appears that we want to work on it, because this thread is still getting traction. And I'd like to hear more from Wooley. If he heard anything different, then he has my sincerely apology.
I am, in general, a lover of change. Some good-looking studies have been done about people who prefer change to stasis and people who prefer stasis to change (and I am not saying either is right, I just know which one is me) and it's really pretty interesting how much it explains about people's political leanings and how they vote and how vigorously they do and so forth.
I for one, am like Fiona Apple, who said, "I'm good at being uncomfortable so I can't stop changing all the time."

Like you, I have to say that I have been largely pleased with how adult of a conversation has come out of what could have been just a free-for-all topic.



So, as much as it pains me as a raving libtard to agree on this point... I kinda gotta agree on this point. It took this character to really drive it home because I am pretty much all Norse. My name is traced back to Viking days and I have my genealogy going back to when the former Vikings were at the Battle Of Normandy. That is who I am. And to see the cavalier reversal of my personal cultural history be just something that we had to accept, even though I really like Tessa Thompson and think she's been a lot of fun in this, it was the first time I had to agree that maybe things aren't quite fair in this game right now.
Pendulums swing. They do. And I can live with that even when they swing away from me. But to see Norse culture turned into the rainbow coalition was fine when I thought it was good for society to do that, it was a bit of a bummer that that's how things have to be right now but it is what it is... but when Wakanda was kept 100% African-descent - which, let's be honest, it should have been - but my culture was sacrificed utterly for diversity... yeah, there's a little sting there, even though I am personally so big on diversity.
Still, like I said, the pendulum must swing so it's a pill I'm willing to swallow.

*hides*
Fellow libtard here, and I'll back you up on this. I think it's possible to maintain a diverse cast of characters, especially among 40 films and 20 series or wherever we are at this point, and still allow the blondes to have the Vikings to themselves. And I say this as a white guy of Mediterranean ancestry who recognizes that even my white people are not white enough for Norse Mythology.

Marvel's Asgard is a case where I feel like we went beyond just race-swapping a character and instead screwed around with an actual culture in a way that we normally wouldn't, as if an all-white group of Norsemen, which would seem to be self-evident, is somehow bad. What's a blonde-haired kid from Norway to make of that message? Wakanda should be 100% African, and you wouldn't hire a Maori director from NZ to make that film. Scandinavia was not given this same consideration, however. (And I want to make it clear that I'm talking about Scandinavia specifically, and not "white people".) How about a story where Asgard and Wakanda team up to fight a common foe instead?

I also acknowledge that the Avengers A-list is already 99% white, so I get it. I'm not losing sleep over it or anything.

Valkyrie was a favorite of my childhood so my main beef is that they turned her into a drunken trash collector. WTF?

BEFORE:



AFTER:

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Casting Tadanobu Asano as Hogun (for the Thor series) was a little questionable... I'll tell you why in a minute.

First, the "Warriors Three" from Thor comics were based on Alexandre Dumas's "Three Musketeers" with virtually no attempts by Lee & KIrby to mask their inspiration:
Grim Hogun was Athos (serious & brooding)
Dashing Fandral was Aramis (swashbuckling & romantic)
Voluminous Volstagg was Porthos (fat, lazy & a braggart, but loyal)

So, I didn't have much of a problem with them casting a Japanese actor as Hogun (in the comics, Hogun was the only one of the "three" with dark hair and he even hailed from a homeland that, although part of Asgard, was outside the golden realm proper).

But for the movie, they outfitted the Japanese actor in a costume straight out of feudal Japan! So, it wasn't just a case of here's a actor who happens to be Japanese playing a Nordic god because he's the best actor we could find for the role, but rather - due to the costuming reference (among others, subtle and not-so subtle) - that Japanese culture is part of Asgard and not only did he look Japanese - the Asgardian called Hogun was now supposed to BE Japanese because even mythological realms created by ancient Norwegians now have to be ethnically "diverse".

Now, I don't know if this is the case or not, but did they take the name Hogun and just put an "S" in front of it - turning him into Shogun? If so, that's kind of a lame joke to play on fans & the public.

And before anyone jumps to any erroneous conclusions - if you've read some of my other posts here over time, you'll know I have a particular fascination with Japan and a special regard for the Japanese people - so this isn't a rant against casting a Japanese actor, it's a rant against (once again) changing an established character in the name of forced diversity because that's what Hollywood THINKS audiences demand.



But for the movie, they outfitted the Japanese actor in a costume straight out of feudal Japan! So, it wasn't just a case of here's a actor who happens to be Japanese playing a Nordic god because he's the best actor we could find for the role, but rather - due to the costuming reference (among others, subtle and not-so subtle) - that Japanese culture is part of Asgard and not only did he look Japanese - the Asgardian called Hogun was now supposed to BE Japanese because even mythological realms created by ancient Norwegians now have to be ethnically "diverse".

We are doomed, it seems, to see race as a cultural determinant. The official rhetoric is that the relationship is reversed, that "race is merely a cultural construct." However, touches like a "Japanese man has Japanese armor" suggests that true belief (under the surface of the "official" story) runs the other way 'round. Tadanobu's "race" dictates the cultural features of his armor in the same way that Takei's homosexuality changed the sexuality of Sulu in Star Trek.



The truth is contradiction and this why emotions flare, as showing contradiction is a sign of heresy.



Victim of The Night
Valkyrie was a favorite of my childhood so my main beef is that they turned her into a drunken trash collector. WTF?

BEFORE:



AFTER:

Yeah, she was a favorite of mine too, I used to read The Defenders on the reg. That was fairly tough to swallow.



I'd be fine with it, if it weren't so ideologically one-sided. The day they can make, produce and market Reese Witherspoon in the title role of "The Rosa Parks Story", then I'll be on board with any other race-or-other-swapping you want -- black Superman? gay George Washington? trans Patton? Bring it on -- AFTER Reese Witherspoon in the title role of "The Rosa Parks Story and/or Leo Di Caprio in the title role of "I Have a Dream" as Martin Luther King Jr.



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I don't mind race swapping at all really in movies like the OPs examples of Gordon or The Little Mermaid as I don't think it changes the story at all.

I heard that with the new Snow White movie being made, that they were going to make Snow White black. Now this might be an exception for me because Snow White is the name of the character because she is pale. So race swapping might not make sense there unless they change the character's name and title? Like what would they call it then? Coffee Brown?

But normally I don't mind race swapping and feel it doesn't really effect the story under most stories.



Again with the historical figures...
Okay, how about a present day figure: Mickey Rourke in the title role of the movie "Barack: The Story of Barack Obama"



quote=Iroquois;2369435]Why keep bringing up real people when the topic title clearly specifies characters?[/quote]


I can keep it to unreal characters: How about --

Jack Nicholson and Shia LaBeouf playing "Sanford & Son: The Movie"

Randy Quaid and Roseanne Barr playing "The Jeffersons: The Movie"

Mickey Rourke playing Shaft

Rob Schneider playing Superfly

Scarlett Johansson in a remake of Jackie Brown (in the title role)

Harvey Keitel as Detective Virgil Tibbs in a remake of "In the Heat of the Night"



There used to be a lot of white washing in films, now there's a lot of black washing. I think most people are sick of this race swapping business.



I have not read all of the posts, but I do think that we are a century away from having enough social evolution and physical race-mixing that "race-swapping" doesn't bring politics into a story. I've seen this in live theater, so-called "color blind casting", and it always seems like whoever did this was trying to make some sort of point that pushed a boundary with a political agenda. Plot got infused with politics.

It's not just about a black George Washington, but also about a white Martin Luther King, not to mention that moody Dane, Hamlet, portrayed by an Asian. Even if the actor could portray the character correctly, we'd all be sitting there waiting for the other shoe to drop....waiting for some sort of political statement, moral lesson, or whatever it was that took an obvious visual fact about a character and told us to NOT see it. The problem is that it IS visual and we're all pretty much trained in childhood to see race, gender and other visual differences. The white MLK doesn't just confuse history, it confuses my visual sense, because I know who the person was and race is essential to his identity.

It probably could work better for minor characters who have no well known racial content to their character, but when race is part of the story, and, in the US, in this time, it always is, it just doesn't work very well and becomes a distraction.




I can keep it to unreal characters: How about --

Jack Nicholson and Shia LaBeouf playing "Sanford & Son: The Movie"

Randy Quaid and Roseanne Barr playing "The Jeffersons: The Movie"

Mickey Rourke playing Shaft

Rob Schneider playing Superfly

Scarlett Johansson in a remake of Jackie Brown (in the title role)

Harvey Keitel as Detective Virgil Tibbs in a remake of "In the Heat of the Night"
Maybe this won't matter because you weren't asking me (and I haven't read the entire thread because it appears like much of what I've read many times over the years) but I'd be ok with this other than the actual casting. I've never seen The Jeffersons though, so it's possible a Randy Quaid/Roseanne Barr casting would work and I don't see a real problem with Scarlett Johansson as Jackie Brown other than her age (I don't know about the source material, but she's about 10 years too young) and does she have that laid back, in control vibe that Jackie has? If so, what's the problem? Rourke and Schneider in their respective roles are just bad casting and surely made for a point?

I wasn't going to get into this because I wanted Denzel to play Bond in the mid 90's, so my position on this is fairly obvious but, hey, there are lots of newish people here so maybe they don't know?
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I hated the TV series KRYPTON. Many blacks in lead roles.


The planet Krypton, where Superman came from is billions of years old and orbits a red dwarf star.


As I understand it, black people get their colour from living under a hot sun, and not under a "cold sun" where people live in domes to protect them from the icy blizzards common outside.


There should be NO BLACK PEOPLE in the show if you want realism. The white people would be bone white.
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I'm all for the best actor possible getting the role