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

I'm a hardcore fanboy, so I hate change.

Not really relevant to the point in question (and also somewhat questionable--he has LOTS of quotes, and since he's a human, not all of them point in the direction of that most famous one). And anyway with your reply the discussion has completely left film, so let's stop there.

I don’t think we use this term anymore to describe non-whites. Just sayin’.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

I think there's a language barrier there, Wrinkled can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe they're ESL? If so, the distinction between that term and "people of color" is probably tricky, if not non-existent.

IIRC, Wrinkled is Indian & lives in the UK. Indians are schooled in immersive British English so I wouldn’t describe their English as ESL. Just my opinion though. I could be completely wrong on this one.

Yeah, I don't know either, but based on what I know of them it seemed plausible, so I thought I should mention it.

It's an odd quirk of language either way, though.

I am sorry if that's an offensive term. I didn't know. Thanks for informing me.

Also, I am indeed Indian, but I live in Mumbai.
I am a big LFC fan, so you might have got confused due to that.

@Yoda
The English we learn here is British English. Again I am sorry if that's an offensive term.

You're fine, you didn't say anything wrong, you certainly didn't have any bad intentions.

Not so much “offensive” as “old-fashioned” these days. As @Yoda said “it’s an odd quirk of language.” We say “people of color” now, but, really, what’s the difference.

Knew I’d get something wrong in my post. I moved you to England.

I've removed a few posts. None of them were really an issue by themselves, but they were totally unrelated to the topic and going into specifics on some pretty sensitive cultural stuff.

I'll remind everyone to please think of the ways in which these topics bump up against political/cultural ones in terms of what's necessary for the discussion, and not looking for opportunities to use it as a jumping off point for cultural opining, however well-meaning.

Back to movies. This one is mostly humorous, but I will admit it's based totally in my own bias (not a racial one, but a character one that likes established characters to look like they always have looked)...

I didn't care for the casting of Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie in the Thor & Avengers series.

Here's why...
Marvel's Valkyrie was based upon Nordic mythology and they originally wanted her as a kind of female counterpart to Thor.

When I first saw Valkyrie she looked like this:



Okay... somewhat laughable, somewhat cringe-worthy on certain levels, not politically correct (especially to modern feminists), but to an adolescent in the mid-70's, pretty cool!

She is most definitely derivative of a certain culture (those that worshipped Norse gods), she's got the blond hair & braids of a Biergarten girl, and bears certain... ahem... accoutrements associated with Viking cultures and / or Wagnerian operas... (I'm talking about her enormous breast plates).

Even Marvel thought the breast plates were a bit much at certain points and changed her outfit multiple times - but the fans loved the original costume, so they kept returning to it.



Despite being a mythological goddess, Valkyrie's entire character is a cultural & ethnic stereotype that refers back to the peoples that developed Norse mythology, so to me her look & ethnicity is as central to her character & place of origin as Black Panther's or Shang-Chi's or Thunderbird's or Sunfire's is to theirs.

No offense to Tessa Thompson who may be a fine actress, but nothing about her says Valkyrie to me since Valkyrie's look has always been intentionally based on a particular iconic look of a Scandinavian female who carries the spirits of Viking warriors to Valhalla.

My problem with Tessa Thompson is that it's Tessa Thompson. She's just not quite right for the role. She's got too much baby fat to be a Valkyrie and the Aubrey Plaza smugness she brings to the screen doesn't quite work either.

Hmmm... Aubrey Plaza as Valkyrie? Hmmm...
No, no, no. Too petite, not regal enough, totally wrong attitude.

Hair's too dark?

(Although, she is sexy in a weird, quirky, nerdish sort of way!)


Now the actress they got to play Sif was spot on... to the comics anyway.

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*

LOL @ "hides" ... probably not a bad idea!

As I was typing my last post, I could hear counter arguments in my head, such as: did you have a problem with Idris Elba playing Heimdall?

And my answer is: not really... mostly because I really like Idris Elba. But to be consistent I should feel the same since, until recently, there's never been a depiction of any Asgardian god as anything but Caucasian (since, obviously, their entire mythology was created by a bunch of ancient Scandinavian Caucasians who created their gods in their own image).

One big reason I didn't mind Elba as Heimdall is, for decades Heimdall in the comics didn't really have a definitive version - he was a background character, often drawn differently, often inconsistent, with different costumes, usually with his features obscured by a large helmet.

This is a lot different from the way Valkyrie has been depicted for decades. Things like her costume changes were intentional (to try to get away from something deemed too graphic as opposed to being done because she had no definitive look).

Race alteration always seems to have a larger effect on the audience depending on how long a character has been around, how well-known they are, how well established they are, and how prominent they are to the story.

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?

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.

But he did write "hides" -- and if even as a joke, speaks to a need for a bit of encouragement to not accept "change because it is change."



And the endorsement in that post involves some ambivalence, which is a sign of complication, a mixed bag, bitter and sweet, good and bad. By my lights this is a mature feeling, but not necessarily one which ramifies to the most subtle of cultural policies.



Even to the extent that we endorse the direction of the current swing, we might still oppose the speed and force of the swing. Steering a car on the highway is best done, in the main, with small correction inputs and not wild jerks to the left or right. Why not encourage someone to offer a moderating subtlety in our endorsement of the "current thing"? Do this enough and we might someday be able to exchange the pendulum for scalpel, or gyroscope or Swiss watch (depending how we want to concretize the metaphor), one which does not, by necessity sacrifice the diversity of one culture to elevate the diversity of another.

Well, first, as you say, it's clearly a joke.

But second, that's just as interpretable as an acknowledgement that the topic is fraught, not some kind of surrender to the inevitable.

Agree on all these points, but none of that suggests that he was bowing to some faux inevitability. And I think it's a little odd to "penalize" a nuanced and ambivalent take on a tough topic, which you agree is mature, by reading it as starker than it is in order to argue with it.

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.