I am all for completely swapping the culture of a story. Shakespeare in space with aliens could be awesome (maybe, it might also suck depending on who does it). The Magnificent Seven was The Seven Samurai in the Old West, and Yojimbo was Red Harvest in Japan. Go for it!
In a slightly different framework, Catholic art often depicts the Virgin and Child in localized versions, wearing traditional garb and looking like the locals, whether Mexican or Chinese or Italian or Thai. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mojotrotters/5522889053
That obviously doesn't mean people think Mary and Jesus were east Asian or blonde, it's just a way of portraying their universal applicability to all people.
You can even just race swap various characters without explanation, like when Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves played brothers in Much Ado About Nothing, and no one cared because it was Shakespeare.
It's the ham-fisted diversity point scoring that drives people nuts, where they randomly change a character, then expect you to notice and be impressed at how they are portraying diversity without actually addressing how that change would work in the story.
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I am all for completely swapping the culture of a story. Shakespeare in space with aliens could be awesome (maybe, it might also suck depending on who does it). The Magnificent Seven was The Seven Samurai in the Old West, and Yojimbo was Red Harvest in Japan. Go for it!
In a slightly different framework, Catholic art often depicts the Virgin and Child in localized versions, wearing traditional garb and looking like the locals, whether Mexican or Chinese or Italian or Thai. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mojotrotters/5522889053 That obviously doesn't mean people think Mary and Jesus were east Asian or blonde, it's just a way of portraying their universal applicability to all people.
You can even just race swap various characters without explanation, like when Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves played brothers in Much Ado About Nothing, and no one cared because it was Shakespeare.
It's the ham-fisted diversity point scoring that drives people nuts, where they randomly change a character, then expect you to notice and be impressed at how they are portraying diversity without actually addressing how that change would work in the story.
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