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I forget what it is called, but what does this community think about when a movie takes a character that was white or a male and makes it a different gender or race for the sake of it?
To the point of advocates, I was cajoled into seeing the recent spiderman movie and I remember there was a cameo of some black superhero, and all of the black kids in the audience went nuts over it. And it was clear in that moment that there's a compelling need, to some extent, for more representation of x demographic, because, for instance, it can't be positive to grow up watching superhero movies and none of them look like you.
At the same time, I think it's often done in an absurd and borderline incompetent manner. I think there are three basic situations with respect to a character's race and gender. 1. Where there isn't really any implied gender or race, so the character's demographic profile can reasonably be whatever the producers want it to be 2. Where there may be an implied demographic profile, but it isn't unambiguously clear, there is a degree of ambiguity, and it isn't crucial to the structural integrity of the film (for instance, the bond films. The characters have historically been white, but 007 is really just Britain's top spy job and it's totally plausible that a black guy could land that job) and 3. Where there is clearly an implied demographic profile and absent the character fitting that demographic profile it's just confusing and nonsensical.
I don't mind the first 2 all that much, but the third is increasingly common. For instance, in House of Dragons, the princess is married to a black guy. However, he's gay and they have an arrangement where they can each sleep with whoever they want, and as a result all of her kids are white. There's a challenge to the succession claims of her kids, but all of the arguments against their succession are like 'I just have a sense for these things. I just know they aren't her kids' or there will be a quiet and vague reference to the fact that her kids don't look like her husband. But no one is ever just like 'she has 5 kids and they are all white. She has blonde hair and her kids all have curly black hair. Obviously they are not her kids'. Or in the recent lord of the rings show, in the hobbit community they are all white except for two people who are not married to each other, and one of those characters had a kid with a white hobbit, and their kid is white. And the producers/writers never thought to or saw the need to address that. I mean the hobbits are a genetically distinct and notoriously insular group and have been for thousands of years. Even ignoring that a white woman and a black man had a paper-white kid, how is it that in a community that has been self-enclosed for thousands of years only two people are black? Or you can even take Bridgerton (which I confess I have not watched), where one of the lords is a black guy. I mean this is in England several hundred years ago. One show might be a period piece for that same time period and cast characters that are black so they can write scenes that highlight how they were treated unfairly, and then another will go the opposite direction and cast a black character that would obviously have been white and you're supposed to ignore their skin color. Like it just doesn't make sense. Another example that really bugged me was in the Foundation show. I read all of those books. And one of the main characters was named Salvore Harden. His whole thing was that he was super masculine in a conventional sense. And they made his character a black woman. It's just not even the same character. I mean that's a character that they perhaps could have made black (so probably in the second category of characters), but making him a woman was just absurd and desperate.
They don't even try and explain this stuff. They just put it out there. I see the general need to increase diversity in film, but it's being done in such a stupid way and I think highlights the sometimes superficial and low quality thinking that comes with DEI lenses. Like if you google these instances I'm talking about the articles all have this tone of 'to all the racists out there:' like you didn't just make a king of england a black trans woman (not necessarily that I've seen that, but just as an extreme). By all means, write more demographically diverse characters into the first or second categories I mentioned earlier, but at some point there has to be some sort of recognition that there are parameters you have to work within in some cases, most prominently a historical drama.
I consistently feel like the current influence progressives have is little more than the dog that caught the car. I think they have been given a 'lets see what you've got' moment in culture and society, and once the current environment, which is more politicized and emotionally charged and thus does not apply a normal degree of critical thinking to ideas, passes, I think people are going to look back and observe that they really fucked it away and lacked serious recommendations when they were given the reigns. There is a way of doing this shit that makes sense, but that is not the way things are being done.
The responses to this are a little out there IMO. They tend to be 'not seeing diversity in film has no impact' or 'it's not weird for two white parents to give birth to a black child'
It's kind of funny to watch this conversation play out here as I'm taking a break to watch House of Dragons. The guy who would inherit the throne if the princess hadn't ostensibly had kids with his brother, meaning they are the true heir to the throne, is currently laying his case down in court and making the formal allegation that they are not his brother's true kids and when he talks about how he knows they aren't his kids he's just like "vibes are how I know! I just have an instinct for this sort of thing!" Like even within the premise of the show, that a black guy is married to a white woman, they are just so afraid of stating the basic fact.
The term you are looking for is "fan-baiting".
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1568182048564875265.html
“Fan-baiting” is a form of marketing used by producers, film studios, and actors, with the intent of exciting artificial controversy, garnering publicity, and explaining away the negative reviews of a new and often highly anticipated production.
Fan-baiting emerged as a marketing strategy in 2016/17, after fans of beloved franchises such as Ghostbusters and Star Wars objected to what they saw as poor writing choices, sloppy scripts, and cheap alterations to plot lines and characters for the sake of shock value.
Along side these critics, there was a small group of bigoted but vociferous commentators who objected to the inclusion of black and female actors in roles traditionally held by white male actors. Some of these individuals began publicly harassing actors.
Bigots have always attacked diversity on screen, but in a highly polarized political climate, instances of harassment on garnered disproportionately massive media coverage, which provided production studios with both free publicity and a new defence against actual critics.
Studios seized the opportunity to discredit criticism of poor writing & acting, insinuating that these, too, were motivated by bigotry. What used to be accepted as standard critiques were increasingly dismissed as part of the ignorant commentary of a “toxic fandom.”
Soon, it became standard practice before release to issue announcements specifying diverse casting choices, coupled with pre-emptive declarations of solidarity with the cast whom they now counted on to receive disparaging and harassing comments.
Actors who are women and/or BIPOC became props & shields for craven corporate laziness and opportunism. The studios save money both by avoiding expensive veteran writers as well as by offloading publicity to news outlets and social media covering the artificial controversy.
“Fan-baiting” works. It brings in a new sympathetic audience whose endorsement is more about taking a public stance against prejudice than any real interest in the art. “Fan-baiting” also permits studios to cultivate public skepticism over the legitimacy of poor reviews.
“Fan-baiting” also compels reviewers to temper their criticism, for fear of becoming associated with the “toxic fandom” and losing their professional credibly, resulting in telling discrepancies between critic and audience review scores.
The true nature of “fan-baiting” is never so clear as when a script is well-crafted and audience reviews are accordingly positive, exposing the announcements, declarations of solidarity, & grooming of skepticism for what they really are: cynical corporate marketing tactics.
The OP was probably looking for the term "race lift", although fan baiting is a more specific thing that can use it.
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If you don't like fan baiting I don't think you should make this argument. It provides a justification for the behaviour, and by presenting capitalism as the cause (because that's what it boils down to) you remove agency from the people actually responsible. You excuse them to say stuff like "Oh yeah sorry about the ridiculous casting choices and plot hole riddled stories, but increased profits demand we do stupid shit to annoy people! Aargh, we wish we could write a good story with well crafted characters, but we can't, because capitalism! Oh evil capitalism, puppeting us into writing lazy shit! If only we could abandon it we would be living in a land of milk and honey, but we can't, so we have to use this first draft we sharted and languish in banality."
Once something seems too big to fix (fixing it would require a full restructure of society) a lot of people just give up. I wish I could still consider it ironic that this is the exact reason progressives put so much effort into forcing representation.
The thing is, the people responsible are ultimately cogs in the machine. To use gaming as an example, people got mad at John Riccitello when he was CEO of EA (Riccitello oversaw that time period where EA became memed for killing studios and generally being dicks), and now that hatred is projected onto Andrew Wilson, the current CEO (who oversaw the more recent time period where EA went so full-steam-ahead on lootboxes that it invited government reaction).
You can criticize the King all you can, but eventually, the King will die and his successor being any improvement is far from guaranteed. It would indeed be more attractive to say "to hell with the Throne and all who bow down to it" at some point.
This is begging the question. It's also coherent to imagine a situation in which they are not machine cogs, but rather masters of their own fate.
The "fan-baiting" definition above does indeed point the finger at Muh Capitalism, but that's not the only possible explanation. Also possible is that the showrunners really do have agency, they really are self-motivated anti-whites, and they enjoy reverse-colonizing white people stories with black actors out of racial animus. That their actions have a side-effect of immunizing the products from criticism of their lazy writing is just a happy coincidence.
I'm not so much asserting that this is the case as I am asserting that it is a possibility which fits the evidence.
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