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Notes -
Perhaps there historically has been
(although people sure didn't use to shy away from casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan). I am simply saying that the pro-race-blind-casting position is to reject the expectation of realistic depiction; not to surrender historical accuracy itself. The smart pro-race-blind-casting argument isn't "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra is canonically Chinese" but "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra, a Greek woman in-universe, is played by a Chinese woman". i.e. you should look past the fact the actress in Chinese in the same way you look past the fact that she's speaking modern English instead of subtitled Ancient Greek.I sympathize with saying that this is a distracting burden to place on the audience. But people keep complaining "but Cleopatra wasn't Chinese. casting a Chinese Cleopatra would be inaccurate", and that is the position I am trying to defeat. "Cleopatra is canonically speaking Ancient Greek, but the audience doesn't understand it and the actress can't pronounce it properly anyway, so we'll depict the dialogue in (non-diegetic) modern English" -> "Cleopatra is canonically Greek, but Chinese actors need jobs and Hollywood doesn't make that many meaty historical dramas about Chinese history, so we'll cast a (non-diegetically) Chinese actress as Cleopatra".
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