site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38166 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'd posted a while back about how Wizards of the Coast was making Aragorn black in the soon-to-be released Lord of the Rings Magic set.

Since then most of the new cards have been released.

There were several more race swaps—see, for example Theóden, along with many other Rohirrim, was made black, but not Éomer. If they had made them all black, this would have been closer to my original suggestion—that they change races, if they really must, do so in ways that make sense in the world. But they did not do that for some reason, and keeping Éomer white makes no sense, if you're changing the rest of the Rohirrim.

Nevertheless, I was surprised at how good the set was, if you ignore the race changes in the art, for fans of Lord of the Rings. They referenced all sorts of relatively obscure things, had cards that had thematic abilities, (for an especially fun example, see how Merry+his blade or Eowyn can defeat the Witch King, who is ordinarily rather invulnerable), or just had fun flavor text quoting from the book, or nice art. And was faithful to the lore in another respect where Rings of Power was not, although I don't remember such a character actually existing…

Ignoring the race issue, I was very impressed overall. I think it's interesting that they were willing to put so much effort into it, while at the same time having unnecessary race changes. I suppose it's not entirely the same people making the various decisions. But I had read it as first as "we don't care that much about Lord of the Rings," which now seems to be false. They must have cared both about signaling leftist politics and about making a good product, and so this was the result.

I might be willing to overlook the problems, because Tolkien is dearer to my heart.

You know, this brings to mind Romeo + Juliet, a film that uses the exact same dialogue as Shakespeare's play, but changes the characters and setting to one that is familiar to Americans.

Would it be unreasonable for a British person to complain about this for the same reason? It's not inconceivable, the movie is partly a cultural and national swap in the same way Aragorn was race swapped - the original most certainly did not conceive of the character(s) this way. I say "partly" because they kept the same dialogue, and language is an important part of placing a culture.

And yet, I suspect most Americans don't mind this, perhaps because it was a swap in their favor, but probably because Shakespeare just isn't as big a culture war topic. Are the British upset about it? I doubt that as well, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't follow their media critics.

@problem_redditor says precisely what I suspect is the real belief of many here - that there is nothing illegitimate about X-swapping, only with the intentions behind it.

Back in the 90s, people in the UK used to get really upset about America taking English stories and setting them in America. For example The Seeker is an adaptation of The Dark is Rising, a fantasy set in Buckinghamshire and deeply intertwined with English history and Celtic mythology... but Hollywood set it in suburban America because they figured otherwise Americans wouldn't watch it. They tried to do the same with Harry Potter and Discworld - one of the reasons why it took so long to get adaptations of the latter.

Theatre is a bit different because there's a long-standing tradition of swapping the settings around. You have to physically put on the same show again and again, and to keep in interesting they like to set Macbeth in North Korea or Romeo and Juliet in New York (West Side Story). In theory this is done to keep the audience engaged but I think it's more for the producers and actors to have a little variety. (EDIT: @raggedy_anthem said it first, sorry).

That's why certain adaptations work and others don't. Romeo and Juliet is young love and feuding families, you can put that on anywhere (that's why he was able to have an Italian setting for an English production, after all). But something that is very much rooted in a particular place and mythology, like The Dark is Rising, you can't just dig it up and plant it in different soil. Maybe you can put it into the American backwoods where there are comparable local legends of their own, but you can't just plop it down into "suburban America" because it doesn't work there. And it really won't work if you cut off the roots before you stuff it into a new plant pot.

Your example is a wholesale, cohesive reimagining of a setting. That's really common with Shakespeare's stuff, as opposed to WotC using a dartboard to decide what characters to swap.

Romeo and Juliet is not that cohesive, imo. Language is informed by many things, you can't expect people from modern America to talk like Shakespeare's characters. If anything, it should bother people just as much that the language was not updated to reflect modern American English.

It's internally cohesive. Everyone in it talks like Shakespeare characters. Nobody actually talked like they do in Deadwood, it's anachronistic in many ways in that regard but it's internally cohesive because everyone talks that way in the show. This kind of nitpicking is like when people call Joss Whedon or Tarantino dialogue bad because it's unrealistic. Maybe it's bad but not because it's unrealistic. You have to allow for style in dialogue at some point or else everything is going to be an Altman/Mumblecore soup.

First of all, I absolutely love that movie. I think it works because the schtick of “Famous story but told differently” is acknowledged and core to the work.

If somebody made Lord of the Rings, but did it in a modern setting, with a diverse cast, and it took place in New York City, I think people would accept it (mostly). Similarly if you did lord of the rings, but it took place in the Congo, I think people would like that (I would).

I think the setting may be more important to Lord of the Rings than it is to Romeo and Juliet, maybe?

What do you mean by setting? I doubt you mean the actual geography.

Mostly we're used to directors arsing around with new! unique! daring! Shakespeare interpretations, same with operas. Setting it in Miami isn't the worst the movie could have done, and he did keep the plot, the characters, and the language.

What the cards have done is the equivalent of the modern show where Anne Boleyn is black, but everything else historically is the same (and her daughter, Elizabeth, is the white-skinned, strawberry-blonde baby she should be, instead of the same colour as her mother). So Anne is black, her brother is black, but her daughter is white and so on. The only reason for this is not "we cast the best actress" because why not race swap the entire cast, then? It's for cheap novelty and attention. Jodie Turner-Smith is a decent actress, but casting her is just more Girlboss Inclusive Revisionism, and of course the quotes at the end of this trailer are not at all the kind of thing the real Anne said at the end.

Setting it in Miami isn't the worst the movie could have done, and he did keep the plot, the characters, and the language.

Right, so why can't we say something like "Making the characters look like a sampling of New York City's elite isn't the worst thing, they still kept the plot, characterizations, and language" for LOTR?

It's for cheap novelty and attention.

Why can't it be the view that race is irrelevant to character? That a black Anne Boleyn is the same in a fundamental sense as a white one?

And before someone tells me that progressives are hypocrites because they don't tolerate the whitewashing of a character, recognize that they, like all people, are more than capable of compartmentalizing their beliefs. That they do this in no way suggests that they also don't actually believe it.

Right, so why can't we say something like "Making the characters look like a sampling of New York City's elite isn't the worst thing, they still kept the plot, characterizations, and language" for LOTR?

I mean, if they set it in NYC, as an updated cyberpunk LotR, where the "Ring" is a USB with StuxNet or something... that might be pretty awesome.

Sure, I'd love if they at least tried something like that. But the harshest complaint here is consistently that this is down out of intentional malice, and that's what I don't agree with.

I can agree with that. My gut instinct is that a lot of people don't like white men, but that's a far cry from "let's change the race of characters just to make them mad."

That a black Anne Boleyn is the same in a fundamental sense as a white one?

Sure, if the entire production were colour-blind in that way. But when they're going all-out on "We cast a BLACK actress" then it's not about "this is the best actress for the role", it's about a different set of values. Most probably "this will be great publicity and get us loads of viewers!", because when it comes down to it, TV stations and movie studios are businesses that need to make money, but it's not about "we are now a multi-racial society, let's consider everyone for the part".

Anne Boleyn was not black. Neither was she American, Spanish, or Australian Indigenous. That matters when it's a historical character in the real world. The day when these productions cast a white actor as Genghis Khan alongside a black actress as Cleopatra alongside a Pacific Islander actor as Mansa Musa, then it'll be "race is irrelevant to character".

But when they're going all-out on "We cast a BLACK actress" then it's not about "this is the best actress for the role", it's about a different set of values.

Yes, as I said, progressives are de facto hypocritical on this topic. But this selective raceblindness can and probably is still out of a genuinely-held if compartmentalized belief that race doesn't matter to the character, so there's a free lunch to be had in also promoting an IRL social goal.

People keep asserting maliciousness, that's what I don't like.

Part of the issue is that Shakespeare is public domain so anyone can do whatever they want with it.

Tolkien products are all licensed. These race swapped cards mean that fans will never get a card game with a book accurate Aragorn.

Additionally activists tend to see these swaps as permanent and will demand black Aragorn in all future adaptations.

Additionally activists tend to see these swaps as permanent and will demand black Aragorn in all future adaptations.

Sorry, where's the proof for that?

It's common in theatre for roles to be seen as belonging to a specific group due to modern adaptation trends. Mercutio must always be gay. Esmeralda was a white girl raised by gypsies in the book, but in modern productions she must always be a person of color. There were a bunch of angry articles written a while back after a college production of Hunchback cast a white girl as Esmeralda.

After Samuel L Jackson got cast as Nick Fury they made the comic book version black. But no one is actually upset about that one. Comic fans view it as an opportunity to create even more distance from the David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie.

If Peter Jackson had gone with a black Aragorn then that would be seen as the default going forward. I'll admit it's not really the case here since MTG cards will never be seen as a definitive adaptation.

If the life action Little Mermaid had been a big success there would have been a lot of pressure to make the animated version black as well going forward.

I'd be shocked if a Magic the Gathering set became the baseline for determining the race of people, rather than the widely popular movies, or books written by Tolkien himself.

This is true of some sorts of adaptations, though.

After Samuel L Jackson got cast as Nick Fury they made the comic book version black.

the comics made him black first, in 2002. They used Samuel L Jackson's likeness without his permission.

Esmeralda was a white girl raised by gypsies in the book, but in modern productions she must always be a person of color. There were a bunch of angry articles written a while back after a college production of Hunchback cast a white girl as Esmeralda.

Sorry, which college production? When I search for this, I find a case of this happening in a high school. Moreover, how many people have even read Hunchback compared to seen the Disney film, in which Esmeralda was decidedly not white? In contrast, the Peter Jackson films are still the way most if not all people have engaged with LOTR at a first pass.

I actually think that is most people’s gripe. They know something is wrong but have trouble sorting it out so they latch onto things like “not historically accurate” or “ruins the immersion” when in reality it is that the creator of this new work hates you the white consumer and therefore wishes to vandalize works you love with vulgar political displays.

Maybe at its most base level that is the case, but there is really far more to it than that. Say the film retained its original setting but introduced a single modern American as Romeo. This would ruin the story to a much greater extent than a full retelling does for numerous reasons.

In the Wheel of Time show, canonically anyone can and does have children from any race. They literally changed the rules of reality for diversity, despite the fact that the main character is a different race from the rest of his hometown, which is a major plot point.

Fantasy nations should mostly be somewhat racially homogenous, maybe with exceptions for big cities. I would much prefer a fantasy movie starring 100% black people made by people who hate me to one starring an unnaturally diverse cast made by people who don't hate me. At the end of the day I just care about my own suspension of disbelief and I think a lot of other people do too.

I would much prefer a fantasy movie starring 100% black people made by people who hate me to one starring an unnaturally diverse cast made by people who don't hate me.

An adaptation of a Shakespeare play that had an all-black cast could be great. Peter Brook's version of the Mahabharata - 9 hour stage play then 6 hour TV mini-series then 3 hour movie - had that kind of unnaturally diverse cast because he felt it was a universal story, not just one applicable to India (I don't know how Indian people felt about this, I'd understand not being too gruntled about having Asian, African and white actors play historically Indian characters). It was a good effort, but it was definitely not the original.

You could make a version of the Three Musketeers that was all-Asian (in fact, there was a Korean TV series that did just this but was dropped after the first season). It'd be odd, but it would work way better than having the traditional version except now d'Artagnan is Korean but he's also still from Gascony.

That being said, casting a black Porthos for the 2014 BBC version of the Three Musketeers worked extremely well, but they were careful to give him a back-story to explain this. They didn't just drop in black Porthos and nobody blinks an eye.

Original African or Caribbean legends/myths with appropriate character art, or shows, or movies, would be great. Taking white characters and race swapping them isn't for anybody's benefit in the long run.

An adaptation of a Shakespeare play that had an all-black cast could be great.

Like this one

Oooh, that could work really well. Orson Welles had imagination and theatrical vision to spare. Caribbean island (cough Haiti cough) as the place where a warlord believed the promise of witches about becoming king? Translates over with little difficulty!

That sounds like a Russel conjugation. "I show reality as it is, you show a vulgar political display." Hardly that convincing, nor do I think it requires a hatred of white consumers.

Race matters in Tolkein in a way that white progressives, by virtue of their white upbringings, simply cannot grasp. Ignorance is not malice.

The difference matters a great deal.

Firstly, it keeps our worst impulses in check. It is too easy for people to assume the worst of others and also generalize off of that assumption. So "some progressives hate white people" becomes "progressives hate white people".

If we're here to culture war, by all means, go ahead and engage in this kind of generalization. If we're not, then it's actively harmful to the effort.

For a close to home example, I don't think anyone at The Schism "hates" white people in the way, say, Hannah Nikole-Jones or Tema Okun does, but I think many of them would engage in a lot of hemming, hawing, and sanewashing why those attitudes make sense in context, or why they should be tolerated (but the opposite equivalent wouldn't be, a la the fiasco last month with Impassionata- I strongly doubt the mods would've tolerated a right-wing rant half as long), etc etc. Or why slurs are so much worse at certain targets, but basically don't matter towards others.

Do you have any evidence to support these claims? I find that the mods there are very hesitant to give out bans at all or even warnings for that matter, and as @drmanhattan16 notes, there's been plenty of right-wing or at least anti-progressive ranting in the sub over its lifetime. I vaguely recall @gemmaem discussing this hesitancy in a comment early on, though I'm having trouble finding a link to it with the reddit api fiasco making searching for old comments a bit troublesome at the moment.

More comments

But attributing it to ignorance gives it too much credit and is pretty uncharitable in its own right.

Ignorance isn't exactly the word I'd use either, I think you're right that it paints too rosy a picture. I think progressives, like all groups, are guilty of having Crystalized Metaphysical Heuristics, and they aren't completely unaware of what they do, but they are only as good as any other human group at updating beliefs. It's made worse by the fact that they don't optimize for truth for its own sake.

"Some progressive hate white people" -> "other progressives provide cover for, tolerance for, ignore, and generally let such bigotry spread; their beliefs cause them to be indifferent to such complaints" -> "to an outsider, there is little discernable difference between progressives that do or do not hate white people because the results are likely similar."

I concur! But I think it can and should inform the response when engaging in intertribal dialogue. "Progressives hate white people" gets no traction, "progressives are indifferent to white people, and indifference is an insidious thing" has a chance to go somewhere.

(but the opposite equivalent wouldn't be, a la the fiasco last month with Impassionata- I strongly doubt the mods would've tolerated a right-wing rant half as long), etc etc.

There was a rant only a few months ago in which the poster effectively called the concept of privilege, but more importantly its public practictioners, idiots. It's not particularly "right-wing", but it's far more hostilely-written than one would except for a forum characterized as "for lefties who may have some issues with social justice". That person is not banned and the discussion went on for a while.

But it really isn’t just Toilken. It’s The Little Mermaid. It’s Star Wars. See other examples in this thread.

The Little Mermaid is another example of what I'm talking about. I don't know what the Star Wars example is.

Let me make your white male heroes of yesterday a dead beat dad and a bitter old loser while the real heroes are a woman, a black man, a rebellion lead by women, and a Hispanic dude. Oh yeah and the villains are all white too.

One of those women was an important character in the original trilogy, I hope you're not forgetting that. She was an important leader then and it's certainly not implausible she would be leader of the rebellion by that point.

But that's beside the point. Ignorance has yet to be ruled out.

Yes but the natural place for her would be in the new government (and that might be more interesting).

But yes you can always hide behind “they don’t actually mean anything; sure they keep doing the same thing over and over again but it could be ignorance.”

But I think for example you could find evidence in statements like:

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/diversity-behind-camera-star-wars/

Nobody was upset about "Romeo and Juliet in Harlem" either (though possibly nobody noticed it). But these types of adaptations aren't the same as woke replacements. American versions of Romeo and Juliet aren't essentially insisting that the original Shakespeare characters were American (whether black, white, or Puerto Rican). Copyright issues make it difficult to make such an adaptation of more recent works.

Nobody was upset about "Romeo and Juliet in Harlem" either (though possibly nobody noticed it).

Or The Wiz because they race swapped the entire cast and changed the plot enough to explain all this. Hell, West Side Story is the race swapped American version of Romeo and Juliet, but again it works because they put in the work to make it credible.

"Here's Aragorn and Arwen and she's still a white Elf but now he's black despite being the descendant of her uncle, her father's twin brother" with no explanation as to "oh yeah, this is how that works" is not remotely the same thing.

Now imagine you take Shaka Zulu but make him Scottish. Complete ginger Jock stereotype all the way. You think there wouldn't be any objections to that? You think "oh but it's diversity and representation for a modern audience" would fly there?

(Though I have to admit, I'd love to see someone try that. The Zulu impi lines up before battle, then out strolls the king, Shaka McZulu, in his traditional clan tartan kilt. "Right, lads, set yer assegais to malky!")

What kind of "woke replacement" do you think insists the original character was the new version?

I would understand if they did changed something but insisted it was historically accurate. But that is about a fraction of the complaints about "woke replacement"

Rome in the BBC, Aragorn here, and Hermione in Harry Potter all come to mind.

What is the BBC media you are referring to? A cursory search does not tell me.

As for fictional characters, I don't think it has been conclusively shown that there is any obligation for them to claim they aren't adhering to the original depictions.

Google "history is a whitewash"

But this discussion has happened before, and will happen again. And people will pretend not to remember to score points.

Fair enough, that example does seem to be a case of social commentary, in which case, I would agree that there is an obligation to get things right. But not all media is trying to do social commentary.

In cases where characters are raceswapped, it seems like most of it these days is trying social commentary, even if on a meta level. To my eyes, at least.

Turning a character that was long considered white in the original text and all of its adaptations may not have have anything in-universe turn on it. But you can just go ahead and read the press release or the creator's Twitter page to figure out why this is happening. They may even say something like "I only did this because I thought this was novel and interesting!", but then quickly reveal that what makes it novel/interesting is pushing back against white male patriarchy or whatever.

It's also based on a play, and reimaginings of plays in different settings/aesthetics/cultures is a time-honored tradition... as is (sometimes) colorblind casting.

Maybe related: nobody had an issue with Boromir being black in the LotR musical.

as is (sometimes) colorblind casting.

Except the motte is "colorblind casting" and the bailey is "no white people please LOL". When's a production of Shaka Zulu going to star a white guy?

I feel like the real bailey is closer to "Aragorn was always black". It certainly was with the Black Romans episode, which had people insisting that the Roman Empire was about as diverse as modern London.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats