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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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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.

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