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Notes -
A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
A bit rambly, but I wanted to take it beyond race swapping to bring up what I feel is the elephant in the room, copyright.
Adaptations are not made equal. I think it's worth drawing a line between third party adaptations, and the copyright holders rubber stamping an iteration of their Brand for Current Year. Most of the complaints I see are about the second kind, new iterations from the same corp.
I find it especially understandable for people to loudly complain about adaptations they dislike for one reason or another for characters that are "ongoing" with a lot of entries in the franchise like Superman, because changes tend to bleed forward. Even if it's a reboot or whatever, I'd say that changes for a character constantly 'in print' by the same publisher are a little bit closer to changes done in the middle of a TV series than it is to someone else coming along hundreds of years later and copying the good bits from an old and complete story.
Complaints about a Dracula movie will tend to take the form of "This particular movie is bad", complaints about entries in long running copyrighted franchises tend to come with annoyance that a version that audience member liked didn't get made, and anxieties for the future of the franchise in the audience's lifetime. Let's take Bob, he likes James Bond but doesn't like Daniel Craig. As long as Daniel Craig was James Bond that means Bob's favorite actor does not get to be, other companies are NOT free to take up the reins and make a James Bond adaptation with Bob's favorite actor. They can make other spy things but to remain in the legal clear, they would be forced to change other elements that Bob does not want changed.
Another angle is the fear of George Lucasing/memoryholing of old versions, which is also much less of an issue for old public domain stuff anyone can legally print an infinite amount of copies of.
To extend this further, even in the absence of copyright, you'd have contentions over what symbols and stories should mean because you can only have one cultural consensus on anything - that's the meaning of the word consensus. Demanding that people not care about what others say is pointless, especially when some consensuses are rooted in what is moral or not.
Who are the Ghost Busters? A group of men who fight ghosts in the 1980s? That's not the answer some people want.
Who is Ariel? Is she a black mermaid? That's not the answer some people want.
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I actually fully agree with you here. I think it will be interesting to see what happens when Superman becomes public domain in 2034, and the Hobbit in 2043. It is rather unfortunate that copyright terms are so long that very little current pop culture will be available within our own lifetimes, though.
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