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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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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:

See, someone's got to tell the tale

Whether or not it turns out well

Maybe it will turn out this time

On the road to Hell

On the railroad line

It's a sad song

[...]

We're gonna sing it anyway

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.

With race swapping, the thing is that it's not all bad and not all good and its that simple. People who completely reject or embrace it are wild.

One of the complexities is that it can take a few forms.

One form is re-examine the story in a different cultural / racial frame. This is completely fair, but you have to allow that people who don't prefer the new frame, or lament the opportunity cost of telling that story in the old frame aren't necessarily racist!

I love Cats! and try to see it when it's on tour in my area. If one year, a major production decided to do a hip-hop remix of the musical, I have no fundamental opposition to such a thing existing. But I can practically assure you that I would find it unappealing personally. However in a world where there were infinate Cats! musicals touring my town every week, I would actually prefer some of them be off-the-wall remixes in every way. But in the real world of scarity, Cats! productions are closer to zero sum. I either have to choose to pay to see a production I like less or not see it at all this year. Suppose, due largely to politics, it became trendy to mostly go forward with the Rap Cats version in the future*. Am I not allowed to be disappointed? Movies based on IP are even more zero sum.

(*There's actually a real analogy. Post George Floyd I will essentaily never be able to see the real cats again because songs were cut and rearanged due to 'racial' concerns about pirates.)


The other kind of race swapping is culture neutral. done in a way where the color or the skin is completely immaterial to the character portray. there is nothing at all wrong with this on its face. But there are three concerns.

  1. It's sometimes just a motte and bailey for cultural reframes. Then all the criticisms above apply PLUS you were lied to to deflect your criticism as racism.
  2. Immersion breaking. Part of what makes high production quality high quality is the depth of the immerision. Cheap sets feel cheap. Period pieces or blood line unrealism can break immersion and feel cheap or hokey.
  3. Meta-trends can also break immersion. If you watch 10 films all with race swapped leads and each on their own works just fine, but you know that the studio heads made big noise about race swapping for the sake of it, about representation, and about making Hollywood less white, etc, you might still have your immersion broken by the clear politics behind the trend, even if each one works self contained.

Meta-trends can also break immersion. If you watch 10 films all with race swapped leads and each on their own works just fine, but you know that the studio heads made big noise about race swapping for the sake of it, about representation, and about making Hollywood less white, etc, you might still have your immersion broken by the clear politics behind the trend, even if each one works self contained.

Ultimately that's what makes it intolerable for me. I don't have a problem with one adaptation doing "what if we tried changing the race of characters in this to challenge their expectations?" But now the entirety of culture seems to be about racism. Every single recent show or movie it seems, if somehow they can't make it all about racism, they will at least try to fit in a subplot or even just a line to remind you of it. Recently I watched The Nun 2, a horror movie about a spooky Nun-impersonating demon happening in 1950s France. What does racism have to do with it? It makes no goddamn sense why, but in this one the main character's sidekick is a an afro-american girl who was sent to a convent, all just so they could fit in a line about how it was better for her to become a nun out in Europe than be black in america. For the rest of the movie, all the things her character does could have been done by other characters.

I mean the typical suspicion is that this has become necessary to secure funding or to be allowed to have a chance to win an award, but it's so damn transparent; it breaks immersion entirely. At this point, it's so overdone, even if it were done with innocent intent, I will resent it. And it's hard to believe it's done with innocent intent, because it would be hard for one not to notice just how oversaturated every aspect of culture is with this message already.