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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:
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.
The good retellings
My earliest memory of a story retelling was that of Chex Quest. A Doom clone made for kids. With the cereal brand "Chex" replacing most of the blood, demons, and foul language with cereal motifs. Looking back on things it seems like a joke, how the hell did that thing even exist? I know there is a legit story behind the game, but I honestly don't want to read it. It is more fascinating to imagine how such a game could be created.
There is definitely something very cute and sweet about retelling adult themed stories for kids. I chuckle every time my young daughters belt out the lyrics to "Rich men north of richmond", and instead of saying "Your dollar ain't shit" they say "your doll er aint chic". That wasn't a reinterpretation I suggest or pushed on them, just what they seemed to have heard.
I also find cleverly disguised adult themes in children's media rather entertaining. The jokes in pixar movies that go over the heads of every kid, but they still laugh as they see their parents suddenly entertained and laughing along with the cartoon.
The Bad Retellings
There is however a hamfisted political messaging that sometimes gets shoved into stories. I find it bad, even when I agree with the message. I'm libertarian, and many of my fellow travelers treat Ayn Rand's books as holy text. I've instead always been highly turned off by some of her books. The short ones like Anthem were great. The long 60 page diatribe in one of the other ones is just ... gross.
The best political literature always seems to be written by the opposition (these are vague recollections, some or all of them might be wrong):
I've written a bit of fiction on my own before, and I kinda get it. I felt I was at my best when a story just came to me from the muses. I let it flow onto the page, and it took me in unexpected directions. I was at my worst when I had some ideas of how things SHOULD work, and I tried to shove them in and make a point.
Some stories written in the modern day just feel like all those authorial instincts and all the inspiration from the muse just got shoved to the side. They had a point to make dammit, and they weren't gonna let a good story get in the way of making the point. Sigh whatever, they ignore the muses at their own peril. No one will like or care about their stories in the future. Some idiot genius that learns to listen to those whispers of the muse will beat them 9 times out of 10 in the long run.
Harry Potter Legacy, the ugly storytelling
I recently beat Harry Potter legacy. Lots of good story telling in most of it. But it had a low point. A trans bartender. There was a disconnect between the face I was seeing and the voice I was hearing. I thought maybe it was some kind of audio mistake at first. Why did this female looking character sound like a dude with a throat problem? Ah, they had to hamfistedly clear it up later, "I use to be wizard, [other character] still recognized me after i became a witch".
Look, this is a freaking magic world. Polyjuice potions can completely imitate someone else, voice included. So whatever magic she/he figured out to change their appearance couldn't also target their voice? Seems dumb.
Also it had the traditional problem that once came with female superheros. They can do no wrong, and they are strong and powerful. She is the only one to stand up to a powerful evil wizard and the evil wizard just ... backs down and lets it go. Unlike every other time that particular evil wizard has encountered a problem. I'm sorry, what? A bar owner is a powerful and scary enough wizard to scare away one of the main villains of the game, while the entire Hogwarts staff, and government of magical England is just kind of an afterthought that the evil wizard isn't worried about at all?
Dumb. The scene should have been rewritten. Trans person shouldn't have confronted evil wizard, they should have hid the player character, and shamelessly lied to evil wizard. After the evil wizard leaves, trans person should have suggested the player character lay low. That would be in line with the behavior of someone that spent most of their life hiding a deep dark secret, and then decided that their highest calling in a magic world was to own a bar. The wasted story and unrealized character growth disgusts me far more than the hamfisted "trans people are great" political messaging.
I will admit, i do love the classic D&D trope of "the bartender is a retired level 18 fighter" and wish more media would lean into that. The evil overlord *isn't * afraid of the king, a level 7 noble, or his guards, a bunch of level 5 warriors (at best). But the old dude who wrecked 15 dragons and seven demon lords, and has his old +5 hackmaster hanging above the fireplace (crossed with a decorative useless sword), and the dusty suit of armor holding the menu is his mithral full plate of speed? Now *that's * who the overlord worries about, plans for, and tries to keep out of the fight.
Yeah, a lot of people fail to lean into the idea that D&D kingdoms that embrace leveling are, functionally, anarchic, and that there is no functional inherited monarchy anywhere, because power doesn't flow from the will of the people or having an overwhelming army, it flows from character levels, which can't be transferred or removed. It means that you can have the storybook endings where you kill the Evil Overlord and that does legitimately end the threat, but it also means that once anyone in an area reaches high enough level, they become de facto immune to the local government, and they get a veto over it that they can enforce with violence themselves.
Try to raise taxes on the retired high-level fighter? He can take a month off to go to the capital and murder everyone in the royal family and most of their defenders. Planning a military campaign against a nearby nation that would threaten the importation of the specific cultivar of hops that the retired adventurer prefers for his ale? Better hope he doesn't hear of it and show up to kill you and your army first.
And that's just the martial types. The high-level rogues can do all of this without you having any idea who they are or why they're doing it; it just is known that attempting certain kinds of governmental actions gets you murdered in your bed without anyone knowing who did it or how, and there's just too many categories of nation-state-level fuckery that high-level primary casters can commit to list here.
That being said, you get some fun results when you lean into the implications. In a campaign world I ran, there was an inn run by a full-on retired demigod who ended up being a sort of one-building buffer state between a kingdom and an empire; neither of the states risked any kind of military action in the area for fear of provoking him into leaving retirement, and both sides also ceded a good amount of unofficial territory where they didn't try to enforce their will just to make sure that no civic official got lost and made a nation-ending mistake. The results of all this was that I had a nice little low-level zone carved out for the PCs to start their adventure and learn about both nations and the world in general, and let them experience gentle scaling as they moved away from their starting area, plus give them a growing mystery when they returned periodically.
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