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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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One thing that stuck out to me in Dune was the chasteness. The Harkonnens are sex weirdo pederasts in the books, an element that is totally excised in the movies, even though they're delightfully weird in other ways.

I haven't seen the Dune films, but it does sound to me like there are a lot of things missing from them that are extremely important to the text, such as Frank Herbert's weird psychosexual theories, or the entire Arabic/Islamic/Middle Eastern element - I think they steered away from the word jihad? And I remember glancing at the cast list and being shocked by, well, pretty much every casting, as well as the total absence of Middle Eastern actors. It looks to me like every single human ethnicity is in those films except for the ones that are actually appropriate. I don't know how you take a story that's about a Greek family falling in with Arabic tribespeople in order to overthrow a Persian emperor and manage to not cast a single person who looks remotely Greek, Arabic, or Persian.

Oscar Isaac (Leto) was probably the most "Middle Eastern" looking cast member, but he's Guatemalan

IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).

I'm not watching the films until using generative AI someone fixes that. Fremen not being a single race after spending thousands of years isolated on a planet with no caste system of their own is ludicrous.

Also Zendaya has to go. It's not that she's half black, it's that she's actually ugly. Incomprehensible casting decision.

I would really like to know where on the scale of 1 to 10 does "ugly" begin for you.

She's a 3 in my book. 1 would be someone with say, acid burns or other unfortunate injury. You know, where you start gently suggesting that maybe it's a good idea to wear a mask as much as possible.

Can you put a finger on why? What are the features 4/10s and above have that she lacks? Presumably there'd be at least 7 things wrong with her, and only 2 things that make her better than a burn victim.

Normally I'd agree with the other replier and shrug, but it appears that my cultural opponents, broadly, want more and higher standard conventional beauty in fiction. So I'm going to challenge them on the conventions and the standards.

It's the nose. If she had a normal or cute nose she would be somewhat above average. She doesn't have a bad jaw nor a horrible skull shape. Nose though..

Mouth maybe a little too big. I can't stand Julia Roberts either on that account.

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