With Mindy Kaling's new VELMA series coming out (which I'm not even going to watch since I don't really have any respect for Mindy Kaling anyway), it's gotten me rather irked about another trend that seems to have been plaguing the world of mainstream entertainment in recent years - almost as much as remaking/rebooting/rehashing older franchises and sequeling present franchises . . . the race-lifting and/or gender-flipping of characters who have already long been established as being who they are and what they are.
Now don't get me wrong: I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with diversity, inclusion, and representation in fiction - it's a very noble and commendable thing to do, especially in this day and age where racial injustice has been brought back into vogue thanks in part to the GOP, but what bothers me is that these studios and executives are just basically seletcing seemingly random characters who have long been established as who and what they are for decades and then just willnilly changing the color of their skin, or the pronouns they use, or who they may have romantic interests in, because they somehow thing they're doing audiences a favor, when that really doesn't seem to be the cast whatsoever. It's become so commonplace and prevalent in entertainment these days, that it almost comes across as arbitrary and unnecessary . . . especially unnecessary.
Again, diversity and inclusion are rather important and crucial for audiences to see representation of themselves in the characters they enjoy watching, but instead of another example of changing a classic character, like the white and suspected-to-be Velma Dinkley into an Indian open lesbian, why couldn't the powers that be given the world an entirely new and original character who's a woman of Indian or other South Asian enthicity, and also openly a lesbian, who can solve mysteries? That could have been a great opportunity to bring to the world such a unique, original, one-of-a-kind character who could've given representation to these particular groups of people, and without having to compromise the integrity and legacy of a character that generations has grown up with loving and knowing them as they had long been established.
What also strikes me as curious is that while entertainment and fiction aimed at older audiences seem to be the biggest offender of such, kids entertainment seems to be avoiding this for the most part (they're not immune to this either, if JELLYSTONE or that Rocky and Bullwinkle reboot are any evidence of such). Just take a look at show like THE LOUD HOUSE for example: it doesn't get nearly enough credit for its diversity and inclusion of characters a kids show would never have been allowed to include even as recent as, say, fifteen years ago; characters who are openly LGBT, couples who are interracial as well as same-sex, I think there was at least one transgendered character who actually transitioned on the show . . . even SESAME STREET has been adding new race and ethnicity-specific Muppets to the show because they realize kids of these races and ethnicities need representation they can identify with, despite the fact that the reason why Muppets had always had a variety of different colors (purple, blue, green, orange, pink, etc.) was so that they wouldn't have to be race-specific for children watching to be able to see them as however they wanted to see them.
Of course, we can't also forget the glaring issue that Hollywood won't take a chance on anything new or original, which is why we just keep getting older franchises remade/revived/rebooted/rehashed, and current franchises sequeled the hell out of them, so I suppose race-lifting and/or gender-swapping older characters is only a part of their puzzle in this.
Anyone else have any thoughts on any of this?
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
Race-Lifting and Gender-Flipping
I mean a part of me wants to agree, that it's lazy, unoriginal, effortless virtue-signaling bs and minority groups deserve better representation than simply having them ride the fame of white and male and hetero and cis, etc characters like they just couldn't make it otherwise. Today they could and can, so it's not an excuse.
But to be fair, I don't think it really matters all that much. And I'm just sick and tired about people complaining that a mermaid now also gets to be black that originally wasn't even described as white, just Disney popularized her as such. Is it political? Yes, it fuckin' is, just like making Jesus white in films is very much political, people just don't care about it, because a white Jesus is what they relate to. It works, it sells. Does it mean the result is bad? No, it doesn't. It takes more to ruin 99,9% of movies and tv shows than changing an already established character's gender or skin color or sexual orientation. And it's not like we'd be completely uninterested in some genderbend concepts. Sure, you can't casually just turn a black character white and expect to "get away with it" when it comes to Hollywood, it's a nasty double standard, but since many ppl make this about representation, not creative freedom, you gotta have better arguments to do it than "freeze peach" and "white genocide". I always hear "why why why why why" when it comes to the inclusion of minorities for roles or as characters. Do they ever question why a lead is white or male? Of course not. That's just how it supposed to be. So to be completely honest, people complaining that not enough characters are black or female or gay or trans… it's nothing new, it's just now the other side does it too. And "gender-flipping" is nothing new, (although it didn't gain a wind until recently) it's just that the other side now does it too.
And it's not that big of a deal, even if the people behind it are insufferable SJWs. Some of these are great contributions. Peter Brook's 320 minute adaptation of Mahabharata (a sanscrit epic) is retold in a nutshell (since the base text is 13 000 pages long) with a cast of extremely diverse ethnicities. It's the best way to approach it for anyone outside of India, because Bollywood releases more, than a 1000 films / year and yet you can count on one hand how many you've heard of ever. They don't hold up internationally, which to be honest has a lot more to do with the silly, over the top ways they make movies that compete with the quality of 80s and 90s tokusatsu shows.
Hollywood constantly remakes and adapts Japanese films and anime with white cast, because their audience can relate to them more and there's money in it. The results aren't necessarily doomed, considering how Japanese live action adaptations look cheap and confusing to many who aren't fans of the genre. The 1996 Romeo + Juliet doesn't have a lot of Italy in it, but it's bursting with creativity, it's the right way to approach an old tale: not word-by-word, but looking to give a similar experience to the youth, about youth than what people could've felt at the time. And who would complain about black Mercutio, that portrayal was legendary! They turned Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica into a woman in the reboot. Thank God they did, it was a complete reimagination for most of the show and it was a great development. There are countless examples of foreign film and series adaptations where they change these things and it doesn't ruin the result.
So yeah, I agree that there is a tendency of Hollywood to be lazy af and instead of writing characters minorities deserve, that they could "own" they just do publicity stunts and they welcome the controversy because the more it's talked about, the more marketing value it has. But considering how most people hate it when their political opponents do it and otherwise they rarely ever care… should any ethnicity or sexual orientation or gender identity really own a character? That's my take on it anyway.
I definitely see it as an issue when it breaks continuity or retcons things.
i.e. when a character is established to be a certain way audiences and fans really super appreciate it when they continue that way because it plays into a meta head-cannon, so to speak: we imagine each outing of this character to be a part of a much larger story that's on-going and we really love that.
Change the fundamentals of the character too much and that gets weaker and people's appreciation of the character becomes weaker too. Change it even more and that relationship suffers damage and you loose fans for that character, even established fans. You can actually break a character that way.
This is the real issue, not race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc because we're all grown up and honestly we can deal with that stuff, but breaking character continuity affects us in a deeper way.
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Where radically altering the fundamentals of a character DOES work is when the we have a lot of different versions of them and it's the IDEA of the character that's important rather than their continuity… Something like Robin Hood, Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Who, Guinevere etc.
If you go back a few decades opera faced it first when faced with the fact that there were many super talented singers who weren't white. What could they do? Standard repertoire had a couple of Asian roles and a black baritone part.
Re-imagination had always been a part of Opera with design and setting. A fantastic re-imagining of the ring cycle was set in Industrial revolution. Characters were treated as archetypes rather than specific personages so you could have an Asian Carmen and a black Hamlet.
Speaking of black Hamlet saw a production in Chicago with racially mixed cast that was fantastic. Also loved the BBC series of Shakespeare War of the Roses histories. The French queen was played by a black.actress. At first it was a little off-putting but then she was so fantastic in the role, really knocking it out of thd park that it didn't matter what ethnic group the actor belonged to, the play's the thing!
Re-imagining a character as other than white is fine by me so far as it's done well. If it's done just because SJW and it might as well be a white person in blackface or with the Asian eye makeup like Hollywood did back in the day. It's empty. Make it matter. Some media is constantly Re-imagining what's been done like opera and jazz. It's high time the others caught up. Make the characters matter though.
There was also the 1990s version of Twelve Angry Men with some of the characters rewritten to represent different aspects of African American culture. It's excellent because they made it matter. The demographics of the population had changed so it represented that. The demographic of audiences has changed let's change up the ethnicity of the cast.
As for the carpenter from Galilee? He was Re-imagined as white two thousand years ago to appeal to Europeans. The earliest images show him with dark skin and hair. Populations have recast him in their own image time and again ever since his ministry became a religion seeking the mass conversion of the gentiles. (Go read some Bart Ehrman you might learn something rather than the garbage spewed out by click bait sites on social media. Awful lot of mythology being spewed out even by folks claiming to set the record straight with "real" stuff.)
Yeah, like I was saying, when it's the idea of a character rather than continuity then it works fine. It's more like different bands playing the same song, each putting their own spin on it
bravo1102 wrote:This isn't actually true.
As for the carpenter from Galilee? He was Re-imagined as white two thousand years ago to appeal to Europeans.
Originally Jesus wasn't depicted visually, the followers just used a symbol, as you know. Later on Christ was always imagined by worshipers to look like them: they created the image to look like themselves.
There wasn't really a "re-imagining" and certainly no designing stuff to appeal better, it's just people doing their own version of the character, which is entirely appropriate when it comes to a person's religion, something that they base their identity and culture on.
Forced diversity irks me because it's you know, forced. It's a cold, calculated marketing strategy that doesn't actually give a crap about representing anyone in a realistic or empathetic fashion.
I'm female, autistic and asexual. Guess that gives me at least a couple of "minority points". And let me tell you, I sure as hell didn't need someone to represent asexuals in Bojack Fucking Horseman. Or autistic people in like, every crime show ever.
Begone, brand.
Let's talk about what this is really about: America. Because america is a melting pot of literally every culture, idea & ethnicity, so it's gotta cater to literally everyone. And maybe sell it overseas too while you're at it. More than half of what runs on TV here is imported from america. It's about money, not making the world a better place.
And really, i could not give less of a crap what americans do to their own media. When i watch a Hollywood movie or yet another CSI ripoff show, i don't see "white" people, or black or spanish or asian… i see a bunch of americans. Acting like americans, talking like americans. There ain't a shred of diversity in this, mates. It's all america.
(Which is ironic, cause a lot of those actors are actually british people, you guys sure like importing your actors from britain.)
Back in the seventies George Clinton would always be shoehorning himself into white roles, like Father Christmas or the water skiing cowboy on one of the Parliament album covers. It was a political statement delivered with irreverent humour, which most considered absurd.
We've definitely taken a stride to get to the situation you're now describing. I take your points but I can't see this in a negative light. For me it's like complaining about the success of the moon landings because you thought the rocket looked a bit janky.
I'm halfway into the 1st episode of Velma and after like 2 minutes it already presents the white Jesus argument, right after girls swearing and wrestling nude. It also uses the characters to comment on trends in pop culture and just be meta A LOT. I mean, to be honest it often seems just more awkward than funny, but it's easy to read these characters as weird parodies of the originals, it's painfully evident from the get-go, that this series is not meant to be faithful to the originals and I don't find that to be bad. I'm probably the only fucking person on the planet who didn't love Scooby-Doo and found it dull as a kid. Well, this was not made for kids and it's a whole different take on the characters. I don't personally like Mindy Kaling, something irritates me about her, but as a first impression, this show doesn't suck any more than most other animated shows on the line, it just reimagines the characters to poke fun at tropes of the genre. If it were meant to be a serious reboot "treating the characters with respect" I don't see how it'd be very funny. People would enjoy it for nostalgia but that's about all it could offer to a mature audience. I think they wanted to use these characters one-third as inspiration and two-thirds as getting people interested and it backfired, but if they would've done the same thing, just making them uncrecognizable, I'm pretty sure this would be an average at worst pilot for an animated series nowadays.
It even reflects on how "everyone is compared to Hitler these days", to me it feels like it aims to poke fun at both left and right sometimes, that's definitely not how people paint the series to be based on a few promo shots and a trailer.
I've never even been bothered by Scooby-Doo that much at all, other than over the decades, it's definitely one of those franchises that you can't seem to kill with a baseball bat . . . I mean seriously, just how many incarnations have there been of Scooby-Doo just since 1969? And I'm not even counting all of the copycat shows that Hanna-Barbera created during the 70s and into the 80s that adhered to the exact same formula of a group of hip, mystery-solving teenagers and their talking animal or other sentient object comic-relief pal.
And just what Inky has described is also one of my biggest pet peeves with adult animation in general, in that it's almost always less about the characters or stories, and more about pushing the envelope as far as they can in terms of what they can get away with as far as content is concerned, because, "Hur-hur! See? Cartoons aren't just for kids! Derp-derp!" Maybe I'm a snob in this regard, but I like a story or a premise I can follow, along with characters who I can invest in - I don't even mind adult humor, but doing it for the sake of it just cheapens the whole thing . . . this one reason why as a puppeteer, I gave HAPPYTIME MURDERS a hard pass (that, and I've never been a fan of Melissa McCarthy, and it's no surprise to me the only reason she has a career in the first place is because her Playboy Bunny cousin Jenny slept around with dudes to get her jobs).
Some "adult" media just ends up like what a bunch of kids think "adult" anything means as opposed to actual erotica or sensuality with a very childish view of actual adult fun with all the adult cares of working and paying bills.
Something truly adult should be entitled "The Mortgage that ate My Life" not anything to do with murder. It's the balancing act of wants, needs and desires not "derp, derp oooo poop sex"
To me all this race/sex swapping is just an example of people doing it being lazy and unable to create anything good. They could create something like Hancock, which was a great superhero movie with Will Smith, but writing story like that is actual work and is hard. It's much easier to just take some already known character, swap race, pretending that you did something new and brave, and post about that on social media, calling anyone who might have a valid criticism a Nazi.
TheJagged Said it well, the problem is forced diversity, done only to make money. It's a cold calculated thing and nobody doing it really cares about those minorities, using them only as a shield and to score "good boy points". It's like this pride month thing. During this special month every Big Corporation changes logo, posts about how they support all the sexualities, but it's clear to anyone with a working brain that they don't care about those people. They will do anything to get your money and your role is to be a good consoomer, consuming the product and getting excited for another one.
That's why I stopped paying attention to Western entertainment. And this Velma show… This seems to me like something done mostly to get reaction from people through outrage marketing. That's why I'm not going to watch it and I'm not even going to listen to people talking about it online. I have more interesting things to do, like working on my own story.
Forced diversity actually is a legit problem in mainstream entertainment in recent years, especially when it comes to network and cable television: studios and networks have an unwritten rule that a show's ensemble cast has to include at least one "ethnic" character to show diversity . . . but then, more often than not, the problem they run into is that one ethnic character ends up becoming nothing more than the show's token minority, who serves no other purpose but just to remeind us that s/he's there for the sake of being there. I hear THE BIG BANG THEORY is not well-received in India because of Raj for that very reason.
The Big Bang Theory is a sitcom, making fun of over exaggerated man-child qualities we associate with nerds and geeks. The biggest challenge for a sitcom is to stay interesting past 4-5 seasons, because letting its characters develop beyond the questions of what careers they have or who ends up with whom is changing the recipe, too much risk. A notable exception would be The Good Place, where character development is a core question of the show. But even if Raj comes across as the least captivating or funny out of the main four men, he's not a prop or a checkbox to be ticked compared to others, it's not like he gets bad writing and the rest is written well in contrast. I'm sure the people of India have a bunch of different issues with him and the show, after all, he complains a lot about India, he's not the poster child representation one would wish for and to my understanding, the show received a variety of criticism for its humor alone. There are so many bad written white cis male characters in tv entertainment that we don't complain about, so even if it fails to live up to standards, saying a character from an ethnic minority should not be included unless it's better would not help much really. If you have a problem with bad writing, (which I agree with), that's not limited to characters people tick checkboxes with lately.
There's Dexter: 8 seasons + 1 to compensate for the terrible ending. From the get go, you see Batista, Masuka and others getting screen time as side-gigs. It's like watching a different show with those except for the few occasions the investigation does revolve around the title character, they have their little jokes and love dramas and whatelse but the amount they contribute to the overall plot is painfully little and otherwise, their screen time is not justified for 8, and in one case 9 fucking seasons. But it has nothing to do with them being ethnic minorities in a US show, they could be caucasian texans and it still would be just as awful (not to mention that after x seasons Dexter himself had to make the dumbest mistakes to move the plot, because if you can't write a smart script, you just have to dumb down the character). They didn't have a clue what to do with these characters, but how they look had nothing to do with it.
The problem appears to be stereotyping, not so called forced diversity.
- despite it being a comedy, people are still going to have their biases confirmed when they see a thickly accented brown man who needs to get drunk to interact with women and has overbearing parents who want him to get married
- with a show that reaches millions of people, this is not how I want to be represented as an Indian, simply there to be laughed at for every last stereotype about my origin rather than using the stereotypes to go beyond surface level ridicule and actually take them apart. i want to be seen as other men are: complex, flawed, and most importantly, realistic.
Reminds me how I mainly use stereotypes in my work in order to mock said stereotypes. Any representation is bad representation to some, so I think of my characters as individuals who only represent themselves. But there's always a chance to develop a character further. There's Orange is the New Black. Clearly a feminist show that starts out portraying men as assholes and many of the main cast even is just a stereotype. But if you watch it past 1 or 2 seasons and the main pespective starts shifting between these characters, you find that they're all layered to a degree, that those who were in the background are incredibly rich personalities with a lot to contribute. And how many shows about women would take a character established to be a rapist only to explore his good qualities and make him relationship material, not to mention with someone who started out as a ridiculous villain-type only to become sympathetic? That's one of the boldest moves pulled out there. OitNB is inclusive and diverse and starts out with a very one-sided narrative only to bloom into valuable entertainment.
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