To preface my comments in this thread: I have not read the Wheel of Time series, nor have I seen any visual depictions of it. Anything I have to say in this thread will be in reference to works that I have read and/or seen depicted visually as comics, artwork, TV, movie, or dramatic adaptations (ie. plays, musical adaptations, etc.).
Does a male character have to be male in adaptations?
See my arguments re: genderswapping Liet-Kynes in the new Dune movie.
To answer the question: Yes, unless the adaptation is either fanfiction or a fan film that is explicitly tagged as an AU of the source material and it's made clear that the specific character(s) are genderswapped. That's how things are done on the fanfic sites, and I know that if I see those tags, I can avoid the story.
Is his implication that (a) anything woke is crap, (b) the implication of non discrimination has spoilt the production (this is a debate in the UK re Doctor Who) or (c) that it is crap for other reasons.
On the matter of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor...
I haven't seen any of her stories. NONE. While I concede that since the Master became "Missy" that constitutes precedence for the Doctor to become female. But (no pun intended) it's not my Whovian cup of tea. I'm an old-school Who fan - I prefer Classic Who (Hartnell - McGann). Yes, I'm aware that as long ago as post-Peter Davison, TPTB were musing about casting a woman as the Doctor. There's a fan-drawn comic depicting Colin Baker in a feminized way (
).
But there was genderswapping in Doctor Who a long time before Jodie Whittaker:
(btw, Rowan Atkinson would have made a great Doctor, and this is so obviously a parody that the swap is not intended to be taken seriously, or at least wasn't at the time this parody was created)
Depends.
Often the issues in a story can "translate".
Othello basically needs to be an outsider in the society he lives in.
Versions of Macbeth have been set in twenties Chicago and South Africa and worked equally well as the original.
Romeo and Juliet have been adapted in a number of ways, as well. In fact, one of them is currently in theatres as a remake of
West Side Story (which is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet).
Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the original West Side Story movie has a different part in the new one. In an interview she related how in the original movie she wasn't considered dark enough to play a convincing Puerto Rican girl, and was ordered to darken her skin.
*As an aside, writing this actually reminds me of a much more minor version of the issue when I saw a performance of one of Shakespeare's histories, (might have been Henry IV?). There's a character who on several occasions criticises others for not having a beard, imply they're weak, cowardly etc. Of course though, the actor playing this role was clean shaven, which made his pronouncements seem really hypocritical - which is very unlikely to be what the author intended. If there's some aspect of the character's appearance that is plot/dialogue relevant, then either cast someone with that, or alter the story to fit....
Back in Shakespeare's time, it was generally expected that most men had some kind of facial hair. The phrase "beardless boy" denoted either a boy, a young teen, or an immature man who was considered incompetent and not worth much.
So if a clean-shaven actor was doing such lines, that's the fault of casting, not Shakespeare.
Now on the issue of white representation...
The most obvious example I can think of is The Handmaid's Tale.
In the novel, the Republic of Gilead is a dystopian theocracy entirely populated by white people. The Sons of Jacob, who destroyed the U.S. and set this twisted place up, are hypocrites if you take their 'concern' for the decline in childbearing at face value. In the novel and the 1990 movie, it's obvious that Gilead only wants more white children to be born. All the non-white people are removed - whether to places outside of Gilead, or simply exterminated is not made definitively clear, since the main character isn't sure (the novel is told entirely from the pov of Offred, the Handmaid, who is kept ignorant of much of the inner workings of Gilead and is cynical about what she's heard and been told).
Fast-forward to the TV series, and suddenly the cast is diverse. Some characters that were white are now black or Hispanic. Some characters that were dead in the novel are alive. Some characters are given characteristics that Margaret Atwood never thought of when she wrote the novel.
There's quite a bit of controversy in the comment sections of the various review channels. I've stopped watching the channels created by the female viewers because they are invariably some variation of HOW DARE THEY DEPICT WHITE WOMEN SUFFERING?!
Honestly, it got tiresome years ago, reading the endless complaints that make it seem as though there's a segment of the audience who knows zip-all about the history of slavery over the past several thousand years. It didn't all happen in the U.S. during the past 300 years.
In the case of this show, it's not that important if some novel characters' race/ethnicity got swapped, as long as the character him/herself is true to the personality and psychological makeup of how Margaret Atwood wrote them. It doesn't matter that in the novel Moira is a white lesbian and portrayed by Elizabeth McGovern in the 1990 movie and is a black lesbian in the TV series and played by a black actress. Both actresses did an excellent job of playing Moira.
But if the showrunners had inexplicably decided to genderswap
anyone in the list of characters, that would have made a huge difference. You can't have that in this show, because all the characters are first and foremost defined by whether they are male or female, and what niche they are therefore permitted to occupy in Gilead. Men can't be Aunts, and Wives only have authority in their own household, over the Handmaid and the Martha and the Daughters. Wives, Handmaids, Marthas, and Daughters aren't allowed to read or write. The only women allowed to do that are the Aunts, and that's only because they are the keepers of the records showing which Handmaids are assigned to which Commander and if they've been successful at getting pregnant and giving birth.
My own take on the race/ethnicity arguments pertaining to the TV series is this: Where are the Asian Handmaids? Where are the indigenous Handmaids? Where are the Middle Eastern Handmaids? If the TV show decided to cast some characters as black or hispanic, why didn't they include other ethnicities as well? It's not as though such people didn't exist in the U.S. and the show is filmed in Toronto, which could easily supply actresses who are more representative of a melting-pot culture.
I guess I just have a Canadian take on this show, because there's a lot of it that just doesn't make sense.
