Thanks Aelf for the thought exercise.
Thinking about it... I think my attitude is that made-up characters have no claim whatsoever to race, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else. They are made up. They can be anything. Luke Skywalker can be played by Idris Elba, T'Challa can be played by Brad Pitt. Superman can be a redhead. Mary Jane can have purple hair. It's all effing make believe. Characters can certainly have cultural value, or significance that is based, in part in their attributes, but ultimately, flexibility has value. Zeus does not have to have a long white mane and beard, in perpetuity. .. He can be a brunette with a short beard... or a black dude... or an Asian female. We can enjoy the made up character in other "skins". Its all made up.
Now with actual historical characters, there is more of a claim that adherence to their actual "accurate" historical race, ethnicity, gender, appearance, whatever, is important and or has value... but even then, bending the representation of the historical character can have real artistic value. A blonde haired, blue-eyed kid playing Martin Luther King in the school play with nothing but a suit, tie, and taped-on mustache, is fine. A Hispanic actor playing Abraham Lincoln is fine... it all depends on the context, and what the artist and/of piece of art is trying to convey/accomplish.
As for characters/tropes being obsolete... meh... the "stoic" man is not obsolete. We've only just begun to recognize/acknowledge tropes and themes and unpack/dissect them. And even to the extent that a particular trope is arguably toxic... if we start dismissing tropes before we've taken the time to examine and appreciate them and what their role is... we risk just repeating societally damaging tropes, because we didn't take the time to really flesh out why they are limiting and/or harmful.
That's my initial, nightcap-enhanced, reaction. However, as always, I am very interested to hear what others have to say.
It's interesting that the examples you chose are either superheroes, gods, or associated with such characters (well, not Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, of course, but as someone who posted examples of why alternative casting is necessary when you don't have actors of the authentic racial/ethnic background available, you make do with who you do have).
In the case of Zeus, he could morph into any appearance he wanted, as could the other Olympian gods. There's a whole subplot running through Xena: Warrior Princess for awhile as to whether Ares was, or was not, Xena's real father (ie. did he impersonate the man she knew as her father, and visited her mother one night - and Xena was born 9 months later). If true, it meant that the other subplot where Ares wanted Xena as his life partner (wife/lover/favored warrior) would have been incestuous, so they decided that no, Ares was not her father.
In the case of well-known literary characters... the Villeneuve movie, for all Villeneuve's blathering that it's based on the novel, rather than Lynch's movie, is too visually-based on the Lynch movie to convince me that he knows WTH he's talking about when he blathers his reasons for genderswapping Liet-Kynes. He wanted a specific actress, and made up a bunch of dumb excuses to "explain" it even though it's not faithful to certain important aspects of the source material.
So no, I wouldn't buy a Paul Atreides who was female and purple-haired, because that doesn't fit with the entire background Frank Herbert wrote. David Lynch, for all the things that went wrong with his movie, at least took great care to get the casting right.
I didn't mind Liet being gender swapped. Would prefer they don't do it but not 100% opposed to it. I've seen women in plays dressed as men big Woop.
Doesn't bother me either that you care not gonna lecture you over it shrugs.
Her being dressed as a man isn't the point of my objections. Fremen women wore dresses or robes in the sietch and stillsuits when they were outside the sietch. My objection is that a woman would not have the position she had,
period. Clothing is unimportant in this point. While Fremen listen to, and take advice from, their Sayyadina, it's still the Naib of the sietch who makes the final decisions. Naibs are
always men. And the way the Imperium is set up, it's skewed heavily to male rule (with the exception of the Bene Gesserit, who are not an actual Great House and so this doesn't apply to them, and in the case of the very few planets ruled by women).
Even Irulan wasn't expected to become a ruling Empress (she was the eldest of the Corrino daughters and had no brothers). Whoever she married would have the right to sit on the Imperial throne and be named Emperor. There is no way in hell that the Emperor would appoint a woman to the post of Imperial Planetologist/Judge of the Change. Even in
Children of Dune, Irulan's younger sister, Wensicia, is scheming to kill the Atreides twins and put her own son, Farad'n, on the throne. In an Imperium where women could rule, Wensicia would otherwise have included her own older sisters in her assassination schemes - but since women don't rule in the Imperium, she saw no reason for that.
I think in a world where humans spawned at the whim of a god, assuming biology instead of divine life is the stretch.
Did they literally come into be because a god created them? Or is it their creation story that's allegorical?
It's an interesting issue when writing historical/fantasy fiction. It may surprise some here, given my emphatic position on Genesis vs. Big Bang/evolution, that I've included a strong interweaving of religion into my King's Heir project. But while it takes place in early 11th century in the British Isles, it's an AU setting in which I've decided that the dominant belief systems include two gods, rather than one... male and female, and while my main characters are sincere believers, it's not something they try to convince others to believe. They accept that other peoples may have other belief systems, and simply go on with their day. There's a reference to a crusade at the start of the game, and I've yet to figure out where the crusading army went. This is a world where people aren't as well-traveled as they were in real history, and for my own preferences, the Christian-Jewish-Muslim situation is simply not going to happen. Jerusalem doesn't exist in my story, or at least most people haven't heard of it, so that's not where any crusaders would have intended to go. It makes sense that the people in this setting would have a religion... but I chose to create it myself, based on inspiration from various older belief systems.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130418-why-does-music-make-us-feel-good
I suspect the same general cause and effect applies here. People are satisfied when characters fit with how they have previously imagined them, but feel anger and disappointment when their expectations are made to fail.
It is one thing to, say, tell the story of don Quijote, but make it take place in modern Japan, with a female lead obsessed with Samurai past - this might be a really clever adaptation with enough forewarning that no-one is taken by unpleasant surprise.
Quite another to keep the original time and location in medieval La Mancha, but randomly make the hidalgo Japanese, so that every time he appears on screen, viewer experiences a "WTH, how?" moment.
This is fascinating. There are computer games that aren't great that I've kept because at least they have music I enjoy. And there are computer games that I like the gaming aspect but mute the sound because the music is annoying. And then there are games that are a perfect blend of challenge and music. There's a solitaire game I have called Avalon Legends that I like to just sit and listen to; playing is optional because I love the music. It's inspired me to create an entire new branch of my ongoing King's Heir story, as I envisioned people at a spring planting festival, dancing to it, and of course I needed to create new characters and a setting to go along with it. There are time management games I've played where I ran out of time because I was too busy enjoying the music!
Personally, I don't see the point of adaptations which stick religiously to the source material. If you want something exactly like the original, well, you've got the original. For an adaptation to make me want to watch it, it need to do enough different that I'm getting something from the story and or characters I wouldn't get from just re-reading the book. I guess for some people, the experience of watching instead of reading is enough of a difference, but for me it isn't - indeed, I'd generally rather read than watch.
What's the point of creating a painting of a famous landmark (whether manmade or natural)? You've got the original.
I definitely think there's a difference between the usage of a trope and asserting that anything less than stoic is not manly. We can safely say the latter attitude is a dying one, and the fact that it was uttered by an old man with not a single strand of non-white hair kinda says it all.
Maybe you've just never met stoic men. I was raised by one, and my grandparents did their best to pass the trait of stoicism on to my dad. It was a real eye-opener for him after my grandmother died when I told my dad, "It's okay to hug me." She'd told both of us that after I became a teenager, that sort of thing was inappropriate.
And someone with such an attitude, who stands on the waning side of history, should certainly not expect everyone else to justify their disagreement - they need to justify theirs. Might as well ask people why they believe in racial equality (also a positive claim). Now, the old man can probably only tell us that that's what he learned or that's how things ought to be (God made it that way, etc). Not sure what Narz, thinks, though.
Over the years since reading his posts here, I've found most of what Narz thinks to be reasonable.
And that's not a matter of practicality to you? Are you thinking that it's just a matter of SJWs accusing the producers of racism? That is to say, some kind of unjustifiable ideological transgression toward artistic intergrity? Can fair employment be reduced to that?
Remember, we're not talking about casting one or two specific characters. We're talking about whether it's realistic to have a cast of 20-40 people in a shoot made up entirely of white people from a diverse society in this day and age. Not sure about in 1980s Alberta, though.
You're just really determined to fight with me, aren't you?
If I said the world was a sphere, it wouldn't surprise me if you said, "No, it's a triangle."
I'm not given to using the expression "SJW." I'm not really sure what it means - it seems to have multiple meanings, depending on the speaker, so let's just not bring it into this, 'k?
Is it realistic to have a cast of all-white characters in any movie or TV show in this day and age? No, of course not. Even if that's who was in the source material, and the original author explained
why. This is why
The Handmaid's Tale series has a racially/ethnically diverse cast, even though the original novel explained that the Sons of Jacob, who run the Republic of Gilead, were bigoted to the point that they were willing to overlook the fact that if their real concern was fertility and lack of children, they wouldn't have killed/deported all the non-white people.
This is something that I shrugged off, since theocracies make no sense to me anyway, and I understand that if the show was true to the novel and had an all-white cast, there would be CONSIDERABLE discontent in Hollywood.
As it is, there is CONSIDERABLE discontent among some black viewers because they hysterically insist that only black characters get punished, only black characters get killed off, and nothing bad happens to the white characters.
Which is utterly ridiculous, if they'd bother to pay attention to the actual storyline and think about the
reasons things happen to certain characters. For example: Natalie wasn't shot because she's black. She was shot because she stole a guard's gun and was threatening the lives of several handmaids in the middle of a grocery store. She would have been shot regardless of her skin color.
It looks like they considered how to pitch the series in a way that attracts the largest segment of viewers. I don't agree with every divergence, but this is a matter of judgement, and they have do have their (business) reasons.
This is the primary concern of any showrunner. They do what they think they have to do so as to attract the largest segment of viewers. So THT decided they needed a diverse cast (that for some reason includes black and Latina characters, but oops - they forgot to include Asian or Middle Eastern or Native American characters. Well, the latter can maybe be forgiven if the series takes the novel's appendix into consideration. But the others? Nope. Apparently with American showrunners filming this show in Toronto, diversity only goes so far.
Yeah, I agree with this one. Books on tape are great for that, but it's a long one. Going to take a lot of car rides and doing dishes to get through it. But, alas, you can usually tell how good something is by what people are choosing to argue over. If this is the issue that keeps coming up, the series doesn't seem to have anything better to offer than then vanilla garden variety social commentary. It's not that there's really any judgement past, "I'd just skip it for something else, it doesn't sound very good. Re-runs anyone?"
I remember trying Star Trek audio books. It's not that the story was bad;
Fallen Heroes is only second to
A Stitch in Time for my personal choice as "Best DS9 Novel".
But I don't think I ever did hear the entire thing. Audio books put me to sleep. People over on TrekBBS keep trying to convince me to try Doctor Who audio adventures, and I'm not convinced that it wouldn't be a monumental waste of money for me - what good is listening to a book if you're just going to nod off?
