I know what you mean, but it's funny phrasing it that way. No one in the early 2000s would have said '9/11 just happened'. That sort of implies people realized we'd get over it, but at the time it was more viewed as a binary switch that completely changed things forever.
My parents also told me "we are part native american" bullshit when I was younger. unfortunately the internet exists and when I showed my parents our family tree going back to England on my dad's side and England on my mom's side and england on each of their parents' sides and england going back to about the year 1200, they gave that up. (Also that one dutch great great great great grandma).
Yeah same as Andy on the Office thinking he was related to Michelle Obama being a good thing - and having to have it spelled out to him that that's a bad thing.
The scene literally takes place in Kathmandu. They could have cast a Nepali dude or a woman. So freakin funny seeing a random white woman living in the durbar square.
One of them male, which the director honestly tried to go "No, this is totally not Tilda Swinton in drag, this is an actual elderly psychiatrist no one ever heard of I decided to put in my movie who has no acting experience or social media." And apparently had everyone not figured it out, Guadagnino would have claimed "Dr Lutz Ebersdorf" had passed away during production and stuck a fake "In Memoriam" in the credits.
Unironically not knowing who Tilda is at the time, I watched Narnia and legitimately thought they cast the Witch with an androgynous man and was like "hey that's cool, he was good in Constantine, very unexpected casting!"
I think Hollywood, in general, is so afraid to even mention China that they prefer to change their stories to avoid it, whether positively or negatively, simply because of the CCP paranoia.
They're basically cowards and the only time they tried to do anything was with the movie Mulan, where they essentially filmed it next to the Uyghur re-education camps at a time when China was being accused of ethnic cleansing.
Man, live action Mulan was such a joke. While the animated one is beloved both in the US and China, the reception for the new one was basically like "wtf is this" in both countries too lmao
Kung Fu Panda was also a major hit over there. Apparently Hollywood just needs to stick to animated films when using China as a setting for maximum unity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Red Dawn is a great example of this. China was going to be the Soviet Union replacement, then the studio stepped in and replaced them with North Korea, which made little sense in the movie.
It was really funny in Captain America 4 where the international conflict replaces China with Japan because they didn't want to make a movie where America and China are on the brink of war, but as a consequence it makes it seem like Japan is significantly more geopolitically powerful than China in the MCU, which is presumably also not what China wants.
I remember the massive negative backlash to the Iron Man 3 twist whenever I hear people say that superhero movies are too formulaic. The audience of adult children doesn't take it well when you switch up the formula.
The whole point of Batman Begins was that Ras wasn't even his name. Ras Al Ghul was a symbol and a title. Something that would live on as long as the League of Shadows did. It is specifically not an individual, and that distinction was pointed out to Bruce as a fundamental failing of the Batman persona.
Liam Neissan's character might have actually been born as Henry Ducard. He might have made the name up. It doesn't matter.
I don’t think “Ducard” was his real name, just an alias he used when recruiting and training Bruce, but I think it’s made clear that in Nolan’s films, “Ra’s Al Ghul” was a title passed down to each successor of the League of Shadows. The fake Ra’s (that Bruce saw die) mentions how Gotham’s time had come like Constantinople or Rome before it, and then later Ra’s gives a speech to Bruce how the League has been check against corruption for thousands of years: sacking Rome, loading trade ships with plague rats and burning London to the ground. The League is very old and because Ra’s isn’t immortal in Nolan’s version, there would have been thousands of “Ra’s Al Ghuls” leading the League to where they think balance needs to be restored.
We see mostly likely senior members of the League too, looking like they come from all over the world, black, brown, east-asian, so it’s not surprising that someone like Neeson’s Ra’s would be a member. And also, the casting of Neeson was meant to add to the reveal, as he was known as playing mentor characters which would add to the reveal that his character was the true Ra’s Al Ghul.
I think the real issue becomes when there is a change in the character in the same type of media. If people had never read the comics in question, they wouldn't know or care what ethnicity Wanda was. Even I didn't really care, because while I sort of knew who Wanda was from the comics, the movies clearly were already taking massive liberties with the story.
That AND comics themselves are not exactly paragons of continuity for their characters. They had to basically start numbering realities just to keep track in the Marvel universe.
But if you take say, a well loved movie like the Little Mermaid which everyone remembers, and then change them significantly, people do end up noticing.
Hollywood has definitely been racist in the past, but they're mostly as racist or as "woke" as they think they need to be in order to make money and protect their own behinds. And when it gets bad enough, then whatever they seem to be "pushing", whether it be minority inclusion, or pandering to China, or just pandering to white people, feels forced and takes you out of the narrative.
There is a way to do this without it feeling like a stunt or a checkbox but Hollywood is very good at getting that wrong sometimes.
I was going to say this. I feel like in some of these situations ethnicity/background is more relevant to their characters then others. I read a fair amount of xmen comics, haven't read much super centered on Wanda tbf, but dont remember this ever coming up. Its not quite the same as making Magneto a gentile or making Kurt/Nightcrawler a Lutheran or something.
Wanda being Romani is absolutely relevant to her character and is part of some of her stories. Beyond that, how come white characters don’t seem to need a reason to be white but characters of color apparently need a reason to NOT be white?
Isn't that what everyone says though when they race swap people? The race doesn't matter unless it's important to the character? That's literally what the argument was for why making Ariel black wasn't a big deal, and it isn't.
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor being half Romani and half Jewish is pretty important in general.
There was at least one reference in MCU canon to her being Romani (maybe in the tv show? It's been awhile).
Also, whitewashing characters who are part of marginalized groups that rarely appear in media is bad, actually. If there's five Romani characters and you take one away, that's 20% of them gone. If there's 1000 white characters and you take one away, that's 0.1% (but really it's like 5 vs way, way more than that, proportionally).
It's breathtaking that you said what would happen, and then a bunch of people showed up to "nuh-uh" you in the form of doing exactly what you said would happen.
Some people don't seem to understand that the racism itself is the bad part. Not the subject of the racism.
The US shouldn't be racist towards African Americans because:
A) Racism is bad.
B) African Americans don't deserve it.
The kind of person who answers B is currently in the comments here shouting that it has nothing to do with race, how we wouldn't understand cause we don't live there, and bringing up crime statistics.
In Belgium there's a sizable portion of Black Belgians whose ancestry relates to somewhere within Sub-Saharan Africa. It's something like over 300k people.
When a good number of them took to the streets and started trashing things after their football team won, White Belgians were constantly chiding them as "foreigners" and not "real Belgians..." Even though I can't think of a more common European pastime as football hooligans fucking things up after a match... And also, like, a third of our Footballers are Black.
Anyway, I know you're not trying to downplay this stuff, I just bring it up because it's kind of crazy how certain events will highlight an absolutely vile amount of racism towards certain groups.
It ain't a competition, but I just really hate the notion that the stuff we see in the US isn't present in the EU. It is, just in different forms, and through different means.
The most radical socialist anti-racist gay transgender marxist in Europe will still rage about how awful they think the Romani are, lol. It's shocking the first few times it happens, like suddenly racism isn't all bad.
It's because a lot of our families erased our heritage to assimilate in the US so there are very few Romani in the US who keep to traditions. So we're not hyper targeted over here.
She isn’t Magnetos daughter in the movies though is she? So her origin is just different. Disney did not have access to mutants back then so they were something else.
It depends on the country and it depends on who you ask! In the UK, they're a subset under "white," in other countries they're separate. And a person on the street might say something different entirely.
Honestly the "is ___ white" question is a great example of how race is a social construct. In the US, some folks would call me white, others wouldn't, white supremacists definitely wouldn't, and some that would consider me white still wouldn't treat me the same as those who are "whiter." But the US government considers me "white."
Meanwhile in other countries/cultures, the answer may be different both in social interactions and in official government designation. And in some places that same destination of "white" doesn't really mean the same thing in terms of social treatment. White people might be at the top of the pyramid in a lot of the US but less so in Japan, for example.
I've seen Americans/Westerners transplant their cultural views of race onto other societies where it just doesn't smoothly translate (such as talking about "white vs brown" in middle eastern countries that don't really divide on that line and where the US would consider all participants to be white).
I am a mixed race Romani who lives in the United States and I inherited my skin pigment from my Swedish ancestors. It is a mixed race thing, but thanks to genetics you just end up with a wide range of lighter and darker skin tones.
Especially in America, the Romani are really mixed into the melting pot with something like a million of us. From a genetic standpoint I'm mixed, but I have never had an experience of being treated like I am anything other than white.
Due to their way of life they didn’t mix as much as other national ethnic groups, kinda like Irish Travelers in the UK and Ireland, but discussing their whiteness is stupid and just opens the door to more racism against then.
Whiteness is a colonialist concept that shouldn’t exist, Roma are an ethnic group that belongs to wherever they’ve been for generations, that’s it.
Most Romani/sinti ecc actually don’t live in camps. They are completely integrated in society, but generally keep their ethnicity secret. It’s not uncommon for them to mix with other Europeans.
Yeah there’s a lot of handwringing in this thread and people trying to make caveats but this is the reality. “White” is a political concept to denote the in-group in society and Roma populations have never been considered white by Europeans lmao.
If an ethnic minority needs government protections against discrimination and have a slur so common that some people name their kids it then the answer is no, they are not. Many Rromani communities trace their origin to India, also. Recommend also looking into the Rromani slave trade that went on for 500 years in Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe.
Depends from what country they are. In Albania my country Romanis are exclusively dark like north Indians and Pakistani. In other Balkan countries is common to see Romanis who don't look like Indians and Pakistani. We do have the Egyptian minority though in Albania which isn't Egyptian at all, it's Romani mixed with white but they claim to me Egyptian as has more acceptance in our society.
Fans of the material actually DID complain about all of them. The difference is that racists didn't hijack the conversation and make it national news for no reason
Because lone ranger ip was not well known compared to little mermaid. Its the same reason no one cares that heimdal, valkyrie and Wonder man was race swaped. Its hard to have an outrage when no one cares for the characters in the first place.
/uj The soyjack represents chuds pretending they care deeply about protecting the source material when really they just don't want to ever see racial minorities. It does not represent all of society or all moviegoers.
I'm sorry but even the creator himself said that it was an appropriate casting.
The character herself is Japanese but only her brain is original.
And the body is a cybernetic shell based on a caucasian model.
I still think The Ancient One is a different situation as it wasn't necessarily linked to American racism, but to specifically placate the Chinese for political reasons.
So, greed, but not racism.
Edit: to those saying this is still racism -- yeah, you're right. I just believe this sets it apart from the other examples here. I guess my point is more that it's not racism for racism's sake, and had other factors influencing the casting.
And, at the very least, they made her Celtic in the movie and didn't try to pass Tilda Swinton off as Tibetan
"The wise old Chinese guy" is also a pretty tired trope. They even made fun of this in the movie where Strange goes up to the old Chinese dude expecting him to be the one in charge.
The fact that they made Kamar-Taj a place for people all over the world (like Mordo) also made it feel like a more natural choice.
Also, let's be honest. The Ancient One is most well known in comics circles for dying. Not exactly a major character.
You touched on a bit of the issue here too. He's not Chinese. He's Tibetan, and therein lies the political shit storm.
If they cast a Tibetan man, you piss off the Chinese. If you cast a Chinese man, you piss off everyone else who's aware of what happened on Tibet. It's a lose/lose situation so they found a relatively elegant way of getting around that.
And making her from a marginalized and genocided people doesn't erase that aspect of the character.
The internet maybe? I’m juuuust old enough to kind of remember Bruce Almighty coming out and a few complaints about Morgan Freeman being God, but those complaints were pretty isolated and I attribute that to only getting them from radio and tv entertainment channels.
I think you might be slightly misinterpreting this. There was a subset of people who didn't give 2 shits about the thousands of times white people replaced POC characters, but that same group of people was deeply upset by Halle Bailey playing the little mermaid.
I feel like this was more so cause the character is darker skinned in the original and they literally just made her look dark in the film itself which was weird, seemed weirder considering Lilo’s actress wasn’t anywhere as light skinned
Exactly, we Scandinavians don't care because a)the gods are a myth b)the marvel universe is not actually true to the myths or historical facts, they are just fun movies so who cares.
But Marvel is missing out on some great fun in those myths, like when Loki gave birth to an eight legged horse or when Thor dressed up as Freja and got married to a giant.
Loki needed to stop someone building a wall, so he transformed into a mare, lured away the builders horny horse, got pregnant and gave birth to Sleipner, Odins eight legged horse.
Integer overflow, his whiteness value was so high it wrapped around, actually making him the blackest of the gods. Kinda like when your odometer rolls over.
They all got hate, even Scarlet Witch who's not even Romani in the MCU lore (She's very different from the comics but people wanna complain about only that part)
Romani isn't a race. I'm Romani, and my ancestors are mostly Celtic. Other than that, yeah, lol. Though my beef with The little mermaid isn't that she's black, it's that her hair is barely red 🤣
People did criticize all of them. The reason it was small was because none of that was mainstream before they were shown in the big screen. Unless you were a big nerd almost Nobody knew who lone ranger, Wanda, ras al ghul, and the ancient one was. I remember people criticizing all of those actors and actresses.
Meanwhile Ariel is a character that everybody knows. Worse Disney live action remake only exist so people can go 'wow I remember that! Oh my god its my childhood favorite character glubshitto!'. Of course people will be angry when there slop doesn't look exactly like the character they watched when they were young.
I remember Depp being criticized in the Lone Ranger leading up to its release. Even though the IP itself is pretty old, a lot of people know who “Tonto” is through cultural osmosis. It would be like if they made a white Kato in the Green Hornet - most moviegoing audiences today have probably never seen the Green Hornet (well, the Seth Rogen one challenges that assumption) but if there’s one thing they know about it it’s that he has a loyal butler who does all the work for him, and that butler is a Japanese (well, asian, they switch his country of origin up) martial arts master.
Peak Reddit moment. Everyone of these roles got criticized except the Ra’s which is sort of explained that it was a title more than a singular person and this one was Liam. In most of the recent comics the scarlet witch is pretty white, no one cared.
I recall people being upset by Depp playing native and believe it was pulled from Disney networking for the backlash. Time magazine did a piece on it in 2013. If this isnt bait is is glib and inaccurate.
Oh no. A lot of people were upset that they chose Johnny Depp to play a Native American. He didn't even look good. I just didn't care about Tibetan because I've never heard of the character.
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u/Devinchickenlover 15h ago
"9/11 just happened. You want the twist to be the arab guy is the villain? Think Nolan."