Anyway, consider that these "impossible ethnicities" are British. Idris Elba, for example, is an incredible classically-trained actor born in London.
His nationality may be British, but his ethnicity is not English.
English is quite a specific ethnicity! He's in an odd situation, where a different ethnicity can portray his culture better than he can I guess.
What roles in the predominately white history of Britain should he be excluded from? Should he only play African thieves like in his first role, or a made-up African prince visiting Henry VIII or something? He's a Shakespearean actor - should he only be able to play Othello?
Why would he play Othello? Othello was a Moor... a Spanish Muslim. Antonio Banderas might work for that.
Neither Moor nor black meant the same thing in Elizabethan English as they do today, so anyone with skin darker than the typical 16th century Englishman would work I suppose. Othello never says where he's from.
How about Rommel? Should Elba play Rommel? Should Dev Patel play von Braun? Should Ice T play Himmler?
Ethnic Germans only!
What if Tessa Thompson was half-Norwegian, for example? Would she be less suited for the role of a Valkyrie than a blonde from Iowa?
Yes. In exactly the same way that, say, a character from Nigerian folklore would be best portrayed by someone who looks like they are from Nigeria, or a Korean tale should be cast with people who look lie they could be from Korea. When you take someone's stories and replace their people in them, you damage both the story and the people. It's cultural vandalism.
Are you sure you aren't on tumblr?
The Smurfs episode "Trojan Smurfs" didn't turn all the characters in the original Iliad blue. I've checked.
What if took all the characters from a Japanese movie based on an English play based on Celtic pseudohistory and changed them? I might get Star Wars.
With historical films I don't know. It seems quite strange to tell someone who's been born and raised in a particular culture "You can't play this hero because we know he didn't look like you even though we don't know what he looked like or even if he existed."
Because those stories, whether tales of the Valkyrie, or Robin Hood, or the Trojan War, or the Battle of Gettyburg, they are vital elements in particular cultures.
So characters from American pop culture should look like Americans. Got it.
Should Robin Hood only be played by Saxons, or is he part of British pop culture at this point? Certainly Idris Elba is more culturally English than Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, or a talking fox.
The diffusion of stories between cultures and their retelling in the process is what creates culture. I sincerely doubt anyone exists solely in one culture anyway. There are layers and diffusion, otherwise everything would be pretty stagnant.
The Japanese, for example, seem to take some interest in the tale of a typhoon coming along and wiping out a Mongol invasion fleet. If a movie was made for the Japanese market that replaced the Japanese people with, say, Indonesians or Dutch, it would not only not work, it would smear the original story and the culture around it.
Much more likely that the fleet would be vaguely Japanese, led by Ken Watanabe, but saved from the Mongols by the heroic sacrifice of Tom Cruise.
Skin color really isn't a deal-breaker for me in historical dramas, and especially not with minor characters in comics.
Great. Then you will have no problem with Paul Reubens playing Gandhi and King T'Challa (Black Panther) in back-to-back roles.
Yeah, he should play Captain Kirk and Thor too.
Or what about this? I'm casting Captain Kirk and Idris Elba and Paul Reubens are the only ones who show up. Who do I pick?
or take James Kirk and make him gay (which is reportedly what they're going to do with ST:SNW, just as
people are pushing for Spock to be rendered gay),
I'm pretty sure Kirk-Spock gay fanfic has existed since the 60s, nothing's ever come of it.
you are admitting to the "included" people that "I'm sorry, but *you* *people* are just not intrinsically interesting enough for us to create an entirely new character; the best we can do is some cultural vandalism and scrape the serial numbers off an existing established character and give them a new coat of Inclusion Diversity Paint."
I agree with this to some extent but some characters are always going to be the standard by which all others are judged. Nobody wants to be Alternate Universe Superman.
There are ways of doing it *right.* Look at "Into The Spiderverse:" the main character was a black/Puerto Rican kid. And who complained? Nobody, that's who, because the main character was not Peter Parker, but Miles Morales. What's more, Miles was not simply a badly photocopied Peter, but his own well developed and interesting character.
I'm not really into comics so I had to look this up.
Peter Parker and Miles Morales exist in different universes. The Spider-Man played by Tom Holland exists in another universe with the MCU characters.
Characters can change radically between continuities. In one Peter Parker is the Hulk! In the prime Marvel comic continuity Heimdall is an actual Norse God, in another he's a alien mutated by the Celestials,
in another he's a cyborg with a transparent brain dome. Black Heimdall seems mild in comparison.
This kind of drastic change in characters between continuities isn't rare, it's been happening since Homeric times or even earlier. I suppose the question is when literally everything about a character can change between retellings of a story, when is race or whatever the one essential characteristic that must be retained?
This isn't an easy question to answer. It's clearly important sometimes in ways that don't have to do with historical accuracy, otherwise it wouldn't matter for fantasy or science fiction.
So once again it's subjective. It probably depends on how much the viewer identifies with or feels a sense of ownership of a story, which will depend on a variety of factors.
I don't know myself. I've been wary of fan-rage since the Star Wars Leonardo DiCrapio backlash when he was rumored to play Anakin instead of one of the worst actors of all time.
As for Disney: if they want to make money moving forward, it looks like their days of Diversity are about to end. Now that China has declared that
effeminate "girlie" men are verbotten from movies on Chinese screens, Disney will have to delete such characters and return to traditional masculinity. If they even know how.
Do you?
