Scarlet Witch wasn’t originally Romani… she was originally still Jewish. You know, since she was Magneto’s daughter. The Romani thing came later. So that’s kind of a mischaracterization. The Johnny Depp as native american was super wierd, like the black face RDJ in Tropic Thunder. It was cringe @.@.
Scarlet Witch wasn’t originally Romani… she was originally still Jewish. You know, since she was Magneto’s daughter. The Romani thing came later.
She could still be both from each parent’s side?
That would make her… Jewmani? Rowish?
Never play Jewmani, you can get sucked into the game and it’s like WWII or smth
BTW I checked Wikipedia and it’s hilarious how often her ancestry changed
The character’s in-universe backstory and parentage have changed more than once. During the 1960s, she and Quicksilver were said to be the mutant twin offspring of two unnamed parents. Later, it was said the children were given to the geneticist called the High Evolutionary, leaving their true parentage a mystery. In 1974, it was said their parents are Golden Age heroes Bob Frank / Whizzer and Madeline Joyce Frank / Miss America. Wanda then refers to herself as Wanda Frank for a time. In 1979, they are revealed to have been raised by human Romani parents, Django and Marya Maximoff. In 1982, Magneto concludes he and a human Sinti woman named Magda are Wanda and Pietro’s parents. In 2014, the AXIS crossover revealed Pietro and Wanda are not related to Magneto. In 2015, the twins discover they are not mutants and their superhuman traits are the result of the High Evolutionary’s experiments combined with Wanda genetically being a Witch, born with natural magical abilities. The 2015–2017 Scarlet Witch series reveals that Wanda and Pietro’s adoptive parents, Django and Marya Maximoff, are biologically their aunt and uncle. Their real mother is confirmed to be Natalya Maximoff, the previous Scarlet Witch, a Serbian Roma sorceress whose father was the Scarlet Warlock.
Fucking comics smh
I don’t know how people got that take from Tropic Thunder when they explicitly make reference inside the movie to how messed up and wrong it was. Like, that was the joke. RDJ was playing a character so full of himself that took method acting to it’s extreme. Am I missing something? Id love to be educated
like the black face RDJ in Tropic Thunder. It was cringe @.@.
Did you actually see Tropic Thunder? It’s pretty good. His character is meant to be looked down on and the movie makes that clear. It’s more of a criticism of actors doing things like black face and playing disabled characters to chase awards.
Don’t forget Snow White who looks like a white person but is mixed-race white and Latina, so she isn’t white enough to play Snow White.
And also don’t forget the very light-skinned black woman who couldn’t play Cleopatra because Cleopatra wasn’t black. (How do we know? We don’t? Cool. Cool cool cool.)
You do realize that that is mainly from a USA point of of view and mostly directed towards mexico, right? So this isnt’t only kinda xenophobic but you’re basically telling me I should consider myself a different race because random yankees think I am? Yeah, no thanks. The country you were born in does not determine your race.
And also don’t forget the very light-skinned black woman who couldn’t play Cleopatra because Cleopatra wasn’t black. (How do we know? We don’t? Cool. Cool cool cool.)
What’s known of her ancestry is mostly Macedonia Greek with some Persian and Sogdian Iranian descent. What’s left would probably either have been more of the same or north African, which still isn’t black. Her coinage (which she would have approved her depiction on) and her busts that are considered most likely to be accurate (because they agree with the coinage) depict her as Greek, so she at least primarily thought of herself as a Greek.
A very light skinned black woman is about the darkest she hypothetically might have been based on what we know of her lineage. Something closer to half Greek and half Arab is probably closer.
My problem is her eyes not sharing the same postal code.
If it’s bad to use white actors for black (or other colored) roles then it’s bad for black actors to do white roles. If it’s okay to do those switches then it’s okay for all. Forget colors it shouldn’t matter.
Having said that, Disney just did the Ariel thing ffor the “look at us being sooooo progressive, please give us your money for this utterly shit movie” instead of trying to just make a great movie
I personally think it isn’t wise to use an actor of any race in substitute of another, if that character’s race is part of the story. The only reason I could think of to change the character’s race, gender, status, etc. would perhaps be to tell a different story, but then it should be renamed and be a different story. But if a character’s race, gender, status, etc. is tied to that character’s story, then it shouldn’t be discarded frivolously.
From what I see, I feel that a lot of the disconnect is based on whether people find an attribute (in this case, race) important or not as part of the character’s story.
I feel I half agree with you. The other half of me thinks, there’s a lot of things we change for an actor acting a character. After all, it’s an actor, playing a character. Someone called Ben can play a guy called John; your grumpiest aunt can play a sweet grandma; often we have actors in their 30s and 40s playing ternagers and 20s; and men playing women even used to be a thing.
I think you have a good point, but I also think it’s okay to have an acceptable disconnect of, this is people acting out a story, not the real thing happening in front of me.
The original actress/singer for Ariel absolutely dominated that role as well, and really the whole cast was damn near perfect. It’s one of the few Disney Princess movies that should have been left alone.
It’s definitely a cynical move by Disney no matter how you slice it.
-
“If you think we’re super woke, you go support the movie. We get money.”
-
“If you hate it (because we thought a superficial change would cover the fact we barely tried), it’s because you’re a nasty racist bigotface, your opinion is disregarded, galvanizes our first crowd into giving us more money, and angry actually-racist bloggers probably hate-watch it while advertising it for free. We get money.”
Ain’t the culture wars grand (if you’re selling to both sides like a proper arms dealer)? :D
The virtue signaling just backfires. “Rainbow washing” is a thing now. Companies never gave a fuck about a progressive message, they care about trendy things to cash in on.
I get the impression Ben and Jerry’s does actually care bout progressive issues, but they are that rare exception.
A big issue here, especially with the MCU stuff, is that it’s not a skin color thing with those changes. They updated the whole character in order to make them into races that are more friendly to China. They’ve done this repeatedly and stripped identities and character traits from characters over and over again.
Every single Romani character that’s appeared in an MCU movie has had their heritage removed and replaced with generic white. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are good examples (since they’re the ones in the meme) but I don’t see any way that Robert Downey Jr is going to be able to do the complicated Romani backstory of Dr Doom very well.
I agree that Ariel was swapped for marketing reasons (and arguably specifically to cause outrage and get people talking) Ariel doesn’t have a racial heritage that plays into her life and identity… She’s a mermaid from the sea… Not a member of a group with a large history of being discriminated against.
But Ariel wasn’t white. She was a fish person. So they were free to do whatever.
Obligatory
I only care when it’s stupid, like Medieval Poland being full of black people, not even modern day Poland has that many black people.
You can call me racist if you want but casting a black guy to play the president of the USA in like 1910 would be as stupid as casting a white guy to play Nebuchadnezzar.
Representation matters. Giving the few traditionally non-white roles that get written in Hollywood to white actors is an actual problem.
Getting mad about the existence of black characters in fiction fucking stupid. Really fucking stupid. Unjustifiably fucking stupid. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Getting mad sure, but it is definitely a dumb creative decision to have characters be random races that don’t make sense in the historical context and it’s fine to criticize it. If it’s a purely fictional world with no basis in reality then no one should care.
No. Fuckin stop it. Its unbearably stupid.
Historical fiction has existed for a long time.
Y’all ain’t out here throwing a pouty parade when someone adds technology or magic or monsters into historical fiction.
But black people? Existing? If that’s where you draw the line, it’s really clear why. Make all the excuses you want.
100% agree, but what should be done would be to green light projects by writers of other races based on different cultures and folklores diversifying the pop culture space (for lack of a better term).
What is done instead is treating minorities as a checklist that needs to be checked in every piece of art even when it doesn’t make sense for them to be in that story.
Exactly. If the roles are the problem, write better roles! I’m surprised it’s not seen as an insult if a role is just token-swapped and “pity given” as some kinda EDI-initiative for culture points.
I would love to be exposed to more genuine characters that reflect their backgrounds. But I get a bit annoyed at this bizarre box-ticking tokenism that’s clearly pervading Hollywood, as if they ever gave a crap about anybody in the first place.
Stoking identity conflict makes them money. Lots of it. It keeps them relevant at the forefront of “the discussion” in a world where cultural relevance is literal currency.
The same corporations that’ll “champion diversity” with a “palette swap” on screen, will outsource their VFX from places with horrible working conditions, for instance. It’s all a big show and apparently lots of us are still falling for it.
Meanwhile middle age fantasy had black knights and it was fine.
Racists are gonna be racists is all there is.
The Witcher isn’t in Medieval Poland though, it’s in a fantasy land.
Rings of Power was far more dumb because there’s black people, but only in a few extremely important roles. Almost as if there’s some sort of reverse curse going on, where a baby pops out black, and they immediately make it their king/queen. Or more likely, they realised very late on that they’d made a very white cast, and made a few last minute changes.
The Witcher isn’t in Medieval Poland though, it’s in a fantasy land.
So by that logic it’s fine to make Wakanda full of white people because it’s fantasy land right?
I sometimes think the token representation is on purpose. Riles up the “anti-woke” and means that internet discourse about your show is all about how there’s some black people, not about how shit the writing is.
Like I really don’t give a rats ass if the dwarves are brown or purple or pink. (Although the lack of bearded dwarf women is unacceptable.) The other changes in Rings of Power are actually bad.
That depends on what you’re doing with it. If Abraham Lincoln is a vampire hunter by night then I don’t think anybody’s going to care who plays the character. It’s obviously beyond reality. If you’re doing the story of Black World War 1 veterans fighting the KKK then you’re going to want representation before the NAACP starts picketing your studio.
