> It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.
I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described."
I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean".
The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
> The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist.
Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.
>The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes.
As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail.
The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.
My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
In Twilight, the main character is not actually described very well. There's an old comic from the oatmeal [1] about how the main character should be named "pants", because they're made just so that every reader can slip into the place and pretend like they're the main character.
This is a lot more common in books than I think you may realize. So when characters don't match expectations, it's because people are saying that characters don't look like them... which is, like, accidentally racism. To be clear, I don't think people are doing this maliciously. It's just that what you expect is not necessarily what you have to get.
>My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
You don't "pick" a diverse audience; you respect the audience/fandom how it currently is. I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
>which is, like, accidentally racism.
No it's not, it's people saying the character isn't as they expected them to be - and again that's on the person using the franchise to match what they are creating to that built-in audience FIRST and FOREMOST - if they don't want to respect that audience they shouldn't be touching the franchise they should be making something original.
> I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
Even if the consensus is wrong? Jesus wasn't white, and wouldn't be described as white, but everyone in the US 'fandom' thinks Jesus looks like them. Also, Jesus is frequently portrayed differently in different parts of the world.
I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described." I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean".
The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
> The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist. Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.