Good TV
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- I would actually appreciate some solid recommendations, @Solstice. There is some great anime out there, I'm sure, but I definitely grew up in the late 90s/early 00s when it was taking the general nerd world by storm, complete with overzealous fans who insisted that all anime was great and fantastic and must-watch and and and purely based on the fact that it was anime, without any regard for whether or not it was actually good. That put me off it for some time (with the exception of Miyazaki, who is beautiful and charming and I adore everything he does) as those sorts of fanbases often do.
Well now there's a THREAD.
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@warma-sheen said in Good TV:
Unless it stretches suspension of disbelief... you're already coping very well with people shooting energy beams out of their hands, y'all. Do you really draw the line at them also being Asian?
I know it is rhetorical, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that some people are this shallow. Race/gender identity is a big, complex thing, but the answer is definitely - yes. That's over the line for a lot of people. And by a huge margin.
When it comes down to it, if I'm a fan I usually don't want changes in general for their own sake. Not including Tom Bombadil in Fellowship made sense; he didn't serve the narrative but took a long time to introduce.
Changes also need to serve the story, and they have to fit the setting; if your long secluded fantasy town has the racial diversity of NYC then make that be part of your plot. It can be a single line ("there used to be a trade route nearby a long time ago"); done.
And basically when you switch things around, make it interesting. Don't just do it for the novelty factor. Add something to your story.
To me that's the difference between Ben Reilly and Miles Morales. If you take a character I care about - like Peter Parker - away then give me something more than "lol, here's another dude going by the same moniker". Miles was really well done; Ben was shit on a stick.
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For me I will almost never notice if a character is recasted between a book and a visual mediun like tv/movies because I dont visualize books in any detail and will usually not remember what most characters were supposed to look like in the first place.
However in a visual medium, you quickly get used to the idea a character is supposed to look a certain way. If a pale skinned woman flew around throwing lightning about, I wouldnt associate that with the character Ive come to know as Storm.
Though at the same time, I think for some characters the association is weaker then others. I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spiderman in part because their iconic look is fully suited up. Also once you start establishing a character can have different looks, people will get used to it, The Doctor has no true appearance for instance.
As a rule, as long as the show itself is good, I am not really going to notice ethnicity and I dont think most other people do either.
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I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spider-Man in part because their iconic look is fully suited up.
I think being white is pretty key to Tony Stark, only because I'd very much want to know the backstory of how a black American got to be the richest man in the world after inheriting a position as the government's primary if not sole weapons supplier from his father during World War II. In a fictional world we're meant to understand closely parallels our own, him having those advantages in America while not being white opens a lot of question about how his planet's history unfolded differently from ours.
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@greenflashlight said in Good TV:
I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spider-Man in part because their iconic look is fully suited up.
I think being white is pretty key to Tony Stark, only because I'd very much want to know the backstory of how a black American got to be the richest man in the world after inheriting a position as the government's primary if not sole weapons supplier from his father during World War II. In a fictional world we're meant to understand closely parallels our own, him having those advantages in America while not being white opens a lot of question about how his planet's history unfolded differently from ours.
And it's good that Marvel is finally addressing these sorts of issues, a la Falcon as the new Cap and inclusion of Isiah Bradley.
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If you want it to be a strong real world pararell, then black american is hardmode but anywhere Asia would hardly raise an eyebrow.
Also if you ever want a relatively young Tony Stark, he cant be the son of a WW2 weapons supplier anyway because timeline doesnt add up, so you have to tinker with the specifics regardless. Original Stark is 80 years old, MCU Stark is 50. In the MCU timeline Howard is 53 years old when Tony is born.
But even if you go with original version, why couldnt Maria Stark be african american and Tony mixed?
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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If you want it to be a strong real world parallel, then black American is hardmode but anywhere Asia would hardly raise an eyebrow.
It's not that I want a real world parallel. It's that if the movie is going raise questions, it should be prepared to answer them, and suddenly Tony's story about how he built a suit that is also a fighter jet is less interesting to me than Howard's story about how he built an industrial empire so powerful it left his kid unanswerable to United States government.
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But even if you go with original version, why couldnt Maria Stark be african american and Tony mixed?
She could. In fact, in Ultimate Marvel she's Latina. However: if Tony were obviously mixed, his experience and the level of privilege he moves in within the society he was raised in would be different.
Being rich and white and being rich and black (even mixed, even if your father is alabaster) is still very different in the U.S.
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But even if you go with original version, why couldnt Maria Stark be african american and Tony mixed?
She could. In fact, in Ultimate Marvel she's Latina. However: if Tony were obviously mixed, his experience and the level of privilege he moves in within the society he was raised in would be different.
Being rich and white and being rich and black (even mixed, even if your father is alabaster) is still very different in the U.S.
What does the audience know about being rich of any color? The rich playboy part of Tony is a fantasy written by people who dont live that life for people who dont live that life. Any resemblence to the realities of inheriting a massive company are accidental.
International audience in particular who are becoming an ever larger portion of total profit would have zero clue.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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But even if you go with original version, why couldnt Maria Stark be african american and Tony mixed?
She could. In fact, in Ultimate Marvel she's Latina. However: if Tony were obviously mixed, his experience and the level of privilege he moves in within the society he was raised in would be different.
Being rich and white and being rich and black (even mixed, even if your father is alabaster) is still very different in the U.S.
What does the audience know about being rich of any color? The rich playboy part of Tony is a fantasy written by people who dont live that life for people who dont live that life. Any resemblence to the realities of inheriting a massive company are accidental.
International audience in particular who are becoming an ever larger portion of total profit would have zero clue.
That's entirely your opinion. There's a whole other school of thought wherein accurate representation of social issues -- even in fantastical allegories -- are an important part of building a narrative and telling a story that resonates (and it doesn't need to resonate with everyone; I have no idea what being black is like, but I still enjoyed Black Panther; I'm sure black people experienced it on a whole other level despite none of them knowing what it's like to live in a ridiculously advanced secret African nation).
That it wouldn't be important to you in no way diminishes its importance to others.
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Imho White Tony isn't a particularly accurate depiction of social issues in the first place so Black Tony would hardly be a change in terms of resonance. Like Batman his wealth exists mostly as a background excuse to justify his toys and like Batman all the wider implications of where that money comes from and how it could be put to better use then luxury toys is ignored for the sake of the power fantasy.
Where Tony is accurate is that he is a very priviledged person who manages to convince himself that his succes means he personally is the solution to all things wrong in the world, something you can see in certain real world CEOs like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. I see no reason why that would be a White only story or fail to resonate if he was another ethnicity.
In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?
In a world where the police murdering an unarmed black person on camera is okay because the black person committed a crime once, it's hard to imagine people being okay with a black man who wears a fighter jet like a suit and has orbital weapon platforms (Veronica) answerable only to him.
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@greenflashlight said in Good TV:
I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spider-Man in part because their iconic look is fully suited up.
I think being white is pretty key to Tony Stark, only because I'd very much want to know the backstory of how a black American got to be the richest man in the world after inheriting a position as the government's primary if not sole weapons supplier from his father during World War II. In a fictional world we're meant to understand closely parallels our own, him having those advantages in America while not being white opens a lot of question about how his planet's history unfolded differently from ours.
I think 'accurate' might not be the right word to use for the discussion as much as 'familiar'. The rich white man trope is familiar, not just in the US but in a lot of the world. But that doesn't mean a rich minority character wouldn't be accurate, even in the US. I don't think even a rich black man would be a huge stretch within the context of super hero entertainment.
But yes, for many people there would be the desire for some type of explanation, even though there are many obvious, simple ones.
Being rich and white and being rich and black (even mixed, even if your father is alabaster) is still very different in the U.S.
That goes down a whole other rabbit whole of the black experience about 'passing'... whew. Too much, even for me.
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@greenflashlight said in Good TV:
In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?
In a world where the police murdering an unarmed black person on camera is okay because the black person committed a crime once, it's hard to imagine people being okay with a black man who wears a fighter jet like a suit and has orbital weapon platforms (Veronica) answerable only to him.
Ugh. Well, that gets into other sticky issues... but I do think that is why the Falcon and Winter Soldier series was good and necessary for Marvel and fans in general rather than Cap just handing over the shield at the end of Endgame and things just moved on like everything was normal.
So bringing it back to good TV... yeah, I recommend Falcon and Winter Soldier.
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As a white guy, something that caught my attention a lot lately was when I was reading the Falcon and the Winter Soldier subreddit - and it's not a spoiler or anything so I won't hide it behind tags here.
But it was a thread in which a black woman was posting being ecstatic about Bucky hitting on Sam's sister, who is black woman herself and not paler skinned, mixed heritage, straight-haired or in any way a more... streamlined potential romantic interest.
I had never realized it before but apparently that is pretty rare, especially for one of MCU's premier single hot dudes to show interest in someone like her.
So yes, the racial diversity seems to absolutely be important even in our shows about guys with vibranium arms who are also former Cold War weapons and WW2 veterans. All they need to do sometimes is look at a black girl and go hey, how you doin'?. It's the small things as much as the big ones.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel Agreed. It was the more subtle things that made the show good. Another was that as much as race was a theme of the show, I can't remember any white characters that were racist (maybe I missed some). Any negative issues with race were focused within the black characters and their experience with America (as a whole and as a Captain).
So they completely bypassed the old, overdone 'whites are racist' cliche and went to more relevant and dramatic themes of the black experience within the US and the dynamic of how we feel a part of America and also apart from it and how do we reconcile both of those things, which are almost universal for black Americans.
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@warma-sheen said in Good TV:
@arkandel Agreed. It was the more subtle things that made the show good. Another was that as much as race was a theme of the show, I can't remember any white characters that were racist (maybe I missed some). Any negative issues with race were focused within the black characters and their experience with America (as a whole and as a Captain).
So they completely bypassed the old, overdone 'whites are racist' cliche and went to more relevant and dramatic themes of the black experience within the US and the dynamic of how we feel a part of America and also apart from it and how do we reconcile both of those things, which are almost universal for black Americans.
I definitely didn't sense any overtly racist characters either, though I wasn't looking for them or anything, and as such might have missed some. But it was as you say more about the experience of racism from the PoV of the black people.
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In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?
Not at all. I liked Connor Mason's character very much in Timeless as the eccentric billionaire inventor.
But I think it gets murkier when you have established properties. People come at it with expectations about the characters. There's more to Tony Stark than just "billionaire playboy". He has a backstory, which comes with a certain set of baggage.
For example, I didn't like it when RDM's Battlestar gender-swapped Starbuck. Not because I have anything against inclusion (on the contrary, I think it's vital), but because I had this "Dirk Benedict" image of this character etched in my head and it created a weird cognitive dissonance. I would much rather them have reimagined Sheba or Athena, or promoted a new character.
I get that it's different in comics, since there are already so many variants of characters. And that there's some marketing value in making a "female 007" versus a new and original spy character. At the end of the day, I applaud having more diversity. I just sometimes wonder if there's maybe a better way to get there.
