memes

I think people need to figure out if the race of a character is culturally significant in any way in the context of the story and IRL. Like, part of Black Panther's whole deal is he's from Africa. Hard to budge on that character's ethnicity. Ariel from the Little Mermaid could literally be any ethnicity and the story would remain the same. Crying about white erasure is pathetic when no actual culture relevant to white western people is being lost.

But Ariel wasn't white. She was a fish person. So they were free to do whatever.

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.

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.

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

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.