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EmpressFunk — Whitewashin' and Racebendin'
Published: 2011-03-09 18:21:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 26664; Favourites: 737; Downloads: 293
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My feelings. Lemme show you them.:/
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Comments: 199
Also, there IS an afro-american Spiderman. As for Idris Elba, Heimdall in Marvel Comics doesn't even HAVE a face under that helm, meaning that he could be literally every ethnicity, especially considering that, in the Thor Comics, multi-ethnic Gods are a thing (Hogunn is Asian, for Odin's sake!).
Also, about people bitching and moaning about a black actor for Johnny Storm: flash news! Being white was never a defining part of his character.
He's not like Luke Cage, who is kept black because his background shows him as a guy from the ghetto, unjustly put into jail because of racism.
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I heard the white girl playing Katara only got that gig because she was the niece of one of the producers.
Certainly not because of her talents
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I salute you. And have you ever noticed how the black character always dies first in 99.9% of movies? Or they get eliminated in the first couple of rounds of any competition show? It's fun to count sometimes XP
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You make an incredibly good point.
P.S. Have you seen Nostalgia Critic's review on the Last Airbender movie? I think you'd like it.
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I agree with you. Movies don't need a white lead to be successful or to appeal to white people. My favorite movie, Precious, has a black female lead.
The Last Airbender was a trainwreck. The race changes were the worst, but trying to cram an entire season into one movie is well-nigh impossible. The exposition only made it worse. The cartoon was already doing great - they didn't need a movie.
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This is so true, thanks for doing this everyone needs to see this
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And yet they still say discrimination isn't a problem anymore.
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HELL YESS! Watching Last Airbender made me SO MAD especially after growing up with all the seasons/books as a kid. But Aang aside, all this is true.
PS>I would've liked to see Black Spiderman as well
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Oh my gosh yes. Aang would've been the only person they could've gotten away with casting as white. But characters like Toph and Zuko were obviously meant to be Northern Chinese. That pissed me off too.
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I sort of both agree and disagree with you on this.
- Maybe it's because I've been a fan for more than half my life, but it bothers me when characters I know and love are given a/replaced with a minority for the sake of having a minority. For instance, in a movie of Marvel's (non-Ultimate) Spider-Man, I was very much against making him black because to me Peter Parker is a well-developed character and I don't think he'd be the same person if he was black any more than my life would be perfectly the same if I were a different race. Your culture is a part of you, and does have an influence, so I don't like random swapping. I'm also upset with DCs trend of taking well-established characters and just making them minorities in what seems more like a marketing campaign than a well thought out plan. The Question was one of my favorite heroes, but they killed him and replaced him with a Latino-lesbian character, Renee Montoya, who I liked in Batman Beyond, but when you kill a well-established hero and expect me to just be like "yeah, I like the Question, I'll keep following this person who isn't the character I like," it causes resentment. I also don't like that they "rebooted" Alan Scott, who traditionally had a wife and children, to be gay now. If they created new characters, or let new minority versions work alongside the traditional versions (I'd be OK with two Questions), I'd be much happier.
-Likewise, I'm all for creating strong minority characters in their own right. It boggles my mind when Hollywood disregards color (because, as I said, it influences the character tremendously). Bane wasn't Bane in Batman to me because Scottish and South American are *not* the same thing. And though I didn't see Airbender (I heard it was horrible) it boggled my mind that all the characters were white in a show with such strong Asian influence. John Stewart, who is black, is a fine Green Lantern and strong character in his own right, but with all of DC's worries about representing minorities, he's underplayed in the movies and comics (Even though DC seems to be on a binge of killing or rebooting white heroes to replace them with minorities). Likewise, there are a number of strong black characters in G.I. Joe, but they felt a need to make white characters black instead of just using the available (good!) black characters for the movie.... although that movie wasn't so hot, either.... Ah, Hollywood.
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Your first point makes it sound as if Marvel and DC are only killing characters to replace them with ~minorities~. Given that comic book characters die/are rebooted ALL THE DAMN TIME, it's a bit of a fallacy to suggest that the few times they're replaced with PoC/other minorities are just like REPRESENTATIVE of the phenomenon.
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In fairness, I probably sound more bitter about it because I hate pointless deaths and reboots period. I think I complained for three months after the last time they killed Nightcrawler just because they obviously didn't know what to do with him anymore. And I'm still bitter that they brought Jean Grey back the second time, let alone the sixth, etc.
It also seems to me that when they want to create new minority characters, they often overdo it and create too many characters (including caucasians), don't develop any of their personalities well for lack of "screentime" and end up calling the book a failure and canning it. I believe New X-Men (the Academy one) ran for slightly more than three years, had a nice melting pot of characters (Dust, a Muslim, being one of my favorites) then drove itself into the ground by killing probably 12 of the 24 heroes they created and replacing them with 6 more. Around that time, they also did Avengers Academy, with a NEW motley crew of young heroes, and drove that book into the ground with little character development after less than two years.
I'm just saying, if they want to create minority characters with the standing power of, say, Spider-Man, they need to create NEW loveable, complex minority characters, invest TIME in them and develop their characters, and keep them in stories long and often enough to allow readers to know and love them. I mean really, even Wolverine wasn't popular at first. Instead of looking for an overnight sensation or an "easy" fix, like replacing an already-established character with a character that is not them, which creates reader backlash.
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True.
Part of this is that the media thinks " AMG IF WE GIVE A WHITE PERSON A POC'S LEAD WHITE PPLE WILL WATCH OUR MOVIE DESU"
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I write PoC characters all the time and would really despise it if some hypothetical Hollywood producer whitewashed them. Fortunately most of my PoC characters are straight-out black (as in dark-skinned African) instead of ethnically ambiguous, so it would take a lot more effort to whitewash them.
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okay first off the Avatar movie was a bad example of everything. Its just a God Awful abomination made by a director who has never made a good movie and the movies he received credit for were strictly controlled by the people who owned the story. Not the case in the Avatar movie. Secondly who honestly gives a fuck about the race of actors in movies when the movies themselves are awfull. Now i can understand how someone could be offended if a white person is playing the role of a persian prince or even the whole Bane thing but seriously getting pissy over a person being cast into a role for a fictional race people. Oh and i was upset about the Donald Glover thing two.
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Its a fantastic example. The main leads are brown and they chose white people as the heros and POCs as the villains.
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Wonderful! It seems like such a simple thing to grasp and yet people just don't get it
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THANK YOU!!!
I love you for this, I've ranted on this many a time. Especially about Last Airbender. I always want to smack the shit out of casting sometimes.
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THIS. YES.
More people need to know about this. C'mon son indeed.
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Wait there's something totally wrong about what you're saying-
The Avatar movie never happened. Say it with me:
There was no movie based off of Avatar
If anyone asks, no such movie was made. Nope.
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I bet that's Ba Sing Se's new brainwashing mantra.
"You are safe here. There is no movie in Ba Sing Se. There never was a movie based off of Avatar..." XD
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Let's hope your message gets through to the movie execs.
Until then, we'll have to look to foreign cinema to see actors of non-white races.
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I have to agree with a lot of you're saying. I've always wondered why they didn't hire Inuit actors to play them in TLA...
Sad.
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insta-minority! that made me LOL XD
it's really a shame that white is the basic when it comes to casting :/ it's even worst if the movie is based off a (comic) book and the character is not supposed to be white =______=
if you create a story and imagine everyone white, that's one thing (a lame thing though). but if it's not your story but you still decide to take a white actor I'm just like "what? even though it was written that the character is dark skinned you still pictured them white???? >.< how fucking dumb and narrow minded are you?"
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Whitewashing is gross, ahhhh. I'm REALLY glad I never saw that Last Airbender movie. I'm hesitant to watch Korra, too, from what I hear of the way her character is portrayed (and voiced by a white lady). :C
Also, I love the Norse pantheon, and while the Thor movie was entirely goofy, I was pretty stoked that the guy who played him wasn't white. White people were all pissed off about a black guy in this white-person movie (and really, the ONLY black guy), but he ended up being by far the most like his character should be. Thor guy was kind of a doofus. Anthony Hopkins is awesome, but makes a lousy Odin. Loki just sat around simpering and looking like a porcelain doll.
Heimdall though? Huge badass, and actually accurate to the character. He was probably the only aspect about that movie I liked, honestly.
There's a really excellent racebent drawing of the Marvel Thor and Loki, I wish I could find it now...
Being white, I have my own racism to sort out, and learning about whitewashing and racebending has been pretty important. I've never done the whitewashing, but in the past I've drawn PoC characters as white, and didn't even think about how it could be bad.
Although, I have seen people try to racebend white characters into PoC, but fail miserably mostly because they only do it to the villain or something and keep the main character white. :/
Er, rambling!
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Thank you for making this. People seriously need to stop and think before they cast/draw/paint. And that last scene - ugh, TLA pissed me off so much.
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That last image. I never saw TLA because I was so angry that they ruined one of my favourite shows but I can't believe they'd be so ... I don't even have a word for the amount of rage I am feeling. Thank you for making this. I think everyone should read it.
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Wow this is completely perfect and wonderful and blessed let me love you???
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This is awesome and you should feel awesome because you are awesome <3
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Thank you so much for making this, it's fantastic!
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So much win.
It's absurd they're still this retrograde and racist, it's stupid from every point of view, even from their beloved marketing standpoint: people - all people - pay attention to this stuff. Companies give themselves a bad name by whitewashing everything that comes their way.
Example, I didn't go see the last airbender because of the whitewashing, and I'm white. Granted, they didn't go bankrupt because of this, but just wait.
This kind of thing is just not acceptable anymore, especially because movies and tv make up a great part of kid's education.
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