I rizzed in with a W cap from Ohio 🎶

Pull me into the plot with believable and relatable characters and I’ll never question why they’re the race/gender/sexual orientation they are.

That’s the right attitude to have about it. 👍 Audiences love closure and they love verisimilitude. If I’m watching a movie and I’m shown how (or can reasonably assume from context that) a character having certain traits makes sense, it doesn’t strain suspension of disbelief at all and can turn a great movie into an outstanding one. And I think that’s something that screenwriters need to pay heavy attention to, because there are no bad ideas, there’s only bad execution.

In fact, just for fun, let’s take the two movies you mentioned as examples. I haven’t watched either of them and know little about them. If you were to tell me “write scripts for adaptations of these two stories where the main characters are black”, it would be lazy, disrespectful to the viewer, and arguably even racist to just do that without giving it any forethought - they’d be as out of place as a white man in Wakanda. But if you put down, for example, “this adaptation of Annie takes place in the cultural melting pot of modern-day New York City” or “Ariel and her sisters are all different races because Triton has taken many wives from all over the world”, and then make that clear through context clues, now the idea of them being black no longer feels like an afterthought, it feels like it was a conscious decision and that time and attention was given to making them feel like they belong. And while it would frankly be better for studios to knock it off with the constant rehashing and write new stories (not everyone likes Jordan Peele’s stuff, but few would call it derivative), a remake done with care and respect is better than one done without them.

A sharp wit is more attractive than any physical feature.

Screenshotted for posterity.

On that point we are in perfect agreement. If it makes sense for the story and the actors are being picked based on merit, diversity will only serve to improve the end product. I personally would prefer more original films and fewer remakes, but I doubt I’m alone in that statement. 🤷‍♂️

Okay, that Breakfast at Tiffany’s example is definitely in bad taste. Thankfully, as far as I’m aware, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in movies anymore.

That being said, to say it’s “a positive” to outright replace white people in movies is also in bad taste. More specifically, it runs counter to your message, as it not only implies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory to be true (thus causing racists to feel vindicated), it also reads as racist toward non-white people by implying that the best they can hope for is white actors’ sloppy seconds instead of their own stories. Media is not a zero-sum game. There don’t need to be fewer white cowboys for there to be more black ones.

People like increased diversity when it’s tasteful and meaningful and adds value to the finished product. Unfortunately, I keep seeing examples of people associated with movies continually adding distasteful and meaningless pandering instead, continually dangling rage bait by insulting men (especially white men) on camera, then continually acting surprised when their movies continually make no money because people won’t watch a movie if you continually tell them it’s “not for them”. So no, I would argue that it’s not “too risky”, because if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t keep doing it.

Just to clarify to anyone who hasn’t watched it, his character was NOT Japanese, he was an American soldier brought to Japan to train Japanese recruits before being captured by the samurai and slowly learning their ways. I shouldn’t even NEED to say that, but we apparently live in a world where characters having their ethnicities swapped with no explanation or forethought or deeper meaning is just a matter of course now.

Care to name any examples? Because redhead characters being played by black actors is so prevalent it has its own hashtag, so if there are really decades of it, I feel like I should know.

Also, because I feel it might be necessary, this is a reminder to anyone reading this that A) racism is not solved with more racism, and B) you can, in fact, be racist against white people. Patricia Bidol-Padva’s personal opinion does not control the English language, and discrimination does not become okay just because it’s against a group you personally don’t like.

You’re the one jumping on me for merely mentioning them and now indirectly accusing me of being a Nazi. At this point you’re just deliberately ignoring the actual point that I very clearly stated. Don’t pretend you’re taking the high road, it’s not convincing anyone. Own your own bullshit instead of telling other people it’s theirs.

Oh yes, your “three-day special military operation” that’s been going on for, what, three, four years now? You have no business calling other people brainwashed.

They’re called Uyghurs. You’d know that if you got your news from somewhere besides Hexbear.

Wow. You really are just mask-off Russian government propaganda, aren’t you? There’s this thing called nuance and only the most vile of people refuse to see it. This “west bad, kys” nonsense isn’t just stupid, it’s boring. Go back to the drawing board and try again.

Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia about that situation, it’s sourced from articles written by people with victim complexes who want to control the narrative. My point is that BlackRock is too liberal to support Trump.

Maybe so, but they’re also on the opposite side of the aisle. The company that owns Sweet Baby Inc. and deliberately pushes inappropriate levels of DEI via bribery-with-extra-steps probably isn’t about to aid or endorse a Republican, especially one who’s that brazen about the shitty things he does.