[ SECRET POST #2718 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2718 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Mayim Bialik]


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[Pacific Rim]











Notes:

Might be another 12 am day. Response time will be slow, sorry.

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 016 secrets from Secret Submission Post #388.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 2 - this is getting spammy now ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[gabzillaz]

Frozen fans complaining about black people not being in the movie? In which universe?

And is not like OUAT's fandom is perfect.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, ye of pure mind. Check out tumblr and see the wrath of the SJWs.

[arcadiaego]

That was people who *weren't* fans of Frozen.

[gabzillaz]

Those aren't frozen fans, though. Frozen fans defend the movie from that kind of criticism.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I have gotten into debate here on F!S about how realistic or unrealistic it would be to have Elsa - a character in a pseudo-Scandinavian royal family - be black. I think at least one time someone used the "LOL, it has magic so it doesn't need to be realistic!" card, which is a bit of a pet peeve for me.

[gabzillaz]

Was that a Frozen fan, though? Frozen fans will bring the "historical accurate" walls of text to justify Disney having only white people in the movie(when the original story wasn't 100% white people and when Disney already translated a german fairy tale and had a black protagonist starring it it)

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I admit, I haven't watched The Princess and the Frog, but just going on simple facts like the one that the german tale was shifted to a setting where large numbers of POCs is not only common but expected makes me think it would work.

Frozen didn't do that. Arendelle comes of as a Scandinavian country, just like the original tale, so being able to believe in a race-shift is a bit more difficult for me. Could they have race-shifted? Maybe, if they totally moved the story to an apparent area of the world where the majority of the population would be expected to be POC. North Asian Snow Queen? Tibetan? Inuit? Maybe that would have worked, but they made it Scandinavian, so I expected a white royal family.

(I can't believe in an African Snow Queen would pass, simply because of a lack of snowy climate in Africa.)

A few more POC background characters may not have been so bad though, especially if they were visitors attending the coronation.

[gabzillaz]

Well, Frozen has nothing to do with the original tale, not to mention that they removed several characters that were not white (like the Robber Girl). Most of those characters were also female, which would have solved some of the representation issues of the movie (maybe people wouldn't be so bothered about Elsa and Anna looking like their mother's twin sisters if there were other female characters, but the rest of the cast is all male). Kristoff could have been a female character, but then we wouldn't have the forced love subplot.

Arendelle is fictional, the only thing stopping Disney from not including POC is... well nothing really, they simply didn't want to, it has nothing to do with historical or geographical accuracy (Elsa's dress, just to name one thing, is anything but historically accurate) And if they were going to change the original story so much, why not set it in Japan? The Andes?

There were POC in the background... but that's the issue, they were background.

[(Anonymous)]

Considering the "realism" defense was that black people can't make vitamin D from sunlight so they die in cold climates.... errr...

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I must have missed that line.

My stance is simply that Scandinavian countries are not the native lands of people with black skin, so I have a problem believing a pseudo-Scandinavian royal family could be POC, especially in the apparent past era Frozen was set. (And as far as I know, even now, all the Scandinavian royal families are still white.)

[(Anonymous)]

How long does it have to be before they're considered native? Yes, the royal families have been white, but historically there have been black people living in Denmark since well before Frozen was set, who live there now, who consider themselves native.

There also weren't any female ruling monarchs native to Denmark until the 1940s, so should they have had Anna and Elsa be boys instead? Having the ruling monarch be a woman is probably more unbelievable.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Is Arandelle automatically Denmark? I know it's based on a Danish story, but I've also seen people say it seems more like Norway than Denmark.

And what era is it set too? Is it a realistic era to have POCs in the population? I know there's that Tumblr account, MedievalPOC? I think? But I also have seen enough about them to believe that while some of their features are an insight into the presence of POCs, they don't always get things right (there was one picture they declared POC, but other portraits of the same person showed him white, if not a really fair skin-toned white. They also ascribe American ideas of bigotry on countries whose bigotry works along different lines than skin colour).

But as I said in another comment, a few more background POCs would have been nice.

If Disney had stuck to accuracy, the movie would not have been about pair of royal sisters, but a commoner boy and girl, and the Snow Queen would have been evil, and less the queen of the nation and more a anthropomorphic representation of winter.

[(Anonymous)]

It does have a link about it.
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/62902854107/this-is-a-collection-of-art-depicting-people-of and I think the people in it are pretty obviously not just tanned. I've seen most people guess early 1800s for Frozen.

The biggest issue I've seen is confusion over the Sami, because most European countries have a much different idea of 'white' than the USA. So USA they'd be considered white, Scandinavia says not.

And they already changed so much about the myth that aside from a queen and snow, there's not much there. They actually seemed to pull a lot more from The Snowman.

I mean I personally think it was fine, the movie was well done, I loved a lot of the details, I just think Historical Accuracy is a bit of a dumb hill to die on, when talking about a Disney movie. It's a bit like yelling that Hercules can't be Hera's son because the whole point of the myths is her hatred of him being a bastard and trying to kill him is what forced him to be a hero, Disney's going to do what they want to do. And if they want to make a character black, they will, and if they don't, they won't, and historical accuracy has little to nothing to do with it.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think when it all boils down, my real line of thought is something like "You really think Disney would put POC in a "Snow Queen" movie? You're being a bit too hopeful if their willingness to give out representation!".

I like the movie too, but I remain unsurprised by Disney making the whole thing very, very white. I do however suffer from Dull Surprise that people expected it to be anything but very, very white.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I'm more surprised at how viciously people defend it being white as The Only Option. I mean, they could have gone back to Robin Hood type stuff and had them be foxes and Kristoff a reindeer and all talking animals. they could have been robots on a distant planet and Elsa glitched and messed up the climate controls. It could have been set in Japan and referenced Yuki-Onna myths.

Instead, they did what they did. Which is fine, but it's a bit like the recent kerfuffle over the video game company that tried to claim a female playable option would be double the work and take twice as much time and money to animate than a male playable option so they literally couldn't manage it and had to go with a dude instead, and everyone was going "..... whatnow?"

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of my other comments in this thread said something the like - they could have transplanted to another place, but they didn't and stuck with a pseudo-Scandinaivian land full of white people. Including Elsa, and the unambiguously white Sami-clothed Kristoff.

Hey has anyone ever considered that Disney looked up Sami and saw piles of people who look unambiguously white and thought that was the unquestioned image of Sami?

Ehh... that video game anecdote does sound really skeevy.

[(Anonymous)]

The biggest issue I've seen is confusion over the Sami, because most European countries have a much different idea of 'white' than the USA. So USA they'd be considered white, Scandinavia says not.

Nope. In Scandinavian eyes, the Sami are white, just like the Romani are white and Jews are white and people speak Spanish in Mexico but they're probably white there too. The concept of POC is very American, and Europe uses a different language (literally) when we talk about ethnic or cultural minorities.

[(Anonymous)]

There were POCs in the background I don't know how much more people expect. Should they have made the servants POCs? That was probably accurate. I be that would go over well. Maybe Hans? Oh wait he was evil can't do that. The little paranoid guy who's name I've forgotten? Well he was kinda bad too can't do that either.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I do believe you have a point there.

And in all the debate about this matter, it is always either questioning whether Kristoff is too white for a vaguely-Sammi guy (I cannot judge on that), or wishing vehemently that Elsa was POC.

Like in a few other comments, maybe they could have gone even further in altering the story and transplanted it to a place and culture with more POC, but the movie is what it is - vaguely pseudo-Scandinavian, white a population of mostly vaguely Scandinavian white people.