[ SECRET POST #4554 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4554 ⌋

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

01.



__________________________________________________



02.
[Dragonheart]


__________________________________________________



03.
[Dark]


__________________________________________________



04.
[Good Omens]


__________________________________________________



05.
[Murder Mystery]


__________________________________________________



06.
[Becoming Jane]











Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 18 secrets from Secret Submission Post #652.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Pepper being black changes nothing about the plot or the character and makes the show more realistic. Plus that kid's adorable.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this is a weird criticism.

I remember this with The Hunger Games, too, with a black character.

Jeez, people. Most of the time a character's skin color isn't relevant to anything, unless you're shooting some story where it specifically is, like Get Out.

Gawd.

[(Anonymous)]

With a black character who was explicitly black in the book, no less.

[(Anonymous)]

+1 seriously

[(Anonymous)]

I've heard it argued that if being black changes nothing about the story or characterization, it's poor representation. Because a black person's lived experience is fundamentally different from a white person's.

[(Anonymous)]

That's the same argument used to argue that white people shouldn't write black characters at all (and straight people shouldn't write gay characters, etc). It's racism pretending to be progressive. A character's race only matters if the story is about their struggles as a person of that race. Nothing about making a character black says their entire life is exactly the same as a white person's. You don't get to see every moment of their life when they're just a character, and not everyone's life is so fundamentally influenced by their race that it's apparent in their every moment in the story.

[(Anonymous)]

To be fair most people's depictions of gay people I've read are pretty ignorant and their writing suffers because of it, I'm not talking about fanfiction either but instead various published media I've read (novels and comics). It's like "you realise a gay person would never do/say/behave like this... right?" Hahaha

[(Anonymous)]

Except I've heard that line about things I have done before because not all non-straight people act the same and there's nothing in the world that none of us would ever do. It fucks me up when people say things like that because it makes me wonder if I'm straight after all, despite, you know, liking women. But no wait, I've done something you said no queer person would ever do, so I guess I'm straight?

[(Anonymous)]

That really depends on

1: How important the character is to the overall plot and how much they feature. Hardships or not, changing an eleven year old girl from ginger to black is not going to change a story about averting the apocalypse, nor should it. The character in question is an eleven year old kid, who is one of three friends of one of the major characters. In the book she's gobby and opinionated, in the show she's gobby and opinionated. Do you expect there to be a random aside about whether she was bullied at school, or something?

2: Where the story is set. Not every setting has racial tension or gives a black person a different 'lived experience' to a white person. Something set in the far future, or in another world, or a fantasy setting not rooted in reality, for instance, is very unlikely to require changing if a character gets a race lift for the sake of diversity.

So that could be argued, but it's also not always the case.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the argument would be that you can't just make the switch and assume that nothing will change.

Not that something will fundamentally change in every case, but that you have to think through the implications.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that's true. I do think there are situations where you have to think about how a character's race (or gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, etc.) will affect their decisions and other behavior, but this is rarely true for minor characters and extras and may not be true for many supporting characters by virtue of the fact that we aren't seeing them in situations where their background would change the plot or otherwise conflict with what they are shown doing on screen.

When it doesn't matter, then it's best that casting be diverse to reflect reality (in whatever way is appropriately diverse for a situation, of course).

If a white man writes a screenplay with a crowd scene, and the race and gender of the people in the crowd doesn't matter, should all the extras in the crowd be white men because to do otherwise is poor representation? Absolutely not.