[ SECRET POST #5469 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5469 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 40 secrets from Secret Submission Post #783.
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

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I definitely agree that the anon, who compared changes in the media to real life child abusers was beyond the pale. But fans of the new stuff often mistake any kind of unfavorable comparison between the old and the new as a personal attack. I get that it can be tiring to listen to something you like being critiqued all the time, but that's no reason to go into the other extreme and insist that the new is objectively better, or the change is not a "real" change because reasons. And that's unfortunately what a lot of people do. And creators of the new media, who actively choose to bait the fans of the "old" canon with the misleading promotional material for the new one, really have no right to act surprised when it backfires on them.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

All I can say is that IME it has been generally more common for fans who hate the old stuff to be the ones generating the toxicity.

And creators of the new media, who actively choose to bait the fans of the "old" canon with the misleading promotional material for the new one, really have no right to act surprised when it backfires on them.

Even if you're annoyed at promotional material that you think is misleading, that doesn't justify toxic backlash. And fan backlash is almost never in practice actually targeted at anyone involved in making a decision like that. Even if TPTB straight-up lied to peoples' faces, yelling at other fans, or actors, or whatever isn't going to do anything about that. I don't agree with the idea that fan backlash is somehow justified as some kind of cosmic balancing of the scales.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

I don't approve of toxicity, but I feel like people are too keen on drawing an equal sign between everyone disappointed with the changes and the very, very tiny toxic minority. It almost seems manufactured, like they go out of their way to bait and mislead knowing full well that some people will overreact, just so they could dismiss all criticism towards their work as either coming from toxic haters or being made in support of those toxic haters.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

Why do you think new leads are always ethnic, or women? Because the creators know what they are doing is often a crock of shit, but are relying on the performatively woke newbies to scream down anyone pointing out that they've written a crock of shit. Why write good material when you can just throw a woman or a black guy, or a black woman, in as a lead character and paint any critics as being anti-woke.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

Yikes.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

This is mainly because all-white reboots are rare these days, so every reboot is going to feature a diverse cast, and since vast majority of reboots are uninspired cashgrabs, the results are what they are. I feel bad for the actors, who are finally allowed a chance to be in a major franchise, only to be thrown into a poorly-written garbage and often just delegated to the sidelines of it anyway, while the dumb rednecks are blaming the actors rather than the writers, as if the writing was somehow improved by casting a white male actor in the role.

And I also agree that studios often have zero desire to make a genuine attempt at writing diverse characters well. Why try, when a legion of fans of these reboots and sequels can be trusted to dismiss all criticism of the problems in the writing of the new characters with cries of racism and sexism? Just look at how people used to vehemently deny issues with Finn's writing until John Boyega called out Disney on sidelining his character, and they could no longer dismiss the criticism of Finn's character arc and role in the plot as just lies of racist antis.

It's not even a new phenomenon - if you look up Knox' Decalogue written in the Golden Age of detective fiction in the 20s, one of the rules states that if a story features a Chinese character, then the story is almost guaranteed to be in poor quality, simply because it became such a common trope in pulp fiction to feature Chinese side characters after some of the better, more successful writers of those times featured such characters in their works. And those characters were hardly written well.

That said, there are some notable exceptions and I hope that as diverse casts become more normalized in original fiction, they will no longer be associated so strongly with shitty reboots.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

This.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

Just about all you have said is true, except for the bit about Boyega. He acted like a whiny little pissbaby over his role in an ensemble cast. He knew he was coming into an ensemble cast, and for two movies he got big roles in the ensemble, but the plot for the third movie had a slightly reduced ensemble role, and he threw such a tantrum he almost turned himself into a white boy with his sense of entitlement over not being the undisputed face of the franchise.

Now it is true that Disney should have been better at PR and at stepping in to put some firewalls in between him and the public, and he was right about Disney hanging him out to dry when it came to taking flak from racists, but he was dead wrong about demanding to be the main face of the franchise when he knowingly signed up to be a part of an ensemble. He had totally unrealistic expectations about his role, and he knew it.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

He was the leading new male character in TFA. The way that it played in TFA is absolutely not that he was just one of the ensemble. I don't know what Disney said to him at the time of casting but his role in TFA was extremely significant.

And then on the other hand, describing his role in TROS as "slightly reduced ensemble role" is wrong, because he had absolutely nothing of interest to do in the film (of course, it doesn't help that the film is just awful in general). Comparing his characters' role in TFA and TROS, the difference is massive and it's reasonable for him to have expected to have had a more substantial role. That doesn't mean that he was right in terms of how he went about reacting to it, but he / his character did really kind of get shafted.

Re: AYRT

[philstar22]

This is true. But the big problem was the fandom backlash to TLJ and how it did things, and in response the TROS creators decided to force Finn and Poe to tag along with Rey in a trio, when previously Poe had been a more minor character than Finn, and focus on giving fans lots of fanservice moments to the detriment of anyone except Rey and Kylo getting coherent plotlines.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

That's bullshit.

The primary reasons that large corporations like Disney cast women and non-white actors is mercenary: they think that they'll sell more tickets, especially to moviegoers who are women or non-white or who don't live in the United States. They looked at the success of the Fast & Furious franchise, which everyone in Hollywood regarded as very marginal and second-rate until Fast 5 & 6 made huge gobs of money largely because of its appeal to non-white moviegoers in the US and internationally, and they decided that they would like to have some of that money too.

Of course that's not the only reason. There are benefits of good publicity associated with it. And another reason is that sometimes a creative person involved wanted to do it that way. Look at Ghostbusters - that definitely didn't cast women because they wanted to shut down critics, it cast women because everything Paul Feig has made in 10 years has had women in it and because Bridesmaids was extremely profitable. So there are all of these types of things going on.

Now, are studios willing to cynically use diversity as a posture to shut down critics after the fact? Yes, absolutely, this is something that they do. But it's not the primary driver of why they make the casting decisions they do in the first place.