rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

not even a shred of lol tbh

xposts DJP otm

"LOL, all these kids are growing up to be racist monsters"

both times collins describes rue physically, she says the same thing -- brown skin, resembles prim in size and demeanor. same words both time. bad writing, but it's explicit and she makes sure to point out that she ONLY resembles prim in size and demeanor.

cinna's only described by his clothes and makeup, so these people are literally getting mad that the film didn't reach inside their head and extract the assumption they made about his skin color. the ridiculous thing is that lenny kravitz was probably the best casting decision they made. i've never said this about him, but he was perfect. he totally embodies the tranquility and sincerity of the character. people suck.

revoke their entertainment privileges imo

Rue and Thresh's skin is described not even simply as "brown", but "dark brown." And Cinna is described as brown, too, IIRC.

I'm just imagining the children of the corn fantasy world which these readers must be imagining when they read the books, also giving the gasface towards the people who are saying the movie should have "stuck to the book"

xp I don't think his skin is described -- only that he has green eyes, brown hair, and gold eyeliner.

p sure 90% of the readers just imagined tim gunn

Or that Tom guy from Queer Eye

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjPao2yjRk4

^^ vid not racist

God fucking dammit that hunger games thing is so depressing to me

you guys, that has been going on for months since the casting was first announced

can't speak for anybody else but I'm p. sure I've never clicked through to any article whose title was any variant of "______ cast to play role of ________" - like, even if I give a shit, all my questions will have been answered by the time I'm done reading the article's title

but yeah in any case this is fucking depressing stuff

you guys, that has been going on for months since the casting was first announced

yes, but its kind of infuriating that jezebel and other places are stirring the shit up AGAIN. like, it was maybe noteworthy the first time, but STOP giving voice to these morons.

eh, I sort of get that, but in the wake of the Treyvon Martin shooting I don't think it's actually a bad idea to point out exactly how baseline racist US society is

fair point, i suppose

I agree, in theory, but i'm not sure how well posting the tweets of thirteen-year-old morons does that. Millions of people will have read the books or seen the film, some of them are going to be racist jackasses. It's difficult to ascertain how large a percentage they form.

how are jezebel and other places the ones stirring up shit, rather than the people actually saying the shit

"let's just ignore it and it'll go away" has proven to be a p ineffective strategy

Why do you have to keep telling me that people think racist things? If we just talked less about it, it'd go away!

most fucked up part are the ppl who think that Rue not being white ruins the idea of the character, aka a shy, quiet, innocent naif type. bc what? black ppl can't be those things?????

yeah I agree w/ DJP and zachlyon - "it's 2012 and racism is fixed!" is a p common argument that needs to be shot down

american teens betrayed, deceived, tricked into caring about fictional black people

I blame liberal hollyweird

lenny kravitz is in this fucking thing? lol.
it is weird that anyone would care what color the characters would be in a fiction adaptation in any case. like, what's the goddamn point? they don't match the images in your head?
book is sitting by my bed, it is pretty dire 20 pages in.

I am perfectly happy with Lenny Kravitz being in movies and not inflicting his music on us anymore.

xp i have learnt recently that despite the truism that the book is always better than the movie, this is actually not always the case. cf game of thrones.

i am learning that by reading goThrones now! i am like three unnecessary paragraphs away from just jumping to book two

I agree w/zachlyon that Kravitz was an inspired choice!

in the wake of the Treyvon Martin shooting I don't think it's actually a bad idea to point out exactly how baseline racist US society is

OTMFM

xxp for GoT i recommend a) just watching the tv show b) if you must read ahead, read the wiki summaries of the books

hm. i think i'm gonna wait to watch season 2 until it's all on the tivo. That worked well for season 1, might as well.

it is weird that anyone would care what color the characters would be in a fiction adaptation in any case. like, what's the goddamn point? they don't match the images in your head?

... yeah, that's kind of the point there, yeah.

exactly - for example, seeing Ford Prefect portrayed by Mos Def was kind of a shock, since I remembered the book describing him as a tall, proper Englishman, sort of the antithesis of cool

obviously it all matters very little, though I do think the Asian community complaining about the movie 21 had a point, since in that case their ethnicity actually did matter in the story

seems like kind of a dumb point! don't go see the movie if you want to see things the way you see them!

There's this thing, right, called Harry Potter...

Actually that's not fair, but there's definitely this thing called Lord of the Rings.

here's a dirty little secret: i never liked the lotr gollum design, looked nothing like what I thought he should be

just to head off another 40 posts of people missing the point, the problem isn't people getting irritated at characters in a movie based on a book not looking like how they imagined them (because this will happen in every movie based on a book) but people thinking that a character being black when they didn't expect them to be black ruined the movie because they are huge racists

oh well in that case fuck em

it is weird that anyone would care what color the characters would be in a fiction adaptation in any case

not very weird that readers project their own race onto (sparely described) characters as a means of identifying w/ them, i guess? but it is sad and stupid that race is a commonly accepted shorthand for character types / traits. america, fwiw.

america, fwiw.

not much, apparently

article drops a nice spoiler btw

just to head off another 40 posts of people missing the point

No no this is shocking, I was totally unaware that was what was going on here.

xpost - except maybe forks and elmo are actually unaware? - it's not that people project their race onto generic fictional characters which sucks but is probably not going anywhere any time soon, it's the twin poles of "I overlooked that Thresh was black" and "I really liked Cinna so he can't be black", and especially their intersection in "But Rue is supposed to be nice and good and so I will ignore and indeed agrily deny that she's explicitly not white in the book"

that's basically what elmo is saying

as i read him anyways

not to be faux naive but the idea of somebody rejecting a fictional character based on their skin color is just too ludicrous for me to take seriously

this would all be easier if we could see their birth certificates

american teens betrayed, deceived, tricked into caring about fictional black people

I think this nails it. It's not the projection, it's the rage and betrayal. It's fucking awful, really.