I don’t think anyone likes to be force fed content that instantly breaks immersion because it doesn’t mirror reality at all.
The other end is shows like Foundation which might look like a woke cast at first but if you pay close attention you’ll realize that the galaxy spanning Empire has the diverse population due to being diverse while all the smaller planetary kingdoms are ethnically homogenous in casting which I thought was a clever attention to detail while satisfying politics.
Netflix is pretty smack in the middle in that they produce content for the woke crowd, but that’s just by focusing on including diverse characters. They tend to not get into complicated plots that are defeated by casting.
Unless my take on that is wrong I can’t see how minorities’ or womens’ existence can be bending any objective facts
Netflix’s offerings in comparison are middle of the road and kinda just have the people exist as either main characters are the quirky friend(tall girl for example) but nothing that bent objective facts
Well, considering that in the Foundation books there are only humans, their ethnicity it's not an important trait (we can assume they are all white or all black for that matter), while their social class is often outlined and the only real difference is their gender, making it a mixed race show it's a sign of the times.
I have no problem with it or the gender swaps. But they had to make it that way because for starters it is certainly more accurate to say that 500 quadrillion people living in countless planets won't look the same, there are 40 billion people on Trantor alone, but it would also been unacceptable for the audience of today to blindly accept the fact that when Asimov wrote the Foundation series he wasn't interested in the skin color of the characters, he was writing of a greater story spanning over a very long period, not about social conflicts over individual identities, which, if you think about it, are a mundane topic in that settlement.
But in the end its real fault is being IMO a bad representation of the original material, that totally misses the point.
Anyways this sentence I think is at the heart of the question I was asking.
> Well, considering that in the Foundation books there are only humans, their ethnicity it's not an important trait (we can assume they are all white or all black for that matter), while their social class is often outlined and the only real difference is their gender, making it a mixed race show it's a sign of the times.
Did mixed races no exist at the time of the stories writing? Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist? I don’t think additional diversity is as big a sign of the times as the source suggests.
Anyways the phrase that sparked my question was “bending objective facts”. A cultural change in what his good or even acceptable story telling is a subjective opinion and not something that can be stretched as far as “objective fact”
Not really, Asimov was born in 100% white Russia and then moved to USA during the 1920s where segregation was still a thing.
> Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist?
Of course there were different worlds with different cultures, rites, traditions, religions and even food (or martial arts), but their look is not taken into great account. Asimov was a biochemist after all, not an anthropologist.
I agree that actualization of a work of fiction it is not bending objective facts, my impression though is that content platforms are more following than leading, they are giving the public what the public will consume, which is dull, it is like giving kids candies or cake because we already know they'll eat them.
There is no real surprise, no Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead or Carpenter's The Thing/Assault on Precint 13/They live, no Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, everything is so canonical and completely unimaginative. There is no space left for provocative, out of the box, even offensive, creation (unless it is sexually defining for minorities, like a dildo, homosexual intercourse, etc. something that wouldn't even shock my 82 years old dad)
In a way they are segmenting the market based on the idea they wanna project of themselves:
- Netflix: social activists involved in identity politics, teenagers (with superpower or supernatural powers), binge watchers, kids and some old show to entertain their parents too (all of Star Trek for example, the only reason I still use Netflix)
- Prime Video: crime aficionados, intelligent comedy (it better be British), superheroes with a twist, people like me who already pay for amazon prime and are not young anymore
- Apple TV: fancy, grandiose, epic stories, that unfortunately lack in writing and results are mixed. For people who love a great cast in a show.
- HBO: actual quality content, for people who love to pay for quality content.
It was a facetious question. Of course mixed race people existed! There was no such thing as a 100% white Russia by any definition of the term in any era! It was an imperial state with explicit multiple ethnicities as far as the locals were concerned.
Like Jesus Christ, Asimov himself was Jewish and then migrated to the multi ethnic United States when he was three!
Do you honestly believe there were states with 100% pure ethnic polities at any point in history? Even supremacists states like the American South in the slave era had other ethnic groups as an underclass and frequently had children with them.
Like I can’t even look at the rest of your comment when you’re claiming Russia was 100% white. I couldn’t handle it if you said it was 90% white. All of Siberia? Dagestan? Tatarstan? Chechnya?
Edit:looked it up to make sure my Russian history knowledge hadn’t been made obsolete by new primary sources. Inorodtsy was the term in the Russian empire for the non Russian ethnic groups controlled by the empire.
You seriously need to take a look through history if you think the acknowledgement of minorities existence is a modern interpretation of historical facts
He was born in 100% white Russia.
In 1998 the village were Asimov was born counted 215 residents...
Of course Asimov being Jewish from a Russian Jewish family that dated back at least 4 generations, knew very well of being Jewish.
> You seriously need to take a look through history if you think the acknowledgement of minorities existence is a modern interpretation of historical facts
You're overreacting mate.
I know very well Russian history, there were no black people and still there are few. That's all I meant, you're arguing in bad faith.
Ad hominem won't cancel the fact that Asimov wasn't interested in mixed races in the Foundation, he was interested in everything else but identity politics for the influencers.
> Do you honestly believe there were states with 100% pure ethnic polities at any point in history?
You're confused.
Take China for example, there are at least 50 official ethnic groups.
But 92% of the people are Han.
It means there are 1.3 billion Han people, more than US+Europe+Russia combined.
So yes, there are large areas of China where 100% of the people are Han.
Modern Japan is 98.5% Japanese.
It's like saying it's 100% Japanese.
In the past?
Except for salves, prisoners and Ainu in Hokkaido, we can say it was 100% Japanese with a very high confidence.
For a foreigner Ainu and Japanese would also look the same.
If you were born in 1919 your World would have been the people around you, Internet did not exist, television did not exist, books were hard to find, traveling was expensive etc etc.
Also reiterating the question, where did diversity in the show bend objective facts?
The person we are talking about was born in a country that considered people not white because they weren't white enough (would you say, for example, that Asimov is not Caucasian?), like Americans did to Italians, it happened to my grand-grand-father too.
If that's not 100% white country mentality I don't know which one qualifies...
> Also reiterating the question, where did diversity in the show bend objective facts?
Is it a fact that in a distant future the human space colonies will be racially diverse in the way it is depicted in the show?
Or is it a decision from the authors?
I mean, if it was an historical documentary on South Americas in the 14th century we could talk about facts (and even there... we should present different theories on controversial topics, not just embrace one), but in a work of fiction every single detail count as "bending facts".
The "reality" of media of yesteryear was the domain of white men. So yes, reality is changing. There's plenty of rage being generated about this, so I have to imagine your media intake might be influencing you in this regard.