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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the sort of dumb reactionary politics that I don’t want in my life. People can make a movie with a black Roman emperor if they want to, but I prefer my entertainment to not be somebody’s political soapbox. Especially for an ideological that demands I must agree with it or be labeled a “bigoted Karen” (or any number of other worse things).

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> This is exactly the sort of dumb reactionary politics that I don’t want in my life

Hey, that's what I thought when I read your comment!

What about the fact that the treatment of women and slaves is almost certainly significantly toned down from what we know to be the reality?

Also there was almost certainly way more gay sex going on among any number of historical personages. Commodus (Gladiator's main villain) in particular was said to have "defil[ed] every part of his body in dealings with persons of either sex." Where is your outrage at this lack of accurate representation?

The implication here is that it's really your own baggage that ruins the immersion for you. You suggest that you can't watch a movie now without cataloguing and mourning the places where a character was more likely in your opinion to be white, male and/or straight.

This is not something anyone can help you with.

White actors have dominated in Hollywood since the beginning, and I don't remember anybody complaining that Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's ruined the immersion. Or that literally all of the ethnic Asian characters in the Manchurian Candidate were played by white actors.

fwiw almost everything is political, not just things you disagree with

I think you're free to take your money and buy the entertainment you prefer.

Is it political soapboxing, or trying to make show business fairer? Because if Hollywood listened to your preferences, minority actors have less oppportunities for roles.

I was watching "A Gentleman in Moscow", a series about an aristocrat living in house arrest in a luxury hotel in 1920s-1950s Soviet Russia. Everyone in it spoke English since it is an US/UK production, and there were black and Indian actors in it, I guess because of "DEI". I found it awkward at first, but I thought "I guess this is progress, better get with the times.". No one moaned about all the Russian characters speaking English, the show didn't have any race-related topics (a movie about the KKK with black Klan members would be incongrous), but with actors of different color skin? That series had lots of IMDb reviews complaining about "political soapboxing"...

I must be one of those people^W sheep who don't mind being oppressed by the woke-mafia, huh?

As an addendum, I find it obnoxious if people insist straight actors can't play gay characters, or genteel actors playing Jewish characters. It's called fucking acting! Scarlett Johansson should've been able to play a fictional Japanese cyborg in Ghost in the Shell without idiots complaining about it...

> I must be one of those people^W sheep who don't mind being oppressed by the woke-mafia, huh?

I don’t think that at all. I believe very strongly that nobody should ever feel the need to apologise for liking something. I simply don’t like this political ideology at all, I think it’s turning everything into monocultural forum for activism, and I’m not interested in the entertainment it’s producing. If you used a bit less prejudgment you’d be able to see it’s possible for me to have a distaste for this kind of product without being a horrible bigot.

I think you should give way more thought to why you don't like current entertainment. Why are you so convinced it's the racial composition of the cast that makes the content bad?

There are plenty of reasons TV and movies are bad these days. With the glut of new shows, writing and directing in particular seems to be suffering.

The Witcher (for instance) fell off a cliff after its first season, and its shittiness had nothing to do with "DEI" and everything to do with Netflix's belief that cheaper creative doesn't hurt the bottom line.

What if more than one trend is happening at once?

"I think you're free to take your money and buy the entertainment you prefer" doesn't really jive with "I guess this is progress, better get with the times" or "Scarlett Johansson should've been able to play a fictional Japanese cyborg in Ghost in the Shell without idiots complaining about it"

I didn't sulk and stop watching that series even though the black/Indian Russians were awkward for me in the beginning (ooh let's cancel me, I'm admitting the sight of minority actors was awkward for me), and I didn't care about "white-washing" and I didn't boycott Ghost in the Shell.

I disliked the ATLA movie before even seeing it because most of the characters didn't look like the original. This isn't some moral stance, there is simply such a thing as bad casting in a live adaptation. The movie sucked for plenty of other reasons of course, but even if it didn't, this would've detracted from it.

Idk if anyone was actually not watching the Ghost in the Shell remake over the casting. The characters look right. If someone out there is upset that the main character wasn't played by someone Japanese, I don't get it, the original character didn't even look Japanese.

Could there ever be an instance not motivated by politics where a black actor portrayed a white character? Not everything everyone does is virtue signaling or politically motivated, but we have somehow arrived at a place culturally where the perception is that a huge fraction of the population is making decisions disingenuously. It's such a coarse and dismissive heuristic.

I thought Idris Elba would have been an excellent James Bond. The alternative they went with doesn’t leave much room for interpretation on its DEI-ness though.

Literally all that happened was they gave a black woman the 007 designation.

They didn't announce her as the new "Bond", and she is not confirmed to continue the character.