• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.

      Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.

      But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?

      Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.

  • theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Irrelevant considering that support for the show will be turned towards letting JK Rowling continue to enact her rabid hatred of transgender people.

    • Chris@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Why do we care about the race of a made up wizard.

      We should talk about how Harry Potter enriches a terf instead.

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 days ago

      I got into it with friends last weekend when they were talking about Black Adam. I told them it’s 2025, they should just be calling him Adam.

  • BroBot9000@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Stop giving that cunt money and the spotlight!

    It’s also both rage bait and bait for social justice warriors.

  • Isa@feddit.org
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    5 days ago

    If the author hasn’t become so … unlikable, I’d say, that the skin color of an actor would only bother racists. With her being the TERF, she’ve became … I’ll not pay any more money for products of hers.

    • Maybe. Snape isn’t exactly a sympathetic character, though; he almost was, but ended up being a true villain.

      Maybe you’re right, with a different author perhaps this would be uncontroversial. It’s hard to not read racism into it given her politics, though. The only thing that would have looked worse, given her nationality and politics, would have been if they’d made Snape Pakistani.

  • loomy@lemy.lol
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    5 days ago

    There is way too much attention on the author’s politics, and not nearly enough on her lack of writing skills.

    I promise you everyone will love a race-swaped character, if the story is well writen.

    Case and point.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).

        • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 days ago

          He still is. Peter Parker is still Spider-Man, Miles Morales is a completely different character who is also called Spider-Man.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    Tbh, I’m not interested in the show.

    However, IDGAF.

    Hire a good actor, period. Nobody can top Rickman at all, so anyone taking the role on needs to be able to reinterpret it entirely, change the way Snape’s menace and arrogance are shown.

    While there are physical descriptions in the books for all the major characters, the original movies didn’t stick to them perfectly in all cases. And I don’t think they did with Snape fully.

    So why the fuck does it matter if the actor isn’t lily white (heh)? Can he act is the important part if anyone is going to watch it at all. If you’re going to turn a book into a show after it’s already been turned into a wildly popular movie series, you could cast everyone looking exactly like the books, and there’s still going to be complaints from the movie fans.

    So fuck it. Make Dumbledore a trans man, or a trans woman. Make Mcgonagle Cherokee. Make Harry Xhosa, or a Southerner from the U.S. Give Ron blue hair, a septum piercing and dress him in leather. There’s always going to be pissed off existing fans of something that’s as huge as Harry Potter. It isn’t like some niche comic book where a character looking different is going to piss everyone off. The fan base will be split, period.

    Shit, if I was going to watch it at all, an unexpected casting choice would make me more eager, because at least then I’m not going to be watching the movies dragged out over months.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      4 days ago

      I honestly agree. The casting of the movies was perfect in my opinion. Mr and Mrs Weasley. Snape. Trewlawney, mcGonagle. Harry, Ron, Hermione. It was great casting up and down. They’re never going to get a cast like that again, so honestly who cares. That’s how I view this whole show. It’s just a cash grab, so who cares.