10 Years Since Tropes vs. Women

[JWeinCom]

JuliusHackebeil said:

The Ariel discussion is interesting and I happen to also have an opinion about that:

I don't like the change. Not because I don't like black people. But because it is such clear pandering. It gets an eye-roll out of me, but nothing more. I wont watch it, because most if not all the Disney remakes are horrible. So far so good.

What I hate is selectiv outrage. The hypocracy is quite nasty. Because it would be a huge surprise to me if a big company dared to whitewash a character. -See, there is even a derogatory term for changing some charakter's race to be white. Imagine the shitstorm if a company made Shaft, Black Panther, Blade, or even historical figures white. They could never. And I get that these companies have first and foremost financial interests that they have to protect. So I get why such changes would never be made by them. And that is alright.
But I do have a big problem with peoples responses and attitudes: "Changing Ariel from white to black is fine and should be fine. But changing Melcolm X (a real person, I know, but again, it worked fine the other way around) or even something obscure like The Nutty Professor (Eddy Murphy) to being white, is almost equivalent to a hate crime."

There are quite funny memes about this sorry state of affairs. I recommend to google "polar bears by Netflix", or "Rosa Parks by Netflix".

In conclusion: if a change from white to anything is generally accepted (I know, some do not) but a change from anything to white could never even be done, something is wrong.

-A good counter example to this would be the change in Dr Strange's teacher from being tibetan to being celtic (white). But I think this was more so because of China and Tibet. And the outrage was not as strong because they changed a man to a woman. That might have canceled it out a bi

Well, this post is an example of selective outrage, because the media has been pandering literally forever. The first black protagonist in a Disney film was created in 2010. About 70 years of Disney animation had passed without a black protagonist. I still don't believe we've had an openly gay main character. I doubt we're going to see a trans lead in the foreseeable future. If you wanted to be cordial about it, you would call this pandering, although there are other words that could be used. Oh, and since The Princess and the Frog, between Walt Disney studios and the live action remakes, I believe we've had 17 or so movies with white leads. Zero black leads till the Little Mermaid remake.

The people who are complaining about black Ariel have been silent on this pandering for just shy of a century and probably continues to this day. This is shown by the list of examples of white washing which you kind of just brushed aside. It doesn't matter that Dragonball evolution was a shit movie, they were still absolutely pandering to a particular audience, and that audience didn't say shit about it. That one's especially interesting, because Chi-chi was allowed to stay Asian, cause that audience was probably ok with a hot asian love interest, but not a male asian hero.

So, Disney has overwhelmingly favored white protagonists throughout its history, and still heavily favors them. If you bought a puppy after the last time Disney has had a black lead in its animation projects or remakes (not including Pixar which has had one black protagonist so far) it probably lived a full life and died before the next time it happened. And when that happened after a decade and a half "OMG PANDERING!" Pfft. 

Which also explains why the rest of your post is, with all due respect, stupid. Because the argument from people who are fine with Ariel being black has never been that changing a character's race doesn't matter. The argument is that it absolutely matters because representation is important.

Since you brought up Black Panther, we can talk about that one. First of all, you are dishonestly poisoning the well by pointing out characters and figures where race is a key part of their story. Black Panther is not a movie that makes sense with a white lead. If Rosa Parks was white she could have sit at the front of the bus. Ariel's race is irrelevant to the story, and mermaids aren't real, nor is the world of the story, so there's no reason she could not be white. 

Setting that aside, out of I believe 22 solo MCU films right now, there are two with black leads. If you made Black Panther(s) white, there would be zero. Also zero from DC.

So, that's why it's not remotely the same situation, or hypocritical. Because people seeing positive portrayals of people that look like them is important. This is especially important when you're dealing with a group that was enslaved for the first few hundreds of year of American history, and for the next 100 years or so could not use the same water fountains or bathrooms. Taking representation away (which isn't really what's happening, because again go watch the animated movie if you want to see white Ariel) from a group that has tons of it is not at all the same as taking representation away from a group that has very little and a group that has historically been discriminated against for their race.

Trying not to be mean, but this is a childishly simplistic take that strips all of the context from the situation. In a world where white people and black people, men and women, gays and straights, cis and trans, had always been treated equally, then a change in either direction would be the same, and getting upset by one but not the other would be hypocritical. But, that's not remotely the world we live in. Instead of googling those super funny memes, maybe you should google scholarly works about how representation in the media shapes societal views and individual self esteem. Reading up on the Clark Doll Study would be a good start. Not specifically about representation in the media, but one of the pioneering, although debatably flawed, works in the field. Educate yourself and do better.

Last edited by JWeinCom - on 11 June 2023