Aang Ain't White?

[RPGPundit]

Hunh.  I thought he looked part Native American.  Silly me.  But then my wife gets mistaken for being Mexican (albeit, not by me).

So, Pundy (or anyone else), where do you stand on:

4) Casting a character that was traditionally white as non-white because the writers, director, and/or actor have a really compelling take on the character?

Without falling back on the knee-jerk reaction of "PC douchebags!", how do you figure you'd wrap your head around that?

!i!

It rarely happens, but there are exceptions. Nick Fury as Samuel L. Jackson is one case in point where I think a good argument can be made, because one of the CENTRAL features of Nick Fury is that he's a badass, and Jackson is certainly a badass. I'd have trouble thinking of a white actor in hollywood right now that would be a better Nick Fury than Jackson.

He's certainly a MUCH better choice than this guy:



But really, this is by far the exception rather than the rule. With BSG, for example, the only driving reason to have made Starbuck a woman was so the producers could say "we're so radical and different and sensitive and hip that we made Starbuck a woman!!"

And just like its utterly stupid for some Movie Executive to say "you know, filling this Avatar movie with little chinese kids wouldn't sell in Iowa, so we'd better make them all aryan disney-zombies", its equally utterly stupid to say "James Bond should be an Australian Aboriginal Lesbian with Disabilities to show how radical and sensitive we are!"
And for people here and elsewhere to argue that the former is an atrocity and the latter something laudable is just the utter essence of hypocrisy (as much as it would be for someone to argue that the former is just great while the latter is terrible).


RPGPundit

[RockViper]

Asians generally prefer to look white these days, especially in more developed countries like Japan, Taiwan, and S. Korea. In Southern California they might be all about 'AZN Pride', but back in the homeland they're telling the plastic surgeon to give them those Angelina  Jolie eyes. Now in VN, beards are getting popular with young hipsters, despite the fact VNamese guys don't really get much facial hair until their late 50's (see Uncle Ho). I like to grow a different beard every week just to fuck with 'em.

Anyways, there's a whole TV sub-genre over here dedicated to colonialist soap operas and Russian plays. All of the characters are played by Vietnamese, with fake moustaches, blonde wigs, etc. Since my salary as an elementary teacher is about 3 times what a TV actor makes, I'm not all that concerned that they don't use foreign actors to play those roles.

Well they cant bitch when a white guy is cast as a little asain dude then but its probably just otaku dinks crying about the change.

[jhkim]

How the hell can you tell? Almost every anime character looks white rather than asian. Lets take Death Note for example it takes place almost entirely in Japan (a couple of episodes take place in LA) with a Japanese Protagonist/Antagonist, yet there is not a single Japanese looking character in the entire series.

I'm not familiar with the series Death Note, but I've seen a lot of people assert that cartoon characters look white when really I think that cartoon characters tend to be of indeterminate race.  Most cartoons don't have realistic facial features enough to distinguish basic races.  People tend to say that a character like Charlie Brown or Tintin look "white" because they don't have exaggerated racial features of other races -- but that purely depends on your viewpoint.  

With BSG, for example, the only driving reason to have made Starbuck a woman was so the producers could say "we're so radical and different and sensitive and hip that we made Starbuck a woman!!"

I don't know anything about the makers of the show, but you're setting an enormously high bar for changing the gender of the character.  However, it seems to me that the new BSG was not trying at all to be exactly the same as the original BSG.  There are some enormous, blatant changes all over between the two series - in visuals, in background, in plot, and so forth.  I feel that you (and to be fair, lots of other people) make a huge amount more out of Starbuck's gender than other changes.

As for reasons to re-think the casting rather than mirror the original -- I think there are plenty.  The original series had narration that the Colonials were related to the ancestors of the Toltecs, Egyptians, or Mayans (mentioned in the starting narration) -- but that failed to match the casting.  Television in the 1970s had a lot of blatantly racist and sexist policies, so I think if one is going to re-imagine a lot of other aspects of the series, I think it is pretty reasonable to re-imagine casting as well.  

As I said, I'm not a purist.  If you like the original, then go watch the original.  The point of doing a remake or re-imagining is to change things.

[Kellri]

People tend to say that a character like Charlie Brown or Tintin look "white" because they don't have exaggerated racial features of other races -- but that purely depends on your viewpoint.

Aw, c'mon, people tend to say that because it's obviously the case and  because their creators were white. Tintin sure as hell wasn't a Gypsy nor Charlie Brown a schoolboy from Incheon. Those glow-in-the-dark Black Jesus felt paintings though are something else.

As for reasons to re-think the casting rather than mirror the original -- I think there are plenty. The original series had narration that the Colonials were related to the ancestors of the Toltecs, Egyptians, or Mayans (mentioned in the starting narration) -- but that failed to match the casting. Television in the 1970s had a lot of blatantly racist and sexist policies, so I think if one is going to re-imagine a lot of other aspects of the series, I think it is pretty reasonable to re-imagine casting as well.

Not to mention the original was largely an attempt to dramatize a thinly-veiled Mormon myth. The grittier, more humanistic new BSG seems to dump much of that thematic agenda, and the casting of women in important leadership roles seems to me to be a good indicator of that.

[Aos]

just as a general comment, complexion  and ethnicity are real, race is not.

[boulet]

People tend to say that a character like Charlie Brown or Tintin look "white" because they don't have exaggerated racial features of other races -- but that purely depends on your viewpoint.

Tintin is like the archetypal white boy and Herge was clearly trying to depict a naive boy from a European-centric colonialist culture. To the point where the satire was wandering into racist territory. I don't see how you can deny the "whiteness" of this character. Bad example.

[Aos]

me gusta Mileu.
And you are correct. Tin tin is actually referred to as "white" on several occasions, throughout the series.

[Ian Absentia]

...its probably just otaku dinks crying about the change.

No, I've voiced my problems with it, too.  I've addressed my feelings on the matter previously, but I'll recap them here.

My whole family appreciated that all of the characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender were presented as Asians, or at least Asian-esque, to fit the setting and inspiration sources.  On a wholly personal basis, the members of my family aren't "white", we don't live in an all-white neighborhood, and my kids' schools aren't even predominantly white, so it's refreshing, if rare, to find entertainment that approximates our daily experience.  We all appreciated the creators' integrity in making a show that broke out of the standard mould relegating non-white characters to support roles.

The casting decisions announced last year for Avatar:tLA seemed like the typical slap in the face that Asian actors get from Hollywood, and rather offended our sensibilities in light of the original cartoon.  As I've stated previously, there are plenty of aspiring hapa actors out there if a casting director is looking for "Asian-esque" and racially indeterminate faces.

!i!

(P.S. There's a delicious, if unintended, irony in your use of the term "dink" above. )

[Aos]

Ian eats paste.

[Ian Absentia]

Ain't that the truth.

!i!

[Cranewings]

I can't believe I'm missing this thread. Avatar is my favorite cartoon.

I was kinda put off by M. Night getting to direct this, but I figure he has two things going in his favor:

1) The endings of each Avatar season are surprising or cheesy, just like how he likes to make his movies.

2) The endings are already written so he can't ruin them, I hope.

I liked a couple of his movies in general, like Signs and Village. It was the crappy effort at a science fiction twist at the end of them that made them suck for me and killed it. I actually like Lady in the Water for what it is.

The choice for Zuko might not be that bad. More than badass, he is suppose to be emotional. Anger is the main thing, but he can be sappy and his voice is kinda high. I'm not totally against the choice.

Besides, no one knew Avatar was going to be so good. The creators could do great things with it. The movie is a big budget live action remake of a kids show directed by someone that didn't have anything to do with the creation... I can't think of any movies like that which are good.

I've never bothered to play the Avatar video games either, mostly because I don't want to ruin my image of the show with some knock-off game. I'll probably see the movie because I love going to movies, but I'm not expecting much.

[jhkim]

Tintin is like the archetypal white boy and Herge was clearly trying to depict a naive boy from a European-centric colonialist culture. To the point where the satire was wandering into racist territory. I don't see how you can deny the "whiteness" of this character. Bad example.

Obviously, I'm not denying that in the story that Tintin was intended to be a young European reporter, just as Charlie Brown in the story is intended to be an American child.  But if you look at the picture of Tintin above, the only racial characteristic is that his skin isn't black - though it is notably darker than the tan wooden box below his left elbow.  By skin tone, the figure isn't native Congolese, but there is nothing about the picture that is any more European than it is Chinese, or Latino, or Korean, or Inuit, or Turkish.  

Some people might say that for the image to look Chinese, the image should have slanted slits for eyes instead of dots - but I'd say that is a convention rather than an objective criterion.

[boulet]

Come on John, you're just trying to make a pointless demonstration here. Sure the drawing is neutral enough that you could split hair even more and pretend the character could be a woman disguised as a man or some other improbable claim. Here it's not only about skin complexion or eyes shape. Tintin's adventures have been stigmatized enough for the imperialist and colonialist views portrayed in them (at least in the early opuses) to contradict definitively any ambiguity about his ethnicity.  


For instance here Herge changed this scene where Tintin was teaching young Congolese about "Belgium, their fatherland" into a lesson about mathematics.

Many have tried, in different countries, to ban Tintin au Congo from libraries because of the racist undertone. If Tintin was as neutral as you pretend he is, there wouldn't be such a recurrent fuss about it.

And have a look at how Herge drew Asian characters and compare with Tintin. Now tell me if Herge, in this simple style (ligne claire) didn't differentiate between Asian and European.



Tintin, whether one likes it or not, is about encounters between European and other cultures. If someone was to make a movie with this character and cast a non Caucasian actor for the role it would be for the purpose of satire. And it would definitively depart from the original.

Charlie Brown as a character isn't much about cultural confrontations and might prove more flexible (I don't know, haven't read it much). And I'm not shocked by the casting of a woman for Lt Sosa in the A-Team for instance. But Tintin was really one of the worst examples you could use.

[RockViper]

)

Then just replace otaku with douche-bag, it should cover all the bases.

[Ian Absentia]

Ah.  So, is this one of those occasions when "Fuck you" is the appropriate response?

!i!

[Edit: I suspect that you meant to replace "dink" with "douche-bag" instead of "otaku", in which case my "Fuck you" is humbly rescinded.]