Throwing in characters with a different origin where they don't belong is tantamount to retconning history.
"oh look, there was no racism in the roman empire. They had black officers!" Fuck yes there was and fuck no there wasnt.
"Cleopatra was black" No she wasnt. She was greek, with a sprinkling of Persian.
And now they're doing Gawaine, the black knight I mean, and the Green knight
Now, I will concede that Palamedes and his two brothers were saracens from the middle east, so there was knights of darker colors at the round table, but Gawaine was from somehwere up in Scotland.
If they, somehow, in the movie, infer that Palamedes or one of his brothers somehow cuckolded King Lot which then produced Gawaine, I will accept it because its, while reaching, at least plausible.
I understand people wanting to see characters who look like them and are part of the same broad culture heritage. That said, I feel rewriting history to be more politically correct is deeply offensive to the memory of all the people who were victimized under colonialism.
You'd think they'd be able to dig up actual historical stuff to play with. Like Yasuke, for example.
But no, it's all wokeist revisionism, all the way down.
Yeah, writers ignore actual non-white characters in Western mythos like Morien, Feirefiz, Memnon, Andromeda, Chariclea, etc in favor of racebending Zeus and Achilles. Because obviously that’s better than giving screen-time to originally non-white characters.
Also, Greek myth used “Ethiopia” in a very broad sense to refer to anyone with darker skin than Mediterranean. Andromeda could have been from Sub-Saharan Africa
or India.
There’s also no shortage of non-white mythology than can be crossed over with. Greek myth includes references to Middle Eastern deities. Why not have Gilgamesh and Rama join the Argonauts?
I say Write alternate history or fantasy, because then you don’t have to worry about whitewashing racism.
I think cultural appropriation is awesome, so I'm fine with adapting stories to different cultures, regions and groups, including modern cosmopolitan tokenism.
I don’t have a problem with that. I loved the colorblind casting
Cinderella movie with Whitney Houston. I loved that fairy tale anthology series where “The Little Mermaid” had an all-Asian cast. I do have a problem with people telling me I’m racist for preferring something with more internal consistency like
Shadow & Bone over “we can’t decide if it’s colorblind casting or alternate history”
Bridgerton.
With fantasy you have much more freedom to write your own human migrations. In
Dragon Prince, humans originally lived in medieval ethnostates until they were forcibly resettled to another continent and economically pressured to integrate. Which neatly explains why the population hasn’t interbred to the point of becoming one race.
With colorblind casting you open a can of worms because SJWs complain if a non-white character is racebent... even if the character was written for colorblind casting.