Racebending Puns

It's just an alternative way of seeing the character and doesn't change their canon race. I'm saying this going all ways so if you want to change a black character white I don't really care. It doesn't do anything because the character will not change and it's just fanart. Most people seem to flip out by whitewashing and blackwashing art, emphasis on art. If it was a live-action characters should be casted accordingly. But since it's a drawing, it doesn't matter.

I find it irritating when characters from books or comics are depicted completely differently by racebending or gender-swapping in the name of diversity or representation. It is wrong to change characters that are already made, to something else in order to make the audience happy it is disrespectful and should be avoided. I see many people try to make this context normal but it should not be.

Being progressive is a good thing, but blatantly doing it for personal gain just devalues everything people in the minority sector worked hard and fought for.

And I just mean the film/TV studios who does this kind of stuff to appear woke.

I know this is a controversial topic, so please be respectful to anyone who has a different opinion from you.

I've had some thoughts about this topic for a while now. By racebending, I'm referring to casting actors who are of a different race from the comic book character they are cast as. The news that Josh Trank wanted to cast a black Sue Storm in Fant4stic inspired me to write down and share my thoughts.

I will split this up into 2 types of characters. The first type is characters to whom their race is explored significantly in their stories. Such examples include Ms. Marvel (Kamala), who's background as a Pakistani American is explored heavily in the comics. Captain America (Steve Rodgers) who would be considered "superior" by the Nazis, yet he still fought against them because it was the right thing to do. Those characters are quite simple, in that I think their race should not be changed under any circumstances.

The other type of characters is a bit more complicated, those would be characters whose race is not a major part of their stories. Examples include Sue Storm (who I mentioned earlier) and Mr. Fantastic. For those characters, I think there are two valid approaches.

The first approach would be to find an actor that heavily resembles the character visually, note that this does not include only race, but height, looks, face, and so on. This approach prioritizes the visual aspect of the character and in this case, race bending should not happen IMO. But this also means that you need to find someone that looks very close to the character, which would disqualify a lot of well-loved casting choices. This disqualifies Charlie Cox as Daredevil, Christian Bale as Batman, even John Krasinski (who only resembles Mr. Fantastic in one comic in which the artist purposefully changed Mr. Fantastic's look to resemble him). An example of where this was done would be Patrick Stewart as Professor X who basically looks exactly like Professor X in the comics.

The second approach would be to disregard the visual aspect of the character and find the actor who embodies strictly the characterisation, so the personality and mannerisms. In this approach, I think race-bending is completely acceptable and it may even be preferable as a way of giving kids from that race a hero that looks like them. This approach appears to be taken by the Eternals movie and it's my personal preferred approach out of the two. I also think that if a certain group is underrepresented in th

Okay so here's a dilemma I'm sure a lot of you have.

My body is pasty white. Me (Fin), Cassidy and Spica are all basically light skinned. But Jordan is medium-dark skinned Black and Penelope is medium-light skin Latina and/or South Asian.

Race/ethnicity is super loaded because I'm the only one who really fronts, the rest of them only co-front occasionally. Usually it's a blended feeling. But I stick to my lane, which is being white.

However, whenever I create avatars online or in games, I tend to lean towards darker skin. This is only for avatars that are not meant to represent my actual body.

The thing about darker skin is it's aesthetically prettier to me (I'm still processing how much of it is due to J & P). But I'm also worried that dark skin avatars might be digital Black face. At the same time, there's this technicality in the back of my head that's literally these people who I guess share my body/brain to an extent. It's not like I actively decided to make J & P "ethnic" (hell, I only recently discovered that Spica is East Asian, like that's such a random thing that's been obscured from me)

So my question boils down to: how do you deal with balancing the politics between your body and your headspace?

Racebending - "situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character."

"James Bond just doesn't work as a black character."

"Hermione wasn't written as brown."

So on and so forth. These are examples of the sort of anti-racebending positions that seem to me untenable in Christian-founded cultures, granting the caveat in the title.

If it is acceptable to alter the perceived ethnicity of Jesus to make it more palatable, relevant, or sympathetic for a particular (local?) audience -- Jesus, who is the Son of God, and God himself -- then changing the ethnicities of fictional characters must be fair game, because what are fictional characters compared to God? If you are Christian, then the answer is "nothing," and something that is good enough for God ought to be good enough for a fictional character. If you are non-Christian, then the answer is "exactly the same, just another character in our cultural pantheon," and you should treat the underlying concept in both examples the same way.

And if it is acceptable to alter the perceived ethnicity of Jesus, then it would also seem to be implicitly understood that Jesus's ethnicity does not fundamentally change anything about him. Which, to those of Christian faith or culture, should be another blow to the argument that racebending a character must fundamentally alter them.

To clarify the difference in the above arguments, in the first I'm saying that Jesus is so important (or "culturally relevant" for non-believers) in Christian cultures, that anything that does not seem like a transgression against Jesus can't be a transgression against a fictional character. And in the second, I'm saying that Jesus is so important (or "culturally relevant" for non-believers) in Christian cultures, that getting him "wrong" would be at least as bad as getting any fictional character wrong, and thus Jesus's whitewashing demonstrates that changing one's ethnicity is actually very trivial.

*Success or failure of individual instances of racebending should still be judged on a case by case basis, just as the success or failure of any other aspect of an adaptation. I am not saying that because the whitewashing of Jesus was "well-received" by certain people, those people must receive every instance of racebending just as well. In other words, execution will vary, but the concept is either acceptable or it is not.

Racebending is pretty present in the DCEU, with characters like Deadshot, Aquaman and Black Canary being played by actors of color.

On the other hand, Genderbending is something new to the DCEU. (if im not mistaken), the only genderbent character is Ratcatcher in the upcoming The Suicide Squad.

I'm personally not bothered by either IF they don't affect the character (for example, Vixen's origins are highly connected with her African heritage, while Deadshot's isn't. Hawkgirl's gender is essential to her character, while Ratcatcher's isn't.)

So, how do you see them in your eyes? Forced representation or creative liberty?

https://twitter.com/shannytyrelle93/status/1029533749271126016?s=19

Grace Randolph discusses the hiring of Tessa Thompson as the voice of Lady in "Lady and the Tramp". To her, hiring a black woman to voice a cartoon dog is "too much change".

I am so very livid at the race bending of Little Mermaid. I get that African-Americans want diversity. But you know what? They should have just made a brand new princess series with a black princess (that would be very awesome by the way, if Disney actually want to make original movies again--they should...I have a few cool ideas for a black princess), or remade "Princess and the Frog," which was a GREAT, underrated movie with a smart and independent heroine.

Halle Bailey is a very beautiful young lady, but I honestly wanted a redhead or ginger to play Ariel, because that is the image of Ariel we have lived with since the 1980s. Do gingers have no place in the industry??? Do they not have a place in diversity? By changing her race, that's what it seems like. There are plenty gingers waiting in line for a role, but I can't think of anyone BIG who's made it besides Saoirse Ronin, Cate Blanchett, and Emma Stone... I mean, the point is, they kept the other princess movies accurate, but why change Ariel's identity? Why race bend?? The reason why Disney keeps remaking these old movies are for nostalgia purposes, and people who have pressured them to change the race of a princess have gone WAYYY too far...Where is the redhead we love? The redhead who was on our backpacks and stickers and childhood items and everything? The image of Ariel we have known all these years will be replaced with an identity that is now totally different LOL.

Nice move there. I am not paying a cent on this movie. If you want black princesses, please come up with original ideas. I want something different with black princesses. Don't change the race of a iconic character, because that's uncool to the many angry Ariel fans who were expecting to see how the redhead would come to life. If you really wanted to change the race of someone in the movie that badly, ERIC should have been the one to touch. Maybe a black or Hispanic or Mediterranean man.

I really don't get y'all, if the race of a character who is originally black or Asian is changed, people immediately take action to change it back to the way things should be. But you are fine with white characters being replaced??? This is sick.

Starfire being Black? shrugs Ariel from the Little Mermaid being Black? Eh. Did anyone care that they had a Black-Hispanic Spiderman shown on the big screen? Sure, Miles Morales already existed in the comics, but popular media would often depict their Spidermen as a White Peter Parker. Sure, maybe no one cared because the movie was actually good, but I bet if it flopped, everyone would say that it’s because they decided to star a nonWhite Spiderman. Did anyone care that The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy had a Black Dracula instead of a White one? How about when Disney made Esmerelda a Gypsy (she was not a Gypsy in the original book)?

I myself was on the bandwagon of automatically hating characters who became a different race, but I kind of thought about it more than as companies doing this as a selling point. I mean, unless it’s about historical accuracy, who cares? I don’t want to waste my time on that. If they made a nonWhite character White, I’d be surprised, but I know that it wouldn’t change the story.

Most of the time, when we talk about "racebending" in adaptations, we refer to the replacement of a POC with a white actor or actress, known as whitewashing. But I'm not sure how I should feel about the replacement of a POC with another POC, or how, as a white person, I should broach the subject.

The reason why I'm mentioning this: The Martian, by Andy Weir (great novel; I recommend it to all lovers of hard sci-fi), is getting an adaptation by Ridley Scott. It will feature Chiwetel Ejiofor, of Nigerian descent, as the character Venkat Kapoor, director of NASA's Mars operations. Venkat has a distinctively Indian name and is once stated to be Hindu.

To me, it feels like the filmmakers were looking for a brown-skinned actor, regardless of actual ethnic origin, and figured the white public wouldn't know the difference. Ridley Scott has certainly been accused of racebending in the past (see also: Exodus). It's hard to argue against the casting of a POC, but: 1) Indians get little enough representation in American cinema, and 2) if they wanted Ejiofor in the cast, it's not like there was a lack of roles for him to play; since none of the characters in the novel gets a physical description, Ejiofor could even have played the protagonist Mark Watney. Given his name, Venkat Kapoor is one of the very few characters that they could possibly racebend... and they did.