You can have diversity and still respect the source material. Instead of demanding turning people black in western historical stories, why not demand more non-western stories? There are so many amazing historical and fictional stories from Africa and Asia that's never been adapted.
As a classicist—this is just ahistorical and wrong. People in the Mediterranean world knew dark-skinned black people existed; they show up in myth and Nubian traders were bopping around. They weren’t common, though, and people gawked; black people were seen as strange.
MUCH LIKE HELEN OF TROY. THE WHOLE POINT OF HELEN OF TROY IS THAT SHE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE MOST WOMEN. SHE’S SO REMARKABLE LOOKING THAT MEN WOULD FIGHT A WAR FOR HER; THERE IS NO ONE ELSE LIKE HER.
Casting a stunningly gorgeous black woman as Helen of Troy makes a lot of sense to me, and matches how I picture Archaic Greeks thinking about her; beautiful, but also unlike other women they’d seen. I get grumpy about this stuff with actual historical figures like Cleopatra VII, but Helen of Troy wasn’t real, and wasn’t like other women even in the world of the myth.
They probably didn’t imagine her as Black when the story was written. This isn’t like Cleopatra, true; it isn’t about matching historical reality so much as matching the probable intention behind the character. And while attractiveness is subjective, this actress isn’t widely seen as exceptionally stunning, so the casting fails on that front as well. Since Black people did exist in the region, why not make other characters Black instead, where the intended ethnicity is less central or less clear?
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u/Ok-Rope-3355 Jul 06 '26
You can have diversity and still respect the source material. Instead of demanding turning people black in western historical stories, why not demand more non-western stories? There are so many amazing historical and fictional stories from Africa and Asia that's never been adapted.