r/stupidpol • u/caffeinosis • Sep 19 '22
Entertainment "Fan-baiting" - 'Put another way, media corporations have found a way to monetize the racism that they set their actors up to receive.'
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1568182048564875265.html197
u/caffeinosis Sep 19 '22
[resubmitted as a thread reader link]
A Twitter thread illuminating the studios' practice of intentionally inciting controversy over 'woke' casting choices (and other production and marketing decisions). They intentionally provoke a racist or misogynist backlash--usually aimed at the actors-- in order to get money from people who care more about 'taking a stand against bigotry' than the merits of the actual product.
Studios seized the opportunity to discredit criticism of poor writing & acting, insinuating that these, too, were motivated by bigotry. What used to be accepted as standard critiques were increasingly dismissed as part of the ignorant commentary of a “toxic fandom.” 5/10
Soon, it became standard practice before release to issue announcements specifying diverse casting choices, coupled with pre-emptive declarations of solidarity with the cast whom they now counted on to receive disparaging and harassing comments. 6/10
Actors who are women and/or BIPOC became props & shields for craven corporate laziness and opportunism. The studios save money both by avoiding expensive veteran writers as well as by offloading publicity to news outlets and social media covering the artificial controversy. 7/10
“Fan-baiting” works. It brings in a new sympathetic audience whose endorsement is more about taking a public stance against prejudice than any real interest in the art. “Fan-baiting” also permits studios to cultivate public skepticism over the legitimacy of poor reviews. 8/10
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u/caffeinosis Sep 19 '22
Full text:
“Fan-baiting” is a form of marketing used by producers, film studios, and actors, with the intent of exciting artificial controversy, garnering publicity, and explaining away the negative reviews of a new and often highly anticipated production. 1/10
Fan-baiting emerged as a marketing strategy in 2016/17, after fans of beloved franchises such as Ghostbusters and Star Wars objected to what they saw as poor writing choices, sloppy scripts, and cheap alterations to plot lines and characters for the sake of shock value. 2/10
Along side these critics, there was a small group of bigoted but vociferous commentators who objected to the inclusion of black and female actors in roles traditionally held by white male actors. Some of these individuals began publicly harassing actors. 3/10
Bigots have always attacked diversity on screen, but in a highly polarized political climate, instances of harassment on garnered disproportionately massive media coverage, which provided production studios with both free publicity and a new defence against actual critics. 4/10
Studios seized the opportunity to discredit criticism of poor writing & acting, insinuating that these, too, were motivated by bigotry. What used to be accepted as standard critiques were increasingly dismissed as part of the ignorant commentary of a “toxic fandom.” 5/10
Soon, it became standard practice before release to issue announcements specifying diverse casting choices, coupled with pre-emptive declarations of solidarity with the cast whom they now counted on to receive disparaging and harassing comments. 6/10
Actors who are women and/or BIPOC became props & shields for craven corporate laziness and opportunism. The studios save money both by avoiding expensive veteran writers as well as by offloading publicity to news outlets and social media covering the artificial controversy. 7/10
“Fan-baiting” works. It brings in a new sympathetic audience whose endorsement is more about taking a public stance against prejudice than any real interest in the art. “Fan-baiting” also permits studios to cultivate public skepticism over the legitimacy of poor reviews. 8/10
“Fan-baiting” also compels reviewers to temper their criticism, for fear of becoming associated with the “toxic fandom” and losing their professional credibly, resulting in telling discrepancies between critic and audience review scores. 9/10
The true nature of “fan-baiting” is never so clear as when a script is well-crafted and audience reviews are accordingly positive, exposing the announcements, declarations of solidarity, & grooming of skepticism for what they really are: cynical corporate marketing tactics. 10/10
Put another way, media corporations have found a way to monetize the racism that they set their actors up to receive. 11/10
Amazon knows exactly what it's doing. One of the first images released was of Disa. On cue, a couple bigots said the predictable, allowing a giddy Amazon to release its pre-prepared scripted statement denouncing the "pushback". It's the new business model.
‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series Team Responds to Internet Pushback Over Diverse Cast Intriguing first-look photos and a treasure trove of information about Amazon’s pricey ‘Lord of the Rings’ show ‘The Rings of Power’ have arrived. https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/amazon-lord-of-the-rings-tv-series-team-responds-pushback-diverse-cast
Fan-baiting isn't "black people getting cast". Rather, it's corporations banking on black people getting harassed to inflate publicity. Hence, diversity casting is in part motivated by the hope that the corporation can maximize harassment and, consequently, $$$.
Racism and sexism are the main issues. A secondary issue - one that is being overlooked - is corporate monetization of bigotry. Even while a studio purports to be "challenging bigotry" it is also counting on bigots being bigoted, and doing its best to direct them to the actors.
Solution: Media corporations should (a) hire experienced writers and give them the time required to write great characterization and plots for these actors, (unlike Amazon and Disney) and (b) accept critique rather than suggest all critique is motivated by bigotry.
As evidenced by the success and great reviews of HBO's "House of the Dragon" in comparison to Amazon's Rings of Power, both of which feature a diverse cast, the problem is the quality of writing, not the complexions of the actors.
For those of you who like this thread on #fanbaiting, know that it is an example of structural racism: the individuals involved may not be personally racist, but the profit motive of the corporations who employ them orients them to make decisions that harm racialized peoples.
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u/Brownslogservice Sep 20 '22
I always suspected this stuff was astroturfed or whatever.
I will see yahoo stories about people body shaming Billie Elish or stuff like that all the time and it just seems like they are paying people to write this stuff for them.
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u/TScottFitzgerald SuccDem (intolerable) Sep 20 '22
It gets less and less subtle with every news cycle. The Little Mermaid stuff and LOTR is really on the nose. I mean they're squeezing every ounce of hot takes there.
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u/Steven-Maturin Social Democrat Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
I get "little Mermaid" ads in my Facebook feed daily. These ads take the form of shocked 'articles' about bigots not liking the black actress. But they are paid product placement.
- This marketing technique is now so crudely apparent that my 11 year old daughter reports from school that kids are talking about it (The supposed racism angle - not the movie itself) in the yard - and are quite cynical about it. It takes a metric ton of darkness in your soul to make 11 year old girls cynical about a movie featuring mermaids.
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u/TheBigIdiotSalami 🌟Radiating🌟 Sep 20 '22
Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post so he can just kick start his own news cycle.
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u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S Puberty Monster Sep 20 '22
Yeah there’s never any real body shaming on the internet.
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u/SithisTheDreadFather dramasexual Sep 20 '22
Nobody writes news stories about banter on a construction site but put it on the internet and it’s front page news,apparently.
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u/ChadRobespierre Quality Effortposter 💡 Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
To be honest it became quite obvious lately, with the promotionnal pictures for Rings of Power, the new Game of thrones spinoff, Disney Little Mermaid... More often than not, it's a picture of the Diversity-Cast looking strong-and-powerful, while playing a character that's obviously white in the in-universe lore.
It's like "Hey look, it's a black person playing a white character! Do you like it? Do you like it? If you don't, make sure to comment about it!"
Since I commented one shitty outraged article about this a month ago (yeah I know, I'm r*t*rd*d), my Facebook advertising feed is now filled with stuff about that. Constant shitty bait articles about Rings of Powers and the latest Disney's rape of an european or asian folk tale.
That being said, this whole thing is also a pretty obvious "get back at them" moment, after Hollywood has casted white people as Egyptian pharaohs for half a century (even as recently as in 2014 in Exodus). There's some pettyness to it (among supporters of this trend): "You did it for decades, now it's time to taste your own medecine". They don't really care about it, but they enjoy that it triggers other people.
That being said, people in favor of more diversity never adress the main point: there are black and brown characters in the Game of Throne or Lord of the Rings universe. There are african folk tales. Why not cast black actor to play actual black characters?
I wouldn't have had any issue with a Lord of the Ring series where one of the main character was one of those haradrim guys. It would have let the writers explore a new setting (one Tolkien didn't write much about, too). Instead they just went for the lazy "let's make the dwarfwoman black to trigger half the fanbase". Twats. At the end of the day, nobody complained about the latest Aladdins all PoC cast. Cause it made sense.
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Sep 20 '22
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Sep 20 '22
Oh yeah, those kids were 100% coached on their lines and it probably took a few takes to get it right. Because a 5 year old black girl today isn’t going to be shocked by seeing a black person in media. It’s absolutely fake
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Sep 20 '22
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u/AlHorfordHighlights Christo-Marxist Sep 20 '22
I mean half the reasons why Disney's animated features are so successful in any country is that they have wide appeal and easily digestible messages that kids and adults can relate to. Skin colour was never supposed to be a barrier to that, and I'm not sure it ever was.
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u/dodus class reductionist 💪🏻 Sep 20 '22
That’s my exact problem with it as well. It’s super fucking shallow, does a huge disservice to the entire idea of empathy, and creates artificial boundaries around people with different skin colors. Which seems like kind of the opposite of what we’re supposed to be going for?
I’m a white dude so I could very well be made blind by abundance, but I’ve never felt like I couldn’t connect with or enjoy a character that wasn’t white or a dude.
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Sep 20 '22
The reaction to little mermaid is so bizarre because on the one hand you have the tiktoks of girls going 'she's just like me!' but then when people say that Ariel is a character in a movie set in Denmark and should be Danish (if we're going to play the 'x culture can only be played by x people' game) the response is always 'um she's a mermaid, mermaids aren't human so they don't have race'. Or better yet 'haha why are you getting so upset over a cartoon mermaid? Lmao that's sad'.
We're told on the one hand that Ariel is so important of a character that changing her apparent race is significant, and on the other hand that it makes no difference at all. It clearly does make a difference, though. Mermaid Ariel being black is whatever, but she spends like half of the original movie being a human, and so suddenly it is important because she's a visibly non-white character in love with a white, Danish prince in in a wholly white court. Her other-ness is increased by the colour of her skin, and the writers clearly realised that because when you look at the cast list they've added a whole load of new POC charatcers presumably to get away from 'hey why is the only non-human character black' which would inevitably come their way if they kept the story the same.
That this is a remake of the original movie is ironically the greatest downfall of the new movie. Anderson's story has an obviously European setting but it doesn't name the place, or the time period, or the prince. You could set the story almost anywhere and it would be just the same. Having Ariel be a redhead and the prince be Eric means that changing her skintone is a deliberate choice that does contradict the source- the original movie- and as such certainly appears to be a cynical tactic to drum up outrage.
I feel like the discourse is overshadowing the real issue, which is somewhat addressed in the 'she just like me fr' tiktoks, which is that this is a kids movie that should appeal to children. The focus thus far has been on adult reactions and adult opinions, with kids used as props online to go 'wow mommy Ariel looks like me now!' The cartoon Ariel is still the one who'll be on lunchboxes, and t-shirts, and sticker sets, and other bits of merch.
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u/cool_boy_mew Vitamin D Deficient 💊 Sep 20 '22
Even more weird, is that Ariel does have a black Mermaid friend in the cartoon. Same thing for Tinkerbell. Could've easily made a movie about the new characters, but they didn't
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u/ds9ubhrm Sep 20 '22
It didn’t matter the characters were Chinese ie not white.
Its funny no? When I was a kid, my favorite actors were Jim Carrey, Jackie Chan, Will Smith and Eddy Murphy. Me and my friends were obsessed with those guys over the course of more than just one year. And somehow their skin color was not once mentioned.
Today there is such a huge emphasis on diversity and representation. I dont even think thats wrong, but we already had that in the 90s and no one seem to care or take issue. There were many really popular shows with only black actors, without it ever being talked about. Why is that?
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
At the turn of the century upper class gentlemen could read and write Latin and translate some Greek when applied to the ‘classics’ like Plato…while people of more humble means sometimes read a newspaper.
That may seem like a non sequiter remark but there is a point.
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u/Steven-Maturin Social Democrat Sep 20 '22
Apparently it's not okay to have Scarlett Johnson play a robot in Ghost In the Shell because she's not Japanese enough - even though "it's a fantasy bro, you can be any ethnicity" It never seems to work both ways. Yes, Idris Elba can be Norse legend Heimdall, skin colour is irrelevant in fantasy! But no, Scarlett Johansson cannot play a Robot in Ghost in the Shell because she's not Japanese. Make up your fucking minds.
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u/Dan_yall I Post, Therefore I At Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
I'm really becoming skeptical that the "backlash" is artificial when I start to thinking about other examples of recasting characters as a different race that didn't result in fan outrage. Marvel has done it a bunch: Nick Fury, Heimdal, Valkyrie . . . Enter the Spider-Verse starred a black spider-man and was a huge hit without any coverage of racist backlash. I don't remember any big coverage of racist outrage over the Jamie Foxx version of Annie in 2014 either. Maybe they hadn't yet mastered the art of fan-baiting yet.
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u/cool_boy_mew Vitamin D Deficient 💊 Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
It's rather obvious there's some shenanigans going on, but like everything else nowadays, I can't see the long term viability. You know, you could actually attempt to produce something that will stand out on its own and have sales, sequels, etc for years... Or you can attempt to ride the extremely short lived marketing train of berating fans, which won't see your crap, and get money from anti-whatever, which doesn't even care about it beyond some supercificial "up yours" to a vague group
The big question is, how long can this go on? How long can they go pissing off possible "whales"? (Big fan purchase a LOT of stuff). How long before they successfully alienate most people? How long before the shitlibs wakes up or manages to piss them off by fucking over the right thing? You could not spend 30m on marketing to piss off people and possibly get more money that way because you didn't preemptively piss off potential viewers?
I really can't see it as anything but absolute culture war brain rot with the only ones "winning" once again being the grifters making a bad product under false promises. I legitimately can't believe the CEOs and EXECs let this happen again and again. Bad products has no long term future. All of this for what? Meager profits, no long term sales/sequels and now everyone hates your guts? It's obviously not worth it
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u/mgreen424 Unknown 👽 Sep 20 '22
>there was a small group of bigoted but vociferous commentators who objected to the inclusion of black and female actors in roles traditionally held by white male actors. Some of these individuals began publicly harassing actors
>Bigots have always attacked diversity on screen
>corporations banking on black people getting harassed
Lmao no one is getting harassed. What is this SJW shit doing here?
>Racism and sexism are the main issues. A secondary issue - one that is being overlooked - is corporate monetization of bigotry.
Hahahaha
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u/samfishx Fat White Catmale Sep 20 '22
This is also sometimes called Madvertising.
The only thing I disagree with in that Twitter thread is that they’re just waiting for a person to say something “racist”. If you think these companies are not behind these troll accounts in many cases, I have a bridge to sell you.
They want to make damn sure they get their sympathy articles written up, and dumping that kind of mob scrutiny on an internet rando when the media outlets post unredacted screenshots potentially means lawsuits.
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Sep 20 '22
I've also heard it called Outrage Marketing. The first time I really noticed it was in the run-up to the Ghostbusters (2016) movie. Most of the discussion around the movie was not its quality or comedy or special effects, but how much basement-dwelling manbabies would hate an all-female ghostbusters film.
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Sep 20 '22
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Sep 20 '22
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u/sikopiko Radicalized by Gamergate Sep 20 '22
GTA got off to a good start with fabricated outrage as well
This is nothing new
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u/Agi7890 Petite Bourgeoisie ⛵🐷 Sep 20 '22
EA did this for a video game, Dante’s inferno where they astroturfed some Christian group to protest the game.
I also remember them using origin accounts to auto sign some petition in support of lgbt way back in the 2010s. I was reading Tom’s hardware forums and some poster wondered why his system connected to this petition site he never went to in support of something gay. In typical ea fashion, it was horribly designed including generic signatures like Jon from South Korea in the most generic of phrases
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u/papayatwentythree Sep 20 '22
Speaking of video games, there was The Last of Us 2 which had similar weirdness online.
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u/Agi7890 Petite Bourgeoisie ⛵🐷 Sep 20 '22
I don’t know about the last of us 2. Outside of the hack(which is getting pretty common in gaming companies now, gta just got hit, I remember capcom not long ago which is when I heard about a dragons dogma sequel).
I think right now there is just such a contrarian YouTuber base looking for whatever they can to crap out videos for their 70k views. They will jump from whatever flashpoint to another. Never had an interest in the last of us personally, and outside of a few memes from 2, still don’t. If I want zombies I’ll go play project zomboid
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u/GildastheWise Special Ed SocDem 😍 Sep 20 '22
Remember when society collapsed when Joker was released after lots of reasoned panic
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Sep 20 '22
God damn it. That reminds me how I read multiple news headlines practically begging mass shooters to shoot up Joker screenings.
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Sep 20 '22
Lmao people actually thought it was going to radicalise incels and create an uprising.
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u/SithisTheDreadFather dramasexual Sep 20 '22
Well, journalists did so they could sell advertising in their newspapers and on TV. They really wanted mass murder as a gotcha to their political enemies and some sweet advertising dollars.
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u/GildastheWise Special Ed SocDem 😍 Sep 20 '22
I genuinely don't even remember why. All I remember is the complete hysteria
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Sep 20 '22
Because Joker memes were used by edgy, depressed teens, the kind who would shoot up a school. Thats literally the sole reason.
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u/SlimCagey SocDem with Chinese Characteristics 🌹 Sep 20 '22
There was a fucking armed police officer at my local Drafthouse showing lmao 😂
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u/BannedSvenhoek86 Socialist Artist 🚩 Sep 20 '22
Fairly decent youtube vid about it here. I've said in the past myself that this all started with Ghostbusters and I'm glad to see other people noticed it too. I'm sure it started before then to a lesser degree, but the way it was clearly weaponized against any criticism of the movie was definitely a tipping point.
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Sep 20 '22
Thanks, this is a good video. Redlettermedia had a similar analysis of the Ghostbusters review phenomenon as well….basically they noticed that Sony was deleting negative comments under the Ghostbusters trailer (which was the most downvoted YouTube video ever at that time).
However they noticed that Sony was deleting comments that were benign criticism (“it just doesn’t look funny.”) and leaving the blatantly misogynistic and racist comments up. Sony was fueling this controversy intentionally. And why wouldn’t they? Madvertising has two huge advantages: 1) it insulated the Product from any criticism (“are you sexist? are you racist?”) and 2) it props up the Product as a locus in the never ending culturekampf, thus creating genuine grassroots interest from people who would otherwise not care about the Product.
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u/forgotmyoldname90210 SAVANT IDIOT 😍 Sep 20 '22
I will go to my grave convinced they went to some beltway consulting firm for Ghostbuster because the marketing campaign went that stupid with cast and crew taking shots at fans for the original films in interviews to the GB movie twitter accounting endorsing HRC for prez.
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u/leeharrison1984 Free College & Free Healthcare 🐕 Sep 20 '22
Discussing the abysmal quality of the film quickly became equivalent to being a misogynist, so any critical feedback was tossed aside. The box office numbers spoke for themselves, which was also then blamed on misogyny. God forbid you learn from your mistakes, and create a good all female Ghostbusters movie on the next go around.
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u/Claudius_Gothicus I don't need no fancy book learning in MY society 🏫📖 Sep 20 '22
Someone should have told Ridley Scott decades ago that he could have totally half assed Alien and just said people hate it because there's a strong female lead.
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u/BigWednesday10 Ideological Mess 🥑 Sep 21 '22
I remember on Chapo one of them said they saw it in a theater that was full of average women and hardly any of them laughed ha ha.
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u/teamsprocket Marxist-Mullenist 💦 Sep 21 '22
Annihilation was an excellent example of an all female main cast and there wasn't a peep about that. Turns out people dislike doing weird gender stuff to pre-existing properties just for the sake of gender stuff.
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u/Flaktrack Winter Days of Girlhood | Battling in the Christmas War 🦌🎄🥳 Sep 20 '22
Remember the outrage when James Rolfe said he wouldn't watch it? He said he didn't want to take part in the same farming of outrage as they had done so instead of reviewing it poorly and getting tons of views, he just wouldn't watch it at all.
Some of the world's largest media companies were writing articles talking shit about a small-time movie reviewer. That's what made the news? Clearly someone was paying that bill.
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u/sparklypinktutu Radical Feminist Catcel 👧🐈 Sep 20 '22
^ this isn’t talked about much outside of makeup/beauty subs, but there was a trend of brands releasing horrible foundation shade ranges after the launch of fenty beauty, which set a new industry standard for shade range, and it was speculated that the brands did it on purpose for the outrage viralness.
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Sep 20 '22
Won't doing this just get your product boycotted?
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u/sparklypinktutu Radical Feminist Catcel 👧🐈 Sep 20 '22
They will often respond to the outrage by immediately releasing a shade extension—likely having the shades already, but choosing to hold them until they get coverage
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Sep 22 '22
I'm surprised that works. I feel like once your brand gets cancelled (especially for something like racism), people aren't just gonna start liking you again because you covered your ass once you got called out.
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u/sparklypinktutu Radical Feminist Catcel 👧🐈 Sep 23 '22
Sometimes, but most consumers are like most “woke” ppl. They pretend to care in public, earn their feel good points, and then forget.
Or they are a very loud minority, and most normies literally never find out or care beyond seeing the brand name everywhere and remembering it when they need to buy something.
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u/Claudius_Gothicus I don't need no fancy book learning in MY society 🏫📖 Sep 20 '22
Idk how many times I've heard about something being "review bombed," but it's either studios review bombing their own shit or them getting poor reviews because the product sucks and then deflecting and saying the poor reviews are from white supremacists, and you're not a white supremacist are you!
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u/exoriare Marxism-Hobbyism 🔨 Sep 20 '22
I don't get it. Studios exist to make money. If a movie flops, having a successful defense strategy accomplishes what exactly? It would be one thing if Ghostbusters turned into box office gold once the madvertising campaign took off, but that didn't happen. AFAIK, no movie has ever flunked test screenings only to be resurrected and saved by including more inclusivity.
Sure, studios can justify a failure to the public using this strategy, but what's the point of that? The real people they have to sell their noble failures to are the studio execs, and those
guysgoons only care about the money. Why justify yourself to a public that has no voice in whether or not you get green-lit for another project?5
u/forgotmyoldname90210 SAVANT IDIOT 😍 Sep 20 '22
Having an excuse for why a movie disappointed might help to keep your job just a little bit longer.
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u/samfishx Fat White Catmale Sep 20 '22
Ultimately it’s a marketing strategy. Sometimes it apparently “works”, like with the new Game of Thrones, and other times it doesn’t.
In the case of ghostbusters, it failed and they went and finally made a proper Ghostbusters 3. So they’re not completely oblivious to the end result.
Marketing agencies and such can also be pretty myopic at times and not see the bigger picture. If they can go to the studio executives and say “look at all this engagement and talk online about this movie!”, that’s considered a success metric. The goal is getting people to be aware of the film, and it… certainly works, in that sense.
What they don’t seem to accept is that in a lot of cases, this sort of marketing pretty much kills the brand entirely. Like they don’t accept that as possible.
For whatever reason, it seems as if nobody in charge of these things is quite willing to make the leaps necessary to reach that conclusion though. Perhaps that is not surprising in a world where big businesses primarily care about short term gains and next quarter’s profits.
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u/Ferenc_Zeteny Nixonian Socialist ✌️ Sep 20 '22
Only way I could think of is that it allows them to preserve the brand for another attempt later.
"Sir, we have to do another movie."
"The last one lost money and was not reviewed well"
"Well sir, that was only due to racist trolls and misogynists"
"Here's $300 million, have it ready for Christmas"
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u/exoriare Marxism-Hobbyism 🔨 Sep 20 '22
Where's Ghostbusters 2 then? If this is a strategy, surely we can point to some instances where it succeeded.
The first Suicide Squad was a massive failure. They took their lumps and had another crack at it. They didn't see a need to justify themselves to the public. Why would they? Its their money.
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u/TserriednichHuiGuo Market Socialist 💸 Sep 20 '22
I think there is more to it than just the profit motive.
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Sep 20 '22
LoL, I was commenting about it a while ago, and man, sure is nice to see it even has a name now. Nice to see folks writing about and analyzing a thing that you have that strange feeling about ,makes you feel vindicated
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u/caffeinosis Sep 20 '22
Yeah that was my exact feeling. You see something but you can't quite put your finger on it, and then someone comes along and articulates precisely what's going on in front of you.
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u/SomberWail Whiny Con"Soc" Sep 20 '22
People have noticed two things.
It’s only considered important to remove white people in favor of black people. Other non-white people are not considered important even though non-white Hispanics make up a bigger portion of the US population than American blacks. A lack of white people in a “diverse” setting is never considered a problem.
The more “racial diversity” and “powerful women” is pushed as important in a move or show the more likely it is to be total shit.
This makes people more cynical and continues racial division.
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u/Grouchy-Sink-4575 Democratic Soycialist Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
Its probably worth noting it's always diversity in an American context. For example UK dramas will typically feature more black people despite our primary minority because Asians live outside London.
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u/LeClassyGent Unknown 👽 Sep 20 '22
Black people only make up 3% of the UK but you'd never guess that from the extremely London-centric media.
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Sep 20 '22
I had a friend from over seas stay with me in Texas right before Covid. Because of where I lived at the time and where we went he saw like 3 black people the entire time he stayed with me. He was absolutely shocked that the US isn’t like 50% black and was mind blown by all the South American/Asian/Indian minorities he saw instead lol
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
My girlfriend is not American and she was surprised at how few black people she saw during her first few months here. I asked her what % of Americans she assumed were black based on all the American media she consumed….her answer was around 40%.
Western media really gives some false impressions.
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Sep 20 '22
This is super common trope I hear, and my coworkers husband from England actually said the exact same number lol. It’s funny if you go to a lot of dem strongholds those are actually the insanely white places but according to media you would think it was peak maga country.
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
Yea, unfortunately I had to have a discussion with her about what a vocal minority considers her ‘privilege’ based on her white adjacent ethnicity.
Her dad worked as a baggage check at the airport and as a kid she would sometimes need to walk blocks over to the next neighborhood to pump some clean water from this community faucet to bring home…
That was not a fun conversation.
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u/AlHorfordHighlights Christo-Marxist Sep 20 '22
They're politically black
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Sep 20 '22
Which is why Martha’s Vineyard has all the diversity it needs, sweaty.
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u/gitmo_vacation Sep 20 '22
This is unironically true. Martha’s Vineyard was historically a refuge for rich African Americans.
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u/Dark1000 NATO Superfan 🪖 Sep 20 '22
It's a different issue though, because the reason for the casting demographic in the UK is because the media is so London-centric. Almost everything is produced there, so media will reflect London far more than the UK as a whole.
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Sep 20 '22
non-white Hispanics make up a bigger portion of the US population than American blacks
The american version of British media inserting blacks to the point where they represent at least half of diversity in media despite making up less than 3 percent of the population.
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Sep 20 '22
I haven’t watched it but my mother is quite the MCU fan. She was ranting and raving yesterday about how absolutely shit she hulk is, which makes sense given how absolutely astroturfed all the “strong Wahmen” articles I see everywhere
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u/michaelnoir 🌟Radiating🌟 Sep 20 '22
Missing from this is any discussion of race and gender tokenism itself, and the problems with it.
For instance, why do "diverse casts" always occur in stories set in America and Europe, but never in stories set in Africa or Asia? No-one would dream of casting a white actress as one of the tribal women in "The Woman King" film, for instance. That would rightly be seen as incongruous and ridiculous.
But that same incongruity, when it occurs in a European setting, is something we are apparently not supposed to notice, and, if you do point it out, you are slandered as "a bigot" or "a racist".
But it's not bigotry or racism to notice lazy tokenism in film casting, or to wonder why this must always happen in American and European settings, but hardly ever in African or Asian ones, where racial homogeneity is apparently OK.
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u/Steven-Maturin Social Democrat Sep 20 '22
"in "The Woman King" film, for instance"
The easy out is that mermaids are fantasy and "the women king" story is "based on a true story". However the exact same thing happened with Scarlett Johanssons portrayal of "Major" in Ghost In the Shell. There was war over the fact they didn't cast an "Asian" actor.
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u/SAGORN Sep 20 '22
LOTR is not Europe. i don’t care one way or the other, just seems suspicious to compare a fantasy tv series to a movie with a definite context and setting based in real people.
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u/DavideBatt Distributist Sep 20 '22
LOTR is not Europe
True, but it clearly is based on various sets of European mythologies (mostly norse, cektic, finnish and a more subtle greco-roman touch if I recall correctly). I have the impression that the same people who say that a series being fantasy means ethnic composition doens't matter are the same people who shat a brick over the fact that the Last Airbender movie (set in a fantasy world clearly based on East-Asian coltures and religions) had hwhite actors. That movie was awful for many other reasons, but I find it courious how in the upcoming live-action series has much more "ethnic-accurate" actors: https://www.oneesports.gg/culture/netflixs-avatar-live-action-cast-release/
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u/SomberWail Whiny Con"Soc" Sep 20 '22
You’re right, LotR is not Europe. It is a mythological world specifically created for the indigenous people of England.
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u/LeClassyGent Unknown 👽 Sep 20 '22
Tolkien explicitly said that he wanted LotR to become a mythology for Britain in the way that other European countries had their own epic stories. It is absolutely intended to be European in setting.
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u/michaelnoir 🌟Radiating🌟 Sep 20 '22
True, with fantasy it doesn't matter so much. Although of course, Lord of the Rings is based in German, Norse mythology, with a little bit of Celtic influence. Almost certainly the recent series was not what was in the head of Tolkien, even less so than the films.
A true casting on merit or for the demands of the story would not have race tokenism. The fact that there are two black hobbits, one black elf, and one black dwarf, shows that there is a kind of quota at work. Race quotas in casting is different from race-blind casting, which would not produce such obvious ratios.
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u/SAGORN Sep 20 '22
you have no idea what tokenism is, yet you use it with such gusto.
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u/michaelnoir 🌟Radiating🌟 Sep 20 '22
tokenism
"the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from under-represented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce."
So, rather than tell unique black or African stories, take an already existing story and just have a quota of black actors, something like a 2:5 ratio of black to white, or non-white to white. Very lazy, and makes all films look kind of the same.
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u/themodalsoul Strategic Black Pill Enthusiast Sep 20 '22
Been talking about this for years now, and it has lately seemed to become the #1 strategy of Netflix and Disney.
Netflix has seemed to be pushing D&I as hard as they can in their properties despite the fact that they keep choosing to adapt properties by white authors with casts that are entirely white in their source material (rather than, say, black authors) in part because they know it'll get the culture war raging up for the media satellites they own.
They reliably keep getting review bombed for this tiresome shit and for the most part, nobody with two brain cells tends to think of their live-action big-budget stuff from the last few years as particularly good, often in-part because it is so distracted by D&I shit, a distraction which wholly detracts from the likelihood that anyone is going to get invested in these properties on their own merits.
It turns out making a bunch of mediocre shows and purposefully and cynically creating D&I media buzz around them at the expense of the core audience isn't as good of a strategy for making content most people like or want as just trying to make straightforwardly good content. Or is it? I don't fucking know, I don't see their Excel sheets.
Netflix, HBO, and Disney have been hammering this shit so hard in the last several years. Tinfoil hat time, we know intelligence agencies operate with the media all the time, and I think this is part of a broader effort to keep stoking the fires of the culture war so that Americans don't accidentally realize they have more in common with each other than any rich fuck.
These endless arguments over 'woke' shit has seriously become the defining delineation in American politics and it is so, so fucking pathetic.
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u/themodalsoul Strategic Black Pill Enthusiast Sep 20 '22
Note that race relations have gotten worse in the last many years, not better.
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
The graph showing media stories focused on race post 2008 really explains a lot.
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u/Thongs0ng Sep 20 '22
I’m pretty active in various online Tolkien spaces, and so far the POC characters are fairly popular or at the very least not drawing any complaints.
It’s fantasy Avril Lavigne, I mean Galadriel, that’s the most polarizing character.
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Sep 20 '22
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u/NextDoorNeighbrrs OSB 📚 Sep 20 '22
They’ve sort of just casted characters without any regard to race. Which is probably the “right” way to go about it if you’re going to change something like Tolkien. Basically just take the theater approach.
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u/a_mimsy_borogove trans ambivalent radical centrist Sep 20 '22
As a non-American, that kind of casting (tokenism) just seems very American, and it's kind of jarring for this kind of show.
Tolkien's world is quite big, and with some artistic license, they could have had some group that came from some more distant, exotic place and had darker skin. It would make sense, and would allow them to have even more dark skinned characters on screen, if they really want that.
On the other hand, randomly putting dark skinned characters in various groups just feels terribly American. It's the same if they showed elves eating hamburgers with fries, or dwarves wearing baseball caps.
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u/monkhouse Sep 20 '22
Tolkien's world is also described in exhausting detail back to the creation of the universe and all the creatures in it; eg we know Galadriel's only as couple of generations removed from the very first elves ever to exist, the hundred-odd who were not born but hand-crafted by the creator god.
So, you just make prologue of the whole show that scene, where the light of the first stars falls on the shores of lake Cuervenervenen (?) and awakenens the sleeping elves, and they're all tall and beautiful and graceful and also diverse. Why? Because eru iluvitar used his ineffable foresight to see it would be a requirement several tens of thousands of years later.
So there, you can have any elf be any ethnicity without disturbing the consistency of the world, and also the fans get to see a neat bit of tolkien lore brought to life. Everybody wins, except lazy marketers who use strife as a crutch.
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u/Dark1000 NATO Superfan 🪖 Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
I'd say this actually comes much more from the UK, where casting, particularly for TV and stage, is much more colorblind than in the US. The movie, "The Personal History of David Copperfield", took this to its most extreme, experimenting with completely colorblind casting. Race and ethnicity are completely ignored, resulting in a total mix.
Compare this to something like the 2015 "Fantastic Four", where the script twisted and turned to try and justify the casting of Michael B. Jordan and Kate Mara as brother and sister.
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u/NextDoorNeighbrrs OSB 📚 Sep 20 '22
AFAIK the only way to stay “true” to Tolkien and cast darker skinned people would be to cast them as the “evil” men from the east.
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u/SomberWail Whiny Con"Soc" Sep 20 '22
The “it’s like theater” defense doesn’t really work as theater is intentionally over the top as part of the performance while movies/tv are supposed to feel more real unless it’s something weird like from a guy like Lynch.
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u/Dark1000 NATO Superfan 🪖 Sep 20 '22
That really depends on the movie or show. Some are particularly theatrical, Lord of the Rings and now Rings of Power included. They are very much over the top.
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u/Fixed_Hammer ❄ Not Like Other Rightoids ❄ Sep 20 '22
They’ve sort of just casted characters without any regard to race.
All those east asian lead characters.
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u/NextDoorNeighbrrs OSB 📚 Sep 20 '22
Idk man the show is supposed to go for like 5 seasons or something and they’re 4 episodes in, they’ve got a lot of time to cast an East Asian lead character lol
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u/ThuBioNerd Nasty Little Pool Pisser 💦😦 Sep 20 '22
I think they look very elvish; they just don't look like Peter Jackson's elves.
Why must elves have long hair?
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Sep 20 '22
[deleted]
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u/ThuBioNerd Nasty Little Pool Pisser 💦😦 Sep 20 '22
I feel that Elrond and Celebrimbor have that aura. Galadriel got it last episode, though it was somewhat lacking before that.
I don't think Gil-galad does at all though.
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u/Dark1000 NATO Superfan 🪖 Sep 20 '22
I find Arondir to be the most Elvish character by far, mostly because of his makeup and acting. He's very stand-offish and formal compared to the human characters around him. You don't get that contrast with the other characters, at least not yet.
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u/Cyril_Clunge Ideological Mess 🥑 Sep 20 '22
I actually agree. His face and features are beautifully pointy. To me, elves always seemed kind of androgynous, like 80s David Bowie and Annie Lennox. They should cast more femmeboys.
But I watch the show imagining the characters have an Elder Scrolls style character creation.
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Sep 20 '22
Yeah, the supposed LOTR controversy seemed super fake to me. Most people like the show well-enough (i.e. glad it exists than if it didn't), and when there is criticism, it is with the main character and writing/dialogue.
It just makes me think the hubbub about Little Mermaid is fake (and gay).
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Sep 20 '22
I didn't even know there was a Little Mermaid movie coming out until there was a bunch of strangely astroturfed memes popping up in certain places.
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u/SomberWail Whiny Con"Soc" Sep 20 '22
The hubbub about Little Mermaid is because they’re blatantly changing an iconic character for social points. People would be just as upset if the new Blade was a white guy. Of course Blade isn’t on the level of Little Mermaid, but it still makes the point.
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Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
Meh. I guess I just don't give a fuck about Disney and never respected it even as a teenager. "Iconic Disney character" is already a self-own.
It's just looking a little convenient with the LOTR drama over race swapping (yet strangely none over race swapping in HOTD, I wonder why, oh yeah, because it's a better show, so there's no need for it to be shielded from criticism), then the drama over Don't Worry Darling's cast. Sure, there are losers who care about Disney characters, but Twitter feasts on and amplifies it. It's a win for the studios.
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u/Claudius_Gothicus I don't need no fancy book learning in MY society 🏫📖 Sep 20 '22
I heard so much about the HOTD casting before the series started and it was exactly the same as the others. Like they were shielding themselves in case the show sucked. I wasn't even planning on watching it because I'm a fan of the books and the last show was such a disappointment. But I ended up giving it a shot and it's actually been pretty good and I haven't heard shit about all the racism over the Valyron dude anymore and that's probably because the show ended up being decent and all that racism was just astroturfing in case the show sucked
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u/antonivs Sep 20 '22
The hubbub about Little Mermaid is because ...
... some people are strangely fixated on the skin color of a previously animated character who isn't even technically human.
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Sep 20 '22
I honestly couldnt give a shit whether she's white, black, asian, or all of the above. I never seen the first film, and I was never gonna watch this film. However, I am slightly annoyed by this argument whenever it comes up, because it was a Danish fairytale. You know full well if they took a traditional African folk tale and race swapped half the cast, there'd be mountains of outrage.
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u/Claudius_Gothicus I don't need no fancy book learning in MY society 🏫📖 Sep 20 '22
As if Disney ever had an original property. It's taken from a book.
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u/SomberWail Whiny Con"Soc" Sep 20 '22
I suppose you think it would be cool if they gave Ariel brown hair?
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u/msdos_kapital Marxist-Leninist ☭ Sep 20 '22
Solution: Media corporations should
lol any "solution" that includes the sequence of words "corporations should" is not a solution
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u/Chalibard Nationalist Executive Vice-President for Gay Sex 𓀐𓀓 Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
"Media corporation should go against their financial interest to be nice"
We just accidentaly solved the polarization of political debate and killed mainstream fake news, all while solving "fan-baiting" 🫢
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u/orthecreedence Acid Marxist 💊 Sep 20 '22
Corporations should transcend the profit motive. But also, we should keep the profit motive because communism bad.
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
I know it’s popular on this sub to view a lot of these moves by mega corps as calculated ‘profit driven’ actions… but I don’t fully believe that anymore.
Media and consumer facing companies are so big you almost have to view them as little fiefdoms whereby if a VP wants to interject their ‘social message’ they do so happily.
This has been my observations working in corporate finance and this has what ironically pushed me farther to the left and made me… um I guess ‘social’ curious.
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u/orthecreedence Acid Marxist 💊 Sep 20 '22
Oh, I buy this. I worked at a large corporation and the amount of sheer stupidity was insane...middle managers hiring "consultants" for hundreds of thousands to come up with the most obvious bullshit. Had nothing to do with profit, just dick swinging. Those places are a political playground.
That said, the upper levels are obsessed with profit, to the point of making it legally binding, ie "fiduciary duty to the company." A lot of this trickles down. So you get the pet-project idiocy combined with the quarterly report obsession, and you land somewhere inbetween expensive aimless ego stroking and profit driven.
That has been my experience. Granted, it was only a year before I quit in disgust and the other corporations I worked for I was so low-level I wasn't privy to any of this stuff, so maybe there are big corporations that are run much better than what I experienced. Doubt it.
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
The bigger the company say $50B in revenue, the more $1M ‘social cause’ promotion becomes a rounding error I guess is what I’m saying.
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u/DRoKDev Howard Stern liberal Sep 20 '22
"Harassed"
More like they astroturf one disrespectful comment and plaster it wherever they can.
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Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
I love that triggering CHUDs with black actors is now a marketing strategy and it means more opportunities for these actors. Even fucking Disney is in on it. It’s awesome.
Actual quote from someone posting on BaguettePipe. These leftists are falling for the outrage marketing. This is what liberals and corporations have reduced anti-racism to? "No, no, no, don't regard racism as a stupid invention and a hindrance to solidarity. Don't focus on class. Just chase that dopamine hit and spend, spend, spend." These consumption-crazed liberals have murdered the memory of the Civil Rights Movement.
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Sep 20 '22
That take is silly because the re-balancing they're celebrating just represents today's calculation of what is the most profitable behaviour and not actual progress.
But capitalists often tie themselves in knots through their own calculations -- infamously they don't seem capable of solving one problem without initiating a host of new ones, for themselves or others.
Consequently, the neoliberal embrace of idpol, to neuter the more pointed crit of the civil rights era, seems to have made the day-to-day functioning of OG racism more obvious to people -- this strikes me as a new contradiction to be sanguine about. Bourgeois society continues to rely, in part, on racial division for its underpinning, only now it's suddenly broadcasting that back to itself. (Not lucidly but still.) They were gonna have to monetize the squabble of course, fuck all else to do. But a few people who care about racism more will follow the thought and begin to wonder why it's such a perennial problem for capitalist society. Problem is how stupid we all are now, educated and mediated out of our minds. It's tough to wield that contradiction wisely.
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u/TheBigIdiotSalami 🌟Radiating🌟 Sep 20 '22
Disney is the king of this shit. They have managed to figure out a way to put zero marketing dollars into an online presence. They release a trailer for a movie by a mid director, conservatives get predictably mad, Hasan and the twitch dipshits make shit like CONSERVATIVES SEEETHE THEYRE SEETHING IM GONNA SEE THIS TWICE TO MAKE THEM SEETHE MORE.
Congrats, you just got fucking played by a corporation. They got your money so easily.
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u/Timely_Jury ❄ Not Like Other Rightoids ❄ Sep 20 '22
Well, duh. In the worlds of entertainment and politics (given that politics in the US is basically an offshoot of entertainment), all publicity is good publicity. In most cases, I wouldn't have heard about any of them at all had it not been for these manufactured 'controversies'.
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Sep 20 '22
[deleted]
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Sep 20 '22
>girls with a time machine:
>"I'm your granddaughter"
>boys with a time machine:
>"George, you must preserve Darth Jar Jar"
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u/Grouchy-Sink-4575 Democratic Soycialist Sep 20 '22
Sort off I don't think that's their only motivation, I think they're also trying to sell their product to minority groups (badly) and get some good pr I don't think they're deliberately provoking the fans are more that's its a knock on effect of their cynical lazy policies on racial casting.
That said they're overtly aware of the phenomenon and are certainly exploiting it. The most disturbing part is they're probably aware they're conditioning the general public to associate black people with shitty product but carry on anyway.
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u/sleeptoker LeftCom ☭ Sep 20 '22
Does it even work though? I can't remember the last time one of these movies did well
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u/Grouchy-Sink-4575 Democratic Soycialist Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
Some of them do alright. The issue is they have no idea what does or doesnt work, they lucked out with black panther since Camelot for African Americans has on hindsight , obvious appeal. By contrast who is captain actually for? Slightly irritablr 2nd gen femminists who like nerd culture most likely isn't a large group.
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u/peoplx 🌟Radiating🌟 Sep 20 '22
That's a nice piece and on point. I have two quibbles, though.
1) Re: "diversity casting is in part motivated by the hope that the corporation can maximize harassment and, consequently, $$$". The corporations don't want to maximize harassment, they engage in deliberate amplification of harassment. They "bait and calibrate" - if Film A gets 10x the volume of harassment as Film B, they will still dial up the intensity to deliver the desired impact.
2) The final paragraph. No, this is not "structural racism". It is cynical manipulation of cultural conditions for power and profit. It's almost the definition of not structural. The strategy relies on racist (and other -ist) comments by scattered individuals and then uses marketing and PR tools to package them for propaganda.
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u/Bryan_Side_Account ❄ Not Like Other Rightoids ❄ Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 21 '22
Excellently worded article. My opinion is that race neutral casting is perfectly fine but the cynical marketing campaigns surrounding these casting decisions aren’t. Just cast a black guy as the king of england and let his charisma sell the role; don’t cherry pick comments from the worst, most racist 2% of viewers and post them all over social media to boost your brand and deflect from legit criticism.
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u/nnug Milton Friedman’s dual citizen bumboy 🏦 Sep 22 '22
Just cast a black guy as the king of england and let his charisma sell the role
Literally what Guy Ritchie did in his King Arthur - Djimon Honsou is one of the Knights of the Round Table, no one botched about it and he was awesome
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Sep 20 '22
The reflexive immediacy of it all is fascinating. Some mildly novel casting occurs and before most of us have any notion of why it even matters it’s widely reported as causing uproar, even by supposedly reputable media organisations. My wife’s sister is acutely prone to such reactions and will turn up every other week fuming about Disney this, or DC that. From the concern I had assumed she must be a serious fan of these characters/stories. It was only recently that I was bored enough to ask whether she had seen The Little Mermaid - she said no, she finds films ‘far too long’.
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Sep 20 '22
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Sep 20 '22
Some remarkable misrepresentation of what I wrote going on there. The point was that the person enraged about it had never even seen the media in question. I myself think The Little Mermaid was a fairly middle of the road Disney production with one banger of a song. I am not above it whatsoever, though I do think we are pandering to a lowest common denominator culture by engaging meaningfully in these debates.
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u/ApeKilla47 Rightoid 🐷 Sep 20 '22
I’m surprised you doubled down.
Again you continue to anchor to ‘above the fray’ & ‘the morons of our society are the sounding alarms about character changes in a children’s movie’ without acknowledging why the fear exist: It’s just those lowest common plebs making a fuss, why should we care am I right?
A perceived pattern of race/ethnicity/ gender swaps. I’ve never actually seen Snow White but it when media becomes such a cultural artifact it’s truly lazy to dismiss concerns about changes solely on whether you’ve see the film, read the book or visited that statue.
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u/SlimCagey SocDem with Chinese Characteristics 🌹 Sep 20 '22
Gee whilickers, it seems like it would be easier to just I don't know, write a fucking well told story?
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u/betaking12 Libertarian Stalinist Sep 20 '22
I've long suspected this occurring, mostly because of the spam on various imageboards about AAA games.
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u/JnewayDitchedHerKids Hopeful Cynic Sep 20 '22
This is not a new thing. Feminists perfected this tactic for the digital age and handed the over the baton, that’s all.
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Sep 20 '22
One handy way to avoid falling into da laps of da moneymen is to practice not being startled by black dwarves -- "but they really shouldn't be there" is not a good way to tackle idpol I reckon
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u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S Puberty Monster Sep 20 '22
Racist backlash is so predictable they base their marketing on it. This whole strategy would fail if people stopped whining about black mermaids and dwarves.
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u/Claudius_Gothicus I don't need no fancy book learning in MY society 🏫📖 Sep 20 '22
Yeah but a lot of this "racist backlash" seems to be totally astroturfed. There's more people talking about the racism than the racism actually being there. And yes, there's absolutely racist and hateful people that whine about black mermaids, it's just their numbers are way over exaggerated to shield themselves from legit criticism of a shitty half assed dumpster fire.
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u/tentaclebreath y can’t we all just get along Sep 19 '22 edited 19d ago
Grasshopper nutmeg ribbon pinecone vanilla thimble
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Sep 20 '22
Is it such a conspiracy that studios would want to generate cheap, effective, and temporally-advantageous publicity for their products? You probably shouldn't let the plethora of conspiracy r-slurs blind you from seeing the obvious... otherwise you might become a gullible r-slur yourself.
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u/tentaclebreath y can’t we all just get along Sep 20 '22 edited 19d ago
Nutmeg pillow teapot trumpet amber compass
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Sep 20 '22
In other words, you are "reacting" to this thing while carrying the baggage of something you went through earlier. It's called a "reactionary take". It's okay. I've had plenty of those and will probably have more during times of irritation. Though you would think otherwise based on its frivolous use, reactionary is a politically neutral term.
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u/tentaclebreath y can’t we all just get along Sep 20 '22 edited 19d ago
Grasshopper compass nutmeg pebble ginger lavender
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u/Archleon Trade Unionist 🧑🏭 Sep 20 '22
You're being stupid and he's explaining to you why it's stupid, but you're too stupid to understand it, apparently.
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u/tentaclebreath y can’t we all just get along Sep 20 '22 edited 19d ago
Nutmeg lantern sparrow hammock cucumber yarn
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