Legal Custodian said:

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My view....

If a character has already been visibly portrayed and entered into mainstream culture, then any future representation of that character should resemble as closely as possible the original representation. Any character that has not been represented is fair game unless source material clearly states otherwise.

Regarding the Rings of Power; if Galadriel was recast as black, Asian, or an other race then I would have an issue as Galadriel is described as fair skinned in the books and has already been portrayed by Cate Blanchett. The dwarf queen Disa or Arondir? No issue whatsoever and doesn't bother me.

I view the portrayal of Ariel in the same light as if they changed the hair color to blonde instead of red.

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fig96 said:

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I got news for you, most people want to see a pale redhead, virginal Ariel, not "diverse female lead"

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I have news for you: most people really don't care.

Also, I'm not complaining about anyone, just offering my opinion.

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hunter2012 said:

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EclipseAg said:

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fig96 said:

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She's only white because she was written by a guy 150 years ago in one of the whitest countries imaginable (Denmark was over 95% people of Danish origin into the 1990s)

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Oh, okay. I guess that's a good enough reason.

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Now imagine the outrage if a snow white pigmented actress was the "Woman Queen". A white actress playing a monarch in Africa with no explanation why a white woman would be in charge of an African nation would be riot level triggering. Of course it makes no sense, and critics would say so. For example, Gal Gadot has been raked over the coals for her upcoming Cleopatra role. The critics are crying about the role being played by a white woman despite the fact that the historical Cleopatra was from the Ptolemy Family and they were freaking Greek. Greek.

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The Debt said:

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fig96 said:

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I got news for you, most people want to see a pale redhead, virginal Ariel, not "diverse female lead"

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I have news for you: most people really don't care.

Also, I'm not complaining about anyone, just offering my opinion.

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You are right in the sense that most people will not see Little Mermaid.

But I assure you China cares. There is a reason blacks disappear from movie posters.

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The Debt said:

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Another Doug said:

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That's alot of tweet to state the obvious. "Movie people do stuff for free publicity", no **** Sherlock.

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Its not about the publicity of controversy. Its the use of willfully casting "diversity" to use as a shield from criticism.

"Well this bombed because of backward bigots (we know this because "token actor" got 1.5k bad tweets deriding at our miscasting, I mean casting), not because the writing and production of the show was bad."

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bluefire579 said:

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Literally posted a link. Feel free to provide archaeological findings or contemporary writings to prove otherwise

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To sum up: it is quite possible that Cleopatra was pure Macedonian Greek. But it is probable that she had some Egyptian blood, although the amount is uncertain. Certainly it was no more than half, and probably less. The best evidence is that she was three-quarters Macedonian Greek and one-quarter Egyptian. There is no room for anything else, certainly not for any black African blood.

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Duane W. Roller is a historian, archaeologist, classical scholar and Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University.

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The skull of the possible murdered princess disappeared in Germany during World War II, but Thur found the rest of the bones in two niches in the burial chamber in 1985. The remains have been debated every step of the way. Forensic analysis revealed them to belong to a girl of 15 or 16, which would make Arsinoe surprisingly young for someone who was supposed to have played a major leadership role in a war against Rome years before her death. Thur dismisses those criticisms.

"This academic questioning is normal," she told the News-Observer. "It happens. It's a kind of jealousy."

In 2009, a BBC documentary, "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer," trumpeted the claim that the bones are Arsinoe's. At the time, the most controversial findings centered on the body's lost skull. Measurements and photographs of the incomplete skull remain in historical records and were used to reconstruct the dead woman's face.

From the reconstruction, Thur and her colleagues concluded that Arsinoe had an African mother (the Ptolemies were an ethnically Greek dynasty). That conclusion led to splashy headlines suggesting that Cleopatra, too, was African.

But classicists say the conclusions are shaky.

"We get this skull business and having Arsinoe's ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s?" wrote David Meadows, a Canadian classicist and teacher, on his blog rogueclassicism.

Not only that, but Cleopatra and Arsinoe may not have shared a mother.

"In that case, the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window," Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 2009.

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hunter2012 said:

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Woman King(yes typo in the prior post) is a historical fiction just like the Ptolomies. I don't know where the "fantasy" aspect comes from unless if you thought I was addressing Rings of Power. There were also fair skinned ethnicities in North Africa during the Ptolemy dynasties so it much more likely that she's lighter skinned, especially with the inbreeding bloodline that you even mentioned.

I think the reason why the criticism is muted versus Rings of Power is that, the critics were shut up about Cleopatra when they were exposed for their ignorance. Whereas the controversy for Rings of Power is legitimate criticism of the show being amplified and twisted with the racism moniker in order to silence dissent.

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fig96 said:

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Quote:

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I got news for you, most people want to see a pale redhead, virginal Ariel, not "diverse female lead"

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I have news for you: most people really don't care.

Also, I'm not complaining about anyone, just offering my opinion.

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The Debt said:

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If you want this:




Instead of this:



You are the problem!

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The Debt said:

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Another Doug said:

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The Debt said:

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Another Doug said:

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That's alot of tweet to state the obvious. "Movie people do stuff for free publicity", no **** Sherlock.

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Its not about the publicity of controversy. Its the use of willfully casting "diversity" to use as a shield from criticism.

"Well this bombed because of backward bigots (we know this because "token actor" got 1.5k bad tweets deriding at our miscasting, I mean casting), not because the writing and production of the show was bad."

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So you are saying executives of a billion dollar industry sit around and say

"Hey lets make a worse product so when it bombs we have explainions, to hell with making money"

They do it for publicity/marketing reasons.

That is why 99% of the "outrage" discussion is always while a movie/show is actively being marketed.

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They are making products to the best of their "ability." But they know what they make isnt great. Its trash, it might be profitable trash but every film is a gamble. Look at Female Ghostbusters, Bank's Charlie Angels, Little Mermaid, its all derivative crap and usually they gut the aspects that make it charming in the first place. With an inferior product and a sacred cow to bow to (representation), they absolutely learned to blame the audience when movies/shows tank.

You see this with the press leading into ROP, no one was hyping storylines or the depth of the characters, it was all about breaking glass ceilings in European fantasy tale. That became the story, not the immersive wonder of the film, not the "story they get to tell." Black dwarfs! So brave and so stunning. Then the official ROP twitter goes out there and makes an official statement about diversity defeating evil in middle earth, its fckin comical.

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David Happymountain said:

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DrEvazanPhD said:

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So there's something to this. Covering up ****ty writing and actors with "racist" messages

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At this risk of derailing this thread, I will be brief. Racist threats are a common way to cover up lots of garbage.

1. Lebron gate right before NBA Finals - no crime ever confirmed
2. Jussie Smollet
3. Aggie Isiah mini Smollet
4. Black guy spray painting swastikas on gay sidewalk in Atlanta

Those are four examples off the top of my head. Hate crimes today are racial hoaxes.

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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This is a digression, but...

The bones discovered may not even be Arsinoe's. There's no genetic proof. The claim that they are hers is based on conjecture, and the timing doesn't seem right to many scholars (she would have been making a power play against Rome as a tween) other than the one making a pretty fantastic claim (who dismisses the criticism as jealousy). The two may not have shared the same mother, and that is the only line Cleopatra wild have gotten any African ancestry from as her father's ancestry is known and purely Macedonian. The facial reconstruction used to declare Arsinoe had African ancestry was made from photos and measurements of a lost skull, not the skull itself. The claim can be boiled down to, "We found these bones that may or may not be her sister's and did a facial reconstruction based on some pictures of the skull we don't have and decided it looked African." So yes, that link has been discredited. It's little more than wishful thinking and pure conjecture for a headline.


https://blog.oup.com/2010/12/cleopatra-2/

Quote:

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To sum up: it is quite possible that Cleopatra was pure Macedonian Greek. But it is probable that she had some Egyptian blood, although the amount is uncertain. Certainly it was no more than half, and probably less. The best evidence is that she was three-quarters Macedonian Greek and one-quarter Egyptian. There is no room for anything else, certainly not for any black African blood.

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Quote:

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Duane W. Roller is a historian, archaeologist, classical scholar and Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University.

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https://www.livescience.com/27459-cleopatra-sister-discovery-controversy.html

Quote:

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The skull of the possible murdered princess disappeared in Germany during World War II, but Thur found the rest of the bones in two niches in the burial chamber in 1985. The remains have been debated every step of the way. Forensic analysis revealed them to belong to a girl of 15 or 16, which would make Arsinoe surprisingly young for someone who was supposed to have played a major leadership role in a war against Rome years before her death. Thur dismisses those criticisms.

"This academic questioning is normal," she told the News-Observer. "It happens. It's a kind of jealousy."

In 2009, a BBC documentary, "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer," trumpeted the claim that the bones are Arsinoe's. At the time, the most controversial findings centered on the body's lost skull. Measurements and photographs of the incomplete skull remain in historical records and were used to reconstruct the dead woman's face.

From the reconstruction, Thur and her colleagues concluded that Arsinoe had an African mother (the Ptolemies were an ethnically Greek dynasty). That conclusion led to splashy headlines suggesting that Cleopatra, too, was African.

But classicists say the conclusions are shaky.

"We get this skull business and having Arsinoe's ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s?" wrote David Meadows, a Canadian classicist and teacher, on his blog rogueclassicism.

Not only that, but Cleopatra and Arsinoe may not have shared a mother.

"In that case, the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window," Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 2009.

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