Swapping the Gender or Race of a Character in Fiction

[GoldRanger]

The OP has images of Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica. That was a successful swap, I liked it. Someone mentioned Nick Fury. That worked too. Another good one was Watson in Elementary. They pulled it off.

It's difficult to put the finger on which cases are good and which aren't. As a rule of thumb, it's better not to touch the race and gender of an established character. If there's any doubt then there's no doubt - don't touch it. I think intent matters a lot though, like people already argued. If you just want tokenism, it will turn out shitty. If you want to explore a what if, new angles on established fictional relationships, or you found a casting that genuinely works with the character but is not of the same gender/race, then it might work out.

 

[Abhorsen]

It's difficult to put the finger on which cases are good and which aren't. As a rule of thumb, it's better not to touch the race and gender of an established character. If there's any doubt then there's no doubt - don't touch it. I think intent matters a lot though, like people already argued. If you just want tokenism, it will turn out shitty. If you want to explore a what if, new angles on established fictional relationships, or you found a casting that genuinely works with the character but is not of the same gender/race, then it might work out.

I would also put out that sometimes there is a perfect actor for a particular character, that just is the wrong race, or less commonly gender. Usually this happens for non-established characters, but this can happen for established characters as well.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

Visual accuracy is something to be pursued in portrayal. It is a positive, and the lack is always a negative. Now, these are not overriding factors in the face of all others, but a flaw is a flaw no matter how small or outweighed by benefits, and it should be referred to as such.

 

[Abhorsen]

Visual accuracy is something to be pursued in portrayal. It is a positive, and the lack is always a negative. Now, these are not overriding factors in the face of all others, but a flaw is a flaw no matter how small or outweighed by benefits, and it should be referred to as such.

Not always. You can use what would be a flaw and make something better out of it. A classic example of this is the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which emphasizes the differences between the previously unbroken bowl, and the new, fixed bowl, and something beautiful results.

If you play into it correctly, this can result in a great story.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

Not always. You can use what would be a flaw and make something better out of it. A classic example of this is the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which emphasizes the differences between the previously unbroken bowl, and the new, fixed bowl, and something beautiful results.

That is definitionally not a flaw, the brokenness of the bowl is a flaw, not the fact that it was once broken and the pieces converted into a new, better object. Further, an assembled bowl mortared with gold is as different from an unaltered ceramic bowl as a painting is from a jar of paint.

 

[Abhorsen]

That is definitionally not a flaw

Someone didn't read much about this. It's part of a whole japanese philosophy called wabi-sabi, or the embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Sounds like a flaw to me.

More, the general idea is just because something is different doesn't make it bad. Fanfic can be better than the original as well (just look at SAO abridged). The reason why these woke tokenisms are bad isn't that they are changing things about the original characters, but are doing it in an incredibly stupid, anvilicious way, and then call everyone who hates them bigots. In contrast, when they made Magneto Jewish, it really added to the character, and gave him a new depth. More, nobody really cared when the next generation of Green Lantern was made black either. Prior to the movie, nobody hated Captain marvel for being a tokenized character, (she was disliked for where she ended up in the Civil war, but that's not because she was tokenized), and she isn't disliked now because she's tokenized either. She's disliked because the story was shit, and she was literally the bad guy, and all of the marketing was girl power.

 

[Navarro]

More, the general idea is just because something is different doesn't make it bad. Fanfic can be better than the original as well (just look at SAO abridged). The reason why these woke tokenisms are bad isn't that they are changing things about the original characters, but are doing it in an incredibly stupid, anvilicious way, and then call everyone who hates them bigots.

Not to mention erasure of past characters (such as the recent Mockingbird mini that acted as if female superheroes hadn't been a thing since the Golden Age); characters who behaved in an arrogant, hubristic way being portrayed as unflawed (in contrast to older origin stories where that was set-up for a come-uppance a la Spiderman and Uncle Ben), etc.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

Someone didn't read much about this. It's part of a whole japanese philosophy called wabi-sabi, or the embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Sounds like a flaw to me.

Dont act lofty because we both saw the same tumblr post. Rejecting a philosophy (or rather, a transliterary interpretation of a philosophy, because that matters) is not the same as not understanding it.

More, the general idea is just because something is different doesn't make it bad.

"Something" way to weasel that word in there, "something" we are not talking about "something" we are talking about portrayal, adaptation, the re-presentation of extant elements in a different medium.

Fanfic can be better than the original as well (just look at SAO abridged).

A fanfic is not an adaptation it is a new product.

The reason why these woke tokenisms are bad isn't that they are changing things about the original characters, but are doing it in an incredibly stupid, anvilicious way, and then call everyone who hates them bigots.

You're conflating issues as if there can be only one problem with something.

More, nobody really cared when the next generation of Green Lantern was made black either.

John Stewart is a different fucking character than the previous Green Lanterns, they didn't turn him black.

Prior to the movie, nobody hated Captain marvel for being a tokenized character

Karl Manvers is not the same person as the original Captain Marvel.

 

[Abhorsen]

Dont act lofty because we both saw the same tumblr post. Rejecting a philosophy (or rather, a transliterary interpretation of a philosophy, because that matters) is not the same as not understanding it.

Um, what tumblr post? Second, sure you can reject it, but saying it's definitionally not flawed means one is using the definition of it, and the artstyle is all about how it is flawed. So no, you still come across as an idiot here.

You're conflating issues as if there can be only one problem with something.

No, I literally just listed a number of problems with the characters. There are more, but I didn't want to go into the details. But the issue isn't that the character is a different race/ethnicity/gender/religion/sexuality, just the woke use this tool to do stupid things with it. It can, well applied, be a useful tool that leads to cool stories (again, Magneto is a hallmark of this), without actually being a bad idea.

John Stewart is a different fucking character than the previous Green Lanterns, they didn't turn him black.

Karl Manvers is not the same person as the original Captain Marvel.

A tokenized character can mean more than just swapping out the character itself. For example, Barbara Gordon as Batwoman (not oracle) was a tokenized Batman (or Robin). Superman has female tokenized versions as well, with both Supergirl and Powergirl. Miles Morales is a tokenized Spider-Man, and I could go on. These are all versions of changing a character. Sometimes it's done to the character themselves, other times it's done very well, and adds a facet that didn't exist to the previous character, making them more interesting.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

Um, what tumblr post? Second, sure you can reject it, but saying it's definitionally not flawed means one is using the definition of it, and the artstyle is all about how it is flawed. So no, you still come across as an idiot here.

Hyper-Niche Japanese art philosophy you're using a crude second hand translation of, and how it attempts to define the word "Flaw" does not concern me.

No, I literally just listed a number of problems with the characters.

Which does not, in fact, mean that you did not commit the logical mistake I described, it only means you're inconsistent. You set up a false binary, the fact that you later did not operate within that binary is a separate but similarly erroneous direction you took.

There are more, but I didn't want to go into the details. But the issue isn't that the character is a different race/ethnicity/gender/religion/sexuality, just the woke use this tool to do stupid things with it. It can, well applied, be a useful tool that leads to cool stories (again, Magneto is a hallmark of this), without actually being a bad idea.

Visual accuracy is something to be pursued in portrayal. It is a positive, and the lack is always a negative. Now, these are not overriding factors in the face of all others, but a flaw is a flaw no matter how small or outweighed by benefits, and it should be referred to as such.


Are you well? You can add something to a thing that contains both positive and negative traits in different proportions.

A tokenized character can mean more than just swapping out the character itself.

Its a shame this is the "swapping out the character itself" thread and not the Tokenism discussion thread.

 

[The Immortal Watch Dog]

In regards to Japanese pottery hipsterism in its relation to deconstructivism and moral relativism and well let's be honest. Artistic parasitism by lazy ass artists and movie producers and writers and script writers et al.

In the immortal words of Mister Pink from Reservoir Dogs?

"Fuck all of that"

 

[Captain X]

There are cases where this can work, but only if it's not done to be "progressive," which inevitably produces a token who is meant to "represent" an artificial group created by identity politics. This is because characters like this inherantly lack, you know, character, because they are meant to act as self-insert characters, or are just made as safe as possible so as to not offend the Twitter mob.

My go-to examples of this working are Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Morgan Freeman as Red. A lot of this frankly comes down to what the actors brought to the table, but it's also because the characteristics of the characters were not defined entirely by their race, but by the experiences they were supposed to have had and what the audience saw them go through. It also helped that there was nothing about the characters that really demanded that they be white, which was even made light of in the case of Red because that was originally a nickname based on the character's hair color. Other than that, there was no reason why the character couldn't be black as far as the story went.

Perhaps somewhat controversially, I also actually liked the Starbuck character from nuBSG, which is to say I liked her from the miniseries and the first season, before they turned her into an angsty, self-destructive, indecisive, substance-abusing piece of shit that I'm convinced the writers ended up killing out of frustration, only to bring her back because they were just completely out of ideas.

 

[Terthna]

There's also the cute anime girl angle to consider:

 

[Captain X]