Racebending

Gonna bump this 9-year-old thread because this is a topic that's interesting to me and the Race thread is broader. (Mods: if it fits better in Yack Fest, feel free to move it.)

When is Race Lift good? When is it bad? Should all racebending service the characterization or plot, or is the "casting a POC in an originally white role for more diversity" approach okay?

My general opinion is that racebending is a net positive if it adds diversity instead of taking it away. I say net because the act does raise questions (eg. "would a character be the same if they were raised a different race") but ultimately I think having a more racially diverse cast is better than not.

Usually, it's fine but I actually think there's been a few cases where it didn't work and distracted from the nature of the story.

My go to examples?

1. Johnny Storm as black while not making Sue Storm black. Especially when a black Ben Grimm or Reed Richards is perfectly fine.

2. I think Iron Fist should be a white character because the character is about someone immersed in a culture that isn't their own and being misjudged on the basis of their skin. Mind you, I would have made the Meachems to be Asian Americans and used that as a contrast.

3. Whitewashing is usually a terrible idea but I think we all agree on that.

Sometimes it also adds depth to the character even if it doesn't have a huge impact on the plot. Jason Momoa's half-Pacific Islander Aquaman is a great example.

For that reason while white guy Iron Fist is fine I would also have liked AsAm or hapa Iron Fist; the immigrant/diaspora alienation would have been a great spin on the inherently Orientalist premise. But considering the MCU responded to fellow inherently Orientalist character Ancient One by casting Tilda Swinton, not surprised they went that route.

Iron Fist wasn’t a proper MCU property, the Netflix stuff had its own people in charge who have a lot of racism issues.

As for the Ancient One, my understanding is that a lot of that tied to racism by the Chinese government and Marvel not wanting to anger them.

I think the strangest early example of racebending I was first exposed to was Lana Lang in Smallville.

Lana was portrayed by Kristin Kreuk who is half-Chinese. But as far as the show is concerned, Lana is a white woman.

• As a child she is portrayed by Jade Unterman.

• Her parents, Laura and Lewis Lang are portrayed by white actors.

• In Season 3, we learn that Lewis is not Lana's biological father and that her biological dad is a man named Henry Small. You might think he would turn out to be of Chinese descent. Except Small is portrayed by a white actor.

• Lana's Aunt Nell, her most consistently appearing relative in the show, is also a white woman.

• The only relatives of Lana that are portrayed by an actress of Chinese descent are her great aunt Louise and her ancestor Isobel Thoreaux. Both characters are portrayed by Kristin Kreuk and neither is acknowledged as mixed race.

Edited by windleopard on Feb 26th 2021 at 10:01:09 AM

For those who are familiar with his comic origin, do you think making Roy Harper (Green Arrow's sidekick), biologically Native American, rather than just being a white kid adopted by a Native American man, would work?

I wanted to bring up Shadow and Bone and its treatment of its racebent main character, Alina Starkov.

Here's 'The Tab' summing up the issue:

In the books, Alina has a From Zero to Hero narrative where she goes from sickly nobody cartographer to one of the most powerful mages in the setting. The sickliness adds to her feeling of ostracization but it turns out she is sickly because she's been neglecting her powers. In the show, they removed the "no magic use = atrophy" bit and she's instead been ostracized because she is half fantasy Russian and half fantasy East Asian (she is played by the visibly mixed white/Chinese Jessie Mei Li), and the show's fantasy Russia is at war with fantasy East Asia.

It is also worth noting that casting Li was not an Ability over Appearance thing; the showrunners called for mixed actresses to play the part from the beginning with the explicit intent to diversify.

The thing that really gets people is that she faces verbal Half-Breed Discrimination in half the episodes; in the first she's called "rice-eater" and stares at in universe propaganda cartoons that look a lot like real 20th century anti-Asian propaganda cartoons, the second and fourth have people calling her "half breed" to her face, the third has someone saying they should make her eyes "less [Asian]".

She is also not the only person of color in the cast — while Jesper (mixed fantasy black/white) and Inej (fantasy South Asian) are from a more liberal city, there are other background characters of color in fantasy Russia alongside her and no one else gets racism this explicit.

And obviously there is the unfortunate real life timing of anti-Asian hate crimes, so there's more reason for people to be on edge.

So the questions are: should they have racelifted her to begin with? Was this a good way to show that she was being discriminated against, or should the show have gone about it differently?

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 29th 2021 at 1:05:56 PM

Is there any source besides The Sun that covers this? Because I refuse to click on that link, and I don't feel comfortable commenting on a story without reading it first.

Changed the source but that was the gist of it; the article was mainly citing Tweets. The new linked article as a bunch of tweets linked as well.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 29th 2021 at 12:43:35 PM

While I think more diversity is a good thing, I do not think it was a good move to have it just to shoehorn in racism.

It'd be like racebending the main character of some book to be black just so that you can shoehorn in the n-word in the show adaptation or something.

An interesting thinkpiece by Slate. It's primarily about Shadow and Bone but relates it to their diversification of fellow genre series Bridgerton and The Witcher as well, arguing that their approach to it can feel half-baked. (Crossposted to Diverrsity thread)

I'm midway through Shadow and Bone, and I do really like it, but the criticism of all the in-universe Half-Breed Discrimination is on point, especially the fact that it so closely fits real world anti-Asian bigotry. I'm kind of reminded of the controversy about New Mutants and how there was a little too much effort placed into thinking about clever slurs about Native Americans.

From a Watsonian perspective, it seems a bit weird that there would be this kind of prejudice (not that prejudice is rational), because Ravkans are fighting a war with both Fijerans (white Scandinavians) and Shu Han (Chinese), and the former have a bigger presence in the story than the latter. Also, while this hasn't explicitly come up in the story so far, since Ravka is the only place in universe where Grisha aren't persecuted, you'd kind of expect Grisha from various places to emigrate there. And this is in line with the fairly racially diverse cast portraying Ravkans.

Regarding the first point, I have to say that the presentation of Shu Han in the books did somewhat bother me, because there is very little page time given to the country (in contrast with Fjierda, which gets a lot of page time and development), and one of the few things we learn about them is that they vivisect Grisha in an attempt to exact their Chi magic. Which IMO seems to invoke nasty stereotypes (and granted sometimes Truth in Television) about Chinese hunting endangered animals for quack medicine (but you know, with people in this case).

Edited by Hodor2 on Apr 30th 2021 at 10:35:00 AM

WB is looking for a black actor to play Superman in a new movie.

Bumping.

I have nothing to add except to bring up how weird it is that they always race-bend red haired people black which is...super weird and kind of not hard to notice when it's LITERALLY done all the time. I don't mind race-bending per se to fit with more modern times or the location of the story, but this always felt super weird at how specific it felt.

Edited by doomrider7 on Sep 11th 2022 at 1:11:25 PM

I don't think people specifically target redheads when deciding which character to racebent. Characters with blonde and brown hair also get racebent.

Also it's not like there is a shortage of redheads in fiction. They make up a very small portion of the population in real life, but a much larger portion in fiction.

Another thing to remember is that redheads are often supporting characters, a role black characters still often get slotted into. If you see redheads racebent into black people so often, it's because they're being used interchangeably as supporting characters and that is an easy way to add diversity.

Well, while there is an underrepresentation of minorities in comics, there is also a gigantic overrepresentation of redheads. It is a relatively rare hair color in real life, and it's absolutely everywhere in fiction - and with color tints that are even more unrealistic than your average comic book blonde hair usually.

So maybe it is seen as a way to bring back some balance.

It might also be that red hair was traditionally a shorthand for exotic while also still being white. Now that fiction is less afraid of non-white characters and interracial couples, the "exotic" character is allowed to be POC.

The alt-right / white-supremacist "red head discrimination" thing is interesting (for lack of a better word) because while it's obviously raised from bad motives - which is why I'm side-eyeing it here, it does at least seem kind of common enough to be a trope.

Ariel aside, AFAIK, all of the examples people complain about are comic book characters, and I'd figure that's a factor of comic books having an over-representation of red-heads.

Thinking of some of the characters who have been race-lifted, I think there is something to the idea of red-heads being comparably "exotic" (i.e. Spider-Man's Mary Jane) as well as Windleopard's supporting character idea (the Wests in the Flash books / Commissioner Gordon).

Also, one of the characters people complained about / subjected the actress to racist abuse is Starfire, and she's not white. She's an organge-ish skinned space babe whose hair color is roughly the same shade as her skin color.

I'm not sure redheads getting racebent at a disproportionate rate is even true.

Like for example, in the Spider-Man movie redhead MJ was racebent, but so were Liz and Flash, who were both blondes I think (not sure what hair color Ned has in the comics).

Yeah, that's probably true also. And good points with those two examples. Although in the case of Ned and Liz, they are composite characters with a character who is the same race as the actor. I believe M.J. / Michelle is this as well.

I'm trying to think of major characters who were racebent who aren't red-heads though and it's harder than I would have thought. I assume Spider-Woman (who has dark hair) is going be Black in the upcoming Spider-Verse movie, since she's voiced by Issa Rae, but I'm thinking about examples that already exist, especially in live action.

I'm vaguely thinking that it might be a matter of blonde and dark-haired hero characters being considered "too major" to racelift. So basically windleopard's theory.

Edited by Hodor2 on Sep 11th 2022 at 3:39:54 AM

I think there are actually quite a lot of examples.

In the mcu, there is also Moon Knight (white with brown hair in the comics, Latino in the series). Valkyrie (blonde) and Heimdall (brown hair) both became black.

Outside of the mcu, you have the new Percy Jackson series, which changed Annabeth (the main female character) from white and blond to black. It also racebent Grover (a brunette) and Luke (blonde).

The Shadow and Bone series changed Alina (its' main character) from a white brunette to half-Asian with black hair. It also made white, blonde Nadia black.

House of the Dragon made the Velaryon's black, though they kept their white hair.

The second fantastic 4 reboot made blonde Johny Storm black (though for some reason his sister stayed white? I haven't watched the movie)

So all in all, I'm not sure why people think only redheads get racebent. Maybe a few castings of black people playing redheads were announced at the same time and people latched onto it or something?

Very good points.

As for why people latch onto red-heads, I think that despite the "exotic" aspect, by some measures, red-heads might be considered the whitest of white people, because it's kind of associated with very pale skin - at least for red heads with Irish ancestry.

So, it naturally follows that racists would have particular issue with those castings (which is of course not to say they don't have issues with the other castings as well).

I also think there might be an aspect of people picking up on the semi-real mistreatment of "gingers", or at least a South Park episode about it, and finding it a convenient way to package racism as a form of anti-racism.

Edit - Also, although racists have taken issue with all of the examples you've mentioned (thinking of the Velaryons here), it is interesting that the particular "red head discrimination" examples are generally female characters. So, I'd think there might be some sexism in addition to the racism.

Edited by Hodor2 on Sep 11th 2022 at 4:37:40 AM

"Don't take away my hot white women and replace them with ugly minorities" you mean? Because that's generally what it seems to boil down to.